A Murder of Justice (3 page)

José and Frank picked at their hash browns. More out of needing something to do than being hungry. Leaving their plates half full, they drank their coffee without talking. Adair had gone to a booth at the back, where he sat working on the books.

Just the three of them in the place.

Night traffic sounds from outside joined with the gurgling of hot water in the coffee urns.

José looked around. “Lonesome is an empty diner at night.” He took another sip of his coffee.

“Skeeter was what . . . thirty-four, -five?”

“Six. Thirty-six.”

“Old to be living at home.”

José considered this, then shook his head. “Advantages . . . Pretty much come and go as he wanted. Besides, with Mama and Marcus there, he could tomcat around town all he wanted and come home to twenty-four/seven room service and security.”

“That, and a twenty-four/seven alibi,” Frank conceded.

“Sure was into high-tech.”

The flat-panel TVs, the circuit boards, the scanner, and the secure phone.

“Pac-Man generation,” Frank said, still putting a
follow-on thought together. “You think about it, Hoser . . . how much Skeeter’s business depends on communication. He can get stuff at Radio Shack or off the Net . . . scanners, bugging equipment, scrambler phones . . . stuff that’s years ahead of anything we’ve got.”

“What’s more,” José said, “he doesn’t need a court order to use it. Something else . . . ?”

“Yeah?”

“Notice how eager Mama Lipton was to get his car back? We oughta have R.C. take it apart.” José said, adding it to a mental checklist. “ ’Nother thing—Skeeter’s organization.”

“Who’s gonna inherit?”

“Yeah. Takeovers in that line of work get messy.”

“Might tell us who had the motive and the balls to go after him,” Frank said.

José scribbled a reminder in his notebook, then sat pensively as though something else was calling for his attention.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “The chair.”

“Chair?”

“Babba Lipton. The chair she was sitting in . . . with the big round back.”

“Yeah?”

“Remind you of something?”

It wasn’t until José asked that a memory flashed to Frank like a falling star. He struggled with it, trying to give it definition, time, place.

“Huey Newton,” José hinted.

Instant clarity: The Black Panther poster. Huey Newton. Black leather jacket. Black beret. Shotgun in one hand, spear in the other. Sitting in a thronelike wicker chair. Brooding hate and malevolence.

“When we came in,” José continued, “I knew she knew. The way she was waiting for us, sitting in that chair.”

Frank put down his mug. “Yeah. She had a hard time. She’s a tough lady.”

“Yes. No.”

“Yes? No?”

“Yes . . . she had a hard time. No . . . tough is raising a good kid. It’s easy to do what she did.”

“What’d she mean by that crap about her looking at Skeeter’s killers?”

José shook his head. “Partner, I done finished with my psychoanalysis for the night. We got to get back to detecting.”

Frank drank the last of his coffee. “Might not be too hard.”

“How?”

“Guy who did Skeeter’s out there somewhere”—Frank thumbed over his shoulder—“still on a high . . . pupils still dilated with excitement. . .king of the world. Absolutely . . .”

“Out there feelin’ bulletproof,” José said.

“Absolutely bulletproof.”

José tried to picture the killer, but Teasdale’s living room came on instead.

Teasdale in his button-up sweater sits in his Barcalounger. TV reflections flicker across the big man’s broad face.

Somewhere off in the distance, he heard Frank. “And he’ll talk,” Frank was saying.

Bedtime. Teasdale fires the remote at the TV. The tube dies.

“He’ll talk . . .”

Teasdale gets up. He checks the locks. The curtains are closed. But Teasdale pulls them tighter anyway.

“. . . absolutely have to talk . . .” Frank batted his empty mug between his hands. Back and forth over the countertop. “. . . get credit for the score . . . big man . . . capping Skeeter Hodges . . .”

José caught his own image in the mirror opposite the counter. “What kind of life is that?” he asked himself quietly.

Frank closed his hands, capturing the sliding mug. “What?”

“Oh,” José said, “thinking about . . . how we have to live.” He stood and reached for his wallet. “How much we owe?” he asked Adair.

Frank shot him a puzzled look. “You forget,” he said, “it’s my turn.”

 THREE

T
rumpets . . . church bells . . . ghostly voices . . . a Morricone score out of an old Clint Eastwood spaghetti western.

In semidarkness, a crouching figure holds the pistol in a two-handed combat grip, aiming it into even darker shadows. A lightning flash. Skeeter Hodges sits in the Huey Newton wicker chair.

Motionless as a manikin, he sits . . . waiting.

Blood erupts. Skeeter’s head explodes.

In slow motion, the shooter turns.

The bells and the voices surge.

And the figure faces him. And a lone trumpet searches his soul. The pistol finds his eyes. And the bore of the muzzle reaches out and engulfs him, and he stares into the darkness at the end of the world.

The trumpets . . . the bells . . . the voices . . . pound in a hellish apocalyptic crescendo. . . .

Frank opened his eyes as the first jet of the morning from Reagan National screamed overhead, clawing its way north above the Potomac.

He lay twisted in the sheets. Motionless, he stared at the ceiling. His pulse beat furiously in his throat. The jet engines faded and his pulse slowed and the dream fragments drifted away.

He rolled over and shut his eyes, but his legs had cramped during the night, and his lungs felt musty, like a room that’d been shut too long. He sat up and swung his feet to the floor. He yawned, stretched, and looked around the bedroom, eyes coming to rest on the two windows overlooking the courtyard garden at the back of the house. Blue sky framed a sun-dappled oak. Plaster walls and heart-pine floors glowed from sunlight coming down the hallway from the front of the house.

Sixteen years before, when he’d bought the dilapidated row house on Olive Street, all the windows had been painted shut. A contractor had wanted to install thermopaned windows. The more Frank thought about it, the less he’d liked it. Old houses had old windows. So he’d learned how to disassemble the original windows, strip layers of paint, replace pulleys and sash cords, and he’d put everything back together so it worked as it had when the house had been new and Grover Cleveland had been president.

It was warm enough to run in shorts and T-shirt, and ten minutes later, he was striding at an easy pace down M Street. He crossed Key Bridge, ran along Teddy Roosevelt Island, then down the riverside path to Memorial Bridge. Once across the bridge, he circled the Lincoln Memorial, then picked up speed for a hard run up the Potomac and back into Georgetown.

Despite the exertion, the dream kept replaying.
Skeeter’s head . . . the pistol . . . Skeeter just sitting there . . . a captive actor in a deadly play . . . the shot.

He finished the run winded, sweaty, and nagged by a rasping sensation that something somewhere somehow had gone very badly wrong.

A half-hour later, showered, shaved, and standing at the kitchen counter, he sipped coffee and scanned the
Post.
Skeeter’s killing ranked front page above the fold,
complete with photos. Bad-boy rating about eight or nine on a scale of ten, Frank figured, reading between the lines. A follower of the flamboyant Juan Brooks. Inherited the business when Juan got life in max security at Marion, Illinois. Then the obligatory boilerplate editorial equation: Young boys plus inner-city poverty plus guns equals crime.

He felt a brushing against his trouser leg and looked down.

“Hello,” he said to Monty.

The big gray cat sat with the steely expression of a drill sergeant. Cats had always intrigued him—how they watched people in the curious but detached way people watched parades. But until Monty, Frank hadn’t thought of himself as a cat person.

Frank tapped the newspaper.
“Les Misérables,”
he explained.

Monty wasn’t interested.

Monty had literally dropped into Frank’s life. Frank had been laying a patio in his courtyard one Saturday. He’d been on his knees, tapping a brick into place, when a very thin kitten landed in the impatiens by the wall. Frank was startled, and assumed the animal had jumped or fallen from an overhanging branch of his neighbor’s tree. Showing no fear, the kitten approached Frank and sat just out of reach. For an hour, it watched him work. When he went into the kitchen for a beer, the kitten followed.

The cat didn’t beg. It just sat, staring, beaming a telepathic command. Frank obediently opened a can of tuna.

The cat made himself at home. He had no collar. Frank put an ad in the lost and found. He watched for lost-cat flyers taped to Georgetown lampposts. The first week, he hoped an owner would show. The next week, he was afraid one might. One never did, and Monty took over as master of the small row house on Olive Street.

Food!

Frank saluted. “Right away, sir.” In the years with Monty, he’d come to the conclusion that if cats could talk to humans . . . they wouldn’t.

Monty had accumulated a variety of bowls from Kate, José, and a loose coalition of neighbors Frank had come to think of as “the Olive Street Gang.” From a cabinet, he picked out a bowl featuring a Delft-blue cat with a crown.

“This okay?”

Move it, move it.

Frank filled the bowl with dry food and put it down near Monty’s swinging door that led into the garden. Monty sniffed at the offering, then grudgingly tried a bite. Soon the food was disappearing, swept up by a furry vacuum cleaner. As he finished his coffee, Frank watched the big cat eat. Then, after stuffing the newspaper into a canvas briefcase, he went through the ritual of setting the alarm system and locking up the house.

On his front steps, Frank glanced up and down the street, taking a second or two to recall where he’d had to park the night before. He found his car on Thirtieth Street and said a silent thank-you prayer for no new dings and the still-intact side-view mirrors.

WGMS was playing the
1812 Overture.
It was too early in the day for booming cannons, so Frank switched to WOL and Joe Madison. Concentrating on the Pennsylvania Avenue traffic, he paid little attention until he realized that Madison was talking about Skeeter Hodges. He turned up the volume.

Madison was refereeing a bare-knuckle brawl between Oliver North and Sarah Brady. North, the former Marine, was arguing against gun control, while Brady, the gun control activist, was arguing for. The two counterpunched with the now familiar prefabricated sound bites—Second Amendment rights, Founding Fathers’ intent, the definition of an organized militia.

All the old answers. Any new questions?

Madison cut in.

“We got a call from a listener, Mrs. Frances Morrow. Mrs. Morrow, you’re on.”

“
Mis
-tuh Madison—” An assertive chocolate-brown voice. Frank tugged at a memory, then gave up.

“Where you from, Mrs. Morrow?”

A pause. Then, crossly, “Eads Street.” As though laying down a challenge, she added, “Forty-five-oh-
four
Eads Street.”

Again the voice sounded oddly familiar, and Frank recognized the address.
Two blocks from Bayless Place.

“Go ahead, Mrs. Morrow. You got words for Mr. North and Mrs. Brady?”

“I do, Black Eagle,” she said, using Madison’s nickname. “Where
you
folks live?”

Dead air.

Frank imagined North and Brady, sensing a trap, exchanging wary glances.

“Well?”
Morrow demanded.

“Ah”—North cleared his throat—“Great Falls. Great Falls, Virginia.”

“Potomac,” Brady answered, her voice tentative.

“Unh-hunh!
Yeah
,” Morrow replied, a sneer in her voice. “An’ how many a your whitebread friends in
Puh-toe-muck
or Great Falls ever had to chase drug dealers off
their
front porches?”

More dead air. It hung there, embarrassing, like a bad smell.

“I tell you how many!” Morrow’s voice rose with indignation.
“None!”

Frank rapped the steering wheel and smiled.

Frances Morrow bored in. “You give us all these downtown arguments about the Constitution. . . . You’re talking about
Puh-toe-muck
living. About how you folks in Great Falls live. I tell you what”—righteous anger rolled in her voice—“I tell you
what
—you come down to where
I
live. Or you go over to Bayless Place. You’ll find one thing, Mistuh North, Missus Brady—you’ll find the only thing wrong with guns is that the wrong people got them.”

Madison, recognizing a dramatic closing line when he heard one, took a break for a commercial. Frank imagined North and Brady wondering what the hell had just hit them.

T
wo large wooden desks dominated the center of Frank and José’s small office. Years earlier, they had pushed the desks together so they could work facing each other. A random collection of file cabinets and bookcases lined the walls. Above the bookcases on one wall was an Ipswich Fives dartboard that Frank had picked up in a London secondhand shop, surrounded by holes in the drywall attesting to sloppy marksmanship. The single window faced south, its sill home to an eclectic parade of potted plants over the years. Today, a variegated pothos shared its perch with a struggling African violet that Frank had bought at Eastern Market and a spider plant that Tina Barber had given José.

José stood looking out the window. He turned slowly when Frank walked in. He glanced up at the wall clock.

“You run this morning?”

“Yeah.” Frank saw that José had already made coffee. He picked his mug up off his desk, regarded the dark brown remainder of yesterday’s coffee, poured it out, then poured a refill. The coffee was scalding.

“Frances Morrow,” he said, and blew across the steaming mug, “on—”

“Joe Madison this morning.”

“Yeah.” Frank tried another sip. “Where’d we—”

“O’Brien case.”

Gears meshed. The picture materialized. Big woman. Filling the doorway of the small brick house. “Gray sweats,” he recalled.

“Redskins jersey,” José added. “Mean like no tomorrow.”

The phone rang. José answered. Listened. Hung up.

“Emerson wants to see us.”

Walking down the hallway toward the stairs, Frank noticed a weariness around José’s eyes.

“You sleep last night?”

José shook his head. “Going home, I stopped by Daddy’s.”

“Oh?”

“He wasn’t home. Mama said he was still at the church.”

A
single light far up in the rafters illuminated the altar and pulpit. His father sat in a front pew, head bowed.

José put his hand on his father’s shoulder. Titus Phelps reached up and covered his son’s hand with his own.

“Getting late, Daddy.”

His father looked at him, then to the altar. He moved over. José sat down beside him.

Titus Phelps paused as if listening to a voice inside himself. “Just sitting here, talking with Jesus.”

“You heard about over on Bayless Place?”

His father turned to him. “You ever wonder, Josephus, what keeps us safe? Truly safe?”

“Go on, Daddy.”

“You’re my oldest son . . . a policeman. You’re strong . . . you’re smart. But you can’t keep us safe.”

Titus Phelps listened to his private, inner voice, then nodded in agreement.

“It’s inside us, Josephus, the power to keep ourselves safe. So we don’t have to fear the night. So we can trust our neighbors.” He paused, then, voice picking up momentum, continued: “That power is in us. Each of us. And if we don’t use it, it goes away. And if that happens, we won’t be safe, no matter how many police we have . . . even if they’re all as strong and as smart as my son.”

The words had rolled through the church toward the farthest pews in the back. José knew he’d heard the beginnings of a sermon yet to be preached.

T
hey were now at the stairway. Frank reached out and squeezed José’s shoulder. “Let’s see what’s on Emerson’s mind.”

They pushed into Emerson’s outer office at eight-fifteen.

Shana looked up from her computer and frowned petulantly. “He’s been waiting.” She snapped an index finger toward Emerson’s door. The inch-long scarlet fingernail resembled a bloody talon.