Acts of Mercy (11 page)

Justice’s face felt damp and hot, and he ducked it against the sleeve of his suit jacket as he went. Ever since leaving the Oval Study twenty minutes ago, he had kept his mind deliberately blank; he had learned in the military, and again in the Secret Service’s indoctrination courses, that when you were given a mission of any kind—and particularly one which involved peril—the only way to perform it properly was to close your mind to everything but the mission itself.

But like an undercurrent, thoughts and emotions kept tugging at him. Bewilderment: too many things happening too quickly, in a way and with implications that he lacked the capacity to understand. Furtiveness, wrongness: he was an officer of the law, he had dedicated his life to upholding it, and yet here he was, about to commit an act which was contrary to the very codes by which he lived. A sense of fatalism: he was not going to get away with this, there were too many things that could go wrong, too many obstacles to overcome. Faith in the President: if he had been surprised and disconcerted by the order to move Briggs’s body, he had also immediately understood and accepted Augustine’s explanation of why it was necessary. He knew well enough what would happen to him if he
were
discovered, but that did not bother him; the greater good was all that mattered. All that mattered.

When he neared the lighted window he stopped and drew a heavy, silent breath. Standing just outside the elongation of light, he looked back toward the west corner. Stillness. He moved his gaze across the lawn, past the dark squares of the helicopter landing pad, around toward the rose garden. Satisfied that he was alone, he bent at the waist and went quickly to the oleander bushes beneath the window, spread them cautiously with his hands until he had access to the press secretary’s body.

He pulled at the one outflung arm and it yielded limply; Briggs had not been dead long enough for rigor mortis to set in. Justice got a firm grip on the arm, another grip on the trousers at the hip, and dragged the body out of the bushes and across the bordering stones. The small rustling scraping sounds he made seemed unnaturally loud in his ears. He paused, down on one knee, and looked up at the illuminated second-story windows. They remained empty.

Justice rubbed sweat from his eyes, got a two-handed purchase on Briggs’s arm and hoisted the body up across his back in a fireman’s carry. The skin on his neck crawled where Briggs’s hair brushed it; he shifted the weight slightly until the head lay canted against his shoulder. Then he shoved up, and once he had his balance, once he was sure the body wasn’t going to slip, he began to run humped-over back to the west corner.

The muggy night air burned in his lungs and he could hear himself breathing in thin, ragged pants, but he did not break stride until he neared the corner. Ten feet from it he veered over to the wall and braced his free shoulder against it, got his breathing under control. He listened. All around him the night held its spring hush.

He put his head around the corner—and one of the civil-service guards was walking at an angle parallel with the far wall, toward where the Ford was parked under the portico.

Justice pulled his head back, stood tensed. Had the guard seen him? But he hadn’t been looking in this direction, had been moving at an easy pace with eyes toward the Ford. He let twenty seconds pass, heard nothing, and eased his head around the corner again.

No sign of the guard.

He stepped off the lawn, striding more rapidly than before because of the absence of shadow here, and when he neared the north corner the muscles in his legs and back were knotted from the weight of the body, the strain of running with it. Nothing to be done about that. He could not put it down, not here; it would take too much time, too much effort to lift it again, and he did not know where the guard he had seen walking was now.

The lights of a car drifted by the old Executive Office Building on Seventeenth Street, briefly touched the guard booths far down at the West Gate. There was no movement from that direction: he had not been spotted from there. Justice craned forward to peer out along the north wall, saw the one guard moving away past the carriage entrance. The other two guards who had been standing there were gone.

Setting his teeth, he made the run to the north portico and the rear of his car.

Three-quarters of the way there he felt his legs begin to give out. Panic gripped him; he had an image of himself sprawled out on the blacktop with the body beside him, people shouting and converging on him. He forced himself to slow to a staggering walk, saw the car loom larger ahead of him and automatically extended his left hand, reaching for it. His fingers touched the warm metal of the trunk, fumbled for the bottom edge and found it and lifted the lid just as a cramp buckled his left leg. He felt himself falling, twisted against the rear bumper—and Briggs’s body rolled off his back and inside the trunk.

Justice heard it hit something metallic, sending small, ringing echoes into the night, as he jarred painfully onto his right knee. The sweat on his body turned cold; he caught the bumper, used it to push himself half-erect. He dragged the trunk lid down, had to curb an impulse to slam it and pressed down on it instead until the lock clicked. Then he leaned against it and jerked his head around in desperate quadrants because he was sure he had just made enough noise to alert anyone within a hundred-yard radius.

He saw no one. Even the lone guard had vanished into the night shadows.

In the new silence he pushed away from the trunk, stood unsteadily for a moment. Pain throbbed in his knee; there was a prickly sensation of weakness in both thighs, both calves. He got his handkerchief out and mopped at the film of moisture on his face as he limped around to the driver’s door, opened it and moved inside. His hands trembled slightly on the wheel, but by the time he had gotten the car started and pointed toward the West Gate, they were steady again.

No one came running out of the White House; no one challenged him at all.

By the time he reached the gate his pulse rate had decelerated to normal. He had no trouble with the guards there; they knew him and passed him through with a brief exchange of amenities and only cursory attention to procedure.

The raw edge of tension left him as he drove slowly to Pennsylvania Avenue, turned northwest. He had done it; amazingly, in spite of the odds and his feeling of fatalism, he had gotten clear of the White House grounds with Briggs’s body and without incident. But the mission was not over yet. Something could still go wrong if he was not careful.

The President had told him that Briggs lived in a private house on Arden Place in Cleveland Park, out in the old county—a thirty-minute drive even at this time of night. Justice glanced at his watch: nearly midnight. Good. The later it was, the less likely the chance of anyone noticing him while he completed the transfer.

Traffic was light on Pennsylvania Avenue, and as he drove along it he found himself thinking strangely of the funeral procession carrying the body of President Kennedy to Arlington National Cemetery. Or maybe not so strangely at all. Weren’t he and his car, traveling part of the same route, also a kind of miniature funeral procession transporting the body of the press secretary?

A chill caressed his neck. He imagined that he could hear caissons, the thunder of drums, the clattering hooves of horses—echoes in his memory of that long-ago day in 1963. He had been nineteen at the time, attached to a military police unit stationed at Fort Benning; young and somewhat callous, not quite as stricken by the assassination as most of the country, as most of the other army personnel. He had spent a good part of those four days after the shooting drinking beer at the PX; routine had been completely disrupted, and for him and most of his company that had been an excuse for taking an extended pass. At the exact moment the casket had been taken out onto Pennsylvania Avenue—he remembered this distinctly—he had been standing half-drunk at the PX bar, watching television and arguing with two other MPs over whether the National Football League commissioner had the right idea in going ahead with the schedule on Sunday or whether it showed a lack of respect.

It was not that he himself had been disrespectful. No, it was only that he had never been an emotional man. Until now, these past few weeks. For the first time he could feel the full weight of the assassination, of what the loss of the President had done to the country—and he knew it was because the crisis facing Nicholas Augustine,
his
President, threatened a similar if not quite so tragic loss.

He turned the Ford north on Twenty-third Street, then northwest again on Massachusetts Avenue. When he reached Cleveland Park—a quiet residential area that had once been the summer retreat of President Grover Cleveland—he pulled to the curb and consulted the map of Washington he kept in the glove compartment. Fifteen minutes later he brought the Ford onto Arden Place, a short dead-end street shaded by Dutch elms and sycamores.

The houses on both sides were all turn-of-the-century dwellings with cupolas and wide front porches, set well back from the street and spaced widely apart. Briggs’s address was in the last block, and the first thing Justice noticed about it was that the driveway was bordered by cherry trees on one side and shrubbery on the other. He drove past, looking at the neighboring houses on each side and across the street. The only ones which showed light were on the opposite side and some distance removed.

He made a U-turn where Arden Place ended at the edge of a park, came back and turned into Briggs’s drive. His headlights picked up a small side porch heavily grown with ivy, the closed doors of a garage that would be empty because Briggs did not drive. Which was good because it eliminated the problem of having to move a car.

Once he had drawn abreast of the porch Justice braked to a stop and shut off the lights. Darkness surrounded him when he stepped out; there was a street lamp diagonally across the way, but its glow did not reach into the driveway. He opened the trunk, reached in to turn the body so that he could get at the pockets in its clothing. It was just starting to stiffen, but not so much yet that it presented a problem. In the right trouser pocket he found a key case, drew it out and then closed the trunk again and hurried up onto the porch.

The third key he tried opened the door there. He slipped inside, stood for a moment to let his eyes adjust. The kitchen: enough moonlight penetrated through a window in the rear wall to let him see the shapes of refrigerator and stove and sink cabinet. Should he leave the body here? Plenty of home accidents happened in the kitchen, and if he put Briggs here he would not have to turn on any lights—

No. The body had lain on the ground beneath the window, it was lying now on the trunk floor; Briggs’s suit would be dirty, maybe even torn in places. The bathroom then, that was the only safe place to put him. Bathroom accidents were even more common than kitchen ones.

Justice made his way carefully to a doorway in the inner wall, found himself in a central corridor. He brushed his fingers along the wall there and located a light switch—he had to risk putting on the lights—and flipped the toggle. A ceiling globe came on, filling the corridor with a pale yellow glow. Blinking, he turned to his left and tried three doors before discovering the bathroom. Immediately, then, he returned to the kitchen and went outside again into the muggy darkness.

It took him twenty minutes to get the body out of the trunk and into the bathroom, to strip it of jacket, trousers, shirt, tie, and shoes, leaving it clad only in socks and soiled underwear, and to position it on the floor with the head between the toilet and the old-fashioned cast-iron bathtub. He examined the clothing. The jacket was ripped in two places and there were grass stains and a smear of grease on the pants; he wadded both articles together, put them on the sink. The shirt and the socks went into a clothes hamper, and he took the tie and the shoes into the bedroom, put the shoes beside the bed and hung the tie on a rack in one of the closets.

He was sweating again when he finished; his mouth tasted dry, brassy. He went back into the bathroom, looked down at the body. Had he overlooked anything? In the mystery novels he read and collected there was always something overlooked, something forgotten, that the clever detective would notice—

Mystery novels. Clever detectives.

He shook himself, tried to concentrate on the scene in front of him. Briggs’s hair, he thought. It was badly mussed and it would not have been that way if he had simply come in here, slipped and fallen against the bathtub.

Justice lifted a hairbrush from the counter beside the sink, knelt next to the body and managed to sweep the hair back into place. Straightening, he replaced the brush. Anything else? No. Everything appeared natural now, nothing out of place.

He caught up the suit jacket and trousers, reentered the bedroom, and laid Briggs’s key case on the dresser next to the wallet and the other articles he had removed from the suit. Then, leaving the lights on in the bathroom, the bedroom, and the center hall, he went through the kitchen and set the push-button lock on the porch door. Outside, the night was still empty, quiet. He closed the door softly behind him, hurried into the Ford.

The street was deserted in both directions when he backed out of the drive. The only house lights in the block were three hundred yards distant; he swung the car in the opposite direction.

And it was done.

Justice tried to make himself relax now. But he was still keyed up; he imagined a dozen things that could go wrong, a dozen mistakes he might have made. He kept reviewing the past three hours, but instead of remaining clear and vivid in his memory, they took on a kind of surreal, extrinsic quality, as if he had watched it all happen—or read it all happen—instead of having done it himself.