Mortal Friends (3 page)

L
ynch Antiques occupied three floors of an old brick building on Wisconsin Avenue between P and Q Streets. My aim was to create the kind of chic, eclectic environment where one could either find the perfect little gift for a special occasion or furnish a whole house in one fell swoop. The front rooms on the first floor were like drawing rooms, crammed with furniture, paintings, chandeliers, and bric-a-brac of all different styles and periods—everything from seventeenth-century Russian icons to a Tony Duquette paper screen with coral finials. The stock ranged from good quality to decorative junk. The second floor was mainly dedicated to tableware and fine linens displayed on antique dining tables and beds. My office was there too—a small back room overlooking a small back garden. The third floor was storage.

The front door bell tinkled as I walked into the shop. Rosina Alvarez, my manager, looked up from her computer. She didn’t even wait for me to take off my coat before she said, “Bad news.”

“You heard about it already?” News really did travel fast these days.

She held up a sheaf of bills and fanned them in front of me. “These are way past due.”

Rosina had the face of a madonna and the sales skills of P. T. Barnum. She was nothing if not direct.

“I take it you don’t know there’s been a murder in Montrose Park,” I said.

“There’s gonna be one right here if you don’t pay these bills
today
.”

“Did you hear what I just said? They found another woman mur
dered right up there in Montrose Park. I jog there all the time.”

She shrugged. “See why I don’t exercise? It’s too dangerous.”

“That’s five women he’s killed now. Montrose Park is right around the corner. You don’t think this is serious? This is really serious.”

“Don’t obsess. It’s bad for your blood pressure, and it doesn’t help anything.”

Rosina could be so irritating at times, mainly because she was the most unflappable person I knew. She wasn’t an obsesser like me. She took life one step at a time and didn’t waste energy worrying about the future or regretting the past like I did on an almost daily basis. But she was also young.

“Obsessing comes with age, like wrinkles. One day you’ll obsess, just like I do,” I told her.

“I doubt it,” she said flatly, handing me the stack of bills.

I gave them a cursory glance.

“You know what? I’m just not going to worry about these right now. It’s a gorgeous day out there—murder notwithstanding—and guess what? I’m
happy
!”

Rosina shook her head. “Oh-oh…I hope he’s rich and he has a house he wants you to decorate.”

She knew me so well. She knew I had a new man in my sights.

“Don’t be such a smart-ass,” I said.

“Why not? Someone around here has to be smart about something.”

She went back to the books, and I poured myself a cup of muddy coffee from the communal pot. I headed upstairs to my office on the second floor. Sitting behind my desk, I sipped my coffee and stared out at the back garden, dotted with wrought-iron furniture and whimsical stone statuary—the outdoor stuff I couldn’t fit inside the store. It usually looked like a graveyard to me. But today it seemed as amusing as a country fair.

I started sifting through the bills. They weren’t so amusing. Lynch Antiques was always in the red. I was born with a good eye, and I could never resist a beautiful piece of furniture or a wonderful old painting. I referred to myself as the Grand Acquisitor, and I was always broke. Plus, the whole antiques business had been in the toilet lately, which made things twice as bad. All the dealers were complaining about it. I felt like ripping up the whole bunch of bills and
just throwing them into the air like confetti. But instead, I began the tedious process of arranging them according to which of my creditors was less likely to put a contract out on me if I stiffed them yet another month.

About a half an hour later, Rosina buzzed me and told me to come downstairs.

“I can’t. I’m in the middle of committing suicide,” I told her.

“You will want to live when you see what’s down here.”

When I got downstairs, Rosina was playfully peeking out from behind a monstrous vase filled with red roses, which she had placed on the center table.

“He must be rich,” she said in a singsong voice, handing me a card.

I opened it with great anticipation. The note read: “Loved being with you last night. Bob.” It wasn’t handwritten. It was typed on a florist’s card. But I didn’t hold that against him. I knew he was a busy man. If I’d held anything against him, it would have been the bright red roses, because they are so prosaic and predictable. But you can’t have everything.

Rosina wanted to know who they were from, and when I told her they were from Bob Poll, she immediately said, “What happened to Melody Hartford?”

Rosina faithfully read the Reliable Source column in the
Post
, and social magazines like the
Washingtonian, Capitol File
, and
Washington Life.
Bob was always in them, usually with Melody on his arm—but sometimes not. I told her that they’d broken up.

“He’s available now. He took me home from the Symphony Ball last night,” I said.

Rosina rolled her eyes. Her reaction was predictable. She’d lived with me through so many boyfriends, she was entitled to be a little skeptical. I seemed to have a knack for finding guys who were either newly divorced, getting divorced, or fresh out of some torturous long-term relationship that had left them scarred and unable to commit. Though this might be a description of half the men in the world, it was always the half I seemed to find.

Since my divorce umpteen years ago, all my romances had had an oddly similar trajectory: a whoosh of enthusiasm followed either by a fast puncture or slow deflation. There was always a nail in the tire somewhere. But one must live in hope, and I was absolutely thrilled
to get those roses—bloody red as they were. Quite frankly, I didn’t appreciate Rosina’s uh-oh-here-we-go-again face, dismissing me like I was a third-party candidate with no hope.

I tried to explain to her that when you’re single and my age, you can’t be too choosy, that most of the men I met either were married or had been in some kind of relationship before me. It was almost unavoidable. But Rosina was twenty-four, not forty-three like me, and she was blissfully engaged to a twenty-eight-year-old contractor who was probably her first beau. What the hell did she know about life?

“Don’t be such a pessimist,” I told her. “As my father used to say, ‘It only takes one.’”

“And my father used to say, ‘Don’t drink at a poison well.’”

What the hell
that
meant, I have no idea. Nor did I ask.

I called Violet to tell her about the flowers.

“Red roses and a typewritten card, right?” she said.

“How did you know?”

“Everyone knows Mr. Poll’s MO, darling. He sent my friend Linda Hawthorne red roses for twelve straight days. Get set for the onslaught. He’s after you.”

“What happened with Linda Hawthorne?”

“He dumped her. But she’s such a pain in the ass, who could blame him? That doesn’t mean he’ll dump you if you play your cards right.”

“And how do I play my cards right, pray tell?”

“Don’t sleep with him right away. Think of yourself as Anne Boleyn. Hold out as long as you can until you get the ring.”

“And then what? He beheads me?”

“At least you’ll have the crown…. Oh, and FYI, Miss Montrose—? I actually saw them take away her body. Someone told me they think she’s been dead for at least a week, and you know what that means.”

“No, what?”

“That we probably jogged past her a couple of times.”

“Jesus.”

“Don’t you just wish
we’d
found her? How exciting would
that
have been? Huh?”

“You are so sinister,” I said.

Rosina left work early that day to go on her endless hunt for the
perfect wedding dress. I manned the front of the shop. A few people dropped in to browse or shoot the breeze, including a couple of my fellow shopkeepers. Everyone was talking about the murder. Toward the end of the day, a rather somber-faced African-American man with dreadlocks walked in the door while I was talking to another customer. He was kind of attractive. He wandered into the next room. I excused myself and followed him. He stood with his hands behind his back, gazing up at one of the paintings on the wall. He was dressed all in black—black suit, black shirt, black tie. A diamond stud twinkled in his left ear. He was not my usual customer.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

“Thomas Wootten…helluva painter,” he said without looking at me.

“I’m impressed. You know your art.”

“No. But I can read,” he said, pointing to the small white card on a nearby table: “
Horn, King George’s Stallion
, by Thomas Wootten, 1795.”

“Oh. My assistant must have just typed that up. It should be tacked up under the painting. Thanks for noticing,” I said, affixing it to the wall.

“It’s my job to notice things…. Detective Gunner, D.C. Police Department,” he said, showing me his ID.

“Reven Lynch.” We shook hands. “Gunner…Great name for a detective.”

He shrugged as if he’d heard that one a million times before. “So this is your place. Very nice,” he said, nodding his approval.

I was pretty sure he’d come about the murder. But I didn’t want to appear rude, so I said: “Are you looking for something special, or are you just browsing?”

“You hear about that murder up in Montrose Park?”

“Are you
kidding
? Who hasn’t? It’s all anyone’s talking about. I always go jogging in that park. It’s really scary. You think it’s that serial killer again?”

He didn’t answer. “So how long have you had this shop?”

“Uh…oh, I guess about eight years now.”

“How’s business?”

“These days not great. The whole economy is screwed. But I’m surviving.”

“You from Washington originally?”

“No, New York. Can’t you tell, darling?” I drawled, striking a pose. He looked a little mystified. I don’t think he found me all that amusing.

Detective Gunner had the style of a hip-hop star. He was around five-ten, a little taller than me—a neat, compact man, who obviously took great pride in his appearance and the way he dressed. He looked a little worn out, though—kind of like his shirt, which was crisply pressed but faded from wear.

“Well, I’m just kinda canvassing the neighborhood. You don’t get a lot of murders in Georgetown. You happen to remember anything odd or out of the ordinary in the past week or so?”

“Nope. It’s all been just business and gossip as usual!” I said cheerily. “Hear a lot of gossip, do you?”

“In this shop? Are you kidding? I hear
everything
. For some reason, when people are browsing around together and talking, they don’t think other people are listening. But, trust me, I am!”

“If you hear anything interesting, give me a call, will you?”

He took out a card, wrote his cell phone number on the back, and handed it to me.

“Thanks for your time,” he said.

We shook hands again. There was no arrogance about him, no swagger—only a hint of weariness in his lively dark eyes, as if nothing in the world could surprise him except perhaps an act of pure kindness.

A
fter that opening salvo of roses, I didn’t hear from Bob Poll again, which was a little surprising, not to mention disappointing. Every time the phone rang, I thought it might be him. It never was. Ten days later, I was upstairs working in my office when Rosina buzzed me and said in a coy voice, “You have a visitor.” I was sure it was Bob. I checked myself out in the mirror and took my time walking downstairs. I didn’t want him to think I was anxious. When I reached the ground floor, Rosina pointed to the back room, where Detective Gunner was examining a Japanese screen.

“You didn’t tell me he was so cute,” Rosina whispered.

I felt slightly deflated that it wasn’t Bob, but I didn’t let my disappointment show. I walked over and greeted him warmly.

“Detective! Good to see you again.”

“Hey, Ms. Lynch. Nice screen. Edo period?”

“Yes. You have good taste.”

“I like Japanese art.”

“I’ll give you a good deal. I’ve had it awhile.”

“Nah…. Thanks anyway. Look, uh, is there somewhere we can talk privately?”

“Follow me.”

I showed him upstairs to my office. He sat down on the couch and declined my offer of coffee. I sat behind my desk, folded my hands primly, and said, “So what can I do for you?”

He pulled a picture out of his pocket and handed it to me. It was a snapshot of a woman. It looked like the photo on a driver’s license.

“You recognize her?”

I studied the picture for a long moment.

“No. Who is she?”

“Her name is—
was
—Nancy Sawtelle.”

“Oh, my God! Is that—? That’s not the woman who was murdered up in Montrose Park, is it?” He nodded. I took a closer look at the photo. “Wow. Poor woman.”

“You never saw her around here?”

“I don’t remember her. You can ask Rosina.”

“Unfortunately, it’s the only shot we have of her. The autopsy pictures aren’t usable for identification.”

“That bad?”

“Yeah,” he said softly, sliding the picture back into his pocket.

He slumped back on the couch. He seemed tired.

“Sure you don’t want some coffee or something? Water? A soda?”

“No, thanks. Know what I’d like?”

“What?”

“A tour of the shop.”

“Really? Are you interested in antiques?”

“Kinda. You mind?”

“Are you kidding? I’d be delighted.”

I had fun showing Gunner around. It wasn’t every day I met someone who was genuinely interested in learning about some of the pieces I had in stock—not to buy them, but just to know about them, what drew me to them, how and where I’d acquired them. Just when I was ruing the fact that I’d ever gotten into the antiques business to begin with because I was in such debt, Gunner came along to remind me how much I loved my little shop, and how proud I was of it. Besides, as we walked from room to room, I felt he was sizing me up as much as he was the furniture, and I felt kind of flattered. He was cute, like Rosina said.

After the tour, we went back upstairs to my office, and this time he accepted my offer of coffee. He asked me how I’d gotten into the antiques business. I told him that I used to be a decorator, but that I’d always wanted to open a shop.

“I like being my own boss,” I said.

I asked him how he’d gotten to be a detective. He said, “When you grow up where I grew up, you’ve basically got two choices: you’re
either with the law or against it. My older brother was against it. He got shot. I figured I’d try the other route.”

Gunner wasn’t too much more specific about his background, but we did talk about some of his cases. He seemed most proud of the work he’d done several years back on the Beltway sniper case, in which ten people were shot and killed and three others critically wounded while they were minding their business, doing mundane things like mowing the lawn, pumping gas, or getting on a school bus.

“Everyone was looking for a white guy in a white van. Then it turned out to be two black guys in a blue car. But we got ’em,” Gunner said.

He proudly showed me a newspaper clipping featuring a picture of himself among a group of officers as they arrested Lee Boyd Malvo, the young sniper.

“That’s me,” he said. “Second from the left in the back row.”

He looked a lot younger then, even though it wasn’t all that long ago. When he left the shop that day, I’d kind of wondered why he’d dropped by.

In the weeks that followed, Gunner came to visit a few times just to shoot the breeze. Rosina joked that it was because he had a crush on me, and I joked that it was because he had a crush on her. But in truth, it didn’t really seem as if he had a crush on either of us. He was simply interested in getting to know me as a friend. He wanted to know all about me, what my background was, where I’d gone to school, how I happened to wind up in Washington. I told him that I’d lived here briefly when I was a young girl. My father was a lawyer with an international practice. He and my mother moved down to D.C. for a brief period of time in the early ’80s so he could open a branch of the firm here. We had a house in Kalorama with a pool and a garden. I had wonderful memories of the place and moved here after design school. It was a cheaper, gentler place to live than New York—much less competitive and hard-edged, provided you weren’t in politics.

Gunner said he’d seen my picture in a couple of magazines at various social events. I think he was impressed. At least, he said he was. The social world seemed to intrigue him. He was always asking about the parties I went to and the people I knew. I got invited to a lot of big
parties, ones you didn’t necessarily have to pay for, and I asked him if he ever wanted to tag along. I thought he’d be a cool escort. But he declined.

Then one afternoon he came in, asking to speak to me in private again. I showed him upstairs to my office. He clearly had something weighty on his mind. He fidgeted a lot and looked sheepish.

“Look, I, um…I haven’t been totally honest with you,” he began.

I went on alert. “You haven’t?”

“Nope.” He flashed his dark velvet eyes at me and expelled a hard sigh, like this was difficult for him. “Fact is, I need your help.”

“I’m listening.”

Gunner explained that he was part of a “special task force” assigned to investigate Nancy Sawtelle’s murder, as well as the four other murders the police suspected to be the work of the Beltway Basher. By this point, I knew quite a lot about “Miss Montrose,” as Violet had dubbed her. The papers had reported that Sawtelle fit the same general pattern as the other four women. She was a brunette who was bludgeoned to death in a wooded area and who maintained an apartment near Dupont Circle. The one difference was that she was older than the others by some twenty years.

As I said, I’ve always been more interested in crimes where I could have been the victim, so this one utterly fascinated me. Not only was Nancy Sawtelle around my age, she’d been murdered in a park I frequented, a park whose tranquil beauty was the setting for dog walkers, joggers, family outings, and the innocent routines of daily life.

“How can I help you?” I asked him.

“Well, I’ve been coming around here with kind of a purpose in mind.”

“Oh?” I said warily.

“You go to a lot of these society events, and you’re friends with a lot of fancy folk, right?”

“I guess.”

“The guy who’s doing these girls…? We have reason to believe he’s someone in your world—you know, so-ci-ety.”
So-sigh-a-tee
, he pronounced it, with a wink in his voice.

“Yeah, we’ve actually heard that too.”

He perked up. “You have?”

“Yeah. There’s been this rumor going around for ages that the Beltway Basher’s a big shot. My friend Violet and I are always joking about it. Maybe it’s because of that intern who was killed years ago. You know, the one who was supposedly having the affair with the congressman…? So the police think it’s some powerful guy too?”

“Could be. We haven’t had much to go on up to now. But we may have caught a break…. Look, I’m gonna tell you something I’m not supposed to be telling you. Can I trust you?” He held my gaze for a long moment.

“Yes, you can,” I said solemnly.

“Well, even if I can’t, I don’t really have a lotta options here,” he said, like he was talking to himself. He hesitated another moment, then said: “We found a calendar in Nancy Sawtelle’s apartment. She was tracking this guy she identified as ‘X.’”

Gunner went on to describe the calendar as “one of those month-at-a-glance wall jobs with pictures of harp seals and leopards and all kinds of adorable endangered shit on it.” He said that Nancy Sawtelle had written entries in the little individual day boxes, like for example, “X @ KenCen” or “X @ Smith,” which he thought stood for the Smithsonian. He showed me how she always used the “internet A,” as Gunner called it. He figured she was stalking some guy, and the guy she was stalking could very well turn out to be her killer. He said the police didn’t know a whole lot about Nancy Sawtelle. Her fingerprints didn’t show up on the national database. All they knew was that she’d moved to D.C. about eight months prior to her death. She’d rented a small apartment near Dupont Circle, and she’d had a couple of jobs waiting tables.

“This calendar is key,” Gunner went on. “The guy she was tracking…? He goes to a lot of social events. She’s got him at the National Gallery, the Phillips, the Folger, the Smithsonian. But there’s only one place where he went where we know that
all
our other victims went too—”

“Where’s that?”

“The Kennedy Center. Her last entry reads, ‘X @ KenCen.’ That was the night of the Symphony Ball.”

“Oh, my God, I was
there
!”

“I know. I saw your picture in the paper.”

“But how do you know this guy she was tracking is your serial killer?”

“We don’t. But it’s still one helluva link. And, frankly, at this point it’s the only new lead we got.”

“So, assuming that this guy
is
the killer, you think he met all these women at the Kennedy Center?”

Gunner shrugged. “Met them, saw them, invited them there maybe. I hear tell some of these guys like to have their girlfriends go to the same events as their wives. Gives ’em a charge. You ever hear that?”

“I told you I hear everything in this shop.”

“That’s what I figured.”

“Why don’t you make a list of the events she marked in the calendar and compare it to a list of the people who attended those events?”

Gunner smiled for the first time ever. The smile lit up his face and made him look years younger. He said gently, “Now, why didn’t
I
think of that?”

I got the point and felt stupid for suggesting it. “Okay. So you’ve already done that. Don’t you have any suspects?”

“A few…
hundred
.” He sprang up from the couch and paced around. “Shit! It’s like all you same damn people go to all the same damn parties all the same damn time! Don’t you guys ever get sick of each other?”

I chuckled. “You have
no
idea.”

“Well, I need to
get
an idea because I believe there’s a stone cold killer hiding in plain sight in this town.”

“Oh, I can think of several! Some of them are in power.”

“All kidding aside, Reven, those rumors you all have been hearing may be true. This guy may actually
be
a prominent person—someone you know, or know of.”

I sank back in my chair. “Wow…. This isn’t a joke, is it?”

Gunner reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out four pictures he’d cut out from magazines. He laid them down on the desk in front of me, one at a time, in a row. Each picture was a group shot of some partygoers, the kinds of photos that appear on the glossy patchwork pages of
Capitol File
and
Washington Life
. In each photo, the head of one girl in the group was circled in blue ink. None of the circled girls was identified by name in print. Each girl just happened to be standing near some celebrity or social couple who were the photographer’s real target and who were mentioned in the caption below. The circled girls were unidentified—just four more anonymous pretty faces on
the fringes of a big social event. Gunner didn’t have to tell me who they were.

“The dead girls?” I said.

He nodded. “Murdered in the meanest way. See what they all have in common?”

“They’re all cute young brunettes wearing bad dresses? Sorry!”

“What the
pictures
have in common.”

I studied them more closely. “I don’t know…. They’re group shots, party pictures…. All in the same magazine? I don’t know.”

“Where
are all these parties?”

I looked again and recognized the unmistakable red carpet in one, the giant columns in another, the gift shop in another.

“The Kennedy Center,” I said.

“That’s correct. So we got Nancy Sawtelle’s calendar and we got the Kennedy Center. And those are the only two leads we have.”

Gunner added Nancy Sawtelle’s driver’s license to the group. He pointed to each picture in turn. “Bianca Symonds…Maria Dixon…Liza Cooley…Dinise Shevette…Nancy Sawtelle…These girls had names. They had lives. Now they’re gone,” he said, as if that really meant something to him.

He collected the pictures one by one with care, like he was gathering flowers. He sat back down on the couch, slowly sifting through the bunch before putting them back in his pocket. I didn’t say anything. I just watched him. He wasn’t detached and matter-of-fact like some detectives you see on TV. These murders seemed to have affected him very deeply. I felt sorry for him.

“I don’t know how I can help you, but I will if I can,” I said.

“Okay, look, I got a hunch. But in order for me to play it out, I gotta get to know a lot more about society and society people. Right now that world’s got glass around it. You all are just a bunch of colorful fish swimming around in this big old aquarium. I don’t have any idea who the real players are. But
you
know that world. You know who the really important people are—not just the ones who get their pictures in the paper. You know how things really work.”