Murder at Ford's Theatre (2 page)

TWO

W
HEN THE CALL CAME IN
to the MPD’s First District Headquarters at 415 Fourth Street, SW, the duty officer that morning put out a notice of a body behind Ford’s Theatre. This was picked up by all vehicles in the area, including an unmarked patrol car manned by two detectives from the Crimes Against Persons Unit. Rick Klayman and Mo Johnson were parked a block from Ford’s Theatre drinking coffee and comparing notes about their long weekend.

Their celebration of Labor Day had taken different turns. Johnson had had Sunday and Monday off with the family. Klayman had worked, paperwork mostly, catching up on what seemed to be a mountain of forms to be filled out. MPD’s upper echelon had instituted what it termed “project paperwork simplification,” which somehow resulted in more forms rather than fewer, more complicated, too, shades of the IRS’s claims of tax simplification. Klayman really didn’t care. He’d had little else to do anyway that weekend, and could use the overtime. He’d also gone over investigative files on a Congressional intern, Connie Marshall, who’d disappeared a year earlier, one of many missing persons in D.C., but a case that had become, according to some of his colleagues, an obsession. Klayman didn’t debate their view of his immersion in the case because they were probably right. His weekend review of the files represented the tenth time he’d done so—or thirtieth?

“You get to see your pretty little lady friend over the weekend?” Johnson had asked his partner as they sat in the unmarked car.

“Yes,” replied Klayman. “We had dinner last night.”

Johnson’s laugh was low and deep and rumbling, like a poorly tuned outboard engine. “Candlelight and all that?”

“Come on, Mo, why are you always asking me about Rachel? We had dinner. No big deal.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why do you care whether I get married or not?” Klayman asked.

“Just looking out for your best interests, my man,” said Johnson. “Married men live longer. You never heard that?”

Klayman looked over at his partner, smiled, and shook his head. He’d been hooked up with Mo Johnson since making detective a year ago after only five years on the force. Johnson was a twenty-two-year veteran, skilled, black, a good teacher, who’d seen it all: “The kid is bright, Mo, but wet behind the ears. Show him the ropes,” Johnson’s supervisor had said after the veteran’s partner of many years had retired, and Johnson had been told he was to be paired with the rookie detective.

Mo wasn’t happy being handed Klayman as a partner. As he’d told his wife, Etta, that night, “Out of thirty-six hundred cops, most of ’em black, I end up with a skinny little Jewish kid from New York. Maybe it’s time to grab the pension and walk.”

Which he didn’t do. The truth was, he’d come to like Rick Klayman, even respect him. Klayman had proved his mettle on more than one occasion, facing down dangerous situations with steely resolve and audacious fearlessness. “The kid may look like a nerd,” Johnson told friends in the department, “but he’s all right. He-is-all-right!”

That was when the female voice crackled through the speaker: “Reported unconscious person, alley behind Ford’s Theatre, Tenth and F.”

“Seventeen responding,” Johnson barked into the handheld microphone as Klayman pulled from the curb and turned the corner down Tenth, coming to a hard stop a minute later in front of the theatre. They bolted from the car and entered, flashing their badges at two uniformed park rangers standing at an interior door leading down into the theatre itself.

“Where’s the unconscious person?” Johnson asked one of them.

“Really unconscious,” a ranger said. “She’s stone-cold dead.” He pointed to the stage. Sirens could be heard from both in front of and behind the theatre. The detectives moved quickly down an aisle, skirted the narrow orchestra pit, and bounded up onto the stage.

“Police,” Klayman announced. “Where’s the victim?”

The older stagehand’s nod indicated the door leading to Baptist Alley.

Johnson went to it and stuck his head through the partial opening. He was faced with four uniformed MPD officers who’d driven into the alley from F Street. They were looking down. Johnson did, too, and saw the young woman whose lifeless, bloody body blocked the door. He turned to Johnny Wales sitting on a wooden chair, head in his hands. “Another way out there from here?”

“Huh?” Wales’s head came up. “Yeah, over there.”

Klayman beat Johnson to the second exit door and went through it, followed closely by his partner. A few people had walked up the alley from F but were kept away from the scene by one of the officers. Another uniform held a scruffy man against the brick wall with a straight-arm. The man’s advanced dishevelment made it hard to determine his age. Thirty? Seventy? His hair was a helmet of matted salt-and-pepper hair, his scraggly beard hanging far below his chin and cheeks. Large, dark circles on the crotch of filthy, baggy chinos testified to his not being housebroken. Klayman took special note of his eyes; they were large, wild, and watery, giving him the look of a crazed soldier who’d just emerged from behind enemy lines. He wore a dirty white sweatshirt with
ARMANI
written on it.

“Cordon it off,” Johnson ordered a patrolman, who went to his car for a roll of yellow crime scene tape. Klayman turned at the sound of other vehicles coming up the alley. Both were white mini-vans; one had
EVIDENCE TECHNICIAN
written on it, the other
OFFICE OF THE MEDICAL EXAMINER
. The two detectives didn’t need to discuss what they would do next. Johnson returned inside the theatre to round up everyone who’d been there when the body was discovered, while Klayman took charge of the crime scene itself, making sure nothing was touched or moved, and working with the evidence technicians and ME as they went about their routines.

Klayman went to where the uniformed cop held the vagrant at bay against the brick wall. “Who’s he?” Klayman asked.

“An unemployed gentleman,” the cop said, grinning. “Claims he’s with the FBI.”

“That so?” said Klayman. “What are you holding him for?”

“Eyewitness. Says he saw who killed her.”

“Ease up,” Klayman said. The cop released his grip. Klayman stepped closer to the bearded man. “You saw it happen, sir?”

“You bet I did,” the man said, wiping spittle from his mouth and beard. “Saw it plain as day.”

“What’s your name?”

“Joseph Patridge. That’s the name I use undercover.” His smile revealed missing teeth; the smell of whiskey curled Klayman’s nose.

“What’s your real name, when you’re not undercover?”

“John Partridge.”

“I see.” To the uniformed officer: “Take him downtown, material witness.”

“Okay.”

The evidence technician took pictures of the deceased from many angles with a digital camera, then took positions from which he could photograph the surrounding area. Klayman crouched next to the ME, who was gently moving the girl’s jaw to determine the level of rigor mortis.

“She’s dead,” Dr. Ong said. What was obvious to the casual observer didn’t become official until the ME had decreed it so.

“What do you figure, time of death?” Klayman asked.

“Not stiff as a board yet, Detective. Legs still flexible. Less than eight hours. Maybe six.”

“She look like maybe she was moved here from where she was killed? Dumped here?”

Ong pressed fingertips against the girl’s abdomen, exposed because her purple shirt had ridden up to her neck. Klayman observed that there was no discoloration from pooled blood, or livor mortis, on her stomach, indicating that she’d fallen on her back when struck and had stayed in that position. Ong shook his head. “No livor on her belly. I’d say the deed was probably done right here.”

Klayman stood and slowly took in the broken macadam and concrete surrounding the girl. He asked Ong from his standing position, “Blow to the head?”

“Appears that way. More than one. Head, the face. She was beaten quite badly.”

Klayman summoned one of the evidence technicians with his index finger. “See those prints over there?” he asked, pointing to areas of crumbled concrete where two footprints were visible in the gray dust. “Get those.”

Inside, Mo Johnson had instructed those gathered on the stage to separate. When they were a dozen feet apart from one another, he asked the group, “Anybody know who she is? Was?”

Their reply was affirmative. “Nadia,” some of them said. “Zarinski.” “Nadia Zarinski.”

Johnson raised his hand to cut off the chorus. “Just one at a time. You?” He nodded at Johnny Wales.

“Nadia Zarinski,” Wales said.

“She work here?” Johnson pulled a small pad from his jacket pocket and started writing.

“She was an intern,” someone else said.

Johnson kept his attention on Wales, his expression urging
him
to continue.

“Nadia was an intern. I mean, not really an intern. Not here. She’s a paid intern in Senator Lerner’s office. She sort of volunteered here once in a while, a night or two now and then. She liked being around the theatre.”

“Paid intern?” Johnson said. “I didn’t think interns got paid.”

“Yeah. Well, she did. Get paid. By Lerner’s office.”

“Who could do such a thing?” Mary asked.

“Anybody got any ideas?” Johnson asked.

Silent shrugs.

“I want an informal statement from each of you. Has anybody left who was here earlier?”

“No. Well, Clarise was here.”

“Who’s she?”

“She’s the boss.”

“Where is she?”

“Up in her office, I suppose. The building next door.”

Mo Johnson pulled his cell phone from his belt and called headquarters: “This is Johnson. We need backup here. Plenty of witnesses.” He clicked off and told uniformed officers who’d entered the theatre to go next door and round up anyone there, including a woman named Clarise. “She runs the place, I think,” he explained.

He looked down at the front row of seats. “Come with me,” he told Wales, indicating the stagehand was to follow him down to the house, where they settled into adjacent seats. Johnson asked for a brief explanation of why Wales was there that morning, asking him to describe what he’d seen, and gathered his full name, address, phone number, e-mail address, and other specifics. “We’ll go to headquarters after we get all the informal statements.”

“What for?”

“To get your formal statement. So hang around. Don’t talk to anybody except me. Got it?”

“Yeah.”

“Next!”

Klayman entered the theatre after Dr. Ong had released Nadia Zarinski’s body to be taken to his office and lab. An autopsy would be performed that afternoon. The members of the stage crew who’d been questioned by Johnson, or by a backup team of detectives, had been told to take seats throughout the theatre with plenty of space between them, and were instructed to not talk to one another until their formal statements had been taken at headquarters.

The slight young detective stood on the stage and stared up to the box in which President Lincoln had been assassinated, kept pretty much as it was that fateful night. Klayman was no stranger to Ford’s Theatre. He’d spent many hours there soaking in its historic meaning and listening to tourist lectures delivered by park rangers. The presidency of Abraham Lincoln and his tragic death were passions of his; he’d read countless books on the subject, and attended lectures presented by Lincoln scholars. In the good weather, on days off, or when he convinced Johnson to accompany him with their brown-bag lunch, he enjoyed sitting on the steps of the gleaming white marble Lincoln Memorial, the soaring figure of a seated, serene Lincoln peering down on the millions of tourists who visited his shrine, the small children racing up and down the steps, citizens paying homage to the man who’d freed the slaves. Others simply enjoyed the view across the Reflecting Pool, inspired by Versailles and the Taj Mahal, to the Washington Monument and beyond to the Capitol.

Mo Johnson had never had a particular interest in Lincoln history—until he’d teamed up with the bookish Klayman. One day, after reading an account of the design, building, and dedication of the Lincoln Memorial on Memorial Day 1922, he asked Klayman—as they were eating sandwiches on the steps—“Did you know, Rick, that when it was dedicated, the president of Tuskegee Institute—he was black, you know—they wouldn’t let him sit with the other speakers—he was supposed to speak—and made him sit across the street with the rest of the black folk?” Anger edged his voice.

“I know,” Klayman replied. “Ironic, huh?”

“That’s all you have to say?”

“What do you want me to say? It was wrong. If Lincoln had been there, he would have denounced it. I denounce it. Okay?”

“Okay.” After a thoughtful pause, Johnson asked, “Do you think your people had it worse? You know, the Holocaust. Slavery. Who had it worse?”

Klayman stood, brushed off the seat of his pants, crumpled his brown bag, and said, “I think everybody got screwed, Mo. Everybody.”

Their discussion was interrupted by a call on the police radio Johnson carried. It wasn’t the first discussion they’d had about race, nor would it be the last. Johnson liked talking about it; Klayman didn’t, concerned that no matter what he might say, Johnson would never fully accept that his white partner, Jewish at that, didn’t harbor some deeply buried prejudice.

“H
EY,
R
ICK,
”
Johnson called, interrupting Klayman’s momentary reverie on the stage. Their attention turned to the door leading to the Ford’s Theatre Society offices.

“I can’t believe this,” Clarise Emerson announced loudly as she strode into the theatre, accompanied by two officers; another man, whale-like and balding, wearing a white shirt, red tie, and red suspenders, tried to keep pace with her.

Johnson stood and held out his badge. “You’re the—?”

“Clarise Emerson,” she said curtly.

Klayman, who’d come down into the house, offered his badge, too. “Detective Klayman, Crimes Against Persons Unit, Ms. Emerson.” He was well aware who she was from photographs in the Style section of the
Post,
and from having attended productions at which she spoke.