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 Miserables,” 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, Jose, 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.
Two large wooden desks dominated the center of Frank and Jose’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 Jose.
Jose 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 Jose 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,” Jose added. “Mean like no tomorrow.”
The phone rang. Jose answered. Listened. Hung up.
“Emerson wants to see us.”
Walking down the hallway toward the stairs, Frank noticed a weariness around Jose’s eyes.
“You sleep last night?”
Jose 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.
Jose 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. Jose 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 pickin
g 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. Jose knew he’d heard the beginnings of a sermon yet to be preached.
They were now at the stairway. Frank reached out and squeezed Jose’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.
Frank felt an acid clot of irritation in his throat.
Emerson stood behind his desk, a green glass slab supported by two matte black metal sawhorses. Resplendent in a creamy silk shirt and an Italian designer tie, he held a folder several inches thick. He studied the contents for a moment or two after Frank and Jose entered. Then he closed the folder and held it up.
“Looks like somebody did some street cleaning.”
“Somebody did murder one,” Jose said.
As if he hadn’t heard or didn’t care, Emerson regarded the closed folder in his hands. “Hodges was a busy boy,” he whispered to himself. He got a sly look that put Frank in mind of something slithering through the grass.
“He’s in cold storage now,” Frank said.
Emerson continued staring thoughtfully at the folder. Then, as if the comment finally registered, he put the folder on his desk and looked at Frank.
“Oh, no. Skeeter’s got one more job to do. A job for us.”
Without having to look, Frank knew that Jose was doing his slow eye-roll. He looked anyway. Jose was.
He looked back at Emerson. Emerson’s eyebrows were raised in a question mark.
“Beg pardon?” Frank asked.
“I said, ‘How many people you think Skeeter clipped?’ ”
“Rounded off to the nearest hundred?”
“Get serious.”
Jose yawned. “Belt-and-suspenders estimate? Fifteen. Twenty. Most of them competitors.”
“Okay. And how many times did he go to trial?” Emerson asked.
“None.” Frank shook his head.
Emerson sat down in his high-backed black leather chair. It looked like it came off the bridge of the starship Enterprise. He tilted back. “And why was that?”
“Why was what?” Jose asked.
“Why didn’t he go to trial?” Emerson eyed the space just in front of him, the question hanging there, rotating slowly in midair. “I’ll tell you why,” he said, eyes still on the question. “Witnesses died, disappeared, or suddenly got Alzheimer’s.”
“Or they’d swear Skeeter was singing in the choir or babysittin’ their kids,” Jose added.
Emerson shifted his gaze to Jose, then to Frank, and back to Jose.
“We have cases where we know Skeeter was involved, but no evidence. But now, like you say, he’s no longer on the street. We don’t have to bring him to trial. We only have to dig a little. Push a little. Bend a little.”
He tilted forward and pushed Skeeter Hodges’s folder across the glass. “So why don’t you two see if some witnesses have reappeared or had a miraculous memory cure?”
“What you want us to do,” Jose said, “is pin a bunch a cold cases on Skeeter so we can make our numbers.”
Emerson’s lips thinned. “I want you two to do some retrospective investigation,” he said tightly. “Bring justice. Is that too much to ask?”
“What you’re asking us to do,” Frank countered, “isn’t investigating, it’s picking through a garbage dump.”
Emerson’s face flushed. He jabbed an index finger at the two detectives.
“You two prima donnas,” he shouted in a strangled voice, “are not… by God… going to fucking define… what your job is in this goddamn department!”
His eyes bulged and his finger trembled as he went on. “There are procedures… recognized procedures… legal procedures… for closing cold cases. And you will damn well get busy, or you will turn in your badges.”
Winded, Emerson paused. “Is that clear?” he asked in a flat, metallic voice.
“Clear…” Jose hesitated, then tacked on a silent “But…?”
“Yes?” Emerson asked.
“You mind if we track down Skeeter’s killer while we’re at it?”
Jose shook his head. “You had to know that was coming,” he said as they walked down the hall from Emerson’s office.
Frank felt the knot of anger tight in his stomach. “Emerson the weatherman.”
“Hunh. Weathervane.”
They stopped at a door with a sign that said “Records-Modus Operandi.” Frank tapped his five-digit access code into a keypad set into the wall beside the door.
Nothing.
Frowning, he entered the numbers again. Again, nothing.
“Damn thing’s fighting you,” Jose said unhelpfully.
Frank mentally went over the access code again. Bank PIN, Social Security number, health insurance group number, frequent flyer account number. “I thought it was only the army that made people into numbers.”
He tried a third time. The door unlocked with a metallic click, and Frank pushed through. Battered ranks of old-fashioned file cabinets filled the left side of the cavernous room. On the right, records analysts sat at four rows of desks. The analysts, mostly women, faced their computer screens with a vacant stare-the empty look of combat veterans who’d seen too much and who knew they were going to see more.
No one looked up as Frank and Jose made their way to a desk in the last row. There, a small-boned woman with short-cut iron-gray hair leaned forward, her fingers racing across her computer keyboard like those of a concert pianist at a Steinway. They stood watching until she looked up.
Eleanor Trowbridge intrigued Frank. R amp;MO’s senior analyst was a constant in a constantly changing world. She’d had the wrinkles and the gray hair when he and Jose had first met her twenty-six years before. She knew damn near all there was to know about crime in the District. She’d turned in her battered Olivetti typewriter for a Gateway computer, but she was still the person you went to if you wanted to make sense of things that didn’t make sense to anybody else.
Jose started to say something.
Before he could, Eleanor swiveled her chair around to a file cabinet and pulled a thick file jacket from a drawer. “James Culver Hodges. Aka ‘Skeeter.’ ” She handed it to Jose.
Jose flashed a look of surprise, then smiled. “While you’re at it, got any picks for NBA playoffs?”
“Maybe the Powerball numbers?” Frank asked.
“Elementary, gentlemen,” Eleanor said, sighing. “Point one, Mr. Hodges is newly dead.”
Jose’s smile turned wry. “Bingo.”
“And you two want me to find you some cold cases you can bury with Skeeter?”
“Double bingo,” Frank said.
Eleanor looked at the two detectives over the top of her glasses. “This afternoon? After five?”
Back in the office, the answering machine flashed insistently. Frank jabbed the answer button.
“Frank?” The words came out burgundy. “Call when you can.”
Jose watched the smile gathering at the corners of Frank’s mouth. “Woman’s got a voice.”
Frank nodded and slouched comfortably into his chair. “She does indeed.”
He never thought about Kate without a flush of warmth somewhere between heart and stomach. He didn’t remember a world before her and couldn’t imagine a world after. He caught occasional reflections of himself in her, and it always surprised him, the goodness he saw there. Part of him marveled that the two of them had found each other, while another part worried how he’d be if she weren’t there.
Jose watched Frank’s smile grow. “I know what y
ou’re thinking.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Meantime, you want to do… what?”
Frank thought about Kate some more, then sat up, took a deep breath, and surveyed his desktop. The overflowing in-box drew his eyes.
“We could”-he waved at the mound of paper-“get some of that done.”
Jose looked at his own in-box in distaste. “Let’s not. Let’s go check the street.”
Frank reached for his phone. “Let me call Kate first.”
“I’ll get the car.”
Frank picked up the phone and hit a speed dial. He looked out toward the Mall. The wind had picked up; the flags atop the Smithsonian castle stood straight out. How long, he wondered, had it been since he’d taken the time to-
“Hello.”
The Smithsonian and its flags vanished, and he felt warm in his chest.
“Jose says you’ve got a voice.”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
He waited several heartbeats. “You’re back tonight?”
Kate gave him a flight number.
“Missed you,” he said.
“It was only a week.”
Several more heartbeats. “Oh?”
Kate laughed. “You’ve got a voice.”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
Another laugh. “No.”
FOUR
The maroon Crown Vic idled at the curb, Jose at the wheel.
Still thinking about Kate and dinner, Frank got in.
Jose dropped the car into gear and pulled away. “Thought we might check the Rolex market.”
Ten minutes later, Frank and Jose sat in the car, watching as Waverly Ngame assembled his stand across the street.
First out of the white Dodge van, a longish rectangular folding table, the kind you see in church basements and at catered receptions. Ngame locked open the legs. With a toe, he nudged wood shims under them, working around the table until it was steady on the uneven brick sidewalk.
A Murder of Justice Page 3
