At first glance, the view of the Capitol seemed to demand a larger, grander office. But after you took in the Azerbaijan carpet, the well-aged club chairs upholstered in butter-soft leather, the walnut credenza with the silver-framed family photos and the Waterford crystal decanters, the room was not so much an office as the private hideaway of an old friend. A place where you could believe what you heard.
“I don’t suspect you’re here for refinancing,” Sheffield said, getting up to shake hands. He had a surprisingly round voice, something, Frank thought, like Nat Cole’s.
“Should we?” Frank asked.
“If you wait, rates may go up,” Sheffield said, “but on the other hand, they may go down.”
“And Capital Mortgage wins either way,” Jose said.
“Only if we’re smart,” Sheffield said dismissively, as he led them to the club chairs. He sat, carefully hitching up his trouser legs to protect the crease. “And that’s what you’re here for, isn’t it… to get smart? Skeeter Hodges?”
“Yeah, Skeeter. We’ll settle for a little less dumb,” Frank said.
Frank studied the man he and Jose had sent to Lorton twenty years before. Times had been changing around Sheffield. Prostitution, gambling, and loansharking had been sufficient to satisfy humanity’s basic sins-sins that history and longevity somehow legitimized. Drugs, however, were different in Lamar Sheffield’s view. They corrupted humanity in a way the old sins couldn’t. A man had to be a man. Stand for something, even in the face of the inevitable. And so Sheffield had killed Mookie, Travis, and Snake, knowing what it would mean. And Frank and Jose had taken him in, and Sheffield had done hard time in Lorton at an advanced age-something that would have killed most men. But he had come out leaving one life behind and started a new one. Yet the old ties remained: people talked to Lamar Sheffield-residual perks of a reputation earned by a lifetime on the street.
“No word out as to who might have done it,” Frank said.
Sheffield frowned. “There’s always talk. Sometimes before. Most always after.”
“You haven’t heard anything about Skeeter?”
Sheffield smiled mockingly. “You talking to the other mortgage brokers in town?”
“Other brokers don’t have such nice offices,” Jose said.
“Or such rap sheets,” Sheffield came back. “You thinking about a hit? Man gets shot in his car in that business, you know it was a hit.”
“A competitor?” Frank asked. “I thought he didn’t have any.”
“Never can tell. It could have been one of his own people,” Sheffield said sadly. “No loyalty these days. Too much on the table. Your best friends get greedy and you end up with a bullet in the back of your head.”
“I heard it happens that way, Lamar,” Frank said.
“Curious thing about Skeeter,” Sheffield mused. “How he managed to slip by you folks with the badges. Took over when Brooks got sent away, and just dropped out of sight.”
He paused to think about it. “A matter of style,” he finally said. “Skeeter didn’t wear the diamonds and fur coats, didn’t charter planes to the Vegas fights. He paid attention to business.”
“You think he may have had top cover?” Jose asked.
“Like I said, there was a lot on the table. Skeeter was in big business. Bound to have some investors.”
“But you don’t know if he did or didn’t have cover,” Frank said.
Sheffield leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers together. “Look, Frank,” he said patiently, “when I got out, Skeeter was just another kid on the street with a couple of friends who’d do what he told them. Then he tied in with Juan Brooks. When the feds got Brooks, Skeeter came out top dog.
“Man was like one of them trapeze acts in the circus,” he said reflectively. “He’d do the damnedest things. I’d hear about him tying up with the boys from Medellin. I thought he was in over his head. Those were hard boys playin’ hard games. I’d say he was gonna fall. I’d know it. But he never did. Man does things like that… knows he’s got a net.”
Sheffield thought some more about it, then nodded. “Knows he’s got a net,” he repeated.
Frank and Jose stood.
“John doing okay?” Frank asked.
Sheffield’s eyes flicked to one of the larger photos on the credenza: Lamar Sheffield standing beside a tall young man on a basketball court. The young man wore his father’s smile and a Dartmouth jersey.
“Could be better. Killings aren’t good for the real estate business.”
“Helps if you’re buying,” Jose said.
Sheffield shook his head. “But the profit’s in the selling.”
For going straight, he stays in touch,” Frank said when they were in the hallway.
“I played football at Howard,” Jose said.
“Yeah. So?” Frank replied.
“I’m not on the team anymore… but I still know the lineup.”
SIX
Fresh?” Frank asked. He was already measuring grounds into the coffeemaker.
Jose nodded. He opened Skeeter Hodges’s file jacket and spread an assortment of documents across his desk. “Lot of reading.”
Frank switched the coffeemaker on. “Skeeter had a long run.”
For the next hour, the two men worked through the files, taking notes, reconstructing Hodges’s life as seen through the prism of his brushes with the law. Frank came across a photograph of him in cap and gown, smiling into the camera, and behind him, with the same smile, Sharon Lipton, then a handsome woman in a silk dress and dramatically sweeping brimmed hat.
“Boy and happy mother?” he guessed, holding the picture up for Jose to see.
Over the top of his half-round reading glasses, Jose gave the photograph an appraising look. “A real mama, all right.” He sifted through the papers on his desk until he found a rap sheet. Tilting back in his chair, he eyed the document.
“Sharon Stilton Lipton,” he read, “aka ‘Babba,’ 1979, possession of narcotics, intent to sell…”
Fourteen, Frank thought, kid would have been fourteen.
“… 1980, solicitation for prostitution.” Jose shook his head. “ ’Eighty-two was a busy year… two charges receiving stolen goods, one sale of narcotics.”
Frank looked at the graduation picture again: Hodges, grinning with a kick-ass confidence. Proud mama, a hand on her son’s shoulder.
Hand… A special kind of hand on a kid’s shoulder. The encouraging squeeze you gave before you sent them out… to the first day of school… away for the first camping trip… back into a game already lost… off to basic training at Fort Jackson… when you tried your best to pass on a small measure of your own strength, of your own knowledge about the world. Where was Babba Lipton sending her son?
“Helluva education he got,” he said.
Jose slipped the rap sheet into the file. “Another testimonial for home schooling.”
Frank pushed his chair back, stood up, stretched, and walked to the window. Several blocks away, the trees along the Mall were greening up after winter. Off to the right, the castle towers of the Smithsonian, brick-red under the late-morning sun.
To the left, the Capitol crowned Jenkins Hill. All his life-as far back as he could remember, anyway-the massive building, white and shining, had reminded him of pictures of monasteries in Tibet. Every so often, he’d idly wonder how he’d come to think of it that way. The Hill certainly wasn’t a hangout for holy men. He’d probably made the connection as a kid, he thought. Back when he’d known for certain-without any doubt-that you could always tell the good guys because they wore the white hats.
The James Hodges that emerged from the files didn’t resemble the morning papers’ romantic spin about a charming and only slightly roguish urban outlaw.
A hot-out-of-the-box start in 1981-sweet sixteen and charged with assault with a deadly weapon. Charge dropped. A year later, a suspended sentence for heroin possession. Thanks, Mama Babba.
Grand theft auto ga
ve Skeeter a year at Lorton and new contacts for his life’s work. There, he met one of Juan Brooks’s lieutenants.
For years, Juan Brooks had been the District’s kingpin of kingpins. A logistics genius, he built an organization of over five hundred street retailers and Uzi-toting enforcers, a ruthless enterprise that smuggled, packaged, and retailed hundreds of kilos of cocaine in the District each month.
Just days out of Lorton, Skeeter signed on with Brooks. By 1991, he had climbed the rungs to become a senior executive in Brooks’s multimillion-dollar monopoly.
Then, in December 1992, Brian Atkins bagged Brooks. Got him big-time, life without parole. Brooks went off to an isolation cell in the maximum-security lockdown of the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois.
Atkins, head of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, got hero treatment: the cover of Newsweek, a 60 Minutes segment with Mike Wallace, a well-publicized lunch with President Clinton, a profusion of lawman-of-the-year awards, and a promotion to headquarters.
Skeeter went to work, picking up pieces of Brooks’s empire and adding chunks of his own. But where Brooks had left the street work to his enforcers, Skeeter had kept his hand in. One informant reported Skeeter’s holding forth about how great leaders led from the front, not from the rear. And so Skeeter Hodges had been at the front on Bayless Place, planning his next campaign, when somebody walked up and blew out his brains.
Frank saw a flag being raised over the chambers of the House of Representatives. There were other flagpoles on the Capitol roof. All day, a handful of congressional employees would be up there, raising scores of American flags-raising them, then immediately lowering them. They’d fold the flags and box them, and later, members of Congress would send them to their more important constituents with a certificate saying that the flags had flown over the Capitol.
Frank realized Jose was standing beside him, watching the flags. “Congress at work,” he said.
“Wonder what it would be like, being a flag raiser?” Jose asked.
“Lot of ups and downs.”
“Like us.”
“Ups and downs?”
“Job never finished.”
Jose watched a flag go up, come down.
“My stomach thinks my throat’s been cut,” Frank complained.
Jose turned away from the window. “Get carry-out and find a bench on the Mall?”
Ruth threw in a pint of potato salad with the salami for Frank and the pastrami on rye for Jose. They walked across Constitution Avenue and found a bench under a hundred-year-old water oak on the Mall, facing the National Air and Space Museum.
Jose motioned to Air and Space. “Haven’t been there in a long time.”
Frank looked at the huge building. He liked going there. But he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been. You live in a city like D.C. and the only thing you see is killers and dead people. He unwrapped his sandwich and took a small, experimental bite. The salami was slick and spicy on his tongue, and there was just enough mustard to make his eyes wrinkle slightly. He sat back and watched a runner make her way down the Mall. Skeeter Hodges and the dream came back in faded tones.
“I was thinking, Hoser… maybe Emerson was right.”
“That Skeeter’s a key to the cold-case locker?”
“He liked working the street personally.”
“So he had to whack a lot of guys.”
“One way to thin out the competition.”
“Business killings.”
“So to speak.”
“Yeah. So to speak.”
“So what you’re sayin’ is he was good at his business.”
“Or very lucky.”
They took their time with their sandwiches and the potato salad, then sat drowsily for a quarter-hour under the springtime sun.
When they got back to the office, the answering machine held two messages: Kate, with her flight number and ETA, and Eleanor, saying the printout was ready. Frank punched the machine and listened to Kate’s message one more time.
You asked for it.” Eleanor indicated a stack on the desk beside her computer.
“Damn.” Frank sighed. The printout was at least six inches thick.
“You were right,” Jose said. “Lot of trees died for that.”
Eleanor shrugged. “Just the cold cases since 1990.”
“How many?” Jose asked.
“Fifteen hundred and change.”
Fifteen hundred. One thousand five hundred unsolved homicides. In ten years.
“But the rate’s going down,” Jose protested.
Eleanor rapped out a riff on her computer keyboard, scanned the results on the monitor, and nodded.
“The homicide rate is,” she said. “In 1990, we clipped off four hundred eighty-three citizens. In 1999, we dropped down to two hundred forty-one. But”-she threw her hands up-“look at the closure rates. In 1990, you guys were closing fifty-seven percent of the cases one way or another. In 1999, with half the killings, you were closing only thirty-seven percent of the cases. Over the ten-year period, we had almost four thousand homicides. Of those four thousand, over fifteen hundred are still open.”
Frank looked at the stack of cold cases, still trying to get his head around fifteen hundred unsolved murders in ten years.
“Sweet Jesus,” Jose murmured.
In the hallway, headed back to their office, Jose muttered, “Fifteen hundred… One thousand… five hundred…”
“Numbers,” Frank said absently. “Somebody said one death is a tragedy, a million’s just a statistic. I wonder where fifteen hundred comes down?”
They were passing Emerson’s office. Jose jerked a thumb toward the door. “We’d been good at cooking the numbers, we’d be sitting behind glass desks and have nasty-ass secretaries with long nails and big tits to guard the front door.”
“Remember what your uncle says about ifs?”
Jose laughed. If my daddy hadn’t died in the poor house, I’d be a rich man.
“What say we work on that”-he tapped the printout Frank was carrying under his arm-“till six or so, then go out for ribs?”
“Give me a rain check. Kate’s coming in at seven.”
SEVEN
At six twenty-five, Frank pulled into the C terminal parking garage at Reagan National, and found a slot on the third level. An arrival screen showed Kate’s flight due to arrive at seven-ten.
Getting to appointments early. A security compulsion, a shrink once told him.
He locked the car and found the elevators to the pedestrian walkway.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Hadn’t Freud said that? And it might be that you get to airports early because you don’t want to risk getting tied up in traffic and miss your plane.
But tonight Kate was the reason. It was like one of those “If you do this, that’ll happen” things you made up as kid-if he got there early, she’d walk through the passageway door sooner. Or at least on time, which was getting to be a minor damn miracle.
Getting through security with his pistol ate up several minutes. A manager had to be sent for. The man had checked Frank’s badge and credentials with anxious uncertainty, then sent for his manager.
Taking a back-row seat opposite Kate’s arrival gate, Frank eyed the crowd. He always found people-watching more interesting at National than at Dulles. He thought it might be that people making the relatively short hops out of National to Orlando, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland carried themselves with more energy than those anticipating the long-leg runs out of Dulles to Berlin, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires.
Fifteen hundred cold cases. Fifteen hundred dead people. How many living relatives of those cold-case victims? Say five? Okay, five per. That’s…
Now, only partially aware of the airport crowd, Frank worked on the mental arithmetic.
An airline ground agent opened the gate door, and travelers began rounding a corner in the passageway.
Kate’s smile caught him while she was still down the passageway. Frank got up to mee
t her. The arithmetic faded into the shadows.
A tweed jacket and pale-blue silk blouse highlighted short blond hair and blue eyes. Before they touched, he felt the warmth between them. They came together and kissed briefly. His hand at the small of her back, he felt the firm, assertive curve of her hip.
“Long time,” he said, feeling his chest tighten.
“Six days?”
“It’s all relative. You hungry?”
“Understatement.”
“It’s warm enough to sit outside.”
“La Brasserie?”
La Brasserie’s terrace faces Massachusetts Avenue, a few blocks east of Union Station. Schneider’s Liquors sits across the avenue, along with a bagel bakery and the offices of a conservative think tank funded by a Colorado beer baron. But despite the view, there was something about the place that was truly French.
“Okay,” Kate said as the waiter left. “You’ve heard all you want to about a city lawyers’ conference at Harvard. Your turn.”
“Hoser and I got the call just before eight, Friday night…” Over his roast veal and her sole meuniere, he filled in the details: Teasdale’s discovery, the murder scene, Skeeter Hodges’s history.
A tarte Tatin arrived for dessert, its apples bubbling in caramel under a puffed dome of pastry crust. The waiter punctured the crust. Like a balloon with the air let out, the tarte collapsed. A tendril of warm cinnamon teased Frank’s nose. As the waiter did the dissection, scooping thin-sliced apples, crust, and sauce onto two plates, Frank pulled a single folded sheet of paper from his coat jacket and handed it to Kate.
“Your boss’s press release,” Frank said.
She unfolded it and glanced at the banner across the top. “Two months ago.” She read the brief statement, then looked at him questioningly.
Frank pointed to the sheet of paper at Kate’s elbow. “The mayor of the District of Columbia says the homicide closure rate is sixty percent.”
She nodded.
Frank speared a bit of apple and pastry and brought it cautiously to his lips. It was still hot. He put the fork down to let it cool.
A Murder of Justice Page 5
