A Murder of Justice

by Robert Andrews

  “It’s not. I’ve done some back-of-the-envelope figuring. My grocery-store arithmetic puts solved cases down around thirty-forty percent. You only get to the mayor’s numbers if you add in the cases closed administratively. And what that release ignores is the impact of the cold cases.”

  He tried the tarte. It had cooled just enough. The first taste made you listen for angels singing.

  “What about them?”

  Kate was giving him an impatient look. He thought better about going for another forkful.

  “Over fifteen hundred in ten years.” Frank went back to the mental math he’d cranked out while waiting at National. “So you’re a citizen of the District. You live east of the river”-Kate understood he meant the Anacostia, not the Potomac-“maybe in the projects, maybe in a little house on what used to be a nice street but now’s a shooting gallery.”

  He paused to retrieve more of the airport math. “East of the river, most of those fifteen hundred cold cases probably come within a five- or six-mile radius of your house. Now think about it… Each of those people might have five relatives. Maybe three or four friends. Multiply the eight or nine people who knew the victim by the number of cold cases. Now we have almost fifteen thousand people who see that people they know get killed and other people they know get away with it. Fifteen thousand people learn that lesson in their personal lives.”

  “Something else.”

  “Oh?”

  “Enemies of the victim,” Kate said. “Even if they didn’t do the deed, they also learned that they can get away with murder.”

  “Nobody pays.”

  “What you mean is, nobody gets revenge.” Kate’s eyes narrowed. “That what you’re saying? How about justice?”

  Frank thought about that. “Revenge?… Justice? You’re a lawyer, I’m a cop, we see them differently.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I think you see revenge and justice as distinct things.”

  “And you don’t.”

  “Different, but not distinct.”

  “I thought lawyers had cornered the market on wordsmithing,” Kate said. “How’s different different?”

  “Revenge is different from justice, but it’s related, not distinct.”

  “How?”

  “Revenge and justice are yin and yang. Always together, always in a dynamic… push-pull.” Frank hooked his index fingers together and pulled them against each other. “Government doesn’t work when people gun each other down in the streets to settle scores. Government says, ‘We will settle your scores. You people stop shooting each other… Pay taxes… obey laws… serve on juries.’ ”

  Kate nodded. “Be nice and we’ll take care of the bad guys.”

  “That’s the deal… the contract. Government serves up justice as a substitute for revenge.”

  “And when government doesn’t serve up the justice?”

  Frank cocked his hand up, then down in a seesaw motion. “Balance swings toward revenge. I’m not so sure people in Skeeter Hodges country think much about justice in the abstract. Not when they’re worried about getting shot in the street. Most of them just want the shooting to stop. But if they’ve lost a friend or relative, they want somebody to pay.”

  “And if government doesn’t make somebody pay through justice-”

  “Friends or relatives will take out the payment themselves.”

  Kate put one hand on the press release. “You think the department’s drawing attention away from the cold cases by talking about closure rates?”

  “About inflated closure rates,” Frank corrected. “You’re reading my mind again.”

  She tilted her head slightly to one side. “And how long have you been on the force, Lieutenant Kearney?”

  Frank didn’t say anything. A challenging, professional edge had crept into Kate’s voice.

  “Well?”

  He sat without speaking. His eyes fastened on the press release. Days, months, years on the force-the credit scrabbling, the blame-gaming, the sucking up and the kicking down. A twinge of loss, dark and draining, made him wince. He put his napkin on the table beside his plate, took a moment or two to smooth out the wrinkled linen.

  “Terry Quinn”-he said the name and saw Quinn’s face, how Quinn would squint, looking through cigarette smoke-“Quinn took Jose and me out for drinks the night we transferred to Homicide. ‘A good detective may be disappointed,’ he said, ‘but he’s never surprised.’ ”

  Kate handed the press release back to him. “And this surprises you?”

  He held the paper out and looked at it before folding it and putting it back in his pocket. “Yeah,” he said, feeling angry with himself, “it does. When Eleanor came up with those numbers, I felt everything… just… just stop.”

  Flashing images:

  Eleanor’s printout of fifteen hundred unaccounted-for deadly sins.

  The M.E. tech wrenching Skeeter Hodges’s broken-headed body out of the car.

  “Every so often something happens that holds up a mirror that you see yourself in.”

  “What do you see?”

  “A guy who thinks he’s a professional, who wasn’t paying attention to what was going on in the rest of the department.”

  “You’re being hard on yourself.” Kate leaned forward, her voice now softer.

  “No. Just realistic.”

  She shook her head. “You aren’t a realist, Frank. You and Jose-two peas in a pod. Two idealists. Two crusaders out for cosmic justice.”

  “Cosmic justice?”

  “Something that will make everything right for everybody all the time.”

  Frank laughed. “You are absolutely full of shit.”

  “Am I?” She leaned further forward. She put a hand on Frank’s forearm. “Why’d you become a cop?”

  She has a way of bringing you face to face with truth, he’d told his father once.

  And that’s why she’s a good lawyer, his father had said.

  “Why’d you become a cop?” she repeated.

  “I told you before.”

  “Once more, come on.”

  “Kate-”

  “Once more, Frank. Say it.”

  “To keep bad things from happening to good people,” he recited.

  It was something he had said to himself coming back from Vietnam. That’d been a long time ago. Some things change as you get older. This hadn’t been one of them. Once he’d said it, he couldn’t get away from it. It had stayed with him all that time. And with any luck, it would probably last out his run.

  Kate studied him thoughtfully for several moments, then: “Why?” She asked tentatively. As though it had come from a partially formed thought.

  “Why?” Frank felt that she had opened a door into darkness.

  She nodded. “Yes,” she said, now sounding more certain of herself. “Why do you care?”

  Frank’s eyes drifted out to Massachusetts Avenue and Third Street. A bicycle messenger weaved his way through cars stopped at the traffic light. Over at Schneider’s, a truck driver loaded cases of beer onto a handcart. The bicycle messenger ran the red light, crossed Mass Avenue, and disappeared up Third, ignoring the “Do Not Enter” sign.

  Frank realized Kate was watching him, waiting. Part of him stayed with her, while another part went off searching for something coherent. Anything that’d make sense to Kate and to him.

  Images-

  Slapping sounds of bullets hitting flesh… bodies ripped apart… muddy boots protruding from ponchos… the putrid odor of death…

  He zoomed in across Mass Avenue. The beer guy unloaded the last case, cocked the handcart back, and wheeled it into Schneider’s.

  “You see how little it takes to kill somebody. How one instant, life is there. The next, it’s gone. Just… gone…” Frank snapped his fingers. “Life shouldn’t go away like that. It oughtn’t be there for the taking.”

  Kate sat silently. “You’re in homicide,” she finally said. “When you go to work, the bad thing has already ha
ppened. Somebody’s been killed.”

  “You can’t stop the last bad thing. But maybe you can the next bad thing.”

  He put his hand to work straightening the napkin beside his plate. “And there’s this indictment sitting in our office. Fifteen hundred cases where we haven’t caught somebody. We’ve been hiding the truth. Hiding it from the public, hiding it from the mayor, hiding it from ourselves.”

  Frank paused. An ambulance, sirens screeching, made its way east on Massachusetts Avenue.

  She smiled. “You know, you’re very handsome when you’re passionate.”

  “I thought I was very handsome all the time.”

  He felt her nudge his leg with her foot.

  “Let’s go,” she said. “It has been a long time.”

  “Your place or mine?”

  Kate got up quickly. “Mine. It’s closer.”

  EIGHT

  Still savoring Kate’s warmth and traces of her perfume, Frank fit his key into the lock and turned. He pushed the door open and stepped into the entryway.

  It took a second for him to realize that the alarm had been switched off. At the same time, he heard the sound of metal sliding on metal. Reflexively, his hand moved inside his jacket.

  His father stood in the kitchen doorway down the hall. He held a frying pan in one hand.

  For a frozen moment, the two men faced each other.

  Tom Kearney broke the spell. “Breakfast?” He smiled and waggled the frying pan. “Beat you to the draw.”

  Frank felt the tension between his shoulders disappear, and he eased the Glock back into its holster.

  “What’re you doing here?”

  His father gave him a longish look. “Shaker lathe. Remember?”

  Shaker lathe? Shaker lathe? His father might as well have been speaking Swahili.

  Tom Kearney still held the frying pan up. “You’re not the one who’s supposed to be getting short-term memory loss. You and Kate,” he prompted, “weekend before last…”

  It came back: The old stone millhouse his father had converted into a woodworking shop. Outside, the waterwheel slowly turning. Inside, he and Kate stood watching his father at a router, cutting a precise channel through a thick cherry post. Overhead, the massive oak shaft groaning and creaking as it turned the web of pulleys and leather drive belts. On a low bench, a chest of drawers in progress.

  Kate had mentioned the absence of electric tools. That led his father off on a tutorial about nineteenth-century cabinetry. And Kate had said something about Hancock, Massachusetts, and the Shaker village. And then his father…

  “Oh,” Frank said, putting the memory together, “oh, yeah.”

  His father still had the quizzical look, as though still unconvinced that Frank had made the connection.

  “Where’s your truck?”

  Tom Kearney lowered the frying pan and returned to the range. “Up at Judith’s.”

  “Oh.”

  His father’s eyes narrowed. “How’d you mean that?”

  “What?”

  “That ‘Oh’ of yours.”

  Frank grinned. “Just happy to see you in town. I ran into Judith the other day, coming out of Dean and DeLuca. She seemed happy too.”

  “Really?”

  It was clear, the way his father asked, that Judith Barnes’s being happy was important.

  “Getting serious, Dad?”

  Tom Kearney cocked his head, and his eyes drifted off into mid-distance somewhere above Frank’s head. “Yes,” he said slowly, “yes, it is.” He set the frying pan down and leaned back against the counter. A man coming to a conclusion he’d been working on, thinking about, but not putting it into words. “For a while after Maggie’s death…” he trailed off. “No… for a long time after… I prided myself for getting on with my life. I fixed up the millhouse, got into serious cabinetry. Got to believing I didn’t need anybody…”

  “Then Judith?”

  “Then Judith.” Tom Kearney nodded. “You live long enough, you get to know something about yourself. I’m one of those people who has to share. If we don’t… if we can’t… there’s something good in us that atrophies. It just withers away.”

  He stood there, thinking about that, then turned and picked up the frying pan.

  “Scrambled? Or fried?”

  Frank sat at the harvest table, sipping coffee, and watched his father at the stove. He traced the ancient scars in the tabletop with an index finger.

  Been what? Five? No… six months.

  Six months since the early-morning phone call and the strangled words. Then the long weeks later, watching his father grit his way through physical therapy. During those grueling sessions, Frank understood how a younger Tom Kearney had gutted it through World War II-jump school at Fort Benning, parachuting into Normandy, and, finally, in muddy combat boots and no longer young, drinking captured champagne in Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest.

  Fast forward-the murder of Mary Keegan, the frantic search for her killer, and the lives that search changed. Among them Judith Barnes’s and his own father’s.

  “Hello, furry one.”

  Tom Kearney looked down at Monty. The big cat had come out of nowhere and was winding around his legs.

  “A little egg?”

  Monty sat staring raptly at Frank’s father.

  With one hand, Tom Kearney found a saucer in a nearby cabinet and, with the other, deftly scooped up a heaping tablespoon of scrambled eggs.

  “He won’t eat eggs,” Frank said.

  Monty was into them before Tom Kearney could get the saucer on the floor.

  Frank shook his head. Cats.

  His father had moved easily. No left-side dragging. The stroke might as well have not happened. Except that it had. And it had brought with it a sense of mortality closing in.

  It’s not all bad-knowing how near death always is. We’re here. Then we’re not. And the world moves on-

  Frank realized he’d missed something his father had said. “What?”

  “Skeeter Hodges.” Tom Kearney put the plates on the table. He pulled up a chair opposite Frank and sat. “Tell me about it,” he said, cutting into a sausage. “Begin at the beginning.”

  “Hoser and I got the call… Friday night… about eight…”

  Bayless Place… flashes of blue and red… the Orioles… Teasdale… isn’t one bunch of gang-bangers, it’s gonna be another… Pencil Crawfurd in the ICU… Marcus and Skeeter’s mother…

  His father listened, interrupting only to ask an occasional question.

  Frank finished. Tom Kearney sat quietly, somber, reflective. Frank remembered his father’s days presiding in court.

  “The seventies and eighties in this town were awful,” Tom Kearney said. “I thought we were on the edge of anarchy. If it had been any other city but Washington, the place would have been under martial law. I thought things had gotten better. But they haven’t. We’ve given birth to a lawless culture. It’s passed on from generation to generation… like a family business. Brutal, unforgiving enterprise. You make a wrong decision and you get a nine-millimeter retirement or life in an eight-by-ten cell. The ones who succeed… who make it big… become even more deadly than their parents.”

  “Survival of the fittest,” Frank mused. “Criminal Darwinism at work.”

  Tom Kearney shrugged and rolled one hand in a gesture of futility. “Now, the numbers business doesn’t surprise me. You let politicians play with numbers, it’s turning the proverbial fox loose in the henhouse.” He got up from his chair, unfolding slowly to stand. He reached for Frank’s empty plate, stacked it on his own, and made his way to the sink.

  “Fella with the lathe said he’d meet me at the flea market.” Tom Kearney said. “He ought to be there by now.”

  Like so many mushrooms, the Georgetown flea market sprang up on Sunday mornings in a school parking lot on Wisconsin Avenue, just across from the Safeway. From Frank’s house, it was a good walk: up Thirtieth to R Street, past Katharine Graham’s home, Oak H
ill Cemetery, Montrose Park, and Dumbarton Oaks.

  At the market, his father went off to deal with the fella with the Shaker lathe, leaving Frank to wander through the aisles of vans. Canopies stretched out from them, over everything from honey, tomatoes, and home-baked breads to chandeliers, wicker chairs, and Bavarian beer steins.

  He stopped to admire a bowling trophy awarded to one Norville “Splits” Casey in 1939. A nearby cigar box filled with marbles caught his eye. He picked out a marble and held it up, taken by a white ribbon twisting through the clear green glass.

  “That there’s a corkscrew.” The speaker, a stocky older woman with short white hair, in red slacks and a Carolina Panthers T-shirt, held a Marlboro in the corner of her mouth.

  “See how it cuts through the middle? That’s why they call it an auger. Augers go through the middle of a marble. When the corkscrew is on the surface, they call it a snake.”

  “Akro Agate?” Frank asked.

  The woman squinted at Frank through a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Yeah. Akro. You know marbles?”

  “Some. How much for the box?”

  He found his father, standing by the Shaker lathe, handing a check to a grizzled man in a red tank top.

  Tom Kearney smiled. “Joe here’s going to deliver it, aren’t you, Joe?”

  Joe nodded. “Wednesday, Judge?”

  “Wednesday’s fine.” Tom Kearney stowed his checkbook away. He pointed to the cigar box under Frank’s arm.

  “What do you have there?”

  “Marbles.”

  Tom Kearney acted as if it was the most natural thing in the world. He nodded approval. “Man can’t have too many marbles. You ready to head home?”

  For several blocks, the two men walked in silence.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Tom Kearney finally said.

  “Marbles? Shaker lathes?”

  “Hodges… the numbers. Fifteen hundred cold cases?”

  “Yessir?”

  Tom Kearney shook his head. “My years in court… for a while, a long while, I thought I’d seen it all. Took years for me to discover that all I’d actually seen was what had managed to get into court. And by the time it had gotten to court, it had been prettied up.”