A Murder of Justice

by Robert Andrews

  Emerson frowned. “Yes?”

  “We traced this lot to a distributor in Columbus, Ohio. The distributor’s records show that it was broken into three separate shipments to retailers. One to a Home Depot in Montgomery, Alabama, and another to a Lowe’s in Lexington, Kentucky, and a third… here in the District. The Home Depot over in Northeast.”

  The door to Tompkins’s left opened, and an assistant slipped in and handed him a folded note.

  Tompkins picked his reading glasses up off the conference table. He took his time when reading the note, then glanced around the table.

  “A summons,” he said, waving the paper. “The Honorable Frederick Rhinelander requests my presence in his office Monday morning.”

  Calkins, sensing his time onstage was over, folded his easel and began putting away his charts. Frank caught Emerson nudging Chief Day’s elbow. Day sat without expression.

  Emerson hesitated, then jumped in. “You know what he’s going to want, Your Honor.”

  Tompkins raised an eyebrow. “Besides my head?” After enjoying Emerson’s discomfort, he continued. “I suspect, Captain Emerson, he’s going to put the squeeze on me to get this case solved.”

  Emerson nodded energetically. “I think you’re right, Your Honor.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Tompkins said dryly. His sarcasm sailed over Emerson’s head.

  “Who do you want to go with you?” Emerson asked with the same suck-up enthusiasm.

  “Who do you suggest, Captain?”

  “Well,” Emerson said, all businesslike, “myself… ah… Chief Day, of course. Perhaps Susan Liberman, our congressional relations specialist…”

  “Quite an entourage, Captain,” Tompkins said as he got up. “I don’t think so.” He got an amused look and pointed down the table to Frank and Jose. “I think these two gentlemen will be sufficient.”

  Jose looked down the block. Both sides of the street had been restricted to parking for official vehicles.

  “We got wheels?”

  “Yeah… blue Crown Vic over there.” Frank pointed. “Richardson wanted to give us a confiscated Hummer.”

  “And you didn’t take it? Shit, Frank, our chance to get a luxury assault vehicle and you turn it down?” Jose glanced around, checking for anyone within earshot. “Tompkins is gonna be hung out to dry. Steaks on it.”

  “Depends on how much Rhinelander squeezes him.”

  “Rhinelander’s in the catbird seat. He gets prime time on the tube for beating up on the D.C. government…”

  “The D.C. punching bag…”

  “And if we close the case, you can bet your ass he’ll grab the credit for that too.”

  “Helluva place, that Congress. You don’t have to come up with solutions… All you got to do is point fingers and piss and moan.”

  “And hire guys to raise flags on the roof.”

  How is he…?” Frank asked. “Long-term prospects?”

  Sheresa Arrowsmith stopped and leaned wearily against a column in the long corridor leading to the ICU. She pushed her glasses up to her forehead with one hand, and with the other scrubbed her eyes.

  “That’s two questions, Frank. How is he? He’s still critical. Damage like that doesn’t leave a clean wound. But Dr. Michaels saved the elbow and a little over three inches of the forearm.”

  “Meaning?” Jose asked.

  “Meaning he’s got a chance for a working prosthesis. One that can take advantage of the muscles remaining above the elbow. The second question, long-term prospects, that’s harder. The best prosthesis can only do so much. Rest of it comes from the heart. Overall, for what he went through, he’s lucky.”

  “Yeah,” Frank said in soft irony, “lucky Leon.”

  In the ICU, a wave of smothering despair swept over Frank. Leon Janowitz lay almost lifeless, his face a waxy white. His right arm, encased in a pillowlike bandage, was elevated by an overhead traction device.

  Esther Janowitz was curled up in a chair beside her husband’s bed. Frank recognized the chair as one from the ICU waiting room.

  Frank whispered her name.

  Esther stirred, was still, then suddenly awake, eyes wide, taking in Frank, only slowly becoming aware of where she was.

  “What… what time is it?” Then her eyes fastened on Jose. “You have to be Jose.”

  Jose smiled big. “Don’t have to be, but I am. How’s he doing?”

  Esther stood and stretched, hand covering a yawn. “He came out of it for a minute or two this morning. Sometime around three.” She smiled wryly. “He told me they were going to discharge him tomorrow. He’s been drifting in and out since.” She gave Frank a grave look. “Each time he asks about you.”

  “Me?”

  “He thinks you didn’t make it. I tell him you were okay. But I don’t think it sinks in.”

  “Does he know what happened?” Frank asked.

  “You mean about his arm?”

  Frank nodded.

  “No. Not yet.” Forlorn, Esther shook her head. “I want to be the one to tell him, but I don’t want to be the one to tell him.”

  Frank stared unhappily at his feet.

  Her voice somewhat brighter, Esther said, “Let me see if I can wake him.”

  Before Frank could protest, she leaned over and put her palm on her husband’s cheek and kissed him. “Leon,” she whispered. Then louder, “Leon?”

  Nothing.

  Frank held up a belaying hand. Before he could say anything, Janowitz stirred, a slight flutter of the eyelids, then a weak cough to clear his throat. His eyes opened and made contact with Frank’s. His lips moved.

  Frank bent closer.

  “Yes, Leon?”

  “Frank,” Janowitz whispered, “you look like shit.”

  “Thanks, Leon.”

  “You okay?”

  “I’m good. How you feeling?”

  “Spaced out… What happened?”

  Frank exchanged glances with Esther, who nodded slightly.

  “My car was rigged with a bomb,” he said slowly. “It went off when I hit the remote to unlock it.”

  It registered gradually with Janowitz. Frank felt he could see the realization bulling its way into Janowitz’s consciousness through layers of drug-suppressed pain.

  “Bomb?”

  Frank nodded.

  Janowitz’s eyes widened in alarm. His left hand scrabbled at the sheet.

  “A bomb? I still got my…”

  Esther leaned forward and took his left hand. “Everything’s still there, sweetie.”

  Leon smiled.

  Jose rolled his eyes toward the door. “We’ll be back, Leon. Anything we can get for you?”

  Janowitz was having trouble focusing, and his eyelids were fluttering rapidly. “Kill for some ice cream,” he muttered, beginning to drift off. Then, making a visible effort to double-back into consciousness, “You guys check Martin Osmond yet?”

  “Today or tomorrow, Leon,” Jose said.

  “Important,” Janowitz mumbled.

  “Today or tomorrow,” Jose repeated.

  Janowitz fought to keep his eyes on Jose and Frank. “You’ll let me know?” he whispered.

  “Sure,” said Jose.

  “No shit?” The words came faint, barely audible.

  “No shit, partner,” Jose said.

  Frank turned onto Columbia Road, only partially paying attention to the early-afternoon traffic.

  “I wonder how I’d take it… one minute walking down the street, the next thing waking up without an arm?”

  Jose pushed his dark glasses higher on his nose with the tip of his finger. “You told him up front about the remote.”

  “I don’t think it sank in.”

  “It sank in? What sank in?” Jose asked irritably. “That you blew his goddamn arm off? You wallowing in that self-blame guilt shit again?”

  Janowitz’s bloodless face came back to Frank. “Can’t help it, Hoser, I couldn’t keep my mind off what was underneath those bandages. T
hinking about her having to tell him… about when he realizes…”

  Jose shifted in his seat to get a better look at Frank. “You remember the first thing he asked?”

  “No. What?”

  “He asked about you. Even before he asked about his dick. And you remember the next thing?”

  “Martin Osmond.”

  “Yeah. I’ll ask Daddy to set it up for us to talk with his grandmother.”

  “Yeah. His file…”

  “Eleanor ought to have it waiting when we get back.”

  By early evening, the headache had taken a recess. Two Tsingtaos, and the stitches didn’t pull as much and the bruises didn’t protest while Frank moved around the kitchen. As he opened a third beer, Monty sprang up to the counter and settled himself on the one space he’d claimed since he was a kitten. His eyes locked with Frank’s.

  “What’s on your mind?” Frank asked.

  You humans.

  “What now?”

  The way you live.

  “And?”

  The cause of most of your troubles.

  “We walk on our hind legs?”

  You make too many decisions.

  “Decisions?”

  You live in a way that requires too many decisions. You are so busy deciding, you don’t have time to think.

  “And the way you live?”

  Monty got a bored look. I have very few decisions to make. This lets me explore the universe. To travel in time. To watch the things in corners that you can’t see. To talk with God.

  Frank took another sip of beer. “And what does God say to you?”

  Monty drew his head back as if affronted. He leaped down and made for the front door. A second later the doorbell rang.

  When Frank opened the door, a smiling Kate waved an envelope. “And what am I offered in return for this court order?”

  “Spinach salad, cold poached salmon, snow peas amandine, and a wholesome selection of the best of Ben and Jerry’s.”

  “Pretty good kitchen work for a banged-up detective.”

  “I did the salad. Dean and DeLuca did the rest.”

  Over dinner, Frank described Calkins’s findings and the meeting with Emerson and Tompkins. When they were finished, Kate placed a “Stay put” hand on Frank’s shoulder. She cleared the table, and then poured coffee.

  “So this Osmond’s the prime suspect for Gentry’s source?”

  “If Gentry had a source. So far, this case’s a grab bag of suppositions and suspicions. According to Gentry’s CIA pal, Gentry made the recruitment in June ’ninety-eight.”

  “Any chance the Agency’s dragging a red herring across the path?”

  Frank shrugged. “There’s always a chance something’s going on under the blanket. The Navarro woman believes that investigating Skeeter’s operation was Rhinelander’s idea.”

  “Your jackstraw game’s getting more complicated.”

  Frank glanced toward the corner where Monty sat upright, a gray sphinx, gravely staring back at him, as if to say, See, human, you make everything more complicated.

  “One thing about jackstraws,” Frank said wistfully, “you jiggle enough sticks and something happens. Problem is, sticks may not all fall your way.”

  The image returned of the ICU and Leon Janowitz’s waxen face and bandaged arm.

  “Leon?” Kate asked. “You can’t keep beating yourself with that.”

  “Last night I sat here and went over the Vietnam album. First time I’ve done that in years. I hated that goddamn war. But I loved the guys around me. It was like we had a contract with each other… a responsibility. To take care of each other. And when somebody got wounded or bought the farm, each of us thought about it. Took everything apart… every move we’d made, every step we’d taken… trying to see where we might have screwed up.”

  “Shoulda, coulda, woulda can haunt you if you let it,” Kate said.

  Frank waved that off. “It was more than playing ‘What if?’ or taking a self-inflicted guilt trip. More than a survivor syndrome. It was self-preservation. You thought about those things so you might keep them from happening again. Because you knew if you didn’t keep those things from happening, none of you would make it through.”

  Angel of Death got that woman marked,” Titus Phelps rumbled. “Husband got killed in that Korea War. Daughter smashed up on the Beltway. Grandson died in her front yard.” He sat in the big armchair, head to one side as though listening to the echo of his own words. The echo faded and he slowly swung his head from side to side. “Angel of Death marked her,” he repeated, with the weary air of a man who’d learned that truth had sharp edges.

  “We want to see her tomorrow,” Jose said. He sprawled on the sofa. Across the living room, Channel 4 was giving out the evening weather and traffic. Neither man was paying attention. From the kitchen came the sounds of cooking.

  “What can she tell you?”

  “I don’t know. Won’t until we talk to her. If she talks to us.” He paused. “You mind calling her before we go over?”

  “Mind? Yes, I mind.”

  “But you’ll do it?”

  “Yes,” he said wearily, “I’ll do it.”

  Weather and traffic went off. A clip of Timothy McVeigh, a cut of the Murrah Federal Building, its face obscenely stripped away, then again a clip of the unsmiling crew-cut McVeigh.

  “Evil man,” Titus Phelps murmured.

  “You think he ought to die?” Jose asked.

  “We all die.”

  “You know what I mean… the death penalty.”

  “For someone like him”-Titus Phelps’s eyes remained on the TV screen-“for doing something like that… I do.”

  “But you been against capital punishment… always.”

  “All my life.”

  “But now…”

  “I know… I know…” The man shifted in his chair to look at his son. “I used to think you get to some age, you get to some place where you’ve wrestled all your demons down… you’re at the magic place where doubt goes away.” He threw his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “I guess I’m still wrestlin’.”

  “You knew Martin Osmond.”

  Titus Phelps nodded. “Baptized him, buried him. In between, saw him in Sunday school, youth choir, league basketball.” He ran his fingertips across his forehead. “Happens a lot. Everything seems to be workin’. Then… the street gets them.”

  “Street got Martin.”

  “His mother lived, he mighta been all right. But he tied in with that Hodges boy.”

  “His grandmother…?”

  “She did what she could,” Titus said. “You get to a certain age, your chirrun get too fast for you to keep up.”

  Jose grinned. “I never got fast enough.”

  His father swatted a hand at him. “There were times. Times I had to run plenty hard.”

  “I know. I’m glad you did. You think Virginia Osmond finally gave up?”

  Titus shook his head emphatically.

  “Hunh! That woman doesn’t know give up. She was on that boy to the last.” He paused to think back. “There was a time… I thought maybe he’d get hisself straight, but…” Titus’s eyes strayed off into the distance, searching for a lost soul.

  “She ever come to you about Martin?”

  His father held up a hand. “That’s something you ask her.” As though he’d received a signal from the kitchen, he got up out of his chair. “Besides, supper’s ready.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  Your daddy called. Said you’d be over.”

  Jose nodded in a way that was almost a courtly bow. “Thank you for seeing us on a Sunday, Mrs. Osmond.”

  Erect, as if on parade, Virginia Osmond came up to just below Jose’s shoulder. Her voice pulsed with a slight tremor, and her green eyes had a hollowed-out but luminous look.

  “My partner, Mr. Kearney.”

  Osmond gave Frank a minimal smile and motioned the men inside. “I fixed coffee and biscuits,” she said. “You don’t
mind?… Sitting in the kitchen?”

  Jose nodded again. “Kitchen’s the soul of the house.”

  Frank got an impression of scrubbed… clean… neat. Smells of furniture polish, floor wax, and years of baking. The living room: two armchairs, a breakfront bookcase, and a camel-backed sofa. On a small table between the armchairs, a lamp, reading glasses, and an open Bible. The lamp was on, and the reading glasses rested atop the Bible.

  A floral hall runner led back to the kitchen.

  It was a kitchen from the 1940s or 1950s: old-fashioned white enamel sink, refrigerator, and gas stove. A brightly colored oval rag rug covered much of the polished dark green linoleum. Four dowel-backed wood chairs waited around a sturdy harvest table. The only jarring note: ranks of prescription drug containers filling a stainless-steel surgical tray on the countertop.

  Three places had been set at the table, two on one side, one on the other. Napkins, ceramic mugs, woven-rush placemats, cream, sugar, and a butter dish.

  Osmond motioned to the two chairs. “Please.”

  Frank and Jose sat. Osmond brought a coffeepot from the stove and filled the three mugs. A second trip to the stove for a basket of freshly baked biscuits, wrapped in a napkin. She offered the basket to Jose.

  He took it, unfolded the napkin, and offered the basket to Osmond. She mouthed a “Thank you” and picked out a biscuit. Jose took one and passed the basket to Frank.

  Jose paid close attention to buttering his biscuit before he looked up and said, “Mrs. Osmond, we need to talk about Martin.”

  “Your father told me.” Osmond sat quietly, her hands folded in her lap.

  Frank started. “People say Skeeter Hodges was selling drugs. That he made a lot of money that way.”

  Osmond nodded warily. “Yes. People knew… they knew he was selling.”

  “And people say that Martin and Skeeter spent time together.”

  “Yes.” The admission came out, dragged across years of pain.

  Frank was about to ask Osmond if she knew of her grandson’s dealing.

  Of course she knows. What will it get you if she says yes? What will you do if she says no?