Murder at The Washington Tribune

by Margaret Truman

  She fell silent as he wove through traffic, driving fast, downshifting, accelerating, changing lanes with sudden abandon, causing other drivers to honk at him, or worse.

  “Michael, please slow down,” she said.

  “Frightened?” he asked, sounding as though he enjoyed her discomfort.

  “Slow down,” she said, more firmly this time.

  He did, and she said nothing else until he’d crossed the Arlington Memorial Bridge, skirted the town of Arlington, and drove down a narrow road to a break between stone walls. He went through it and followed a gravel driveway to the front of a redbrick, one-story building with white shutters flanking the door and window boxes spilling over with red roses. Michael departed the car with great flourish, opened her door, bowed, and took her hand to help her out.

  “This is it?” she asked.

  “Yes. This is it! Ask me how I found it.”

  “All right,” she said. “How did you find it?”

  “I met the owner at a party where I happened to play a few tunes on my guitar. He offered me a job performing on the weekends.”

  “You said you never play in public.”

  “I succumbed in this case.”

  “That’s wonderful. Are you going to do it?”

  “I’m considering it. The owner brought me here a few times and I fell in love with the place. You will, too.”

  They entered the restaurant where a young man with multiple earrings in one earlobe, wearing black slacks and a loose fitting white overshirt, warmly greeted them. “Michael,” he said, “ready to begin your performing career?”

  “No, Tony,” Michael said. “This night, I am strictly a guest. May I present my lovely niece, Roberta Wilcox, of television fame.”

  The owner took Robbie’s hand. “I see you all the time on TV,” he said. “And this talented fellow is your uncle?”

  “He certainly is,” she said.

  They were led to a terrace behind the building where six tables were set for dinner. It was a lovely late afternoon and early evening, a gentle breeze creating the perfect temperature for outdoor dining. Once seated, the host asked whether they wanted drinks before dinner, or the wine list.

  “A light dry, white wine,” Michael said. “Your discretion.”

  “Happy, my dear?” Michael asked after the host had placed menus before them.

  “Michael,” Roberta said, “when I said I had something to tell you, you immediately referred to the letters. What do you know about them?”

  “That your father, my esteemed brother, wrote them on my typewriter and sent them to himself, claiming they were from the monster stalking young women on the streets of Washington.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He called me earlier today. I’d say he’s gotten himself in a deep pile of doo-doo, as a former president was fond of eloquently saying, or so I’ve read.”

  Their wine arrived, and Michael went through the requisite ritual of judging its worth with a sniff and a sip. “Fine,” he told the waiter, who poured. Roberta raised her glass to his. “To life,” he said.

  “Michael,” she said, “I have a confession to make.”

  “Oh? It sounds very serious, and I rush to assure you that I am not your friendly neighborhood priest. My confessional has been closed for years.” He noted that she’d laid her cell phone on the table. “No cell phones allowed,” he said. “House policy.”

  She turned it off and returned it to her purse.

  “That’s better,” he said. “People’s public use of cell phones is infuriatingly uncivilized, don’t you agree?”

  “Force of habit for me,” she said.

  “Of course,” he said, “but I doubt there will be a terrorist attack on the White House while we dine.”

  She smiled, wine glass held in both hands, her focus on its shimmering contents. “I believed you wrote those letters, Michael,” she said, still avoiding his eyes. “I thought you were the serial killer.”

  She looked at him. His face was hard, taut, small muscles working his cheeks.

  “I’m sorry for having thought such a thing,” she said.

  “The documentary?” he said. “Was it because you intended to have captured the killer on videotape?”

  “Yes. I’m ashamed to admit it, but—”

  “It would have been quite a feather in your pretty cap, yes?”

  She nodded.

  He picked up his menu. “I highly recommend the fried shrimp,” he said. “They serve it with honeyed walnuts and a delicious lemon mayonnaise. The rib-eye steak is quite good, too.”

  “Michael, I—”

  “I did not kill that young woman at the newspaper, Robbie. I’m afraid your journalistic scoop will have to be put on hold. More wine?”

  “Damn it!” Joe Wilcox said after returning to the car where Georgia waited with the engine running.

  He’d knocked on Michael’s door. When there was no answer, he let himself in with his passkey, finding the apartment empty except for Maggie, the cat, who greeted him with a version of “meow” and a rub against his leg.

  “He promised he’d be here,” Wilcox told his wife as he got behind the wheel. “And I promised Edith he’d show up.”

  “Maybe he ran out for a few minutes,” she said, checking her watch. “We’re a few minutes early. Let’s wait. I’m sure he’ll be back.”

  Twenty minutes later, Wilcox muttered a string of curses as he drove away. They were almost to the First Precinct building when Georgia said, “Michael must be terrified.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of having his history made public, and people wondering whether he might have killed again.”

  “Disappearing won’t help him,” Joe said, pulling into a driveway that ran alongside the precinct, and parking in a marked spot.

  “It’s reserved,” Georgia said.

  “What are they going to do, arrest me for illegal parking? Come on before I’m tempted to disappear, too.”

  Vargas-Swayze was at the front desk when they entered, and motioned for them to follow her into the precinct’s recesses. “Hi, Georgia,” she said, opening a door into an interrogation room. “I’m sorry for this.” She asked Joe, “Where’s your brother?”

  “I don’t know,” Wilcox said, slumping in a straight-back wooden chair. “He said he’d come with me, but when we got to his apartment, he was gone.”

  “That’s foolish of him,” the detective said.

  Their attorney, Frank Moss, arrived, escorted by a uniformed officer from the front desk. “Sorry I’m late,” Moss said, breathing heavily. “Damn traffic this time of day.”

  “Anyone want some station house coffee?” Vargas-Swayze asked. There were no takers. “Excuse me,” she said, and left the room.

  She went to Bernie Evans’s office where he was meeting with detectives Jack Millius and Ron Warrick.

  “Wilcox is here?” Evans asked after she’d pulled up a chair.

  “Yes,” Vargas-Swayze replied. “His wife is with him, and his attorney. The brother never showed.”

  She recounted what Wilcox had told her about Michael’s failure to appear.

  “Why was it left to Wilcox to bring his brother in?” Evans asked, his displeasure not lost on her.

  “I thought it was the best way,” she replied defensively.

  “Looks like it wasn’t—the best way,” Evans said.

  “Do you want to talk to Joe?” she asked.

  “Yes, I do. But first, I think you should hear what Jack and Ron have come up with.”

  “We’ve been talking to people at Franklin Park, Edith, about the Grau knifing,” Millius said. “We came up with a live one this afternoon.”

  “Good,” she said.

  “We have an eyewitness to the killing,” Warrick said.

  “Even better,” she said.

  “It was the neighbor, LaRue.”

  Her heart sunk. She forced her thoughts into a semblance of order and asked, “This eyewitness knows
LaRue?”

  “Right on,” Millius said. “He’s an old guy who hangs around the park, downs too much vino, I think, but pretty clear-headed most of the time. He was there when the McNamara girl got it, too. Saw nothing. He says he knows LaRue from when LaRue would come to the park, usually with a book to read, or wearing one of those Walkman kinds of things.”

  “I-Pod,” Warrick corrected.

  “Whatever. This witness says LaRue always had some jazz type music playing. He thinks it was a guitar, only it might have been a banjo, he says.”

  “And he was there the night Grau was killed?” she asked, trying to maintain calm.

  Warrick nodded and continued consulting a notepad. “He says—by the way, his name is Olson, Swedish I guess—he says that he was sitting against a tree—”

  “Thinking great thoughts,” Millius said, laughing.

  “. . . sitting against a tree when LaRue and Grau come into the park. He says they were arguing, and that Grau got pretty nasty, lots of four-letter words directed at LaRue, claims he called him a fag and a pervert, a sicko, stuff like that. It got pretty heated, according to Mr. Olson. Next thing he knows, LaRue is running from the park. Olson gets up from where he’s sitting and goes to the bench where he finds Grau bleeding to death.”

  “He called it in?” Vargas-Swayze asked.

  “No. He says he left the park, too, and told somebody on the street that a guy was dying there.”

  “Why did he never come forward?” she asked.

  “Why else? He was afraid he’d get in trouble. He’s got a rap sheet, mostly nuisance stuff, public urination, panhandling.”

  “We worked him pretty good this afternoon,” Millius said. “The guy’s a vet, like Grau was. We told him it was his patriotic duty to help solve the murder of a fellow vet, strike a blow against terrorism. He puffed up his chest and agreed.”

  “And you don’t have any doubts about his story?” Vargas-Swayze asked, glancing at Evans, who’d listened quietly, chair tilted back, hands behind his head.

  “It plays,” Evans said, coming forward. “You have no idea, Edith, where Mr. LaRue is at the moment?”

  She shook her head.

  “Put out an APB,” he instructed the other detectives, “and get over and stake out his apartment. Ask around. Maybe somebody knows where he went.”

  After they’d left the office, Evans said to Vargas-Swayze, “I’m disappointed in you, Edith.”

  “For good reason. I wanted to do Joe Wilcox a favor. I guess I’m not as good a cop as you thought.”

  “No, Edith, you’re still a good cop. I figure the hassle you’ve been having with your hubby has occupied your mind. Just don’t let it happen again.” He noticed that the office door was open. “Close that, huh?”

  He slid papers across the desk. “Take a look at these.”

  “They’re copies of e-mails with everything deleted except the messages,” she said. “How did you get them?”

  “Dropped off in an envelope at our front door. You know Morehouse at the Trib, right?”

  “Not well, but—according to these, he’d been having an affair with Jean Kaporis at the paper.”

  “That’s what it looks like. I’d say this gal was pretty mad at him, judging from what she wrote, making demands of him, threatening to tell his wife. Nasty stuff. That might have made him pretty mad, too.”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “You don’t know what?”

  “After finding out that the letters that supposedly came from the serial killer were phonies, I’m questioning the authenticity of everything.”

  “These ring true to me. You know his wife?”

  “Mimi Morehouse. I’ve met her a few times at Joe Wilcox’s house.”

  “They get along, Mr. and Mrs. Morehouse?”

  “Beats me.”

  “My guess is that the proverbial woman scorned dropped these off, which most likely means his wife. You agree?”

  “Makes the most sense.”

  “All right,” he said, standing, “we’ve got plenty to do. Time for a talk with your buddy Wilcox. Maybe he can give us a lead on where his brother might have gone. And then let’s find Mr. Morehouse and ask a few pointed questions. This could turn out to be our lucky day, not his.”

  Georgia Wilcox had tried unsuccessfully for the second time to reach their daughter on her cell phone. “It’s not like her to turn it off,” she said, snapping closed her phone’s cover as Vargas-Swayze and Bernard Evans entered the room. After Evans had been introduced to Georgia and reestablished that he and Joe had met numerous times before, the head detective said, “So, Joe, why not lay it all out for us and get it over with.”

  “One second, detective,” attorney Moss said. “Is Mr. Wilcox being charged with a crime?”

  “Not yet,” Evans answered.

  Moss turned to Wilcox. “My best advice, Joe, is to say nothing. You’re not obligated to answer his questions.”

  “I’m sure that’s true, Frank, and I appreciate the advice. But there’s no reason for me to not tell what happened. I’d feel better doing it.”

  “As you wish.”

  Wilcox didn’t attempt to mitigate what he’d done, offered no excuses except that he’d lost his ego boundaries and had tried to be something he wasn’t, someone important in his profession. With his hand firmly in Georgia’s grasp, he laid it all out for Evans, point by point, misguided action by misguided action. “That’s about it,” he said after the sad tale had been told.

  “Okay,” Evans said. “Next. Where’s your brother, Michael?”

  “I don’t know,” Wilcox replied, and told of Michael’s failure to show up at his apartment.

  “We’ve put out an all-points for him,” Evans said. “No way you can contact him, let him know that it’s in his best interest to come in voluntarily?”

  “No. I really don’t know much about Michael’s life here in Washington, who he knows, where he goes.”

  “You’ve put out an all-points on Mr. Wilcox’s brother?” the attorney said. “Is he charged with a crime?”

  “We think he might be responsible for a knife murder in Franklin Park,” Evans replied.

  Joe and Georgia Wilcox looked at each other.

  “Will Joe be charged with a crime for writing those letters?” Georgia asked.

  Evans ignored the question as his cell phone sounded. He listened without response, thanked the caller, and motioned for Vargas-Swayze to accompany him outside.

  “What’s up?” she asked when they were alone.

  “That was Millius,” Evans said. “He and Warrick are over at the brother’s apartment building. A resident there, an older woman—Warrick says she’s the apartment snoop—says she saw the brother leave in a fancy black sports car. He had somebody with him.”

  She waited for more.

  “The old lady says she recognized the woman who drove off with him from television.” He nodded toward the closed door to the interrogation room. “Your friend’s daughter, Roberta Wilcox.”

  Vargas-Swayze exhaled noisily.

  “You said she’d been there with a camera crew filming a documentary.”

  “Right. Did the woman get a plate number?”

  “No. Just said it was a shiny black convertible with the top down. Warrick says the woman was afraid Ms. Wilcox would catch a cold. I like older women. They worry about the right things. Go back in with the Wilcoxes. Take a formal statement, then let them go.”

  “Bernie, will Joe be charged with a crime?” she asked.

  “We’ll see. I’d like to think I worry about the right things, too. I’ll talk with someone at the DA’s office. Meantime, let’s take care of Mr. LaRue and Mr. Morehouse. Check in with me later.”

  After taking a formal statement from Wilcox, to the attorney’s chagrin, Vargas-Swayze told them they were free to go. She escorted them to the lobby where Moss told Wilcox that he’d be in touch with the name of a criminal lawyer, and left.

  “T
here’s something I have to tell you,” the detective told Joe and Georgia.

  “What?” Georgia asked.

  “According to detectives who went to Michael’s apartment building, he was seen leaving in a black convertible sports car.”

  “I didn’t know he had a car,” Joe said.

  “We’ll check rental agencies,” Vargas-Swayze said. “There’s more.”

  The Wilcoxes waited.

  “Roberta was with him.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Over the course of his career in The Washington Tribune’s newsroom, Paul Morehouse had heard every four-letter word known to man. But what he was hearing this evening on the phone from his wife rivaled it. The slight, ordinarily demure woman let loose with a string of invective that would make any contemporary comedian proud.

  She paused to breathe.

  “Look,” he said, “I know you’re upset, but we can work this out.”

  “ ‘Work this out?’ ” she screamed, and started down the list of classic forbidden words again, adding a few of her own invention.

  He had no choice but to continue listening or to hang up. He chose to listen, glancing nervously into the newsroom through his window and hoping her shrill, piercing voice wasn’t reaching others’ ears.

  He’d expected the tirade; she’d thrown in his face that morning her discovery of the e-mails, sending him from the house in search of refuge at the newspaper with a sense of dread. It was the dread that trumped other emotions at that moment as she growled, “Did you kill that woman?”

  “What?” His exaggerated shock sounded exactly that, exaggerated, and false.

  “Jean Kaporis! Did you kill her?”

  “Oh, Jesus, Mimi, come on. Look, I made a mistake, that’s all. I’m sorry. I—”

  “Tell that to the police, you lying bastard!”

  It sounded as though she’d destroyed the phone while hanging up.

  He was pondering what steps to take next when Gene Hawthorne knocked on his door.

  “Not now!” Morehouse shouted.

  Hawthorne opened the door.

  “I said—”

  “You have to hear this, Paul,” the brash, young towheaded reporter said.