Murder on the Potomac

by Margaret Truman

Detective Eikenberg had left work early and gone to her apartment to shower and to change into something less workaday. She would be working, but maybe more.

  It had been important to her from her first day on the force to not succumb to the “uniform” of her work—the drab suits and sensible shoes worn by her female colleagues. Darcy’s father had told her to always dress a little better than others at work, no matter what career she pursued. She’d taken his advice. Perhaps she dressed too fancy at times for a detective, she sometimes knew, but that was all right. Better to err on the side of fashion.

  She arrived at the rooftop restaurant looking fresh and vivacious, the very words that went through Mac’s mind as she came to his window table.

  He, on the other hand, did not look fresh and vivacious. He’d been staying up later than usual the past few nights and was tired. The dark beardline that always appeared at the end of a day was especially pronounced.

  “Lovely view,” she said. Washington’s lights were beginning to be defined against a smudging horizon.

  “Drink?” Smith asked.

  “Absolutely. Officially I’m off duty.” She ordered a vodka-and-tonic. “I must admit, Mac, that I was pleased to receive your call this morning, even happier when you suggested a drink together. Frankly, I’m growing weary of responding to just the official obligations of my life. Nothing but bureaucracy and rules and regulations. Superiors to placate, politicians to appease.” She raised her glass, narrowed her eyes, and said, “To a pleasant, unofficial evening.”

  Smith participated listlessly in the ritual; the sentiment of the toast made him uncomfortable. He asked how the investigation was going.

  “I thought we were off duty,” she said.

  “According to the clock? That’s union thinking. Civil service.”

  “You forget I am a civil servant. Salary paid by the taxpayer.”

  “How’s the investigation going?” he repeated, smiling wryly.

  “All right. Round one to you. Is that why you suggested we get together? To ask me questions? You said you had information for me about the Juris case.”

  “And I do, but I’ll get to it in a minute. I thought you might bring me up to speed. Unofficially, of course.”

  “Okay. Let’s see. Joe Chester.”

  “The director of the Building Museum.”

  “Yes. His plaster is cracking. We’ve kept the pressure on him, knowing it would. No love lost between him and Pauline.”

  “You think he is a suspect?”

  “I think it’s an outside possibility. We’re going to keep pushing him. I’ve seen his type, passive but bitter, spill it all when the going gets tough.”

  Smith thought of Annabel’s recent conversation with Chester. Were he the man’s attorney, he’d tell the police to either charge him or back off. But he wasn’t Chester’s attorney, or anyone else’s for that matter.

  Eikenberg said, “I spent an hour with Chip Tierney this morning.”

  “And?”

  A delicate laugh. “You are amazing, Mackensie Smith. I’ve been here only a few minutes, and I feel like I’m on the witness stand.”

  “Which is exactly what I don’t want you to feel,” he said. “What did Chip have to say?”

  “He denies having had an affair with Pauline Juris.”

  “Does that surprise you?”

  “No, but I don’t believe him. He’s a weak sister. Not much backbone there. Daddy’s boy all the way. He also denies that his father had any romantic attachment to Juris. He didn’t want to meet me alone. He wanted his fiancée, Terri, to be with us. I vetoed the idea.”

  “Because he’d be reluctant to discuss in front of her an affair with Pauline.”

  “Uh-huh. I interviewed her after I left him.”

  “And, of course, you brought up your suspicion that her fiancé was having an affair with his father’s personal assistant.”

  “You bet I did. I suggested that she might have known about it, which, of course, would give her a motive to kill off her competition.”

  “Did she? I mean, did she acknowledge that Chip was—”

  “No. But I didn’t believe her, either.”

  “That’s one of the dangers of being a cop, isn’t it? You end up not believing anybody, about anything.”

  “Not true. I believed you when you said you had information for me.” He started to respond, but she shook her head. “I’m in no rush to hear what you have to say, Mac. This is too pleasant to have it ruined by talking business. I like the fact that you and I are not adversaries. I’d like to keep it that way.”

  “No reason why we should. Become adversaries, that is. Let me get to the reason I called you today.”

  “Do you have dinner plans?” she asked.

  He’d started to reach under the table for the envelopes containing copies of the Pauline Juris letters and family history, and said from that awkward posture, “Yes.”

  “With Mrs. Smith?” Darcy’s grin was mischievous. “What are you doing under there?” she asked.

  He returned to an upright position, envelopes in hand. “Yes. My wife and I are having dinner.”

  “Do you eat out often?”

  “Less often than before,” Smith responded. “We prefer eating in. I fancy myself a cook, although I suppose my friends are right when they say the secret of my success is keeping it simple and fresh.”

  “A meat-and-potatoes man. I like that.”

  “Not so much meat these days. More like tuna or pasta.” He placed the envelopes on the table. “I came into possession of—”

  “I love a good piece of meat now and then,” she said. “I’m partial to filet mignon, although a rare sirloin gets my juices flowing, too.”

  Smith sat back and fixed her across the table. “I always enjoy talking about food, but the subject is murder.”

  “I wish you didn’t feel that way. I am off duty, Professor. Very off duty.”

  “But I’m not, and really can’t stay much longer.”

  “I’d like another drink. Join me?”

  “No, but you go ahead.” He ordered her another vodka-and-tonic and continued to nurse his bourbon-and-soda.

  “Mac.”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

  “Uncomfortable? I’m not—”

  “I think you are, and I can only speculate why.”

  He came forward again, picked up the top envelope, and opened the clasp.

  “I’ll be direct with you,” she said. “You are—”

  He withdrew the sheaf of letters. “These are copies of the letters Wendell Tierney purportedly wrote to Pauline Juris. The infamous love letters.”

  Her coquettish play was dashed.

  “Where did you get them?”

  “I refuse to tell you that. You’ve got a serious leak in your Evidence division. These copies were passed on to an acquaintance of mine, who gave them to me. I’m giving them back to you.”

  She took the letters and stared at the one on top of the pile. “Damn it!”

  Smith opened the second envelope and took out the history. “This is a family history that Pauline was writing before her death. She’d evidently been working on it for many years.”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “A great deal, I think, if you read both the letters and the history with an eye toward comparing them. I believe they were written by the same person.”

  The expression on Eikenberg’s face mirrored her confusion. She started to speak, stopped, looked at the second letter in the pile, then at the cover page of the history. “You say Pauline Juris wrote this history. I accept that. But do I understand that you think she wrote the letters herself. To herself?”

  “Exactly.”

  She made another false start, then summed up her feelings with a nervous laugh. “Preposterous.”

  “That she wrote love letters to herself? Unusual, certainly. But I believe that’s what happened.”

/>   “She must have been demented.”

  “Not necessarily. She was madly in love with Wendell Tierney but never enjoyed having her feelings reciprocated. At first, I thought she might have done it in a misguided attempt to create a blackmail scenario. Reveal the letters to Tierney’s wife, Marilyn, in the hope it would break up the marriage. But I don’t think so. I don’t know what the shrinks would call it, but it satisfied a simple need for her. She was providing herself with the very words that she desperately wanted to hear but wasn’t about to.”

  The detective, having regained the composure she’d lost, said, “Who released these letters?”

  The staunchly direct Mackensie Smith fudged. “A journalist obtained them and passed them on to the acquaintance I mentioned. Who released them from MPD really isn’t my concern—that’s your problem. But I do encourage you and your colleagues to read them against the history. I think you’ll come to the same conclusion I have. By the way, it looks to me as though the last portion of the history was written on the same typewriter she used to write the letters.”

  “I must say … I didn’t expect this when we made a date tonight. Along with all your other attributes, you’re capable of delivering big surprises.”

  He looked at his watch. “Darcy, I really have to go.”

  Eikenberg returned the material to its envelopes and looked out the window. The ever-darkening city was now studded with the lights of office buildings and the glow of powerful floodlights that gave the city’s famed monuments life after dark. She looked at Smith and said, “Maybe I do understand a woman writing love letters to herself.”

  Smith said nothing.

  “Will you have dinner with me tonight?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t, Detective.” He scribbled in the air, signaling their waitress to bring the check. “I’m glad to see you,” he said. “But maybe having a drink wasn’t such a good idea.”

  “You know, don’t you?”

  “Know what?”

  “How I feel about you. I’m afraid I haven’t been very subtle.”

  The waitress took his American Express card and the check. “Detective Eikenberg, I think there might have been some missed communication between us. If I’ve done anything to—”

  She slowly shook her head, folded her hands on the table, and looked down at them. “No, you haven’t done anything—except be Mackensie Smith. I fell in love with you when I was your student. I recently had dinner with Nick, my ex, and he reminded me of how I used to talk about you all the time. Real schoolgirl stuff. Not unusual. Students fall in love with their professors every day. I’m sure I’m not the first to have fallen in love with you. Funny. I sometimes wonder whether that in-your-face crush I had on you contributed to Nick and me breaking up.”

  “You accused me earlier of being uncomfortable. I am now very uncomfortable. Let’s go.”

  “Can’t I at least complete my embarrassing confession?”

  “I wouldn’t deprive you of that, Darcy.” Smith signed his name to the receipt and returned his card to his wallet. “Why don’t we forget we ever had this conversation,” he said. “Maybe I misled you. I didn’t mean to. I don’t think I said anything, but maybe my face, my voice, indicated that I find you extremely intelligent, to say nothing of attractive. You were an impressive student, and you’re an impressive woman, Detective Eikenberg. But I’m married to another beautiful, bright, and impressive woman. Just that simple.”

  “Well put, Professor. See? No hearts on my sleeve. Or up them. Shall we go?”

  He came around the table and drew out her chair. They walked side by side to the elevators, rode down in silence, and went to the parking lot. She fumbled in her purse for her keys, found them, and he held open the driver’s door. They were close. She raised her face and offered him flower-soft lips. The deeply sensuous bouquet of her reached his nostrils. Her large, glistening eyes were, at once, pleading and demanding. “We could be friends,” she said softly. “Just talk. I would like that.”

  As she spoke, she pressed her length against him and brought her lips to within inches of his. She purred as their mouths met. It began as a tentative kiss, lips lightly touching without breaking shape. Then they pressed harder. No longer tentative.

  For Mac, the powerful, compelling sensation of their embrace was tainted by the realization that, like a pilot, he’d reached the point of no return. Cross it and you were committed to continuing on to your destination. No return to home base.

  He stepped back. He drew a deep breath.

  “Delicious,” she said. “We could be good friends.”

  “I … Good night, Darcy.”

  35

  Later That Night

  Smith took a detour on the way home, determined to put his mind on other matters. He stopped at the A & B Shellfish Company in Arlington to pick up two live Maine lobsters, cherrystone clams, and a container of red and sweet potatoes with onions. He used a phone booth outside the store to call Annabel and was surprised to reach her machine. He assumed she’d be home by now. A call to the gallery resulted in another recorded message.

  He returned to a dark house. No Annabel. No note. No message on his machine from her. He was now worried. This was uncharacteristic of her, of them. They made a ritual of keeping in touch to avoid anxiety. He was about to begin making calls when he heard a key in the front door. “I’ve been worried about you,” he said.

  “Sorry, Mac. I know I should have left a message, but time got away from me.” She hung up her raincoat and disappeared into the bathroom. They met again in the kitchen. “I bought lobster for dinner,” he said.

  “Sounds yummy, but I’ve already eaten. I have to talk to you.”

  He scowled. “Sounds like something even more serious than lobster.”

  “It is. Pour me some wine?”

  He carried two glasses of a red zinfandel into the study, handed her one, and they sipped. Seated on the love seat, she said, “I’ve had a provocative day.” She recounted her conversation with Joe Chester, told of going to the gallery to train Sally Frasier, getting instead a lesson in and receiving a lesson in radio music programming, and then about her Chinatown tour and lunch with Sue Yoy.

  “Sounds busy,” he said. “But I have a hunch we haven’t come to the good part yet.”

  “Right.” Her face and voice now took on additional animation as she twisted on the couch, placed her hand on his knee, and said, “After Sue and I parted company, I returned to the restaurant. I went back because while I was having lunch with her—she had gone to the ladies’ room—I was looking out the window on H Street and saw Sun Ben Cheong come along.”

  “Sun Ben? Wendell told me he was staying at the compound for a couple of days, depressed.”

  “He must have changed his plans. Or his mood. It was him, Mac. No question about that. He appeared, at least to me, to be nervous, kept looking over his shoulder. He stopped in front of a small Chinese take-out place directly across the street from the restaurant I was in, did his swivel-neck routine, and went inside.”

  Smith sipped his wine.

  “Then I saw his twin come up the street and go into the same restaurant.”

  Smith’s eyebrows went up. “Twin?”

  “Not a literal twin, but someone who sure looks like him. A little shorter maybe, but the same family. I’d bet my life on that.”

  “Okay. And then?”

  “I went across the street and looked into the restaurant but couldn’t see them. Immediately adjacent to the restaurant is the entrance to a small office building. Three floors, I think. The door was open, so I went in and looked at the list of tenants on the walls. Most of the names were in Chinese.”

  Smith smiled. “Did you learn Chinese before lunch?”

  “There was a set of symbols that, for some reason, were familiar.”

  “From a previous life?”

  She slapped his knee. “Stop it. No, I kept staring at it and trying to remember why those symbols looked familiar. Then it d
awned on me. I’d taken the photographs with me, the ones you gave me that included the shots of Tony on Wendell’s dock. Hold on a minute.” She jumped to her feet, went to the kitchen and returned with the package of pictures, went through them, and handed Mac the print. “See? On the racing boat behind Tony.”

  Smith held up the photograph to better catch the light. “MOR,” he said. “I can read that.”

  She was on her feet again, opened his desk drawer, and returned with a magnifying glass, which he used. “Those Chinese symbols underneath? Is that what you’re talking about?”

  “Yes.”

  Smith dropped the photo on his lap and ran an index finger over his upper lip. “Let me see if I follow you so far. Those symbols evidently translate into ‘MOR’ in English. Your new assistant talked about MOR meaning middle-of-the-road in music programming. And the same Chinese symbols, which evidently mean MOR, were on the tenant board in the lobby of an office building in Chinatown.”

  “Like I always say, Mac, your mind is a steel trap.”

  “Don’t pick on me, Annabel. Sorry, but I don’t see the significance.”

  “Then allow me to provide it for you,” she said pleasantly and not without a certain egoism. “This morning, I went through the vouchers at the museum that Pauline Juris created each time she took money from the special fund. Her handwriting was atrocious, but on more than half of them she’d scribbled MOR.”

  “To indicate where the money had gone?”

  “Yes. Who knew? I mean, maybe her jottings on the vouchers indicated companies that had provided services. Contractors. Linen suppliers for the catering operation. No matter. A lot of the missing money, at least according to the vouchers, went to something or someone called MOR.”

  “To Sun Ben Cheong.”

  “How else can you read it?”

  “No one at the museum ever checked on what this MOR was?”

  “No. According to Hazel Best-Mason and Don Farley, the only people who had access to the account were Pauline and Wendell. It started small, petty cash really, but then grew. Farley told me that because Tierney was such a strong force at the museum and raised so much money, nobody was about to challenge him.”