Murder on K Street

by Margaret Truman

  As he sat in the opulent private plane flying at thirty-one thousand feet, the whoosh of its twin jet engines the only ambient sound, he shifted his attention between what Simmons and his aides were discussing, and his own thoughts about everything that had transpired since receiving Lyle’s phone call announcing that Jeannette had been killed. Had his friend of so many years played a role in his wife’s murder? There was certainly speculation about that around Washington. The senator’s own daughter harbored such suspicions. Was she right? He knew he had to consider the source, a free-spirited, iconoclastic daughter estranged for years from her powerful father. Still, one had to at least not arbitrarily rule it out, nor summarily dismiss anyone else in the Simmons family with the exception of Polly, who wasn’t anywhere near D.C. the day of the murder.

  He glanced over at Simmons, who’d slipped into his lecture mode, with McBride and Markowicz his eager students.

  If Lyle Simmons had nothing to do with his wife’s death—and Rotondi fervently hoped that was the case—what kind of president would he make? Rotondi had abandoned interest in the political scene since leaving the U.S. attorney’s office in Baltimore. Not that he’d ever been a keen observer of it, or participant in it, even back then. He didn’t trust politicians. As far as he was concerned, their only interest was retaining power, loftier societal needs be damned. He realized that his disdain for elected officials represented a level of cynicism that was probably uncalled for, and sometimes wondered whether he should change his tune. It hadn’t happened, and he remained content to be an onlooker, regular voting serving as his conscience salve.

  The Gulfstream landed smoothly at Chicago’s Midway Airport, where a stretch limo awaited them. They were whisked to the Ambassador East Hotel, home of the famed Pump Room bar and restaurant. Rotondi had been treated to evenings there by Lyle’s father and mother when the two college students visited the Simmons home on the city’s Near North Side. On many occasions, they were seated in the famed Booth One on the east wall, mirroring the elder Simmons’s stature in Chicago. Myriad high-profile celebrities had enjoyed the vantage point of that booth; Bogart and Bacall celebrated their wedding in Booth One, as did Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood. Sinatra held court there on many nights, John Barrymore roared for more champagne, and noted Chicago columnist Irv Kupcinet used Booth One as his office away from the office. It was a heady, albeit uncomfortable experience for the college-age Phil Rotondi to be seated there as part of the Simmons family.

  “Afraid you’re on your own, Phil,” Simmons told Rotondi as they headed for their rooms. “I’ll be tied up in these meetings all afternoon. Meet you in the Pump Room at five for a drink before the fund-raiser.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Rotondi said, meaning it.

  After being shown to the small suite to which he’d been assigned, Rotondi sat at the desk and placed a phone call. Kala Whitson answered on the first ring.

  “Hi, Kala. It’s Phil.”

  “My gimpy friend made it,” she said in a husky voice. “Nice flight?”

  “Fancy private jet, all the comforts of home. No, better than home.”

  She laughed. “Sounds like you’re selling out, Phil. Private jets were never your style.”

  “They still aren’t, but when in Rome—”

  “Don’t go getting literary on me, pal. Are we on for this afternoon?”

  “I hope so. I have to be back at the hotel by five. I’m free until then. Where and when?”

  “My apartment. I don’t think it’s bugged, although everyplace else seems to be. The war on terrorism and all…or is it the war on the Constitution?”

  Rotondi smiled. His friend from the Baltimore U.S. attorney’s office hadn’t changed a bit since being transferred to the Chicago office ten years ago. They’d worked closely in Baltimore on some of the toughest prosecutions, and he valued her no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners attitude. They’d stayed in touch after her transfer and his retirement, sending amusing e-mails back and forth, making fairly regular phone calls, and swapping books they knew would interest each other. Kala was an avowed, prideful, unabashed lesbian, as comfortable in her skin as any heterosexual. She looked mannish. She wore her hair in what could only be described as a designer-styled crew cut, and was fond of tailored black suits that tended to slim down her square body. She talked tough and had a raspy voice, enhanced by chain smoking. She also possessed the most beautiful green eyes Rotondi had ever seen—and his deceased wife, Kathleen, had a pretty spectacular set of green eyes herself.

  Kala Whitson was one of his favorite people.

  “I assume you’ve come up with what I need,” he said.

  “Of course I have, Philip. What the hell did you think I was doing, inviting you to my apartment to seduce you?”

  “I was hoping.”

  “Hope on, my friend. Maybe you noticed you’re not my type. Two o’clock?”

  “On the button.”

  Rotondi carried the envelope containing the damaging material about Lyle Simmons and the Marshalk Group with him to the Pump Room. He sat at the bar and enjoyed a beer and sandwich. The doorman hailed him a cab, and he arrived at Kala’s apartment building in the Old Town Triangle section of the city, adjacent to Lincoln Park. It had been settled in the mid-1850s by German immigrants and remained a German American enclave until an influx of other nationalities created a melting pot of Germans, Hungarians, and Russian Jews. Gentrification followed, and real estate prices soared, forcing out many of its original residents. Kala bought her condo there because she enjoyed the ghosts of what had been, including saloon-keeper aldermen like Mathias “Paddy” Bauler, who was fond of telling reporters, “I’ll talk about anything with you, as long as the statute of limitations has run out.” Kala was right for the neighborhood, and the neighborhood was right for her.

  Kala and her two rescued stray cats welcomed Rotondi to the apartment. “Drink?” she asked.

  “Please.”

  “Still drinking Scotch?”

  He nodded and followed her into the kitchen.

  “I hope you know how much I appreciate this, Kala.”

  “You’d better appreciate it, Philip. My neck’s way out on this one.”

  “I know.”

  “When you called and told me what you had, I was ready to kill the little weasel, only somebody beat me to it.”

  “Who is this weasel?”

  She handed him his Scotch over two cubes and led him back into the living room.

  “Show me the stuff you ended up with,” she said, lighting a cigarette.

  He opened the folder and laid out its materials. She rifled through it for thirty seconds, shoved the papers back, said, “Yeah, the same stuff.”

  “Gathered by a weasel?”

  “A no-good, rotten little double-dealing weasel. I’d use some other words to describe him, only I wouldn’t want to offend you.”

  “Thanks. So, tell me.”

  She took a long, sustained drink of club soda, sat back, fired up another cigarette, and said, “Where do I begin? Okay. We flipped a guy who was inside one of our fair city’s leading crime families. Despite all the Russian and Jamaican and Haitian mobs, we still have the Eye-talian variety, not as powerful as they used to be but still with plenty of fingers into everything, mostly construction and trash hauling, with side ventures in prostitution and drugs. This guy we flipped, Joey Silva, started bringing us the sort of material you have in the folder, links between his crime family and a certain U.S. senator who happens to be an old friend of one of my favorite prosecutors, now happily retired. At first, the info was sketchy, and it was tough to connect the dots. The route the money took to the senator was convoluted, no straight lines, which you would expect from somebody as smart as your college buddy. But the more Silva gave us, the more the picture started to take shape. The family used front companies that moved the money from their hands to a middleman, namely a lobbying firm in D.C. headed by a gentleman named Marshalk.”

  “A familiar name,
” Rotondi said.

  “Another familiar name is president of Marshalk, Simmons’s kid. But of course, you already know this.”

  “Everything but the weasel. Go on.”

  “The weasel, Mr. Joey Silva, lowlife that he is, kept hitting us up for more money. Every time he did, he said he had more and better information, so we went along. The little bastard was getting rich off us, but he was delivering the goods.” She tapped the file folder on the coffee table. “Juicy stuff, huh, Philip?”

  “Not for the senator and Marshalk.”

  “Who cares about them? Oh, you do, of course.”

  “Not Marshalk. Simmons? Yeah, I care about him.”

  “Are you trying to protect him?”

  Rotondi shook his head and sipped his Scotch. “I’m not out to protect anybody, Kala. I just need to know the truth. Simmons’s murdered wife, Jeannette, and I were close.”

  “Oooh,” she said with a deep, provocative laugh. “Tell me all about it.”

  “Another time, Kala. Get back to the story. Who sent this material to Simmons’s wife? This weasel, Silva?”

  “Looks like it.” Another cigarette was lighted. By now, a gray haze had engulfed the room, stinging Rotondi’s eyes. “After you called,” Kala said between drags, “I checked with the FedEx office in the neighborhood where Silva lives. They pulled the records for me—I have a friend there—and she comes up with the shipping forms that coincided with the dates you gave me. Sure enough, Silva sent a package to Mrs. Simmons. The stupid bastard didn’t even bother to use a phony name.”

  “He was working both sides of the street,” Rotondi said.

  “That’s right. Where’s the honor, Philip? He wasn’t satisfied getting paid by us, he has to try and extort money out of the senator’s wife, too.”

  Rotondi remembered what she’d said when he first arrived—that she’d wanted to kill Silva but someone had beaten her to it. He asked about it.

  “It would have been my pleasure to waste Silva myself,” she said, “but one of his spaghetti-bender friends must have gotten wind of his deal with us and shut him up for good. Slit throat, tongue pulled through the slit, classic.”

  “The pictures, Kala,” Rotondi said. “They set Simmons up?”

  “They sure did. He’d been bedding down this broad here in Chicago for a while now. We all knew it, and we didn’t care. No crime in shacking up, although I’m sure his wife wouldn’t have been as understanding. This lady is cozy with some of the mobsters here in Chicago. When they knew she was warming the sheets with a United States senator, they went high-tech and videotaped them in the throes of passion, with her permission, of course.”

  “Did anyone from the mob tell the senator about the photos?”

  “Not according to the weasel. He said they were holding on to them in the event the senator decided to not play ball with them any longer. An insurance policy. So tell me, Philip, how close you and the deceased Mrs. Simmons really were. Must have been damn close for her to entrust you with what’s in that folder.”

  “Close enough that she trusted me, Kala. I guess I have a trustworthy face or something.”

  “Probably the something you have was most important. Speaking of that, how’s your love life?”

  “Good. She’s a D.C. caterer.”

  “Smart move. You never have to worry about a meal. She own a liquor store, too?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What about the senator’s son?” she asked. “You close with him, too?”

  “I know him.”

  “Who back in D.C. knows about the stuff you have in that envelope?”

  “No one. Jeannette Simmons was going to talk to her son about it, but I’m not sure she ever did prior to her murder.”

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “I don’t know. What are you going to do with what you have?”

  “The way it looks at this juncture, nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “The long reach of Senator Lyle Simmons and the Marshalk gang extends beyond Washington, Phil.”

  “The fix is in?”

  “Sure is. The powers that be in the AG’s office here are sitting on the information about Simmons and Marshalk. Ask them why and they say they don’t have enough to go forward with indictments. You know what I say? Bull! Simmons was instrumental in getting them their jobs here, and they’re not about to lose what they have. They’ll keep it under wraps until he makes the White House and they need something from him. Business as usual. Sweet, huh?”

  “Sour is more like it.”

  “Want a tip, Philip?”

  “Sure.”

  “You might as well do what my esteemed leaders are doing, buy a good shredder and get rid of that stuff. You might end up hurt by hanging on to it. The senator and his friends at Marshalk play rough.”

  “Thanks. How’s yours?”

  “How’s my what?”

  “Your love life.”

  “Boring. I’m thinking of the convent.”

  “You’d hate it. They have vows of silence and a no-smoking policy.”

  “I suppose you’re right. I have to get back to the office. Any other questions?”

  “No. I really appreciate this, Kala.”

  “The leg’s bad, huh?” she said as they said good-bye in front of the building.

  “There are moments.”

  She kissed him on the mouth and said, “Take care of yourself, Philip. You’re one of the white hats.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “How did your meetings go this afternoon?” Rotondi asked Simmons when they met in the Pump Room.

  “Good, Phil. The brain trust feels that the time is right for me to announce my candidacy.”

  “Will you?”

  “I still haven’t made up my mind. Jeannette’s murder has muddied things.” A thoughtful expression crossed his face as he finished what was left of his bourbon. “What do you think?”

  “About announcing your candidacy?”

  “About running at all.”

  “My opinion about something like that is irrelevant, Lyle. I’m illiterate when it comes to politics.”

  “That’s a cop-out, Phil. You know me better than any other person in this world now that Jeannette is gone. Has her murder tainted me?”

  Rotondi looked quizzically at him.

  “You know what I mean, Phil, the rumors that are swirling around that the marriage was on the rocks, that I had a mistress in Chicago, trash like that. The situation with Polly doesn’t help, that’s for sure. I asked her to come with me to Chicago this trip and join me at the fund-raiser. Naturally, she refused. I don’t know how to get through to her. I love her, Phil. I’m sure you know that.”

  What Rotondi knew was that Jeannette had told her husband that she wanted a divorce.

  “Running for president won’t help the situation,” Rotondi said.

  “I suppose not. I hate to bring this up, Phil, but I’m curious about that trip Jeannette took to the Eastern Shore not long before she was killed. She was a different person when she came back.”

  “In what way?”

  “I don’t know, more distant, uncommunicative. There was already a gap between us that was growing. I admit that. But she was—” His laugh was rueful. “I’ve always wondered whether you’d get even with me one day for stealing her from you at school, you know, try and bed her down.”

  Simmons’s comment was, at once, hurtful, infuriating, and sad. Rotondi thought before responding. “I’m going to let that pass, Lyle.”

  “Hey, no offense,” Simmons said, placing his hand on Rotondi’s shoulder. “To be honest, I’d deserve it for what I did back at old U of Illinois. That you chose to remain friends with me after it says something wonderful about you. I’m not sure I could have done the same.”

  “That’s old news, Lyle. And no, Jeannette and I didn’t sleep together that weekend.”

  “You’re a quality guy, Phil.”

  “Shouldn’t w
e be heading for your fund-raiser?”

  Simmons looked at his watch. “I suppose so. Meet you in the lobby in half an hour.”

  Rotondi watched Simmons exit the bar and chewed on the conversation they’d just had. He knew that if he’d ever wanted to “get even” with his college roommate for wooing Jeannette away from him, sleeping with her would have been minor compared with what he could do with the information upstairs in his room.

  The fund-raiser was held in a ballroom at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Chicago, just off the Magnificent Mile. A few hundred well-heeled supporters laid out three hundred dollars apiece for a meal, a chance to hear their senior senator opine about his vision of the future for Illinois and the nation, and a moment’s press of his flesh.

  Seeing Simmons deliver his after-dinner speech brought back memories for Rotondi of their college days together. Lyle had always been good on his feet, a natural performer, confident and comfortable in front of a microphone. Rotondi had come to appreciate the power and potency of a gifted public speaker, someone who could set agendas and garner support through words and the smooth delivery of them, particularly when the audience was already in his corner, or dissatisfied with the status quo and seeking answers. Hitler came to mind, for one.

  Simmons had the party faithful in the palm of his hand as he spun his tales for the evening, self-effacing at times, boastful at others, his engaging smile brought to bear like a laser pointer, softening the hard messages and cuing the audience when it was time to smile or laugh. It was a masterly performance from a man whose wife had only recently been violently murdered, and who would return to Washington to lead a memorial to her.

  The handshaking ritual followed, one person after the other jockeying for position to squeeze his hand, slap his back, and whisper in his ear. The senator treated each one as though he or she were the only person in the room, a gift unto itself. Some women were openly and inappropriately flirtatious, which Simmons handled with characteristic aplomb. It wasn’t his good looks that invited such behavior, Rotondi knew. It was the power he exuded. Kissinger had been right. Power was, indeed, a mighty aphrodisiac.