He led her through the house pronouncing the brand names of his possessions as if they were the names of wild and dangerous game he had stalked and vanquished in darkest Africa while armed only with a spear. Majolica plates from Rosselli, trompe-l’oeil paneling, Italian leather sofas and chairs, Jesurum lace tablecloth and bed linen, two original Chippendale chairs, Fabergé eggs—they were trophies, in a way, and it would not be overstatement to say that he loved them.
After the tour, he led her back to the den where he fixed drinks. She had a vodka tonic and he made himself a scotch and soda. With the lights dimmed and the strains of a Dvorak CD floating from the Klipsch speakers, T. Jefferson Brody ran his fingertips along the widow’s thigh and kissed her willing lips.
Three sips of scotch and three minutes later he went quietly to sleep. The remains of his drink spilled down his trouser leg and onto the Kashan carpet.
Mrs. Lincoln managed to lever herself out from under Brady’s bulk and find a light switch. She refastened her brassiere and straightened her clothes, then made a telephone call.
When Jefferson Brody awoke sunlight was streaming through the window. He squinted mightily against the light and rashly tried to move, which almost tore his head in half. His head was pounding like a bass drum, the worst hangover of his life.
“My God …”
His memory was a jumble. Deborah Lincoln, with the sublime tits … she was in—no, she was here. Here! In his house. They were kissing and he had his hand … and nothing! There was nothing else. His mind was empty. That was all he could remember.
What time is it?
He felt for his watch. Not on his wrist.
The Rolex! Not on his wrist!
T. Jefferson Brody pried his eyes open, gritting his teeth against the pain in his head. His watch was missing. He looked around. The TV and VCR were gone. Where the Klipsch speakers had stood only bare wires remained. His wallet lay in the middle of the carpet, empty. Oh God …
He staggered into the dining room. The doors to the china cabinet were ajar, and the cabinet was bare! The Spode china, the silver and crystal—gone!
“I’ve been robbed!” he croaked. “God fucking damn, I’ve been robbed!”
He lurched into the living room. The Fabergé eggs, the engravings, everything small enough to carry, all gone!
The police! He would call the police. He made for the kitchen and the phone on the counter.
A newspaper was arranged over the phone. He tossed it aside and picked up the receiver while he tried to focus on the buttons.
Something red on the newspaper caught his eye. A big red circle around a photo, a photo of a fat, frumpy black woman. The circle—it was lipstick! He bent to stare at the paper. Yesterday’s Post. The picture caption: “Mrs. Judson Lincoln, at National Airport after her husband’s funeral, reflected on the many civic contributions to the citizens of Washington made by the late Mr. Lincoln, a District native.”
“Lemme get this straight, Tee. You paid this woman you thought was Mrs. Lincoln four hundred grand. You took her to dinner. She slipped you a Mickey last night and cleaned out your house?”
“Yeah, Bernie. The papers she signed are worthless. Forgeries. I don’t know who the hell she is, but I’m sitting here looking at a photo of Mrs. Judson Lincoln in yesterday’s paper, and the broad who signed the papers and took the money ain’t her.”
“Did she have nice tits, Tee?”
“Yeah, but—”
Bernie Shapiro had a high-pitched, nasal he-he-he laugh that was truly nauseating if you were suffering from the aftereffects of a Mickey Finn. Brody held the telephone well away from his ear. Shapiro giggled and snorted until he choked.
“Listen, Bernie,” Brody protested when Shapiro stopped coughing, “this isn’t so damned funny. She’s got your money!”
“Oh, no, Tee. She’s got four hundred grand of your money! We gave you our four hundred Gs to buy that goddamn check cashing company, and you had better do just precisely that with it. You got forty-eight hours, Tee. I expect to see documents transferring title to that business on my desk within forty-eight hours, and they goddamn well better be signed by the real, bona fide, genuine Mrs. Judson widow Lincoln. Are you on my wavelength?”
“Yeah, Bernie. But it would sure be nice if you helped me catch up with this black bitch and get the money back.”
“You haven’t called the cops, have you?”
“No. Thought I oughta talk to you first.”
“Well, you finally did something right. I’ll think about helping you catch up with the broad, Tee, but in the meantime you had better get cracking on the Lincoln deal. I’m not going to tell you again.”
“Sure. Sure, Bernie.”
“Tell me what this woman looked like.”
Brody did so.
“This lawyer with her, what’d he look like?”
Brody described Jeremiah Jones right down to his shoelaces and bad teeth.
“I’ll think about it, Tee, maybe ask around. But you got forty-eight hours.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t do nothing stupid.” The connection broke.
Jefferson Brody cradled the receiver and picked up the ice bag, which he held carefully against his forehead. It helped a little. Maybe he should take three more aspirins.
He needed to lie down for a few hours. That was it. Get his feet up.
But first he wandered through the house, cataloguing yet again all the things that were missing. If he ever caught up with that cunt, he’d kill her. Maybe after he’d closed the Lincoln deal he could talk Bernie into putting a contract on her black ass.
In the hallway, as he passed the door to the garage, a sense of foreboding came over T. Jefferson Brody. He opened the door and peered into the garage. Empty. Hadn’t he parked the Mercedes in here last night? Or had he left it in the driveway?
He hit the button to open the garage door. The door rose slowly, majestically, revealing an empty driveway.
Oh no! She’d stolen the damned car too!
CHAPTER EIGHT
WHY? Tell me why.”
“Because I wanted it,” Elizabeth snarled. “Is that too difficult for you to understand?”
Thanos Liarakos pinched his nose and stroked an eyebrow. His associates had seen him do this many times in the courtroom, and they knew it was an unconscious mannerism to handle stress. If his wife knew the significance of the gesture, she ignored it now. She hugged her knees and stared at the hospital’s stenciled name on the sheets.
After a moment he said, “That stuff will kill you.”
She sneered.
“What am I supposed to say to you? Should I talk about the kids? Should I tell you how much I love you? Should I tell you once again that you’re playing Russian roulette? And you are going to lose.”
“I’m not one of your half-witted jurors. Spare me the eloquence.”
“You’re prostituting your soul for this white powder, Elizabeth. Prostituting your dignity. Your intelligence. Your humanity. You are! You’re trading everything that makes life worth living for a few minutes of feeling good. God, you are a fool.”
“If that’s the way you feel, why don’t you get out of here? I’m not going to sit quietly while you call me a whore. You bastard!”
“What do you want, Elizabeth?”
She glared at him and wrapped her arms around her chest.
“Do you want to come home?”
She said nothing.
“I’m going to lay it out for you in black and white. You’re a cocaine addict. When they discharge you in a few days you’re going back to that clinic. I’ve already made the phone calls and sent them a check.” This would be her third trip. “You are going to sign yourself in and stay until you are cured, finally, once and for all. You are going to learn to live without cocaine for the rest of your life. Then you may come home.”
“Jesus, you make it sound like I’ve got a nasty virus or a pesky little venereal disease. ‘When the pus in your vagin
a drys up—’ ”
“You can kick it, Elizabeth.”
“You’re so goddamn certain! I’m the one that’s in here living it. What if I can’t?”
“If you don’t, I’ll file for a divorce. I’ll ask for custody and I’ll get it. You can whore and steal and do whatever else you have to to maintain your addiction, and when the people from the morgue call, the kids and I will see that you get a Christian burial and a nice little marble slab. Every year on Mother’s Day we’ll put flowers on your grave.”
Tears ran down Elizabeth’s face. “Maybe I should just kill myself and get it over with,” she said softly. But too late. Her husband missed this histrionic fillip. He was already halfway through the door.
Before she could say anything else he disappeared down the corridor.
Henry Charon was at the apartment on New Hampshire Avenue at nine a.m. when the truck from the furniture rental company came. Grisella Clifton wasn’t home, and Charon felt vaguely put out. He showed the truck crew where to put the bed, the couch, the dresser, the chairs, and the television, then tipped the driver and his helper a ten-spot each.
At eleven o’clock he was at the apartment he’d rented in Georgetown when the truck from the furniture rental company in Arlington arrived, A-to-Z Rentals. The deliverymen had the furniture inside and arranged by eleven-forty. He tipped both those men and locked the door behind him as he left.
At one he was at the apartment near Lafayette Circle. The telephone company installation person—a woman—showed up a half hour late. She apologized and Charon waved it aside. She had almost finished when the furniture arrived, this time from a rental company in Chevy Chase.
At four p.m. he bought a car from an elderly lady living in Bethesda. He had called five people with cars for sale in the classified section of the newspaper and settled on her because she sounded like an elderly recluse.
She was. Even better, she peered at him myopically. At her daughter’s insistence, she explained at length while he nodded understandingly, she was giving up the car, a seven-year-old Chevrolet two-door sedan, brown. The plates were valid for three more months. He paid her cash and drove it straight to a Sears auto service center where he had the oil and plugs changed, the radiator serviced, all the belts and hoses replaced, and a new battery and new tires installed. While he was waiting he ate a hamburger in the mall.
As he strolled through the evening crowd toward the auto service center at the north end of the mall, he passed an electronics store. In he went. Fifteen minutes later he came out with a police band radio scanner.
That evening at the Lafayette Circle apartment he read the instruction book and played with the dials and switches. The radio worked well whether plugged into the wall socket or on its rechargeable batteries. He stretched out on the bed and listened to the dispatcher and the officers on the street. They routinely used two-digit codes to shorten the transmissions. Tomorrow he would go to the library and try to find a list of the codes. And he would visit more electronics stores and buy more scanners, but only one at each store.
Tomorrow the telephone people were installing phones in the other two apartments. And tomorrow he would have to shop for food and first-aid supplies. Then tomorrow night he would begin moving food, water, and medical supplies to the subway hideout.
Maybe the following night he could put some dried beef and bandages in the cave in Rock Creek Park.
So much to do and so little time.
As he listened to the scanner he mentally went through the checklist one more time.
The real problem was afterward, after the hunt. He did not yet have a solution and he began to worry about it again. The FBI would have his fingerprints—that was inevitable. Henry Charon had no illusions. The fact that the fingerprints the FBI acquired would match not a single set of the tens of millions they had on file would eventually cause the agents to look in the right places. They would have plenty of time—all they needed, in spite of exhortations by politicians and outraged pundits—and the cooperation of every law-enforcement officer in the nation.
Eventually, inevitably, the net would pull him in. Unless he was not there. Or unless the FBI stopped looking because they thought they already had their man. The false clues would not have to hold up forever; indeed, every day that passed would allow the real trail to get colder and colder. A month or so would probably be sufficient.
Why not a red herring?
At three the following afternoon Jack Yocke was finishing a story on the collapse of Second Potomac Savings and Loan. His editor had told him earlier to keep the story tight: space was going to be at a premium in tomorrow’s paper. The Soviets had just announced an immediate cessation of foreign aid to Cuba and Libya. Both nations would be permitted to continue to purchase goods from the Soviet Union but only at world market prices, with hard currency.
Yocke hung up the telephone without looking and kept right on tapping on the computer keyboard. The authorities were fully satisfied that the late Walter P. Harrington had been using Second Potomac to launder money for the crack trade. Local crack money or from somewhere else? No one was saying, not even off the record.
And someone had used a high-powered rifle to blow his head off while he drove the left lane of the Beltway at fifty-five miles per hour—his widow fervently insisted that he always drove fifty-five.
It certainly had not been a motorist enraged over Harrington’s highway manners. Not using a rifle.
Money, money, money. Hadn’t the other man killed the evening Harrington died also had something to do with money? Didn’t he own some kind of check-cashing business?
The phone rang.
Still tapping the Second Potomac story, Yocke cradled the receiver against his shoulder and cheek. “Yocke.”
“Jack, there’s been a shooting at the day-care center in the Shiloh Baptist Church, next door to the Jefferson projects. About thirty minutes or so ago. Would you run over there? I’m also sending a photographer.”
“Yo.”
Yocke looked over his story, pushed RECORD, and then left the terminal to turn itself off.
The Jefferson projects was not the worst public housing project in the city, nor was it the best. It was simply average. Ninety-eight percent black and Hispanic, the tenants existed in a netherworld of poverty and squalor where the crack trade boomed twenty-four hours a day and men sneaked in and out to avoid jeopardizing their girlfriends’ welfare eligibility.
All the legitimate merchants in a five-block radius of the projects had long ago gone out of business, except for one sixty-year-old Armenian grocer who had been robbed forty-two times in the last sixty months, a record even for Washington. Yocke had done a story on him six months or so ago. He had been robbed four times since then.
“One of these crackheads is going to kill you some night,” Yocke had told the grocer.
“Where am I gonna go? Answer me that. I grew up in the house across the street. I’ve never lived anywhere else. The grocery business is the only trade I know. And they never steal over a day’s receipts.”
“Some strung-out kid is going to smear your brains all over the back counter.”
“It’s sorta like a tax, y’know? That’s the way I look at it. The scumbags take my money at gunpoint and buy crack. The city takes my money legally and pays the mayor a salary he doesn’t earn and he uses it to buy crack. The feds take my money legally and pay welfare to that crowd in the projects and they let their kids starve while they spend the money on crack. What the hell’s the difference?”
Still pondering the crack tax, Yocke slowed the pool car as he went by the Armenian’s corner grocery and looked in. The old man was bagging groceries for an elderly black lady.
He parked the car two blocks from the project and walked. As he rounded a corner, there they were, long three-story gray buildings, four to a block, decaying without grace under a cold gray sky.
Something about the scene jarred him. Oh yeah, the place was deserted. The teenage boys who
manned the sidewalks and sold crack to the white people who drove in from the suburbs were gone. The cops were here.
Yocke veered onto a sidewalk between the buildings and strode along purposefully, his steps echoing on the cinderblock walls and the gray, vacant windows.
White man, white man, the echoes said, over and over. White man, white man …
The church was across the street from the projects, on the western edge. Police cars in front, lights flashing. An ambulance. One cop keeping an eye on the vehicles.
Yocke showed the cop his ID. “Understand there’s been a shooting?”
The cop was a black man in his fifties with a pot gut. The strap that held his pistol in its holster was unlatched. The gun could be drawn in a clean, crisp motion. The cop jerked his thumb over his shoulder and grunted.
“Can I go in?”
“After they bring the body out. Be another ten minutes or so.”
Yocke got out his notebook and pencil. “Who is it?”
“Was.”
“Yeah.”
“The woman who ran the day care. I don’t know her name.”
“What happened?”
“Well, near as I can figure, from what I’ve heard, a couple squad cars stopped over on Grant.” Grant was the street bordering the west side of the projects. “The dealers ran through the projects. A cop chased one guy. He went charging into the church, through the day-care center toward the playground door, and when the victim didn’t get out of his way fast enough, he drilled her. One shot. Right through the heart.”
The radio transceiver on the cop’s belt holster crackled into life. He held it to his ear with his left hand. His right remained near his gun butt.
Other cops were searching the abandoned buildings and tenements to the west of the church. The cryptic transmissions floated from the radios of the parked cruisers.
When the radio fell momentarily silent, Yocke asked the patrolman, “Where were the kids when the shooting occurred?”
“Where the hell do you think? Right there. They saw the whole thing.”
05.Under Siege v5 Page 14
