by Gene Riehl
He bowed his head and I could see his thin lips moving. Praying, no doubt, for the lost tribe of Latter-Day Saints. That they be spared God’s righteous wrath for their heresy. I didn’t have to hear the words themselves to know what they were. I’d heard them all before, and a whole lot more, many of which had been aimed directly at me. I said a short and silent prayer myself, a prayer from my past, but one I’d been using more and more of late. An accusation—to be honest—more than a petition. Dear God, if you really exist, why didn’t you come down and rescue my mother and me when it still mattered?
The Pastor began to blink again, over and over and over. His head began to nod. The milkshake cup slipped out of his fingers and bounced against his leg on the way to the carpet. I reached across and picked it up. The plastic top had kept the shake from spilling. I stood and walked to the cheap veneer chest of drawers opposite where we sat, set the milkshake on it, in case the Pastor wanted it later. Then I turned and left the room.
Back in the reception area, a voice stopped me.
“Mr. Monk?”
Shit. Quigley. I turned to see him approaching.
“Look,” I said, trying to keep my voice level, “I told you the money’s coming. Now if you’ll excuse me.” I turned to leave, but he scurried around to block me.
“It’s not the money, Mr. Monk, although as I think about it, I guess that’s what it will turn out to be.”
“Just tell me what you need. I don’t have time to chat.”
“His condition is worse, I told you that on the phone the other day. You may have noticed the perseverative blinking, the increasing inability to maintain present-day reality.”
I felt my fingers clenching as I listened to him, disgusted at his choice of words. Not his blinking—my father’s—not his memory damage. I couldn’t remember ever loving the old bastard, but he wasn’t gone yet. The Pastor still deserved the simple respect of a pronoun.
“He’s going to need more watching,” Quigley continued. “Around the clock soon, at least that’s the way it normally goes.”
This time I nodded. “Just give me the bottom line.”
And some way to come up with it.
I didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell me why I did it, why every time I saw my father I had to go straight to a card room. And the new one in Arlington was just the ticket. I thought for an instant about the irresponsibility of playing poker when the Brenda Thompson case was spiraling into the toilet, but only for an instant before I pointed the Caprice toward Arlington and stepped on the gas.
It was a typical card room, I saw when I got there. A dozen or so round tables with green felt tops, about half of them filled with gamblers. Straightforward fluorescent lighting from the ceiling, too bright, but what the hell. Cashier’s cage against the far wall, lots of smokers in the room, a blue haze hanging like swamp gas above the players. Muted voices, not a lot of talking. Nobody here for the conversation.
I twisted my gold pinky ring for luck, went to the cashier’s cage and traded three one-hundred dollar bills for a tray of chips, chose a table at the back of the room—always at the back, where I could see the whole room as well as the front door—and got the nod to join the three men already seated. We exchanged names all around. I pulled my chair up close and arranged my chips. The hand already in progress ended, and I threw in a five-dollar chip to ante up for the next one.
“Straight poker,” the man to my right said, a portly fellow with a shaved head who’d introduced himself as Jim. “Five card draw, no frills.”
We began to play. Four or five hands went by before I realized I’d made a mistake by coming, by thinking there’d be anything for me in a place like this.
Jim had described the game as no-frills, but that wasn’t the word for it. It was no anything at all, and certainly not what I needed after a visit with the Pastor. The problem wasn’t losing, it was just the opposite. I couldn’t possibly lose to these bozos. Talk about your tells, the three of them might as well have given me a printout of their hands.
“Man oh man,” Jim said after each and every deal, “man oh man oh man,” except when he drew the cards he needed, when he added yet another “oh man.”
To Jim’s right, Alan loosened his old-fashioned skinny necktie just before he bet, unless he was going to bluff, when he tightened it. Like cinching up your saddle, he must have thought, before heading out after the Indians.
But the third guy—Joey, he called himself—took the prize. Joey’d read once that a good poker player never changed expression, had obviously decided to go one better, to have no expression at all. None. His face was placid as new snow, but unfortunately for him only when he had the hand he wanted. The rest of the time he did exactly what the rest of us did. Grinned, grimaced, pouted, just like a real human being. What could you possibly be thinking? I wanted to ask him, as I raked in the pots he gave away when he wasn’t stone-faced.
I stood it as long as I could, until the hand that finally sent me packing.
Joey deals. I come up bupkes, a couple of fours, nothing with a face on it. I take three cards, no help. Alan takes one card. Examines his hand, lays his cards on the table face down, loosens his skinny tie, shrugs, takes it all the way off, stares at it as though he’d never before removed it completely. Four of a kind, I’m guessing … at least.
“Oh man oh man oh man of man oh man,” from Jim. Holy shit, five oh mans this time. Can he possibly have a royal flush?
I glance at Joey, wonder for a moment if he’d died. His face might as well be carved from granite. I can’t even tell if he’s breathing.
I check my own hand again. Maybe I missed something, but I haven’t. My fours are still slumped in solitude, surrounded by numbers that don’t add up to a nickel. What the fuck, I say to myself. You’re not having any fun anyway.
“To you,” Joey tells me, his voice impatient.
I throw in two black chips, the table limit. Two hundred dollars, just to see what they’ll do. I don’t have to wait long.
“Oh man,” Jim says, checking his cards again, shaking his head. He chucks his cards into the pot face down. “Man,” he says, not even the “oh” this time. Alan’s cards follow immediately, he grabs his tie, puts it back around his neck, doesn’t know whether to cinch it or leave it alone. I turn to Joey, his face distorting with pain as he adds his cards to the pile. I drop mine on top of the rest of them, face down, then reach to scoop in the pot. Jim’s hand starts toward my cards, but I look into his eyes and he backs away.
Outside in the Caprice I opened my briefcase and replaced my pinky ring, added four-hundred-eighty dollars to the secret stash.
I could almost hear Gerard Ziff’s voice in my ear.
“You what?” he was saying. “You quit winners? Jesus God, what’s the matter with you?”
But he’d know better even as he said it.
We were gamblers, the Frenchman and I, part of the brotherhood. He wouldn’t need me to explain to him why I’d quit … why I’d walked away without every cent of their money. It wasn’t about money, we both knew that. It wasn’t even about winning and losing. It was about playing the game. About the risk. Without the risk of loss, there’s no gambling. What I had going in the card room was little more than stealing.
I checked my watch. I had an hour to get over to Cheverly, to meet Lisa at Jabalah Abahd’s office. Despite my aches and pains, I was aware of my impatience to get there. The game was afoot, as Sherlock Holmes liked to say. I didn’t smoke a pipe or play the violin, and the only doctor I’d ever shared rooms with was Annie Fisher, but the detecting game itself was exactly the same, and suddenly I couldn’t wait to get started.
Before I could, my cell phone rang.
“The ADIC wants you again, Puller,” Karen Kilbride told me when I answered. “Wants to see you. Now.”
I grimaced at the phone. Lieutenant Barra hadn’t wasted a whole lot of time going over my head to Kevin Finnerty.
“What should I tell his secretary?” Ka
ren wanted to know.
“To quit bothering me, that I don’t have time for Finnerty’s nonsense today.” Silence from the other end, Karen’s shock so vivid I could almost feel it through the phone in my hand. “Or,” I continued, “that I’ll be there as fast as I can. Whichever you think is best.”
I took the time to call Lisa, tell her to stand by until she heard from me, and twenty minutes later I was sitting in Kevin Finnerty’s office. His big jaw was tight, his lips turned down at the corners, but that was pretty much how he always looked. I checked for his tell, but his normal stack of paperwork was off to one side. Maybe I’d been wrong to expect trouble from him. Maybe he was just checking on my progress in finding the missing roommate.
“Could it be, Mr. Monk,” he began, “that you’ve forgotten how our system works?”
I sat up straighter, began again to watch his paperwork as I played my first card, the classic dumb-ass agent card.
“I’m not sure I understand, Mr. Finnerty.”
“I got a call from the chief of police in Cheverly He was very upset. What happened out there?”
I told him. Told him what Lieutenant Barra wanted, that he wanted Brenda Thompson’s name, that he wanted to know specifically why I was at Jabalah Abahd’s house in Cheverly.
“Abahd?” Finnerty said. “Is that name supposed to mean anything to me?”
“The missing college roommate. She changed her name.”
“She was dead when you showed up to interview her?” He scowled. “And you let the killer get away?”
“Didn’t exactly let him, no. We fought, but he got by me and out the door.”
“Where was your sidearm?”
“In my briefcase. It’s a SPIN case. I had no reason to wear it.”
“How long has it been since you’ve read the manual of rules and regulations?”
The question was not meant to be answered.
“What about the A.F.O. case?” he continued. “You were assaulted, were you not? You are a federal officer, are you not?”
“He’s already a murderer. Seems a little silly to add kicking an FBI agent into the mix.”
“It’s not your decision to make. Your job is to present the facts to the United States Attorney’s office, let them decide.”
“Of course. When we arrest him. Adding a technical violation to the charges isn’t going to make catching him any easier.”
He sat back, his eyes closed for a moment, then swung forward again.
“I spoke to the legal division a few minutes before you got here. They agree we do not want to introduce Judge Thompson’s name into this. Legal will contact the chief of police in Cheverly, tell him to subpoena you if they must. We can challenge the subpoena until they give up and go away.” He stared at me, those gray eyes of his especially chilly this morning. “Unless, of course, you have something that might help them solve the homicide. We can’t be in a position of withholding evidence.”
“Nothing. Outside of a dead body and the presence of the man who’d murdered her, I couldn’t testify to anything else.”
What I did have—the diary thing—wasn’t anything except a highly theoretical motive, didn’t come close to the standard for evidence. Not yet anyway, and I wasn’t about to spread the theory around the Hoover Building until I had some facts to back it up.
“And the problem with the Thompson case,” Finnerty said. “What did the judge say when you went back to her?”
I told him her explanation—that she’d forgotten the missing three weeks, that she had not in fact told Lisa Sands the sick aunt had died, only that auntie had been expected to die but hadn’t.
“SA Sands insists the judge is wrong,” I told him. “Showed me her interview notes. The notes support her claim.”
“Agent Sands is a first office agent, a woman first office agent. She made a mistake. Add your own notes to the file, make it clear Judge Thompson cleared up the misunderstanding. With the roommate dead, your investigation is complete. I know the deadline is more than a week away, but you don’t need that much time anymore. I’d like to see the report before the weekend.”
He pulled a file from a stack to his left, opened the cover, then looked up at me.
“Is there something else, Mr. Monk?”
I thought about his question for a moment. Now was the time to object, but I couldn’t make myself do it. Not until I had something better to say.
NINE
I stopped by my desk to check my messages and sign out some of the mail that was beginning to pile up. One thing led to another and it was an hour before I broke away, summoned Lisa, and told her we would drive over to Abahd’s office together.
By the time we got there it was pouring rain, freezing rain. The office was one of many in a converted industrial building near Dupont Circle. There were no police around when we arrived, and Abahd’s secretary, her eyes heavy with the shock of what had happened to her boss the day before, told us why.
“They were here most of the morning,” the heavyset young woman told us. “Two detectives and a crime-scene specialist.”
“They take anything?”
The woman shook her head. “Made some copies, but this is a business office. We still have clients. We can’t give away our files and records.”
“We’re sorry to intrude,” Lisa said, “but we need to look through her desk as well.”
“Help yourselves,” she said. “Just don’t take anything without telling me.”
Inside Abahd’s office it was too cold to work. I walked around the desk and closed the factory-type windows that had been left open. Raindrops splattered against the glass, and the dull gray light that came through added to the bleakness of our task.
Abahd’s desk was stacked with files. Her criminal clients’ files, I saw, when I looked through a few of them, along with notes about her strategy for trial, records of phone calls made and received, the usual stuff you’d find in a trial lawyer’s office. I pushed them around but saw nothing to interest me. The desk itself was what you call double-pedestal, a center drawer with two large drawers on either side.
“Why don’t you take the left side,” I told Lisa. “Regardless who Robert Bennett turns out to be, Abahd might have made notes of their conversation, and what she told him about Brenda Thompson.”
She nodded and I bent to examine the center drawer myself.
Desk supplies, mostly. Pens and pencils, a ruler, paper clips and a stapler, scissors, a half-empty pack of gum, and a fresh tube of lipstick.
The two drawers on the right side were filled with the same type of files as those on the desk, their little plastic tabs sticking up in an orderly row, even smaller names typed on the tabs. I concentrated on the top drawer first, bent lower to scan the names, saw nothing that meant anything to me. I closed the drawer and went on to the bottom one. Exactly the same thing: files, tabs, little names, no Brenda Thompson, no Robert Bennett.
I considered taking the time to go through the files one by one, but decided it would be counterproductive. The Cheverly P.D. would do that, probably had already done so. Besides, it was unlikely that notes pertaining to Thompson or Bennett would be stuck into a file that didn’t bear either one of their names. I closed the drawer, turned to help Lisa.
“Whattya got?” I asked her.
“No Bennett, no Thompson, lots of other stuff.”
I bent over her shoulder. My chin touched her hair and I backed off a little, not far enough, however, to avoid the wildflower scent. I ignored it, mostly, then got back in close again. She was still examining the top drawer on her side.
“Personal files,” Lisa said, “looks like to me. Household accounts, receipts and warranties, bank records, stuff like that.” She turned her head suddenly enough that our noses almost collided. This time I couldn’t make myself retreat. “Want me to copy some of this?” she asked.
“If you see something we can use.”
She nodded, began to open folders and examine contents. I took anoth
er whiff of her hair, then straightened up and stared out the window at the rain. The reflection of my face didn’t look happy. Searching for something is always tough, but it’s even more frustrating when you’re basing the search on guesswork.
Abahd had been pretty clear—at least in my mind—that she had bad news about Brenda Thompson, but it was possible I’d read too much into her words. That I’d wanted to read too much into them. That in my need to elevate the suspense I was trying too hard to make this special, something to get my juices flowing again.
“Hey,” Lisa said, right in the middle of my soliloquy.
I looked at her. “Hey what?”
“No home phone bills.”
“And?”
“And phone bills are all that’s missing.” She pointed at the drawer. “Like I said, these are household files, and everything else is here. Gas and electric, newspaper, water bill, cable TV, car lease, Visa and Mastercard, stuff like that, all here. Including her Verizon cell phone account. Everything but the bills for her home phone.”
I turned and walked out the door, went over and spoke to the secretary for a moment before going back to Lisa.
“The only phone bills the secretary keeps at her own desk,” I told her, “are the ones for the telephones here in the office. Abahd’s home phone bills should be with the rest of the personal stuff in her desk in here.” I nodded toward the file drawer. “You can’t find any phone bills at all? Not even old ones?”
“Haven’t looked yet, not for the old stuff.”
She bent over the drawer, rifled through the other folders, plucked one out and straightened up with it. She opened the folder and glanced through the contents, turned to me.
“End of mystery. Here they are.” She rifled through them. “Except for this month’s. But Abahd might have misplaced it … or hadn’t gotten around to filing it yet.”
“The rest of the bills, had she filed them already?”
“All there, neat as a pin. The old phone bills all show the pay-by date as the fifth of the month. If Abahd didn’t lose it, it should be here with the rest of them.” She paused. “We can get it from the phone company, if you think it’s important.”
