Corruption of Power

by Brenda English

  “Did anyone else see him?”

  “No one I could find. The other supervisors’ secretaries say he wasn’t in any of their offices. Of course there are lots of places in that building he could have been, but he wasn’t in the most likely ones.”

  “Well, I guess that doesn’t mean he didn’t do it, but it doesn’t mean he did either,” Rob said. He turned to me. “What did he tell the police about where he was?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I admitted. “They’re being real closemouthed about it. They’ve got a new guy there who’s in charge of the case, and I haven’t been able to get much out of him yet.” The understatement of the year. “But I’ll find out one way or another.” I had to.

  “And Taylor’s still not talking to anybody,” Ken added. “I tried again this afternoon to get to him, but he’s over at Ed Lloyd’s house, and you can’t get within five hundred yards of that place. It’s like a fortress, with fences and gates and stuff. Between Lloyd’s staff and Taylor’s, they’re isolating him pretty effectively from reporters. Mannie Sims says Taylor doesn’t plan to go back to his house until after the funeral. I think they’re having the wake there.”

  Rob looked thoughtful.

  “Okay,” he said. “We’ll go with what we’ve got for tomorrow. Sutton, your autopsy news will give us some ammunition. Ken’s got his profiles of Mrs. Taylor and the honorable supervisor. It’s a start. But you two really need to corner Taylor or lean on the cops and find out what kind of alibi Taylor’s got.” Rob looked up at the large round clock on the opposite wall of the newsroom, which said our deadline was an hour away. “Let’s get to it.”

  We did.

  * * * *

  I had turned in my story, said good night to Ken and Rob, and was on my way home, when I got off the elevator in the lobby at the same time as Sy Berkowitz exited the one next to it.

  “Well, well,” he said, moving to cut me off. “If it isn’t Sutton McPhee, star reporter.”

  “What?” I asked bluntly, trying to move around him. There was no love lost here. Sy Berkowitz is uniformly disliked by most of the other reporters at the News. He’s a smug bastard with a raging superiority complex and a powerful protector in Mark Lester. No one denies that he has done some good stories, both in Philadelphia and here, but that never seems to be enough for him. He wants all the good stories for himself and never feels his own work looks good enough until he’s torn everyone else’s work to shreds.

  “I hear you and Kenny aren’t making much headway figuring out who killed Janet Taylor,” Sy said sneeringly, his New Jersey accent grating harshly in my ears. “I hear they’re thinking of shipping the both of you and Rob Perry out to the Maryland bureau, where the stories won’t be too taxing for you to handle.”

  My frustrations from a long day got the best of me. I turned on him.

  “Sy,” I said, my voice in that low register it takes on when I’ve gone past anger and into fury, “get out of my way. If you were any kind of reporter, you’d have too many things of your own going on to worry about what I’m doing. Ken and I are doing just fine on this story. We certainly don’t need any help from you. Our work speaks for itself. We aren’t the ones who have to kiss our editor’s ass three times a day to keep our jobs or take stories away from other reporters because we don’t have the brains to find any for ourselves. You’re the only one who has to do that. So leave me the hell alone.” I was so angry, I actually pushed him aside and stomped off through the lobby toward the front door. Shawn, the evening security guard, had been watching our little display wide-eyed, probably wondering if he was going to have to intervene and separate us. When I steamed past him, he grinned weakly at me in apparent relief that he wasn’t going to have to go save Sy.

  “We’ll see who has to kiss whose ass, McPhee,” Sy called out loudly from behind me, his voice echoing across the marble floors and walls. I went through the outer door.

  Friday

  Twelve

  Friday morning, the morning Janet Taylor would be buried, dawned red. From my bedroom window on the eastern side of my end-unit apartment, I watched the sun come up behind a low bank of clouds that hugged the horizon, turning them into gorgeous and yet ominous fluffs of rose and blood, and I remembered the old sailor’s poem that warned about red skies in the morning. How appropriate for today, I thought.

  The funeral was scheduled for 10:30, and when I went to the county building to look for Bill and to the Great Falls police station to look for Lansing, neither was in, both apparently on their way to the church. It wasn’t a wasted trip, however. Jimmy Turner at the front duty desk proved quite helpful.

  “Hey, Sutton,” he said, when I walked into the police-station lobby. “How’s it going?”

  “Could be better, Jimmy,” I told him. “Is Noah Lansing around this morning?”

  “Nope, not till sometime after Mrs. Taylor’s funeral.

  You wanna leave a message for him—that I can repeat publicly?”

  I laughed.

  “No, I’ll just see him there. I might as well go nose around and see who shows up. Don’t the police always look around at the funerals to try to spot the murderer?”

  “Shouldn’t be too hard in this case,” Jimmy answered darkly, and I sobered up instantly. Jimmy knew just about everything that went on at the Great Falls station. It was how he compensated for the fact that he no longer was out on patrol, not since eighteen months ago when he had responded to a report of screaming in an abandoned house, had interrupted a man who was raping a ten-year-old girl, and had taken a bullet in the left hip in the process. He had shot the rapist in the chest and called for more police and three ambulances before passing out, the little girl sobbing next to him on the pavement beside his cruiser. The rapist had gone to prison for life. The little girl lived, unlike the two other children the police learned the man had raped previously. Jimmy had a torn-up pelvis that put him on permanent desk duty and turned him into an alcoholic. My story about what his selfless act had done to his life and about his struggles to put things back together had resulted in several heroism citations for him and a couple of awards for me. Jimmy told me at the time that reading my story about himself was what finally helped him stick with AA and kick the booze for good. He didn’t mind telling me things when he could.

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  Jimmy looked around the quiet station to make certain no one else was nearby to hear us.

  “You want to put money on whether her husband bumped her off?” he asked.

  “But everyone says they were the perfect couple. He was crazy about her. Why would he want to kill someone like his wife?”

  “Beats the hell out of me,” Jimmy said, warming to the subject. “But it wouldn’t be the first time one half of a perfect couple did in the other half, usually for some reason that makes no sense. Besides, her husband was the last one to see her alive, and he’s got no alibi.”

  There it was, the lodestone I needed to point me in the right direction.

  “You… ah, want to elaborate on that?” I asked, now looking around as carefully as Jimmy had.

  “Don’t let this come back to my doorstep, Sutton, but Hub Taylor’s in deep shit. He says he went home for lunch with his wife and left by twelve-thirty, at which time, he says, she was fine. But he didn’t show back up at the county building until nearly two for that meeting that was on TV. And the best he can come up with is that he was driving around thinking about ‘things’ during that time.”

  “No kidding,” I said. “He told them this during the interrogation?”

  “It was what he told ‘em at the house the day she was killed. Of course, then it looked like she was attacked while he was at the board meeting. But by the time he came in yesterday, they’d gotten the autopsy results. You should’ve heard the buzzing going on around here when the medical examiner called with that bit of news. Bill Russell had the chief on the phone, and Lansing was looking real grim. You have to be careful how you suspect a county s
upervisor of killing his wife.”

  “I’ll just bet you do,” I said.

  “Of course, when Taylor got here yesterday he had John Aldritch, that fancy-shmancy lawyer of Ed Lloyd’s, with him. Lansing and his guys tried six ways to Sunday to nail Taylor down, but Aldritch kept saying, ‘My client doesn’t have to answer that.’ Taylor couldn’t deny what he told them at the scene, but they sure didn’t get much else out of him.”

  As I was absorbing what Jimmy had said another cop came up to the inner-hallway side of the desk to ask a question. I knew what to do.

  “Well, listen, if Lansing shows up before the funeral, would you tell him I’m looking for him?” I said, without missing a beat.

  “Oh yeah, sure,” Jimmy answered, taking my cue. “I’ll tell him.”

  “Thanks. A lot.”

  Jimmy winked at me. I went back outside to my car.

  * * * *

  On my way to Willow Hill Methodist Church, I stopped at a Mobil station to get some gas and then pulled over to the side of the parking lot to use the pay phone. I wanted to check my voice mail, and considering the stories I had going on, I vetoed the car phone again. The first voice I heard was Cheryl Wiggins.

  “Sutton, hi. I saw your article about the autopsy results in the paper this morning. Thanks for keeping me out of it. It looked good. I hope your boss thought so, too. Talk to you later. ‘Bye.”

  The next one was from Bill Russell.

  “McPhee, what am I going to do with you? It took me an hour to calm Lansing down after you left yesterday. Do you have to go to such pains to bait him? Anyway, I had a long talk with him. I gave him a little lecture on police-press relationships and how we don’t threaten to prosecute reporters just because they found out something we didn’t. I also talked to him about you. I think I made some headway. Now, if you’ll just behave, too, maybe he’ll at least be civil. We’ll talk.” He hung up. I would have to thank him if I saw him later this morning.

  The third message was from Peter Morris, M.D.

  “Ms. McPhee… uh, sorry… Sutton… it’s Peter Morris. I’m sorry you’re not there. I remembered something that might help. But I’d rather you didn’t call me at the office.” He paused, then resumed speaking. “I suppose it will be all right to leave it on your voice mail. Anyway, I remembered that when I first brought the woman into the exam room, she had a coat over her. I took it and hung it on a coat hook on the door. This was when I thought she had taken the Demerol on her own, so I checked the pockets to see if the bottle was there, to make certain that was really what it was. I didn’t find a bottle, but I did pull out a business card. I just glanced at it, long enough to see that it had a senator’s name on it, a man. I didn’t think it was important and stuck it back in the coat pocket. Last night, after we talked, I was racking my brain for anything I might have forgotten. I was going back over that night in my mind and I remembered the card. It occurred to me that the senator on the card might be someone she knows, someone who could tell you who she is. I wish now I had kept the card, but I wasn’t thinking this clearly at that time. As I say, I just glanced at it, but I’m pretty sure the name on it was a Senator Black.” He paused again. “Well, that’s all. I hope this helps.”

  The cutoff tone sounded and the voice-mail recording told me that was the last of the messages. I stood at the pay phone, digesting Peter Morris’s latest tidbit.

  Paul Black, I knew, was the other senator from Florida. Junior senator to Rita Wills, Ann Kane’s boss. So I knew the following: that a woman who knew, or perhaps worked for, Senator Paul Black had an experience at the hands of Ed Lloyd that sounded disturbingly similar to what might have happened to Ann Kane, an aide to Black’s Florida colleague, Rita Wills. Might the two women have known each other? Possibly. Probably, if the mystery woman worked for Black. If I found Morris’s unknown patient, would she know anything about what happened to Ann Kane, or whether Ed Lloyd also knew Ann Kane? Would she know who the second guy with Ann Kane could have been? Might it have been Black?

  I walked back to my car and got in.

  It looked like Ann Kane definitely wasn’t going to take any kind of back burner to Janet Taylor. It also looked as if I might have to make a trip over to the Hill to a certain Florida senator’s office. In the meantime Ed Lloyd most certainly would be at Janet Taylor’s funeral and interment. What were my chances of getting to him with some questions? As usual, I would just have to make the most of whatever opportunities arose.

  Back into traffic I went. Shortly, I turned onto Willow Hill Road, and up ahead I could see where the police had blocked the street off at the church, detouring traffic around a couple of blocks and back onto Willow on the other side. Inside the barriers, the church was surrounded by black limousines and other upscale cars. Outside, there was the usual flurry of reporters and cameras, all waiting for the funeral to end—which should be almost anytime now—and for the mourners to reemerge. I saw Ken in one group, although he didn’t see me. Instead of stopping, I decided to drive on over to Potomac Memorial Gardens, where the obituary had said Mrs. Taylor would be buried.

  Thirteen

  As I drove between the large white brick pillars that held the entry gates to the cemetery and looked out across the acres of softly rolling green, I noticed that the sky was becoming more threatening by the minute. Apparently, the red dawn’s promise was going to be fulfilled shortly.

  I didn’t know where Janet Taylor’s grave site was, so I drove around until I found a digging crew at a newly excavated grave, covered by a large tent from the funeral home that had cared for Mrs. Taylor’s body. When I stopped and called out my question to them, the grave diggers told me that was the place. I put the car in gear and drove farther along the road until I rounded a curve that put my car out of immediate sight. I had no idea what the security arrangements were going to be, but I saw no point in calling early attention—from the police or the rest of the press—to the fact that I was there. I put on the raincoat and hat I had brought, black to blend in and the hat brimmed to delay recognition. From my car I walked at an angle across the lush green lawn to stand by a group of trees that looked across the hillock back toward the Taylor grave site. I hoped to stay unnoticed until people were converging on the site. I didn’t want to get lumped in with the rest of the press and completely isolated from the mourners if I could prevent it.

  From my spot under the tree, I couldn’t see the gates, but after another thirty minutes of watching the clouds build overhead, I saw the flashing lights of the police-escort cars come slowly around the bend closest to the grave site, followed by a long line of black limousines and private cars. As I watched, the funeral procession snaked to a halt before going as far as my car. Uniformed police, mourners, and the funeral-home staff all began to empty out of their cars for the walk up to the grave.

  The pallbearers, who rode in the first limo immediately behind the hearse, moved as a group to the hearse’s rear, to take charge of Mrs. Taylor’s coffin and carry it up to the waiting hole in the earth. From the next limo came Hub Taylor with an elderly couple I took to be his in-laws, as well as a clergyman easily distinguished by his telltale white collar, and Ed Lloyd. They all fell into step behind the coffin and trudged up the hill, Janet Taylor’s parents leaning on each other’s arm for support in their grief.

  As they made their way they were followed by other members of the board of supervisors, by county officials, who included the chief of police (accompanied, I noticed, by Bill Russell) and the county executive, and by others I assumed were family friends and acquaintances from Janet Taylor’s charitable causes.

  With a start, I recognized one of the mourners as Dr. Morris. Was he Janet Taylor’s physician? I wondered. It would make sense, of course. Very possibly Ed Lloyd even had introduced them. Morris said Lloyd had sent some influential patients his way. The Taylors might well have been among that group. Fortunately, Morris didn’t see me. His eyes were on the flower-covered coffin that was being lowered onto wide s
traps to hover above the darkness of the open grave. I didn’t want my presence to startle him into giving our acquaintance away to Ed Lloyd.

  My eyes resumed their scan of the crowd. I watched Hub Taylor most closely. His face was mottled and bloated, his eyes red-rimmed, even from my vantage point. His slumped shoulders and shell-shocked face certainly gave the appearance of a man in deepest mourning over the loss of his beloved wife. Could he possibly have killed someone whose absence he felt so heavily? Of course he could, the cynic in me thought. People kill people they love every day. Love is not necessarily a shield against violence and anger.

  But if that was what had happened—that he had killed in anger—what could that gentle, loving woman possibly have done to make him that mad? She was the one who had been angry, according to his secretary. Perhaps he killed her—if he killed her—for some other reason. So what other motives usually led people to murder?

  Actually, the list is quite short. Besides anger (which includes what are usually known as crimes of passion), there is money. But Hub Taylor had more money than he knew what to do with. Then there’s power, control. But Janet had been his wife and had done more than most women would have to support him. And there is fear. But what could Janet Taylor have done to instill the kind of unreasoning fear in her husband that would have led him to kill her? It was definitely a maze, I thought, a maze of human emotions and motivations, and a quagmire for anyone trying to navigate it.