The Blackmail Club

by David Bishop

  “No doubts. He confessed before committing suicide.”

  “My God. First my Christopher. Now Harry.”

  “Are you okay?”

  Sarah sniffled. “I’m okay. Thank you for telling me.”

  “I’ll see you around eight.”

  Her voice stopped him before he hit the end button. “Jack!”

  “Yes?”

  “What—” He heard her take a deep breath. “What did Harry blackmail my husband over?”

  “We’ll talk about that tonight.”

  “I won’t be hearing it on the news, will I?”

  “No. I’ll see you at eight.” He hung up just as he pulled into the lot at Metro PD.

  Jack sat in one of six chairs in a mid-sized Metro conference room. The out-of-the-way room was never used for case suspects because it had no two-way mirror and, Jack guessed, no listening mechanism. The air was a bit musty and the rectangular table had more places with scratches than places without. The other chairs were occupied by Mayor Molloy, the police commissioner, Metro’s deputy chief of police, its chief of detectives, and Sergeant Paul Suggs, the first officer on the case that had started it all, the suicide of Dr. Christopher Andujar.

  The police commissioner spoke first. “There will be no minutes and this meeting will not be taped or recorded. When this meeting finishes we will discuss the timing and content of a public statement.”

  During the meeting, Jack picked up whiffs of the usual police department odors: sweat, the supposedly forbidden tobacco and a new one, the odor of cordite that had been moving through the building’s air ducts since Chief Mandrake discharged his sidearm.

  The official reason for the mayor’s attendance was that Jack’s statement addressed the criminal conduct of DC’s dead chief of police, but Jack knew the mayor was also there to learn if his involvement with Phoebe Ziegler might come out.

  The meeting started with Jack telling how his suspicions had begun, how they grew, and the content of his meeting with Mandrake. The meeting ended at seven-fifteen. On the way out of Metro Jack saw detectives and uniformed officers huddled in small groups, talking in hushed voices.

  “What will Mandrake’s death mean for the department?” The question’s hidden meaning: how will this impact me? Another he overheard was, “Chief Mandrake was a good dude. I heard they’re going to make Deputy Asshole our new chief,” and on and on.

  Mayor Molloy suddenly appeared from a side hallway. He grabbed Jack’s sleeve and tugged him inside an empty office. “You knew about the chief when you were in my office, didn’t you?”

  “Mr. Mayor, I had a strong suspicion, but I would not discredit the chief by mentioning it to anyone. I wasn’t absolutely certain until Mandrake confessed.”

  Molloy continually glanced in one direction or another, even though the two of them were alone. “The chief could have had a million character witnesses,” Molloy said. “Why didn’t he fight it?”

  “Who knows,” Jack said. “Perhaps he felt the money and portraits would eventually be found. Perhaps he feared going to jail as an ex-cop or the shame of losing his reputation. Perhaps his conscience finally overwhelmed him, or he just didn’t want to go through the legal process and all he knew that it entailed. We may never know, Mr. Mayor.”

  “Still, if the story gets out—”

  Jack cut him off. “It’s over, Mr. Mayor. Mandrake confessed. He’s dead. He told us where to find the presidential portraits, Tittle’s records, and the money. I expect Tittle’s records will combine with Tyson’s confession about payoffs to give you a solid picture of police and city corruption over the past five to ten years. All in all, Mayor, that’s a pretty good haul.”

  Chapter 52

  Jack arrived at Sarah Andujar’s home a few minutes after eight. The porch light was off. His shadow from the streetlight led him until he caught up with it on the porch. The door was ajar. No lights were on inside except for a stiletto from the streetlight that had sliced through the slightly parted drapes. He pushed the door a little farther and eased in sideways.

  “Sarah? It’s Jack.”

  She didn’t answer.

  He opened the hall door into the garage. Her car was there; the hood was cool to the touch. A faint light was coming from Chris’s bedroom next to the study. He looked in. A small lamp was lit on the nightstand next to the bed. The comforter and sheet had been folded back on an angle. The room was empty, the adjoining bath dark. He went upstairs. Sarah’s bedroom was dark, her bed made.

  The outside temperature was mild so he went to see if she had fallen asleep on the sun porch. She hadn’t. When he stepped back into the kitchen, he saw a note, with today’s date, attached to the refrigerator with a little magnet in the shape of a red rose.

  “Chris, I went to visit a neighbor. I’ll be with you soon.”

  Sarah had spoken of Chris’s spirit being in the house. Still, Jack had no idea Sarah felt the presence of her dead husband to the point that she would leave him notes.

  As he turned to leave the kitchen, he glanced into the backyard softly lit from the circular dome lights along the brick walkway. Her slaughtered roses were still strewn around the yard. The cuttings, now dried enough to lay much flatter to the ground, revealed that the American Red Beauty, the rose bush Sarah had gotten from her mother’s garden, stood proud, the only rose bush she had cut down.

  Jack stood staring at the decimated garden. Then he ran to his car.

  The speedometer needle surged upward, the engine straining to respond to the demand from his foot.

  Troy Engels lived on Jefferson Street, a few blocks from the Andujar home. While Jack had worked for the agency, he had once been in Engels’s home. Cornering on two wheels left little time for thought, but he tried to recall the floor plan of the house he needed to reach before it was too late.

  Engels had been Jack’s control for two of his early covert counterterrorism missions. Jack would never like Troy Engles, but Engels had not been involved in the blackmailings or murders, so Jack didn’t like the sudden thought that had spurred him to action.

  The fountain near Engels’s front door slurped and gurgled while throwing water into the air, then catching it a moment later in its own circular pool. Jack barely heard his knock over the action of the fountain. He looked through the glass in the narrow relight next to the door. He saw no one. He tried the door. It was unlocked.

  Engels is a security freak. He would lock his door.

  For the second time in less than an hour he cautiously moved into a private residence, this time the residence of the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. His Beretta 92FS held just above his shoulder.

  The living room lamp was lit, still the scene felt foreboding. Except for a few shadows, the darkened kitchen held no surprises. A Land Rover was parked in the garage. The hood cold.

  A faint line of light brightened the narrow space beneath a closed door at the far end of the hall. He headed that way, checking the guests’ bathroom and the laundry room as he passed them.

  He pressed himself against the wall, aimed his 9mm at the center of the doorway, reached out with his left hand and eased the door open far enough to be sure no one stood behind it. He entered the master bedroom and pushed open the door to the connected bath to find the source of the light: a nightlight plugged in next to the sink.

  The CIA’s director of covert operations sleeps with a nightlight. Doesn’t that beat all?

  By the time Jack returned to the bedroom, his eyes had adjusted enough to reveal an outline on the bed, the outline of a man. As he drew closer, Jack recognized the man. Engels was naked. He was dead.

  Jack checked the walk-in closet before turning on the lamp.

  A bullet had tunneled through Engels’s wrinkled forehead. Blood that had first pooled in his right eye socket had spilled over to trail down his cheek, creating a jagged red shadow on one side of his head.

  A gun rested hard on the nightstand. The shooter had needed both hands for what
had come next. Engels’s genitals had been severed and stuffed into his mouth. There was no blood spray outward onto the sheet. His heart had stopped before the violent amputation.

  Within the intelligence community Engels was known as a man of extraordinary achievement. He had crawled out of the squalor of his birthplace into the inner circle of his nation’s intelligence operations. In Jack’s opinion there were times when Engels had been overzealous. Times when he had used people as pawns in his black-ops chess games. Still, Engels hadn’t deserved to die so ugly. No one did.

  Back in the living room, Jack took out his cell to call Sergeant Suggs before it dawned on him that he was in Virginia—outside Suggs’s jurisdiction.

  He heard the shrill sound of wind fighting through a crack. The noise led him to the rear sliding glass door which had been left open less than an inch. To avoid smudging any prints, he stretched as high as he could, wedged his fingers into the crack and slid the door over far enough to let him out to the rear patio.

  “Sarah?” he whispered as he stepped outside. “It’s Jack … Sarah.”

  She did not answer. She was lying in the cold on a chaise lounge. As he stepped toward her, he kicked something, her pruning shears still sticky with sap from her roses, and blood from Troy Engels’s genitals.

  Sarah had not cut down her roses looking for Chris; she had used the roses to symbolically castrate her unfaithful husband, and now she had done the same thing, literally, to her husband’s lover.

  The scratches from the thorns of her roses would no longer itch; her scabs would no longer draw tight. Sarah Andujar was dead.

  A bloody kitchen knife had fallen to the deck next to her frail body. The cuts were so deep that her right hand extending beyond the arm of a chaise lounge, elbow-up, appeared to hinge at the wrist. Her blood had flowed within an expansion joint in the decking and into the pool, further darkening the unlit water.

  He fought off the impulse to shut her eyes; nothing should be changed before the authorities arrived.

  Whap. Whap.

  An envelope, anchored by a heavy glass candle holder, flapping in a sudden breeze busily slapped the top of a wire-mesh patio table. A shaky hand had written on its face: To Be Opened by Jack McCall. He sat on the stationary end of the diving board.

  Dear Jack:

  I have slain the beast. You are undoubtedly wondering why.

  I told you and the police I went to bed the night of Christopher’s death and found him the next morning. I lied. That night when I got home from my book club I found Christopher, holding his gun, sitting in his study. He was crying. He told me he had paid our life savings to a blackmailer who threatened to reveal that he had taken his heart from me and given it to Troy Engels. He told me he did not wish to disgrace me further. He begged me. “I can’t do this without your help.” He put the gun against his temple and pleaded. You knew Christopher as, everyone thought of him, a man’s man, but he was soft inside. I slid my finger over his, over the trigger. He looked at me and nodded his head. I squeezed with him, or maybe I squeezed alone. I am no longer certain. I hired you with the desperate hope you would find that Engels had been the blackmailer and that you would recover our money.

  Now I won’t need it.

  Donny stayed with me a few nights right after his father’s death. One night after Donny thought I had gone to sleep, I heard him talking on the phone to Engels about his being a silent investor in Donny’s disgraceful club. So Engels had also contributed to the decay of my son.

  I wanted Engels to be the blackmailer so I could see him in jail. That cannot be so, now, I’ll see him in hell.

  Sarah Andujar

  Jack realized then there had been clues he had not seen or perhaps had not wanted to see. When he and Nora had visited Sarah to give their first progress report, he had looked at pictures hanging in Chris’s study. None of the pictures of Chris with his friends included Troy Engels. When he told Sarah he had the pictures Nora had salvaged from Chris’s office, Sarah had lost it for a moment, gotten angry and insisted they be thrown away. The pictures Chris had kept in his office all included Engels. That clue had been there. Subtle perhaps, but there and he had failed to see it.

  The latest hint had come less than an hour ago, when Sarah asked, “I won’t be hearing on the evening news why Harry Mandrake blackmailed my Christopher, will I?” She had been afraid Chris’s relationship with Engels would become common knowledge. In the end, she could not face that her husband was gay.

  Jack went inside and called a number he would always know, the twenty-four/seven secure line that rang directly into Engels’s department at the CIA.

  “This is Jack McCall. Troy Engels is dead. His death is not the result of any terrorist or foreign activity. He’s at home. You know the address. I’ll come by Monday morning to be debriefed … No, I will not talk to the control officer on duty. Tell him if I’m bothered before Monday I’ll suffer a massive loss of memory.”

  Jack hung up without waiting for a reply. He unknotted his tie, leaving the two ends trailing unevenly down his shirt, and headed for his car.

  When Jack turned onto George Mason, he dialed his cell phone. This was scoop time in the newspaper business.

  “Eric Dunn.”

  “Eric. Jack McCall.”

  “Jack. It’s frigging late.”

  “You wanted the scoop. Get out your pencil.”

  Jack told the columnist about the blackmailer who called himself Moriarty, a longtime good cop whose heart had rotted. Next he told Eric about the dirty ex-cop and scummy PI, Arthur Tyson. He also told the fascinating story of the heist at the National Portrait Gallery, and how that connected to Donny Andujar’s club and the death of Phoebe Ziegler. Lastly, he spoke of the payoffs and Tittle’s records.

  He omitted the deaths of Troy Engels and Sarah Andujar. He’d leave the CIA to decide how to spin their deaths.

  He ended with the story of the blue-blooded investor, Dean Trowbridge, another of America’s growing number of amoral, I-can’t-get-enough money grabbers.

  Then Jack hung up without saying anything more.

  Not even goodbye, take care, or I’ll see ya around.

  Epilogue

  For the past week, the stories of blackmailings, murders, and indiscretions had unsettled the nation’s capital, but like a pail of water left to sit after having been stirred, things had settled back to calm. Well, DC’s brand of calm anyway.

  On Monday Jack had gone to the CIA as promised and told his story. By the end of the week the agency had loudly praised Engels and quietly closed their file on his death. A separate story told of the sad suicide of Sarah Andujar, a widow who could not survive the grief of having lost her husband a few months earlier, when he too had taken his own life.

  The Friday evening sun would set in a little over an hour. Jack decided he would watch it go down from his balcony while sipping a little Maker’s Mark, and use the solitude to tuck his memories of Rachel into a warm private corner of his mind where he could visit her, while otherwise letting her go.

  Tomorrow morning he was taking Roy to ride a big dump truck. In the afternoon the boy was going to a friend’s house for a sleepover, and Jack had a date with Roy’s mother, Janet.

  He cracked the bedroom door to let in some fresh air, turned on his gas log fireplace, and settled down at the small desk in his bedroom. The time had come to prepare his final report to Sarah.

  Dear Sarah:

  My real assignment was not identifying Moriarty, but finding out what happened to your husband. Chris and the mysterious Troy Engels died for two primary reasons. They lacked the courage to live their sexual orientation, and together they shattered your fantasy life.

  Chris might have coped with the blackmailing, but he was devastated when he learned Donny had sexually assaulted his patient Allison Trowbridge. Then you stepped in and helped pull the trigger. I can’t guess what the final outcome will be for Donny and, frankly, I don’t care.

  You had met Mary Lou Sanch
ez. I expect she will rise above the twin catastrophes of the murder of the father she knew, Tino Sanchez, the good cop, and the suicide of Harry Mandrake, her birth father, the bad cop.

  True to eternal history, the members of each generation must perish or survive, despite the sins of their parents who never meant them harm. In the end, life is a series of choices. These young people will make theirs as we made ours.

  In the final analysis, justice is a perfect concept we struggle to apply to imperfect people and circumstance.

  McCall Investigations, Inc.

  Jack McCall

  Jack crumpled his report to Sarah, and tossed it in the fireplace.

  The End

  Note to Readers

  It is for you that I write so I would love to hear from you now that you have finishing reading the story. I can be reached by email at david@davidbishopbooks.com, please no attachments. For those of you who write or who aspire to write I encourage you to write, rewrite, and write again until your prose live on the pages the way it lives in your mind. If you have found errors of fact or location, I would like to hear about them. As for any errors you might imagine in spelling or punctuation or capitalization, please let me rest in peace. There are many conventions and styles with regard to these matters, and I often have characters speak incorrectly intentionally, for that is how I envision that character would speak. I will reply to all emails that respect these requests. And with your email address, I will send you announcements for my upcoming novels. Thank you for reading this story. I’d love to hear from you.

  With appreciation,

  David Bishop

  P.S. I have two, maybe three other writing projects in mind for release this year. The Original Alibi, and possibly a collection of short stories. I may also get another novel finished: Empty Promises. These are working titles and may be revised. To stay current on these endeavors and other announcements, please visit my website from time to time or stay in touch with me through email, Facebook or Twitter.