A voicemail came from my cousin Doreen. She invited me out to her son’s first-communion party the next Sunday. I was about to delete it—I hadn’t heard from her in five or six years—but then she nailed me: she was making my mom’s beef stew.
As I said, the key to a successful con is to use the mark’s greed against him, and I missed that stew. The whole invitation reeked of a setup. I knew that a couple days before the event, she’d call me up to mention my dad might be there too and check to see if that was okay. I wouldn’t be able to say no without being the bad guy. My father was probably orchestrating the whole thing. Well, at the very least it was good to know the guy hadn’t lost his touch for setting people up.
I’d let him have this one. The fact was, I needed some time with the old crook. Right now I had the unsavory choice between, on the one hand, playing along with Henry and keeping my dream life, and, on the other, snitching to the police and facing down William “I Know Nine Ways to Kill a Guy with an Envelope” Marcus. It was either honor among thieves or, like my mom had once begged my dad, just tell them everything. Now that my ass was on the line, the answer didn’t seem so clear-cut.
So I skipped over Doreen, called my father myself, and asked him to meet me.
“Great,” he said. “I’ll pick you up.” I’d thought I was throwing him a bone, but he didn’t sound like he needed much sympathy.
When he arrived, I saw that he’d gotten the Cutlass up and running and then some. At traffic lights, it felt like a plane taking off.
“I had to hone the cylinders,” he said.
“Add some volume?”
“Maybe,” he said with a guilty smile.
I gave him a look.
“I figured while I was in there, you know? It’s about four-sixty now and I managed to scrounge a five-fifty top-end kit.”
And off we zoomed. He’d straightened out Cartwright’s books and credit and saved the station about six thousand dollars a month. His jumpiness was gone, as was the cornered-rat look he’d been sporting right after his release.
I took him to the steak house I’d mentioned the first time we’d met up. He’d become rather chummy with a fellow on the Virginia Board of Accountancy.
“I Googled him,” my dad said.
Not bad. The upshot was that he might have a chance to take the exam if he kept his record clean for two years after probation. He’d aced his last sample test.
I didn’t give him a hard time about the usual shit. I mean, who was I to judge? I’d just gotten myself into a jam that made his burglary look like a jaywalking ticket. It took me a while to bring up what I really wanted to ask him, mostly because I kept hoping the whole awful situation would go away. But right after the coffee came, he got there first.
“What’s on your mind, Mike?”
“You can tell?”
He nodded. “You’re chewing your nails. It was one of your tells when you were a kid. I’m not going to…I mean, we can talk about whatever you want. I’m sorry things got so heated last time. I’m a little rusty. There aren’t a lot of heart-to-hearts down in Allenwood.”
“I wasn’t trying to break into any Sargent and Greenleafs, but you were right about the free lunch. I got myself into some trouble.”
His pocket started ringing.
“Shit, sorry. That’s me,” he said, and reached in to silence it. “Alarm. I’ve got to get home for my parole call.”
The guy had really caught up with the times.
We went back past the big former-liquor-store clown to his trailer behind the gas station, and he phoned in to the parole system. When he turned around, he found me looking over some construction plans he had tacked up on the trailer wall. Old and tattered, they showed a three-bedroom Craftsman-style house. They looked awfully familiar.
He watched me for a while as it sank in. I remembered where I’d seen those plans, and now I knew why that clown gave me the heebie-jeebies. My dad had taken me out to this spot in the woods before, when I was a kid, before there was a gas station. He’d had the plans back then, and he was showing me the land where he was going to build a house for me and my mom. It was right before he got sent away for the twenty-four years.
“You sold the lot to Cartwright?”
“Yeah,” he said. “We needed the money.”
“Did he chisel you?”
“About sixty percent of what it was worth. But I didn’t have much choice. I had to get it settled before I went in.”
The guy was pumping gas where he’d hoped to put up his little Mayberry.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s not worth worrying about now.”
“I fucked up, Dad.”
He leaned against the counter next to me.
“That’s my area of expertise,” he said.
I remembered what Haskins had told me about how dangerous it was to know dirt about Henry Davies. By getting himself killed, the justice had only underscored the point. I didn’t want to involve anyone any more than was necessary, especially a parolee trying to get his life straight. So I gave my dad the radio edit of what had happened.
“My work. They want me to keep my mouth shut about some stuff they’re up to.”
“Bad stuff?”
I nodded.
“How bad?”
I looked over at the newspaper on his kitchen table. The stories about the missing Supreme Court justice had finally made their way onto the front page. The newsprint folks were way behind the curve, however. The online chatter had raced ahead to the most salacious possibilities, yet those rumors still had nothing on the sordid truth.
“The worst. I can’t say much more than that.”
He grimaced, then ran his hand back through his hair.
“Talk,” he said after a minute. “Like a magpie. Tell them everything. It’s the only way.”
Like most people, I tend to seek the advice I want to hear. I guess that’s why I was so hot to talk to my dad, a guy who was a living example of keeping your mouth shut. And then he went and encouraged this really troublesome do-the-right-thing habit I’d been trying to kick. My honesty was really starting to mess with my seeming respectability, my career at Davies.
Now this. What good’s a bad influence if he tells you to do the right thing?
“But you never talked,” I said.
“No, I didn’t.”
I sighed in frustration.
“Why do you think I kept my mouth shut all these years?” he asked.
“You know,” I said. “Don’t turn over. Protect your friends. It’s like…a code. Honor among thieves.”
“God, Mike.” He shook his head. “I wouldn’t have kept myself away from you kids, and your mother, for that. That’s what I was trying to get at last time we talked. My biggest mistake wasn’t trusting some crooks from the neighborhood; it was trusting the honest men.”
“What happened?”
“That doesn’t matter. It wasn’t about talking or not talking in the end. It was about doing the right thing. I didn’t go to prison to protect my accomplices. I went to protect the family. I had no other choice. Just trust me. These things never end well. Talk. Get out while you can.”
The full Haskins story broke early the next morning. A dozen TV reporters stood on platforms across the street from the Supreme Court so each could get a clean shot with the building in the background. Lined up under the floodlights, they looked like carnival barkers. News crews and trucks practically shut down the five blocks around the Capitol, completing the ambience.
It was the kind of circus only Washington could muster: pure tawdriness, but with a thin veneer of public importance so even the most respectable outlets could indulge in the peep show. The press had a squatters’ camp out in Paris, near the scene of the crime. The major networks preempted the prime-time schedule with updates, and the big four all broadcast the president’s statement on Haskins’s death.
By the next day, the news had become a standard conversational opener among strangers, constant
background noise on the street: I heard he killed her during. I heard before. Drudge says it was suffocation. No, bullets.
All that week, it was like nothing else in the world mattered except those deaths. I watched Davies’s cover-up slowly begin to establish itself as reality in the minds of millions, in the mouth of the president himself. All the early findings pointed to a murder-suicide. Henry must have taken care of every bit of evidence that contradicted his fiction, must have somehow gotten to whoever it was that the Supreme Court justice had been talking to on the wiretap. I couldn’t begin to imagine the sort of pull, the scope of backroom deals and whispered threats such an undertaking would require.
And I was going to take down the man behind it all? Not a chance.
The lies about who killed Malcolm Haskins and Irin Dragović were everywhere, inescapable, pressing in on me like deep water. I managed a passing similarity to my usual routine as the pressure built up, but finally I just wanted to stand in front of the White House with a piece of poster board and a Sharpie like every other maniac and start screaming the truth until the cops dragged me away.
Annie could tell something was wrong. She asked me to take a walk the night after I spoke to my father, to get me away from the thousand excuses—work, e-mail, phone calls—that I’d been using to avoid talking about what was on my mind. We passed through Adams Morgan then turned down Calvert St. and stopped on Duke Ellington Bridge, a ribbon of limestone stretching over Rock Creek Park.
“What really happened on Saturday, Mike?”
I guess the ghostly look I had after the murders was enough to keep her from prying then. But I’d known that wouldn’t last.
“Someone got hurt,” I said. “I tried to stop it but I couldn’t.”
She watched the clouds slide over a fingernail moon.
“Haskins.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You’re not alone in this, Mike. Tell me what I can do to help you.”
“I just need you around. That’s enough.”
I listened to the creek rush over the boulders below, and I gripped the railing. Annie’s eyes stayed on me.
“Something very wrong happened. Part of it’s on me. And I’m going to make it right. I’m going to get the truth out there. Even if that means going against Henry Davies.”
She stood close to me and rubbed my back.
“Listen,” I said. “I’m going to ask you a dumb question, because I don’t know how this is all going to work out. I’m…I’m worried. Because I may mess things up with Davies, with the job, and that could put everything at risk: the job, the house, maybe me and you. You’ll still be here, right? Without all that stuff, if I end up on my ass with nothing left?”
She was glaring at me, her arms folded across her chest. I hadn’t wanted to make her choose between me and Davies, because I wasn’t sure that was a contest I could win. She might have been interested in me only because I was Davies’s new rising star. For all I knew, Davies had arranged the whole relationship—the offices so close, the same assignments. She spent all that time one-on-one with him in his office. Was it crazy to think he’d set his right-hand girl up with me so he could keep his eye on me? Maybe. But given what I’d seen Davies pull, it wasn’t all that far-fetched. No. I pushed the thought out of mind. The pressure, the fear, was getting to me. “Forget I asked,” I said.
“That’s a silly question, Mike. Because you know I will.”
She unfolded her arms and put them around me.
It was a dumb question, not because the truth was obvious but because her answer didn’t tell me anything. It was the same as when Marcus and Davies asked me if I was going to play along with their cover-up. There was really only one thing Annie could say, whether she was going to stick with me or not.
The truth or a lie, I didn’t care. It felt good to hear her say it.
I was going to talk to the police, but not because I was certain it was the right move. In fact, I was pretty sure I was running headlong into a world of pain. I possessed dangerous information. No secret stayed safe from Henry for long, and I’d rather go after him than wait for him to come after me.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
HENRY HAD HINTED he would be watching me, and losing any tails, real or imagined, turned out to be the easiest part. The area around Nineteenth and L Street Northwest is built like a multilevel labyrinth: generic glass office buildings, back alleys, one-way streets, and underground garages with four exits each. I nearly lost myself.
The hard part was finding a working pay phone. I finally came upon a greasy one outside a Greek deli. I made a call to the Metro Police main number and asked them to put me through to the extension for Detective Rivera, just to make sure he was who he said.
No answer. I left a voicemail. I told him I wanted to talk, in a safe place, provided he could prove his identity and good faith. I left him a Hotmail e-mail address and a password. I’d leave any messages for him in the drafts folder, without sending them, and he could do the same to get in touch with me. I’d read an article about terrorists using that to communicate, so I figured if it worked for the Taliban, it ought to give me a decent chance of avoiding Henry’s electronic sniffers.
Once I called Rivera, the creeping nausea of the last few weeks lifted almost instantly. The dread was all in the anticipation. However lunatic the plan, now that I was moving against Henry Davies, I felt relieved, almost manic.
I could barely stomach watching as the lies about the murder spread through the news, but that day, the story changed. I watched with growing satisfaction as Henry’s neat narrative of the murder—an obsessed Haskins killing Irin and then himself—unraveled on the front page.
With all the scrutiny that came with a case like this—the FBI had been called in to investigate the deaths in Fauquier County—surely even he couldn’t conceal the fact that both had been murdered. CNN had sources saying it might be more than a murder-suicide. Other rumors suggested the police were searching for a gunman still at large.
The updates only bolstered my confidence. Part of Henry’s strength was that image he projected of being all-powerful and everywhere, of being able to lever anyone he wanted, no matter how influential, and remake the world as he saw fit. But that image was starting to crack. Marcus’s and Davies’s neat narrative of the murder was getting a whole lot messier, and I could relax a little, knowing that even their power had limits. Sure, they could buy off a few local cops, but the whole FBI? Come on. I’d made the right call.
I kept up appearances at Davies Group. Around seven forty-five that night, I was still working, down in the law library on the first floor. I was reading, digging in on Rado Dragović and the alien tort statute. Normally the building would be almost empty at that time, but I heard a commotion.
I took the stairs up, following the noise. When I opened the stairway door on the third floor, I saw a few detectives walking away from me, down the hallway and toward the executive suite—to Marcus’s and Davies’s offices.
I swallowed a smile. So much for omnipotence. Had the cops figured out Henry’s role in the murders that quickly? I was almost disappointed. I’d expected a bit more sport.
Soon enough, Henry Davies came striding down the hallway, leading the detectives. I ducked back into the stairwell before they could see me. Henry sure didn’t look like a man in the early stages of a perp walk.
When I poked my head out on the second level, where my office was, I started to understand what was happening. Through the windows, I could see the festive flashing reds and blues of a large assembly of police cruisers. I took a rear corridor and glimpsed Henry leading the detectives to my office. Another cop took a post near the main stairwell. More clustered around my office door.
I checked the news on my BlackBerry. I didn’t have to look very long. There were banner headlines on every site. I’d just entered the center ring of the circus.
They hadn’t published my name, but according to various officials close to the investigation
, the police were closing in on a person of interest in the murders of Justice Malcolm Haskins and Irin Dragović. Henry had told me he’d know my next move even before I did. He must have known somehow that I was working against him. Had he set me up as the killer?
Sneaking away from cops happened to be one of my specialties, though I was a bit rusty. One former burgling buddy of mine, a guy everybody called Smiles, had quit the residential-break-in game to be an “office creeper.” He tripled what he’d been making. You’d be amazed at the tunnel vision people acquire at the workplace. Smiles would just pick a building and waltz in wearing halfway decent clothes, and no questions were asked. He’d take a couple laptops, maybe a cup of coffee from the commissary, then head out with a wave to the security guard.
The cops hadn’t fully mobbed the Davies Group mansion yet. I hoped, per my buddy’s experience with office creeping, that no one would notice the well-dressed young murder suspect dragging himself by his elbows along the carpet between the lesser-used cubicles.
I slunk fifty feet, past an occupied office and a fellow listening to headphones and bopping slightly in his chair, then hauled myself past one of the executive assistants’ desks. My vantage brought me eyeball to eyeball with a small collection of heels that Jen, another senior associate, kept under her desk. She wore sneakers on the Metro and changed when she arrived at work.
More cops were moving in by the second, and when I noticed them posted by the men’s john and the main stairwells, I was pretty sure they’d have the exits covered. Something occurred to me then. It would probably be too generous to call it a plan, but it’s all I had, so I went with it.
By crawling through a little-used conference room, I made my way past the two cops acting as sentries and into the women’s room. There were only three female senior associates—Davies Group was a bit of a boys’ club—and it looked like they’d left, so I had a good chance of having the place to myself. The cops were all men too. I figured, with the nice pair of Jimmy Choo sling-backs I’d grabbed from under Jen’s desk, I could wait them out in the ladies’ room.
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