Damage Control

by Michael Bowen

  She launched into a riff about love is love but money is money, except with a lot more words than that. I didn’t pay much attention, focusing instead on clicking the Leaves-for-Camp-David story and watching it replay. The visuals looked like stuff I’d seen a hundred times. Almost stock footage. The President and First Lady walking across the White House south lawn toward the helicopter dubbed Marine One, trailed by a quartet of close aides. The camera followed the group as the helicopter rotor and fuselage came into the shot. Okay. So what?

  Then, all it once, it just leaped out at me. Aide number two—Gerri Chapman. Rafe and I were on a first-name basis with her. She had a book pinned between her right hand and her envelope-style briefcase. Not the way you’d normally carry a book. Awkwardly but carefully positioned so that every reporter on the south lawn—including the one behind CNN’s camera—could see the cover and read the title: Ducks in a Row, by Theo McAbbott.

  Everything dropped into place. Why Jerzy had recruited me by dangling a million-dollar campaign in front of me; what my real role was supposed to be; how Dierdorf’s handgun had ended up in Jerzy’s possession; which actors I could trust and which ones might try to kill me if I didn’t watch my step closer than a hanging chad; and (most important) who had killed Jerzy and why.

  DeHoic’s well-rehearsed explanation hadn’t yet run its course. I cut in.

  “All right, Ms. DeHoic, we’ve got a deal. I’ll tell my lawyer to sign off on the Reuter plea arrangement as soon as I have that server in my hands.”

  “When can we get together at Jerzy’s house?”

  “Let me check my To-Do list.” I glanced at a blank sheet on top of a legal pad next to my iPad. “How about Friday afternoon?”

  “Done. We can meet outside the main entrance to Annapolis Mall on the outskirts of Annapolis at one and drive over together.”

  As soon as DeHoic had hung up, I picked up a ballpoint and attacked the pad:

  TO DO:

  1. Call Mama.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  For my Mama-chat I closed my office door and used the cell phone that Seamus doesn’t know about. I laid it all out for her, except for the part that she, and especially Uncle Darius, were better off not knowing. You know, plausible deniability. She listened in her no-judgments/no-nonsense way, just as she had during talks about whether I should be on the pill, my short-lived exploration of marijuana, and what Carondelet primly called my occasional “deportment issues.” Concern in her voice, but no panic, once I’d finished and she spoke up.

  “Well, from the looks of things, Josie, you’re in a heap of trouble.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “Do you have a plan?”

  “Sure do.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Shooting is only part of it.” I explained my plan, including the element that would include literally shooting.

  “High risk, high reward.” A tincture of approval colored Mama’s voice—a good thing, because I was sure in the mood for some. “But I wonder if I might make a suggestion?”

  “Of course you can, Mama.”

  “‘May.’”

  “Sorry. Of course you may, Mama.”

  “I think your uncle might play a constructive role in this.”

  Pulling the phone from my ear, I flat out gaped at it. I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone, let alone Mama, use ‘constructive’ in a sentence about Uncle Darius.

  “Mama, the last time I involved Uncle D in this mess, he got himself all banged up.”

  “Which was his own blessed fault. But in the process he came up with some real useful information for you.”

  “This is true,” I admitted. “And I’m the first one to say he could be helpful again. But if you draw a circle around the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, including the Maryland and northern Virginia suburbs and exurbs, he would have to be useful from at least seven-thousand feet outside that circle, because according to some NRA folks I’ve talked to in the last week or so, six-thousand-five-hundred feet is the maximum effective range for a non-military grade firearm.”

  “What I have in mind is him being effective from Baton Rouge, Louisiana—and I’ll be standing at the door with a baseball bat to brain him with, in case he tries to skedaddle before you’re done.”

  “Mama, that sounds very promising.”

  ***

  After Mama and I had finished talking, I revised the list in front of me:

  TO DO BEFORE FRIDAY

  √ 1. Talk to Mama.

  2. Talk to Tony.

  3. Talk to Klimchock.

  4. Visit Shooter’s Paradise. Bring cash.

  Good start. Tony and I were talking fifteen seconds after I’d dialed his number.

  “Is this about Reuter?”

  “Yep. You’ll get either an e-mail or a phone call from me Friday afternoon saying that I’m okay with the plea deal. Ignore it unless it includes the words ‘pas de merde.’”

  I’d halfway expected some push-back on that. Didn’t happen.

  “Got it,” Tony said. Then, being a lawyer, he spelled out pas de merde. Got it right, too.

  Klimchock was a tougher nut to crack. When we’d talked at Dulles he’d said he’d be overseas for a week, which meant he should have gotten back by now. I called all three numbers on the business card he’d given me, though, plus the different number I got for him from my phone’s Recent Calls list, but I had to leave four voicemails. I asked him to use a land-line when he returned my call, and to call my desk-phone number at work. By the time I left for Shooter’s Paradise, he still hadn’t gotten back to me.

  I did Shooter’s Paradise during the afternoon, because I didn’t want to make up a story for Rafe about why I was unexpectedly going out after dinner. I toted my certifiably legal Colt snub-nose to the shooting gallery in back and fired six shots at one of the human outline targets. I’m pretty sure I hit with all six, but I didn’t really pay that much attention.

  Klimchock finally returned my call at six-fifteen, after I’d gotten back to the office from Shooter’s Paradise and was cleaning up some things before going home for the day.

  “Can I interest you in some applied engineering solutions involving hydraulics or thermodynamics, Ms. Kendall, or is something else on your mind?”

  “Okay, this is going to sound a little, uh, elliptical.”

  “You’re talking to me from Washington, so that would figure.”

  “Here’s the deal. I have no reason to believe that you could get in touch with Sanford Dierdorf, or with anyone who could get a message to him. And I have no reason to believe that you care one way or another what happens to him. But I do have reason to believe that he has received word in the last twenty-four hours suggesting that he visit Jerzy Schroeder’s former Maryland residence this Friday. If, by some wild chance you could get in touch with him, and if for some reason you might wish to do him a favor, you might tell him that it would be a good idea for him to RSVP with regrets.”

  “Because why?”

  “Because he will be walking into a trap.”

  “I take it,” Klimchock said after five or six intriguing seconds, “that as a law-abiding person you would not ask me to warn Mr. Dierdorf away from a meeting where the FBI is planning to arrest him.”

  “You are correct. I wouldn’t do that. My felony quota for this fiscal year is zero, and obstruction of justice would put me over it.”

  “Me too. Message received. Jesus loves you and wants you to be saved. No further comment.”

  “Got it. You have a real good day, now.”

  ***

  The closer we got to Friday, the more tension roiled my gut and the more excitement I felt tingling through my body. Fear, too, of course. I was scared, for sure, but it was a good scared—the kind you get before a volleyball match against a strong team with a reputation for hard
spikes aimed at your face.

  The hardest part was, I couldn’t talk to Rafe about any of it. The key things I just couldn’t tell him. Yet.

  Damage Control Strategy,

  Day 30

  (the fifth Friday after the murder)

  Chapter Forty-eight

  I waltzed into the Annapolis Mall’s main entrance at straight up noon on Friday. An hour early, on purpose. I planted myself in a rear corner of the modest entryway between the huge, glass outside doors and the not quite as huge glass doors opening into the abundantly air-conditioned mall itself. I had a decent view of a designated smoking area well outside, on the opposite end of the entrance. I’m not trying to pass myself off as Sherlock Holmes or anything, but it didn’t exactly shock me to the soles of my feet when DeHoic showed up there at twelve-thirty-five.

  She did the silver case and Piaget lighter thing, igniting her cigarette with an elegant aplomb truly impressive for someone wearing a gray pantsuit in ninety-three-degree heat. I let her get in three calming puffs as she impatiently surveyed the patrons traipsing toward the entrance from the parking lot. Then I went out and approached her.

  “Good afternoon.”

  “You’re early,” she said, giving me a startled look.

  “That’s the way I was brought up: early for appointments, late for parties, right on time for supper.”

  “Did you bring that belly-gun you’ve been campaigning for on the Internet?”

  “Like the Coast Guard says, Semper paratus. Always ready.”

  “All right, then.” She put her cigarette through an inconspicuous hole in a waist-high tube that seemed to have been deliberately designed to look like it had nothing to do with smoking. “My car is right over there. Let’s go.”

  “You know what? Let’s take my car instead.” I started strolling toward my Fusion. “It’ll be harder to follow. A myopic cyclops could keep that Mercedes of yours in sight even on the freeway, much less on country roads.”

  “You expect us to be followed?”

  “Hope for the best, plan for the worst.” I half-shouted this over my shoulder, because I was moving steadily forward while DeHoic hesitated.

  She still hadn’t moved when I clicked my Fusion open and climbed in. We had a good two hundred feet between us by now. Pulling out of my parking space with a little tire-squeal, I wheeled around three rows of parked cars and pulled up to the curb with the passenger-side door toward DeHoic.

  “Climb on in. You can smoke in here if you want to. Won’t bother me.”

  That closed the sale. She folded herself into the seat and slammed the door, just in case I didn’t know she was pissed off. Out came her cell phone.

  “I’ll tell my driver to follow us.”

  “That would defeat the purpose. Tell him to meet us there if you want to, but make sure he stays at least a mile behind us.”

  By now I’d gotten us out of the parking lot and onto a four-lane road with a forty-mile-per-hour speed limit that drivers seemed to regard as just a friendly suggestion.

  “Are you serious about this cops-and-robbers stuff?” she demanded.

  I’d been waiting for that one. With my right hand I opened the purse in my lap and took out the snub-nose. Thumbing back a knurled knob on the left side of the gun’s frame, just behind the cylinder, I used two fingers on the right side to push the cylinder out. I held it up with the breech in DeHoic’s general direction so that she could see the brass bases of six cartridge casings. Not just showing her the gun—after all, I’d already told her I had it—but showing her I could handle the thing proficiently without any help from Photoshop.

  “That’s how serious I am, sister.” I snapped the cylinder back into place with a determined wrist-flick and re-stowed the Colt in my purse. “After I got Jerzy’s brains splattered all over my blouse, several people told me, indirectly, that Sanford Dierdorf is the one who put them there. One of those people was you. Now you’ve promised to hand me evidence that will hang the sonofabitch, figuratively speaking—so don’t act like we’re on our way to a tea party.”

  That pretty much stopped the conversation. She seemed a little nervous. She looked around a couple of times, craning her neck toward the rear window, once we reached the county road intersecting the lane that ran past Jerzy’s house. No idea what she saw, if anything. Plenty of cars behind us, of course. Hell’s bells, this is Maryland. If you want privacy on a public road, go drive in Montana. Even so, I started to get a touch of the shakes myself. Power of suggestion, maybe.

  We reached Jerzy’s house a little after one-thirty. I parked at the east end of the driveway, behind the hedge, same as I had the day Jerzy died. DeHoic produced a key as we approached the front door. Stepping nimbly over sagging, plastic yellow crime-scene tape, we walked in like we owned the place. She didn’t relock the door. Hmm…Memories radiated from the Currier and Ives prints and the oversized pastoral landscapes on the faded red living room walls, from the well-trodden ecru carpeting on the deep maple stairs, and of course from the locked cabinet built into the corner bookcase. Warm memories and sinister memories and shaming memories. I choked them back as DeHoic led me up to the master bedroom, on the southwest corner of the second floor.

  It looked a lot like it had the last time I’d left it, roughly ten minutes before Jerzy’s head exploded. The bed, with its head against the center of the west wall and framed by mullioned windows, still looked big enough for a three-way and then some. Satin sheets rumpled, pillows thrown every which way at the head, royal blue combed cotton duvet bunched down at the foot, remnants of the Times and the Post scattered here and there. Between the northwest corner and a bathroom door stood a man’s chest of drawers, with the drawers all slightly open, presumably the way the crime-scene team had left them. Blank space on the floor at the opposite end of the north wall, where DeHoic’s dresser and vanity presumably had sat before the break-up. Interesting homey touch that she’d taken them. In the corner near the chest sat a straight-back chair draped with a tux Jerzy presumably had worn the night before he died. Patent leather dress shoes rested almost fastidiously on the floor underneath the chair.

  A semi-circle of sweat beaded across the back of DeHoic’s neck as she went to the windows on the south wall. No air-conditioning in the house now, of course, but I chalked the sweat up to more than Washington’s high-summer heat. This was no longer the icy-cool, disdainful DeHoic that I’d gotten to know. Standing to one side of the windows, she nudged the filmy drape a few inches away from her with her right hand. She gazed toward the road for a good ten seconds. Same routine then with the windows on the west side.

  “Is there something you should be sharing with me?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure the car-switch you insisted on accomplished much. I had the feeling someone was following us on our way out here.”

  “If you’re trying to get me good and scared, you’ve managed it nicely. So let’s just find the server you promised me and get out of here as fast as we can.”

  DeHoic went down on her knees near the foot of the bed on the side near her. She reached underneath the frame, and started fiddling with something on the inside. She’d been at it for five or six seconds, with no results that I could see, when a distinct, metal-on-metal snap sounded from downstairs.

  Chapter Forty-nine

  DeHoic looked up at me, her expression mildly annoyed rather than scared or startled. My assumption that she expected Dierdorf to join the party was starting to look pretty good.

  “That’s probably nothing,” she muttered. “Old houses come with odd, random noises. But humor me, okay? Stand over there near the window on this side of the bed, facing the door, and get that Junior G-Woman cap gun of yours ready.”

  I thought about it. I’d put the chances of company at no better than one in five. Sure, maybe Klimchock hadn’t contacted Dierdorf, or maybe Dierdorf hadn’t listened to him, but Dierdorf figur
ed to see DeHoic’s invitation as a low-percentage play, in any event. When you hear a dubious noise split the still summer air in an almost empty house, though, probability calculations get a second look.

  I crossed the room. Didn’t stand in front of the window, of course. Got my back against the wall in a space between the west-side windows and the corner. Unholstered my Colt. And without making a production out of it, took out my cell phone, punched a speed-dial number, and as I set the phone on the sill prayed that Mama would keep Uncle D’s mouth shut when they accepted the call.

  DeHoic went back to fingering the inside of the bed’s long, solid side brace. A tiny, whispering, almost apologetic thok sounded from under the bed. As a small, hidden drawer slid smoothly out from the frame, creak came from the stairway—the main staircase, which you’d use if you came in the front door; not the back stair case that Jerzy and I had used the last time he’d used anything.

  DeHoic took a thumb-drive out of the drawer and held it up so that I could see it. Not a server. Hmm…What if there’s a gun in that drawer, too? For two terrible seconds I wondered if I’d blown the whole thing through sheer carelessness, but DeHoic stood up holding the thumb-drive and nothing else.

  “It’s all on here.”

  Another creak, this one from the top of the stairs.

  “Get ready with that gun!” she stage-whispered at me. Fierce but calm.

  I kept the Colt held lightly in my right hand, along my right thigh. Cocked it because, really, why not? The edge of the bedroom door pushed maybe three inches into the room. Then it stopped. I held my breath.

  “Steady,” she muttered, still under her breath, going for calm and reassuring and sounding wound-tight tense instead. “Ready…ready…”

  Nothing happened. I stayed the way I was. The door didn’t move another millimeter. No sound that I could hear from outside it. My gut tightened and every muscle in my body tingled. My nerves were screaming Do SOMETHING! ANYTHING!—and I had actually foreseen this and thought it through. I could only imagine what games DeHoic’s neurons were playing with her.