But this was different. The impotency of his inability to act stabbed him in the gut.
He put off the decision he knew must be made, placed the envelope in the safe, locked it, and returned the painting to its place on the wall. Then, turning out the lights, he slowly left the building.
NINE
That same morning, a blinding headache had been Hatcher’s sunrise. He’d been suffering more such headaches lately but refused to see a doctor. To Mae, “Doctors only make people sicker and then send a bill. Besides,” he said, hauling himself out of bed, “it was the wine last night. Red wine always gives me a headache.”
Her creased face reflected her concern as she watched him disappear into the bathroom, losing his balance as he went and bumping against the doorjamb.
She threw on a robe and slippers and went downstairs to prepare breakfast. When he appeared a half hour later, showered and dressed, he smiled and said, “Feeling better, Mae. Damn wine always does it to me.”
She didn’t buy it but didn’t say anything except, “That’s good, Walt. I’m glad your headache is better.”
Mae went to shower, leaving her husband to enjoy his breakfast. He consulted a slip of paper on which he’d listed things to be accomplished that day. Heading the list was the eleven o’clock meeting at the Crystal City Marriott with Congressman Slade Morrison. The contemplation of grilling the congressman was pleasing. Hatcher had little use for elected officials: “Whores whose only interest is in preserving their power, the nation be damned.” Whether Morrison had murdered Rosalie Curzon was almost irrelevant; Hatcher’s pleasure would come from seeing the Arizona congressman squirm.
He decided to bring Mary Hall with him. She’d made the initial contact, and her presence at the meeting would add an interesting dimension. Matt Jackson would not accompany them, Hatcher further decided. The rookie detective had demonstrated an annoying softness during the questioning of suspects, rounding off the rough edges that Hatcher preferred. The kid would never make a good detective, from Hatcher’s perspective, any more than most of the new breed coming into MPD. They were all book-learning and theory, or knee-jerk do-gooders without the necessary street smarts to work the city.
Also on the list was the name of Curzon’s friend, Micki Simmons. Hatcher had intended to follow up on her personally, but changed his mind. Jackson could chase her down while Hatcher and Mary met with the congressman.
He also intended to revisit the lobbyist, Lewis Archer, and make contact with the man who’d recommended Archer to the dead hooker, Jimmy Patmos, chief-of-staff to Utah Senior Senator William Barrett.
And there was the question of what to do about Al Manfredi. He’d need to think that through before going upstairs with what Jackson and Hall had reported to him about their run-in with the police instructor.
The list ended with Manfredi, but Hatcher knew they’d have to widen the circle of suspects and do it fast. Had Rosalie Curzon’s client list not included men like Archer, Congressman Morrison, a top senatorial staffer, and the cop Manfredi, her killing would soon be relegated to the bottom of unsolved D.C. murders. But once he’d shared the juicy portions of the tapes with his bosses, the Curzon file rose to the top of the pile and would stay there until there was a resolution.
Mae returned to the kitchen and cleared the table.
“Home for dinner?” she asked while walking him out to his car.
“Hard to say. I’ll give you a call.”
“How’s your headache?”
“Fine. Better.” It had abated slightly, but was now back with a vengeance. He put on dark glasses to shield his eyes from the sunlight.
“That’s good.” She kissed his cheek and watched him drive off to spend another day experiencing Washington, D.C.’s underbelly. Retirement and Florida couldn’t come fast enough.
• • •
Matt Jackson also woke with a headache that morning, although it was minor compared to Hatcher’s. Wine had, indeed, contributed, along with a lack of sleep.
After leaving Hatcher, he and Mary had gone to dinner at the Reef on 18th Street, known for its organic and free-range foods. From there they walked to Columbia Road to catch a local blues band at Chief Ike’s Mambo Room. That’s where the argument ensued.
Like most of their spats—and there hadn’t been many—he couldn’t remember the following day what had triggered it, although he knew it had to do with their racial differences. He splashed water on his face, made a cup of instant coffee, and sat by a window that overlooked the street. Looking down into the cup, he remembered that a previous argument had erupted over his using instant coffee, rather than brewing fresh. Mary refused to drink his instant concoction. To add insult to injury, she accused him of not having taste buds, or standards. He found that to be an unnecessary assault on his character and told her so, which sent her from his apartment back to her place, near Dupont Circle. Silly, they both knew, and they were back together the following day, sipping coffee he’d brewed in a coffeemaker she’d delivered that morning, along with herself. But, alone at the moment, instant would do just fine.
As he pondered the previous night at Chief Ike’s, he realized why MPD had a policy of cops not becoming intimately involved. It would be one thing if they’d had a fight and went off the following morning to their different jobs. But that wasn’t the case. They’d both have to arrive at headquarters on Indiana Avenue and spend the day together, much of it in the close confines of a car, tempted to bring up the previous night but knowing they couldn’t, or shouldn’t, especially not with Hatcher around.
The genesis of the argument came to him as he stepped into the shower and stood beneath the streaming water.
He’d fallen into a sour mood as the evening progressed, nothing to do with Mary, all having to do with Walter Hatcher. The senior detective’s persistent jibes at Matt, especially those with racial overtones, gnawed at him.
It wasn’t as though Matt was obsessed with race. While aware that prejudice existed despite advances made by African-Americans, he’d suffered little of it growing up in an affluent, multi-racial area of Chicago. His parents were professionals—his father was an optometrist, his mother a high school teacher, a thesis away from her Ph.D. Yes, there had been schoolyard incidents, but his slight stature had invited more taunts than his color. He was aware that there was plenty of racism in Washington, and within the MPD, but most of it was veiled, certainly less overt than forty or fifty years ago. Jackson witnessed those subtle messages but usually dismissed them.
But there was something about Hatcher as the messenger of bias that particularly irked him, which was very much on his mind last night. The bottle of wine at dinner, and drinks at Chief Ike’s, did a good job of allowing his feelings to surface and his tongue to loosen. As the Mose Allison lyrics went: “Your mind is on vacation, your mouth is working overtime.” Mary was usually effective at changing the subject whenever he fell into a funk about it, but she’d failed this time.
She’d indulged his obsession for most of the evening, which didn’t mean always agreeing with him. At one point at Chief Ike’s, she said that it distressed her as a white woman without prejudice to be viewed with suspicion by blacks simply because she was white.
He came back with, “Maybe your prejudice shows in other ways.”
Now, hackles up, she challenged him to explain.
He tried to deliver his message casually so as to not fan the flames. “Maybe you think I’m with you because I want to be with a white woman. You know the old cliché—”
Her angry eyes and tight lips stopped him in mid-sentence. There was a moment when she considered throwing her drink in his face. Instead, she left the club, leaving him to extend his hand and call after her.
He came out of the shower and dialed her number. “Mary, are you there? Are you there? Please pick up if you’re there. It’s Matt. Look, I’m sorry about last night. I said things I shouldn’t have and I apologize. I never should have had that last drink and… and I’
m sorry. See you at work.”
She was cold to him when they met up at MPD, but not terminally, and Hatcher’s arrival curtailed any further discussion.
“Here’s the drill,” Hatcher said, still wearing his sunglasses. The headache hadn’t gone despite the glasses and a mouthful of Tylenol. “Mary and I will talk to the congressman at eleven. Matt, I want you to run down this Mickey Mouse broad and see what you can get from her.” He glanced at Mary. “You’ve got a dirty mind, kid,” he said. “I didn’t mean what you think I meant.”
She rolled her eyes and shook her head.
“We’ll meet back here at four,” Hatcher said. “The deceased’s father is arriving this afternoon. Got it?”
On the way to the parking lot where they’d checked out two unmarked vehicles, Matt whispered to Mary, “I called this morning and left a message. I’m sorry about last night and—”
“What the hell are you two doing?” Hatcher growled. “Making a date?”
Mary and Matt’s eyes met as they prepared to climb into different cars. Her tiny smile buoyed him.
Before leaving headquarters, Matt ran a computer check on Micki Simmons. Like Rosalie Curzon, she lived in Adams Morgan. He drove to her apartment building and called her number on his cell. A sweet, sexy, southern-tinged recorded voice said, “I’m not available at the moment, but I do want to talk to you. Please call again soon.”
He left a message saying who he was, and included a phone number at which he could be reached.
Matt sat in his car and watched people come and go from the apartment building. After a half hour, boredom set in. He pulled the printout he’d run at headquarters. Micki Simmons: According to the sheet, she was thirty-one years old, although a photograph taken when she’d been booked a few years earlier showed what appeared to be a woman older than that. But that was a booking photograph, usually less flattering than even driver’s license and passport photos. Natural redhead? Hard to tell, but probably not. Nice features, a little swollen from crying. Getting booked often brought out the tears.
She was born in South Carolina and came to D.C. six years ago. Aside from a few busts for prostitution, one as a result of a sting while working for an escort service, she had no further criminal record, not even a parking ticket. As he studied her photo, he read into it a vulnerable woman, her eyes sad and looking for something in her life that she’d probably never find. Hatcher would consider such an analysis to be naïve, even stupid.
He forced Hatcher from his mind, got out of the car, and walked to the building’s entrance, where he scanned the tenant list next to call buttons. Her apartment was number 9-C. He pressed the button and heard it sound in the apartment. No voice responded through the small speaker.
An older woman pushed through the door.
“Excuse me,” Jackson said.
She eyed him suspiciously.
“I’m looking for Ms. Simmons.”
The way she said, “I don’t know her,” coupled with the disgusted look on her face, told him that she did.
“Do you know if she’s away?” he asked.
“I hope so,” the woman said, and left.
He was about to return to the car and go back to headquarters when the door to the building opened and Micki Simmons exited. She wore a scarf over her head, and carried a suitcase.
“Ms. Simmons?” Jackson said.
She stopped and glared at him.
“Can we talk for a minute? I’m—”
She walked away.
“Whoa,” he said, catching up with her and blocking her path. He fumbled for his detective’s badge and displayed it. “I’m Matt Jackson, detective, MPD. I’d like to speak with you.”
She cocked her head and sneered, “Yeah, I’m sure you would. Maybe another time.”
He shifted his position to prevent her from advancing toward the curb, where a taxi had pulled up.
“Get out of my way,” she said.
“Look,” Jackson said, “either you agree to talk with me now, or I slap cuffs on you and we do it at headquarters. Your call. It’s about your friend Rosalie Curzon.”
“I never would have guessed,” she said. “That’s my cab waiting.”
“After we talk, I’ll drop you wherever you want. But first we talk.”
Until this point she’d been all toughness and challenge, not a hint of any southern accent or charm. Then, as though she’d received an instant Dixie transplant, she sighed, lowered her suitcase to the pavement, and said in a softer voice, “Ah suppose ah don’t have any choice, do ah?”
Jackson smiled. “No, ma’am, I suppose you don’t.”
She looked around. A middle-aged couple came from the building and didn’t try to hide their interest in what was going on.
“Can we go somewhere?” she asked.
“Your apartment?”
“No, ah don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“My apartment?” Jackson said.
It was her first hint of a smile. “Are you sure you’re a cop?”
“Want to see the badge again? Look, tell you what, we’ll go to my apartment. It’s in Adams Morgan, only a couple of blocks from here.” He pointed to his car. “That’s mine. I make good coffee, the real thing. When we’re through, I’ll drive you wherever it is you want to go.”
She chewed her cheek.
“By the way, where were you going?”
“Home. All right. But if I answer your questions, I’m free to go?”
“That’s right, unless you confess to killing your friend. Then—”
“Don’t even joke about that.”
They dismissed the taxi, whose driver was visibly miffed, placed her suitcase in the trunk of Jackson’s car, and drove the short distance to his apartment.
“You live here alone?” she asked.
“Yeah. I mean, sometimes my girlfriend stays but—”
“It’s so neat.”
He laughed. “I like order around me. Must mean I have a disorderly brain. At least that’s what a professor of mine claimed about externally neat people.”
“You went to college?” she said, going to a window and looking down at the street. In her experience, cops weren’t college-educated.
“Uh-huh,” he said from the kitchen, where he readied the coffeemaker. When he returned to the living room, she’d removed her raincoat and settled on the couch, her shoes on the floor in front of her. She wore a white sleeveless sweater that was too tight across her sizable bosom, and jeans that were also too tight. This was a woman who would fight a weight problem as she aged, he thought. But that was in the future. Right now, she was a tall, solidly built woman who looked as though she spent considerable time in a gym, maybe even lifting weights. The most striking thing about her was a mane of copper hair.
“Coffee will be ready in a minute,” he said, pulling up a yellow director’s chair.
She spread her arms. “So, go ahead and ask your questions.”
He pulled a slender notebook and pen from his inside jacket pocket, removed the jacket, hung it over a matching chair, and resumed his seat. “I suppose I can start by asking why you were leaving D.C. and going home. Home is South Carolina?”
“How did you know that?”
“Your, ah, your sheet.”
She winced. “Pretty sad, huh, a nice southern girl like me having a rap sheet?”
“We all make mistakes.”
“It wasn’t a mistake. It’s what I chose to do with my life, at least for part of it.”
“Prostitution.”
She nodded.
“I’m not judging you, Ms. Simmons.”
“Good. You can call me Micki.”
“Okay, Micki, and I’m Matt.”
“Micki and Matt,” she said with a laugh. “Sounds like a TV sitcom.”
“It does, doesn’t it?”
An expression crossed her face. “I can’t believe Rosalie is dead.”
“Tell me about her, Micki.”
She shrug
ged and wiped a single teardrop from her cheek. “We were friends, that’s all.”
“How’d you meet her?”
“The agency.”
“Which agency?”
“Beltway Escorts. I’m sure that’s on my rap sheet, too.”
“Yeah, it is. You both worked there for a while?”
“We both worked there for too long. More than one day is too long as far as I’m concerned.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The slob that runs it.”
His raised eyebrows said that he wanted the name.
“Billy McMahon,” she said. Jackson noted it. “He’s a low-class bastard.”
“He why you were leaving D.C.?”
“It’s time I left,” she said. Her laugh was sardonic. “Ah came here because I thought living in the city would be neat, you know? Small-town girl makes it big. Jesus, what a dope I was.”
“Did you have any jobs here besides turning tricks?”
“Sure. Lousy ones, low pay, long hours. That’s why…”
“That’s why turning tricks appealed. Money.”
“Why else do it?”
“I don’t know. Tell me about Rosalie.”
“She was great. Man, she had a sense of what was going on and how things went down. She made me look like the naïve jerk that I am.”
“Did she like the life?” Micki’s expression was quizzical. “Prostitution,” Jackson clarified.
She sat back and blew a stream of air at a red strand of hair that had fallen over her forehead. “She hated it as much as I did,” she said, “only she knew how to make it work. How do I say it?—She was worldly. I guess that’s the way to say it. She knew how to make the most out of a bad situation.”
His immediate thought was of the video recorder and tapes found in Rosalie Curzon’s apartment. Was that what the woman seated across from him was referring to, her dead friend’s ability to “make the most out of a bad situation”? He almost brought it up but thought better of it. Instead, he said, “Tell me more about the escort service and this guy McMahon.”
Murder Inside the Beltway Page 6
