Murder Inside the Beltway

by Margaret Truman

  “Ah, don’t be silly,” he said, using the back of his hand to wipe his lips again. “Just some damn bug that’s going around. I’m fine.”

  Matt Jackson was at headquarters when they arrived. “How’d it go with the congressman?” he asked.

  “Good. How about you? You run down Mrs. Mouse?”

  Matt looked at Mary, who suppressed a smile.

  “I found her,” Jackson said. “I interviewed her.”

  “Yeah? What’d she have to say?”

  “I’m writing up the report now,” Jackson said, not anxious to deliver it verbally.

  “Good.”

  “I also tried to interview the guy who runs the escort service where the deceased and Ms. Simmons once worked. He wasn’t there. I’ll give it another stab tomorrow.”

  “All right. Look, we have to make contact with this senate aide. What’s his name? Patmos? You take care of that, Mary. The hooker’s father is due here this afternoon. Finish up your report, Matt, and Mary, you get hold of Patmos. Talk to the father when he gets here. I’ve got some stuff to do this afternoon. Catch you in the morning.”

  They watched him walk from the office.

  “I think he’s sick,” Mary said.

  Matt laughed.

  “I don’t mean that kind of sick,” she said. “He threw up on our way back here from Crystal City.”

  “Where? I mean—”

  “He stopped the car. Matt, about last night—”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I am, too.”

  “Dinner when we get off?”

  “Sure. Dinner sounds great. Glad our leader is otherwise occupied.”

  ELEVEN

  Jackson and Hall did paperwork while waiting for Rosalie Curzon’s father to arrive.

  Matt paid particular attention to how he worded his report about interviewing Micki Simmons, leaving out that the meeting took place at his apartment, and that he’d driven her to Union Station to catch her train to South Carolina. Mary’s report was necessarily incomplete; she hadn’t been party to the entire interview with Congressman Morrison, although Hatcher had told her enough during the ride to headquarters to help fill in some of the blanks.

  They were summoned to the front desk, where Rosalie’s father waited. He was a short, compact man, no more than five feet, six inches, with a chiseled face, his posture erect, his gaze steady. He wore a crisp white shirt and a wrinkle-free tan safari jacket. His salt-and-pepper hair was in a buzz cut, the sides of his head shaved close. Neither Jackson nor Hall was surprised when he announced that he was career military, army, retired; his final rank, master sergeant.

  They escorted him to an interview room and asked if he wanted coffee or a soft drink.

  “Just water, thank you,” he said.

  He sat straight up in the wooden chair, hands folded on the table. His expression hadn’t changed since their initial introduction to him, a man used to taking orders—and giving them—and who accepted whatever was thrown at him without flinching. A good soldier.

  “We’re sorry about your daughter,” Mary said.

  His response was a curt nod.

  “I know this is difficult for you,” she said, “but we have to ask some questions that might help lead us to your daughter’s killer.”

  “I understand,” he said. “I’m sure you’re doing everything you can.”

  “We’re trying,” Matt said.

  “When was the last time you saw or spoke with your daughter?” Mary asked.

  He lowered his eyes and stared at his folded hands before looking up and saying, “It’s been a very long time.”

  “Can you be more specific?” Matt said.

  “At least five years.”

  “You were estranged,” Mary said.

  “That’s correct.”

  “I hesitate asking this,” Mary said, “but were you aware of what your daughter did for a living here in Washington?”

  For the first time, his stoic expression cracked. He squeezed closed his eyes and his lips tightened.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Mary said.

  His eyes snapped open. “No, it’s all right. I’m just glad that her mother never knew.”

  “She… ?”

  “She died when Rosie was in high school.”

  “I see,” said Mary. She turned to Matt.

  “Even though you hadn’t had contact with your daughter in quite a while,” Matt said, “it’s possible that you know someone who might have been close to your daughter during your period of estrangement.”

  “Only Craig.”

  “Who’s Craig?” Matt asked.

  It seemed as though he’d been holding his breath. Now, he exhaled, and shifted his posture in the chair. “Craig was a man she’d been dating here in Washington. At least that’s what he told me.”

  “You knew him?” Mary asked.

  “Yes. He—”

  “How did you come to know him if you hadn’t been in contact with your daughter?”

  “He came to see me a few years ago. He found where I was living and came to see me. I’m retired, you know, twenty-six years in the U.S. Army. I live in West Virginia.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Matt, feeling the need to be respectful to this man who was obviously proud of his service to the country.

  “It wasn’t the best life for my family,” Curzon said. “We moved a lot, too many times for my wife and Rosalie. It was hard on them, especially Rosie. We were never in one place long enough for her to put down roots and make real friends.”

  “Not easy,” Mary said.

  “No, not easy,” he agreed.

  “About this fellow Craig,” Matt said. “You say he was seeing your daughter here in D.C.?”

  A nod from Curzon. “He said they’d been dating for more than a year. He said he wanted to marry her.”

  Both Matt and Mary’s eyebrows went up slightly in unison, and their thoughts were in sync, too. The daughter’s life as a prostitute was obviously the reason for her boyfriend’s visit to her father.

  “Craig wanted me to do something about Rosalie, about the way she was living her life.”

  “Were you able to?” Mary asked.

  “No. I didn’t even try. The last time Rosalie and I were in contact, I’d come to Washington to visit with her. I didn’t know that she was a prostitute, had no idea. She’d told me that she was working as a hostess in a fancy restaurant, and was taking acting lessons. It was all a lie.”

  “Understandable,” Mary offered. “She didn’t want to hurt you.”

  “It was worse finding out the way I did.”

  “Through this Craig?”

  “No. I knew before that. I sensed things weren’t the way she said they were. She never allowed me to visit where she lived in—what is it, the Morgan section of the city? Every time I suggested I’d come by there, she had some excuse. She used a post office box, no home address. The same when I wanted to have lunch or dinner in the restaurant she said she was working at. Always a reason not to go there. I knew something was wrong. One day when we were having lunch in a cafeteria in one of the museums, she left her purse when she went to the restroom. A letter was sticking out that had her home address on it. She’d said we couldn’t get together that night because she had other plans, so I drove to the address on the letter and parked across the street. I saw her leave the building dressed like a whore. Later, she came back and a few men arrived. I didn’t know whether they were there to see her, but I had a feeling that was the case. The second or third man—I don’t remember which—eventually came out of the building, and she was with him. They walked down the street and disappeared around the corner. I knew then what she was up to.”

  “Did you confront her about it?” Mary asked.

  “No, I couldn’t bear to do that. I went back to my hotel, checked out, and drove to West Virginia that same night.”

  “Didn’t she wonder why you did that?” asked Matt. “Didn’t she contact you?”

 
“No. I sent a letter to her address at the apartment building and said in it what I now knew about her. She never replied.”

  “But then Craig arrived,” Matt said.

  “That’s right. He seemed a nice sort of fellow. He told me that he was in love with Rosie and wanted them to get married, but first she would have to give up what she did for a living. He wanted my help.”

  “And you couldn’t help,” Mary said.

  “I wouldn’t help, I told him.”

  Neither Jackson nor Hall pressed him as to why he refused to come to the aid of his daughter. Instead, Matt asked, “Did Craig indicate that your daughter wanted to give up her life as a… as a call girl?” It seemed the gentlest of terms to describe his daughter’s occupation.

  “I don’t recall whether he said that or not,” Curzon replied.

  “What was Craig’s reaction when you refused to help?”

  “Oh, he was angry. He said he was disappointed in me. I suppose he had reason to be. Don’t think it was an easy decision to make. I thought about it for days after he left. But I’ve lived my whole life under a set of rules and beliefs. To me, life is nothing more than a series of decisions. You make good ones and things go pretty well, barring a calamity over which you have no control, you know, an earthquake or a plane crash. You make bad ones, well, things don’t go so well. Rosalie made a bad decision, one she had to live with. It was up to her to straighten out her life. No one could do it for her, including me. I suppose I was still angry at being lied to all that time.”

  While both Matt and Mary didn’t agree with his thinking—how could he not have tried to help his daughter escape a life of degradation and, as it turned out, danger?—it wasn’t their role, nor was it the place to air their feelings.

  “Tell me more about Craig,” Matt said. “What was his last name?”

  “Thompson.”

  “Did he say what he did for a living here in Washington?”

  “He said he was a consultant.”

  “For whom?”

  “He didn’t tell me that.”

  “Did he give you an address or phone number where you could reach him?”

  “No.”

  There didn’t seem to be anything else to gain from him, and Matt stood. “Thank you for coming in, sir,” he said, “and for being candid with us at what must be a very difficult time for you. We’ll get back in touch if we make any progress in finding Rosalie’s killer.”

  Curzon, too, stood, erect, as though awaiting his next order. “Can you tell me how I can arrange the release of Rosalie’s body?”

  Mary answered. “I’m afraid it will be a little while before that can be done, Mr. Curzon. Murder victims are held longer than others.”

  “I want to bury her next to her mother, in Oklahoma. We bought a family plot when I was stationed there.”

  “I’ll check for you,” Mary said. “You’re staying in Washington for a few days?”

  “Yes, at Andrews Air Force Base. I have rooming privileges there as a retired soldier.”

  After eliciting further contact information, they walked him to the front reception area and shook hands. As Jackson did, he said what he always heard politicians say when speaking to someone from the military: “Thank you for your service to the country, sir.”

  Curzon nodded and left. Hall and Jackson returned to the room in which the interview had taken place.

  “Breaks your heart,” she said.

  “Tough for a man like that to find out his kid is turning tricks.

  “What about this guy Craig Thompson? He falls in love with a hooker.”

  “Maybe he wanted to save her from prostitution. Lots of books written about shining white knights coming to the rescue,” Mary said.

  “For a hooker with a heart of gold,” Matt said.

  “He must have been serious, going to West Virginia to ask her father for help.

  “Let’s find him and ask what it was all about,” Mary suggested.

  “And where he was the night she was killed,” Matt added.

  “Yes, that, too.”

  TWELVE

  Hatcher left headquarters and went directly to Tommy G’s restaurant and bar, a hangout for the city’s cops, politicians, and wiseguys. Telling them apart wasn’t always easy.

  Tommy Gillette had arrived in Washington ten years before with a stash of cash from various projects in his native New Jersey, some of them legal. He’d left New Jersey when a new governor waged war on “businessmen” of Tommy’s ilk. The heat was turned up; the Garden State was no longer fertile ground, and so Tommy went south, to D.C., where an older brother had settled and opened a succession of restaurants, none of which lasted very long. He convinced Tommy that together they could make a killing in D.C.

  Their first partnership was the Gillette Grill, a shot-and-beer joint in the non-trendy, non-gentrified Southwest quadrant. It wasn’t long before more than bad food was being served along with the whiskey. A pusher cut a deal with them and used the place as a cover. There were women, too, who were kept busy making outcalls to hotels where male clients awaited their arrival.

  Within a year, the Gillette brothers were arguing daily. Tommy, who’d been accustomed to rubbing elbows with fat-cat Jersey politicos and show-business types from Atlantic City, considered the restaurant’s clientele to be beneath him: “They’re all a bunch’a losers,” he constantly told his brother. Two years into their partnership, his brother dropped dead of a heart attack while hauling a beer keg up a flight of stairs, which left Tommy as the sole owner. He sold the place to the drug dealer and headed for downtown, where he found a location for a new, more upscale restaurant and bar—Tommy G’s, Fine Spirits and Quality Cuisine. It was a large space consisting of two rooms, the bigger devoted to a long bar manned by wisecracking bartenders, the smaller, the dining room in which a simple menu was served—shrimp cocktail, steak, salmon, and a few other items that didn’t tax the kitchen.

  Although the Prohibition era was long gone, Tommy ran the place as though it were a speakeasy, palling around with customers, doing favors, slapping backs, and making everyone feel like a high roller in a posh casino—D.C.’s answer to Toots Shor. The décor was an eclectic mix of Paris and the Old West, huge prints of nudes and scenes from the Folies Bergère sharing the walls with black-and-white and sepia photos of mining towns, saloons, and roundups.

  It worked. Business was usually brisk, especially later at night when other places were winding down. Tommy worked the crowd wearing expensive, custom double-breasted suits that slenderized his bulked-up body. He was in his element.

  “Hey, Detective Hatch,” Tommy said as Hatcher walked through the door. “Long time, no see.”

  “Been busy keeping the city safe,” Hatcher said. “Things good with you?”

  “Everything’s cool, man. What’ll you have? First one’s on Tommy.”

  “I need a snooze, Tommy.”

  “Hey, no problem, pal. You know how to get there.”

  Hatcher crossed the barroom and went through a door leading to Tommy’s office, and to an adjacent room in which two single beds were made up and waiting for occupants. Tommy maintained the room for moments like this, for a cop to crash after coming off a long shift, or a politician needing to sleep off too much booze before heading home. It was known to insiders as “Tommy’s Motel.”

  As Hatcher tossed his suit jacket on one of the beds, he saw that perspiration had left dark rings in the armpits. He pulled down his tie and fell heavily on the second bed, letting out a prolonged sigh. He felt like hell. Once, on the ride from headquarters, he’d had to pull over when an excruciating stab of pain in his head caused momentary blindness. It lasted only a few seconds, but long enough to concern him.

  He closed his eyes and sleep came almost immediately, but didn’t last long. A series of dreams kept waking him. He tried to grab hold of them but their fragments vanished as quickly and suddenly as they’d materialized. But not all. Once, he awoke suddenly, sat up, and let ou
t a moan as he saw his daughter, Christina, as a small girl, standing on the edge of a building. “Don’t,” he said, reaching for her. But she fell, face-first, her arms outstretched as though in a swan dive, leaving Hatcher looking over the precipice and seeing her small body smash to the sidewalk many floors below.

  He wiped sweat from his face with his hand and tried to nod off again, but a succession of similar dreams made that impossible. In one, tethered to a long rope attached somewhere high in the sky, he spun out of control in a vast void, around and around, until the rope broke and he disappeared.

  After a half hour, he slowly got to his feet and looked in a small mirror on the wall. “What the hell is going on?” he asked aloud. He knew he should go home, but Mae would see that he wasn’t well and insist he see a doctor.

  He went to the men’s room, where he splashed cold water on his face, returned to fetch his jacket, and rejoined Gillette in the barroom. Virtually empty when he’d arrived, the bar now had a dozen customers. Hatcher went to a small bistro table out of the mainstream and ordered a double bourbon from the waitress, Jill, who’d worked at Tommy G’s since it opened. He recognized some of the people at the bar; a few waved to him.

  “Something to eat, Hatch?” Jill asked when she delivered his drink.

  “Yeah, thanks. Baked stuffed clams and some bread, huh?” Maybe that’s what I need, he thought, some food in my belly.

  Tommy G. joined him. “You okay?” he asked. “You don’t look good.”

  “Ah, I’ve got some kind’a bug, some kind’a flu.”

  “It’s goin’ around. Too many germs, you know?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “You still working that hooker murder?” Tommy asked.

  “Yup.”

  Tommy lowered his voice. “I did a little asking around of my own, Hatch. You know, we get some working girls come in later at night. I don’t mind as long as they don’t flaunt it. Anyway, I asked a few whether they knew this gal—what was her name?”

  “Curzon. Rosalie Curzon.”

  “Right. Rosie Curzon. I asked whether they knew her.” He grinned. “These types hang around together, you know. Anyway, one of them says she met her a few times but it was a while ago.”