They waited with the daylight leaking in the half-height cellar windows.
Then the doorbell rang again.
Henry cocked his head, listened, whispered, “Whoever it is, they’re leaving the porch.… and … comin’ … round … to the side.” He gestured with the gun for Peter to come closer. “Do you know him?”
Peter looked up the cellar stairs. Sorrel had put a mirror above the side door for just this purpose, to see from the cellar without being seen.
“Motherfucker,” said Peter.
“Who is he?”
“Professor Colin Conlon.”
“Who?
“Well, if Volpicelli is the Red Sox, that guy is the Yankees.”
“So that means one of them has twenty-seven rings and the other has two?”
“It means that Conlon is a jealous son of a bitch who wants to tell everyone what to do, and keep Lady T from getting tenure.”
“Motherfucker,” whispered Henry.
“And the Red Sox have seven championships.”
Conlon turned the knob.
“I locked the door,” said Henry. “Let’s see if he has the balls to break in.”
He didn’t. After a moment, the professor pulled out his cell phone and made a call from the side of the house.
Peter and Henry listened for the sound of phones ringing upstairs or in the garage. None.
“He’s calling someone else.” Henry holstered his gun. “We better find out who.”
The professor had his back turned and was leaning against the house. So he did not see Henry whip open the door, grab him by the collar, and pull him inside.
“Hey.”
Henry snatched the professor’s phone and turned it off, locked the door, and pushed Conlon down the stairs.
Peter flipped on the light.
Conlon looked around and said, “Wow.”
Henry looked at Peter. “‘Wow,’ he says. Another wowser.”
Conlon looked at Peter. “You!”
Henry said, “What the fuck you doin’ in here, man?”
Conlon recovered quickly. Peter had to give him that. He looked at Henry and said, “I might ask you the same thing.”
Henry pulled out his Magnum and held it, pointing at the floor. He did that sometimes, just for effect. “I asked you first.”
“I was on an important phone call with a rather volatile gentleman. You’ve heard of him. His name is Keeler.” Conlon then made a show of straightening his club tie and wiping the dirt off the sleeves of his tweed jacket. “Keeler’s searching for Lincoln’s diary.”
Peter said, “How did you learn about it?”
“I read Volpicelli’s book.”
“No, you didn’t.” Peter gave Henry a jerk of the head.
Henry put the Magnum against Conlon’s skull. “Now, I had a bad day. Been driving’ all over Maryland, and my hemorrhoids is killin’ me. I used to be a long-haul trucker, see, so hemorrhoids come with the territory, but I’m mighty cranky. So—”
“Those men on the telephone will be coming to find out why we were cut off.”
“If they were close, they would’ve come themselves,” said Henry.
“I thought you were above treasure hunts, Professor,” said Peter. “How did you get into this?”
Conlon looked at the gun again and said, “Kathi Morganti.”
“That’s better.” Henry lowered the Magnum.
“But she’s on the other side,” said Peter.
“Kathi Morganti told Dougherty, as sort of a peace offering to the Milbury camp, a way to stay on Milbury’s good side, even though they’re going around calling him the Communist Congressman because of this VAT business. Dougherty told Milbury, and Milbury told me, because I am his advisor on all things historical.”
“And you told Keeler? You’re in bed with Keeler?” said Peter. “Liberal professor and disgraced lobbyist with a grudge against the government?”
“Money makes stranger bedfellows than politics,” said Henry.
“Money is politics,” said Conlon. “And Keeler was an excellent lobbyist. He came to me a month ago, when he first read about the Volpicelli book. I told him there was nothing to it. But two weeks later, dumb luck changed everything. Jefferson Sorrel went to a flea market and found that.” He pointed to the engraving.
“But you and Keeler?” said Peter. “I still don’t get it.”
“I owed him. He did some excellent work for us when we were trying to get government funds for the Conlon Center for Studies in American History. It’s named for my father, you know. And it’s given me an enormous amount of clout.”
“Enough to keep a woman off the faculty because she wouldn’t sleep with you?” said Peter. “A gorgeous black woman, no less.”
Henry looked at Peter. “That’s why Lady T don’t have tenure? Because this motherfucker couldn’t get laid?”
“Pulitzer Prize–winning motherfucker, to you,” said Conlon.
“Well, Pulitzer on this.” Henry brought the Magnum back to Conlon’s temple.
But the professor didn’t even flinch. He said, “If my relationship with the congressman doesn’t make me bulletproof, my Pulitzer does. And Peter Fallon knows it.”
Henry asked, “Do you mean bulletproof literally or metaphorically, Professor Motherfucker?”
Peter was enjoying this good cop–bad cop game. He said, “Professor, you’ve got your fingerprints on the back door and the doorknob and the front doorbell. And we’ve got a body in the garage, belonging to Mr. Sorrel, whose house you have broken into.”
“Body?” That changed Conlon’s demeanor. The arrogance drained right out of him.
“So, did Keeler do it and then forget something?” asked Peter. “Is that why you’re here?”
Conlon looked from one face to the other. “They asked me to come over here and see if I could get Sorrel to sell the backing for the engraving of First Reading.”
“Why?” asked Peter.
Conlon said nothing.
“Why?” asked Henry, and he cocked the Magnum, even though it was double-action.
And Conlon said, “They found letters in the backings of the engravings of Jesus and Frederick Douglass that they bought from Dawkins up in Sharpsburg. But they need one more piece of the puzzle. So—”
“We beat you to it.”
Henry said, “Now, you got two choices. You can promise me on your soul that when Assistant Professor Diana Wilmington comes up for tenure again, you are her champion, especially if she’s written a book about the Lincoln letter. Or I can handcuff you to a heatin’ pipe and leave you to answer to the cops when they come to investigate Sorrel’s body.”
“She deserves tenure,” said Conlon. “She’ll get it.”
“Promise?” said Henry.
“Promise.”
Henry made a gesture: Beat it.
Conlon turned and hurried up the stairs.
“She don’t get it,” called Henry, “I’m comin’ after you.”
“She’ll get it.” The side door opened and slammed shut.
After a moment, Henry said to Peter, “Everybody’s fuckin’ everybody else in this deal.”
“Everybody’s fuckin’ everybody else in this town,” answered Peter. “But I don’t think that Keeler and his boys killed Sorrel. Otherwise, they would have taken the backing.”
“Then who killed him?”
“The bruise brothers I met on the Key Bridge might be a better bet. Iraq security types know more about silent assassinations than guys like Keeler and his white-collar criminals.”
“Yeah, and maybe it was just a heart attack.”
* * *
From a pay phone on the Lee Highway, they called the police and tipped them to the body in the garage. Then they headed back to the hotel.
Henry gave the valet a twenty and told him to keep the car close.
J-Man let them into the suite then went back to whatever he was doing on his iPad.
Evangeline was in her bedroom, reading old newspa
pers on her computer, looking for references to any of the players they had been following.
Diana was sitting in the living room, studying the copy of Fort Lafayette, looking for clues as to the identity of the owner of that book, a woman name Molly Blodgett.
Henry looked around and said, “This is what I like. Everybody workin’ hard. Thinkin’ hard. Doin’ the hard thing to find the good thing.”
J-Man said, “How come you like to talk so much, man, even if you ain’t sayin’ a thing … about a thing.”
Henry laughed and looked at Diana. “Has this D-Leaguer been botherin’ you?”
“Not at all,” said Diana.
Peter changed the mood with this: “Sorrel’s dead.”
“Dead?” Diana brought a hand to her mouth.
J-Man looked up from his iPad. “Now that’s somethin’ important.”
Peter asked Diana, “What have you found?”
She shook her head. “Not much. This is a different kind of research. Not scholarly. Just hard. And dangerous, I guess.”
“This is research for money,” said Peter.
“Is he really dead?” asked Diana.
“Don’t you worry about it,” said Henry. “Just put it out of your pretty little Lady T head and get back to that computer. Let me and the J-Man worry about the bad stuff. Ain’t that right, J?”
“True dat,” said J-Man.
After a moment, Diana turned her eyes back to her computer screen.
Peter went into the bedroom.
Evangeline was sitting cross-legged on the bed. She looked up. “Did I hear the word ‘dead’?”
He nodded. “The first casualty.”
“Let’s hope it’s the last.”
“Got anything?”
She shook her head, digested the word ‘dead,’ and said, “I can tell you what a bowl of she-crab soup cost at the Gosling Restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue. I can tell you that Laura Keene is playing all week at Ford’s Theatre, closing on Saturday night before Easter, but—”
“Keep reading.”
“Any word from Antoine?”
Peter sat on the edge of the bed and checked his iPhone. “He just admitted that he’s hit a blind alley.”
“Peter, I don’t want to be fearing for my life when I’m trying to look natural on camera. And we’re filming at the Lincoln Memorial tomorrow, nine o’clock.”
“Then that’s my deadline.” He massaged her foot. “I find this thing tonight or go home and leave you to work.”
“Have you decided what you’re going to do with that half-million-dollar check in your pocket?”
“Not yet.”
“Until you do, you’re on David Bruce’s payroll.”
“Now, this is what I like to see,” Henry stepped in. “No-Pete and the E-Ticket, havin’ a nice little married chat, even though they—”
“Don’t say it,” warned Evangeline.
“Don’t say what?” Henry feigned shock. “I was just goin’ to say, ‘even though they ain’t eaten yet.’”
“Oh. I thought you were going to mention the—”
“Wedding that wasn’t?”
Evangeline threw a pillow at him.
“Best no-weddin’ party I ever went to.”
* * *
Over room service hamburgers and salads, they tried to make sense of what was going on, because it seemed as if everyone was feeding information in every direction
“Who do we trust?” asked Evangeline.
“Ourselves,” said Henry. “And the J-Man.”
J gave them a wave and a nod and toasted with his Heineken.
Peter drained a Yuengling, wiped his mouth, and cleared the table. Henry brought over a light. Peter got out a magnifying glass. Then he spread out the four pieces of backing that they had taken from Sorrel’s wastebasket.
After about ten minutes of squinting and trying to read the old ink, backwards, off the cardboard, they had deciphered just a few words from that second letter:
Dear Mrs. Blodgett, I have be … asked by … Hutch … of a valuable item … son Zion … other letters as proof … if I can ever help you, I should. Yours, Noah Bone … by son Jacob
Blodgett. Diana said that the name on the endpaper of Fort Lafayette was “Molly Blodgett, and beneath it, ‘Mother Freedom.’” The only other words written in the book, on the back endpaper, were, “This is the veriest rubbage.”
Peter said, “No odd markings? No letters underlined on alternate pages, no acrostics?”
Diana shook her head. “No mumbo jumbo. Just a lady’s strong opinion on a book by a Copperhead.”
“Funny name, Molly,” said Henry.
“Not really,” said Diana. “It’s my mom’s name.”
“But not her last name. The old lady that give all this stuff to Dawkins, her name was Esther Molly, right?”
“Right,” said Peter. “According to Savannah Dawkins.”
Henry said to Evangeline, “Can you look up Esther Molly? She just died, so there might be somethin’ on her.”
Evangeline typed the name into the search bar on her computer.
An obituary popped up right away. She scanned it and gave out the facts. Esther Molly, a lifelong Washington resident, a teacher of fourth grade in the city schools, mother of a son killed in Vietnam, and daughter of Zion Molly III, whose ancestors had lived and worked in the District of Columbia for five generations. And then, she read, “‘Esther Molly always liked to tell people that her ancestors were the original sanitary workers of Washington, night soil men who cleaned privies and sold the leavings as fertilizer, a common practice in mid-nineteenth-century American cities.’”
“But how did the first name become the last name?” asked Peter.
Diana said, “Once they were free, a lot of slaves didn’t want their masters’ names. That’s why you have so many Washingtons and Lincolns among black folks. They took the best names they could think of. And a lot of the children of slaves took their parents’ first names as their last names. So, a son named Zion took his mother’s first name and became Zion Molly.”
“Zion Molly,” said Henry. “I wonder what made him do the hard things.”
Peter went to work with a few Web sites and found the address of Esther Molly, which had not yet been taken down. She had lived eleven blocks east of the Capitol, between F and H.
He said, “I think we should drive over there and look around.”
“I’ll call for the SUV,” said Henry. “J-Man, you in?”
J-Man gave a little flip of his fingers. He was in. Then he punched up Google Earth on his iPad and showed them Maryland Avenue and Eleventh.
Peter took the iPad and “drove” down the street, past some big apartment buildings, a few long runs of joined row houses, all nicely kept with little gardens and good paint jobs in wild colors, lavender, yellow, some white to offset. All the houses had big windows, but a lot of them were barred. So there was some crime in the neighborhood.
Esther Molly’s house was unpainted stone, three stories tall, four rooms deep.
Meanwhile, Evangeline was doing her own address search, turning up this: “Donald Dawkins lives right across the street.”
“And he inherited the Molly property,” said Diana. “Should we call him and tell him we’re coming?”
Henry said, “Let’s surprise him. It might cheer him up.”
On the way down in the elevator, Henry said, “We get in that old house, look around, I bet we find a hidin’ place for a valuable book in no time at all. It has to be there, right? In a wall or under the floorboards in the attic?”
Evangeline said, “It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve found something like that.”
Peter squeezed her hand. He liked it when she said “we” in the midst of the hunt.
On the third floor, the doors popped open, and a man wheeling a room service tray glanced in at them. He said, “I wait.” He was short, dark-haired, Hispanic.
Henry said, “Hey, Ricky.”
> The man looked up, looked shocked, and the doors slammed shut.
Henry turned to J-Man. “That was Ricky the Rican, wasn’t it?”
“I told you, man, I don’t know no Ricky the Rican.”
Peter said, “That guy delivered wine to our room last night.”
“He sure looked like Ricky the Rican,” said Henry.
“Like I told you,” said J-Man, “I don’t know no Ricky the Rican working in the Willard or anywhere else.”
Henry and Peter caught each other’s eye. Strange.
In the lobby, J-Man said, “I follow in my car, make sure nobody trailin’ you.”
That sounded reasonable, but Henry caught Peter’s eye again, as if he was getting suspicious.
Henry and Peter had wanted to go alone, but the ladies insisted, saying that they would get through the old row house more quickly with four sets of eyes. So the four of them piled into Henry’s Ford Edge.
* * *
They drove over Capitol Hill and out Maryland Avenue. At Eleventh they took a left. There was a playground on the corner. Some older kids were hanging there, smokin’ and jokin’. They passed F Street and a large apartment building. Then Henry started to look for a parking spot. But as in most urban neighborhoods, parking was a competitive sport around here.
They found a spot up near H Street, the business strip, and walked back. Just for safety, and for a better look at things, Peter and Evangeline went down the east side, and Henry and Diana went down the other.
Dawkins lived in a wooden row house on the east, one of three joined façades, all gray, with porches that reached to the sidewalk. There were no lights in the Dawkins house, and because the street was well planted with trees, the streetlamps were shaded and the sidewalks were dark.
Esther Molly’s stone row house, diagonally across the street, was much nicer than Dawkins’s and much bigger. A building permit showed in the window. A pallet of chimney brick lay outside. A Dumpster filled almost all of the front lawn.
Peter said, “I don’t like the sight of that.”
“What?” said Evangeline.
“Construction work. Demolition plays hell with hiding places. Then he squeezed between a blue Nissan Versa and a Chrysler minivan and crossed the street.
She went around to the back of the Nissan, and they met Henry and Diana on the other side.
Henry said, “You seen J-Man?”
The Lincoln Letter Page 41
