The Washington Decree_A Novel

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  Doggie followed developments with apprehension, telling no one she’d spoken with her father. She concentrated on preparing for her new job and avoided burdening anyone with her company.

  * * *

  —

  The trying of case number 1:2008, cr.1312—the United States of America vs. Bud Curtis—was given February 9, 2009, as a starting date. As expected, the presiding judge would be Marsha W. Tanner.

  Judge Marsha W. Tanner was an attractive white woman in her early fifties. She began by lecturing both sets of attorneys as to the difficult nature of the case, stressing that, since the prosecution’s charges were built entirely on circumstantial evidence, its burden of proof must be incontestable and unequivocal.

  After that, it took three days to pick a jury. Twelve citizens had to be found who, among other things, had neither a strange attitude towards shopping in a Jansen’s Drugstore nor had spent the night in a Splendor Hotel. In the end, four black and eight white jurors were chosen—half men and half women— and the trial was under way.

  * * *

  —

  Both sides’ procedure regarding the prosecution’s charges was brief.

  The prosecution presented transcriptions of e-mails—sent from a number of Bud Curtis’s confiscated computers to Doggie during the election campaign—where he lambasted Senator Jansen in no uncertain terms. For Doggie it was extremely unpleasant having these old private quarrels with her father spotlighted in this manner. On top of these were numerous other e-mails, even more vicious, that had been sent to a wide range of people.

  Next the prosecution gave an account of Bud Curtis’s past connections with the Republican Party’s right wing, including his great engagement in lobbying for the rights of gun owners and working for Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in the midsixties.

  From her seat in the sixth row Doggie had a hard time recognizing the one-sided picture the prosecution was presenting of her father as an aggressive right-wing extremist.

  Then the prosecution announced its ability to bring forth witnesses who would swear that Bud Curtis had goaded the simpleminded Toby O’Neill into loathing Jansen and his wife, and that there was evidence of a money transfer from one of Curtis’s many bank accounts to O’Neill just before the killing. They could also produce the murder weapon in whose chamber all remaining cartridge casings bore the defendant’s fingerprints. Next, the court was provided with tape recordings the Secret Service had made during a meeting just before election day between Bud Curtis and both the Secret Service and Jansen’s bodyguards, where Curtis gave precise instructions as to which of them was to accompany Jansen’s entourage into the hotel corridor and be present during the unveiling of the painting. The recordings also contained Curtis’s specific request that Toby O’Neill perform the actual unveiling.

  All this and much more indicated that Curtis was behind the assassination, Mortimer Deloitte concluded, and for this the prosecution was asking that he receive the law’s severest punishment.

  Naturally, the defense lawyers had countermoves for—and ways of explaining away—each of the damning charges. An angry Bud Curtis denied emphatically ever having requested the Secret Service allow Toby O’Neill to unveil the picture. On the contrary: They were the ones who’d suggested it, he said, and demanded the tape be analyzed by impartial experts. Furthermore, anyone could have gotten hold of Curtis’s gun, which always lay in his desk drawer, and any half-intelligent person could figure out how to phone-transfer money to O’Neill’s bank account. But, he wondered out loud, if it had been him, why the hell would he do it in such a damn-fool, clumsy fashion? Besides, he didn’t believe the bank account number from which the money was transferred was one of his. Next, the defense lawyers claimed that the proven fact—that as a very young man Curtis had played a completely unimportant, passive role in certain election campaigns—couldn’t be held against him now, adding that Chief Prosecutor Deloitte had similar skeletons in the closet. Had he not once supported a certain Sheriff Brown’s election campaign in his hometown, even though said Brown went to prison shortly afterwards when several cases of brutal torturing of prisoners surfaced that had taken place during his previous term in office? Could one at all be made responsible for the dirty deeds of others?

  After the defense mentioned Deloitte’s past political tastes and questioned the relevance of ancient political affiliations, Judge Tanner had to bang her gavel on the desktop to restore order in the court.

  * * *

  —

  In the opening round of witnesses, each was questioned about the killing itself: Who happened to be where, and who witnessed what?

  First questioned were all those who had been present during the murder of Mimi Todd Jansen in the passageway at the Splendor Hotel in Virginia Beach—twenty-five witnesses in all. This included security people, delegates and their spouses, the governor of Virginia, Attorney General Lovell, presidential staff members Thomas Sunderland and Wesley Barefoot, John Bugatti and his cameraman, and—after the doors were closed to the public—the president himself.

  None of them could shed any new light on the murder. They only described where they’d been standing and what they’d seen during the time the painting was being unveiled and the moments after, and how the killer struck. Each one said that, just before she was shot, Mimi Jansen had whispered something to Bud Curtis and that he’d then left the room. In other words, he wasn’t in the room when the shot was fired.

  Then it was Doggie’s turn. Her story coincided with all the others, only for her the witness stand felt like the gallows. It was as if everybody was looking at her as the woman who was pulling the strings behind those who were pulling the strings. A heavy sense of guilt was pressing her down into her seat. Every word from both the prosecutor and the defense attorney felt like little stabs.

  At no point during the questioning was she able to look at her father. It was only after she’d sat down again behind the prosecution bench that she dared steal a glance at his slumped figure. He’d lost even more weight since she’d seen him last; his favorite Armani suit looked three sizes too large.

  A really depressing sight.

  * * *

  —

  It was packed with journalists, photographers, and TV cameramen outside the courthouse. The scene was grotesque, and everyone was screaming at Doggie. Was it she who’d had the idea of holding election night at her father’s hotel? Would she still have her job in the White House if her father were found guilty? What had the president said to her when his unborn child died? Et cetera, et cetera.

  They pushed and shoved her savagely, and no courthouse guards came to her aid. She reached the base of the courthouse stairs only to be assaulted by a new wave of the merciless media. Someone grabbed her arm, and she turned angrily to fight the assailant off.

  “Let go of me, I’ll hit you!” she yelled, and looked directly into the sleepy brown eyes of her fellow quiz show contest winner, Sheriff T. Perkins. She stopped struggling and relaxed. Suddenly his grip was like a mother’s protective embrace. Now she felt safe.

  In no time he spirited her past the notepads, flashbulbs, and floodlights and into his battered Chrysler. T. Perkins had had plenty of experience with situations like this.

  “I had a feeling it would be good to wait for you here, Doggie,” he said as they took off. He didn’t slow down until they reached Scott Circle. “I’m staying at a hotel up behind the zoo,” he told her. “I’ve taken a couple of days off, and if you want me to be around until you’re finished on the witness stand, I’ll be glad to.”

  * * *

  —

  It was a fact that Doggie’s evenings at home would have been unbearable had it not been for Sheriff Perkins’s solicitude. He sat across from her, calming her down with his soothing voice, allowing her to manifest her feelings. He put his arm around her shoulders as he spoke to her about normal, everyday things and
occasionally flung his ever-present favorite dart into a well-punctured black spot he’d drawn on one of her moving boxes.

  When it came to the law and the people who dealt it out, there wasn’t much T didn’t know. It even turned out that he knew the prosecution lawyer Mortimer Deloitte quite well. They were the same age and had both grown up in Floyd County, Virginia.

  After spending fourteen months in the jungle hell of the Vietnam War, Perkins resolved never to obey an order he didn’t like. He was currently serving his thirtieth year, first as deputy sheriff, then as sheriff, of Highland County, Virginia’s smallest county.

  He picked Doggie up every morning in front of her apartment over the Starbuck’s on 19th Street, sat by her side during the trial, delivered her to the West Wing of the White House at 1:00 P.M., then picked her up again at seven and brought her back home. He was also in charge of the shopping, which meant the same dinner every night: T-bone steaks à la T. Perkins, with mountains of anemic french fries.

  The first couple of days, they didn’t discuss the trial at all.

  A mere two weeks into the trial, the press was already as good as unanimous in its prediction that it would be all over in a hurry and Bud Curtis would be found guilty.

  And how could anyone think otherwise? According to the prosecution, ever since Bud Curtis had taken O’Neill under his wing, pleasing his master was what had given the dim-witted future killer’s life meaning. Horrible anecdotes about Doggie’s father were mentioned, too, like how he’d bet his poker-playing buddies he could get O’Neill to lick his spit up from the floor, and how O’Neill repeatedly got into quarrels with the hotel personnel if he overheard them complaining about their employer.

  Bud Curtis had had an uncanny hold on O’Neill, the prosecution concluded, and could have made him do anything. If Curtis had been able to get his simpleminded servant to lick up his mentor’s spit, why couldn’t he have him commit murder?

  Despite all his anger, Doggie’s father didn’t seem sincere during his cross-examination, and she knew many of the things he said were directly untrue. How, for example, could he claim he’d supported Jansen’s candidacy and that he’d had no other reason for offering Jansen his hotel on election night than to support his campaign? And how could he deny having actively partaken in George Wallace’s racist gubernatorial campaigns when his name was on every list of Wallace’s supporters? Why did he try to give a false impression of himself when everyone could tell he was lying?

  Worst of all was when he was asked why he wasn’t present when the murder was committed. What had Mimi Jansen whispered to him just prior to the painting’s unveiling? When Curtis replied that she wasn’t feeling well and had asked him for a glass of water, Mortimer Deloitte lay his trump on the table: Why, then, had he no glass in his hand when he returned a couple of minutes later?

  To this he replied that he had had a glass of water in his hand, but he’d dropped it in shock as the dreadful shooting and chaos erupted. And he hadn’t thought about the glass of water since.

  The problem was that the glass, or shards of it, were never found, and the video surveillance camera in the corridor showed Curtis’s hands being empty when he returned. A clear sign of a man who couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth, Deloitte remarked, suggesting that Curtis had left the area so as not to be present when the killing took place and even claiming that the video clearly depicted Bud Curtis looking over at his daughter to make sure she was out of the line of fire before leaving.

  The judge upheld the defense’s protest over this far-fetched line of speculation, but it did little to offset what the jury could see with its own eyes on the video. Bud Curtis left the passageway just before the murder, and he wasn’t holding any glass when he returned. Ergo, the man was a liar.

  Last to be questioned was Ben Kane, head of Jansen’s corps of personal bodyguards. Like the accused, he was also decked out in an Armani suit, only this one fit snugly. And he was wearing his trademark heavy gold bracelets. Trained to interpret situations and imprint them on his memory, his cold and tight-lipped presence impressed the court. He naturally had no explanation as to why his now-suspended Secret Service colleague had failed to find the gun when he searched Toby O’Neill, but otherwise his testimony was like out of a movie script where all the actors had specific roles and everyone performed on cue. So and so much time had passed from the moment O’Neill shot Mimi Jansen to the moment when O’Neill himself was shot. Mimi Jansen had just stepped forward as O’Neill fired, so the bullet could easily have been meant for the president. He also clearly remembered hearing Bud Curtis speaking to Toby O’Neill over the hotel intercom shortly before the incident. “Don’t say anything, Toby,” he’d warned, “just do as I told you!” To top it off, when Ben Kane arrested Curtis shortly afterwards, the latter had spit in his face and screamed that the Democratic sow had gotten what she deserved.

  At this point Doggie’s father sprang from his seat, calling Kane a liar, but to little avail. It was easy to see the jury was becoming more and more thick-skinned.

  Mortimer Deloitte was really in his element as he delivered his closing statement, and the jury needed merely four hours to reach its verdict. They didn’t doubt that the accused had planned the murder; they just weren’t certain as to whether the president was to be killed along with his pregnant wife. Apparently, one juror had had a problem with the fact that Bud Curtis had done nothing to remove his fingerprints from the cartridges and that he’d made such an easily traceable money transfer to O’Neill instead of handing him cash.

  But that’s how it is with murder cases: At some point the killer always screws up.

  * * *

  —

  T. Perkins stopped right in front of the White House West Wing and escorted Doggie past a row of rowdy journalists. Inside she was greeted by averted eyes and pained expressions. It was clear to her that no one knew quite how to react.

  Wesley Barefoot came along and gave her a brief hug, but that was it. Being at work didn’t feel good at all, and it didn’t help that the entire West Wing was stretched to the breaking point by the suspenseful tension emerging from the Oval Office the past few days. She asked Wesley what was going on and could tell from his vague answer that it had to do with her father’s trial. She was sure the court case had put a stopper to what she’d felt was a growing intimacy between the two of them.

  She sat in her office and looked around. The room she’d been given to occupy was less than thirty feet square, there were no windows, the furnishings had seen better days, and the old shelves were stuffed to overflowing. On her shabby desk stood a computer with a nicotine-yellowed keyboard surrounded by piles of papers. None of her work was of much importance. Her position was next-to-lowest in the White House staff hierarchy, just above the young man assigned to shred the contents of their wastebaskets. If it weren’t such a high-profile murder case, hardly anyone would have known her name. The only solace she found was in the Buddha figurine Jansen had given her in Beijing. It was perched like a paperweight in a corner of her desk atop a stack of departmental circulars about emergency water depots and fire inspection laws for public buildings. The little Buddha belonged to a previous life.

  She sat for a moment with a lump in her throat, remembering the expression in his eyes as Jansen had handed her the figurine. This was the look that had later made her join his presidential campaign. If he’d never bought her the Buddha and looked at her the way he did, her father would be a free man today, and Mimi Todd Jansen and her child would be alive. How could such a tender, authoritative glance lead to such a disastrous quirk of fate?

  She picked up the figurine and hugged it close. The president had promised her happiness and a lifelong friendship, but where were the happiness and friendship now? Had he devoted a second to keeping his promise during her father’s trial? No, not a single word of consolation or even a sympathetic glance.

  She considered tossing th
e little Buddha in the wastebasket but thought better of it when two secretaries walked past her open door with unconcealed looks of contempt. They turned their heads away quickly when she looked back, as though their merely looking at her could be harmful.

  For the next half hour she considered just walking away from it all. Calling T. Perkins and have him fetch her and take her home with him to Virginia. This was obviously what her fellow employees wanted—that she left of her own accord.

  She was actually about to pick up the telephone when Thomas Sunderland strode into her office. He was thinner and paler than she was used to seeing him. He’d been one of the most incriminating witnesses at her father’s trial, and now it was apparently her turn.

  “What are your plans now, Doggie?” he asked, the desired reply painted on his face. He wanted her gone, nice and easy—and voluntarily. Until then, the situation would be unstable. At the moment his ex–military man’s sense of order and propriety was weighing on him heavier than if he were counseling the president on the ways of the world.

  She didn’t answer him.

  “President Jansen hasn’t formally asked me to say this, but I think he’d prefer not to have to run into you.”

  Doggie placed the Buddha back on top of the pile of circulars.

  “I assume you can manage without having to work,” he added.

  “Yes.”

  “Then do you agree?” he asked.

  “About what? That I should quit my job and just disappear, or that I shouldn’t roam the halls so the president doesn’t have to see me?”