Butterfly Knife

by Larry Matthews

  ***

  Federal Judge Alexander Beechum was a man of habit and routine. He believed that spontaneous acts were a sign of a cluttered life that had no meaning or order. His day was precise. Each day was planned in accordance with its needs, meaning, of course, his needs. His office in the federal courthouse in Washington was a tribute to his ordered mind, with a place for every thing and every thing in its place, including his well-groomed clerks and minions. “Let justice not be ill served by a misplaced fact or file,” was one of his frequently issued slogans. And so it was that Judge Beechum went to lunch each day at precisely 12:30PM, walking through the front doors of the courthouse after a brief wave to the marshals who staffed the security point.

  The courthouse is officially on Constitution Avenue at Third Street Northwest, within sight of the United States Capitol building. In fact, it is on Pennsylvania Avenue in a clot of intersections which, in high-tourist seasons, are packed with out-of-towners gawking at the Capitol, the Mall, the Museum, or the Embassy of Canada, which is arguably the most impressive embassy in Washington and is next door to the courthouse.

  It was early April and the cherry blossoms were at peak bloom. The blossoms bring hundreds of thousands of tourists to the city to gaze upon the fragile flowers and spend money in local hotels and restaurants. Most years the blossoms are at peak for only a few days before a front blows through with wind and rain, sending the petals into the Tidal Basin and leaving the tourists with the taste of disappointment. Not so on this day.

  Judge Beechum noted that the Mall area was crowded with smiling families, all of them taking pictures of each other with the Capitol building in the background. It was Wednesday, so the judge was having lunch at Sammy’s, a sandwich shop on 4th Street. He would order, as on each Wednesday, a turkey and Swiss on French bread with a light smear of mayo and a handful of sprouts. The sprouts were a nod to the health concerns of his wife, to whom he had been married for thirty-four years. He had eaten the same lunch every Wednesday for eleven years. Thursdays were soup and salad.

  He stood in the sunshine and enjoyed the warmth it offered after a cold, wet and rainy March. He looked up at the monument to General George Meade, the Union general credited with defeating Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg. Meade’s monument is on the plaza at the courthouse complex and it comforted the judge to see such a tribute to victory. As he stood facing west with a smile on his face a loud crack bounced off the stone skins of the buildings, making it sound as though several shots had been fired, but it was only one. The 7.62 millimeter round hit Judge Beechum just above his right eye. It exited behind his left ear, leaving a wound as large as an orange, sending much of the brain that had so impressed legal scholars spewing onto the stone image of General Meade.

  A lawyer who was stuffing papers into her leather briefcase nearly tripped over him before she saw the body and the carnage around it. She screamed for help but it was several minutes before the scene was secured and U.S. Marshals from the courthouse began to assess the situation. By then the gunman was gone and so was the M14 that had killed the man known as Maximum Alex. It was a nickname given to him by defense lawyers in recognition of Judge Beechum’s belief that public officials who are convicted of crimes against the people be locked up for as long as the law allows. The judge had sent a good many such officials away after a subjecting them to his infamous tongue lashings about the responsibilities of those elected to serve the people. Former members of Congress were sitting in their cells at that very moment, along with a few Cabinet officers and lobbyists, unaware, of course, that the man who had sent them to long stretches at Allenwood or Cumberland or Petersburg was facing his own eternity.

  One man, a sitting Representative from Tennessee, was aware. He was facing his own legal challenges and his friends had taken action in an attempt to slow the wheels of justice. He was waiting by the phone for word that the problem had been solved. As he would learn, it wasn’t as simple as a quick assassination.

  Radio reporter Dave Haggard was sitting at his desk in his new office in a high rise building overlooking the Potomac River in Rosslyn, a section of Arlington across the river from Georgetown. “High rise” is a relative term. In Chicago or New York it means skyscraper. In the Washington area it’s anything over ten stories. The D.C. region is a decidedly “low rise” area because the Washington Monument, at 555 feet, is as high as it gets. Rosslyn, with its steel and glass modernity, was a contrast to Georgetown; with its 17th and 18th Centuries store fronts and townhouses. Dave was happy to be looking back in time. He thought Rosslyn was hideous.

  His employer, a Washington-based news service called Now News, had recently moved from smaller offices near Dupont Circle in the city to the high rise on the strength of its increased visibility and wealth created by the publicity of its involvement in the story known as The Priest Killings, a string of grisly murders of Catholic Priests. Dave had been at the center of the story and had, in fact, been part of the capture of the killer and the rescue of his then-girlfriend. The publicity had brought a rush of clients and funds to Now News, thus the new digs.

  Dave was restless and bored. The tourist season had begun and it was difficult to get around the city. He was stuck covering the Justice Department and its boring leader, the aptly named Attorney General Jubal Gray, who spoke in sentences designed to suck the energy out of every moment. But Dave had to admit to himself that he liked the view. He could see the Kennedy Center, Roosevelt Island and its semi-wildness, the Georgetown waterfront, and, in the distance, the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building.

  Two high school rowing teams were on the river, the four-man teams were racing each other in the long, thin boats in practice runs for the spring season. The boats went under Key Bridge and emerged heading north to Three Sisters Islands, a group of rocky protrusions in the middle of the river. The young men were powerful and the boats moved with amazing speed. Dave watched and had a moment of admiration for the boys who were on the river in the middle of a school day. The idyllic scene was interrupted by a scull being rowed by one man who pulled past the high-schoolers and sped up the river by the rocky islands and disappeared behind the trees along the Virginia shore.

  Dave saw powerful shoulders and arms and a white man’s head under a Washington Nationals baseball hat. Later, when he was asked to describe the man, that is all he could recall. The moment was nothing more than an interruption in an otherwise idle day. He was killing time before yet another of the AG’s news conferences about a legal issue relating to land rights in the West. Even the folks in Montana wouldn’t be interested in this story. He wanted to press Sid for some street assignments around the city but that was not possible at the moment because Now News was still reeling from the priest killing story and Sid had made a deal with the F.B.I. to keep Dave out of harm’s way. I’m a house cat, he thought, gazing down at the traffic on Key Bridge.

  His phone rang. “Yeah,” was his usual answer.

  It was Sid, his boss, an old news lion who liked to keep the cubs in line. Dave was no cub but Sid still growled at him from time to time. “Get your ass down to the District Court. Somebody just shot Judge Beechum.”

  “Where?”

  “Right in front of the statue of General Meade. All hell’s breaking loose.”

  “I’m on it.” Dave had his coat on and was out the door before Sid could change his mind. The taxi situation was always dicey in Arlington. Most of the cabbies wanted to drive in D.C. where there was more business. Arlington cabs mostly went to Reagan National Airport and the drivers spent a lot of time in line waiting for fares, unlike the city drivers who dropped off and picked up anywhere. Dave went out the lobby door and saw a cab dropping off a fare at the door and he raced to grab it. The driver was a Somali who had perfected the art of having no facial expression whatsoever. The man nodded when Dave told him he wanted to go to the federal courthouse at 3rd and Constitution and proceeded to head for Key Bridge.

  “No, don’t go that way. Lo
op over to Roosevelt Bridge and go down Constitution. It will be faster.”

  The driver kept going. “Are you aware of the Cherry Blossom Festival?” he asked in a formal, British public school manner. “There are many, many tourists here for that. It will take an hour that way.” So he drove to Georgetown and headed down M Street to Pennsylvania and made it to the courthouse in twenty minutes. Dave felt foolish but he was grateful that the driver knew the city and its ways.

  Pennsylvania Avenue was blocked by police cars with their lights flashing. The area was closed for blocks as federal agents searched for evidence and clues. A press pen had been established near the courthouse and Dave could see reporters frantically calling out to every cop and agent they knew, pleading for some crumb to report. Television reporters were the most intense because their bosses were yelling at them through the small earphones they had embedded in their heads. Newspaper and other print reporters were the most serene and detail-oriented because their deadlines were longer. Online bloggers tweeted out morsels of information that had no context and no one seemed to care. Press pens are areas where cops and other officials herd reporters during breaking stories to keep them from running around like a bunch of cats out of control. Loose reporters can be risky to people who are trying to control a narrative.

  Dave saw a reporter from the Associated Press with whom he had shared information in the past and walked over to him. The man’s name was Peter Deutch and he was a solid but conventional journalist. He could gather facts as fast as anyone but he was conservative in the conclusions he drew from those facts, unlike the cable television types who drew conclusions first and then went in search of facts to back them up.

  “What are they saying?” Dave asked.

  “That’s him under the tarp. One to the head. I hate to say it, but this is good news for Congressman Prewitt.” Deutch looked sad.

  ~*~

  Available from better book stores, amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com or www.a-argusbooks.com

  November 2012

  Meet our Author

  Larry Matthews

  Larry Matthews is an award-winning broadcast journalist whose thirty-plus years as a reporter provide the background material for his books. Matthews was a street reporter, anchor, news director, producer and editor for major radio stations, ABC Radio, and National Public Radio. He was a producer, host and reporter for Maryland Public Television. As a reporter he covered some of the major events of the late Twentieth Century in Washington, D.C. and other cities. He is the recipient of the George Foster Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcasting, The DuPont/Columbia Citation, The National Headliner Award, and national and regional awards from The Society of Professional Journalists, The Associated Press, United Press International, and other professional organizations and universities.

  His memoir, I Used To Be In Radio, was hailed as “a must-read in journalism schools, especially for those who aspire to be investigative reporters” and as “a funny and moving page-turner”.

  Two of his novels, Healing Charles and Saving Charles, were praised as “outstanding works of fiction.” The novels are about the life of one man, set thirty years apart.

  Matthews is also co-author of Street Business, with Ernie Lijoi Sr., a police/crime novel based on real events in the career of retired Detective Lijoi.

  Matthews’s experience as an investigative reporter provides much of the background material for his Dave Haggard thriller series about a radio reporter in Washington, D.C. who finds himself at the dangerous center of major criminal investigations. The first in the series, Butterfly Knife, involves the hunt for a serial killer of priests. The second, Brass Knuckles, finds Dave chasing down leads in a murder/kickback scheme involving a member of Congress. The third, Detonator, is about the betrayal of national trust and high-level treason.

  Matthews lives and writes in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

  His website is www.larrymatthews.net.

  Twitter @lawrencematthew

  Facebook is larrymatthewsauthor

  Titles in the Dave Haggard Series

  By

  Larry Matthews

  *****Butterfly Knife*****

  *****Brass Knuckles*****

  Haggard is back! This time, when not chasing romance, he's chasing a story of assassination, greed, and an out-of-control hired killer. A federal judge is shot down outside the courthouse in Washington. A member of Congress is being investigated for skimming Oak Ridge cleanup money. A professional assassin, a former army sniper, is on the loose.

  Brass Knuckles takes you inside the world of investigative reporting in Washington, where journalists and their sources feed off each other; a story filled with action, adventure, and romance.

  Dave Haggard, ace reporter for Now News, is again in the center of a dangerous search for the truth about murder, millions of dollars skimmed from the federal government by a powerful subcommittee chairman, and the madness of one man. The deadly search for the truth runs through the F.B.I., the Justice Department, the office of a high powered defense attorney, Capitol Hill, and the beautiful mountains of East Tennessee, to its shattering conclusion.

  Reviewers of the Dave Haggard Thrillers say:

  "...a taut, mystery thriller that will stretch your nerves to the breaking point." Austin Camacho, author of the Hannibal Jones Mysteries.

  Amazon reviewers say: "It was a roller coaster ride from beginning to end." "This is one of those books that sucks you in and holds you captive until it's over."

  *****Detonator (Spring 013*****

  Other titles

  By

  Larry Matthews

  *****Take a Rifle From a Dead Man*****

  *****Unsung Heroes of the Old Line State*****

  (Non-fiction)