A Murder of Justice

ELEVEN

Milton, a white guy with a graying brush-cut, wore jeans and a khaki shirt. Yellow-lens shooting glasses and a pair of sound-suppressing earmuffs around his neck accented his high cheekbones and gave him the lean look of a hunter, which he had been once.

He sat on the bench between Frank and Jose, the Gentry case folder open in his lap. On the firing line, ten or so feet away, a single plainclothes-a female officer-practiced slow fire at a silhouette target. The peppery nitro odor of gunpowder hung in the air.

Milton ran his hand over the jacket. He looked at Jose, then Frank. “You say ballistics connect Gentry and Skeeter?”

Frank nodded.

“And Calkins did the analysis?”

“Yes.”

Milton’s eyes shifted into the distance, as he worked to pull together the implications of what Frank and Jose were saying.

“Tell us about your snitch, Milt.”

“In so many words, the guy told me that Zelmer Austin got his head fucked up and decided to bag a honkie. He came back that night and told his woman he’d done it. Shot a guy at the Capitol South station.”

“That’s it?”

“Look,” Milton said. “You guys know how it is… It’s a cold day in hell when a snitch comes to you with the whole story. All’s you get are little pieces. This was this asshole’s little piece. It wasn’t the only piece.”

“He say how he knew?”

“Said he got it from Austin’s woman.”

“You check?”

“We couldn’t find her. You know how these bitches are…” Milton turned to Frank, then Jose, seeking agreement.

Milton got a look as if things were crumbling inside him. He was silent for a long time, staring at the jacket. “I got a goddamn ulcer from that case. Everybody from the mayor on down was on my ass. Fucking Emerson was over me like flies on a manure pile.”

“We remember,” Frank said.

Milton looked at Frank. “I guess it’s open again.”

“Yeah,” Jose said.

Giving no sign he’d heard Jose, Milton watched the shooter on the firing line squeeze off another round. “Same gun…” he whispered to himself. “Gentry and Skeeter Hodges.”

Milton handed the folder back to Frank.

Frank took it, but Milton held on for a second or two. When he dropped his hand, his eyes met Frank’s.

“Yeah?” Frank prompted.

Milton got up. He faced Frank and Jose. He motioned toward the folder. “I thought we had that case good, Frank. Wired. Or I wouldn’t have let Emerson…”

“I’m sure you did.”

“I mean wired.”

Frank started the car. He heard gunfire in the distance.

Bam… bam… bam.

The single shooter on the range.

“I don’t feel like going back to the office,” he said.

“Me neither.”

“Where to?”

“Long time since we been to the Smithsonian.”

“National Gallery?”

“How about the Air and Space?” Jose pondered this, then nodded to himself. “Yeah. I feel like Air and Space. Something mechanical. You know, with wings and wheels and engines and shit like that.”

The National Air and Space Museum is one of Washington’s feature attractions. The busiest museum in the world pulls in more than nine million visitors a year. After flashing his credentials, Frank eased the Crown Vic down the ramp to the restricted underground garage.

A minute or two later, he and Jose stood in the elevator as the doors whooshed open onto the main entrance hall, the Milestones of Flight gallery.

Wow!

Frank felt a smile inside. No matter how many times he’d been to Air and Space, the sight touched off the same schoolboy reaction.

There stood Friendship 7, John Glenn’s spacecraft, scorched and battered by its fiery reentry through Earth’s atmosphere. High above Glenn’s capsule, Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis flew in formation with the Wright Brothers’ “flyer,” a boxy kite of white muslin wings and brown ash struts.

For almost half an hour, the two men worked their way back through aviation history, from an Apollo lunar orbiter and Chuck Yeager’s Bell X-1 to the old classics-a Douglas DC-3, a beautiful Beech Staggerwing.

They came to a stop in front of Otto Lilienthal’s hang glider, suspended as if in flight. Frank stared up at the frail craft. A manikin dangled in a harness below the birdlike wings of the century-old glider. A placard explained that Lilienthal had died in a crash. Several years later, the Wright brothers had used his data to build their own powered machine and launch a revolution.

“Good choice, coming here.”

“Yeah,” Jose said. He was looking at the Lilienthal glider too. “Something about airplanes… you got to do them right. There’s something clean about them. Bullshit and a fancy paint job can’t make them fly. Basics-all comes down to basics.”

Frank’s mind skipped a groove or two. He’d been thinking about the glider; then he caught what Jose had said about basics. Skeeter popped up, and Frank connected basics to the killing.

“Same gun killed Skeeter that killed Gentry,” he said.

Jose didn’t respond.

Frank went on. “Question is, same person? Two years. Long time for a killer to hold the same weapon.”

“Yeah.” Jose sounded as though he were only half listening.

Frank looked at Jose’s sad frown. “I know.” Frank sighed. “I feel the same way.”

“Milt shouldn’t have folded like that.”

“I know. But it must have seemed easy at the time to pin the rose on Austin. No red flags. After all, it wasn’t like Austin was a choirboy. And the snitch did know the holdouts.”

Jose didn’t say anything, but the frown stayed put.

“Emerson’s got to be sweating,” Frank said.

Jose nodded. “Yeah. It gets out he pressured Milt…”

“You know,” Frank ventured, “Milt always wanted that job running the range. Regular hours, no pressure. A good job to see him to retirement.”

“You saying Emerson paid him off?”

“Whether he did or he didn’t, that’s what it’ll look like. And Emerson knows it.”