A Murder of Justice

SEVENTEEN

Dinner had started with a simple salad, lemon vinaigrette dressing. A garlic-marinated hanger steak had followed, accompanied by a Frog’s Leap Merlot and Brussels sprouts sauteed in sweet butter. Tom Kearney had helped Judith Barnes clear the table and bring in cognac and dessert-a strawberry tart.

Barnes circled the dining room table, pouring dense black coffee from an antique silvered copper pot with a beaklike spout.

“Qahveh,” she explained, filling Kate’s demitasse cup, then Frank’s. “The Turks pave their streets with it when they run out of asphalt.”

Frank sipped the thick, pungent coffee. “I’m surprised anybody in the country ever sleeps.”

“Lower caffeine than the stuff you manufacture,” Tom Kearney said. He pushed his chair back from the table. “So your survivor jumped ship.”

Frank stirred his coffee. “Gone.”

“You’ve set the dogs out for him?” Barnes asked. “Or whatever it is you do?”

“I wish we could. No charges on him unless the Hospital Center claims he skipped payment.”

“But it shouldn’t be too hard to find him.”

“Not as easy as you think. Look at all those kids they put on milk cartons. Pencil’s got money, and he’s got what’s left of Skeeter’s outfit to run interference.”

“Then what do you do?”

Frank rolled a hand over and back. “Go out, talk to people on the street.”

Easier said than done. Crawfurd’s house had turned up cold. And then they’d spent a long afternoon, touching the bases, passing the word. Show enough that people know you’re interested; don’t show so much that they think you’re desperate.

You seen Pencil? We got something he might want to know. He could help us, we could help him.

Barnes leaned forward. “Snitches?” she whispered, eyes bright with excitement. She suddenly looked worried. “That is what they call them, isn’t it?”

The little-girl way she said it made Frank smile.

“Well, isn’t it?” she insisted.

“Yes, Judith, that’s what they call them. There’s also sources.”

“The difference is…?”

“Motive. You always have to be looking for the snitch’s motive. He’s telling you something to get something for himself.”

“Like money.”

“If the motive’s money, that’s at least straightforward. When it isn’t money, things get more complicated.”

Tom Kearney cut in: “Sometimes a snitch wants to settle a score. Or he gets manipulated by a cop. I saw cases where a snitch was cutting a deal for a reduced sentence for his own crime. Fingering some poor bastard to get a few years off his own time.”

Barnes looked at Frank and Tom in frustration. “Then why listen to them?”

“Because,” Frank said, “you have to. You get a piece of information from a snitch. You know it might not be straight. Even so, it might help you if you can figure out the motive… understand what’s behind it.”

“Double-think?”

“Double- and triple-think. Like somebody said about the spy business… it’s a wilderness of mirrors.”

Barnes asked. “And you can get the truth out of this… this mess?”

“Sometimes.” Tom Kearney sipped his cognac. “Sometimes,” he repeated. He turned to Frank. “You wanted to know about Al Salvani?”

“Yes.”

“He was a junior staffer in the Senate when I was counsel on the Judiciary Committee.”

Kate cocked her head. “I didn’t know you’d been on the Hill.”

“Just two years,” Tom Kearney said. “After I left private practice and before I joined the bench. A tour of the sausage factory… a necessary pit stop in the education of a cynic. If the outside of big government frightens you, the inside will scare the hell out of you, once you see how it works. I can recall one day-”

“Al Salvani?” Judith prompted softly.

Tom Kearney pulled up abruptly and gave her a small smile of embarrassment. “So many good stories, so little time… Al Salvani… I was an old man for a Senate staffer… fifty-four, fifty-five. Al was much younger-”

“He’s sixty-two now,” Frank said.

“Damn kid. Anyway, Al was already a fixture on the Hill. One of those guys goes up to the Hill and stays. When I signed on, he’d been there ten years or so. New Jersey. Heavy-duty Catholic. Old-line Democrat down to his bones. He knows the two basics of Hill politics.”

“Which were?” Kate asked.

“Which are,” Tom Kearney corrected. “Which are: Know who’s with you, and know who’s agin you.”

“Pretty basic,” Frank said.

“Wasn’t for me.” Tom Kearney smiled ruefully. “Sides shift minute to minute up there on the Hill. Being a judge was more my line. Truth’s not as slippery in the courtroom.”

“I don’t think I’m going to have an easy time with him.”

“What do you have to do?”

“See if Kevin Gentry was into anything that’d make somebody want him dead.”

“And Al isn’t happy about that.”

“No.”

“You can’t blame him. You’re an outsider. You want to come digging. And on the Hill, there’re things buried that people want to stay buried.”

“But Tom,” Judith protested, “they’re looking for a killer.”

“Like I say, kiddo, bodies aren’t the only things some people want to keep buried.” He turned to Frank. “Free advice?”

“I’m afraid to hear what it is.”

“Don’t underestimate the importance of staffers like Al. Guys like him run the Hill.”

“Senators and congressmen don’t?” Kate asked with a touch of sarcasm.

Tom Kearney took another sip of cognac. “They’ve been hoisted on their own political petards. The pols have made government so damn big that they have to rely on their staffs to find out what’s going on and to draft legislation. There’s just too much going on for a congressman or senator to get their hands on. Hell, when I was on the Hill over twenty years ago, the senator I worked for got two to three thousand letters a week from his constituents. It’s probably gotten worse, what with e-mail.”

“You aren’t going after us poor Democrats, are you?” Judith asked.

Tom Kearney laughed. “Republicans grow government almost as much as the Democrats-they just don’t advertise it as much.”

“And Salvani in all this?” Frank asked.

“He’s a major player. He knows how to make himself indispensable to those with the elected egos. At the same time, he makes certain they get the credit. He stays offstage.”

“The invisible man.”

Tom Kearney drained the last of his cognac, looked thoughtfully at the empty snifter and reluctantly set it down on the table. “The invisible man,” he said, trying out the description, and finally nodded, as though deciding he liked it. “He can help you a lot, or he can hurt you a lot. Either way, he can do it without leaving any tracks. You want, I can give him a call.”

Frank turned that over, then shook his head. “Maybe later.”

Kate and Frank stood for a moment on Judith Barnes’s steps. Across Thirty-second Street, a “For Sale” sign hung from a wrought-iron standard in front of a small red-brick row house. Above the sign, another one read “Under Contract.”

Frank remembered the first time he’d been in that house. Last October, an autumn morning with a blue sky that went out to forever. That morning, the house had smelled cleanly of tomato and fennel and garlic and its owner had been found dead in a neighboring park by a woman walking her dog.

Kate took his arm and they started down the steps. “You think the new owners know?”

“Probably,” Frank said. “A thing like that… Georgetown’s too small for people not to know.”

As they walked the block over to Wisconsin Avenue, Frank wondered if Mary Keegan’s ghost lived in the neat Federal-era house. He hoped she did. A nice ghost to have watching over you.

Kate slipped her hand down his arm and interlaced her fingers with his. “I watched you and your father tonight.”

“Oh?”

“You love him very much.”

“Well… yes…” he answered, struck by her saying it. “What brought that on?”

“Oh, I don’t know…”

“Sure you do.”

Kate looked at him, and he could tell she was trying to sort it out, the way she narrowed her eyes and bit her lower lip.

“Maybe it was the wine and the candlelight,” she said, “but I suddenly saw the two of you as you and an older you. There was a… a… a connectivity…”

Kate squeezed his hand. “Like I say, maybe it was the wine and the candlelight.”

Frank felt his face warm, and he squeezed back.

“Looks like we’re going to have fun on the Hill.”

Kate said nothing, then nodded, as though agreeing with a thought she had had. “You have your hands full.”

“Juggling.”

“More like threads,” Kate said. “You have to pull hard enough to unravel, but not so hard that you break them.”

“Gentry, Skeeter.”

“They’re two.”

Wisconsin Avenue was still bright with lights and evening traffic. And no taxis in sight.

“We could go to my place, get my car,” Frank said.

Kate shook her head. “You had more wine than I did, and I wouldn’t drive.”

Frank knew better than to argue, first because it was Kate, and second, because Kate was right. After three attempts, he semaphored a cab over to the curb. He opened the back door and held it open once Kate had settled in.

“Rashid,” he told the driver, picking the name off the laminated license over the visor, “take this lady home.” At the same time, he flashed his badge and let his jacket fall away to let Rashid get a good look at his shoulder holster.

He watched the cab disappear down Wisconsin Avenue, then began walking south. A display in an antique store caught his eye. He stopped to look over a simple pine chest. He imagined a French carpenter, needing something to keep his tools in, throwing together the chest in an afternoon, little knowing-or caring-that it would bring a four-figure price in an upscale shop in an American village a century later.

As he continued down Wisconsin, he considered dropping into Billy Martin’s for a decaf. He glanced at his watch and decided to head home instead. As it was, Monty would be sulking about being fed late.

He crossed Wisconsin and turned down N Street.

Threads.

Who killed Gentry?

Who killed Skeeter Hodges?

Connections?

How? Where? What? When? Who?

Ancient maples along the sidewalks formed a leafy tunnel over Olive Street. Frank hadn’t left the outside light on, and the houses on either side of his were dark. He held his key ring up to catch the dim light from the corner streetlamp.

As he did so, he heard behind him the slight rasp of a shoe on the brick sidewalk. He switched his keys to his left hand and turned toward the sound, silently cursing his vulnerability.

“Good evening, Detective Kearney,” came the BBC announcer’s plummy voice.

“Good… evening, Waverly.”

The big Nigerian’s eyes widened as he noticed Frank’s right hand, armpit high inside his jacket. “I am sorry… I have given you a turn.”

“That’s all right, Waverly, I’ve been given worse.”

“I came by. There was no light. But I thought you would return. And so I decided to wait.”

Ngame motioned behind him toward the cars parked across the street. One of them was a black Cadillac with someone in the driver’s seat.

“Come in?”

Ngame shook his head. “Thank you, no.” He paused, weighing a matter of some delicacy. “I regret that I was not open for business today, when you and Detective Phelps were making… ah… inquiries.”

“I’m sorry we missed you, Waverly.”

“Pardon my inquisitiveness,” Ngame said, “but have you had success in locating Mr. Crawfurd?”

“Not yet.”

Ngame pursed his lips and paused as he did another weighing of another delicate matter.

“I have two things. They are not much, but…” He paused apologetically. “… they are something.” He came in heavy on the last syllable.

“Yes, Waverly?”

“The two things-one, Skeeter Hodges had insurance, and two, there are eyes on you and Detective Phelps.”