A Murder of Justice

TWENTY-THREE

Trees! Yes, damn it! I said, trees!”

All six feet, six inches of Senator Daniel Dugan Patterson stood behind his desk, phone at his ear. He listened for a moment. What he heard evidently met with his approval-his almost feminine lips pulled into a smug smile.

He hung up and, with his hand still on the phone, gazed out the window at the panoramic view down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Treasury and the White House. The man’s lean body didn’t fit a round face made even rounder by large horn-rimmed glasses. The glasses, the unruly silver hair, the rumpled blue seersucker suit, and the yellow paisley bow tie gave him the air of a slightly distracted college professor, which he had been at Harvard between stints in the administrations of four presidents.

“Pennsylvania Avenue,” he whispered to himself. “America’s main street. And the silly bastards complain about the cost of a few dozen trees.”

He shook his large head as though to clear it of silly bastards, then turned and regarded Frank and Jose with the perplexed look of a man finding a stranger using his toothbrush.

“And who are you?”

“Ah… police,” Frank said. “District Homicide.”

Patterson’s bewilderment hung on for another moment.

He fished in his jacket pockets until he came up with a pack of three-by-five cards, then shuffled through them until he found one that seemed to satisfy him. Holding it high in front of his face, he studied it, his mouth slightly open. He nodded and tucked the cards away.

“Yes. About Kevin.” He pointed to Frank. “You are…”

“Frank Kearney.”

“And you?” Patterson swung the finger around to Jose.

“Jose Phelps.”

Patterson nodded. “Very good, gentlemen. Please sit.” He gestured to a leather sofa and took a nearby chair for himself.

“So,” he said, “you didn’t catch Kevin’s killer.”

“No, sir, we didn’t,” Frank said.

“But you’re going to do so now.” Patterson spoke it kindly, but with a flat irony.

“Takes being lucky and being good, Senator,” Jose said. “We’re good. But we still need luck.”

Patterson’s expression softened. Leaning forward in his chair, he rested his hands on his knees and thrust his head at Frank and Jose.

“How can I help?”

“Mr. Gentry-”

“Kevin.” Patterson whispered the correction.

Frank nodded and began again. “Kevin… came here from the State Department in 1991. He stayed seven years… tell us about him.”

With a sad smile, Patterson shook his head. “Neither you nor I have enough time for me to tell you all I remember. Suffice it to say I was lucky to have him here. The office was lucky to have him. The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it is so rare. Kevin was a bright fellow who could run easily ahead of the rest while devoting time to those who struggled at the back.”

“Why’d he leave?” Jose asked.

“Staff work on Capitol Hill is repetitive,” Patterson said. “After a while, a job here resembles riding a carousel… one moves, but ’round and ’round through the same scenery. Kevin needed to move in a different direction.”

“And the job with Congressman Rhinelander offered that?”

Patterson’s lips parted as though he was preparing to speak; then something happened behind his eyes, a flicker like a camera shutter. He hesitated, then said, “Rhinelander offered a different challenge from what Kevin could find here.”

“What was that?” Jose asked.

“Why,” Patterson said quickly, “the challenge of the District of Columbia, of course.”

“Of course?” Frank raised his eyebrows.

Patterson looked at Frank and Jose as if at students in a seminar.

“This country,” he began, “is coming apart.” He flung his arms out dramatically. “Coming apart!”

He aimed a questioning look at Frank and then Jose as though trying to detect a hint of ignorance or disagreement.

Finding none, he continued. “The District is a microcosm of our disintegrating society… the proverbial miner’s canary. Understand what ails the District and perhaps… just perhaps… we might be able to save ourselves. And if not ourselves, pray to God, we might be able to salvage the next generation, or perhaps the one after that.”

For a moment, no one spoke. Then Jose said, “That’s a pretty bad picture.”

Patterson tilted his head back and laughed. Light danced across his glasses.

“Actually, Mr. Phelps, it’s quite optimistic. I used to think salvation out of reach.”

“So we haven’t passed the Plimsoll line.” The thought had struck Frank while Patterson was talking, and he was surprised that it just came out.

“The Plimsoll line,” Patterson repeated thoughtfully, turning it over in his mind. “Yes,” he said, drawing it out. Yessss. “Yes! Samuel Plimsoll!” he said, with a catch of excitement. “That’s good. That’s very good.”

“My father made the connection.”

Patterson grinned mischievously. “Fathers manage to do that, sometimes… commit a modest bit of wisdom.”

“When was the last time you talked with Kevin?” Jose asked.

Patterson’s face clouded. “The day he was killed. We had lunch.”

“What’d you talk about?”

“Cabbages and kings. Our lunches were always a dog’s breakfast… odds and ends of this and that. The smallest of details, the largest of pictures.”

“Anything in particular?”

“Insofar as the details were concerned, Kevin was absorbed in the upcoming hearings on the District appropriations.”

“Do you remember any of those details?”

Patterson shook his head. “Oh… the procedural worries… witness lists, staff coaching of the subcommittee members, publicity… that sort of thing.”

“And the big pictures?”

“When we got to that, it was always the same… Bits and pieces might change, but essentially we always ended up talking about numbers and levers.”

Patterson took in Frank’s and Jose’s expectant looks.

“Numbers,” Patterson explained, “the statistics… the harbingers of society’s tomorrow… crime, illiteracy, disease, divorce, children born out of wedlock.” He paused as though somewhere in his head a tape was bringing in the latest figures.

“And the levers?” Frank prompted.

“The levers,” Patterson said, “yes, the levers. The means by which we might shape society’s tomorrows. From Archimedes… ‘Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth.’ ”

“And Kevin’s place to stand was on Rhinelander’s subcommittee.”

Patterson nodded.

“And the lever?”

“He was still searching.”

Frank glanced at the antique wall clock, now getting on to six.

“Last question… Did Kevin ever mention anyone who might have a motive to kill him?”

“No. But I never believed his killing was a random act.”

“Oh?”

Patterson’s chin dropped to his chest, and he looked at Frank and Jose over the tops of his glasses. “The fates don’t allow such a man to die at the whim of another.”

With that, Patterson’s attention seemed to drift away. Frank and Jose stood.

“Thank you for your time,” Frank said.

Patterson continued staring off into the distance, or perhaps into another time. Without acknowledging Frank and Jose, he took off his glasses and wiped his eyes.

“There’s no use being Irish,” he said to himself, “unless you know the world is going to break your heart.”

Look!” Jose pointed with theatrical alarm. “Someone’s been in our office! And there he is… in your chair!”

“You’re right, Papa Bear,” Frank said. “And I bet he ate up all our porridge too.”

In what was becoming his trademark position, Leon Janowitz was cocked back in Frank’s chair, feet on the edge of his desk. Arms extended, he was reading from an accordion-folded computer printout.

Still holding the printout, still cocked back in Frank’s chair, he turned to face Frank and Jose.

“You guys get a bigger office, a hardworking fella like me wouldn’t have to borrow a place to sit.”

“Hardworkin’ fella like you, Leon, shouldn’t be sittin’,” Jose said. “Oughta be out savin’ the world.”

Frank nodded toward the printout. “What you got there?”

Janowitz folded the printout, tossed it onto the desk, and dropped his feet to the floor, righting himself in a controlled crash.

“Subcommittee financials.” Janowitz tapped the printout with his fingertips. “And xeroxes of Gentry’s appointment calendar.”

“Why the frown?” Frank asked.

Janowitz stared for a moment at the printout and the sheaf of xeroxes as though searching for the answer, then looked at Frank and Jose.

“You know how sometimes you know there’s something right under your nose? But you really aren’t seeing it?” He turned to the paperwork on the desk and shook his head.

“Sometimes,” Jose suggested, “you’re lookin’ too hard.”

“Or too long,” Frank added. “TGIF. There’s something called weekend. We do get one every month or so.”

Janowitz smiled. “I haven’t forgotten.” He reached down to a shopping bag on the floor and pulled out a bottle of champagne.

“Mumm demi-sec,” he said, gazing lovingly at the label. “Mrs. Janowitz and I will be in New York tomorrow night. We will be ensconced in the Plaza Hotel, drinking champagne, fucking ourselves absolutely silly, and forgetting there’s any such thing as crime and punishment.”

Frank felt suddenly tired and at the same time envious. “You figure out how to do the last, let Hoser and me know.”

A few minutes later, on the sidewalk outside headquarters, Frank and Jose watched Janowitz head toward his car, shopping bag in hand.

“We ever that young?” Jose asked.

Frank took in Janowitz’s bounding stride. “We ever that smart?” he asked back.

Both men stood quietly, until Jose broke the silence. “Bothers you, doesn’t it… him leaving the force.”

Frank didn’t say anything immediately. Then, feeling a sense of loss, he said, “It’s like watching a priest walk away from the Church.”

Janowitz started his car. The headlights flashed on.

“Helluva church we’re in,” Jose said.

Frank watched Janowitz back out of his parking place and drive down the block. He watched until the taillights disappeared around the corner.

“Wonder if there’s another room at the Plaza.”