A Murder of Justice

TWENTY-NINE

Gentry’s military files in his lap, Frank rested his head back against the passenger seat. The trail to CIA and Colombia was there-UCLA political science, Army commission into Military Police, Ranger school, and service in the Army Attache Office, Bogota. Outstanding efficiency reports, top-notch physicals.

A man on paper… a paper man… two-dimensional… black-and-white.

He put Gentry out of his mind and, half drowsing, took in the trees and the river. He liked the GW Parkway. An endangered species in an age of interstate takeovers. Built in the 1930s, it had become a commuter freeway, but it still kept its original character as an extended park along the Potomac, from Great Falls in the north to Mount Vernon in the south.

“What you thinking about?” Jose asked.

It took him a moment to realize Jose was talking to him.

“Why you think I’m thinking?”

Jose took his eyes off the road long enough to shoot Frank a look that said, “Come on.”

Frank sorted through the jumbled thoughts and images.

“We got us a first-class fur ball, Hoser. One day, everybody’s got the same picture down cold. Then somebody pops Skeeter. All of a sudden, it’s like somebody took the picture apart like a jigsaw puzzle and tossed all the pieces up in the air. We don’t know who did Gentry… or why. We don’t know how Gentry fits. Hell, we don’t really know Gentry. And we don’t know why Pencil’s dead along with his woman.”

“And,” Jose added, “we don’t know about the cartels.”

Frank motioned toward the roadside sign indicating Chain Bridge Road.

“And to finish out our day, Congressman Richie Rich demands our presence.”

Jose slowed and stopped at the top of the ramp, then turned east on Chain Bridge Road.

Less than a mile down the road, Frank pointed to a “Private Road” marker beside a drive that disappeared into a thick stand of trees.

“I think that’s it.”

The winding drive led through the trees to a low hilltop and a massive gate between two stone columns. A chain-link fence Frank estimated to be at least nine feet high ran from the columns into the dense woods on either side.

“Welcome to Fort Knox,” Jose grunted. He stopped the car, lowered his window, and reached out to punch a button on a pedestal-mounted squawk box.

A short static burst, and a disembodied voice followed, asking for name and identification. Jose held his badge case out to the camera lens set in beside the loudspeaker. A moment’s pause and the gate slid silently open.

For fifty or so yards through more trees, the drive dipped, then rose again. The trees dropped away with a final turn.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Frank breathed.

The house crested the highest ground of Arlington Ridge, the basalt granite promontory channeling the Potomac into the rapids below. Three stories of pristine white wide-plank siding, a mantle of greened copper roof with ornamental cupolas and weathervanes. A rolling lawn impeccably trimmed, magnolias towering over the two-story columned portico, a raked gravel drive. The scene echoed with the sounds of horse’s hoofs and carriage wheels.

Jose laughed. “Reckon Miz Scarlett’s home, Massa Rhett?”

A large-boned blonde woman in a severe black dress answered the door. She wore no makeup, and her hair was pulled back to a tight bun. She took Frank’s and Jose’s cards, muttered a “Please wait” that sounded like a command, and closed and locked the door.

Jose made an exhaling sound over his lips. “Wouldn’t want to mess with that,” he whispered.

Frank nodded. “Woman looks like she might have a collection of tattooed lampshades at home.”

A moment later came the sound of a bolt being drawn back, and the door opened.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen, I’m Cornell, the house manager.”

Cornell spoke with an English accent and carried himself with the muscular poise of a gymnast. His dark brown hair had been meticulously bleached at the tips, and he wore gray slacks and a dark blue Lacoste knit shirt. On first glance, Frank judged him to be in his late twenties or early thirties, but another look revealed lines etched around the eyes and mouth; lines that came with an understanding of the capriciousness of life.

“We’re here to see-” Frank began.

“Yes,” Cornell said with a professionally pleasant modulated voice, “this way.” He turned and led them inside.

Large black-and-white square tiles paved a foyer Frank imagined he could fit his row house in and still have room for a basketball court. The curving ebony arms of a dual marble staircase swept down from a mezzanine encrusted with crystal chandeliers.

Frank realized that he and Jose had stopped to gawk, when Cornell turned around.

“It is, isn’t it?”

“It certainly is,” Frank said, recovering.

“Mrs. Rhinelander found it in Alabama,” Cornell said in a passive tone.

Puzzled, Frank asked, “The staircase?”

“No.” Cornell smiled with the mischievous delight of an amateur magician enjoying his audience’s mystification. “The house. She had it disassembled and brought here.”

Cornell led them toward a door between the two staircases.

Frank felt a whispering gust of air in his face as Cornell swung the heavy door open. Muted lighting and dove-gray walls blurred the dimensions of the gallery, drawing the eye to paintings that seemed to float magically in a mist.

A critic might have called the collection eclectic. Frank found it jarring. A Madonna and Child icon gave way to an oil of two wrestlers, their side-lit bodies twisted and straining against a dark background.

“George Bellows.” Cornell gazed thoughtfully at the wrestlers. “Magnificent muscular definition, don’t you think?” he asked, without expecting an answer.

Halfway down the gallery, a low bench along the left wall faced a still life hung on the wall opposite. The painting looked familiar. Frank stopped to examine it more closely.

Cornell put on a tiny condescending smile, almost a smirk.

“It looks like a Cezanne,” Frank ventured.

“It is a Cezanne. Still Life with Apples and Peaches, circa 1905.”

“Unh-hunh,” Frank said, now more certain. “I’ve seen it before.” He turned to Cornell. “The National Gallery?”

Cornell grudgingly awarded Frank a passing grade. “Mrs. Rhinelander lent it to them. We’ve just gotten it back.”

As they continued down the gallery, Frank thought he recognized a Chagall and something that looked authentically old Dutch-certainly not a Vermeer?-but by now he wouldn’t have been surprised to see Guernica or the Mona Lisa.

They reached the end of the gallery, and Frank looked back, taking it all in.

“Very nice.”

“The same contractor who built the Pompidou Center,” Cornell said with a burble of proprietary pride in his voice. “Separate climate control keeps the humidity and temperature constant. The light is concentrated in three spectral bands. Brings out the color and depth but doesn’t damage the paintings.”

Without knocking, he opened the door into the library.

Directly ahead, a waist-to-ceiling window stretched across the room, framing sky, forest, and the boiling, churning falls of the river below. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases lined the walls on right and left. An oak Victorian partner’s desk at least seven feet wide sat angled so its occupant could see the river as well as a semicircle of leather-upholstered chairs.

Cornell gestured to the chairs.

“Please sit. I shall fetch him.”

Jose watched the door close. He leaned close to Frank “ ‘Fetch him?’ ” he repeated in a mock English accent.

Several minutes passed. Finding himself drifting off, Frank got up, stretched, and walked over to the bookcases behind the desk. One shelf contained a matched set of large, folio-size volumes, gold-edged pages bound in burgundy leather. Using his restaurant French to translate the titles, Frank guessed them to be something about-or by-Voltaire. Elsewhere on the shelves, Melville’s Billy Budd led to Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Balzac’s Old Goriot, Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle-all, to judge from the bindings, first editions in what John McDonnell at Olsson’s would describe as “fine/fine” condition.

“You’re a reader, Lieutenant Kearney?”

Frederick Rhinelander stood at the desk. Behind him, a section of the bookcase was closing with a pneumatic sigh. Rhinelander glanced back at the meticulously crafted door, then at his visitors. He wore a bright, childlike smile.

“I love that thing,” he said, and pointed to the now closed door. “It always creates such a stir. Please… sit,” he told Frank, indicating the empty chair next to Jose.

“Gentlemen, thank you for coming out here. I hope I didn’t inconvenience you.” He looked at Frank, then Jose. It was Jose who first understood Rhinelander wanted an answer.

“No inconvenience,” Jose said.

“I had some issues here that required tending to,” Rhinelander responded. “You are familiar with congressional hearings procedures?”

Frank and Jose shook their heads.

Rhinelander sat back in his chair and matched his fingertips together, hands forming a tent. “Hearings are a way that Congress gets testimony on a formal record… Sworn testimony,” he added with a prim, schoolmarmish severity. “And then Congress decides, based on that record, what laws must be passed, changed, or done away with.”

“And we’re going to have to testify?” Jose asked.

Rhinelander pursed his lips. “Not necessarily. I asked you here today to get some ideas as to what lines of questioning would be most beneficial.”

“Who to?”

“Why, to the people of the District, of course,” Rhinelander said loftily.

“Oh. Okay. How can we help?”

Rhinelander casually dropped his right hand beneath the desk, then brought it up.

Somewhere in the library, Frank imagined, discreetly placed microphones and videocameras had been alerted.

“Let’s start with Kevin Gentry’s killing. The papers are reporting a Colombian connection. What do you know about that?”

“That there isn’t much there, Mr. Chairman,” Frank said.

“What is there?”

“First, there’s the business dealings.”

“Which are?”

“Skeeter’s and Pencil’s dealings. You don’t do big-time drugs in the District without connections. Either Jamaican or Colombian. Pencil’s former girlfriend says he and Skeeter traveled repeatedly to South America. Then there was the weapon used to kill Skeeter and wound Pencil-”

“Yes, yes,” Rhinelander said with a sour note. “The gun that also killed Kevin and”-Rhinelander pointed an accusing finger-“and reopened a case that your department had marked closed.”

Jose ignored Rhinelander’s charge. “So we have a connection between Skeeter, Pencil, and Kevin Gentry. Then you add the fact that Kevin Gentry had worked for CIA in Colombia and that somebody killed Pencil by cutting his throat and pulling his tongue out through the opening-what they call a Colombian necktie.”

Rhinelander shuddered and ran his tongue across his lips. “Grotesque.” Recovering, he turned his hands palms up. “But is that all we have?”

“So far.”

“Brian Atkins might have something,” Frank said. “Have you talked with him?”

The corners of Rhinelander’s mouth curved up ever so slightly. He regarded Frank for a moment, then returned to Jose.

“Let me ask you this.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Because you have no evidence doesn’t mean there is no evidence. Might it be possible that there is more substantial evidence of a Colombian connection?

Jose nodded. “Yessir, it’s possible.”

“And if there is more substantial evidence,” Rhinelander pressed on, “is your department best qualified to conduct the investigation?”

Frank watched his partner size up Rhinelander; he could feel Jose working out what he’d answer.

“A lot of ifs, Mr. Chairman.” Jose began carefully, deliberately, a mason laying a foundation. “We’re responsible for investigating homicides in the District of Columbia. If the perp… the perpetrator… is from another country and he’s in the District, we’ll apprehend him. If he’s somewhere else, we’ll get that jurisdiction to apprehend him. We may not be Interpol or the Bureau, but we know how to track down killers and take them off the street.”

Rhinelander’s tightened lips said he wasn’t happy with Jose’s answer. Rather than challenge Jose, however, he asked, “Do you have any suspects?”

“Not yet.”

“No suspects.” Rhinelander said it in a pious monotone, putting a mark against a mental checklist. “Any prospects?” he followed up.

“Sir, if we had ‘prospects,’ we’d have suspects,” Jose said. “Way we work, we gather information. We put the pieces together. We’re still gathering.”

“Informants?”

Rhinelander’s tone was maddeningly condescending, arrogantly dismissive.

Frank saw the muscle along Jose’s jawline quiver. He stepped in. “People are talking to us.”

Rhinelander toyed with a gold fountain pen, taking its cap off, making several exploratory dashes on a lined pad, putting the cap back on, settling the pen on the desktop. He looked at Frank, then at Jose.

“You realize, of course, that this is a high-visibility case?”

“We noticed,” Jose said.

“And you realize,” Rhinelander went on, “that my subcommittee funds the District government.”

“Yes, we-”

“And you realize”-Rhinelander cut Jose off-“that along with funding we are responsible for oversight.” He paused a beat. “Oversight,” he continued in his prim, schoolmarmish voice, “means that we want to make certain those funds are properly spent.” Another beat. “Do you appreciate that?”

Jose took a breath, then swallowed. “Yes, sir,” he said, “we appreciate that. We really do.”

Rhinelander weighed that for a moment before accepting it. Then he picked up the gold fountain pen and twirled it between his fingertips like a baton.

“Thank you for your time, gentlemen. It’s helpful to have an appreciation of the state of play before we open the hearings. Cornell will show you out.”

As though summoned telepathically, Cornell materialized in the doorway. Leaving the library, Frank looked back: Rhinelander was gone, and the bookcase door was just sliding shut.

Jose tossed the keys to Frank. Neither of them spoke until they were well down the parkway toward Washington.

“Feels like we been on a short trip to hell,” Jose said dispiritedly.

“Some people are rich, Hoser, and other people just have money.”

Jose smiled. “Not bad. Who said that?”

“Maggie Kearney’s little boy Frank.”

“That sounds like my daddy.”

“Hoser, that sounds like a compliment.”