A Murder of Justice

THIRTY

Frank stood for an indecisive moment in the breakfast room, a CD of Handel’s Water Music in one hand, Johnny Cash, 1955-1983 in the other, and Monty wrapping around his left leg.

“Okay, what is it,” he asked the cat, “Freddy or Johnny?”

Monty growled an answer, so Frank loaded up the Man in Black. Cash started out with “Hey Porter.” Having made one decision, Frank wrestled with another. Freezer to microwave? Whip up an omelet? Call out for pizza?

The omelet won. From the refrigerator, Frank rescued four brown speckled eggs, two jalapeno peppers, several shallots, the butt of a Smithfield ham, and a wedge of extrasharp cheddar. He went back into the refrigerator for a half-bottle of a California Pinot Grigio.

Cash was driving his gravel-rich baritone hard with “Folsom Prison Blues,” accompanied by waves of inmates’ raucous cheering.

Frank notched up the volume. While the peppers and shallots sauteed, he grated some cheese, then cracked the eggs into a yellow-glazed mixing bowl. “… let that lonesome whistle,” he sang with Cash in a monotone as he beat the eggs, “blow my blues away.”

Monty eyed Frank as he slid the cooked omelet out of the pan onto a plate.

“Grandpa Tom didn’t make this, you know,” Frank warned the cat.

Monty’s gaze stayed fixed on the plate. Frank shrugged, sliced out a portion, and minced it into Monty’s bowl.

Ten minutes later, Frank had finished the omelet. Monty was sleeping by his bowl. Johnny Cash wasn’t liking it, but was guessing things happened that way. A swallow of Pinot Grigio gave off a hint of pears and seductively called for a refill.

The phone rang as Frank drank the rest of the wine in his glass.

Caller ID said it was a District number, caller name unknown. Monty had rolled over onto his back, all fours up, mouth slightly open, making sleep attractive as only cats know how.

The phone rang again.

Bad Frank: Ignore it, go for the second glass.

Good Frank: You’re a cop, you’re a cop, you’re a…

“Shit,” he muttered, and picked up the phone.

“I’m calling for Detective Frank Kearney.”

Bad Frank sneered as Frank cursed Good Frank.

“You got him.”

“Can we meet?”

Confident… no kid. Bass baritone. Maybe black, maybe not, but American English.

“Sure. My office is at-”

“It’s not good… coming to your office. Tonight somewhere? You call it.”

“This’s about?”

A heavy silence, then, “Kevin… about Kevin.” Steely with a subtext of anger.

I want to tell you about the Kevin I know. I want to tell you because I want the ratbastard who killed him to roast forever in the hottest corner of hell.

“How do I recognize you?” Frank asked.

Nineteen imposing feet of solid Georgia marble, Abraham Lincoln watched over the republic he’d saved. Every time Frank stood in the Memorial it struck him that someday Lincoln was going to speak, and it would be a voice of sadness, pride, and hope.

The memorial was empty but for a Park Service guide in her Smokey Bear hat and two Oriental couples standing in front of the Gettysburg Address chiseled in the south wall, on Lincoln’s right.

Frank checked his watch. He was several minutes early.

He walked over to the north wall. His eye traveled the familiar words of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. The first time he’d been here, it had been with his father. Tom Kearney had read the words to him. He had told him how thousands of people had stood in the mud beneath a gray and threatening sky in March 1865 to hear Lincoln. How it was that when Lincoln stood to speak, the sun broke through the leaden clouds to shine on the nation’s savior. And how it was that Lincoln then stood in the shadow of death, at the hands of John Wilkes Booth little more than a month later.

“ ‘Let us strive on to finish the work we are in… to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace.’ ”

The voice came from behind him and slightly to the right-the confident bass baritone.

Frank turned. The man stood like a pro running back, hands hanging loose but ready at his sides, body coiled slightly forward. Milk-chocolate skin, a thick black well-trimmed mustache. Scars above the eyes, and a larger, crescent-shaped ding on the point of his right cheekbone. The man held out a big square hand.

“I’m Bradford Sims.”

“I’m-”

“Franklin Delano Kearney.” Sims opened a credentials case. A holographic eagle seal floated across the photograph and a statement that Bradford Sims was an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency.

“Signed by Tenet himself,” Frank said. “I didn’t know you guys carried credentials.”

“Most of the time we don’t.” Sims replaced the case inside his jacket.

“What do you do at the agency?”

“You know the D.O.?”

“Directorate of Operations,” Frank translated. “The clandestine service.”

“Unh-hunh.”

“Nice night out.” Frank motioned toward the Washington Monument and, farther, the Capitol’s white dome.

Outside, the two men walked around to the back of the Memorial. Old-fashioned streetlamps along Memorial Bridge led across the Potomac to Arlington National Cemetery. There, just below the Custis-Lee Mansion, occasional glimpses of the flame at John Kennedy’s grave site.

“You’re running the investigation into Kevin Gentry’s death.”

“Yeah.”

“We hear there’re questions about Kevin and a Colombian connection.”

“We?”

Sims gave Frank a level look.

“I came to tell you,” Sims said, “the Agency’s not involved.”

Frank spotted a pair of runners coming across the bridge from Virginia. Two guys. Lean. Seven-minute pace. They’d probably angle off the bridge to his left, take the path down past the FDR Memorial. Then they’d have a choice: back into Virginia over the Fourteenth Street bridge or turn left by the Tidal Basin, pass the Jefferson Memorial. It would feel good, in the cool of the evening, hitting a stride where you felt you could run forever, your mind taken up with the running. He saw Sims watching the runners too, and he waited a moment.

Finally he asked, “Why do you think you have to tell me that?… That the Agency’s not involved?”

“Talk’s going that way,” Sims replied, eyes still on the runners.

“All by itself?”

Sims gave him an appraising look. Frank wondered where Sims had gotten the scar on his cheek.

“All by itself?” Frank repeated.

“It’s getting help.”

“From who?”

“Our cousins on Pennsylvania Avenue.”

“Why’d they do that?”

“Why does any bureaucracy do anything? Feather its own nest, get the fingers pointed somewhere else.”

The runners had taken the path south. They were well out of sight now, probably passing the FDR Memorial.

“You knew Gentry well, didn’t you?”

Sims’s face lengthened. “I was his boss in Bogota station.”

“What’d he do?”

“My deputy. His real talent was as a case officer. One of the best I’ve seen.”

“Case officers do… what?”

“Recruit agents… spies.”

“Like recruiting informants?”

“Like… but not exactly like.”

“What’s the difference?”

“A case officer’s got to be selective. His first question is, What do I need to know? Next question is, Who can get access to what I need to know? Third question’s the toughest: How do I get this person to work with me?”

“Money helps,” Frank said.

Sims didn’t shake his head, but turned it slightly. “Sometimes. But not all the time.” He directed an inquisitive glance toward Frank. “You’ve got informants,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You put them on the payroll?”

“No payroll. I can’t afford it, and the city makes it hard to use their money.”

“You’d rather have somebody motivated by something other than money?”

“Sure.”

“Same with a good case officer. What’s ideal is somebody with a dream or a beef, or maybe both. They work out better than a mercenary. They may not be as smart. They may not have as good an access. But you can rely on them.”

“And Kevin Gentry could find those people?”

Sims smiled, and it seemed to Frank that the smile had behind it memories of other times and other places. “He was one of the best. Kevin had a nose for recruiting the true believers.”

“Why’d he leave the Agency?”

“I didn’t want him to. We talked… hell, we argued… about it for several weeks. He didn’t feel that the Agency was doing enough in the drug war.”

“Meaning?”

“Look,” Sims said slowly, perhaps picking his way through a minefield of secrets, “the druggies were a new target for the Agency. If it had been up to us, we never would have gotten involved.”

“Why?”

“The old-line Agency guys, the Ivy League Wasps, cut their teeth in the OSS in World War Two. They saw drugs as a law enforcement problem.”

“Beneath their dignity.”

Sims smiled ruefully. “That, and they were afraid of it too.”

“Why?”

“The money. Enough goddamn money to buy a country or two. The cartel bosses almost bought Colombia. You could lose your soul in the drug trade. You can’t find out about the cartels by going to embassy receptions. Young Sammy Straightlace from Harvard or Yale would have to get chummy with the producers, the distributors, the street men. It was safer dealing with the commies and their nuclear weapons than it was dealing with the Colombians. The commies had rules. Tough rules, but they were rules. It was… cleaner… more fastidious.”

“More honorable than law enforcement,” Frank said with a touch of sarcasm.

Sims gave him a long, regarding look. “I didn’t say that. My father was a cop here in the District. A good one.”

“Retired?”

“Dead,” Sims said, the hurt shadowing his voice. “Fought his way through Korea, then got killed here in the King riots… ’sixty-eight.” He motioned toward Arlington National and the Kennedy flame. “Buried over there.”

Letting out a deep breath that was almost a sigh, Sims picked up the Colombia thread again.

“When I first got to Bogota, we were targeting the KGB in Latin America, the Cuban connections, the contras in Nicaragua. Then, when the Soviet Union crashed, the Ivy League mafia at headquarters sat back on their butts.”

“Until the cartels caught somebody’s eye.”

Sims nodded. “The White House woke up one fine morning and found that the drug lords like Pablo Escobar had decided they wanted their own country and part of ours. Somebody had to do something to keep Colombia from becoming Cocaine Central. And so the president dragged the Agency into spying on the drug business.” He laughed cynically. “There were heel marks all the way from Langley to Sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue.”

“And Kevin Gentry?”

“Like I said, he was one of the best. Same talents he used against the Soviets and Fidel he turned against Escobar and his pals. He built up a stable of solid-gold sources high inside the Medellin and Cali cartels.”

“You guys finally got Escobar, didn’t you?”

Sims didn’t say anything, but a smile twitched at the corners of his mouth.

“So, after he left the Agency, you kept in touch with Gentry?”

“He was a friend.”

“Officially?”

“The Agency can’t do that kind of thing in the States.”

“You’re not supposed to,” Frank said. “When’d you see him last?”

“Week before he was killed. We had dinner at a Tex-Mex place on the Hill.”

“He doing anything that could get him killed?”

“Easy to do these days, give somebody a reason to kill you,” Sims said. “Drive too slow, wear shoes somebody wants, be white, be black.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Sims looked at Frank as though trying to get behind his eyes.

“I know,” Sims said wearily. “I know.”

Silence stretched out until he took a deep breath. “Kevin had recruited somebody. A source.”

“For?” Frank asked, feeling the adrenaline kick in and his pulse pound in his throat.

“He didn’t say, exactly. I got the idea he was stoking up for some kind of investigation.”

“Source have a name?”

“Sure. But Kevin didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask.” Sims paused. “Look, it was a couple of buddies eating tacos and drinking Coronas. Most of the conversation was guy stuff… football, women, jobs. The part about his source took up less than a minute. It wasn’t anything you’d talk about in a bar.”

“Male?” Frank persisted. “Female?”

Sims shook his head. “No idea… none.”

“When do you think he recruited this source?”

Frank waited. Sims stared toward the river and the bridge with its lane of lights. Frank waited some more. Finally Sims looked at him.

“Summer ’ninety-eight.” He nodded, as if confirming that something inside had whispered the answer. “June, sometime.”

Kevin Gentry was standing out in sharper relief now, but Frank still had the sense of being surrounded by something he could not see.

“Do you think,” he began carefully, “there’s any chance Gentry got involved in something he shouldn’t?”

“Meaning?” Sims asked.

“Like you said, the money could buy a person’s soul.”

“No!” Sims cut off each word: “Absolutely… fucking… no!” Then, more softly, “There’s only a few people I’ve trusted with my life. Kevin was one.”

“I had to ask. Women friends?”

“Nobody serious. He was a refuge from a hatchet-fight divorce. Had a saying that second marriages-”

“Were a triumph of faith over experience,” Frank finished.

Sims gave him a sidelong grin. “You’ve been there too.”

“Anybody he was working with before he was killed?”

Sims thought, started to shake his head, then held it. “Woman, first name Elena. She ran one of those associations up on Dupont Circle.” Sims worked on it more. “Institute for… ah, yes! Institute for a Free Drug America.”

“You mean ‘drug-free’?”

Sims grinned. “Nope. Free drugs. As I recall, they want to give the stuff away.”

“Elena?”

“Yeah. Like I say, I don’t think I ever had the last name.”

Frank looked at his watch. “It’s been a day.”

The two men headed toward the front of the memorial. The floodlights had been turned off. The Park Service guide sat on one of the steps, filling in a report on a clipboard she held on her knees. Side by side, the two men went down the steps.

“By the way,” Frank said, “he ever say anything about his boss?”

“Not really. I got the impression the boss was a guy who bought his way through life with other people’s money. Kevin said once that Rhine… Rhine…?”

“Rhinelander.”

“Oh, yeah.” Sims laughed. It was a good laugh, one that reminded you of Friday afternoons at a bar with a buddy, and a beer in front of you that was probably one too many but wouldn’t matter until tomorrow morning.

“That Rhinelander’s idea of heaven,” Sims said, “was to be the best-dressed at a Hamptons wedding.”