A Murder of Justice

EIGHT

Still savoring Kate’s warmth and traces of her perfume, Frank fit his key into the lock and turned. He pushed the door open and stepped into the entryway.

It took a second for him to realize that the alarm had been switched off. At the same time, he heard the sound of metal sliding on metal. Reflexively, his hand moved inside his jacket.

His father stood in the kitchen doorway down the hall. He held a frying pan in one hand.

For a frozen moment, the two men faced each other.

Tom Kearney broke the spell. “Breakfast?” He smiled and waggled the frying pan. “Beat you to the draw.”

Frank felt the tension between his shoulders disappear, and he eased the Glock back into its holster.

“What’re you doing here?”

His father gave him a longish look. “Shaker lathe. Remember?”

Shaker lathe? Shaker lathe? His father might as well have been speaking Swahili.

Tom Kearney still held the frying pan up. “You’re not the one who’s supposed to be getting short-term memory loss. You and Kate,” he prompted, “weekend before last…”

It came back: The old stone millhouse his father had converted into a woodworking shop. Outside, the waterwheel slowly turning. Inside, he and Kate stood watching his father at a router, cutting a precise channel through a thick cherry post. Overhead, the massive oak shaft groaning and creaking as it turned the web of pulleys and leather drive belts. On a low bench, a chest of drawers in progress.

Kate had mentioned the absence of electric tools. That led his father off on a tutorial about nineteenth-century cabinetry. And Kate had said something about Hancock, Massachusetts, and the Shaker village. And then his father…

“Oh,” Frank said, putting the memory together, “oh, yeah.”

His father still had the quizzical look, as though still unconvinced that Frank had made the connection.

“Where’s your truck?”

Tom Kearney lowered the frying pan and returned to the range. “Up at Judith’s.”

“Oh.”

His father’s eyes narrowed. “How’d you mean that?”

“What?”

“That ‘Oh’ of yours.”

Frank grinned. “Just happy to see you in town. I ran into Judith the other day, coming out of Dean and DeLuca. She seemed happy too.”

“Really?”

It was clear, the way his father asked, that Judith Barnes’s being happy was important.

“Getting serious, Dad?”

Tom Kearney cocked his head, and his eyes drifted off into mid-distance somewhere above Frank’s head. “Yes,” he said slowly, “yes, it is.” He set the frying pan down and leaned back against the counter. A man coming to a conclusion he’d been working on, thinking about, but not putting it into words. “For a while after Maggie’s death…” he trailed off. “No… for a long time after… I prided myself for getting on with my life. I fixed up the millhouse, got into serious cabinetry. Got to believing I didn’t need anybody…”

“Then Judith?”

“Then Judith.” Tom Kearney nodded. “You live long enough, you get to know something about yourself. I’m one of those people who has to share. If we don’t… if we can’t… there’s something good in us that atrophies. It just withers away.”

He stood there, thinking about that, then turned and picked up the frying pan.

“Scrambled? Or fried?”

Frank sat at the harvest table, sipping coffee, and watched his father at the stove. He traced the ancient scars in the tabletop with an index finger.

Been what? Five? No… six months.

Six months since the early-morning phone call and the strangled words. Then the long weeks later, watching his father grit his way through physical therapy. During those grueling sessions, Frank understood how a younger Tom Kearney had gutted it through World War II-jump school at Fort Benning, parachuting into Normandy, and, finally, in muddy combat boots and no longer young, drinking captured champagne in Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest.

Fast forward-the murder of Mary Keegan, the frantic search for her killer, and the lives that search changed. Among them Judith Barnes’s and his own father’s.

“Hello, furry one.”

Tom Kearney looked down at Monty. The big cat had come out of nowhere and was winding around his legs.

“A little egg?”

Monty sat staring raptly at Frank’s father.

With one hand, Tom Kearney found a saucer in a nearby cabinet and, with the other, deftly scooped up a heaping tablespoon of scrambled eggs.

“He won’t eat eggs,” Frank said.

Monty was into them before Tom Kearney could get the saucer on the floor.

Frank shook his head. Cats.

His father had moved easily. No left-side dragging. The stroke might as well have not happened. Except that it had. And it had brought with it a sense of mortality closing in.

It’s not all bad-knowing how near death always is. We’re here. Then we’re not. And the world moves on-

Frank realized he’d missed something his father had said. “What?”

“Skeeter Hodges.” Tom Kearney put the plates on the table. He pulled up a chair opposite Frank and sat. “Tell me about it,” he said, cutting into a sausage. “Begin at the beginning.”

“Hoser and I got the call… Friday night… about eight…”

Bayless Place… flashes of blue and red… the Orioles… Teasdale… isn’t one bunch of gang-bangers, it’s gonna be another… Pencil Crawfurd in the ICU… Marcus and Skeeter’s mother…

His father listened, interrupting only to ask an occasional question.

Frank finished. Tom Kearney sat quietly, somber, reflective. Frank remembered his father’s days presiding in court.

“The seventies and eighties in this town were awful,” Tom Kearney said. “I thought we were on the edge of anarchy. If it had been any other city but Washington, the place would have been under martial law. I thought things had gotten better. But they haven’t. We’ve given birth to a lawless culture. It’s passed on from generation to generation… like a family business. Brutal, unforgiving enterprise. You make a wrong decision and you get a nine-millimeter retirement or life in an eight-by-ten cell. The ones who succeed… who make it big… become even more deadly than their parents.”

“Survival of the fittest,” Frank mused. “Criminal Darwinism at work.”

Tom Kearney shrugged and rolled one hand in a gesture of futility. “Now, the numbers business doesn’t surprise me. You let politicians play with numbers, it’s turning the proverbial fox loose in the henhouse.” He got up from his chair, unfolding slowly to stand. He reached for Frank’s empty plate, stacked it on his own, and made his way to the sink.

“Fella with the lathe said he’d meet me at the flea market.” Tom Kearney said. “He ought to be there by now.”

Like so many mushrooms, the Georgetown flea market sprang up on Sunday mornings in a school parking lot on Wisconsin Avenue, just across from the Safeway. From Frank’s house, it was a good walk: up Thirtieth to R Street, past Katharine Graham’s home, Oak Hill Cemetery, Montrose Park, and Dumbarton Oaks.

At the market, his father went off to deal with the fella with the Shaker lathe, leaving Frank to wander through the aisles of vans. Canopies stretched out from them, over everything from honey, tomatoes, and home-baked breads to chandeliers, wicker chairs, and Bavarian beer steins.

He stopped to admire a bowling trophy awarded to one Norville “Splits” Casey in 1939. A nearby cigar box filled with marbles caught his eye. He picked out a marble and held it up, taken by a white ribbon twisting through the clear green glass.

“That there’s a corkscrew.” The speaker, a stocky older woman with short white hair, in red slacks and a Carolina Panthers T-shirt, held a Marlboro in the corner of her mouth.

“See how it cuts through the middle? That’s why they call it an auger. Augers go through the middle of a marble. When the corkscrew is on the surface, they call it a snake.”

“Akro Agate?” Frank asked.

The woman squinted at Frank through a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Yeah. Akro. You know marbles?”

“Some. How much for the box?”

He found his father, standing by the Shaker lathe, handing a check to a grizzled man in a red tank top.

Tom Kearney smiled. “Joe here’s going to deliver it, aren’t you, Joe?”

Joe nodded. “Wednesday, Judge?”

“Wednesday’s fine.” Tom Kearney stowed his checkbook away. He pointed to the cigar box under Frank’s arm.

“What do you have there?”

“Marbles.”

Tom Kearney acted as if it was the most natural thing in the world. He nodded approval. “Man can’t have too many marbles. You ready to head home?”

For several blocks, the two men walked in silence.

“I’ve been thinking,” Tom Kearney finally said.

“Marbles? Shaker lathes?”

“Hodges… the numbers. Fifteen hundred cold cases?”

“Yessir?”

Tom Kearney shook his head. “My years in court… for a while, a long while, I thought I’d seen it all. Took years for me to discover that all I’d actually seen was what had managed to get into court. And by the time it had gotten to court, it had been prettied up.”

After another silence, Tom Kearney continued. “The stories were still pretty damn grim. But in court, they’d become just that… stories. Wasn’t until later that I realized there was a lot of very nasty stuff that never got to court. That stayed out in the streets.”

“Kate said it teaches a lot of people they can get away with murder.”

Tom Kearney took that in, then asked, “Ever hear of the Plimsoll line?”

“A railroad?”

“No. In heavy seas, a ship that rolls over past a certain point isn’t coming up again. Nothing you can do will bring it back. In the 1800s, a British member of Parliament, Samuel Plimsoll, demanded a safety limit, a load line marked on a ship to limit the weight of cargo.”

“So you shouldn’t go past the Plimsoll line?”

Tom Kearney nodded. “I’ve often wondered if our society doesn’t have its Plimsoll line.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning fifteen hundred murders. Fifteen hundred unsolved murders loaded onto a society that isn’t too stable in the best of times. How much more weight before we pass our own Plimsoll line? What if enough people-the people outside the courtrooms, the people in the streets-start believing the ship’s going down?”

At home, Frank put the box of marbles down beside the answering machine in the kitchen. One message on the machine.

“Frank, I’m at home.”

Frank checked his watch. Jose had called fifteen minutes earlier. His number rang twice before he answered. Sheresa Arrowsmith had called him from the Hospital Center. Pencil Crawfurd was groggy, but able to talk.

Don’t know.”

Frank stood on one side of the bed, Jose and Arrowsmith on the other. A mound of bandages covered Crawfurd’s left shoulder, and dried saliva crusted around his mouth. The ICU was overly warm, the air heavy with the smells of ammonia, alcohol, and antiseptic soap.

“Come on, Pencil,” Frank said in disbelief. “Somebody stood out in the street… right beside your car… opened up a shooting gallery… and you don’t know who did it?”

“Don’t know.”

“What were you and Skeeter doing?”

“Sittin’ there. Just sittin’.”

“So you and Skeeter were just sitting on Bayless Place and somebody just walked up and just started shooting? And you don’t know who and you don’t know why?”

“Tha’s it. Show me the muthafucka who did it, I take care a him.”

“You got any guesses who?” Jose asked.

Crawfurd rolled his head to look venomously at Jose, then Frank. “You cops hard-headed? Or hard-hearing? Tol’ you. Don’t… know. We’re sittin’ there. Skeeter talkin’ to me. All a sudden his face blows out. I don’t remember hearin’ anything. I don’t remember seein’ anything ’cept his face blowin’ out at me.”

“Come on,” Jose prodded, “guess.”

Crawfurd said nothing.

“You not a guessing man, Pencil? Nobody’s name comes to mind? Nobody who’d want to take over the business you and Skeeter built up?”

Again, nothing.

Jose bent closer, bringing his face inches from Crawfurd’s. “Let me ask it this way, Pencil… Who you gonna watch out for when you get out? Who you gonna worry’s out there, waiting for you?”

Crawfurd ran his tongue across cracked lips. “Take care a myself.”

“Unh-hunh,” Jose said, “like you and Skeeter took care of yourselves on Bayless Place. Somebody caught you two badasses like sittin’ ducks.”

Pencil Crawfurd’s eyelids closed, then opened, then fluttered. “I’m tired,” he murmured, and fell off the edge of consciousness.

In the hallway, Frank turned to Arrowsmith. “He still need to be in ICU?”

The doctor shook her head. “Not really. It’s a precaution I take with all gunshot cases.”

“You keep him there another couple of days?”

“I can… Why?”

“Visitors have to sign in, don’t they?”

Arrowsmith nodded. “And you want to know who?”

In the car, Jose settled into the passenger seat.

“Bad-nigga wannabe.” He sighed.

“Scared bad-nigga wannabe,” Frank amended.

“I could use some hash browns.”

Frank started the car.

“With a couple eggs on top, sausage sides,” Jose added.

“It’s Sunday night.”

Jose gave Frank his “So what?” look. “Get us a running start on the week’s cholesterol quota.”