Strachey's folly

Chapter 4

Maynard's chances of surviving were better than even. The surgeon told us that the head wound was messy but superficial, and the much more serious abdominal injuries had required major replumbing-just short of a colostomy and if Maynard lived through the next twelve hours, full recovery was a good possibility. The surgeon said Maynard's sturdy constitution and overall good health were a big help, but that infection was a danger and Maynard would have to be closely watched over the next day.

Timmy said, "He's already got a stomach infection."

"He does? What's that?" A small, soft-eyed man with a cleft chin, the surgeon looked interested in this.

Timmy explained how Maynard had apparently picked up a parasite that wouldn't let go in Zambia, Burkina Faso, or Kyr-gyzstan. "He's had it for going on a year," Timmy said.

"That'll be the least of Mr. Sudbury's problems," the doctor said. "Infections like that are a month in the country compared to the kinds that urban North American hospitals have to worry about."

Timmy said he didn't find that reassuring, and the surgeon left us with instructions on how to attempt to pry information on Maynard's condition out of the hospital bureaucracy.

At just after 2 A.M., in a cab rolling south and east through Washington's nearly deserted early-Sunday-morning streets, I said to Timmy, "Ray Craig isn't the worst cop I've ever run into in my long career of running into law officers who'd have been equally comfortable on either side of the law, but he may be the second or third worst. He's so in thrall to his own insecurities and hatreds that he can survive professionally only in a place where most of the actual criminals fit his idea of a criminal stereotype- black or Hispanic or whatever. Bust enough black heads, and he's bound to catch an actual criminal sooner or later. It's cops like this that create juries like the one that acquitted O.J.

"But nasty as Craig is, Timothy, I didn't come away with any sense that he's aware of Jim Suter's letter to Maynard or Suter's alleged perilous situation, or the Suter quilt panel or Betty Krum-futz or any of that. He's not a party to a nefarious plot who was digging around to see what we know. Craig is just another unimaginative, mildly disturbed cop in love with the obvious who, when he hears about shootings and Mexico, he immediately figures drugs. But I wouldn't interpret his remarks to mean anything more extensive or more worrisome than that. Trust him with what we know about the Suter situation? No way-the guy's a flake and an incompetent. Clue him in at this point and he's liable to get Suter killed, and maybe us, too. But is Craig worse than a bigoted hack? I don't think so."

Timmy had been fidgeting restlessly as I spoke, and now, keeping his hands down low, he gestured urgently in the direction of the cabdriver and said, "Yes, I'm sure you're right. Maybe we should just forget about all that." Then, looking otherwise wild-eyed, he winked at me.

Now he thought the cabdriver was in on it? Whatever he thought "it" was? I leaned up and read the driver's name spelled out alongside his photograph on the cabbie's license mounted on the visor. He was a slim black man in a brown sport coat that gave him a dressed-up look, and his name was Getachew Tessemma. The man had been soft-spoken and polite when we'd climbed into his cab. I assumed the name was African, maybe Ethiopian; with his slender nose and dark, delicate eyelashes the size of marquees, Tessemma resembled the maitre d' at the restaurant we'd eaten in six hours earlier.

Tessemma's had been the only cab parked outside the hospital when Timmy and I came out. I was aware that sweet, placid people could be treacherous-I had been deeply involved in the great Southeast Asian disaster arranged for the nation by Johnson, Nixon, Kissinger, and others. But was it remotely possible that this unprepossessing African who waited for fares outside a hospital in the middle of the night was somehow out to do us both in? I thought not.

I caught a glimpse of the street signs as we rode along Seventeenth Street, NW, the American Red Cross headquarters on our right, and then the old Pan American Union building. Timmy had gone to school in Georgetown and knew D.C. much better than I did, but I had visited the city often enough to know its basic layout. I said, "This is a good route to Maynard's house, isn't it? We're going to the Hill by way of the Tidal Basin and the Southwest freeway. We've been with Maynard when he's taken this route."

"It's one way of getting there," Timmy said, and glanced nervously left and right at the passing Washington scene.

We cruised past the Mall, where, just east of the Washington Monument, the AIDS quilt panels had been folded up and stowed away for the night. The exterior columns of the Lincoln Memorial, off to our right, were dark, but I caught a glimpse of the big, illuminated marble statue within the structure. The great man was seated stiffly in an armchair in a characteristically formal pose of the era. Today he'd be grinning in a designer polo shirt, maybe seated at the wheel of his and Mary's retirement RV.

We rolled past the Tidal Basin, where House Ways and Means Committee chairman Wilbur Mills had been nailed for DWI in 1974 and his companion, Argentine stripper Fanne Fox, had ended up splashing around zanily in the drink. In the American capital, history was everywhere.

Within minutes, we were off the freeway, onto the quiet residential streets behind the mausoleum-like House office buildings, and headed up E Street. At Maynard's house, midway up the block, yellow crime-scene tape was still stretched around his Chevy and tied to a street sign. But the cops were gone and the street deserted. We paid Tessemma, who did not shoot us in the back as we stepped out into the cool October night, and we walked up Maynard's front steps.

Maynard had left his keys on the dining room table before the shooting, and I had picked them up to lock up the house when I left for the hospital. Now I unlocked the wooden front door and stepped into the foyer, with Timmy close behind. Lights were on in the living room and dining room, as they had been when I left, but the rooms were otherwise not the same at all.

Drawers had been opened and their contents dumped on the African and Central American rugs. Books had been flung from shelves. Paintings and other artwork were largely undamaged, but many were hanging cockeyed, as if whoever had tossed the place had conducted a search so methodical that even the wall art had been carefully examined for-something.

Timmy said, "I've never seen this done before. It's nauseating."

I had seen it before and found it just as sickening this time as the last time and the time before that. I said, "Don't touch anything yet," and walked through the dining room and toward the kitchen in the rear of the house.

"Are you going to call the police?" Timmy said. "I don't know about that."

"I don't either. Although if we don't call the cops and it does turn out that some of them are involved in this, they may be inclined to think we know more than we actually know. It might be better for us-and for Maynard and maybe Jim Suter- if we look like a couple of uninvolved outsiders who are shocked and frightened by all of this, but ignorant of-whatever it is that's going on."

"Of course, that's exactly what we are."

"You don't have to remind me."

The kitchen was bedlam. Every pot, pan, and plastic refrigerator box had been left out on the counter or on the floor. The cupboards had been emptied of food and dishes. Food was piled in the sink-spices, Wheat Chex, fruit, peanut butter, peanut oil, sorbet, half a thawing frozen chicken.

"There's where they came in," I said, and we looked over at the sizable section of the back door around the lock that had essentially been dismantled.

"I'm surprised," I said, "that nobody heard this happen and reported it."

"Maybe somebody did report it. And the police never came."

"Oh, sure. The 911 operator, the dispatchers-they're all in on this… thing.

This conspiracy so vast it's got tentacles reaching into every level of law enforcement in the District of Columbia. Timothy, I'm not ready to go quite that far."

"How far are you ready to go?"

I tugged the broken door open and flipped on the switch for the backyard floodlight. The patio and fish tank seemed undisturbed. The back gate in the tall board fence was shut and locked. The intruder, or intruders, had apparently clambered over the fence both coming and going.

We made our way back to the dining room and up the half-open stairwell to the second floor. The mess upstairs was like the mess downstairs. Nothing seemed to have been purposely smashed; the chaos appeared to be the result of a methodical search that had been unsuccessful over a long time and across a lot of square footage.

I said to Timmy, "This job must have taken a couple of hours. I left for the hospital at about ten-forty. It's two thirty-five now. If the intruder was watching the house and waiting for us to leave, he could have jumped the fence early. But that would have involved a heavy risk of being overheard. If he'd waited for all the neighbors to go to sleep, after midnight, say-and on a Saturday night that would have been unpredictable-then he'd have run the risk of our coming back and catching him in the act."

"Unless, of course," Timmy said, "he or they were in touch with someone who could keep him or them informed about our location and movements. Then there'd be no risk at all of discovery."

"Uh-huh."

The middle bedroom, where Timmy and I were staying, had been ransacked just like Maynard's front bedroom. Our bags were open and our clothes strewn about.

"Jeez, I ironed that shirt myself," Timmy said. "Now look at it."

"You've had a rough night, Timothy. I just hope nobody went in the bathroom and sucked on your toothbrush."

"Look, you know what I mean."

I did. We went into Maynard's office in the small back room. File drawers had been yanked open and papers were everywhere. The disk boxes next to his computer were open and empty. Maynard's computer files were evidently gone.

The telephone answering machine on the desk was not blinking. I checked for the tape; it had been taken, too.

Timmy said, "It's a good thing you picked up Maynard's address book before you came to the hospital. I'll bet they'd have taken it."

"Maybe."

Timmy suddenly looked up from the debris around Maynard's Mac and said,

"The letter from Jim Suter! Do you think they took that? Where was it when we left the house?"

"It was right where it is now. In my pocket with the address book. I grabbed it just before the cab arrived."

"Good for you. Any particular reason you picked up the letter? Surely you didn't suppose for a second that Maynard's getting shot and that strange, turbulent letter with all the talk in it of murder and people on the Hill and death threats and the D.C. police-you didn't think all that suggested some kind of terrible conspiracy, did you?"

"No, I just did what I thought Maynard would have wanted me to do: keep that letter safe."

"Well, that's a good reason, too."

While Timmy changed out of his bloodstained clothes and went about straightening up the mess in the guest room, I walked down to the bathroom.

The medicine cabinet had been opened and most of its contents dumped in the sink. The magazines stacked on the shelf next to the toilet- The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, Smithsonian, Blueboy — looked as if they had been rifled; several lay open on the tile floor. I flipped through the Blueboy, then resumed examining the scene. The toilet paper had not been unrolled, a sign, perhaps, that the intruder whose job it had been to search the bathroom was essentially anal retentive, despite the nature of his assigned duties that night.

Downstairs, the doorbell rang. I stepped into the hallway. Timmy appeared in the guest room doorway and stood very still. There was an alertness in him that I knew was partly caffeine and partly fear. He said in a low voice, "Should we answer it?"

"I guess we should see who it is."

I started down the stairs as the bell rang again, and Timmy followed me.

In the living room, I pulled the curtains aside and looked out the bay window at the front stoop. A man stood there, but it was his car, double-parked alongside Maynard's Chevy, that drew my attention. It was a D.C. police patrol car, its flashers flashing.

"It's a cop," I told Timmy.

I went around and unlocked the door, opened it, and stood face-to-face with Ray Craig.

Craig said evenly, "Somebody in the neighborhood reported a disturbance in this house earlier. The officers who responded to the call were called to a robbery over on Half Street before they could investigate. I recognized the address on the report and thought I better come over and see what the problem was." He peered over my shoulder at Timmy, standing perfectly still, and at the wrecked interior of Maynard's house. His nicotine stench wafted into the room, and Craig said, "Looks like you had a break-in. Anything missing that you know of? It's been a real pisser of a night for you and your buddy Sudbury."

"It has," I said.

"We were just about to call the police," Timmy said.

Craig stared at him hard, his face still devoid of expression, but with something in the set of his head on his narrow shoulders that suggested suspicion mixed with contempt.