Robert Andrews - A Murder of Justice

Bouchard grinned. “Helluva combination, Mr. Thurmond.”

Thurmond returned a conspiratorial smile. “A combination to die for.” He paused, then turned and disappeared through the swinging doors into the kitchen.

“We got a choice,” Bouchard said. “We suck up to Atkins and order scrod, or we go with the house.”

“Scrod taste better than it sounds?” Jose asked.

“Has to, Hoser,” Bouchard said.

A moment’s silence as the three men looked over their menus. Frank glanced up from his and found Jose and Bouchard, their menus closed, eyes on him.

Bouchard signaled to Dobbs, who came over and took their orders. Then he turned to Frank and Jose. “So what’s new?”

Jose told him about the meeting with Cookie, how Pencil had been fingering Zelmer Austin for Gentry’s killing.

Bouchard listened intently for a few moments before he raised one hand an inch off the table and nodded toward the door.

From behind Frank and Jose came Brian Atkins’s voice. “I invite you to dinner and I’m late.”

Bouchard, Frank, and Jose started to get up, but Atkins waved them down.

“You guys looked at the menu?”

Bouchard nodded. “We’ve ordered.”

Atkins grinned. “Hope you went with the beef. My cholesterol’s got me stuck with the scrod.” He made a face. “An acquired taste.”

Bouchard gestured toward Jose. “We were just catching up.”

“I was telling Robin about a meeting,” Jose said.

Atkins nodded. “Go on.”

Jose backtracked, working his way through the meeting with Cookie. In the middle of it, Dobbs brought Atkins’s scrod, New York strip steaks for Frank and Bouchard, and a Delmonico for Jose.

Atkins looked longingly at the steaks, then sipped his iced tea. “So Pencil dropped the dime on Zelmer Austin? That Austin did Kevin Gentry?”

“And now, Pencil’s split,” Frank said.

“You think it spooked him, hearing that the same weapon that killed Skeeter killed Gentry?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“Where does that lead?” Robin asked. “Is Pencil afraid that the same guy who did Skeeter is going to come after him?”

“You’ve got to remember,” Jose said, “two years ago, Pencil was pushing the story that Zelmer Austin killed Gentry. Now Pencil finds out it isn’t so… or that other people know it isn’t so.”

Frank cut in. “Then again, we don’t know for sure that Zelmer didn’t do it. Just that the admin case against him doesn’t hold up.”

“I’m getting an overload,” Bouchard said. “What all this boils down to is… what?”

“Finding Pencil,” Atkins answered. He turned to Frank and Jose. “I know you guys are already working that. Could we help?”

Frank paused. He felt Jose’s shoe nudge his.

“Emerson wanted to set up a task force,” Frank said, searching for a graceful out, “but Jose and I wanted to keep it small. It’s just us and another detective.”

Atkins nodded emphatically. “I think you were right. I wasn’t envisioning a bureau pile-on. No publicity. Just one person.” At “person,” Atkins put his hand on Bouchard’s shoulder.

Frank and Jose exchanged glances. Both nodded.

“Deal,” said Jose.

Neither Frank nor Jose said anything until they were on the sidewalk.

“What about that?” Frank asked.

“Great coconut cake,” Jose replied.

“No… What Atkins was up to?”

“They want in,” Jose said. “Atkins was nice about it. But we’d said no, he would have gone to Emerson…”

“Who’d have folded like a cheap suitcase…”

“And probably gone ahead with that brain-fart of his about a task force. At least we got Robin and no publicity.”

“We got Robin,” Frank amended, “but I’m not betting on no publicity.” He paused, playing out possibilities in his head. “Yesterday afternoon, Rhinelander calls Atkins. Whines about having us on his ass…”

Jose picked up. “… Atkins sees an opportunity to get the Bureau in on the case…”

“… and score points with Rhinelander at the same time,” Frank finished.

Ahead, down Pennsylvania Avenue, windows shone on the Capitol’s West Front, and the dome glowed white against a dark velvet-blue sky.

Nothing in this town works along a straight line. Everything moves along a curve just in front of you. And you can never see around the curve.

Frank pointed toward the Capitol. “Tomorrow morning, why don’t we drop up and see how Janowitz’s doing?”

Gentry’s personnel file… nothing in it but his resume, pay records, and a couple of letters of commendation.”

Leon Janowitz pushed the folder across the table to Frank and Jose. Meeting in Janowitz’s cramped cubicle was impossible. It was Friday, the cavernous subcommittee hearing room wasn’t being used, and so the three men huddled at the witness table. Before them, a semicircle of raised seats from which subcommittee members could look down on those testifying and into the cameras. Centered on a low wall below the seats, the crest of the House of Representatives marked where Frederick Dumay Rhinelander would preside.

Looking up at the crest, Frank remembered a vacation in Rome when he and Kate had toured the Colosseum. He had stood in the arena and had looked up toward where, with a roll of the hand, emperors had once decreed who would live and who would die for the entertainment of the crowd.

“ROTC at UCLA,” he heard Jose reading off the resume. “Lieutenant, Southern Command…”

“I’ve asked for his service records,” Janowitz said. “They have to send off to St. Louis.”

“Law school, NYU,” Jose picked up. “Then State Department, Western Hemisphere Affairs…”

“I’ve had a few of those,” Janowitz murmured.

“Those… what?” Jose asked.

“Affairs in the western hemisphere,” Janowitz cracked.

Jose frowned and lowered his eyelids and gave Janowitz his “Down, boy” look, then continued. “Four years at State, then staff of Senator Patterson, New York, then here.”

“Interesting background,” Frank said. “Anything else?”

“Just this.”

Janowitz passed over a sheet of paper.

“Character references,” he explained. “Gentry gave them when Rhinelander interviewed him for the job.”

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.