Robert Andrews - A Murder of Justice

They sat without talking. Music, soft and indistinct, carried across the water from the cabin cruiser. Finally Kate squeezed his hand. “You’re down.”

“Just tired.”

“It’s more than that.”

He started to shake his head but then realized she was right. He probed, trying to sense the outlines of something lying hidden in the underbrush.

“It’s a feeling. A feeling more than a thought.”

“And the feeling’s like…?”

He probed some more. “It’s like the dropping feeling in your gut,” he added slowly, “like when you sense you’re on a losing team.”

“Losing? Why?”

“Emerson’s face this morning… He sees all this as something he just wants to go away. He tried to sweep it under the carpet once. He’d try again, if he got the chance.”

Kate thought about that, then shook her head. “But he can’t,” she said, “it’s gotten too big.”

Frank drew in the night air and exhaled in a sigh. “Yes, he can. For precisely that reason… that it’s gotten too big. He can pass it off to the Bureau.”

“What makes you think that’s probable?”

“Knowing Emerson for twenty-five years.”

“In a perfect world,” Kate challenged, “why’d it make any difference? If the Bureau could solve it, or the department?”

“In a perfect world it wouldn’t make any difference. In the real world it does. It makes a real difference, who closes the case.”

“Why?”

“If the Bureau takes this over, it sends a message to everybody on the street. It tells them DCMPD can’t do its job. We’re already catching a load of crap because of the cold cases. Now we throw our hands up because this’s just too hard?”

He felt anger rising in his throat. “It’s not up to the FBI or the CIA to keep the peace on the streets. That’s our job.”

“And you don’t want your job taken away?”

“I don’t want somebody saying I can’t do it. Especially somebody like Emerson.”

“And there’s Atkins,” Kate said simply.

He had the eerie feeling she’d read his mind.

“This morning”-Frank drifted, putting his thoughts together for the first time-“we were standing in the door at Pencil’s. There Atkins was, wearing a raincoat that must have cost what I pay for a suit. Hell, two suits. He’s got a driver waiting in a big black car to take him back to an office that’s like the Taj Mahal. Beside him, Hoser and I come off looking like poor cousins… a pair of ragpickers.”

Kate squeezed his hand again. “Envy… a deadly sin,” she teased.

“No. I don’t want anything he’s got. He earned it… putting down Juan Brooks. He stuck his neck out on that one.”

“You and Jose have done a lot of that. But nobody’s given you two a Taj Mahal office.”

“I may not be happy all the time, but I’m content… where I am, what I’m doing. I think Hoser is too. Anyway, neither one of us was cut out to work in a Taj Mahal. What does bug me, though, is a system that rewards the dodgers… the Emersons.”

“I think he’s good for you and Jose,” Kate said, a provocative lilt in her voice.

“Night air’s corroding your brain.”

“No… think about it. You and Jose define your own rewards. One of those is getting the job done despite the Emersons. It’s almost perverse… Sometimes, I think, the worse he is, the better you two get. So maybe the system works?” Kate said it as though she were saying “Checkmate.”

“It works because Hoser and I are dinosaurs,” Frank came back. “We remember how it used to be. New talent comes in, they’re isolated. They didn’t know the old-timers… the Terry Quinns… the guys who were leaders, not managers. The dodger culture rewards risk aversion. The good ones get out-”

Kate finished the thought. “Like Janowitz?”

“Or sell out, like Milton.” Frank watched as the cabin cruiser dropped anchor off Teddy Roosevelt Island and another 737 swung in from the north just over Key Bridge.

Kate reached across and put her hand on his forearm.

“You and Monty have room for a visitor tonight?”

The faintest of sounds… a slap, a slide, a thump.

Frank opened his eyes. The alarm said just before six a.m. He looked over to Kate. Monty was curled on the pillow above her head. Kate was still asleep, but the way the tiny muscles tightened around her eyes told him she was floating up toward waking.

“Paper,” he whispered.

Kate breathed something in acknowledgment and her face relaxed as she drifted off again.

Frank shut his eyes. Somewhere down the street a dog barked; he wondered if it was Murph. He felt Monty get up and make his way toward the foot of the bed. He opened his eyes in time to see the big cat stretch, then jump to the floor, landing with a cushioned thump. Frank gave up the thought of going back to sleep and instead lazily gazed at the ceiling, listening to Monty at work at his water dish.

After a second or two, he sat up and swung his feet to the floor. He snagged a pair of running shorts out of the bureau, and went downstairs, Monty following.

The Post lay where it had skidded across the sidewalk and caromed off the front door. He picked up the paper, and stood, still half asleep, sorting out the sky.

Soft blue. Rain-washed blue. There was another word. A better word. What was it? Cerulean? Yes… cerulean. Cerulean blue. A good spring day in the making. With a cerulean-blue sky.

He shifted his gaze from the sky to the paper in his hand.

Papers come in plastic bags now. Even when it’s not raining. Condoms for newspapers? Come to think of it, not a bad idea.

In the kitchen, first things first. Monty to be fed. Then the coffee. Frank ground it extrafine and, while the maker gurgled and wheezed, stood absorbed in thinking about absolutely nothing but the coffee filling the carafe.

He’d finally sat at the table with a full mug and taken the Post out of its plastic sheath when Kate, wearing one of his shirts, entered and came over to the table and tousled his hair.

He slipped his hand under the hem of the shirt.

Kate swatted his hand. “Let’s not get started.”

That made him want even more to play around under the shirt.

“Why not?”

“Because,” Kate said, twisting away and walking to the cabinet for a mug, “I don’t like burnt coffee.”

With a sigh, he let his early-morning fantasy fade and opened the paper. Like a magnet, the headline drew his eye. His chest tightened.

“Holy… shit!”

Carafe in one hand, mug in the other, Kate turned.

Frank held the paper up, pointing to the headline.

“Subcommittee Chairman to Investigate District Drug Crimes.”

He read the subhead aloud: “ ‘Rhinelander says recent deaths connect to Gentry murder.’ ”

Before he read any further, the phone on the wall, his pager, and his cell phone interrupted with a medley of electronic beeps, chirps, and whistles.

Mayor Seth Tompkins wore a pale-yellow shirt with antique gold cuff links, charcoal-gray trousers held up with burgundy-and-dark-blue suspenders, and his trademark bow tie, today a carefully knotted silk accent that matched the blue in the suspenders.

“Not only do we learn that Congressman Frederick Rhinelander is going to open hearings on crime and punishment in the District,” Tompkins said in a deceptively quiet voice, “we find that the good editors of The Washington Post”-here his irritation cracked through the veneer of calm-“recommend that the congressman expand the hearings to investigate the overall performance of my administration.”

Frank’s first impression was of a spare, neat man, a man who shaved each morning, lathering with a brush, using his grandfather’s straight razor, and splashing his face with bay rum after.