Robert Andrews - A Murder of Justice

“Where you from, Mrs. Morrow?”

A pause. Then, crossly, “Eads Street.” As though laying down a challenge, she added, “Forty-five-oh-four Eads Street.”

Again the voice sounded oddly familiar, and Frank recognized the address. Two blocks from Bayless Place.

“Go ahead, Mrs. Morrow. You got words for Mr. North and Mrs. Brady?”

“I do, Black Eagle,” she said, using Madison’s nickname. “Where you folks live?”

Dead air.

Frank imagined North and Brady, sensing a trap, exchanging wary glances.

“Well?” Morrow demanded.

“Ah”-North cleared his throat-“Great Falls. Great Falls, Virginia.”

“Potomac,” Brady answered, her voice tentative.

“Unh-hunh! Yeah,” Morrow replied, a sneer in her voice. “An’ how many a your whitebread friends in Puh-toe-muck or Great Falls ever had to chase drug dealers off their front porches?”

More dead air. It hung there, embarrassing, like a bad smell.

“I tell you how many!” Morrow’s voice rose with indignation. “None!”

Frank rapped the steering wheel and smiled.

Frances Morrow bored in. “You give us all these downtown arguments about the Constitution… You’re talking about Puh-toe-muck living. About how you folks in Great Falls live. I tell you what”-righteous anger rolled in her voice-“I tell you what-you come down to where I live. Or you go over to Bayless Place. You’ll find one thing, Mistuh North, Missus Brady-you’ll find the only thing wrong with guns is that the wrong people got them.”

Madison, recognizing a dramatic closing line when he heard one, took a break for a commercial. Frank imagined North and Brady wondering what the hell had just hit them.

Two large wooden desks dominated the center of Frank and Jose’s small office. Years earlier, they had pushed the desks together so they could work facing each other. A random collection of file cabinets and bookcases lined the walls. Above the bookcases on one wall was an Ipswich Fives dartboard that Frank had picked up in a London secondhand shop, surrounded by holes in the drywall attesting to sloppy marksmanship. The single window faced south, its sill home to an eclectic parade of potted plants over the years. Today, a variegated pothos shared its perch with a struggling African violet that Frank had bought at Eastern Market and a spider plant that Tina Barber had given Jose.

Jose stood looking out the window. He turned slowly when Frank walked in. He glanced up at the wall clock.

“You run this morning?”

“Yeah.” Frank saw that Jose had already made coffee. He picked his mug up off his desk, regarded the dark brown remainder of yesterday’s coffee, poured it out, then poured a refill. The coffee was scalding.

“Frances Morrow,” he said, and blew across the steaming mug, “on-”

“Joe Madison this morning.”

“Yeah.” Frank tried another sip. “Where’d we-”

“O’Brien case.”

Gears meshed. The picture materialized. Big woman. Filling the doorway of the small brick house. “Gray sweats,” he recalled.

“Redskins jersey,” Jose added. “Mean like no tomorrow.”

The phone rang. Jose answered. Listened. Hung up.

“Emerson wants to see us.”

Walking down the hallway toward the stairs, Frank noticed a weariness around Jose’s eyes.

“You sleep last night?”

Jose shook his head. “Going home, I stopped by Daddy’s.”

“Oh?”

“He wasn’t home. Mama said he was still at the church.”

A single light far up in the rafters illuminated the altar and pulpit. His father sat in a front pew, head bowed.

Jose put his hand on his father’s shoulder. Titus Phelps reached up and covered his son’s hand with his own.

“Getting late, Daddy.”

His father looked at him, then to the altar. He moved over. Jose sat down beside him.

Titus Phelps paused as if listening to a voice inside himself. “Just sitting here, talking with Jesus.”

“You heard about over on Bayless Place?”

His father turned to him. “You ever wonder, Josephus, what keeps us safe? Truly safe?”

“Go on, Daddy.”

“You’re my oldest son… a policeman. You’re strong… you’re smart. But you can’t keep us safe.”

Titus Phelps listened to his private, inner voice, then nodded in agreement.

“It’s inside us, Josephus, the power to keep ourselves safe. So we don’t have to fear the night. So we can trust our neighbors.” He paused, then, voice picking up momentum, continued: “That power is in us. Each of us. And if we don’t use it, it goes away. And if that happens, we won’t be safe, no matter how many police we have… even if they’re all as strong and as smart as my son.”

The words had rolled through the church toward the farthest pews in the back. Jose knew he’d heard the beginnings of a sermon yet to be preached.

They were now at the stairway. Frank reached out and squeezed Jose’s shoulder. “Let’s see what’s on Emerson’s mind.”

They pushed into Emerson’s outer office at eight-fifteen.

Shana looked up from her computer and frowned petulantly. “He’s been waiting.” She snapped an index finger toward Emerson’s door. The inch-long scarlet fingernail resembled a bloody talon.

Frank felt an acid clot of irritation in his throat.

Emerson stood behind his desk, a green glass slab supported by two matte black metal sawhorses. Resplendent in a creamy silk shirt and an Italian designer tie, he held a folder several inches thick. He studied the contents for a moment or two after Frank and Jose entered. Then he closed the folder and held it up.

“Looks like somebody did some street cleaning.”

“Somebody did murder one,” Jose said.

As if he hadn’t heard or didn’t care, Emerson regarded the closed folder in his hands. “Hodges was a busy boy,” he whispered to himself. He got a sly look that put Frank in mind of something slithering through the grass.

“He’s in cold storage now,” Frank said.

Emerson continued staring thoughtfully at the folder. Then, as if the comment finally registered, he put the folder on his desk and looked at Frank.

“Oh, no. Skeeter’s got one more job to do. A job for us.”

Without having to look, Frank knew that Jose was doing his slow eye-roll. He looked anyway. Jose was.

He looked back at Emerson. Emerson’s eyebrows were raised in a question mark.

“Beg pardon?” Frank asked.

“I said, ‘How many people you think Skeeter clipped?’ ”

“Rounded off to the nearest hundred?”

“Get serious.”

Jose yawned. “Belt-and-suspenders estimate? Fifteen. Twenty. Most of them competitors.”

“Okay. And how many times did he go to trial?” Emerson asked.

“None.” Frank shook his head.

Emerson sat down in his high-backed black leather chair. It looked like it came off the bridge of the starship Enterprise. He tilted back. “And why was that?”

“Why was what?” Jose asked.

“Why didn’t he go to trial?” Emerson eyed the space just in front of him, the question hanging there, rotating slowly in midair. “I’ll tell you why,” he said, eyes still on the question. “Witnesses died, disappeared, or suddenly got Alzheimer’s.”

“Or they’d swear Skeeter was singing in the choir or babysittin’ their kids,” Jose added.

Emerson shifted his gaze to Jose, then to Frank, and back to Jose.

“We have cases where we know Skeeter was involved, but no evidence. But now, like you say, he’s no longer on the street. We don’t have to bring him to trial. We only have to dig a little. Push a little. Bend a little.”

He tilted forward and pushed Skeeter Hodges’s folder across the glass. “So why don’t you two see if some witnesses have reappeared or had a miraculous memory cure?”