Bill Pronzini - Acts of Mercy

It was not that he himself had been disrespectful. No, it was only that he had never been an emotional man. Until now, these past few weeks. For the first time he could feel the full weight of the assassination, of what the loss of the President had done to the country-and he knew it was because the crisis facing Nicholas Augustine, his President, threatened a similar if not quite so tragic loss.

He turned the Ford north on Twenty-third Street, then northwest again on Massachusetts Avenue. When he reached Cleveland Park-a quiet residential area that had once been the summer retreat of President Grover Cleveland-he pulled to the curb and consulted the map of Washington he kept in the glove compartment. Fifteen minutes later he brought the Ford onto Arden Place, a short dead-end street shaded by Dutch elms and sycamores.

The houses on both sides were all turn-of-the-century dwellings with cupolas and wide front porches, set well back from the street and spaced widely apart. Briggs’s address was in the last block, and the first thing Justice noticed about it was that the driveway was bordered by cherry trees on one side and shrubbery on the other. He drove past, looking at the neighboring houses on each side and across the street. The only ones which showed light were on the opposite side and some distance removed.

He made a U-turn where Arden Place ended at the edge of a park, came back and turned into Briggs’s drive. His headlights picked up a small side porch heavily grown with ivy, the closed doors of a garage that would be empty because Briggs did not drive. Which was good because it eliminated the problem of having to move a car.

Once he had drawn abreast of the porch Justice braked to a stop and shut off the lights. Darkness surrounded him when he stepped out; there was a street lamp diagonally across the way, but its glow did not reach into the driveway. He opened the trunk, reached in to turn the body so that he could get at the pockets in its clothing. It was just starting to stiffen, but not so much yet that it presented a problem. In the right trouser pocket he found a key case, drew it out and then closed the trunk again and hurried up onto the porch.

The third key he tried opened the door there. He slipped inside, stood for a moment to let his eyes adjust. The kitchen: enough moonlight penetrated through a window in the rear wall to let him see the shapes of refrigerator and stove and sink cabinet. Should he leave the body here? Plenty of home accidents happened in the kitchen, and if he put Briggs here he would not have to turn on any lights No. The body had lain on the ground beneath the window, it was lying now on the trunk floor; Briggs’s suit would be dirty, maybe even torn in places. The bathroom then, that was the only safe place to put him. Bathroom accidents were even more common than kitchen ones.

Justice made his way carefully to a doorway in the inner wall, found himself in a central corridor. He brushed his fingers along the wall there and located a light switch-he had to risk putting on the lights-and flipped the toggle. A ceiling globe came on, filling the corridor with a pale yellow glow. Blinking, he turned to his left and tried three doors before discovering the bathroom. Immediately, then, he returned to the kitchen and went outside again into the muggy darkness.

It took him twenty minutes to get the body out of the trunk and into the bathroom, to strip it of jacket, trousers, shirt, tie, and shoes, leaving it clad only in socks and soiled underwear, and to position it on the floor with the head between the toilet and the old-fashioned cast-iron bathtub. He examined the clothing. The jacket was ripped in two places and there were grass stains and a smear of grease on the pants; he wadded both articles together, put them on the sink. The shirt and the socks went into a clothes hamper, and he took the tie and the shoes into the bedroom, put the shoes beside the bed and hung the tie on a rack in one of the closets.

He was sweating again when he finished; his mouth tasted dry, brassy. He went back into the bathroom, looked down at the body. Had he overlooked anything? In the mystery novels he read and collected there was always something overlooked, something forgotten, that the clever detective would notice Mystery novels. Clever detectives.

He shook himself, tried to concentrate on the scene in front of him. Briggs’s hair, he thought. It was badly mussed and it would not have been that way if he had simply come in here, slipped and fallen against the bathtub.

Justice lifted a hairbrush from the counter beside the sink, knelt next to the body and managed to sweep the hair back into place. Straightening, he replaced the brush. Anything else? No. Everything appeared natural now, nothing out of place.

He caught up the suit jacket and trousers, reentered the bedroom, and laid Briggs’s key case on the dresser next to the wallet and the other articles he had removed from the suit. Then, leaving the lights on in the bathroom, the bedroom, and the center hall, he went through the kitchen and set the push-button lock on the porch door. Outside, the night was still empty, quiet. He closed the door softly behind him, hurried into the Ford.

The street was deserted in both directions when he backed out of the drive. The only house lights in the block were three hundred yards distant; he swung the car in the opposite direction.

And it was done.

Justice tried to make himself relax now. But he was still keyed up; he imagined a dozen things that could go wrong, a dozen mistakes he might have made. He kept reviewing the past three hours, but instead of remaining clear and vivid in his memory, they took on a kind of surreal, extrinsic quality, as if he had watched it all happen-or read it all happen-instead of having done it himself.

And as he guided the Ford through the empty streets of Cleveland Park, there was fear in him. It was abrupt and insidious, different from the fear of discovery or the fear of error, different from any fear he had ever known.

Because it had no name.

Painted a gleaming red, white and blue, its big diesel locomotive rumbling steadily in the warm Los Angeles afternoon, the Presidential Special reminded Augustine, not for the first time, of a sleek faithful animal awaiting the arrival of its master. As he crossed the Union Station platform surrounded by aides and Secret Servicemen, Claire with her arm tucked around his, he gazed fondly at the ten cars in the string: baggage car, train staffs car, security personnel’s Pullman, specially outfitted communications car, the old SP parlor car which he had had converted into an office and conference room and private compartments for himself and Claire and which he had dubbed U.S. Car Number One, aides’ Pullman, dining car, club car, and finally the glass-roofed observation car with its open rear platform. And he felt the familiar stir of excitement that always came to him when he was about to embark on this train, his train.

His spirits had been at a low ebb since last night; even Justice’s report that the transference of Briggs’s body had been accomplished without incident had failed to ease his mind. But now that he was in California again, approaching the Presidential Special and soon to be at The Hollows, a sense of optimism had begun to return to him. He always seemed to feel more sanguine about things when he was away from the Washington milieu, the austere atmosphere of the White House. Truman had been right: no man in his right mind would ever enjoy living in that place. And that, of course, was why all the presidents in the past several decades had taken every opportunity to go elsewhere-Roosevelt to Warm Springs, Truman himself to Independence, Eisenhower to Camp David, Kennedy to the family home in Hyannisport, Johnson to his Texas ranch, Nixon to Key Biscayne and San Clemente and Camp David, Carter to his Georgia farm. Despite all the negativism in the press about his own California trips, Augustine thought, the simple truth was that a “Washington Presidency” was a figment of the Constitution. The country could be run just as effectively outside the Capital.