Hour of the Assassin

by Matthew Quirk

  31

  Nick sat in the back of the cab going up Seventh Street. He’d checked in with Delia and was on his way to meet her in Shaw. He looked at his phone and saw there was a new message waiting for him, a voicemail. He hit play.

  “Hey, man, it’s me. A detective called, asking about you. Hit me back, all right? I’m worried about you.”

  Nick knew that voice well. It was his friend Jeff Turner. They’d been in the marines together, came up through the infantry and then worked personal security details for generals and other VIPs, running them through combat zones in armored convoys. Nick had trusted Jeff with his life for years.

  Now they both had their own security consulting businesses and often worked together. The ultimate test for any protection that Jeff set up was hiring Nick to try to slip through it.

  He could use Turner’s help now. Jeff had a better network. If Nick was going to turn himself in to law enforcement, Jeff could connect him with a good lawyer, make sure he approached the police or the FBI the right way.

  Nick looked at the number. His thumb hovered over the call button for an instant, but then he put the phone down.

  Not yet. He didn’t want to bring anybody else into this, not until he fully understood the risks. Jeff could be relentless, and Nick wasn’t sure how he would react. He might try to force Nick to go to the police, or even insist on helping Nick go after the people behind this. Nick wasn’t about to screw up anyone else’s life.

  He would wait. He had a name and number for Ali. He was getting closer to the answers, to having solid proof of what really happened last night. He would call Jeff when he was ready to talk to the law.

  32

  Nick met Delia outside a coffee roaster in Blagden Alley. She handed him a paper cup.

  “You look like a guy who deserves a five-dollar coffee,” she said.

  “No one deserves a five-dollar coffee, but thank you.” He raised it and took a sip, then checked himself in the window, his face like wax from the lack of sleep.

  They walked out of the back alleys of Shaw, past the murals and art galleries. This neighborhood of Victorian row houses had been home, along with the U Street corridor, to an African-American renaissance that predated Harlem’s. Langston Hughes and Duke Ellington walked its streets and the Howard University campus stood at its edge.

  After the 1968 riots, it took decades to recover, and over the last ten years the auto repair shops and old boxing gym had been replaced by beer gardens and craft cocktail bars as the luxury developers moved in.

  Nick looked for a quiet spot where they could talk and settled on Delia’s car, parked a block down. They got in and shut the doors.

  “I think I have a name for the woman who set me up,” he said.

  “Is it Clara Marzetti?” Delia asked.

  “That’s the woman renting the apartment. Our lady was just staying there. I think her real name is Ali Waldron, though that might be an alias. I have her cell number.”

  “How?”

  “It’s probably better you don’t know.” He gave her the number. “Can you get a location from that?”

  “Maybe. It’ll take some time, though. I’m making progress on the shell companies. No eurekas yet, but I’ve found some overlaps that might connect us to real-world people. There’s a lot of offshore, and anonymous corporations in Nevada and Delaware.”

  Nick nodded. It was one of the open secrets of the banking world: there was no place better and easier for hiding money than American anonymous corporations and real estate. It was where the rest of the world offshored their money.

  Nick took her through everything he knew about the connection between him, Emma Blair, and Malcolm Widener. He had a sense of what he needed to do next. He wanted answers about whatever information Emma had and who would be willing to kill to keep it from coming out.

  Delia already knew about Emma and how Nick had been looking for her after she disappeared. He ran his best theory past Delia: Emma Blair had gone to both him and Malcolm looking for help, and someone had tried to get rid of him and Malcolm last night to keep them from finding out or sharing Emma’s secret.

  “So they went after you because of what you knew,” Delia said. “But you don’t really know anything.” She shook her head.

  “No specifics,” Nick said.

  “When you were out looking for her, did you find anything at all? You must have been getting close to something so they had to shut you down.”

  “Maybe. Or I was just a good guy to set up. I had the right skill set and was connected to Emma so they could make it look like I was some kind of obsessive, a stalker, crazy. They were going to kill me at that house, probably make it look like a guard shot me or, I don’t know, stage it to seem like I committed suicide in the office.”

  Delia’s lip curled. “No one gave you any leads?”

  Nick shook his head and looked out the window.

  He had been thinking through everyone he had talked to as he tried to find out what happened to Emma. He’d asked them if she had ever mentioned something painful that happened to her in the past, any hints of crime or tragedy, any information that might have made her a target.

  Emma had never said anything like that to him before the day she showed up unannounced at his house a month ago. It was odd: even with all the time they had spent together, he never had a sense that he really knew her. There was a part she always kept hidden, even during those moments, lying together in bed with the lights out, when it felt like you could say anything.

  What had drawn him to her in the beginning—the wit, the worldliness—by the end had seemed like a kind of performance. She was always on to a new passion or hobby or cause, always ready with a bit of gossip or some erudition she’d picked up from an obscure book or journal, always primed to dive in on any subject but herself.

  There were small signs every so often, after she’d had too much to drink and everyone else had gone home, moments when he found her looking into empty space as a darkness came on, buried anger, perhaps, or well-covered depression. But no matter how safe he tried to make her feel, she would never talk about it. Given everything that had happened over the last month, he was beginning to understand why.

  He felt a heaviness in his chest as he turned back to Delia. “Nobody gave me anything solid,” he said. “Emma said she never told anyone about it. She and I were close, really close, a long time ago, and she never said anything to me. She kept it a secret all those years, until now.”

  “No one knew anything, or no one would talk to you?”

  “That’s the question,” he said, and took a long sip. There was one run-in that he kept coming back to: an old school friend of Emma’s who had acted strangely when Nick asked him about her. “One guy shut me down really quickly,” Nick said. “Eliot Hopkins. He was at St. Albans with Widener when Emma was at National Cathedral, and he and Emma went to Princeton. I met him a couple of times when Emma and I were dating, though they were more acquaintances than anything else.”

  Nick thought back to the night he’d talked to Hopkins. He’d run into him at a fund-raiser for Georgetown University Hospital at the Washington Hilton. Nick was there with Karen. He remembered that Hopkins had known Emma and went up to him in the foyer as he came back from the restroom. Nick chatted him up for a while and then began asking him about Emma.

  “Hopkins said he hadn’t talked to her in years,” Nick said to Delia. “I asked him if he had any idea what might have happened to her back in the day or who she might be afraid of. He said he didn’t know anything and gave me the brush-off. I would have thought it was the typical DC thing where he saw someone more important he wanted to talk to. But something was off. He was scared.”

  “Did he know she was missing?”

  “I told him. But I think he might have already known.” Nick remembered how Hopkins’s shoulders rounded slightly at the mention of Emma’s name, how his brow came down. Nick knew fear, could read someone’s emotions at a glance. They train
ed for it in the Service: how to walk a rope line ahead of the principal and find the faces of the agitated, the dangerous. It was the riskiest part of the job.

  “Sometimes I don’t think you appreciate how scary a dude you can be when you have your mind set on something.”

  “No,” Nick said. “He was looking around. It was like he was scared to even be talking about it.” Nick finished the coffee and looked at the cup. “This is really fucking good.”

  Delia raised her eyebrows. “I know.” She pulled out her phone. “Eliot Hopkins?”

  “He’s a lobbyist. A partner somewhere.” Nick checked his watch.

  “You’re going to lobby him?”

  “Something like that,” Nick said. “Can I borrow your car?”

  “Sure.”

  He dropped off Delia in front of her apartment. Ten minutes later he was cruising toward Hopkins’s office in Georgetown in a Subaru Outback with a “COEXIST” sticker on the bumper.

  Delia called him on the way. “He’s not at his office.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I called and talked to his executive assistant. I said I was with the courier company and was sending over someone with docs he needed to sign for one of his clients. He’s working from home.”

  33

  It was a blustery day in Chevy Chase, the old-money suburb straddling DC’s border with Maryland.

  In Eliot Hopkins’s side yard, the garden gate slammed open, its hinge squealing as the wind pushed it back, again and again.

  Hopkins stepped out of the front door of the Colonial Revival and walked toward the gate. He wore a black suit and a white shirt with no tie. His hair was close cropped and he had the drawn cheeks of a triathlete.

  He shut and latched the gate and turned back to the house, ducking his head against the wind.

  He froze. Nick Averose stood on the walk a few feet from him. Hopkins didn’t look like one might imagine a lobbyist, a glad-hander in a shark-gray Italian suit and tasseled loafers. With his black glasses, he had the air of a scarily competent math professor. Nick guessed that made a kind of sense. This man could work Congress and the White House like a marionette, turn the government into a moneymaking division of his clients’ enterprises.

  “Hi, Eliot,” Nick said.

  “Jesus. How the hell did you get in here?” He looked around the yard, the high hedges, the automatic gate still closed across the driveway.

  “Let’s talk about Emma Blair.”

  Hopkins’s blinking picked up. His shoulders drew in. That fear again.

  “I told you I haven’t talked to her.”

  “I know what you told me.”

  Hopkins swallowed and forced himself to stand tall. It was pretty typical of high-powered men. They weren’t used to being afraid. It made them uncomfortable, and they would try to bluster and domineer their way out of it.

  Hopkins reached into his pocket and took out his phone. “You’re on my property. I suggest you leave before I call the police.”

  Nick grabbed the phone out of his hand. Eliot took a step back and hit the gate.

  “Do you know what I do, Eliot?” Nick asked.

  The man nodded.

  “Good,” Nick said brightly, as if kicking off a meeting, and clapped his hands together.

  Hopkins flinched at the sound.

  “That will help us be more candid with each other,” Nick said. He didn’t like threatening people or implying threats, but this man was hiding something, and Nick had no time to waste. “Did Emma talk to you?”

  “You’re making a mistake. Do you know the kind of trouble you put yourself in by coming here?”

  “I have so much trouble a little more doesn’t matter.” He stepped closer and noticed the trembling in Hopkins’s chin.

  “Fine,” he said quietly.

  “Did Emma talk to you before she went missing?”

  “I told her I didn’t know anything. That I couldn’t help her. That’s the truth.”

  “Help her do what? What was she asking about?”

  Silence.

  Nick brought his face a foot from the other man’s, stared him in the eyes. “Tell me,” he said, his voice almost a whisper.

  “The Fourth of July party at the Whitleys’ country place. It was twenty-five years ago, and all of a sudden she’s dragging it all up. She wanted to know if I was upstairs and if I saw anything. I didn’t.”

  Nick knew the name. The Whitleys were a long-standing political dynasty in Maryland and Virginia.

  “What happened at that party?”

  Hopkins looked down and exhaled. “A woman died. Catherine Wilson. I went to Princeton with her, but I didn’t really know her.”

  “How?”

  “This is all public knowledge,” Hopkins said, raising his hands as if declaring his innocence. “It was an accident. They had that party every year. Catherine came. Everyone was back for the holiday. She was younger than most of the other people there. She drank too much and went upstairs to pass out, but she fell in a bedroom. They found her dead in the morning. This was all open-and-shut decades ago. It was a fucked-up accident, and I don’t think Emma ever got over it. Then for some reason she came to me a month ago and started dredging all of it up. That is all I know.”

  Nick took half a step back. Emma Blair wasn’t a victim. She was a witness. “Why didn’t you tell me when I first asked you?”

  Hopkins gestured back and forth between himself and Nick. “To avoid exactly this kind of sketchy shit. I don’t go digging around in past tragedies that happened in close proximity to the hundred most powerful people in Washington.”

  “Who was there that night?”

  “Everyone. A bunch were still in college because of the youngest Whitley sister, but the older crowd was there, too. It was a kind of reunion. That party had been taking place since we were all in high school. A lot of people who’d gone to St. Albans, Georgetown Day, Landon, National Cathedral, Sidwell. Most of them were in their twenties, out of school, starting out on the Hill. Fourth of July at the Whitleys’ was a tradition.”

  Twenty-five years ago, Nick thought. Families that prominent. The people at that house ran the city now.

  “I told Emma the truth,” Hopkins said. “I didn’t see anything that night. I don’t know anything about what happened to Catherine. I tried to warn Emma not to rake this stuff up, for her sake.” He looked down. “And I was right. I have no idea what happened to her. I don’t want to know. You ask why I don’t want to be in the middle of this. Look at her.”

  “Who else did you tell that Emma came to you, that she was asking about this?”

  “No one.”

  “Who was upstairs at that party?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, underlining every word.

  Nick put his hand on Hopkins’s shoulder, didn’t crush, didn’t grab, but it was enough.

  “I swear,” Hopkins said. “If I knew something, I would have talked then. I’m telling you all this, I’m telling you the truth, because you should just drop it. Walk away. That’s what I told Emma, because I was trying to protect her. If something criminal happened at that party, let it be. Those were the sons and daughters of senators, governors, heads of banks. You have no idea what those people will do to keep a secret—”

  The driveway gate rattled and pulled back. Nick let Hopkins’s arm go. A Porsche SUV rolled toward the house with a woman behind the wheel and a Bernese mountain dog in the back seat. The driver stared at her husband, cornered by a stranger on a winter day.

  Nick started walking and went past her as she stepped out of the car calling out, “What is this? What’s going on?”

  Nick tossed Hopkins’s phone onto the grass and slipped through the gate as it closed. He could have laughed. At the end Hopkins had been warning him off, telling him to stay out of this for his own sake.

  It was too late for that. He looked down this perfect Washington street. He knew exactly what these people were capable of.

  34r />
  Nick drove back through the District, heading toward Delia’s apartment in her car.

  His hands tightened on the wheel, again and again, the anger getting the better of him now. He checked his speed, forced himself to slow down.

  Emma must have seen something that night at that party. Did someone kill that woman? Did they go after Emma because she knew?

  He called Delia. “I’ve got something,” he said. “Are you at home?”

  “Yeah. What is it?”

  “I’ll tell you about it when I see you,” he said. “I’ll meet you at—”

  He heard three knocks over the phone. Delia let out a quiet gasp. “Someone’s here.”

  “Are you expecting anything? Anyone?”

  “No,” she whispered. “The resident manager knocks sometimes. That’s it.”

  “Don’t go near it,” he said.

  A rustling came over the line, then the click of a door closing. “There’s a car parked in front of the building.” Her voice echoed. She must have locked herself in the bathroom.

  “What make?”

  “Chevy sedan.”

  “It could be the police.”

  Three bangs again, muffled now. He couldn’t be sure if they were really the police or if they could be trusted.

  “I’m a block away. I’m coming.”

  “But if they see you—”

  “It’s fine. Don’t answer. That’s entirely within your rights. What’s the door code?”

  “Nick, no.”

  “I’ll be careful. What is it?”

  “Seven oh four three.”

  A shout through the phone. “Delia Tayran. This is the Metropolitan Police Department.”

  “You can talk to the police,” Nick said, “but you should have a lawyer. And I don’t know if you can trust those men. I don’t want anything to happen to you. I’m coming.”

  “Am I an accessory?”

  “Did you believe I was innocent?”