"We don't have an alarm coming from that address," the woman said. "Are you sure, sir?"
"You're damn right, I'm sure," I said, sounding offended. How dare they? "The guy jimmied the door open and went right in."
"Is this…." A pause. "Mr. Atwater?"
"Who? No, I was walking by and saw the guy go in. And your sign in the front yard, that's why I called."
"May I have your name, please, sir?"
I hung up on the nice lady and walked back to my car. I had five or ten minutes, depending on whether they had roving patrols or a dispatch station and garage nearby. I was leaning against the hood, still marveling at the flyer, when I heard screeching tires. A glance at my watch made it almost fifteen minutes. SecureTrex seemed a poor choice for any home protection needs.
A black Navigator--tinted windows, no logo, license plate SECTREX1--pulled up fast, but under control. I smiled at the choice of vehicle. The big SUV looked imposing and sinister exactly like it was meant to, but every federal security force in the area used black SUVs with tinted windows, too. They could probably do a hundred miles an hour in the streets of DC, Virginia, or Maryland and most cops would just assume they were from the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, or one of a hundred other federal departments. The lack of a government plate would give it away, but even if the cop noticed, he'd shrug and move on to easier pickings.
The SUV bucked to a stop at an angle to the curb, blocking half the street. Two guys in matching khakis and black polo shirts jumped out. They had big arms, small waists, and legs thick from twenty-rep sets. Both had dark hair cut close so that the scalp showed through and each had one of those wireless earplugs for their cell phone, the thing that makes you look like a reject from a Star Trek convention. Around their waists they wore black nylon belts that held flashlights, cell phones, and multi-tools. Everything except what you needed most, which was a sidearm. Another strike against SecureTrex. Or maybe that was a plus. Not every clown should carry a gun.
They conferred briefly, then one guy unclipped his flashlight and headed up the steps to the front door while the other pulled the short straw and hoofed it to the far end of the block, probably so he could cover the back. Cover it with what, I wasn't sure. Maybe he would flash a light in the evil-doer's eyes or do arm curls around his neck.
The first guy pointed his light on the ground as he went, even though it was broad daylight. He flashed it at the wrought iron railing, the door handle, he even leaned over and lit up the window. Satisfied, he opened up the screen door and turned the handle of the main door. It didn't budge. He looked at it for a second and then he knocked. Standard procedure, I guess, but in my experience, bad guys don't answer knocks.
Shortstraw appeared from around the corner and shook his head when Flashlight glanced his way. They must've gotten instructions from the mother ship, then, because they both abandoned the front porch and started looking around. It didn't take long for them to spot me, watching from a half-block away.
I thought they were going to get in the SUV and drive over, but they were in too good a shape for that. They jogged instead, looking fit, young, and healthy. They stopped in front of me. Neither one was out of breath and wearing short sleeves in forty-degree weather didn't seem to faze them in the least.
"Excuse me, sir," Flashlight said. "We had a report of a breakin at one of these residences. Did you happen to see anything? Say, in the last twenty minutes?"
"A breakin?" I said. "No, sorry. I just got here."
"You didn't report the breakin, then?"
"No, I'm afraid not. Like I said, I just got here."
"What's your business here, sir?" Shortstraw said, eyes narrowing. His hair was cut even shorter than the other's, the half-inch bristles sticking up from his scalp. He made the word "sir" sound like an insult. Ex-military, maybe, with a touch of scorn for civilians.
"I'm waiting for a friend," I said.
They chewed that over, exchanging glances. This was a singularly unlikely spot to meet someone. You meet people at restaurants, coffee shops, bars. Not Pershing Avenue sitting on the hood of your car in December. Shortstraw got a look on his face.
"Can I see your ID?" He held his hand out. It was calloused on the pads and the palm, no doubt from the cross-hatched grips of barbells.
"No," I said. "You can't."
He purpled around the eyes. Maybe he'd been a sergeant, used to giving orders. Or maybe he had a type-A personality and people did what he said. Or maybe he was just a rent-a-cop asshole and liked to push people around. I could tell he wanted to take a swing at me, then dimly remembering that following through on that desire would be assault, so he tried the stare-down, instead.
I gave it right back, staying relaxed and unconcerned. The trick was to stay still. If I'd moved, it would've broken the spell, turned it into something physical. And this showdown was about willpower, not knuckles. I'd like to think I can handle myself, but no way was I going to take a guy twenty years younger than me with wrists thick as drain pipes. You hit lunks like that from behind with a brick or you shoot them, you don't see which one of you can take a punch. I had to make sure it didn't come to that. So he scowled at me and I glared back, letting him know I wasn't going to snap in half, even if he stamped his feet and yelled mean things at me.
When I was a rookie, the guy who got stuck with me was a round, pasty-faced second-generation Russian named Sokalov. He laughed a lot, drank too much, and smelled like onions. He wasn't much to look at, but he was hell in a fight. The first time we got into it, I mean really into it, with a couple of punks down on Georgia Avenue, he stared down a half-dozen of them. I was sweating it, my hand near my holster, ready to draw and empty my clip if any of them decided to earn their street cred by taking out a couple of cops.
Sokalov had looked at them, still and serene in the face of all their bluster and insults. It seemed a close call to me. But they'd all seen something, sensed something, that convinced them to drop it. The magic moment passed, that razor's edge where, at some other time, in some other place, six kids and two cops were killed in a street-side shooting in southeast DC. Instead, in this universe, we got dirty looks and the finger, but everyone walked away.
When Sokalov turned around, I was too self-conscious to ask him what had happened or how I could work the same spell next time I was in a jam. He knew, though, and said to me as he walked past, "Steel breaks bone." We got back in our squad car and cruised on out of there.
I still don't know what the hell he was talking about. But I carried that phrase around in my head and, after a while, it made sense. It's what I thought of now as I eyed up the iron-pumping freak in front of me. Steel breaks bone, I said to myself, and looked back at him as he tried to cut me down with his eyes. I saw a hesitation there.
"C'mon, Scott," Flashlight said, grabbing Shortstraw's arm. At that moment, a light brown Malibu rounded the corner and came to a cautious stop behind SecureTrex's SUV. I slid my eyes away from the two in front of me and towards the car. The door opened and Julie Atwater, still in her faded black-gone-to-gray pants suit, got out of the driver's side, hesitating. She glanced from the SUV to her house to the three of us tough guys having our pissing contest halfway down the street.
"Hey, there she is," I said. "Just who I was waiting for."
The two SecureTrex clones, who had turned around when she'd pulled up, glanced at me, then jogged back in unison to Atwater. I stayed with my car, hands in my pockets, watching the gestured conference. I watched the fast-action pantomime as they described the call, their response, the fruitless result, and then--with fingers pointing--their encounter with me. Atwater squinted in my direction. Even at this distance, I could see her expression and it wasn't good. She turned and said something to the Dynamic Duo, who argued for a minute, then gave up and plodded back to the SUV. The black monstrosity started up with a roar and they drove down Pershing in my direction. As they passed, they gave me the kind of You better watch out look kids give each other when they peel out
of a high school parking lot.
I turned to see Atwater stalking towards me, her fists curled at her sides as she walked. She must've been cold, wearing only the threadbare pantsuit, but I guess her anger was enough to keep her warm. She pulled up five feet away, breathing fire. I sensed steel breaks bone wasn't going to work here.
"Singer, what the fuck do you think you're doing?" she said, with nary a hello.
"Waiting for you, Miss."
"I hope you have plenty in whatever nest-egg you've saved up for your retirement, because I'm going to have an injunction on your ass inside the next hour. And that's just a start."
"For what?"
"Harassment is a good start. Falsely reporting a crime."
"Calling a former colleague isn't illegal. Mistakenly reporting a breaking and entering isn't either."
Her lips pressed together, forming a horizontal line across the bottom of a face that wouldn't have looked half bad if she'd smiled more often. A deep furrow creased the spot between her eyes. Her hair was longer than I remembered, falling past her shoulders. It was black with a streak or two of grey. Probably put there by guys like me. Strands fell in her eyes and she pushed them away with an impatient flick of her hand, a curiously girlish gesture. She had a ski-slope nose and large, dark brown eyes that snapped with anger.
"Calling six times?" she said. "Sitting outside my house, staking it out? You aren't a cop anymore, Singer. And you'd be out of your jurisdiction even if you were."
"Look, I get it. You're not a fan. If it makes you feel better, the feeling's mutual. But that's irrelevant right now. There's something going on that's bigger than our mutual dislike. I need half an hour. That's it."
"I don't want to give you a half hour, Singer," she said. "In fact, I don't want to give you the time I'm wasting right now. I don't want to talk to you and don't need to. This conversation is over."
I nodded slowly. "You're right, there's nothing I can do to you to get your cooperation. Officially. But we both know that I've got enough connections back at MPDC to make life rough for you, whether it's in the courtroom or not."
She didn't say anything, just continued to glare. I pushed it. "Give me some credit, Atwater. I might've been a pain in your ass back in the day, but I was never interested in wasting anybody's time, least of all my own. You know that. Thirty minutes and I'll be out of your hair."
Something I'd said got through. The anger was still there in the gritted teeth and squeezed fists, but, as I watched, the great surge of rage that had carried her over here leaked out and dribbled away. Her shoulders sagged. "What do you want?"
"Same thing as I did on the phone," I said. "Tell me about Michael Wheeler."
"Jesus," she said, closing her eyes for a second. "That case is done and gone. Wheeler is gone. Ten, twelve years ago. What could you possibly need to know at this point?"
"Let's just say something's interfering with my retirement and Wheeler's part of it. And that means talking to you."
"What're you going to do? Try a citizen's arrest, this time?"
"Actually, I'd prefer if he tripped and fell onto the Beltway at rush hour," I said. "But I'll settle for finding out where he is. You can help."
She looked at me, weighing her options. Could she really be rid of me in a half hour? How much of a pain would I be if she didn't agree? Looking unhappy, she jerked her head back towards her house. "You've got thirty minutes. You ask me questions, maybe I'll answer, then we're done. You try to push me around again, I fight back. I'm not going to be on the hook forever. Deal?"
I nodded. "Deal."
Chapter Ten
I followed Atwater back to her townhouse, stopping for a second while she grabbed an attaché case out of the passenger's side of her tea-colored car. She walked ahead of me with a controlled stomp, completely silent. It would've been kind of cute, if it didn't look as though she was trying to put her heel through the ground. I'd thought she walked that way because she was angry with me. Now I realized it was how she walked all the time.
I held the screen door open while she unlocked the triple set of Yales on the front door. She banged it open and went inside, tossing her keys in a bowl of pennies sitting on a table by the door. She stomped down the entry hall, flicking some lights on. The walls were painted that shade of not-quite-white that you can buy by the tanker truck, a color a friend of mine had dubbed "nicotine." A lonely pair of sconces were the only decoration. The place smelled stale, inert, as though the windows had never been opened.
I trailed her into the living room. A couch with worn arms and two upholstered chairs faced each other in a companionable circle, though I had trouble believing there were two people in the world who wanted to talk companionably with Julie Atwater at any time. A small end table held an ash tray with a few butts in it.
She dropped her attaché case on the floor, then shrugged off her blazer and threw it over the far arm of the couch. Something made me look at her again. The simple, familiar move, in her home, transformed her into someone more normal and relaxed than I'd ever seen her in the courtroom. Her back was still ramrod straight and her expression wasn't even close to inviting, but the edges had been softened. She also had a nice figure that the tawdry jacket had concealed. I scooted one of the chairs to a better angle and eased into it, while she took the middle cushion of the couch. She got back up, fished out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of her jacket, sat back down. The tip of the cigarette glowed ruby red while she lit it. She took a drag, then we stared at each other for a second until she made an exasperated, "well, what?" motion with her hands, the smoke waving from her cigarette like a flag.
"This is your show, Singer," she said. "Twenty-eight minutes."
"Tell me about Michael Wheeler."
"You're going to have to be more specific than that."
"Where is he?"
Her eyebrows shot up. "Is? I have no clue. People can cover a lot of ground in twelve years."
"You never heard from him? He doesn't send you postcards, thanking you for getting him off a murder rap?"
She snorted. "I'm a criminal defense lawyer, Singer. People like Wheeler don't give a shit. Most of them think they should get off because they want to. No better reason than that. They don't think they're innocent, they just don't think they should go to jail. So, no, they don't thank me for saving them from doing twenty-to-life and they sure don't remember it twelve years later."
"So, you've got no idea where he is? You haven't heard from him"?
She took a drag, exhaled "No."
"What about the days right after the trial? Where did he go? What did he do?"
She shook her head. "I don't know."
"You've had no contact with him since the day he walked out of the courtroom?"
"That's what I said."
"Gimme a break, counselor," I said. "Your first real client as a criminal defense attorney. A huge deal in the press. Maybe a landmark case against the MPDC, a bad cop goes on trial for murder one, and it gets screwed up on the way. And you're telling me you don't know anything about him?"
"That's right."
"You don't know where he lived, or ate, or what his forwarding address was?"
"Singer, you probably know as much or more than I do. Up until the time I represented him, I hadn't even heard of Wheeler except in the papers. After I was brought on the case, he was in custody during the trial. I visited him a couple of times in lockup to get our strategy straight. After that, the only other time I saw him was when the bailiff marched him over to my table. And that's it."
"And after the trial," I said, still digging. "Nothing? He walked out of the courtroom and out of your life ten minutes after the verdict?"
"More like five, but yes, pretty much. We gave the obligatory statement to the press--it was big news, naturally--and then we shook hands and he took off."
"No phone calls, no visits, nothing?"
She smiled. "No matter how many different ways you ask, Singer, the answer's the same:
I never saw Michael Wheeler after the trial."
I tried a new angle. "Don Landis."
The smile dropped off her face like a stone off a cliff. "What about him?'
"No congratulatory handshake? No commiserations? No gloating?"
"Don had just lost a high-profile, must-win case to a first-time criminal defense attorney. Because his own side had dropped the ball. Do I need to remind you? He wasn't going to pat me on the back. And I wasn't going to shove his nose in it. Don was a good lawyer and it could've easily been me, then or later. In fact, it should've been me, except--" She stopped herself.
"Except what?"
Her mouth was so pinched that it seemed as if there were sutures pulling her mouth inward. "The screw-up. I had a decent defense strategy, but I knew I wasn't going to get anything better than a reduced sentence. It didn't matter that your evidence against Wheeler was circumstantial; everyone was howling for a conviction. I told Wheeler to expect the worst, no matter how well I did. But thanks to your bungling, when the case got dumped, it all went away. The evidence, the bargaining, the trial. Everything."
"You don't sound very happy about it."
She re-focused on me, but took a second to answer. "It was bittersweet. I put a lot of work into that case. As you said, my first real client. An important, noteworthy case. Lots of press. I wanted to win it on my own merits. Instead, I got handed a turkey. One that worked for me, but a turkey anyway."
I let the silence spool out. Then, "How did you feel about that?"
"What the hell do you care?"
"I've never gotten this close to a criminal defense attorney before. I'm curious."
She laughed, a short bark that fell flat. "What do you think? It should've launched a career. But it was a lame duck, a gimme. Everyone assumed if I was lucky, I couldn't be good. I got passed over by all but the dumbest or most desperate schmucks you can imagine. No one recognized the work I did on Wheeler's case before you guys laid an egg. And, since I was getting lousy clients, my win rate spiraled downward, netting even worse clients than before. So, what do you think it did to me, Singer?"
A Reason to Live (Marty Singer1) Page 7