Cold Frame [retail]

by P. T. Deutermann

  He knew he hadn’t convinced Ellen Whiting of anything. She suspected that he’d done something to McGavin, or, at the very least, lit that fuse, which was why he’d wrapped a lock on her: you bought the flowers, you were there when he died, not me. It hadn’t been subtle, and she’d caught on immediately. So: for the moment, anyway, Ellen Whiting had been neutralized. She was an up-and-comer in the Bureau, where even the whiff of any kind of screwup or, worse, scandal, would see her career go up in flames.

  His phone rang, and Strang gave him the information on the Metro cop.

  He hung up, thought some more, and then made a decision. He picked up the phone and dialed a twelve-digit number. There were a series of clicks, and then silence, followed by a voice-mail beep.

  “Beacon twenty-three,” he said. “Tonight.” Then he pressed the pound key and hung up.

  FOUR

  Av had to penetrate Amex’s version of menu hell through six iterations before he snared a human in card security, who told him to bring them a warrant. Av told the man that he wasn’t looking for a data dump, just a phone number for McGavin’s next of kin, now that he was unexpectedly deceased. That was news to the security guy, who said there was a hefty balance on the account. The security guy’s supervisor came on, took ILB’s office number, called him back, and then gave him McGavin’s home phone number.

  A stuffy-sounding man answered the McGavins’ residence phone. Av identified himself as a Metro police detective and asked to speak to Mrs. McGavin. The man told him that Mrs. McGavin was not taking any phone calls due to the recent death of her husband. Av then asked for an appointment with Mrs. McGavin. Not likely, the man responded with an aristocratic sniff. Her attorney, possibly? Who is her attorney? You said you’re a detective, the man said, and then hung up.

  Everyone’s a wiseass today, he thought. He was about to call back, but then realized that he no longer had to make a notification because, apparently, the widow already knew. But: they still needed an autopsy authorization. Okay, if the family wouldn’t talk to him, then he’d get a court order. Use that John Doe business.

  He paused. How had the widow already known? The hospital was calling the case a John Doe. OCME, currently holding the remains, was calling him a John Doe. So who the hell had informed the newly minted widow? His office? And who’d called them? Not the OCME, not MedStar, and not ILB—so: the girlfriend? Had to be, didn’t it?

  Okay, he decided; tee up this Ellen Whiting, then. He looked at his watch—almost four-thirty on a Friday. That meant Monday for the mysterious lady luncheon partner. Right now, let’s get a court-ordered autopsy rolling. Four-thirty. Well, he’d give it a try, but on a Friday afternoon it was very likely that their honors would have bailed at two for the golf course.

  Friday. Thank God. Monday would be good enough. It wasn’t like he was going to bring McGavin back to life, and, besides, he wasn’t even supposed to be trying to solve this one.

  * * *

  Carl Mandeville paused to look for traffic coming around the Lincoln Monument. Even at midnight there was still some traffic; this was Washington, after all. He crossed the narrow lane into the trees and sidewalks flanking the reflecting pool, a custom-made Burger walking stick tapping the concrete discreetly as he walked toward the distant Capitol building. More than most, he was aware of the security patrols in the precincts of the White House. Carl Mandeville did not sleep very much, if at all. He walked the Mall just about every night unless the weather was really bad. The night security people all knew who he was, the great big guy from the White House who haunted the Mall and the monuments at midnight, walking boldly forward as if on an urgent mission of state, with that fancy walking stick, which contained a seventeen-inch Damascus steel blade, gripped firmly in his right hand. He wore his usual dark suit, a lightweight overcoat if the temperature demanded it, and a dark gray fedora which added four inches to his already imposing height. Secret Service agents sitting in darkened vehicles would whisper into their lapel mikes: Mandeville, at the Lincoln, headed east.

  When he’d first started making his nightly excursions onto the Mall, there’d been night owls all over the area, couples getting some air after a big dinner at one of the downtown eateries, workaholics getting some badly needed exercise, street thieves, panhandlers, and muggers over from Anacostia, hoping to get lucky, tottering drunks trying to find their cars, furtive gays, and a few homeless people. Not anymore. After nine-eleven, this part of Washington around the White House, a teeming tourist mecca by day, had become an armed camp after dark. He knew about the gun emplacements on top of many of the federal buildings, and the real reason why the 555-foot-tall Washington Monument had been closed for so long after the earthquake. If he had stopped suddenly, got down on one knee, and aimed his walking stick at the White House, seven snipers would have dropped him in two seconds. Brave new world, he thought, as he reached the World War II Memorial, so small considering the global holocaust it was supposed to memorialize. And they were all missing the point.

  The threat’s not here, boys, he wanted to shout to the caffeine-jagged agents trying to stay awake in their parked cars. The real threat’s offshore, where an Iranian tramp steamer would one day lay to fifty miles off Maryland, open a cargo hatch, and fire a ballistic missile into the atmosphere above Illinois and fry every tendril of the electrical system the whole country depended on. The threat’s on the Mexican border, where depraved Muslim fireheads carrying a vial of Ebola-virus-infected blood in a hornet spray can would come over one night amid the flood of “homeless refugees” and take a Graypup to a football game in Dallas. It was all well and good for the TSA goons to pat down granny at the airport and dump the baby out of its airplane car seat, but the Big Deal, when it came, would come from outside the country, directed by seventh-century barbarians who’d finally realized that the modern world had consigned them to the dustbin of history.

  In other words, the Candidates.

  He sighed in frustration as he tramped across the Mall itself. The DMX was the only entity in the byzantine world of federal counterterrorism that was aiming at those shadowy maniacs who set the martyrs in motion, aided and abetted by oil money and Saudi princelings who were playing both sides just to be safe. One good thing about all those agencies involved: they cast a wide net, and the process, however unwieldy, had surfaced some real bad guys out there on the edges of the Empire. And the Muslims knew it. He could never prove it, but he’d become convinced that the legislators who were now out to undo DMX had been bought off by the same people who were determined to destroy America, that blazing glass house on the hill, whose entire nervous system ran on something so delicate as the Internet and the galactic array of electronics that made it all possible.

  He reached the base of the Washington Monument and, like every tourist before him, looked up at the spotlighted obelisk. He repressed an urge to wave at the watchers up there, both human and robotic, and then looked around for Evangelino. There he was, sitting on a park bench about fifty yards away, staring at nothing.

  Evangelino Francini was so named by a very misguided mother of Sicilian heritage who had hoped to invoke the protection of her family’s patron saint by imposing this outrageous name on her second son when he was born in Brooklyn. Once in school, where names began to matter, he’d tried to call himself just Gino, but the word got out and he had become, out of necessity and the annoyance of daily fistfights when someone called him Evangeline, one of the toughest kids in school. From there he’d graduated to being a hanger-on with the neighborhood mob, and from there to a made man in his early twenties in the Fortunato family business. Fifteen years into his career as a mobster, he’d been given the assignment of supervising the takedown of a Brinks armored van. The operation had gone like clockwork, thanks to two drivers who’d been paid off handsomely to decamp, right to the point where Gino, standing in the back of the truck in wide-eyed amazement over a pile of cash beyond his wildest dreams, had gunned down his two accomplices and then driven the van
to an abandoned warehouse in Queens sometimes used by the mob to store corpses. Leaving his erstwhile associates in the van, he’d coolly taken the subway back down to Brooklyn, loaded up his Ford Econoline van with a few personal possessions, gone back to the warehouse, loaded up the cash, set fire to the warehouse, and left for Florida that very night.

  It had taken the mob two years to find him, and when they did, they set up an ambush in the little trailer park outside of Gainesville where Gino had gone to ground. He’d known from the get-go that it was a matter of when, not if, they found him, so he’d created a web of people who would alert him to strangers from New York. In the ensuing shootout, he’d killed all three of the hit squad but not without taking one in the neck. His girlfriend at the time, an exotic dancer at the local strip club, had found him a cocaine-dependent doc who made his living treating the flow of illegal immigrants, drug mules, the desperate individuals who were willing to undergo organ transplant for money, and anyone else who could never afford to surface into the regular medical system. He’d patched Gino up, but in the process had damaged some nerves that had reduced half of Gino’s face to a frozen mask and left him with both a stiff-legged walk and the inability to speak. He was now rich but permanently damaged, and once again on the run, moving from trailer to trailer around town and always looking over his shoulder. He slowly got his speech back, but pretended he hadn’t. He’d discovered that people were often very careless with important information around a man who couldn’t speak.

  Until one night outside of the strip club, where he was dozing in his van, waiting for his lady, when a big guy, seriously drunk and wearing military cammies, came out of the bar followed by two Latino hoods who were obviously planning to roll the drunk. For some strange reason, this offended Gino. Yeah, he was a mobster, but he was an American mobster, and these greasers rubbed him the wrong way, the drunk being a soldier and everything. He got out of the van just as the two guys whacked the drunk army guy on the shins with a tire iron, putting him on the ground gasping in pain with tears in his eyes. Gino produced his stainless-steel twelve-gauge coach gun, which he used as a bat to rearrange the muggers’ faces on their way into unconsciousness, if not death. He loaded the wailing army guy into the van, waited for his lady, and then took him back to the trailer.

  Turned out the army guy, who was seriously grateful, was connected with some kind of Special Forces outfit based in the panhandle of Florida. The next morning, one thing led to another after lots of talk over coffee, and Gino was invited to come to some place called Eglin, where there were military units without names who were looking for some stone killers. The rest, as they say, was history. Gino went out to the various Stans, still frozen-faced, but this time as a contractor. He appreciated the irony—contracts had been his stock-in-trade as a mobster, too. Mandeville now had him on a personal-services countersurveillance contract under the auspices of the DMX. He loved the irony of having an ex-mob hit man being paid with government funds within the overarching mission of counterterrorism.

  Mandeville sat down on the bench next to the motionless Evangelino, who’d gone back to using his real name on the off chance that someone would crack a smile, thus allowing him to thrash people, something he enjoyed in his otherwise blistered existence. He laid a small envelope down on the bench between him and the motionless figure to his right.

  “For now, this is a targeting task. Figure out routes, routines, daily schedule. After you’ve got all that down, let him see your pretty face once in a while, so he knows there’s a watcher on him. I may or may not need him removed, but if I do, I’ll speak his last name to the message board. Which is Smith, by the way, if you can imagine that.”

  Evangelino hadn’t moved a muscle since Mandeville had joined him. His left eye, closest to Mandeville, stared out and down just a little. Mandeville thought he had sight in it, but just couldn’t move it. He had a round, pumpkin-shaped head with lots of dark hair, except for a gray streak running from his forehead all the way back to the nape of his neck. He wasn’t tall, but he was thickset to the point where Mandeville could feel his menacing bulk right next to him.

  He stood up, feeling uncomfortable being right next to this—beast. He looked down on the bench. The envelope was gone.

  Okay, then, he thought, and walked away, up toward the Capitol building and the Smithsonian buildings. When he finally looked back, the bench was empty. He shivered. Evangelino, the man who never spoke.

  FIVE

  On Sunday evening Av slid into his rooftop rocker, pulled a patio chair under his feet, and leaned back to enjoy a cold beer after a session with his Exercycle. He hadn’t put much effort into the workout, the day’s-end beer being more on his mind than a cardio blast. It was a gorgeous fall evening in the capital. The city’s atmosphere was beginning to thin out a little after the summer’s endless heat, humidity, and the hordes of sweaty tourists. He was up on the roof of his three-story brick building in the southern precincts of Georgetown, supposedly Washington’s toniest neighborhood. He was probably the only Washington Metro cop with a Georgetown address.

  The building had begun life in the early 1840s as a warehouse, morphed into a general store, and then finally a tavern with rooms above. Av’s uncle Warren, his father’s brother, had bequeathed the building to him after succumbing to HIV. Uncle Warren had been ostracized by the entire Smith family after declaring one day that he was gay and that he was leaving his horrified wife. Av had been the lone exception, especially once into his teenage years. He’d refused to join in the familial shunning effort, having developed a better relationship with his uncle than with his own father. When he got back to D.C. after the Marines, he discovered that he was now the proud owner of a very valuable corner property overlooking the remaining vestiges of the C & O Canal and its narrow towpath in downtown Georgetown. His neighbors in the block included several law offices, restaurants, Cannon’s fish market, and three embassies within walking distance. A stand of old oaks behind the building helped damp out the perpetual traffic roar of M Street, just two blocks north.

  The bottom floor along Thirty-third Street was now occupied by an import-export company, run by a fussy little Iranian man named Bayamad Kardashian, who was quick to tell you that he was, regrettably, no relation to the young lady who was famous for being famous. Av was not exactly sure what Kardashian imported and exported, but it appeared to involve the usual Middle Eastern display of lamps, rugs, and lots of brass objects. More importantly, the Iranian paid his rent on time every month.

  The second floor was a two-bedroom rental apartment unit, recently occupied by a young woman who had listed her occupation as an attorney. His rental manager had handled the details and he’d only seen her a couple of times, usually heading off to work, but she appeared to be quite attractive. The income from the lower two floors allowed him to pay the city’s hefty taxes on the building and bank almost his entire monthly salary. Besides that, the neighborhood was a delightful place to live, with all the bars and fancy restaurants up on M Street offering every kind of company a choosy bachelor might want on any given boring night.

  He reviewed Friday’s events. The court order for his John Doe autopsy was “in process.” Even though he actually had a name, he’d left the paperwork as a John Doe, hoping that would add impetus for the duty hizzoner to order it up. Unlike in the cop shows on TV, getting a court order for an autopsy took at least a day, often longer, as did any other emergent requests placed respectfully before their honors of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Budget cuts had reduced the number of judges and magistrates to the point where almost nothing happened on a same-day or even second-day basis. Either way, Av had no intentions of attending the autopsy. He’d done enough of those as a homicide detective and now he’d be entirely satisfied by the report from the slicers and dicers.

  He still couldn’t figure out how the victim had lost his name in the process of being processed by the ER and then regained it when he showed up in the hosp
ital’s morgue. And where the hell had the girlfriend run off to? Scared off by all the commotion? Knew there’d be cops and EMS there? Had she possibly done something to McGavin? And then it hit him: Precious had said the Bureau was keeping its distance because of some as-yet-undefined federal involvement— Holy crap! Was Ellen Whiting working for the FBI? He let out a low whistle. The chief medical examiner would love that.

  “Knock, knock.”

  Av turned around to see the pretty blonde from the apartment clambering over the low parapet wall from the building’s fire escape behind him.

  “Hi, there,” he said, enjoying the view as she straightened up. She was wearing what looked like a one-piece bathing suit covered with a sleeveless tee and a pair of clingy nylon running shorts. When he’d seen her before she’d been in her go-to-work clothes. He liked this outfit better.

  “I’m Rue Waltham,” she said, coming across the flat tar-and-sand roof while rubbing rust off her hands.

  “Av Smith,” he said, getting up to shake hands.

  “Mister Kardashian said you were a runner and that you had an exercise area on the roof, but I couldn’t find a way up. So I—” She indicated the external fire stairs, then looked around. The roof had two metal sheds, one for utilities and another small storage hut where Av kept his workout gear. A third, outhouse-shaped protrusion contained the stairwell that came up from his loft apartment just below.

  “Oops,” she said, when she saw the open stairwell door. “This isn’t part of the apartment deal, is it.”

  “’Fraid not,” he said. “I’m your landlord, actually. I have a loft on the third floor, right below, and that’s how I get to the roof. I’d never thought about the fire stairs.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, obviously embarrassed.

  He shrugged. “Yeah, well.”