McGill's Short Cases 1-3, Three Jim McGill Short Stories

by Joseph Flynn

  To McGill’s surprise, de Loyola responded, “I know how you feel. I know just how you feel. We are commanded by God not to kill. But we are also instructed that there is no greater love than laying down one’s life for another. Sometimes we may risk our lives for those of others, survive that trial and cause the death of the source of menace.”

  De Loyola rubbed his bearded chin as his eyes filled with a painful memory.

  “Such situations never allow time for reflection. We must act without hesitation. Yet we must be sure the danger is real.” The priest’s eyes now focused on McGill. “Here you have the advantage of me. In the situations you describe, you truly had no choice. In one case, it would have been a moral offense had you remained passive, and in the other you would have been acquiescing to your own murder.

  “You are without sin in these matters, my friend. You owe no penance as such. What you might do to salve your pain is to look for more chances to ease the suffering of others.”

  De Loyola was about to remove his stole when McGill asked him to let it be.

  “Your confession is not finished?” the priest asked.

  “We need to talk about the sins I’m going to commit,” McGill said.

  The Jesuit told him, “Confession is not a prospective sacrament. You cannot bank absolution.”

  “I’m not asking for forgiveness now, Father. I’m looking for an accomplice.”

  De Loyola exhibited surprise. Then he smiled broadly.

  “We are indeed brothers-in-arms,” the priest said.

  McGill told him, “The money you found and asked for, Father? I’m afraid you can’t have it, but I know where you can get a substantial amount. Maybe even an ongoing source of funds, if you want to use it for a good cause.”

  De Loyola thought of his idea for the Street Corps. Having someone underwrite that plan would be manna from heaven. He and this henchman truly shared many bonds. The Jesuit, as his superiors in the hierarchy well knew, was not beyond sinning.

  He would repent, of course.

  Do his penance without complaint.

  “What do you need, sir?” he asked McGill.

  “The first thing is your vow of silence.”

  Draped in his stole, the priest steepled his hands. “The seal of confession is inviolable.”

  Dikki Missirian, the owner of the building in which McGill Investigations, Inc. had its offices, was usually the first to arrive at the Georgetown address in the morning. Mr. McGill and Margaret Sweeney normally arrived at nine a.m., as did the staff at the accounting firm of Wentworth & Willoughby on the second floor. Max Lucey, the owner and chief recording engineer of A-Sharp Sound on the ground floor, came and went at all hours, but his days usually started close to the lunch hour.

  So when Dikki arrived at six-fifteen a.m., a half-hour before sunrise, he was surprised to be greeted by Max. Dikki’s office was also on the ground floor, a small space tucked under the building’s staircase.

  “Good morning, Max. You were working late?”

  The sound engineer nodded. “Yeah, I was. Listening to the final mix of a new blues album. Wanted to make sure I have all the sound levels right. Dikki, did any of the building’s alarms get set off last night?”

  If something had been amiss, the building owner would have been notified by either his private security firm or the Secret Service. He looked disturbed by Max’s question.

  “No, I received no calls. Did you hear something?”

  Max said, “No, I guess not. I stretched out on the sofa in my office. Fell asleep listening to Beethoven and started dreaming. Thought I heard a scuffle out back.”

  “Scuffle?”

  “Fight. Guys duking it out. Didn’t last long. I got up to use the john later and took a peek out the back door. Didn’t see anything.”

  Dikki started to relax. Max yawned and stretched.

  “Funny thing was,” the sound engineer said, “when I lay down again I thought I heard people climbing the stairs. But you’ve got alarms on W&W, right?”

  “Yes, of course,” Dikki said.

  “That’s what I thought. And the Secret Service takes care of Mr. McGill’s space. So I went back to sleep.”

  The two men paused to consider the situation. Four years earlier, a psychotic psychiatrist had broken into Jim McGill’s office and tried to kill him. The creep had knocked Dikki out in his little office. People in the building had been on edge for some time after that. But years went by with nothing unusual happening … you wrote it off as a once in a lifetime thing.

  Right?

  Max and Dikki were trying to do just that.

  The sound engineer asked his landlord, “You want to hear a sample of the new album?”

  Dikki was a blues fan. He’d never heard the music before arriving in the United States from Armenia, but loved it from the first plaintive note to reach his ears. He attributed this to his natal country’s heartbreaking history of being conquered — fourteen times in two centuries — suffering an attempt at genocide at the beginning of the twentieth century and enduring violent protests against the new, independent government a hundred years later.

  He could relate to music that sang of people’s sorrows.

  The two men were heading toward Max’s sound board in the recording studio when they saw the trash-hauling truck go by the window that looked out on the alley.

  Morning pickup.

  Only the usual guy wasn’t behind the wheel.

  Sweetie watched the back of Dikki Missirian’s building. She had set up a vantage point on the roof of the neighboring building. She saw the driver of the trash-hauling truck bring his vehicle to a stop. He got out of the cab and looked around, as if to see if anyone might be watching him. Hardly the usual behavior for someone in his line of work.

  Trash collectors didn’t tend to be self-conscious about doing their jobs.

  People scheming against the president’s husband had more reason to be nervous.

  The man who got out of the truck didn’t spot Sweetie. She wore dark clothes and a navy blue stocking cap to cover her blonde hair. The cell phone in the cargo pocket on her right leg vibrated twice, went still and then vibrated twice more. Deke and Leo had just checked in.

  Their message was: The man who got out of the truck had company, someone sitting nearby in another vehicle. Leo was positioned to follow the second party. Sweetie raised her Canon Elph LT camera to her eye. There was enough light in the brightening sky to shoot without a flash. She took her first shot of the driver as he approached the Dumpster behind Dikki’s building.

  Got the guy’s face full on.

  What someone in his line of work should have done was push the wheeled Dumpster out behind his rear-loader truck. Align the Dumpster with his cart-lifter. Have the machinery dump the load and set the trash bin back on the ground to be returned to its point of origin.

  There was no need to inspect the trash that got dumped.

  Unless, of course, you expected to find something.

  Sweetie’s camera silently captured the efforts of the man below to have his Eureka moment. His first few armloads of shredded paper were taken out of the Dumpster in a methodical fashion. Grabbed and stacked nearby and neatly, making the return of the refuse to the container quick and easy.

  As the man plumbed deeper into the Dumpster without result, though, he became agitated. He hurled the waste about helter-skelter. Events weren’t following the script he’d been given and he wasn’t comfortable improvising. The man leaned over the Dumpster, the upper half of his body descending into the trash receptacle. He swung an arm back and forth as if stirring a giant pot of soup.

  He soon emerged, stepped back from the Dumpster and gave it a kick.

  He took a cell phone from his pocket and hit a single button.

  Sweetie listened in on the man’s call with a small device called a Signal Magnet. SigMag, as it was called in the government snooping trade. She wasn’t supposed to have one; only federal agents were authorized to carry t
he device. Captain Welborn Yates of the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations was a federal agent. He worked out of the White House on detached duty to the president. He had a SigMag and had been looking the other way when Jim McGill borrowed it.

  The device could record the calls it snooped, but that would create a record of its use.

  Neither McGill nor Sweetie wanted that.

  Relying on Sweetie’s memory would do for their purposes.

  McGill stood in front of Rockelle Bullard’s house on W Street in North West Washington. The metro police captain opened the trunk of her meticulously washed and waxed ice blue Chevy Impala, vintage 1965. McGill gave the vehicle a smile of appreciation.

  “Beautiful ride, Captain,” McGill told her.

  “Thank you.”

  Rockelle swore that she didn’t mind being awakened early but anyone could see she had a grump on. SAC Elspeth Kendry saw it, easily. McGill had put her out of sorts, too. With Deke Ky and Leo Levy off doing other tasks for McGill, she had to act as his bullet-catcher.

  Not that she minded his company. He was smart, honest and almost as funny as he thought he was. Altogether more human than someone in his position needed to be. But while she was out on the street making sure the president didn’t get widowed a second time, the paperwork generated by the administrative side of her job piled up.

  She hated doing any paperwork.

  Facing a backlog really made her crazy.

  Rockelle pointed to the cardboard box inside her trunk.

  “Bag’s in the box,” she said. “Money’s in the bag.”

  McGill was impressed. He understood the captain hadn’t been reckless leaving a half-million dollars parked at the curb. She knew nobody in her neighborhood, and probably the whole town, would mess with her car. That was why she didn’t have to put the classic gem in a garage.

  It also told McGill the money had never been logged in with the Metro PD.

  Rockelle Bullard had anticipated correctly that McGill might need the cash.

  He grabbed the box.

  Told Rockelle she need not concern herself about the money any further.

  “Because you’re not going to play finders-keepers.”

  “Right,” McGill had said.

  He put the box in the trunk of his turbocharged Chevy, light years ahead of Rockelle’s car in technology, safety and power. Nowhere near it in breathless cool. Maybe someday Detroit would put it all together.

  McGill asked, “When the time’s right, you want me to tell you what happened?”

  Rockelle shook her head. “I’d just as soon not know.”

  McGill gave her a salute and left with Elspeth at the wheel.

  Max Lucey and Dikki Missirian stood in front of Dikki’s building on P Street when the trash-hauling truck barreled out of the alley, slowed just long enough to see there was no approaching cross-traffic and made a hard right turn, the driver gunning the engine for all it was worth. It was almost comical watching the big, clumsy vehicle trying to gain speed. Once it got going, though, it was going to need as much room as a jumbo jet to come to a stop. Heaven help anything that got in its way.

  The truck was halfway down the block when a red Mini Cooper pulled out of a parking space, made a U-turn on the narrow street and charged after the truck. Tailgated the larger vehicle so close it looked like an automotive hemorrhoid.

  “What the hell is going on?” Max Lucey asked.

  He and Dikki stepped out into the street.

  Dikki took out his mobile phone ready to record any further lunacy.

  Sure enough, down the block, parked on the near side of the street, a stretch Cadillac pulled out and joined the caravan, proceeding more sedately than the Mini Cooper and the truck.

  Dikki videoed the Cadillac’s departure. The garbage truck and Mini Cooper had turned left at 26th Street; the Caddy turned right. Maybe it had just happened to be going the same way for a short distance. Max and Dikki looked at each other. Asked the question without saying a word.

  Just a coincidence, the Caddy pulling out right after the other two vehicles passed by?

  No way.

  Max said, “Make sure to keep that video.”

  Dikki replied, “Yes, of course.”

  Leo Levy and Deke Ky kept track of the trash-hauling truck the modern way. Not tailing it from behind. Watching it from in front, using a rear-facing video camera. Many newer model cars had such cameras to aid drivers in parking their cars in tight spaces. Leo had modified the camera in his car to watch vehicles traveling behind him. The lens could be tilted up or down to adjust to the height of the target vehicle.

  The video captured by the camera was displayed on a monitor set into Leo’s dashboard.

  Leo, of course, kept his eyes on the road. Even a pro had to watch where he was going.

  But Deke, riding shotgun, said, “That guy looks like his day isn’t starting out the way he’d hoped. Whoops! Did you see that?”

  “Caught it in my mirror,” Leo said.

  A tiny red car that they hadn’t even known was behind the truck made a screeching right turn onto a side street. It disappeared in seconds. Neither Deke nor Leo worried about it.

  “A reporter,” Leo said.

  “Just lost his big story,” Deke added.

  By now, the truck was starting to crowd Leo’s rear bumper. He smoothly pulled into an open space at the curb. The truck roared past, the driver not having needed to honk his horn. Leo pulled back into the near lane.

  The truck turned a corner two blocks up. Leo didn’t hurry to catch up. They already had an excellent idea of where it was heading. Sweetie had e-mailed them the photos she’d taken of the truck driver. Deke had forwarded them to the White House Security Detail. A colleague there started his check of the man’s identity by running the image of his face against those of visitors who had taken the White House tour during the past twelve months. Found him among the tourists passing through two weeks after the president’s second inauguration.

  Noticed he was chatting with another guy.

  Deke’s colleague compared both faces to those on record in the D.C., Maryland and Virginia departments of motor vehicles databases. Got hits on both men within minutes.

  Turner Kinney of McLean, Virginia. A private investigator and faux trash hauler.

  Earnest Deveraux of Georgetown. Address on the street just ahead where the truck had turned. Mr. Deveraux’s occupation was listed as a political consultant.

  “Deveraux spells his first name with an ‘a’ ” Deke told Leo. “Like that’s supposed to make him more trustworthy.”

  Leo just grinned and shook his head.

  McGill’s two henchmen cruised by the street where the truck had turned.

  Having glimpsed a Metro PD patrol unit on the scene.

  With its lights flashing.

  Inigo de Loyola lay curled up on the landing of the front stoop of the Georgetown townhouse, the delightful leather sack filled with cash under his head once more. The concrete surface was no match for the comfortable hospital bed from which he’d been summoned, but it was a familiar sort of resting place nonetheless. One that had allowed the Jesuit easily to succumb to the demands of his tired body.

  It seemed he’d been asleep for less time than the Church needed to condemn a heretic — him, for instance — when he felt a hand on his shoulder, shaking him none too gently.

  “Come on, old timer,” a gruff voice told him, “time to wake up and move on.”

  De Loyola saw two uniformed policemen, one black, one white.

  “Time for breakfast already?” the priest asked.

  The two cops looked at each other. They’d responded to a call. An anonymous neighbor had called the department to report a vagrant sleeping on private property. Couldn’t have that become a trend. It’d kill real estate values. Spread crime.

  Officers Timpkins and Fabach had found and approached the sleeping figure with caution. You never knew what street people might find in thei
r travels: hammers, knives, even firearms if they got into burglary. Their state-of-mind upon wakening would be another unknown consideration. Caution was their watchword.

  Both cops had hands on the butts of their duty weapons. But neither was a hardass. A guy who had to sleep outdoors but could wake up cracking a joke, he deserved a little slack.

  “You hungry, Pops?” Timpkins asked.

  De Loyola pushed himself into a sitting position.

  “Not quite so much as most times,” he said. “I ate last night, and I have some sandwiches I might share with you, if you need food.”

  Timpkins and Fabach smiled. Neither had ever had a street person offer them food before.

  Officer Timpkins smiled and asked, “What you got?”

  “Roast beef, ham and chicken.”

  “Where’d you get all that?” Fabach wanted to know.

  “A kind man took pity on me last night.”

  “You talk pretty smooth, Pops. You have yourself some education?”

  “Several years in the seminary,” de Loyola said.

  Both cops saw a light go on upstairs in the townhouse. The homeowner had finally noticed the little drama playing out on his doorstep. The cops would have to adopt a sterner demeanor when he appeared. Show him his tax money wasn’t being misspent.

  Until then, Fabach asked politely, “Are you a priest?”

  De Loyola nodded, accepted a hand from Timpkins as he got to his feet.

  “I am a Jesuit, yes,” de Loyola said.

  “Well, what are you doing out here, Father?” Fabach had never heard of a homeless priest.

  “Ministering to those who need me.”

  “People in Georgetown?” Timpkins asked.

  “Those who exist on the leavings of the rich,” de Loyola said.

  “What’s in the bag, Father?” Fabach asked.

  A light went on just inside the front door and they all heard footsteps descending a staircase.

  De Loyola said, “I don’t know. I was walking by, saw the bag and thought it might make a fine pillow. It did. But I didn’t open it.”