The garage entrance was a block-and-a-half away and invisible from the front entrance to the building, so anyone looking for her there would not see her exit. And anyone watching for her exit from the garage would be visible to her because there was no place of concealment at the building's underground rear exit. She made a hard turn into an alley behind the dry cleaners and then made an illegal right turn into K Street. She gunned the engine, shifted into third, ran a yellow light, and ignored the yield sign at the entrance to the Rock Creek Parkway. She headed uptown, wishing she could remove the hat and glasses and let down the top and let the hot air burn her face and scalp, the way it would in Los Angeles. But she settled for the sheer joy of driving—too fast—in the beauty of the park that ran the length of D.C., from the Potomac River in Virginia, to Maryland.
She left the Parkway at Piney Branch Road and angled over to Georgia Avenue, which she took north out of D.C., across the line and into Silver Spring, Maryland. She prayed to be able to find a parking space in the huge lot at the Silver Spring Metro station, and after driving around for almost fifteen minutes, she whipped a u-turn and beat a Volvo to a just-vacated space. The guy driving the Volvo gave her the finger. Grinning, she dropped three dollars worth of quarters into the parking meter and trotted toward the station. She was parked at the far end of the lot and her blouse was quite damp by the time she inserted her fare card in the turnstile. The air conditioned train car would feel good.
She rode the Metro from Maryland South, back into D.C., changing trains—from the Red to the Yellow line—at Metro Center, and rode the three stops to Chinatown, then walked the block to the restaurant. It was exactly one forty-five when she entered the aromatic dimness that was the Yangtze River. She was greeted with a formal politeness by the owner, a woman whom she had been instructed to call Mrs. Chang, though that, Carole Ann knew, was not her name.
"Hello. Nice to see you again," the woman said with a slight bow. Then she surprised Carole Ann by saying, "So sorry about husband. Please to follow me." And she turned toward the back room that was the special haven of preferred customers.
Carole Ann stood in place, too stunned to follow immediately. How could this woman know to express sympathy to her? She shook off her surprise and quickly caught up with her hostess. "Mrs. Chang," she said, and the woman stopped, turned and faced her with a calmly expectant expression. "I'm meeting someone," Carole Ann began.
"Yes, yes. Police officer already here. Please to follow me," Mrs. Chang repeated, as she repeated the slight bow and her forward motion. This time Carole Ann followed.
Tommy indeed already was there and already eating. He stopped when he saw her, quickly wiped his hands and mouth on a napkin, and stood. When she got closer he took a step to meet her, then stopped. He opened his arms, then extended his hand, then blushed, reminding her again how young and vulnerable he was. She opened her arms to receive his embrace, grateful for it. She hadn't seen him since the day of his return to work. "I'd say you haven't been doing such a red hot job of taking care of yourself," Tommy said, his hands on her shoulders and holding her at arms' length.
"And why would you say that?" she growled, stepping away from him and conscious of trying to re-institute the control she had exercised in their lawyer-client relationship. She sat down, put a napkin in her lap, and poured herself a glass of water.
"You've lost too much weight and you look like you're running on about three hours of sleep."
"I'll gain it back and it was four, thanks to you. And what the hell do you mean, Al's death wasn't an accident?" She held him by the eyes and he didn't flinch or waver or blink.
"I'm sorry, Miss Gibson. C.A. Truly sorry. But you need to know. I thought you'd want to know."
"Know what, exactly?" She cut him off, her words a sharp blade.
"Valerie got the call that night. You remember Valerie?" He asked the question to cover his embarrassment for referring to the police response to Al's murder—if it was murder—in cop jargon. Valerie was Tommy's girlfriend and a patrol officer in the First District, which included Foggy Bottom, the area of town where they lived and where Al had been killed. "Anyway, she called me the next morning, early, to tell me about it, and about...about who the dude was...I mean, that the vic...that Mr. Crandall was your husband." They both took long swallows of their water and organized their emotions. "By the way, thanks a lot for the card and the note."
She was about to ask him what he was talking about when it occurred to her, suddenly and correctly, that Cleo would have acknowledged a message of sympathy from Tommy with a personal note. God bless Cleo! "You're welcome. Then what?"
"I asked Valerie to keep an ear on it, to let me know how the case was working. You know they made it a high priority." He paused and rubbed his hands together. "They pulled a lot of guys in off the street, homeless dudes, mostly. Whipped up on a few of 'em. This went on for a couple of weeks, 'til the ACLU got pissed off and started talking class action suit. So they sprung all the homeless dudes and nothing happened for another couple 'a weeks. Then this homicide dick, fella by the name of Graham, starts making weird noises."
Carole Ann made a sound, then covered by pretending to cough. She drank some more water. "I know Graham. He's one of the ones who came to tell me that night, and I'd met him before. Started making weird noises like what?"
"Like the pieces didn't fit, he said. Like the times didn't jive, when the lawyer dudes said they left the restaurant with the victim and when the dishwasher saw him in the alley. Like the crime scene had been tampered with. Like your hus...Mr. Crandall's brief case had been planted at the scene. Like Mr. Crandall himself had been planted there."
Carole Ann's head pounded and she felt hot enough to explode. Her blouse clung to her and perspiration trickled down between her breasts. Tommy reached across the table and took her hands and squeezed and wouldn't let go. "First the dishwasher disappeared, the one who saw your husband in the alley. Then Graham took a bullet in the back. Then the Feds took the case away from us."
Carole Ann snapped out of her grief, snatched her hands from Tommy's grip, and sat back in the booth. "How could the Feds take the case from you?" she asked in an almost whisper.
"Some high-up muckety-muck allowed as how Graham was right after all, the body had been planted. The crime really had occurred in Lafayette Park and the body moved to Pennsylvania Avenue. The Park is Federal property and the jurisdiction of the U.S. Park Police. So, we gave it to 'em. Everything. The case and the case files and nobody's heard nothin' about it since then." Tommy finished his story, the anger and disgust curling his mouth like he wanted to spit out something poisonous.
"How do you get murder of that, Tommy?" Carole Ann asked so quietly and with so much forced control that it hurt her to speak.
"'Cause that's what Graham called it. Didn't I say that? Graham said it was premeditated and planned. Valerie said he was making a lot of noise about it, about how he was pissed off that he'd wasted so much time looking for a robber or a mugger or some damn homeless dude. Said he oughta have been looking for a hit man. Valerie said that's what the man said: He shoulda been looking for a hit man. Then he took a bullet in the back that'll keep him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. A bullet in the back just like your husband. And the dishwasher who could back up his theory just disappeared. Vanished."
Carole Ann felt as if she'd been sitting at the table listening to Tommy for years. Mrs. Chang's arrival with a cart-load of steaming and aromatic plates was proof that it had been but minutes. Without speaking, she began off-loading the cart. Three dishes she placed in the center of the table. One plate she placed directly before Tommy and another before Carole Ann. The aroma was both delicate and pungent and unlike anything Carole Ann had ever experienced.
"This is food for hope," Mrs. Chang said to her. "Food to know husband on safe journey." The she bowed to their table and rolled the cart away.
Carole Ann could not speak for a long moment. The combination of Tommy's informat
ion and the unexpected kindness of the Chinese woman whose name she didn't even know caused her emotions to feel like they were caught in a tornado. Tommy watched her for a while, then began to eat with a gusto that was enjoyable to behold. Out of courtesy, Carole Ann picked up her chopsticks to sample Mrs. Chang's "food for hope," thinking that she'd ask to take it home with her rather than leave it in a display of bad manners and ingratitude, but she began eating and could not stop. She didn't know what exactly she was eating, she'd never been able to discern what the herbs and spices were, and Mrs. Chang's command of English diminished proportionate to the intensity of Carole Ann's questions about the ingredients.
They ate in silence, savoring the magnificence of the food and the generosity of spirit that provided it. Carole Ann broke the silence once to ask Tommy how Mrs. Chang knew he was a cop and, grinning, he explained how he'd brought Valerie here one night, both of them in uniform and just in time to evict a party of drunken tourists who refused to accept that there existed no menu in English, and no Chinese person who spoke English well enough to take their order for pork fried rice and Mongolian beef with broccoli. Since then, they'd been regulars, separately and together, and whenever they arrived Mrs. Chang immediately brought them "good luck" food, which is what he had been eating when Carole Ann arrived. Then Tommy predicted that at the rate she was going, Carole Ann would have regained her grief-lost pounds by the end of the meal. They laughed together, grateful for the lessening of the tension that would allow them to continue the conversation they both knew was far from over.
Carole Ann asked so many questions that she was surprised that Tommy didn't object, and as she asked, it became clear that had Al Crandall been anybody's husband but her own, she would have smelled the rottenness of the police investigation a month ago. If it had been anybody's husband but her own, she'd have demanded to know why there'd been no follow-up contact from the law. But it had been her husband and she had been wallowing in her grief and had not wanted to talk to the police, had not wanted to know the whereabouts of Al's briefcase and the clothes he was wearing and the condition of the body and the placement of the wounds. She hadn't even asked—and hadn't hired an attorney to ask—for the return of the victim's personal effects. She'd demanded of Detective Graham that night the return of the ring that had been her father's, and had made no mention of it since. She had, in short, behaved like a grieving widow and not like a criminal attorney. And because of that, her husband's murder was seven weeks cold. The evidence was seven weeks cold. The investigation was more than cold; was perhaps dead and buried and decomposing. Like...like...
One final question, Carole Ann begged, and Tommy, weary from going over the same material from different angles so many times he said he felt he could understand how innocent people broke and confessed under intense interrogation, acquiesced with a sigh. Why, she wanted to know, did he believe that her home telephone might not be secure and that her home might be under surveillance. Did he believe that she was target? And if so, why. And Tommy began to squirm. Visibly and physically squirm.
"Fish," she said, lowering her voice and drawing the tiny word out across several syllables and making it a question, a demand, an accusation, and a chastisement. It was a tactic employed to great effectiveness by her mother to elicit information from a recalcitrant child. It now worked on Tommy.
"Well," he said, still squirming, "I've been doing some checking on my own."
"What kind of checking?" she snapped at him.
"I went to see Graham. And I tried to get a line on the missing dishwasher. Talked to Immigration, to see if they had him. He was an undocumented from El Salvador or one of those Spanish speaking places. But INS don't know jack about him. That dude is just plain gone. Disappeared into thin air." He was shaking his head and pouring tea so he missed the look on Carole Ann's face as she recalled Al's fear that people missing in Louisiana after contact with him somehow were related to Parish Petroleum.
"What did Graham say?" she asked him.
"He said whoever took out Crand...your husband, also took out the dishwasher, and that same somebody put a bullet in his back. I told him he was being paranoid and he told me if I started sniffing around this case I better be paranoid, too. He told me he tried getting a line on some outfit called Parish Petroleum and that's when his troubles started. He said your husband must have pissed them off real bad, whoever "they" are, 'cause Graham said he can't find out who they are. And he said if I insisted on filling you in, that I also better tell you to watch your back."
Tommy sat back and drank some of his tea and watched the effect of his words. He seemed not to mind that he had shown her his fear. And perhaps had she not been so angry with herself, she'd have reciprocated, because she, in truth, felt the vague stirrings of something resembling fear. But the anger was in charge, and that is what she displayed. Anger at herself for succumbing so completely to her pain and loss that she'd abdicated rationality, which now was insisting to her psyche that it was too late to do anything but accept things as they were. The struggle within waged on and Tommy watched until she took a couple of deep breaths and calmed herself.
"You said Graham would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Was that hyperbole?"
"Was that what?" He scrunched up his face at her.
"An exaggeration, Tommy," she said, not concealing exasperation.
"Hell, no!" he said quickly and seriously. "The dude has nothing from the waist down."
Carole Ann closed her eyes and leaned back into the padded cushion of the booth. She found that she easily could picture Detective Graham as he had been the night he brought her news of Al's murder, found that she could not picture the intense, wiry man confined to a wheelchair, found that she felt pain and sorrow for someone other than herself and her Al.
"Can I ask you something?" Tommy's voice was low, hesitant.
"Of course you can. What is it?"
"Why didn't you return my phone calls?"
"I never got your messages, Tommy." She put up a hand to stop the words ready to rush from his mouth. "I never got them because I don't listen to the message system. Until this morning, when you called, I hadn't answered the phone since the day Al. was murdered."
She explained to him about the two phone lines and how the private line was hooked up to an answering machine and the other line was answered by the phone company messaging center. That's the number he, Tommy, had, the number that was published in the telephone directory; and because she never used that phone, she wouldn't have heard the tone that indicated the existence of messages. She used the private line to call Cleo and her mother and the few friends whose calls she'd bothered to return because their messages were on the answering machine with the light that flashed and flashed until it got the attention it demanded. "I apologize," she said, and, digging into her purse for a pen, she wrote the private line number on a napkin and slid it across the table to him.
"Are you sure you answer this phone?" he asked with a furrowed brow and a deep skepticism as he folded the napkin and slipped it into his pocket.
"Always," she said solemnly, raising her right hand as if taking the oath. "My Mom calls this number."
On the brief walk from the restaurant to the Metro stop, Carole Ann focused outward, noticing the different energy between the tourists and conventioneers, and the office workers pressed to eat and get back to the job: The difference between a merry-go-round and a rollercoaster. On the train ride uptown to the Silver Spring Metro Station, and on the drive downtown, back through Rock Creek Park, Carole Ann turned inward and tuned in to the shifts and changes taking place within herself. She felt the new knowledge of the truth of Al's death assume its rightful place, displacing the feelings that so recently had taken up residence: Grief, longing, loss, heavy sadness. She felt the familiar stirrings of restlessness and competitiveness. And anger. She felt her energy slowing down to a speed that encouraged contemplation and decisiveness. She felt the widow's veil slip from her being to reveal the
lawyer that was one of the best in the business.
Today was June First and Carole Ann had something worth living for.
CHAPTER FIVE
For Carole Ann, the next two weeks were an ice-water immersion into the patterns and rhythms of her previous way of life. Not that she'd forgotten how to be a criminal defense lawyer. She couldn't forget that any more than she could forget how to be a Black woman, but she was appalled at how far away from herself she'd stepped once she finally returned. Appalled at how much she didn't know about what had happened to her husband; appalled at how many alarm signals she'd allowed to go unheeded. Why hadn't she been more alarmed about the nature of Larry Devereaux's visits? Why hadn't she wondered at the lack of a follow-up visit from the police? Why hadn't she wondered about the location and disposition of Al's personal belongings? Why hadn't she wondered about the evidence at the crime scene? Why hadn't she wondered about the existence of suspects? And goddammit why hadn't she understood the meaning of the flashing red lights on the alarm system key pad! So clearly did the meaning present itself to her in the present instant that she actually caught and held her breath.
She suddenly and clearly remembered Al explaining a salient feature of the then-new alarm system. It was, he'd proudly proclaimed, one of the most advanced on the market, and one of the simplest to operate. The system "understood" that human operators made errors. So, Al had said, it was OK if she forgot her code. She could, in fact, forget it three times. The system would simply flash a second red light, indicating the error. Then, the entry of the correct code three consecutive times would cancel the error. However, a fourth incorrect attempt would activate the alarm—the system "thinking" illegal activity was in progress, and the security company automatically would notify the police.
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