Murder at The Washington Tribune

by Margaret Truman

  “I was thinking of Robert Redford,” Joe offered.

  “Come on, he’s older than you are, Joey.”

  “I know. How about Julia Roberts?”

  “Julia Roberts! She’s a—woman.”

  “So what? They do whatever they want out in Hollywood. Hell, they might make you black in the film, turn it into a story from the ’hood.”

  “I might write a book about it,” Wilcox interrupted, “depending, of course, on how the whole thing turns out.”

  “We knew you when,” someone said.

  “Yeah. I got a call this morning from a New York book publisher.”

  “Get an agent” was suggested.

  “The hell with an agent,” someone else counseled. “Do the deal yourself.”

  If he didn’t have a story to write for tomorrow’s edition, Wilcox would have been content to stay there for the rest of the day, maybe even get drunk the way he had a few times earlier in his career when surrounded by other journalists. Those were happy, carefree times, long before a sense of his own mortality increasingly entered his consciousness. He felt a measure of that youthful abandon while enjoying lunch that day with his friends, but knew it was just a fleeting reincarnation.

  “I really have to go,” he said after finishing lunch. He reached for his wallet, but someone clamped a hand on his arm. “Hey, Joe Wilcox, your money’s no good today. Just remember us when they’re casting extras for the newsroom scenes.”

  “I will, I will,” Wilcox said, getting up from the table and shaking hands. “Thanks for the lunch and drinks,” he said. “You’re the best.”

  The final comment he heard as he walked away was from the only woman in the group: “Lock that daughter of yours up, Joe, until the nut is put away.”

  Her words dampened the exuberance he was feeling, and stayed with him as he rode the elevator down to the lobby and headed back to the Tribune Building. The danger to Roberta.

  By the time he got there, however, his mind was focused on what he had to write, and he hunkered down in his cubicle, the words filling his computer screen as though coming from some automatic compartment inside his brain. On many days, it was a struggle to finish an article, even though much of what he’d written over the years was boilerplate—“The police have reported that another homicide took place last night . . .”

  This story was different. This story flowed from him. He’d created it. It was like writing fiction, a novel, a creative act with him as the centerpiece. He was free to vent his feelings, to pull from his inner core and express himself as he’d never been able to do before as a who-what-why-when-where journalist.

  He took a break and called Jimmy Breslin in New York, who was gracious in sharing his feelings about being on the receiving end of letters from New York’s infamous Son of Sam. He wove those comments into the piece, rewrote the lead, plugged in a comment by an MPD spokesperson who pledged an all-out campaign to bring the serial killer to justice, polished the ending, and dispatched it to Paul Morehouse.

  The editor came to the cubicle ten minutes later. “Great piece, Joe,” he said. “Beautiful, especially the way you handled the turning over of the letter to the cops. Makes us sound like public citizen number one.”

  “Thanks,” Wilcox said. “I think I’ll pack it in, make it an early night.”

  “Everything going smoothly with the media requests?”

  “I’ll check in with public affairs before I leave. I got a note from them that The National Enquirer wants to interview me.”

  “Well . . . Do it, Joe. Clear everything first.”

  “I got a call from a book publisher in New York.”

  Morehouse’s eyebrows went up, and he whistled. “That could be big stuff, Joe. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks. Nothing concrete, just a feeler.”

  “Say hello to Georgia and Robbie,” Morehouse said. “Make sure they know that I won’t let all of this go to your head.”

  “They’ll appreciate that, I’m sure.”

  Georgia called before he left work to thank him for the flowers, clearly touched.

  “Glad you like them,” he said. “Let’s go out for dinner tonight. I’ll be home in an hour.”

  “I’ve already started dinner,” she said.

  “So, stop it. I’m really in the mood to go out. Pick a place and make a reservation, a steak house maybe, or lobster.”

  “It sounds like we’re celebrating something,” she said.

  “Maybe we are, Georgia,” he said. “Maybe at last we are.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Roberta was getting ready to run out to meet Tom for a fast lunch at a Chinese restaurant. But before heading out, and despite already being late, she placed a call she’d been considering all morning.

  “Uncle Michael?”

  Michael laughed loudly. “Ah, it must be Roberta,” he said. “I love it, being called Uncle Michael. How are you, my dear?”

  “Fine. I just called to say that last evening was many things, shocking to be sure, and—how can I put it?—it was wonderful. It’s amazing to me that Mom and Dad were able to keep you a secret for so many years.”

  “I’m sure they had their reasons,” he said, his tone more rueful.

  “I’m dying to know more about you, Michael, about the novel you’re writing, your music career, your—”

  “No, no, no, no, no,” he said. “There’s no musical career as such, Robbie. I’m strictly a closet guitar player, playing for my own amusement.”

  “You never play in public?”

  “Absolutely not, although an occasional friend has heard me strum away here at my apartment.”

  “I would love to hear you play,” she said. “Would you consider allowing a family member to join that inner circle?”

  “Of course. Your father has heard me.”

  “He has?”

  “Yes. The first time he visited me here.”

  “That devil, not telling me.”

  “What are you doing this evening?” he asked.

  “The usual. I have a report on the six o’clock news, and back to do another at eleven. In between, I’m pretty much free, until nine anyway.”

  “Splendid,” he said, “I don’t claim to be a gourmet chef, but I did spend quite a few years working in the hospital’s kitchen and learning my way around a stove. My fellow patients said they preferred my cooking above all others.”

  “I’m sure whatever you come up with will be special. I’ll come at seven.”

  “Good. I look forward to it.”

  “There’s one condition, though, Michael.”

  “And what is that?”

  “That you play a tune or two for me.”

  “It will be my pleasure.” He gave her his address.

  Roberta’s tendency to run late was a bone of contention with Tom, albeit a minor one. He believed that people who were chronically late were seeking attention, keeping everyone waiting for their arrival, but hadn’t expressed his harsh analysis to her.

  “Sorry,” she said, sliding in next to him in a booth. “I was on a call.”

  “You’re always on a call,” he said, not unpleasantly. “Your ear is starting to look like a phone.”

  “I happen to think I have pretty ears,” she said with mock indignation.

  “And I happen to agree.” He kissed her ear. “Let’s order. I’m on at two.”

  Their order in, she said, “You’ll never believe what happened last night.”

  “At work?”

  “No, at the house. I had dinner with Mom and Dad. I told them that we’re considering getting engaged.”

  “You what? That’s a little premature, isn’t it?”

  She gave him her best pout. “You aren’t backing out, are you?”

  “I mean telling your folks. What did they say?”

  “Actually, I only told my mother and didn’t get to discuss it with dad. I’m sure she did after I left. Anyway, there was a surprise guest at dinner.”

 
“Who’s that?”

  “My uncle Michael.”

  He didn’t respond as the waiter brought their communal dishes and set them on the table.

  “It was incredible,” she said.

  “What was?”

  “Meeting my uncle Michael.”

  “Meeting him?” he said, spooning portions on to their plates. “You never met him before?”

  “No. In fact, I never even knew he existed.”

  Tom’s hand and spoon stopped in midair. “You didn’t know you had an uncle?”

  “Right. I do now.”

  He finished serving and took a bite of steamed dumpling before asking, “How could you not know you had an uncle? Where’s he been, in a foreign country? In jail?”

  “Close.”

  She filled him in on Michael’s background and he listened intently, eating as he did. When she was finished, he said, “That is some story, Robbie. He murdered somebody, a young woman?”

  “Yes.”

  “And they decided he was insane?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m not sure I’d want somebody like that in my family,” he said.

  “You don’t,” she said. “It’s my family, not yours.”

  “It’ll become mine if we get married.”

  “He’s fascinating,” she said. “He used his time in the mental hospital to learn to play jazz guitar, and he’s writing a novel. He’s very well-read, Tom, and utterly charming.”

  “Is he?”

  “Are you angry with me?”

  “Of course not. It’s just that—”

  “Just that what?”

  “Just that sometimes you can be unbelievably naÏve.”

  “About Michael?”

  “Yeah. I mean, people like that don’t just get better, Robbie, because they get some kind of treatment. People like that are—”

  “Stop saying ‘people like that,’ ” she said.

  “I’m talking about people who kill other people,” he said, motioning for a check. “It’s in their genes. They don’t just get over it like the flu or a broken bone.”

  “I have to get back,” she said, not attempting to hide her pique.

  He paid the check and they left the restaurant.

  “I’m having dinner with Michael tonight,” she said as they stood on the sidewalk. “At his apartment. He’s cooking dinner, something else he mastered while hospitalized.”

  “Good,” he said. “I’ll call.” A kiss on her check and he was quickly gone.

  She spent the afternoon preparing her report for the six o’clock news, and debating whether to tell her parents of her plans for the evening. She decided not to, remembering how angry her father seemed at seeing Michael at the house. She’d tell them tomorrow.

  For MPD detective Edith Vargas-Swayze, lunch didn’t include egg rolls or sweet-and-sour chicken. She ate at the station house, a pie with sausage and mushrooms delivered from a neighborhood pizzeria, and a Diet Coke from a machine in the lobby. Sharing the table was her partner, Wade Dungey, and their boss, Bernard Evans.

  “There was no problem with putting a tap on Wilcox’s line at the paper?” Evans asked. He lunched on an egg salad sandwich brought from home.

  “No,” Vargas-Swayze replied. “They were perfectly willing. His home phone is another matter.”

  “We’ll get a court order,” Evans said.

  “I’d rather Joe approve it voluntarily. His wife’s the problem. He’ll speak with her. I know her. She’ll say okay.”

  “What’s the lab say?” Evans asked, folding the piece of wax paper and his napkin into tiny, precise squares and dropping them into an overflowing wastebasket.

  “They’ll run prints on it.” she said, “and do an analysis of the typeface. Looks like it was written on a typewriter, not a computer printer, that’s for sure.”

  “The paper?”

  “Nothing fancy we could trace. Plain white, hard surface, high gloss.”

  “Good for prints,” Dungey said.

  “Why do you figure he mailed it from the post office down the block from the Trib?” Evans asked.

  “Makes sense to me,” Dungey said.

  “I don’t mean whether it makes sense, Wade,” Evans said. “It just seems to me that whoever this guy is probably lives close by. He lives in the District, not a suburb.” To Dungey: “Are you finished running those backgrounds on people who were at the Trib the night the Kaporis girl was killed?”

  “Close.”

  Before ending the meeting, Evans said, “Put a tail on Wilcox. This nut is liable to want a face-to-face.”

  “Not enough cheese,” Dungey groused to his partner as they sat at their desks filling out reports. “We should have ordered it with extra cheese.” They left the precinct at three and went to the car assigned them for that day. He slid behind the wheel.

  “Where to?” Edith asked.

  “Let’s swing by the address the Frenchman gave us.” He consulted notes he’d retrieved from his locker. “LaRue. Michael.”

  “Why?”

  “No good reason. You have a better suggestion?”

  They pulled up in front of the apartment building.

  “Nice older structure,” he said.

  She knew he was interested in the city’s architecture and had taken tours of various neighborhoods sponsored by historical societies, a side of him that surprised her. Somehow, Wade Dungey didn’t seem the type to appreciate architecture, art, or other staid, static things. But she’d learned over the years from dealing with a variety of people, good and bad, that you couldn’t always tell a book by its cover.

  For her, buildings and their spaces couldn’t be modern enough. Form meant little to her; function was everything. As she sometimes said to friends after separating from Peter, “What I really want out of life is a one-room apartment where everything is Formica, there’s a drain hole in the floor, and all I have to do is hose it down every once in a while.”

  “Let’s stop in and see if he’s home,” Dungey said. “Make a social call.”

  Michael’s intercom interrupted his dinner preparations. “Yes?” he asked.

  “Detectives Dungey and Vargas-Swayze, Mr. LaRue,” Dungey announced.

  “Oh? I wasn’t expecting anyone. I’ll ring you in.”

  He stood outside his apartment door to greet them as they came down the hall.

  “Sorry to barge in on you like this,” Dungey said, “but we were in the neighborhood.”

  “Is something wrong?” Michael asked.

  “No, nothing’s wrong,” Dungey said. “Just a couple of follow-up questions.”

  “Of course. Come in.”

  “You play the guitar?” Dungey asked, spotting the instrument the moment they entered.

  “Just a little,” Michael said.

  “I always wanted to play the guitar,” Dungey said. “Never got around to it.” He did a three-sixty. “Nice little place you have here.”

  “Thank you. I’m quite comfortable. You’re obviously here because of the murder of the young lady at the newspaper. I’m afraid I’ve already told you everything I know. I delivered supplies there that night but don’t recall ever seeing her. I wish I had more to offer. All this talk of a serial killer being responsible for that murder and the murder of the girl in the park is most upsetting. What sort of animal could do such a thing?”

  “A two-legged animal,” Dungey said. “Four-legged animals don’t kill anybody unless they’re in the jungle and haven’t had a meal in a while.”

  “Yes,” Michael said. “An important differentiation. Have you developed any leads?”

  Vargas-Swayze said, “You said you’re from the Midwest. Illinois, was it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Mind if we look around?” Dungey asked as he went into the kitchen.

  “I suppose I should object,” Michael said, following him. “I think I’m supposed to ask to see a warrant or something like that.” He said it with a noncombative laugh
. “Or have I been watching too many cop movies?”

  “You could ask for a warrant,” Dungey said. “We don’t have one. Looks like you’re getting ready for a dinner party.”

  “I am having a guest for dinner,” Michael said. “A young lady, as a matter of fact.”

  “That’s nice,” Dungey said. “What’s on the menu?”

  Vargas-Swayze stood in the living room. She was uneasy at her partner’s approach. This Michael LaRue wasn’t a suspect, simply one name on a long list of people who happened to be at the Tribune the night Jean Kaporis was killed, or who had had some sort of relationship with her. This constituted harassment in her mind, and she decided to end the visit.

  “Thank you for your time, Mr. LaRue,” she announced. “We appreciate being allowed to come in without notice.”

  Michael emerged from the kitchen, followed by Dungey. “I am willing and happy to help in any way I can,” he said. “Just as long as you don’t view me as a suspect. I’ve never killed a thing in my life, in or out of the woods. I capture spiders and other insects with a paper cup and sheet of paper and release them outside. Every living thing deserves respect.”

  “Ants and wasps, too?” Dungey asked.

  Michael laughed heartily. “No, you’re right, detective. There are exceptions.”

  They left the apartment, and Michael watched through a window as they went to their car and drove away. He’d begun to perspire and hoped they hadn’t noticed. He closed the blinds, fell to the floor, and did push-ups until a rap on his door stopped him. “Who’s there?” he yelled.

  “Rudy.”

  “Go away. I’m busy.”

  “Who were they?”

  “Who?”

  “The guy and woman who were just here. They look like cops to me.”

  “They’re old friends, Rudy. Now go away.”

  “Everything okay with you?”

  “Yes, everything is fine. Good-bye, Rudy.”

  The sound of Rudy’s cane hitting the floor faded as he walked away. Michael returned to the kitchen and finished the prep work for dinner, carefully wrapping prosciutto and cheese in lightly breaded chicken breasts, and adding delicate flavoring to white rice. Showered and dressed in gray slacks, a flowing white shirt worn loose, and sandals, he sat at his desk, removed the first ten pages of the novel he’d started writing a few days ago, and placed them on the bare surface so that they would be clearly noticed by Roberta. He was about to get up and practice the guitar when his eyes noticed the edge of an unfamiliar file folder beneath papers on the side table. He pulled it out, opened it, and saw that it contained his brother’s articles along with other written materials about serial killings. How did this get here? he wondered. Joe must have left it by mistake. He browsed the papers in the file, closed it, and returned it to where he’d found it. He checked his watch; still hours before Roberta’s arrival. After placing a bottle of chardonnay in the refrigerator, he turned on his guitar and amplifier and ran through songs contained in a thick fake book of a thousand popular tunes, the sweet sounds blanketing the small room and relieving the tension he’d felt earlier. Music does, indeed, soothe a savage breast, he thought as every other aspect of his life, every hurtful, cruel, unfair, and degrading element of it was lost in the rich chords created by his fingers on the strings.