Access to Power

by Robert Ellis

  “Don’t,” he said. “Please don’t.”

  The gun flashed. Woody reached for his ear. It felt like a bee sting.

  “Are you feeling suicidal tonight?” the man asked. “Or would you rather be the victim of a failed robbery?”

  “What are you talking about?” Woody shouted.

  The expression on the man’s face was fierce and horrific. His lips were parted revealing clenched teeth. Woody couldn’t stop shaking.

  “If it’s suicide,” the man went on, “they’ll look into your past. Someone might guess.”

  “What do you want? Please. If it’s money—”

  The man cut him off. “You know what I’m looking for.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  The gun flashed again.

  Woody grabbed his shoulder. Blood was splashing over his hand onto the carpet, his entire body shuddering now. He remembered the gun Frank kept in the bottom right drawer of his desk and wondered if it was loaded. He needed it to be loaded.

  The man waved the gun at him. “Either you’ve got a lousy memory or you’re an idiot. Maybe it’s both. Now stop wasting my time.”

  Woody gathered himself, looked at the man and took a step toward the desk. When the man didn’t protest, he took another.

  “Okay. Okay,” Woody stammered. “I know what you’re looking for. I won’t waste your time—”

  Woody went for the drawer.

  The gun flashed and knocked him against the wall. It was a gut shot. Woody reached out trying to block another. Then three more shots came right at him in terrifying succession.

  Woody took the hits, tumbled forward and bounced onto the floor. He guessed that he’d been shot in the head because of the blood flowing over his face. He couldn’t move, couldn’t fight back. He saw the man check the drawer and close it, then kneel down and look him in the eye.

  “I guessed right,” the man said. “You’re an idiot.”

  Woody stared back, unable to speak. He noticed the man’s hair, the gray spikes, and thought that he seemed vaguely familiar. He watched the man get to his feet and walk out, leaving him for dead. He could see his blood rolling across the carpet in quick waves. He could feel sleep coming on and tried to fight the tide as it swept over him. The pain was less than he would have expected and he thought about his friendship with Frank. Their early races together. That campaign in Trenton when Frank was so scared. They were like brothers. Then. Now. Brothers forgave each other, he hoped.

  He tried to move again, tried to focus.

  He listened to the man who had just shot him enter his office next door and begin rifling through his papers. He was searching for something—opening drawers and closing them. Then Woody remembered where he’d seen the man before. He’d delivered flowers to Linda, beautiful flowers, just the other day.

  Chapter 11

  Frank stood in the rain, staring at the building from a distance. He was smoking a cigarette and feeling dizzy.

  His office was once the home of a very important person, but he couldn’t think of who just now. Frank told friends that he and Woody bought the old building because of its close proximity to their clients. Members of the House, Senate, even the White House this term. He told them that he liked working in a place where it was impossible to forget the past. A living history everywhere you looked....

  Frank’s eyes drifted away from the building and lingered on the coroner’s van in the parking lot. He noticed a man in a suit and raincoat cross the street and begin walking toward him. After a few moments, the man reached him, his face hidden in the gloom.

  “You the one who called?” Frank asked.

  The man nodded. “Detective Randolph, Mr. Miles.”

  The detective’s voice matched the one Frank had heard when he checked his voice mail from the hotel bar after the fund-raiser. The voice had sounded clear and steady as he listened to the message over the phone: there had been a problem and he should come down to his office as soon as possible.

  The detective stepped beneath the street light. Probably fifty, the color of his skin reminded Frank of newly finished mahogany. He was graying at the temples, his coarse, wiry hair cropped short and even.

  “What happened?” Frank asked.

  Randolph shrugged. “It looks as if you’ve been robbed.”

  Cars were pulling up to the curb, people with cameras—the press had arrived.

  Frank glanced at the coroner’s van, then turned back to Randolph. Crossing the street, he stepped over the yellow crime scene tape and walked with the detective toward his office. As he got rid of his smoke and entered the building, he heard the fire go out when it hit the wet pavement. Randolph was on his heels. He could feel the detective measuring him, his eyes working over his face as they climbed the stairs.

  The door was open. All the lights were on.

  They passed the reception area and stepped into the war room. Frank had always called it the war room because this was where most campaigns were won or lost. On the second floor, sealed from prying eyes. Now there were cops, mostly crime scene techs, going through the clutter on the desks and worktables. Tracy’s desk sat beneath a huge wall board charting their client’s progress through election day. A drawer was open. Frank saw a photographer getting it on film and turned away. Everything in the office was confidential. Until now, he thought.

  He looked around, trying to sort through the confusion. His own door was closed, but he could see two men in Woody’s office wearing dark blue jump suits and hair nets, placing papers, a coffee cup, the contents of an ashtray into plastic bags and marking them as evidence.

  Then Frank’s door swung open and a woman from the coroner’s office stepped out and went downstairs. Behind her, he saw Woody lying on the carpet with a gun in his hand. There was a lot of blood. More than he had ever seen. And Woody’s eyes remained open, lost and vacant like last week’s catch of the day.

  Frank shuddered, steadying himself against a cabinet and feeling light-headed again. He thought he might vomit.

  “You gonna be okay?” Randolph asked.

  He nodded, his eyes returning to the gun in Woody’s hand. Pearl handled. Why did it seem so strange?

  “You don’t mind if I call you by your first name do you?”

  Frank shook his head. The even tone of the detective’s voice seemed out of place for what he was seeing. It was too friendly. Too relaxed and calm for a world that had just been turned upside down, gutted and then trashed.

  “Thanks,” Randolph said. “They went through his wallet, Frank. Took his cash and credit cards. You keep anything of value around here?”

  “There might be some petty cash.”

  Frank led the way to Tracy’s desk. The drawer was already half open. The photographer had already taken the shot. It was empty. Randolph reached for the handle anyway, sliding it all the way open with a gloved hand.

  “Did he have any relatives, Frank? Parents, siblings, a wife or children?”

  Frank shook his head again. Woody didn’t have anybody. Frank knew he didn’t. They’d been friends since law school and started the company right after graduation from the University of Virginia. Small races at first. Local grassroots campaigns propelling them forward until they reached clients with money and clout.

  A detective Frank hadn’t seen before poked his head out of the media room and flashed a grin. Randolph nodded, introducing the man as his partner, Ted Grimes. Frank looked him over as he approached them. Younger than Randolph by ten years or so, Grimes had pale skin and slate gray eyes set wide apart in an extraordinarily round head. He stood as tall as Frank at six feet two, but he was built like an ox, his manner coming off simple, maybe even a little crude.

  “Frank, did you know your partner kept a gun?” Randolph asked.

  “No,” he said. “But I keep one in my desk. Bottom right drawer.”

  The detectives exchanged quick glances. Then Grimes crossed the room. The woman from the coroner’s office had
returned with a small Asian man. Once Woody’s hold on the pearl handled gun was broken, they began stuffing his round body into a long black bag. Woody wasn’t cooperating.

  Grimes gave them a look, his grin seemingly permanent, and stepped around them. When he opened the desk drawer, the gun was there. The detective shoved a No. 2 pencil down the barrel, lifted it to his nose and turned back to Randolph, shaking his head.

  “It’s a forty-five,” Grimes said. “The holes in this guy were done by something smaller. They barely poked out the back side.”

  Randolph’s eyes met his partner’s. It was a Glock .45, pre-1994 with an extended clip. Unlike many handguns, there was no art to the weapon Frank kept hidden in his desk drawer. It was a people killer with maximum stopping power and probably seemed out of place for the line of work he was in.

  Frank turned to the door by the stairs, noticing the bullet holes in the plaster as a cop wearing a raincoat rushed in.

  “Heads up, Lieutenant. We just found another one out back.”

  Randolph and Grimes started for the door.

  Frank followed them outside and along the gravel path around back, the cop showing them the way through the rain with his flashlight. When they stopped, Frank saw the body of a teenage boy sprawled on the wet lawn. A pistol lay beside his outstretched hand. He wore jeans and a light colored jacket, and Frank could see the plume of blood that surrounded a small rip in the material right between his shoulder blades.

  “Either it’s raining bodies from heaven,” Grimes said. “Or we had ourselves a shoot-out, fellas.” He moved closer for a better look at the gun. “It’s a Beretta. Nine millimeter. Bet it matches the holes in the guy upstairs.”

  Frank kept his eyes on the body as the female coroner brushed by.

  “Empty his pockets before you get started,” Randolph said to her.

  She nodded and switched on her flashlight. Everyone stood back as she approached the body, step by step, careful not to disturb the scene. Then she dug her small gloved hands into the kid’s pockets and emptied the contents into a plastic evidence bag.

  “He’s not carrying any ID,” she said. “Just credit cards and cash.”

  She stood up, backing away from the corpse as cautiously as she had approached it and handing the bag to Randolph.

  Frank moved closer, leaning over the detective’s shoulder as he held his flashlight to the bag. He saw Woody’s name on the credit cards and knew that Randolph was counting the cash. After a moment, Randolph turned to him, his voice not much more than a whisper.

  “Looks like your partner got his man.”

  “Yeah,” Grimes added loudly. “Right in the back.”

  Chapter 12

  Ozzie Olson, former candidate for the U.S. Senate, took another long swig from the bottle and tried to get a grip on things.

  He’d heard the story on the radio and parked just across the street. But making out faces through the rain and all those flashing lights was giving him the willies. He tried to shake it off and opened the window. Two figures were wheeling a body out on a gurney and lifting it into the coroner’s van. Then Frank Miles stepped outside, alive and kicking. He was with two men dressed in suits and raincoats. Detectives, Olson figured, getting into an unmarked car and driving off.

  The bottle dropped onto the passenger seat, flooding the cushion with whisky. Olson snatched it up and guzzled another big pull. When he came up for air, he capped the bottle and tossed it under the seat.

  His head was spinning. He knew that it was Woody Darrow zipped up in that body bag and that there had been a major screw up. Olson wanted to get home. He needed to find out what had happened. What the hell went wrong.

  He started the engine and grabbed hold of the wheel. The view out the windshield ran together like a bad watercolor painting until he remembered the wipers. Switching them on, he tried not to look at them pivoting back and forth as he eased the pickup away from the curb.

  What the hell happened?

  He took a deep breath, keeping his eyes on the road ahead and trying to imagine a straight line. As the pickup gained speed and began to tack like a sailboat, he lost his balance and slowed down some.

  There was a cop at the corner, directing traffic in a bright yellow rain slicker that vibrated like a warning light on the dash. Olson knew that the cop was looking at him, staring at him. He pulled forward, the pickup swaying in the rough seas and wind. When the cop began shouting at him and knocked on the driver’s side window, he didn’t know what the fuck to do. He was over his limit. He was gassed.

  Chapter 13

  As Randolph and Grimes drove him down to the station in a car that rattled and shook and reeked of spent cigarettes, Frank wiped the steam off the window and looked out at the empty sidewalks and the rain spilling over the curb.

  His mind was drifting. He could see what had happened that night as if he’d actually been there. Woody at his desk, grinding out scripts, frantically searching for the message that would save his clients even though they couldn’t raise enough money for any message to save them. Then the kid broke in and shot Woody, and somehow Woody shot back.

  Woody.

  Frank looked up front at Randolph guiding the car through the storm. Grimes sat beside his partner staring out the windshield. No one spoke, the only sound coming from the rain pounding on the roof like a steal drum. When they hit a deep pothole, rode out the bounce and both detectives remained silent, Frank wondered if they were thinking about the seventeen dollars and twenty-three cents Woody had died for. Probably not. This was their life. Their everyday. He guessed that they were immune.

  Randolph pulled into the lot and they got out of the car.

  The Metropolitan Police Department was still open for business. The lobby, busy like Union Station at rush hour. Frank hadn’t expected it. He knew it was late. Past two in the morning. But all of the interview rooms were taken, and Randolph told him that it would be about twenty minutes before the next one opened up.

  When Randolph and Grimes walked off to check their messages and get started on their reports, Frank followed them down to the detective bureau at the end of the hall where a pot of coffee was said to be waiting.

  The room was set up like a campaign office with desks pushed together to form long tables assigned to what Frank assumed were various divisions. Where one table would have been delegated to the field campaign in Frank’s world, another to fund-raising, and the next to press relations, here the cluttered tables were dedicated to gangs, robberies and murder. Each campaign a real life race without a day when anyone involved could say it was finally over.

  Frank found the coffee pot. As Randolph and Grimes picked up their phones and glanced at him, he poured a cup and decided to wait in the hall.

  The coffee had gone bitter, probably brewed two or three hours ago with the shift change. But it was strong and the concentrated jolt of hot caffeine in his system revived him slightly. He checked his hands. The shaking had stopped. Then he noticed the row of doors before him and became aware of the muffled voices behind them.

  Interview rooms. Suspects being interrogated.

  One door had a sign on it that read Booth 7. Detectives kept walking in and out of the room on the other side, giving Frank dirty looks as he stood there in his wet tuxedo. Their faces were intense, hungry, their words rushing out of their mouths in excited whispers.

  Frank managed a glimpse inside before the door swung closed. It was a long narrow room, five feet wide at best. The lights were dimmed, with folding chairs facing what looked like a window that extended the length of the room. Frank could hear the metallic sound of voices over a small speaker in the background. The detectives were watching someone through the mirrored glass in the next room. It seemed like they were getting somewhere with someone important. Like they were having a good time and dinner was served.

  Interview 7 finally opened up and that important someone turned out to be a fourteen-year-old boy, led out of the room in handcuffs by two detecti
ves and a woman in a cheap suit who must have been the designated public defender on call that night. Frank looked at the boy’s feet. They were shackled, and it didn’t appear the boy would be headed for the lobby anytime soon. As they passed, the boy smiled at Frank and started to mumble something like you’re next, motherfucker, but a cop jerked him away like a leashed dog before he could say anything more.

  After a few minutes, Grimes appeared, opening the door for Frank and showing him into the room that had just been vacated. It looked like a small conference room with a beat-up table and a set of chairs. The linoleum floor was cracked and beginning to break up along the edges. The walls were whitewashed and left blank, except for the long mirror on the inside wall. Before he could ask why they had to meet here, Grimes thanked him for coming, excused himself and closed the door.

  Frank sat down at the table. He’d peaked. His body was starting to go cold again and the bright walls lit up by the fluorescent lights felt like they were closing in on him.

  The door opened. He heard Linda call out his name and looked up to see her rushing toward him a half step ahead of Jason Hardly. She wrapped her arms around him and buried her head in his chest. He could smell the rain in her hair. He could feel her trembling beneath her jacket as she clung to him.

  “Are you okay?” Hardly asked.

  Frank nodded. Hardly was standing over them, watching them hold each other. Then he picked up Frank’s coffee and made a point of examining the pasty mixture.

  “You don’t look okay,” he said. “Neither does this coffee. I’ll go see if I can get them to make a fresh pot.”

  Hardly walked out of the room. Wiping her cheek, Linda turned from the door, her eyes moving over Frank’s face gently, lovingly.

  “I’m sorry, Frank. We were together when Lieutenant Randolph called. Jason wouldn’t let me come alone.”

  Frank looked about the small room, realizing that Hardly had used the coffee as an excuse to give them time together. It was an elegant gesture and it hurt. Linda had found someone real.