by Mike Lawson
Those people?
“Why would he steal a calculator?” DeMarco asked.
“Shit, I don’t know. To hock it, maybe.”
“What kind of calculator was it?”
“One of them handheld jobs. They probably give one to all those senators to keep track of the national debt.”
DeMarco ignored Drummond’s attempt at humor. “Hell, Lieutenant, these days you can buy a top-of-the-line calculator for fifty bucks. Banks give ’em away when you open a savings account. I’ll bet you couldn’t get ten bucks for one in a pawnshop.”
Drummond shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows what the asshole was thinking? Burrows said that when Morelli walked into his office the kid was just putting the calculator in his pocket. Maybe that was just the first thing he grabbed. Maybe he was planning to go through the whole room looking for small things to boost, petty cash, whatever he could find.”
“Seems like an odd thing to risk your job over,” DeMarco persisted.
“Or maybe he was some sorta kleptomaniac,” Drummond said. “Like that movie star. Why would a movie star shoplift a hat? Who knows why people steal.”
“Did Perry have a record for shoplifting?” DeMarco said.
Drummond frowned. DeMarco’s interrogation was starting to irritate him. “I don’t know, but I do know that I don’t give a shit. What difference does it make if he was a shoplifter or not, or if he was going to hock the calculator or not?”
“How ’bout motive, Lieutenant? Don’t you think the threat of losing a job is a pretty weak motive for killing two people in cold blood?”
DeMarco’s tone was a bit sharp and Drummond responded accordingly. “Motive my ass! I could come up with a million motives. Isaiah Perry was a punk from a family of punks. His older brother’s a pusher and a suspect in at least one murder. I think little brother just decided to join the family business.” Slapping one thick palm on the surface of the desk, he concluded, “I don’t give a shit about motive!”
DeMarco decided not to press Drummond further on the subject of motive. He asked a few questions about Isaiah Perry’s criminal record, the armed robbery he’d committed as a juvenile, then another thought occurred to him.
“Why would he shoot Lydia Morelli first?”
“What are you getting at?” Drummond asked.
“If you were going to shoot two sleeping people, Lieutenant, wouldn’t you shoot the man first, the one more likely to take away your gun and shoot you with it?”
“Maybe I would and maybe you would, but maybe this kid wasn’t as smart as us. Or maybe it was dark in the bedroom and he couldn’t tell who he was shooting first.”
Before he could ask another question, Drummond said, “You’re asking some funny questions, pal, and I don’t think I like where you’re going with ’em.” He studied DeMarco a moment, his eyes narrowing with suspicion. “Are you trying to cause the senator problems? Is that your game?”
DeMarco decided it was time to disengage from this discussion.
“No, Lieutenant. I knew Lydia Morelli and I’m just disturbed by her death.”
Drummond pinned DeMarco with his hard, cop’s eyes. “Yeah, well I’m going to be real fuckin’ disturbed myself if you use anything I told you to hurt Morelli. I like that guy. I liked him before this happened, but now that he shot this little prick, I like him even more.”
Chapter 30
Paul Morelli had flown to New York ostensibly to consult with a doctor about his arm, a sports-medicine specialist whom he’d used in the past. There were any number of doctors in Washington he could have seen—several had even called and offered to see him for free, hoping to become his personal physician when he moved into the West Wing—but Morelli said he had confidence in the Manhattan physician.
His real reason for coming to New York was to meet with the old man.
He finished with the doctor at five p.m. No worries about the arm, the doc had told him, and then he gave Morelli a set of exercises to keep things from stiffening up. Morelli would follow the exercise regimen religiously. He went back to his room, rested for an hour, then took the stairs down to the parking garage. The nine-story descent was no problem at all. Harry Foster was waiting for him in the garage, parked in a handicapped parking space. Morelli didn’t approve of this but said nothing.
Harry would drive him to the meeting. If he was seen with Harry, that wouldn’t be a problem. He’d just say he’d been consulting with Harry on the upcoming campaign. He glanced at his watch. He had to be back at the hotel in two hours to meet some people for drinks but he had no idea where Harry was taking him or how long it would take to get there because the old man, as paranoid as ever, hadn’t set the location for the meeting until the last minute.
The meeting place, fortunately, turned out to be a nearby office building in Manhattan. Harry pulled into the underground parking garage and handed Morelli a key to a room. The office building was used by lawyers, accountants, and other professionals. Most of the people who worked there had left for the day, but if Morelli should run into someone, there were plenty of legitimate reasons for him to be in such a place.
He got off on the sixth floor, looked down the hall, and didn’t see anyone. It was so quiet on the floor that he wondered if anyone worked there at all. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the old man had picked a suite of offices that had just been vacated. Morelli walked down to room 623 and slipped the key in the door. Eddie and the old man were already there.
Eddie, as usual, was standing off to one side, in a corner, near a window. He was like a massive rock: silent, unmoving, and strangely ominous. Morelli had always wondered how Eddie had gotten the scars on his hands. They weren’t burn scars and seemed too wide to have been made by a knife blade. It almost looked as if his hands had been mangled—slammed in a car door or smashed with a hammer—then surgically rebuilt. They were functional but not quite human, like hands that Frankenstein might have sown onto the wrists of his monster.
The old man rose from the chair where he’d been sitting. He moved slowly forward, his face solemn. Neither he nor Morelli were huggers, and the two men shook hands, Morelli making sure he didn’t squeeze the old man’s hand too hard.
The old man looked as he always did: his soft white hair was carefully combed, his complexion burnished bronze, his stern face hinting at his potential for brutality. He was wearing a brown suit, a white shirt, and a wide green tie. Morelli bet the suit and tie were at least fifteen years old. The old man had enough money to buy his own chain of clothing stores but he had stopped caring about being fashionable years ago.
“How are you?” the old man asked.
Paul nodded his head, feigning a sadness he didn’t feel. “Okay. And you?”
The old man shook his head. “You know, I hardly knew her. It’s not like when Kate died, but . . .”
“I know,” Morelli said. “I haven’t slept since it happened. I should have taken better care of her. I should have been a better husband.”
The old man nodded. “I know how you feel. When my wife died, I felt the same way.”
They said nothing for a moment, both thinking of wives lost, neither feeling any real remorse.
“This kid, this black kid,” the old man said. “Is there anything more than what the papers said?”
“No. He was just some young guy who worked in my office.”
The old man shook his head. “I guess it goes to show: no matter who you are, no matter how powerful you are, you can’t protect yourself from fate.”
“The thing is,” Morelli said, “we have an alarm system for the house but we never set it at night when we were there. We just used it when we went out. If I’d just set the damn alarm . . .”
“Yeah,” the old man said, “but back to the black. You’re sure he’s not connected with anyone?”
“Yes. He was just a kid. Maybe he belonged to some local gang, I don’t know, but he certainly wasn’t working for anyone with a political agenda.”
“Okay, as long as you’re sure. We’ve come too far, Paul. We’re too close. If there’s anything I need to do, anything, you need to tell me.”
“You know I will,” Morelli said.
They sat in silence for a minute, the only sound in the room the old man’s labored breathing. “Did you ever figure out why those women were on the reporter’s list?” the old man said.
Goddamnit! He had to get the old man’s mind off that subject but lying to him was so terribly dangerous. The old man had killed men just because he suspected they were lying.
“Just what I told you before,” Morelli said. “The one woman, the one who lives in New York, she worked for a while on a zoning study when I was mayor and we fired her. She just wasn’t competent. I think this reporter figured we may have fired her because she saw something and objected to it. I don’t know if you remember this, it was quite a while ago, but the zoning study was done to help some people you knew in Brooklyn and you put some pressure on the borough president at the time. Anyway, this woman, she didn’t know anything about that. She just worked on the project for a couple of months, not doing anything important. But the reporter didn’t know this; he was just hoping that someone who’d been dismissed would talk to him.”
The old man nodded. “And the other woman, this decorator?” he said.
“Same thing. Lydia hired her and later fired her. I guess she wasn’t a good decorator. I don’t know. But this reporter, he must have talked to her for the same reason. She was in my house for a few days, and maybe he thought she might have heard something or seen something, and if she was angry about being fired, maybe she’d talk. Finley was grasping at straws,” Morelli concluded, “running around talking to people I’d fired, hoping they’d have something to say.”
“That must be a pretty long list, people you’ve fired,” the old man said.
“You know, not really,” Morelli said. “I’ve been lucky with most of the people I’ve hired, and when they get fired, Abe usually does it. That’s what’s so odd about this woman in New York. I don’t think I even met her when she worked for me.”
“Good,” the old man said after a moment. “So we’re done with the reporter?”
“Yeah,” Morelli said. “Although I still don’t know how he caught on to the doctor.”
This was a lie too. Lydia had told Finley something, he didn’t know what, that had led him to the doctor. But with the doctor and Lydia both gone . . .
“And this investigator you wanted us to watch? You want me to get somebody else on him? And this time Eddie’ll make sure whoever it is won’t get spotted.”
“No, he’s not going to be a problem,” Morelli said. “He has no leads to follow.”
Not with Lydia dead—but he couldn’t say that.
Chapter 31
It took DeMarco twice as long as it normally would have to reach the public-housing project in Alexandria where Isaiah Perry had lived. It took him that long because he didn’t know if he was being followed by either Charlie Eklund’s people or people who might be working for Paul Morelli. So he wasted time and gas and drove down quiet streets and took turns he didn’t need to take, and several times he waited until the light was almost red before driving through intersections. It occurred to him as he drove that if the CIA was involved they might have attached some tracking gizmo to his car, but if that was the case, there wasn’t anything he could do about it.
The buildings in the housing project were boxy, two-story quadplexes made of pale brick and were as appealing as army barracks. Patches of playground grass, optimistically planted between the buildings, had become scorched-earth battlefields littered with sharp-edged bits of debris. The hunter-green paint applied to doors and window frames hung in tattered strips and the only touches of vibrant color throughout the complex were fluorescent swirls of militant graffiti.
DeMarco knew that public housing was part of someone’s well-intentioned plan: a helpful hand held out to the needy, a cheap place to live until they could get back on their feet, until all those other obliging federal programs could boost them into the ranks of the middle class. But good intentions aside, the reality was that these places were spawning beds for misery, lightning rods attracting grief. They tended to concentrate the poor’s problems, and like radioactive atoms, densely packed, the occupants too often reached a critical mass.
He found the address he wanted, shut off the motor, but remained seated in his car, not sure that he wasn’t wasting his time. The papers had said that Isaiah Perry had been convicted as a juvenile for armed robbery, but the cop, Drummond, had begrudgingly told him what the papers had failed to state: that Perry had been fourteen at the time of his arrest, convicted as an unarmed accomplice, and given a suspended sentence. The actual armed robber had been Isaiah Perry’s older brother, Marcus, the drug dealer that Drummond had mentioned.
But other than the one suspended sentence, there were no other blemishes on Isaiah’s record. There had been no drug busts, no car thefts, no series of small escapades leading inevitably to murder. Isaiah Perry had been no Jesse James, and considering the environment in which he had been raised, having just a single brush with the law seemed a remarkable achievement. It was so remarkable, in fact, that DeMarco couldn’t understand how he had gone from unarmed accomplice to cold-blooded killer with no record of crime in between.
He got out of his car and walked up the cracked sidewalk toward the door of Perry’s home. There were two young black men sitting on the porch of the adjacent apartment. One of the men wore farmer’s-bib overalls, a maroon turtleneck sweater, and a brimless leather cap. The other man was wearing a black Oakland Raiders hooded jacket that reached mid-thigh, black sweatpants, and black, high-top Adidas tennis shoes with the laces undone. The hood of the Raiders jacket was pulled up, obscuring the man’s face. He looked like Darth Vader dressed for a trip to the gym.
Leather Cap was talking intently but quietly to the man in the Raiders jacket, who sat looking down at the ground, saying nothing in return. Leather Cap noticed DeMarco at that moment and stood up. He was at least six-two and very broad, and the dark scowl on his face looked like a storm cloud about to burst.
“You lost, Jack?” he said to DeMarco.
“No,” DeMarco said. “I’m here to see someone.”
Leather Cap glowered at him, but DeMarco ignored him—or tried to. The man was hard to ignore; his hostility was tangible.
DeMarco knocked on the door to the Perry residence and when he did, Leather Cap said, “Hey! What the fuck you doin’, beatin’ on Miz Perry’s door? You another reporter? You best get your ass on outta here before I kick it up through your neck.”
DeMarco suspected that Leather Cap was a friend of the Perry family, angered by the media’s coverage of Isaiah’s death. DeMarco could sympathize, but if he didn’t do something this situation was liable to escalate to ugly. It was time to bring Big Brother into play. He stared coldly at Leather Cap while he slowly took out the half wallet that held his Congressional ID. He flipped the wallet open, á la cop, and said: “Guys, I’m federal. If I have to get a squad of blues over here to do my business, I will.” He thought that sounded pretty good: it didn’t have the élan of “Make my day,” but it showed a certain streetwise grit.
The man in the Raiders jacket had not said anything to this point, but now he stood. He was even bigger than Leather Cap, at least six-five. Maybe the Raiders gave him the jacket as a bribe not to hurt their players.
“My mom ain’t home,” he said. “What do you want?”
DeMarco couldn’t see the man’s face clearly. The hood of the jacket created a shadow, effectively hiding his features, and his eyes were covered by wrap-around sunglasses with black lenses.
“Are you Marcus Perry?” DeMarco asked.
“Yeah. So what?”
“Mr. Perry, I’d like to talk to you and your mother.”
“Fuck for? I ain’t done nothin’.”
“I’d just like some information
about your brother.”
“Got nothin’ to say to you. You cops don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground. And my mother’s over at her church, hidin’ from the press. You bother her, and we will kick your ass.”
DeMarco elected not to correct the man’s mistaken assumption that he was a cop.
“Mr. Perry, you might find this hard to believe, but I just might be on your brother’s side.”
DeMarco didn’t know what subconscious twinge had made him say that; the only side he was on was his own. Apparently Marcus Perry was of the same opinion.
“On his side! What the fuck’s that mean?”
“What can it hurt to talk to me?” DeMarco said quietly.
“You don’t have to talk to him, man,” Leather Cap said to Marcus. “Tell him to get his ass on outta here.”
Marcus didn’t say anything for a moment as he studied DeMarco through the opaque lenses of his sunglasses. Turning to his friend, he said, “It’s okay, bro. Let me see what this fool wants. If I don’t talk to him, he’ll just come back and bother Ma.” Leather Cap started to say something, but Marcus said, “Go on. It’s okay. I’ll catch up with you later, over at your place.”
Leather Cap nodded and reached up to put a hand on Marcus’s shoulder. “I’m here for you, man. Any way you want. You know that.”
Marcus simply nodded.
Leather Cap glowered at DeMarco as he walked away.
DeMarco said, “The reason I’m here is—”
“Let’s get out of here,” Marcus said. “I don’t want you here if my mom comes home.”
They got in DeMarco’s car and drove into the kinder, gentler part of Alexandria, down King Street toward the waterfront. They passed ice cream parlors and trendy boutiques and bars called “pubs.” The commercial quaintness of the area was a foreign landscape compared to the housing project only a few blocks behind them. While DeMarco drove, Marcus Perry sat silent and motionless in the car. His huge form filled the interior of the vehicle, his head almost touching the roof, his broad shoulders extending beyond the boundary of the passenger seat. With the hood of his jacket obscuring his profile, he was a brooding, hostile presence—an alien predator cruising a boulevard of fluff.