Along with everything else, Sutherland found himself annoyed at Stalk’s use of the British usage. That was something he’d always noticed about CIA brass, the tendency to affect the language and manner of their British counterparts.
Stalk locked Sutherland’s files in the drawer, dropped the key into his jacket pocket, stood, came around the desk and slapped the psychiatrist on the back. “You know, Chester, this is a strange world we live in, and it sometimes takes extraordinary people, and acts, to inject some sanity into it. There is no clear-cut good or bad, Chester. Mostly it’s a matter of survival. Some understand that, some don’t.” He removed his hand from Sutherland’s back and went to his door. The point was made, the meeting was over.
At the door Stalk shook Sutherland’s hand. “I’d be happy to have you back in the program, Chester, but I would understand if that should prove rather too difficult for you. If that is the case, I think it best that you never come here again.”
The notion of ever returning to the CIA’s top secret research program almost made Sutherland laugh. Still, he needed to ask, “Why would you invite me back into the program in the light of what’s happened with the files?”
“Well, Chester, no offense, but once a man has made the mistake you have, he does tend to become rather more easy to control. I’ve enjoyed knowing you, Chester. Good luck in all your future endeavors. By the way, I’d heartily recommend getting one of those video games. A wonderful way to get your mind off real problems…”
Sutherland now got out of his car and went through the back door to his office. As usual, Vera had left a night-light on, a large translucent plastic goose he’d given her as a gift five years ago. A small bulb in the base illuminated the entire figure and cast a warm glow over the room.
He flipped on the overhead lights, took a key from his pocket and opened the file drawer marked MNOP. He touched the top of a folder marked Poulson, J., almost removed it to read its contents, then closed the drawer and locked it. He made his way to the house, glanced at mail that had been left on a table near the staircase, then slowly climbed the stairs to the second floor, where he opened the door to his bedroom.
His wife Eleanor was on the chaise, reading.
“You’re home,” Chester said. “I thought the fundraiser would go later.”
“I didn’t go,” she said, removing her glasses and looking up at him through narrowed eyes.
“Why not?”
“I couldn’t get up the interest or strength.” She didn’t sound weary, her voice was strong.
He took off his jacket and hung it in the closet, took off his shoes and sat on the edge of their king-sized bed.
“Where were you?”
“I had a meeting, grabbed some dinner at the club and then went to the movies.”
“The movies? You went to the movies? You haven’t been to the movies for as long as I can remember.”
“I needed a little diversion,” he said as he unbuttoned his shirt.
“I’m impressed.”
“Impressed with what? What’s so unusual about going to a movie?”
“I don’t mean the movies, Chester, I mean the need for diversion. I’ve never known you to express such a human need.”
He understood too well that she was looking for an argument. He went to a bathroom off the bedroom, closed the door, took a fast hot shower, put on a terry-cloth robe and returned to where Eleanor stood in front of an eighteenth-century French escritoire. She held in her hands what she’d been reading on the chaise, a thick batch of letters. She was especially beautiful at the moment, her face etched with a sadness that had been perpetual since Clarence’s murder. Champagne blonde hair was pulled up into a loose chignon on the top of her head, stray tendrils framed a full, lovely face.
“What are you reading?”
She answered so quietly that he didn’t catch it. He asked again.
She turned. “Letters from Clarence, Chester, letters he wrote while in college and that you never had the time to read.”
He abruptly crossed the room to his bureau. “Nonsense,” he said over his shoulder, “I read everything he ever wrote us—”
“Only because I insisted on it. You’d sit and pretend to take in his words, pretend to respond to what he’d said, but the fact is none of it really mattered to you. You were never interested in your own son… Too bad he wasn’t one of your patients—”
“That’s enough, Eleanor. We’ve gone over this too many times before.”
He watched as she lowered the letters to the desk, as though putting them in a fire. There was a discernible trembling to her hands as she gripped the edge of the writing desk for support. When she turned and faced him her blue eyes shone with anger. “He’s dead, Chester, and I think you killed him—oh, you didn’t have to pull the trigger, Chester. There are other ways to assassinate a human being without being the one at the other end of the gun—”
“I’ve heard enough, Eleanor. Have you been drinking?”
“Isn’t that typical of you, Chester, and how unanalytic, to look for an external reason for something that displeases you. Have I been drinking? Should I be literary and say that I’ve been drinking the words of the son that I no longer have, that I’m drunk with the loss of him?”
“I’m tired, Eleanor, we can discuss this in the morning—”
Her action took him by surprise. She swept the letters from the desk, ran across the room and pushed them in his face. “Read them, Chester,” she shouted. “Read them now that it no longer matters. Listen for the first time to what was in your son’s heart.”
The corner of one of the letters nicked his eye. He put his hand to it, turned and crouched in pain. “What heart?” he said.
She came up behind him, placed her hands on his shoulders and spun him around. “Why did you hate him so?” she asked. Tears now flowed down her cheeks.
He straightened, his hand still over his eyes. “I didn’t hate him, Eleanor, I loved him, damn it… no, damn him. He was no good…”
“Is that an appropriate way for a psychiatrist to talk?”
“Maybe it is. Sometimes I think we do a disservice using so much jargon to describe behavior. There are people in this world, Eleanor, who are no damn good, and as much as it breaks my heart to say it, our son was one of them—”
He knew it was coming, didn’t avoid it. Almost welcomed it. She brought her right hand across his face. When he didn’t react she did it again, then grabbed his neck with both hands and dug her nails into his flesh. He took hold of her wrists and pulled himself free. Tiny rivulets of blood sprung from where her nails had broken the skin and ran down to the collar of his robe.
“Oh God… I’m sorry, Chester…” Her body was heaving.
“We’re all sorry, Eleanor. Sorry… I’ll sleep downstairs…”
CHAPTER 24
Martin Teller glanced at a wall clock as he moved through the bull pen at MPD headquarters. It was a quarter to nine, fifteen minutes until his morning ritual with Dorian Mars.
A detective assigned to the Sutherland case stopped him and said, “Got a new Polish joke, Marty.”
“Not interested. Besides, Polish jokes are in bad taste these days.”
The detective looked at a colleague and shrugged. “Sorry,” he said. Teller continued toward his office, entered it and slammed the door behind him.
It had been a bad morning. His cats had gotten into a fight during breakfast and spilled his coffee all over the rug. A few minutes later his ex-wife called from Paris, Kentucky, to inform him that their younger daughter was dropping out of college because she was pregnant. “Who did it?” Teller asked, now knowing what else to say. “I don’t know, Marty, she’s coming home in a few days and I’ll let you know.” Then, as he was leaving his apartment building, he read a notice posted on the wall that there would be no hot water for three days while the boiler was being serviced.
The detective who’d offered the Polish joke opened the door and asked, “You playing
tonight, Marty?” He was referring to an intrasquad poker game.
“No, and instead of playing poker I suggest you and the rest of the brilliant young sleuths assigned to me spend the night hitting every bar in town, especially the singles’ joints, with Clarence Sutherland’s photo in hand.”
“Every bar?”
“Start in Georgetown. Ask the bartenders, the broads hanging out, guys on the make. I want a list tomorrow morning of every joint you hit, and I want it before nine o’clock.
“That’s a lot of overtime, Marty.”
“You complaining?”
“No. What’s with you? How come you’re so uptight this morning?”
“The position of the moon relative to my sun.”
“No kidding.”
“No kidding. You got any kids?”
“None that I know of.”
“They break your heart. Get moving.”
“Yeah, have a good day.”
Teller picked up a coffee cup stained from the day before, went into the bull pen and poured from a communal pot, leaving a quarter in a dish. He returned to the office, hung up his jacket and sat behind his desk. It was now 9:10. He punched in Dorian Mars’s extension on his phone. “Marty?” Mars said. “Where are you? I’m waiting.”
“Let’s skip the meeting this morning, Dorian. I’ve got nothing to report. It would be a waste of time.”
“Doesn’t matter. We should meet anyway, every day. Brainstorming can open things up. You run a case like this through a grinder enough times and out comes the perfect hamburger.”
“What?”
“Come up, Marty.”
“No. I’ve got a lot of sorting out to do. Let’s catch up later.”
Mars sighed loudly. “All right, Marty. By the way, are you okay? You sound strange.”
“I’m terrific, Dorian, tip-top, at peace with my fellow man. Life is truly a bowl of cherries, a virtual perpetual cabaret.”
“Take it easy, Marty.”
Teller called the desk and instructed the sergeant on duty to hold all calls until further notice.
“One just came in for you, detective. I was about to put it through.”
“Who is it?”
“Your Miss Pinscher, from Justice.”
“My? Oh, all right, I’ll take it, but that’s it for a while.”
“Good morning,” Susanna said.
“Good morning. How’ve you been?”
“All right. I thought you might have called me.”
“I’ve been busy as hell. Sorry.”
“That’s not what I called about, though. I wanted to fill you in on a conversation I had with Laurie Rawls.”
Teller found a pad of paper and uncapped a pen. “Go ahead,” he said.
“Remember when I said I thought I might be able to establish a sort of big-sister relationship with her? Well, it happened… I had dinner at her apartment and she opened up.”
“What did she say?”
She read from notes she’d made right after leaving Laurie’s apartment—Laurie back clerking for Conover, the preliminary vote in Nidel v. Illinois in Nidel’s favor, confirmation that Cecily Conover and Clarence had had an affair and that Justice Conover had confronted both of them about it. Teller listened, made his own notes until she got to the part about Clarence sitting in the Court at night and playacting, and that he and Laurie had almost made love there.
“In the Supreme Court? That is mighty high-level making out.”
“Well, his liking for the Chiefs chair could explain why Clarence was there the night he was killed. No one had to entice him into the room. He went there on his own almost as a matter of routine…”
“Go on.”
“Laurie says that Clarence once bragged to her that he had… How did she put it?… He had the key to every lock and person in the Court. Evidently Clarence knew something damaging or embarrassing about everyone. At least that’s what he told her.”
“Where’d he get the information?”
“I asked her that too. She says he picked it up while working as closely as he did with the justices.”
“What about his father? Did he come up?”
“In what context?”
“The fact that he treated the high and mighty, and that Clarence might have learned things through that connection.”
“We didn’t discuss it.”
“Okay, anything else?”
“Laurie says that Justice Poulson is sort of a puppet of President Jorgens and that the White House plays a direct role in most everything Poulson does on the Court. She also claims that Clarence had documents to prove it that would… here’s exactly what she said… ‘had documents to prove it that would blow the lid off the Court.’”
“Is the phone you’re using secure?”
“I think so—”
“Don’t think. Be sure.”
“I’m in my office at Justice.”
He wanted to tell her that a telephone in the Justice Department was probably as unsecured as any phone in Washington, but didn’t. He wanted her to go on.
“There’s not much more,” she said. “She told me that Clarence knew that Justice Childs was a phony hero and that he could prove it.”
“How?”
“I don’t know and I don’t think she does either. Anyway, her advice was to look for a man—”
“Seems I’ve heard that before.”
“Childs said look for a woman. Remember?”
“Yeah… Do you think she did it?”
“Laurie? No, but my opinion doesn’t mean anything. What do you think?”
“Who knows? You can’t tell the players in this thing without a scorecard.” He glanced up at his empty flow chart on the wall.
“Well, Detective Teller, I’ve shown you mine. Now, it’s your turn.”
“I’d love to, but I’ve never found that the phone was a substitute—”
“Teller… cut it out… have you learned anything new?”
“Not a thing.”
“Sure? I’d hate to think this was a one-way street, my telling and your holding back.”
“Free for dinner this week?”
“No. I’m taking a few days off and going with one of my kids to California to visit my father. By the way, did you know that Mozart wrote The Magic Flute because a theater owner in Vienna commissioned it?”
“Yeah.”
“You did?”
“Sure. He started off writing a light piece but it turned out to be a serious work—”
“Damn.”
“Call when you get back.”
From the carton that had contained the wall chart he took an assortment of colored, magnetic plastic symbols and labels, spread them on his desk, then used an erasable marking pen to write the names of each suspect. He considered categories to group the names under—personal and Professional, male and female, Court and family. He decided on the last, wrote the words on the largest of the magnetic labels and put them on the board. He added a third heading, personal, to include those not in the Court or family.
He ran into a snag grouping names beneath headings. Those from the Court, people like Poulson, Conover and Childs, might well have had personal rather than professional reasons for killing Clarence. Or both? He’d let it go, at least where the chart was concerned.
When he was finished, the chart was resplendent in red, green, yellow and blue:
COURT FAMILY PERSONAL
Justices Poulson Dr. C. Sutherland Friends
Childs Mrs. Sutherland (Male)
Conover Sister (Female) C. Conover
Clerk L. Rawls
He considered where to place Vera Jones. Seeing her at Club Julie and convinced that she’d had a personal relationship with Clarence certainly made her a good suspect. He started to put her name under Personal, then changed it to Family. A close call.
He narrowed his eyes and took in the chart as a blur of color. He slapped colored magnetic arrows on the board to link the names, realized i
t accomplished little. Besides, he wanted more room next to each name to write comments. He rearranged the board into a vertical configuration.
COURT
Justices Poulson
Childs
Conover
Clerk L. Rawls
FAMILY
Dr. C. Sutherland
Mrs. Sutherland
Sister
Vera Jones
PERSONAL
Friends
(Male)
(Female) C. Conover
He wrote Clarence’s name in large letters and put it at the top of the chart, then took it down, changed it to DECEASED and returned it to the board. Next he sat at his desk and wrote out motives to be put next to each suspect.
Poulson—father’s patient, White House sellout.
Childs—phony hero???? (He found orange magnetic question marks and strung four of them next to his comment.)
Conover—jealousy, wife and deceased.
Dr. C. Sutherland—violation of his files???? (Again, a string of question marks.)
Mrs. Sutherland??—He didn’t know, and had used up the supply of question marks. He took two from the other lines and placed them after her name.
Sister—nothing.
Vera Jones—woman scorned, possible affair.
Friends—He’d taken Laurie Rawls’s name from the Court list and put it here. Next to her name he put Jealousy.
He created another heading, MISC. No suspects yet here; he left it blank, a category-in-waiting.
Murder in the Supreme Court (Capital Crimes Series Book 3) Page 15