He stared dejectedly at her wedding ring. She’d managed to be taken off the market before he’d become a free man again, dammit. It wasn’t the first time this twinge of regret had hit him.
“Yes,” he said, “here I am.”
She laughed. “What in the world brings you here, honey?”
He could have arrested her just for that tone of voice, rubbing itself up against him like a purring cat. “Oh, I just needed to talk with you, that’s all,” he replied.
“Okay, toots, that sounds intriguing. Why didn’t you call me, then? You know I’m always ready for a bit of you-know-what on the telephone, don’t you, little T?”
He leaned towards her desk and wound up peering straight down a dangerously deep cleavage. “I . . . have to speak with you, Beth. The telephone wasn’t such a good idea in this case. Can you come outside for a minute? I have something I want to show you.”
She fanned her face as though she was having a hot flash. “Well, well, T. What can you show me that I haven’t already seen?” She laughed in a way that made the other office girls look up.
“It’s something you’ve seen before. Something you really, really want.”
She placed a couple of files on the corner of her desk and turned off her computer. Beth must have been almost sixty by now, but this fact had yet to reach her pituitary gland. There was no doubt that Beth Hartley would continue performing unmentionable, sinful acts with men until she went to her grave. Luring her outdoors wasn’t too difficult.
He led her down to where his car was parked on 7th Street and opened the door for her.
She glanced at her watch. “If you were planning to drive me out to some haystack in the countryside, I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint you, honey. We have twenty minutes at the most. I can’t be gone longer than that.”
T. Perkins sat down in the driver’s seat and pulled the painting over from the back seat. “Look. You’ve always wanted this, Beth, and now you can have it.”
It clearly wasn’t what she’d been expecting, but this didn’t prevent her from staring at the painting with the same kind of desire as if it had been a male stripper or Aladdin’s lamp, which—in a way—it was.
T. Perkins was well aware of what he’d brought with him, because it had been a topic of conversation more than once. The painter Edwin Forbes worked for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper during the entire Civil War, and in this case had painted a portrait of a cadet from the Virginia Military Institute who’d partaken in the exceptional battle at New Market. It was said he hadn’t done many oil paintings, and this was apparently one that collectors really wanted to get hold of.
T. Perkins didn’t know what the painting was worth, and he didn’t care. It had hung in his family home for generations, and now it was time for it to move on. Beth had been pestering him for the picture ever since the first time she’d laid eyes on it—and laid him, too, for that matter—and now she was going to get it if she did the right thing.
“Yes, sugar, it’s what you think it is. In return, you have to get me all the documents from the Bud Curtis case. Video surveillance tapes, photographs, court records, the stenographer’s verbatim report—everything.”
His words had the same effect as if he’d pulled an ice-cream cone out of the mouth of a child. She stiffened in a combination of frustration and despair while her eyes remained locked on the picture.
“I don’t care how, Beth, just do it.” He held the painting in front of her. “I know you can, Beth. You have access to everything. You’ll probably have to go through the Investigative Services Unit here in Virginia or use some of our friends in Washington. The case documents are probably gathering dust in the appellate court. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Department of Homeland Security had a copy of everything. I want you to siphon off all the data you can find and put it in this.” He pulled a flash drive out of his briefcase and laid it in her hand.
Telltale red blotches were beginning to spread across her face.
“T, you’re insane,” she said, taking a couple of deep breaths. “Totally insane.”
“I need it by this evening. Can you do it?”
“Oh, mon dieu!” Her mother’s origins were not to be mistaken. “How much do you think that painting’s worth?”
“How should I know? One hundred thousand, maybe.”
She tore her eyes away from the picture while she tried to think. “And you’re giving away a hundred thousand for that information? What’s the point? You’re not even a family relation, are you?”
“The point? The point is, I know someone who’s ready to pay whatever it costs. Don’t worry, I’ll get my money back.”
She put her hand to her bosom. Now she was on the verge of hyperventilating. “Oh, mon dieu! And here I was expecting we were just going to cuddle a little on the back seat for old times’ sake.”
* * *
—
He waited in the lounge of the Crowne Plaza for four hours before he saw Beth Hartley enter, wearing an expression that left no doubt that she was anxious to get their meeting over with. He asked her to sit down, but she disregarded him, looking about incessantly.
“Not here where everybody can see us,” she whispered, clutching her handbag as though her life depended on it.
He stood up without a word and walked over to the elevator with Beth following behind. He saw that no one else was waiting and pushed the elevator button.
Inside the elevator she immediately reached inside her handbag while she checked the elevator ceiling for signs of video surveillance. She found the little flash drive and dumped it into his jacket pocket. Then she pushed the button for the seventh floor and stood without saying a word until she left the elevator with the painting under her arm. He continued up a couple of floors and, after waiting a half minute, took the elevator on the opposite side of the corridor back down.
T looked for her as he left the lounge, but she wasn’t there.
* * *
—
The Virginia Capitol Police was founded back in 1618, but it had never had an employee as quick, efficient, and bright as Beth Hartley. Of this, T had no doubt after he’d been home a couple of hours, sifting through the material she’d given him. There was everything he could ever wish for.
He leaned back in his threadbare easy chair with a cigarette hanging loosely in the corner of his mouth. Bud Curtis had lost his day in court, and this, in all likelihood, had been the correct conclusion. But what if the man had been telling the truth? What then?
There was no doubt that Curtis was as reactionary as they came, but was that a crime? Was there anything wrong with it, if it were all just talk? That’s how it usually was with people like him. In T’s experience, very few braggarts followed up on their words with deeds.
He nodded to himself. He’d try the simple experiment of forcing himself to believe Bud Curtis’s testimony 100 percent. Then it was a case of starting from the beginning and seeing what it led to.
He lit a new cigarette and stared emptily through the cloud of smoke.
During the trial the prosecutor Mortimer Deloitte had claimed that the story of the murder of the president’s wife began when Bud Curtis was a young man and had participated in a far-right election campaign. Curtis’s defense was that he’d done so solely to win the heart of Doggie’s mother, and what was wrong with that? What hormonal young man wouldn’t have been capable of doing the same?
Later he’d been successful in the hotel business and after some years had hired a dimwit by the name of O’Neill. Curtis had played with his power over the guy and, yes, he’d gotten him to lick Curtis’s spit off the floor during a drunken all-night poker game, among other things. Rather repellent for T’s taste, but that’s how it was. The defense had argued that it hadn’t been Curtis who’d suggested O’Neill unveil the painting, but rather a Secret Service agent who’d giv
en a false name and had managed to disappear without a trace.
Even though Bud Curtis had often bad-mouthed Jansen, everybody who knew Curtis knew he was the argumentative type, and so what? Didn’t everyone have some person who was their pet aversion?
And then there was the money transfer from Bud Curtis’s account to O’Neill’s. When you thought about it, this fatal transaction spoke more in Curtis’s favor than against him. The man was a multimillionaire, for Christ’s sake, and surely would have given O’Neill an envelope full of cash. On the other hand, this could be precisely why Curtis might have transferred the money so openly. He could have figured that such an obviously clumsy move would make people believe he had nothing to do with it, but the intended effect had boomeranged, anyway.
But this was all speculation. T’s impression of Curtis was that he wasn’t a man who took unnecessary chances. Therefore something fishy must have been going on. T was convinced that someone else had made that money transfer. Willie—the youngest man in the sheriff’s office, with his obsessive affection for Internet technology—could do something like that with his eyes closed. There were plenty of possibilities, especially since identifying the actual sender of an electronic money transfer was impossible.
If one really believed in Curtis, then someone else must have manipulated Toby O’Neill into doing the shooting and had provided him with a weapon at the right moment. And why couldn’t that someone be a man with a fictitious name like “Blake Wunderlich”?
Backed up by Curtis’s own admission, the prosecutor Mortimer Deloitte had claimed the gun came from Curtis’s desk, and then he’d thrown down his trump: The cartridges also bore Curtis’s fingerprints. So it didn’t do Curtis much good to claim he’d never loaded it.
But, according to the records, these fingerprints were far from perfect. They could have been transferred from somewhere else. T had seen it before, where a fingerprint from a glass, for example, had been photographed, a rubber mold made and then stamped onto the cartridges. This wasn’t at all impossible, and someone could also have easily grazed Curtis’s skin with these rubber fingerprints so his DNA would be there, too. So it all could have been a setup.
Then there was the whole issue of the glass of water that disappeared, or had never been there. If it were true that Curtis had fetched a glass of water for Mimi Jansen, then this activity would have had to have been recorded somewhere on a surveillance video, but T couldn’t see it when he watched the video copies Beth Hartley had provided him. He actually couldn’t see much of anything in those throngs of people on the grainy, black-and-white video. That the glass had disappeared in all the confusion was no stranger than so many other aspects of this case.
He frowned. There was still something odd here. A glass tends to break when it hits the floor, and any water in the glass would leave signs of wetness. If Curtis’s claim were true, then why didn’t the technicians mention broken glass and puddles of water in their report? He shook his head. He had to pursue Bud Curtis’s version of events: that there had been a glass and there had been water. These were just two small details in the midst of all the confusion, and it was certainly not impossible that someone had made this evidence disappear. Why would Curtis lie about such a thing, when he knew the room was under video surveillance? How could anyone have known someone would doctor the video?
The more T. Perkins went over the sequence of events, the more nagging questions emerged. Who gave the shooter the weapon, for example? No one could make a seasoned sheriff believe that the Secret Service agent who’d originally searched and okayed O’Neill, or Ben Kane, who’d searched him immediately prior to the unveiling, couldn’t do their job properly. Under all circumstances, the gun’s route from Curtis’s desk to O’Neill’s hand was a series of unanswered questions that the prosecution had done very little to answer.
Perkins returned to reading the case documents. Something else was hard to understand: No one had seen the perpetrator fire the shot. Another thing was, many witnesses had heard O’Neill scream something before he fired, but none of them could say what. T. Perkins simply couldn’t understand it. Toby O’Neill may have been pretty dim, but his enunciation wasn’t that poor. In addition, several of the persons present were highly trained special agents who would have been able to identify a single voice among hundreds on the tape. T. Perkins had once had one of these guys come to his department to help whip a couple of slow-witted new recruits into usable sheriff’s deputies. Hadn’t the man been able to give a detailed description of another officer who popped in and out of the office in five seconds, wearing twenty-five articles of clothing?
Then why didn’t any of these specially trained superagents know who shot O’Neill or what he’d screamed in the seconds before he fired and was subsequently shot himself? Could it be because they’d never been asked? Could it be because he hadn’t yelled anything intelligible?
And finally, there was a point the defense had raised, namely, why in the world did Toby O’Neill shoot the man’s wife instead of the man himself?
The prosecution’s whole theory was built on Bud Curtis having practically hypnotized O’Neill into becoming a killer, and that it was the senator upon whom Curtis’s wrath was focused. How could O’Neill not hit his victim at such close range?
T. Perkins looked at the computer screen and beamed up the video recordings for the third time that evening. There were five three-minute files from the surveillance camera in the hallway and two video clips from NBC4, one of them two minutes long, the other, ten. Files one, two, and three showed a slightly impatient O’Neill waiting by the painting, next to a statuelike Secret Service agent in a gray suit. The crude, bashful little man really was acting crude and bashful: picking his nose, scratching his crotch, blowing his nose, and then waiting some more. It was impossible to see if he was concealing a weapon somewhere.
File four showed what much of the case had dealt with: the entourage coming in and stopping at the still-veiled painting, Bud Curtis speaking with Mimi Jansen and then disappearing, and finally the shooting and ensuing confusion.
He studied every individual in the video. They were all there: Bugatti, the soon-to-be president and first lady, Sunderland, Wesley and the rest of the staff, and the black-clad and gray-clad bodyguards. He saw firearms appear in many hands immediately after the first shots. Reminiscent of Lee Harvey Oswald’s fate in Dallas, one could clearly read the pain in the assassin’s body language as he himself was hit. Still, it wasn’t easy to figure out how the man who’d shot O’Neill could pick him out so easily in the crowd, unless he’d had previous knowledge of what was going to happen and who to shoot.
T. Perkins nodded to himself a few times. If he’d been there, he’d have hesitated shooting.
Amongst all those prominent people and amidst all that confusion, how could one be sure of not hitting someone by mistake?
He lit a new cigarette and ran the fourth video file again. The camera angle wasn’t good, and the clip wasn’t of much use. People were standing packed together, so unfortunately he couldn’t see if someone bumped into O’Neill as he fired, which—if it were true—could possibly explain why O’Neill missed his shot.
He clicked on the fifth file, which showed the battleground just as Bud Curtis reentered. There he stood in the doorway as some panic-stricken guests cowered on the floor around him and others charged past him out of the room. T could see no glass of water in his hand, but one hand made a brief movement before both of them flew to his temples in apparent disbelief as he spotted Jansen bent over his wife. One couldn’t see Curtis’s face from the high camera angle, but his body language clearly communicated shock. Several people were lying on the floor, wounded by ricocheting bullets, and more security was rushing in as others yelled into their lapel microphones for assistance.
It was all very interesting, but, in the end, the videos revealed just as little about what happened as what didn’t.
&nbs
p; He closed video file five and opened file six. This was NBC4’s direct transmission of the flags hanging in the hallway, followed by a minute of unsteady, handheld footage shot over people’s heads. One could pick out the moment where O’Neill’s arm pulled the tassel of the drape and revealed the painting. Then the photographer focused closely on the painting, as though communicating to the TV viewers his bafflement over the picture’s tackiness. Next he panned down to Mimi Jansen’s face as she stepped forward. For a moment it appeared as though she were about to laugh, but she managed to maintain her composure. Instead she nodded slowly, but as her eyes traveled up the painting she looked as if she were about to laugh again. T caught himself imitating her grimaces—it was simply impossible not to. Next the camera zoomed out a bit, as though in search of Senator Jansen’s face in the crowd, but, with so many people, there wasn’t enough room for the cameraman to get a good shot.
At that moment came a cry, presumably from O’Neill as he was shot. It was a thin voice, and even though T reran the sequence several times, it remained unintelligible amidst the muddle of noise and voices around him. Next the cameraman was knocked down as panic-stricken guests made for the exits, and the last sequence showed a blurred picture as the camera fell to the floor and continued running.
T sat for a while, trying to sum up all his impressions, but by now it was late and his brain was overloaded, so it wasn’t easy.
The Washington Decree Page 24