The Washington Decree

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  “Dody, tell Daniel Smith to drive over here to the trailer,” he yelled into his walkie-talkie.

  “I’m afraid it’s not Daniel,” she replied.

  “Who is it, then?”

  “Jonathan Kennedy!”

  “What?!”

  “Yeah, it’s Stanley’s brother.”

  T. Perkins looked over at his dead deputy sheriff, who was still lying in the field, staring into space. He cursed softly.

  “Stop Jonathan and tell him not to do anything on his own initiative—under any circumstances. You hear me, Dody? It won’t help his brother if he’s killed, too.”

  “Okay, boss.”

  He watched as she gave the warning to the backhoe, then watched as it was ignored and the farm machine rumbled past, towards the house. It still had fifty yards to go, but it was already possible to predict what Jonathan Kennedy had in mind. He was going to steer around his dead brother, turn sharply in front of them so he didn’t hit Willie on the front stairs, and then ram the house broadside. Jonathan and Stanley had been twins. There was nothing to do about it.

  The next few seconds were chaotic, but T would long remember the sound of the house beams splintering like matchsticks. Leo Mulligan fired a couple of rounds straight into the backhoe’s tires but couldn’t stop the machine’s enormous forward inertia. They watched as Jonathan sprang out of the cab and sprinted to the back door. The rifle in his hand was usually employed for hunting foxes on Daniel Smith’s farm, and here was a fox that needed flushing out of its lair. They yelled to him, but it was too late. With one jump he was inside the back door. Now all that was left in Jonathan Kennedy’s script was the final shoot-out.

  * * *

  —

  Twenty-five minutes later, at about seven thirty, the entire area was thick with people. The ambulance had already left with Willie and Arredondo, who’d had a lump of flesh shot from his shoulder but was in no great danger. Both were doing fine according to the doctor. Thank God they’d been spared the sad chore of informing Willie Riverdale’s folks of the death of their son.

  They found Leo Mulligan crushed under the chimney that, ironically, was the only masonry in the whole house. Next to him stood his nemesis, Jonathan Kennedy, his face covered in dust and bits of plaster.

  “You know what the bastard said just before he died?” asked Kennedy, Dody’s handcuffs clanking from his wrists. “He said: ‘My son can go to hell. Everything’s his fault.’” Dody Hall pulled him away as he proceeded to kick the body. “No, Leo, it’s you who can go to hell!” he screamed, as he was led to the patrol car. “Wasn’t it you who killed my brother, or was that your son’s fault, too?”

  T stood for a moment, staring at all the shell holes in the walls. Why had Leo said that about his son? He shook his head. He’d probably never find out. He watched Jonathan Kennedy as Dody and another officer led him away.

  He was sure to get a mild sentence.

  * * *

  —

  T worked his way through Mulligan’s living room. They’d accused him of stealing seed from a nearby barn. Leo had denied the theft and then turned his shotgun on the officers. A few quick rounds, after which he’d fled inside his house, and the rest was history. As far as T could see, there were no sacks of seed inside the house or in any of the other farm buildings.

  He sighed. Leo Mulligan hadn’t had an easy life. His wife had flirted with any man who came along, making Leo burn with a jealousy that eventually consumed him, and he murdered her. He’d sat in the state hospital and begged the police to find his son and see that he was well taken care of, and then—when they finally found the kid—he’d had to watch impotently as they let him be adopted. Leo Mulligan had never gotten to see his son again, and after more than thirty years of preventative detention was finally released from the loony bin, only to be accused a few months later of something he apparently hadn’t done. And now, there he lay: crushed under the rubble of the chimney he and T’s brother-in-law had built with their own hands. What a wasted life.

  Aside from the Caterpillar backhoe that now stood in Leo’s bedroom and the hundreds of bullet holes that had been provided by Gonzales Arredondo’s service revolver and rifle, the living room—despite its layer of dust and debris—was neat and tasteful, as though a woman’s touch were still present. The dining room table was covered with a lace tablecloth, and there’d been fresh flowers in the overturned glass vase. Everything was exactly the same as it had been thirty-two years ago when he’d been led away in handcuffs.

  T. Perkins looked at the pictures hanging over the hollowed-out easy chair and ran his finger over a pile of copper pots that used to be lined up in a row on an old bureau. The house had apparently just been standing there, waiting to be awakened from its fairy-tale slumber when Leo Mulligan finally got out of the state asylum. Apart from the damage, everything seemed to be just as before.

  He studied a framed photograph of the young family standing close together. Leo’s wife was strikingly beautiful; was it any wonder that men ran after her, begging for her affection? The boy standing between them was delicate, with a gentle expression. A boy eleven or twelve years old. That is, only a couple of years before the innocent lad saw his father murder his mother and then ran off to begin his career as gigolo for neglected housewives. Looking at this photo, taken on a lovely summer’s day, who could imagine all this would take place? T held the picture in front of him and stared into the eyes of the now-deceased homicidal father, the mother—whose eyes’ last image was of a baseball bat heading for her skull—and the boy, who now had another name and, hopefully, a better life somewhere. His were lively, boyish eyes with carefree lips that could still break into a smile. How could anything be this boy’s fault? What had Leo meant?

  The next photo sent chills down his spine. The boy was older here, but the eyes had been crossed out with a felt-tip pen. They were crossed out in the next photograph, too. Leo’s son must have been about fifteen at the time, just before his father killed his mother. T shook his head and began rubbing the ink off the frame’s dusty glass.

  He peered deep into the boy’s eyes as they became visible. He noticed his mouth was getting dry. Suddenly it was as if the boy were standing right in front of him. All that was needed to bring the picture up-to-date was to give the skin around these eyes a few wrinkles. T held his breath. My God, he thought, I knew it all along! This was what had been lurking in his subconscious, pestering him ceaselessly. Why hadn’t he been able to bring it to the surface?

  He placed the picture frame on the table and took a step back without taking his eyes off those of the boy. There could be no doubt. This adolescent, who’d witnessed his father kill his mother and had fucked women for money, had traveled far since he’d deserted his humble beginnings. Everybody knew him, every man and woman in this suffering nation, and everyone had their own opinion of him.

  It was Thomas Sunderland, vice president of the United States, the man at the center of the most forbidding cataclysm an American government had ever unleashed on its citizens.

  A few police technicians looked in through the splintered remains of the house’s wall, trying to get his attention, but T waved them away and mumbled that they’d have to look after themselves. Then he began searching methodically through every drawer, cupboard, and pile of papers he could find, scarcely knowing what he was looking for. He found relics of bygone days everywhere, relics from a time that a crazy old man had passionately wished would return.

  A narrow door at the end of the dining room led him into a small child’s bedroom. Its walls were mildewed but still bore witness to a boy having inhabited it many years previously. T looked around. There was a miniature bust of Thomas Jefferson, a kite made of silk paper, and centerfold pictures of David Bowie, Alice Cooper, and a very young Ursula Andress with bare breasts and glistening lips. The bed remained unmade since the last time it was slept in, with Penthouse
magazines still poorly concealed underneath. The overall impression was scarcely that of a young man the country’s vice president would want to be identified with. Still, it was here—amid the cornfields and with a father who’d fought to survive and keep his inner demons under control—that Thomas Sunderland had been molded.

  The coats hanging in the hallway were completely shredded by bullet holes. He searched the pockets and kicked the shoes and boots that lay strewn on the floor. On a shelf beneath a shattered mirror lay a sports bag that didn’t fit the overall picture of a house long uninhabited. It was red and trendy, so apparently the twenty-first century had made some inroads in Leo Mulligan’s existence in spite of everything. T opened it cautiously and saw a white towel upon which was written PROPERTY OF MARION CORRECTIONAL TREATMENT CENTER. They must have thought that letting him have it was the least they could do when they sent him home from the hospital.

  T carried the bag in to the dining room table, swept the broken glass and other rubble aside, and emptied it. No happy memories in here, he thought, as he made a pile of hospital discharge papers, certificates, medical prescriptions that Mulligan apparently had never had filled, plus all kinds of odds and ends that someone in an institution for the criminally insane might collect over the years. How little can a person own, and still survive? he wondered, as he came across some small drawings made by Leo Mulligan’s fellow sufferers.

  Three of them were signed identically—“With regards from Benno”—but the dates stretched over twenty years. T let his fingers glide lightly over the touchingly naive drawings. He was willing to bet that Benno was still at the institution.

  In the bottom of the bag he found a couple of magazines and some tattered, folded-up newspaper clippings. He took the first one and spread it out on the table. He could see no date, but there were several headlines that suggested the early eighties. Doesn’t matter, he thought, and reached reflexively for a cigarette in his breast pocket. He needed to find one end of this tragic ball of yarn in order to begin unraveling all the unknowns of the case—and this was it. An incipient sense of impending breakthrough began growing inside him, and he stood for a long time with the cigarette in the corner of his mouth before remembering to light it. The caption under a photograph had caught his attention. The large press photo was rather indistinct, thanks to its grainy quality and having been blurred by countless handlings. It depicted two soldiers saluting each other: a high-ranking officer with a mustache and a big smile, facing the camera, and a young soldier whose face was hidden but who obviously was very proud about the situation. If it hadn’t been for the caption, T wouldn’t have given the picture a second thought and the world would have continued rotating in its uncertain orbit. But there it was: “Former deputy commander in chief of Ramstein Air Base, Lieutenant General Wolfgang Sunderland salutes his son, Captain Thomas Sunderland, for distinction in the battle of Grenada.”

  T. Perkins took a deep drag on his cigarette. Could there really be a reason to honor anyone for anything that had to do with that act of misguided, macho, military aggression?

  He placed the clipping on top of Benno’s sketches. The ridiculous invasion of Grenada had taken place in 1983. That is, about eight or nine years before Thomas Sunderland became Bruce Jansen’s faithful foot soldier, around the time T met him on the ill-fated trip to China. T let the smoke sieve out through his teeth and took another deep drag. So this was how the path had been cleared for the son of a murderer who grew up in the middle of nowhere to become the most outspoken chief of staff the country had seen for generations. A military man had adopted Leo Mulligan Jr. and had determinedly set about shaping and preparing the young man for the tasks that lay ahead. Outwardly, it looked like a case of the ugly duckling being transformed into a swan, but T wasn’t so sure. It was rare that fairy tales and reality were compatible in this wicked world.

  He reached into his pocket for the cell phone and swore as he noticed his fingertip was beginning to bleed again, followed by the recollection that his expensive, state-of-the-art cell phone had been blown to bits.

  He stopped in mid-movement as the next terrible realization hit him: Without his cell phone, he wouldn’t be able to return Bud Curtis’s call.

  T stepped over a stuffing-sprouting, wrecked chair on his way out of the house and then almost slipped on Willie Riverdale’s coagulating blood on the front steps, but he barely noticed. His brain was working at high speed. How was he supposed to call someone back on a destroyed cell phone?

  Back at the trailer he found the half of the phone that hadn’t been blown away. “Hey,” he called to the technicians who were putting Leo Mulligan’s weapon arsenal into clear plastic bags. “Do you know how to remove the SIM card from one of these things?”

  He held the little electronic mess out to them.

  “If there’s anything left that works here, it’s not the SIM card, chief,” said the man who took it.

  “Look, there is no more SIM card.” He pointed at the spot where it once had been.

  T stood for a moment, letting cigarette smoke waft in front of his face as he weighed the consequences. Not only did he no longer have Bud Curtis’s number, there couldn’t be many others who had it, either, and people condemned to die weren’t usually listed in the phone book. None of the numbers he had in his head belonged to people who could help him find Curtis’s cell phone number, either. But maybe Doggie could—he’d had her phone number in his address book in the glove compartment ever since the trial.

  T considered his options and decided to postpone the problem. There was a more urgent matter. He nodded to one of the technicians. “Mind if I borrow your cell phone? Sure would appreciate it.”

  T hesitated for a moment before punching in the number to police headquarters in Richmond. He asked for Beth Hartley’s private number and received a not particularly friendly question in return: Why didn’t he ask her himself?

  “How on God’s earth am I supposed to do that when I don’t have her number?” he wanted to know.

  “You could ask to be transferred to her desk, for example. She’s been here since six this morning, and it doesn’t look like she’ll be leaving anytime soon.”

  “On a Saturday?”

  “Saturday, Sunday, Monday . . . What the hell’s the difference,” came the impatient voice. “Don’t you wear a uniform yourself?”

  After being transferred twice, he finally heard Beth Hartley’s fetching voice on the line.

  “It’s me, Beth . . .” he said. The silence was deafening. “Anything the matter?”

  “I’m really busy, T. Didn’t you get everything you needed yesterday?”

  He suppressed a little chuckle. “My dear Beth, I need your help one more time, and this time it’s for something completely different. Would you please give me some information about a certain retired lieutenant general by the name of Wolfgang Sunderland? That’s not so difficult, is it?”

  “Is that all? It’s Saturday, you know? I really should be in my nice, soft bed, getting my beauty sleep.” She seemed very, very reserved. Maybe she was afraid of what he might say. He knew the walls had ears, and she wasn’t about to jeopardize her newly acquired Edwin Forbes painting because of some careless remark.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know, Beth, but I just need his data. When he retired and his last known address.”

  He could already hear her computer keyboard clattering away in the background. Good old Beth. “The names of his children and stuff like that. Date of birth and death. Any criminal record for him or his family members . . .”

  “Why his date of death?” she interrupted. “He’s not dead, as far as I can see.”

  “You mean he’s alive?”

  “Unless he died yesterday. He’s old, but he’s alive. And he doesn’t live far from you, by the way. He lives in Lexington.”

  “Lexington, Virginia?”

  “Right. Listen, do you want
me to fax you his data sheet?”

  “No, just give me his address.” He looked up and noticed two oil-smudged men in the process of trying to get the backhoe digger out of Leo Mulligan’s smashed house. “Hey, just a minute, guys,” he shouted. “You better not remove it before we say so. We don’t want the ceiling caving in on us, do we?” He shook his head. What airheads. “Sorry, Beth, but sometimes I wonder what folks have between their ears. Just one more thing: Were there other children than the one son, Thomas?”

  “None that were legitimate, in any case.” She gave a little laugh—a sign that her old self was returning. Thank God for that.

  He switched off the cell phone and stuck it in his inner coat pocket.

  “Hey, that’s my phone, remember, T?” said the technician, reaching out for it.

  T had to shake his head. “Jesus, am I getting senile, or what?” He shook it again and then gave a big smile. “You shouldn’t put up with your sheriff running off with your phone, just like that. No way. Here, son, you have my handshake as guarantee that when I come back you’ll get a receipt saying I confiscated it. Of course you will.”

  The first thing he did when he arrived in Lexington around eleven o’clock was make a stop at one of his favorite old haunts, Lexington Restaurant. Here it was possible to order a kind of stew, the various origins of which could be found on the previous week’s menu, yet it tasted out of this world and came in such huge portions that the waitress had to hold the plate with both hands.

  He sat down in a booth by the window facing the parking lot and checked out the counter. It was from the fifties and looked it.

  The short-haired waitress already had her ballpoint pen out.

  “What brings you this way in these unhappy times, T?” she asked, adjusting her apron over her shabby uniform. There wasn’t the man she hadn’t flirted with in the course of time, and she wasn’t about to stop now, in spite of the date on her birth certificate. “Couldn’t live without me a moment longer, could ya’, hon?”