Capital City

by Lee Hurwitz

  Owen Styx appeared to consider the Mayor’s Office to be his entitlement. What was worse, forty percent of the community seemed to agree with him. Styx, who was not an announced candidate, led Keisha Lee, who was not a candidate at all, by twelve points. Corbin polled six percent.

  What was worse, Watson’s private polling had his lead—if he decided to run for a fourth term—down to single digits against Styx.

  This wouldn’t do at all. “There’s something else,” he told Trotter.

  The Senator’s voice curled in suspicion. “Yes?” he asked.

  “As you know, there are four vacancies in the DC Court of Appeals.” Watson made himself sound crisp, as though he were a news anchor. “President Reagan has been trying for years to fill them, but the Senate won’t report out any of the names he sends.”

  “They want him to appoint a liberal. Fat chance of that.”

  “I believe they would settle for a Democrat. Even a law-and-order Democrat.” Who was against law and order? “One who respects the Constitution, does the right thing and has a stellar record in the prosecutor’s office.”

  “Since when do you care about doing the right thing?” There was a moment of silence. “All right. Who you got in mind?

  “Owen Styx.”

  “Ah, fuck, Wendell. How old is he? Twelve?”

  “Twenty-eight. With a double degree from Yale and two years in the US Attorney’s Office.”

  “Are you sure he’d even take it? I hear he wants your job.”

  “I guarantee it.” Styx’s fondest ambition, Watson knew, was to serve on the Supreme Court. To sit one step below at age twenty-eight...Watson blurted out, “He’d be the Thane of Cawdor.”

  “Well, that’s comforting,” Trotter said. “But I’m afraid it’s above my pay grade. The President does not consult the Junior Senator from Utah on judicial appointments.”

  “No,” Watson conceded. “But he does consult the Senior Senator from Utah.”

  The line was silent for thirty seconds or so. “And what’s in it for the Junior Senator from Utah, if I may ask?”

  He had had this card in his back pocket for a while, now, and Watson understood that it was time to play it. “You know my ex-wife, Rachel Montgomery, don’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “As it turns out, she’d like to throw a party for you. And introduce you to some of her friends.”

  The man who greeted them at the airport gate flashed a Captain’s badge, but Hightower was sure he had never seen him before. Medium height, medium build, no marks or scars. “I sent some firearms through,” Hightower told the man, quietly.

  “We’ll take care of it,” the man replied in an equally soft voice. There was something odd about that voice, a slight accent or something. And what else—his face had a tan line, as if he had recently shaved off a beard. Hightower drew Evelyn closer to him.

  They trudged out into the bracing cold. “Should have kept our overcoats,” Hightower said, thinking of the garments they abandoned in their panicked getaway from Conyers. The Captain said nothing.

  There was a car waiting for them. “Get in,” the Captain said. “Sergeant Hightower, you sit in the front with me.”

  There was already a man and a woman in the back seat. The woman, Hispanic, late twenties, muscular, coatless, with tattoos all over her arms, wore a black t-shirt with a badge pinned on to it. The man was uniformed, about twenty-five, White, big, slope-shouldered.

  “Move over, Charles,” the Captain said, and the big guy moved over. “There’s room for four in back.”

  “Are you with the DC police force?” Evelyn asked the woman once they had pulled away from the curb.

  “Yeah,” she snickered. “Tattoo Division.”

  They drove off, and Baltimore-Washington International grew smaller behind them. The Mayor had told Hawkins to fly to BWI in order to avoid reporters. But Hightower had never been to this airport and he had no idea where they were once they hit the open road. He felt the bottom drop out of his stomach.

  These weren’t cops. Hightower didn’t know who they were. He didn’t know…

  “Where—” His voice broke like a reed. He cleared his throat, breathed, deliberately lowered his voice an octave. “Where are we going?”

  “This is your lucky day!” said the woman in the back seat. Hightower turned to look at her; she was grinning broadly. “Youse guys are going to see His Honor de Mayor!”

  The car sped up. They were all alone on the highway, flying past the wind-whipped branches of dormant trees. Hightower noticed that Evelyn and Hawkins, like himself, were on the passenger side of the car. The bad guys—and he knew that was what they were—were on the driver’s side.

  He noticed something else, too. “We’re running low on gas,” he said. “Why don’t you get some here?”

  It was a brief drive to the Municipal Center, a large, drab building a half mile from the Senate side of the US Capitol. Traffic was sparse for 2:00 p.m.

  “It smells funky here,” Yvonne said, standing next to Mitch as he explained his business to a bored officer at the reception table. Yvonne wondered how the police department of the nation’s capital could be headquartered in such an unpleasant building.

  “We’ll be seeing Captain Elijah E. Pitts,” Mitch said. “He’s the Chief of the Criminal Investigations Division, which is the same as Chief of Detectives in any other city. He’s been on the force for a quarter-century, but this is his first year in this job. First man of color to occupy this position, oddly enough. When the homicide rate shot though the roof during the crack epidemic, Watson told Chief Pike to reorganize the department and bring the rate down. If the numbers of homicides did not come down, there’d be a new Chief of Police, he said that in the newspapers. So Pike put Pitts, a lifelong friend, in charge of CID.”

  “Did it help any?” The cop at the reception desk got up and motioned them to follow. If Mitch replied, Yvonne wasn’t able to hear.

  “So what kind of guy is this Pitts?” she asked once they were alone in the small, windowless conference room where they were evidently to meet the CID Chief.

  “I’m told he’s a straight shooter,” Mitch replied. “He’s got his own agenda, like everybody else here. I’m going to be as honest as I can be with him.”

  Pitts walked in, shook hands with Mitch and Yvonne before either of them could speak. He was about fifty, pencil-thin and balding, with big eyes and obsidian skin. He looked like an accountant, except that Yvonne couldn’t help noticing the cords of muscles underneath his shirt.

  “Captain, let me explain what we are investigating,” Mitch began, skipping the preliminaries. “On Tuesday, December 6th, a woman by the name of Evelyn Boone was having dinner with some friends at a restaurant in Miami. Two men in the restaurant allegedly harassed Ms. Boone. Ms. Boone and a female friend fled in her friend’s car. The two men pursued them, forced their car into a ditch and kidnapped Ms. Boone. Ms. Boone is a resident of DC. This is a difficult and rather delicate matter, Captain. We have plenty of witnesses who saw Ms. Boone being harassed in the restaurant. We have a witness to the actual kidnapping. And while we are by no means certain, we have substantial evidence to suggest that the kidnappers were two members of the DC police force.”

  Pitts sat up straight. “And exactly who might that be?”

  “Believe me, Captain, if I knew I would have told you straightaway.” Mitch smiled. “Two Black males, both around five ten, both weigh maybe one sixty, one about forty-five, one about ten years younger. One answers to the name ‘Hi’”.

  “Well, that describes about sixty percent of the DC Police Force,” Pitts said. “Except I don’t know anybody called ‘Hi.’”

  Mitch took out the sketches. “This is what our guy got from the witness.”

  Pitts examined each one, holding it with a handkerchief to reduce the possibility of smudging. “Generic Black male number one and generic Black male number two.” He looked up at Mitch. “Sorry, can’t help you.”r />
  Mitch smiled. “I didn’t think they were very good, either. That’s why I brought these.” He took out the fingerprint cards. “They were taken from some evidence found near the car from which Ms. Boone was taken. I’d like you to run a match with the prints you have on file in your personnel office. Oh—and could we look through a duty roster? I’d like to see if we come across any Hirams.”

  Yvonne felt the temperature drop about ten degrees. “Certainly,” Pitts said with exaggerated politeness. “I assume you have a court order.”

  “I assume it won’t come to that,” Mitch said in a tone implying that he could very easily get one if he needed to. “We’re a sister law-enforcement agency. And the roster is a matter of public record.”

  “Put in a Freedom of Information request, then,” Pitts said, a smile playing at the corner of his mouth. “We’ll respond in ten days.”

  “Captain Pitts.” Mitch leaned over. “If I have to, I can have Federal Investigators combing through every nook and cranny of the Municipal Center. I’ll read not only your duty roster, but every duty roster you’ve had since nineteen seventy-seven. Not only will I see the fingerprints of your uniforms, I’ll be reading their tax returns for the last five years.”

  Pitts seemed to study the official portraits on his wall for a while. “I’ve been a detective for more than twenty years,” he said, “so you have to realize that by nature, I’m very skeptical about jumping to conclusions. Maybe too skeptical, according to my wife.” He waited for the laugh that didn’t come. “I have no doubt that someone posed as a DC policeman in Miami in order to commit a crime. Washington’s very vulnerable right now. Washington is a majority-Black city that is largely Black-run and Black-controlled. And that’s very scary to some people. So maybe Ms. Boone was kidnapped, yes. And maybe it’s a set-up job designed to further embarrass the police department of the city of Washington!”

  Mitch’s eyes widened. “You’re seriously suggesting that this kidnapping was staged for the sole purpose of embarrassing the Washington, DC police?”

  Pitts pounded the table suddenly, like a man striking a fly. “Yes, dammit! That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. This is a desperate struggle, we’re in a desperate struggle to keep the hand of the man off our necks. The man will stop at nothing—and an armed police force in the hands of the brothers—now, that’s scary.”

  He fell back in his chair, energy spent. “We have thirty-eight hundred officers. Of course, we’ve got a few bad apples. Every department has bad apples. You pay a cop twenty-five grand a year and put him in contact with prostitutes, drug dealers, and other scum on the streets. What the hell do you expect? It’s hard to resist the temptation. Lemme tell you something. We don’t have any more bad apples here than anywhere else.”

  “Captain, I’m not talking about taking money from drug dealers or prostitutes. I’m talking about forcing two young ladies off the road, risking their lives, breaking into their car, and dragging one of them off. This happened more than a week ago and no one has heard from her since.”

  Pitts looked at him grimly, and then took out a walkie-talkie. “Hostler, bring a duty roster down to the first-floor conference room.” He switched the walkie-talkie off. “It’s all I can do right now,” he said. “We don’t have our officer’s fingerprints on computer. We’d have to hand-compare them. It would take years.”

  So for three hours Yvonne and Mitch poured over the duty roster of the City of Washington’s Police Department. They did find a Hyman Schwartz, but as it turned out ,he was stationed right there in the Municipal Center and didn’t look a thing like the man Yvonne remembered.

  After dropping Yvonne off at her hotel around 8:00 p.m., Mitch returned to his office to work on the White-Collar Crime Report. It was just as he remembered it, unreadable. There was a lengthy discussion of the Amberscambia embezzlement matter. He remembered Amberscambia, a beefy man with seventies muttonchops. And then he remembered that he hadn’t had dinner; exhaustion was taking over. He remembered the time that he and Helen had been in Pensacola, in Escambia County, Florida. He imagined himself there still, eating beef and muttonchops, with Helen. God, that would have been good. He saw himself, with Helen and with Amberscambia, eating beef and muttonchops in Escambia County, and for desert: ambrosia. Yes, here comes the ambrosia, all icy pineapple and whipped cream, and it was being served by—Ambrosia! Yes, the rock goddess herself, in her dominatrix outfit, strutting up to their table with a big plate of Ambrosia. And then he thought—

  Jimmy Ray Mallory.

  It was the first thing he said to Yvonne when he picked her up the next morning—not “how are you,” not “have you had your coffee,” not “you’re looking fine this morning!” which he thought of later. He said, “Jimmy Ray Mallory was there when they went after your friend.”

  Yvonne seemed a little startled. “Yeah—I thought it was kind of funny. I mean—bizarre. Like what else could be crazy. Here guys were chasing after Evelyn and Evelyn just snorted up like three lines of coke and then—Jimmy Ray Mallory!”

  “People were taking pictures.”

  “Yeah, of Jimmy Ray Mallory. But I don’t—”

  The National Tattler’s offices were on Massachusetts Avenue, near Union Station. As soon as he showed his badge they turned their archives over to him. Goddam government agencies were the only ones who ever gave him trouble when he wanted to see something.

  It didn’t take long. Mitch remembered seeing the photo standing in the Safeway check-out line last week or the week before.

  “That’s him!”

  “Jimmy Ray Mallory’s bodyguard.”

  “He wasn’t Mallory’s bodyguard. That big guy is the bouncer. He was in a fight with the bouncer. And there’s the other one. And there’s Evelyn.”

  “I need to borrow this,” Mitch said to the woman at the front desk. “I can sign for it—”

  “Keep it,” she said. “We have like ten thousand copies.”

  Their next stop was the Washington Post.

  “You ran a little blurb a week or so ago,” he said to Jim Fannin, the Post’s Metro editor. “Kind of a gossip-column thing. It had to do with this picture.” He took out his copy of the Tattler. “Something to the effect of what member of the Mayor’s security team was now a Jimmy Ray Mallory groupie. Who were you talking about?”

  Fannin looked at him strangely. “Yeah. I was talking about Aloysius Hightower.”

  “That must be it!” Yvonne cried. “Aloysius Hightower!”

  Fannin looked at her, and then back to Mitch. “Is this about the explosion?”

  “What explosion?” Mitch asked.

  “Didn’t you read the paper this morning?” Fannin reached behind him, grabbed a copy of the Post off a colleague’s desk, and handed it to Mitch. “If you know this guy, you’d better find a place to sit down.”

  Mitch and Yvonne found two hard plastic chairs together. They opened the paper and read.

  MAYOR’S SECURITY DETAIL KILLED BY ARSONIST

  Aloysius Hightower, forty-three, and Ronald Hawkins, thirty-five, both members of Mayor Wendell Watson’s security detail, were killed last night when, witnesses reported, a passenger in their vehicle doused them with gasoline at a service station outside Columbia, Maryland, and set them on fire. A woman traveling with them was also killed. She has not yet been identified. The victims were burned so badly their identity could be determined only from the police ID's they carried in their wallets.

  “There was a huge fireball, like a nuclear bomb you’d see on T.V.,” said Otis Guess, the attendant at whose independent I-Rite Service Station the conflagration took place. “I [saw] three guys run from the car just before it went off.”

  Police have launched a massive manhunt for what was described as three Black men, all about five-ten and in their mid-thirties. Hightower and Hawkins left no immediate family.

  Chapter 11

  Hightower hauled himself off the asphalt, shook the shattered glass from his bleeding hands, and beg
an running. He had no particular direction in mind except out of there. Away from the radiant heat, the mushrooming light, the horrible screams.

  He had broken something—his collarbone, for sure, and maybe something else—his shoulder, maybe. And he was bleeding. His nose? No. He felt the stub of a broken tooth with his tongue.

  “Aloysius! Your eyebrows are gone!” Evelyn grabbed his shoulders, stopping his progress instantly, and pulled him toward her. Damn! That hurt like a motherfucker! She hugged him briefly, then took off. He stumbled after her.

  He was not thinking now, luxuriating in the pleasure of pure animal response. Heart pounding, lungs pumping, blood rushing through his ears. He had just finished thinking harder than he had ever thought in his life—Out! Out! Now! Kick the door into him and grab the hose out his hands; aim the gasoline at their eyes, blind them before they can get a shot off, and then the matches, the concussive blast throwing him back—it felt good not to think; it felt like he was napping, even though he was running as hard as he could.

  Afterward, the three of them safely hidden in the woods, Hightower explained his plan. Evelyn immediately objected. I was promised a contract, she said. One hundred thousand dollars was not an adequate substitute.

  “Things have changed since we first talked,” Hightower explained. “We’re wanted in three states. Maybe four. And you’ve seen what Watson is capable of. What he’s willing to do.”

  “I don’t care. It wasn’t the deal.” Evelyn pulled herself up to her full height, and beyond—puffing up like a cobra, until she was nearly Hightower’s height. “The deal was a million dollar contract. And I will get it.”

  Hightower, who had just killed three humans—fried them, their sickly stench still in his nostrils—felt intimidated by this young woman. She’s more dangerous than Watson, he thought, watching her sway before him. And then she, noticing the barely perceptible shift, the fear, shifted herself again. “I love you, Aloysius,” she said, touching his rough face, riding her soft palm against it. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”