Murder at The Washington Tribune: A Capital Crimes Mystery

by Margaret Truman

  They spoke about other things during lunch, but Joe’s thoughts weren’t entirely on those topics. The New York Times and The Washington Tribune had been in competition for as long as he could remember, vying for the biggest stories with the most impact on the body politic and the nation’s conscience. Like every youngster with Yankee pinstripes or Dodger blue in their fanciful futures, The Times and the Trib represented the big leagues to journalism students across the country, and he was no exception. Sure, there were plenty of jobs in the reporting business that were meaningful and fulfilling. But those two competing newspaper giants in New York and Washington represented “making it,” whatever that meant. The Trib, he knew, tended to be more sensational than The Times in its news coverage, and had its share of critics because of that. But it was no tabloid. It had broadsheet clout, and anyone working for it did, too.

  “Joseph Carlton Wilcox at the esteemed Washington Trib, huh?” he said to Melito over dessert, laughing at the very notion of it.

  “Suit yourself, Joe, but they’re looking for Young Turks like you. I don’t qualify.”

  “What are you, over the hill?”

  “I am as far as they’re concerned back in D.C. They sent me out here to wind down, go peacefully into the night, cover the latest car models, and make it sound like I care. Maybe you’re right. It is intense in D.C. Cutthroat, like politics today. Get the story at all costs. Publish or perish ain’t only for academics. Used to be fun. No more, and I can’t say I’m unhappy being further away from it. But you? You’re exactly what they’re looking for. You could really make your name there, pal.”

  Wilcox grunted and dug into his apple pie. The topic didn’t come up again until they had split the bill and were standing on the sidewalk.

  “Sure you don’t at least want to explore the Trib thing?” Melito asked. “I can give somebody a call.”

  “No, I. . . . Sure, Tommy, call somebody. It’s not for me. But it’d be interesting to see what golden opportunity I’m passing up.”

  Wilcox spent the afternoon interviewing two witnesses to a shooting at a downtown public housing complex and filed his story before leaving the office. He’d had trouble pushing aside the conversation with Melito, and thought of little else as he drove to the house he’d called home for the past couple of years. He decided not to even mention it to Georgia. No sense upsetting her with thoughts of another move. The Detroit Free Press was his third job since graduating from Northwestern seven years ago with a degree in journalism and marrying his college sweetheart. She’d been a good soldier about it, encouraging him as he moved from a weekly paper to a daily, and then to the larger daily where he now worked, each move advancing his career and bettering his salary. But he knew she considered the Free Press the culmination of that career, a major daily in a large city, with room for advancement. For her, this was the big time, and he sometimes agreed with her.

  Still, there were those youthful visions of one day becoming, say, a foreign correspondent, trench coat and all, his generation’s Edward R. Murrow, meeting with shadowy figures in exotic foreign cities while bombs burst around you, scooping others who were after the same story, front-page bylines on a paper like The New York Times or The Washington Tribune and the resulting notoriety, including prizes—a Pulitzer for little Joey Wilcox from Kankakee? Maybe he’d start smoking a pipe.

  A pipe dream, he knew, like envisioning himself hitting the home run that would lead his favorite baseball team, the Chicago Cubs, into the World Series—finally! He was a beat reporter, covering the city of Detroit the way Hamill and Breslin did in New York, and Kupcinet did in Chicago. A foreign correspondent? You’ve been watching too many movies, he told himself. Be happy with who you are and what you’ve got.

  He eagerly took Melito’s call the next day.

  “Hey, Joe, just wanted you to know that I got through to my guy in D.C.”

  “And?”

  “Talked to Paul Morehouse. He’s assistant managing editor of the Metro section, part of the new regime, a no-nonsense guy but okay. Rough cob. Came over from The Baltimore Sun. I told him all about you, in glowing terms, of course, and he said he’d be interested in getting a call.”

  “I really appreciate it, Tom, but—”

  Melito rattled off Morehouse’s phone number. “Got it?”

  “No, give it to me again.”

  This time, Wilcox wrote it down.

  “It’s his private line. Call him.” Melito said. “You’ve got nothing to lose, maybe lots to gain.”

  Wilcox left the paper that afternoon to make the call from a gas station phone booth. Morehouse answered. He sounded gruff and distracted and squeezed a series of rapid-fire questions into a few minutes. When it was obvious to Wilcox that the conversation was about to end, Morehouse asked, “You as good as Tommy Melito says?”

  “I don’t know,” Wilcox replied. “What did he say?”

  “Send me a resume and some clips. If I like what I see, I’ll pass it on to Human Resources.” He laughed, a bark. “Christ, it used to be Personnel. I’ll get back to you.”

  Wilcox decided to follow through on Morehouse’s request without informing Georgia. He’d come to the conclusion that it was a wasted exercise; nothing would come of it. Five days after sending the material by priority mail, he received a call at the Free Press from Morehouse. “Can you talk?” the editor asked.

  Wilcox looked around the newsroom. “No,” he said.

  “Call me back.”

  That night, after dinner had been cleared and Roberta was in her room, Wilcox told his wife of his flirtation with The Washington Tribune.

  “They want you to go to Washington for an interview?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you want to do it?”

  “I think so. It could be a wonderful opportunity for me.”

  “For you. What about us, me and Roberta?”

  “I think you’d enjoy living in Washington, Georgia. It’s a nice city. Morehouse said the Trib is beefing up at every level, in every department. They’re willing to pay for the right people.”

  Georgia turned in her web chair on their small patio and looked out over the garden she’d so tenderly cultivated. A single tear ran down her cheek, and Wilcox moved his chair closer, placing a hand on her shoulder. “Hey,” he said, “I don’t have the job. Nobody’s offered it to me yet. And if you feel that strongly about it, I’ll call Morehouse and tell him I’ve changed my mind, that I’m not interested.”

  She said nothing for a minute, her attention still on the garden. Then she turned, took his face in her hands, and said, “No, go for the interview, Joe. If you don’t, you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering what you missed, and that wouldn’t be good for us, for our marriage. I just wish you’d included me from the beginning. I fear surprises.” She brightened. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained, Joe.” He smiled at her use of the cliché. She knew and used more of them than anyone else he knew.

  Two days later, Wilcox took a personal day and flew to Washington where he sat with Paul Morehouse in the editor’s cubicle on the perimeter of the Trib’s Metro newsroom. The air was thick with smoke; the keyboards provided a cacophonous background to their conversation. At first, he was put off by Morehouse’s crusty persona that bordered on rudeness. But he soon sensed that behind that exterior was a committed man, someone who had no patience with fools or pretenders. Like my father, Wilcox thought as the interview continued, interrupted frequently by phone calls and people sticking their heads into the office with questions. He even got in some questions of his own.

  “Say hello to Joe Wilcox,” Morehouse told a heavyset reporter who’d walked into the cubicle wearing yellow suspenders with tiny green evergreen trees on them.

  “Whaddya say, kid?” the reporter said, shaking Joe’s hand.

  “He wants a job here,” Morehouse said.

  The reporter laughed. “Good,” he said. “You come to work here, the first person you come see is me. I’ll fill you in, sh
ow you where the bodies are buried—and tell you who should be buried.”

  “Get out,” Morehouse said, waving his hand.

  “Nice meeting you, kid. Lotsa luck.”

  After another twenty minutes had passed, and Morehouse had asked questions ranging from pertinent to impertinent, he stood, yawned, and extended his arms over his head. “Interested?” he asked. He was a relatively short man, tightly packed with a deep chest and hard jaw, prematurely bald—Wilcox judged Morehouse to be only a few years older than he—the beginnings of gray at his temples. Bottle-green eyes seemed always to be asking a question: Come on, come on, tell me more.

  “Yeah, I think I am,” Wilcox said.

  “You think you are?”

  Wilcox smiled. “No, I know I am. Do you guys pay salaries?”

  “Let’s go to Human Resources. They get testy when we go over their heads about pay.”

  They went down a long, carpeted hallway lined with photographs from the paper’s past, which went back to its founding in 1897. “You’re married, huh?” Morehouse commented as they reached a door with the sign HR.

  “Yes. Her name’s Georgia. We have a daughter, Roberta.”

  “They okay with you coming to work here?”

  “At first—yes, they’re fine about it.”

  “Good. They won’t see much of you once you’re here,” he said, opening the door. “HR’ll work out moving expenses, benefits, that sort of stuff. No deep, dark secrets in your past, Joe? A good-looking young guy like you’ll have the broads here in D.C. salivating, wife or no wife. HR’ll run a background check, fingerprints, the works, like you were going in the army. Or the CIA. Welcome aboard. See you in three weeks.”

  Three weeks later, Joe Wilcox arrived again in the nation’s capital as one of a number of new hires at the powerful Washington Tribune. And now, twenty-three years later and forty pounds heavier, he and his wife sat in matching green recliners in the den of their home in Rockville, a tumbler of bourbon in his hand, a finger-pour of Kahlua in her glass, shoes off, feet up, the awards evening behind them.

  “Here’s to Roberta,” Georgia said, raising her glass.

  Wilcox lifted his glass and sipped.

  “She’s off to a good start,” Georgia said. “It was sweet what she said about you tonight.”

  “It was good of her,” he said, then added, “but obviously not true.”

  Georgia started to respond, but held back. The moment had all the trappings of what had lately become a frequent scene in their marriage, her husband lamenting what he considered his failing career, his wife trying to change the subject.

  “Did you see what that silly congressman from New Jersey did yesterday on the floor of the House?”

  Wilcox nodded and sipped his drink. “Silly is kind,” he said.

  Joe wasn’t a heavy drinker; Georgia had never seen him even slightly tipsy in all the years they’d been together. But unlike some people who became morose after a few drinks, or expansive or even combative, Joe Wilcox tended to become somber and reflective, occasionally about life, especially his own. There were times, but only a few fleeting ones, when Georgia wondered whether her husband could ever become suicidal, so dark were his moods.

  “Anything new on the murder at the paper?” she asked.

  He shook his head as he went to a small bar, refilled his glass, and returned to the recliner. “Morehouse is on a rampage, wants it solved in-house by staffers, not the police. He wants the story. Edith Vargas-Swayze says he’s even stonewalling the cops.”

  “Is he?”

  “Could be. The guy gets more paranoid every day. Somebody comes up with a new rumor and he’s ballistic.”

  She tucked her stocking feet beneath her. “It’s scary to think someone at the paper might have killed her.”

  “It is, isn’t it? I get these pep talks from Morehouse that are supposed to motivate me to crack the story open, come up with some goddamn source within MPD who doesn’t exist.” His laugh was a snort, and he swirled the ice around in his glass. “Know how I know, Georgia, that the fire’s gone from my belly?” She didn’t respond. “I know it when I really don’t care who killed Jean, except to want to pull the switch on him myself. God, to see a beautiful young woman like that have her life snuffed out by some sick bastard. I care about that. But getting the story? It just doesn’t seem that important to me any more.”

  “I can understand that,” she said. “It’s a matter of priorities. But getting the story is your job and—”

  “Is it, Georgia? Maybe it was. I go to work these days because of the pension. I might as well work for some transit authority, be a toll taker or brakeman on a commuter train.” He raised the glass to his lips again, drank, and intoned, “All aboard! Take your personal items with you and watch the closing doors. Toot! Toot!”

  She laughed, although she didn’t find it amusing. “You wanted to be a journalist, Joe, and you are, with one of the country’s most important newspapers. You have every reason to be proud of what you’ve accomplished.”

  “Really?” There was an edge to his voice that wasn’t lost on her. “I’m no journalist. I’m a reporter. Proud of what, Georgia? Working the cityside beat for twenty-three years covering cops and robbers? That’s hardly what I came to Washington for.”

  She finished her drink and stood. “I’m beat,” she said. “Come on, let’s go to bed.”

  “I’ll be up in a while.”

  She kissed him on the forehead.

  After she’d left the room, he got up and went to the wall where the family photos chronicled the past thirty years. Family, this family, was important to him. It was the only family he had. His mother and father were dead, as were uncles and aunts, their offspring somewhere in the country. He hadn’t kept up with them. His only sibling, a brother, hadn’t been heard from in twenty-five years.

  Photos of Roberta on the wall at various stages of her life took center stage—graduation ceremonies from junior high, high school, and college, interspersed with candid color shots of birthday celebrations, family vacations, and other passages of a young woman’s life. He was immensely proud of his daughter; taking out his handkerchief, he realized he was tearing up, which sometimes happened when he’d had a few drinks and slipped into his introspective self.

  He shifted focus from the pictures to the few awards he’d garnered over the years. They amounted to nothing more in the aggregate than pro forma acknowledgments of having been with the Trib for twenty-three years, no more meaningful than yearly merit raises. At least the raises bought something tangible.

  He was glad Georgia had abandoned him and gone to bed. Had she stayed, he knew what he would have heard from her: “You have everything to be proud of, Joe. You’re a respected reporter. More important, you’re a good and decent man, a wonderful husband and father. I hate hearing you degrade yourself and what you’ve accomplished.”

  Fair enough. He’d feel better about himself—for a minute or two.

  But then he’d point out that while he was proud of his family and his place in it, having achieved something greater in his career would not have diminished his role as a husband and father: “Christ, Georgia, career success and family happiness aren’t mutually exclusive.”

  They’d go back and forth a while longer before both realized the issue was beyond resolution. They weren’t arguments; they were too predictable to qualify as such. The problem was—and he was quick to acknowledge to himself that this represented only his view—she didn’t understand what happens to a man whose dreams are dashed. It can do bad things to you.

  He poured what was left of his drink in the kitchen sink and went to the bathroom where his pajama bottoms hung from a hook on the back of the door. He brushed his teeth, rinsed, and took a long, hard look at his mirror image. He hadn’t aged any worse than other men. There were jowls where they hadn’t been thirty years ago, and his reddish-brown hair had thinned somewhat. His waist had thickened, as one might expect; he’d never been slend
er, built as he was on the stocky side.

  He thought of his wife asleep in their bed, and his depression eased. You’re one lucky guy, he silently told himself, and carried that thought with him to bed where he kissed her cheek before turning off the bedside lamp.

  It took a long time for sleep to come.

  THREE

  Edith Vargas-Swayze sat at the counter of the Diner, on Eighteenth Street in Washington’s Adams Morgan district and tried not to look at the man seated next to her. He was noisily enjoying French toast slathered with maple syrup and a side order of turkey hash. It was seven in the morning, too early to process that. She focused on her cornflakes with sliced banana and black coffee, her usual breakfast fare at this neighborhood institution open 24/7 every day of the year.

  She wore a multicolored blouse over a white turtleneck and black slacks, more to conceal the bulge of her standard-issue Glock pistol than to make a fashion statement. She’d been an MPD cop for fifteen years, the past four of them as a detective in the Violent Crimes Branch, which used to be known as Homicide until the MPD brain trust, aided by high-priced consultants, conquered the city’s appalling homicide rate with a stroke of the pen.

  She’d been starting her day at the Diner for the past two years since she’d left her husband, Peter Swayze, and moved from downtown where they’d lived together to Adams Morgan, the ethnically mixed, lively community north of Dupont Circle named after John Quincy Adams and early settler Thomas Morgan. Their names also became a symbol of racial harmony in 1954 following the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. The Board of Education. A white school, Adams, and a black school, Morgan, were merged into one, creating the city’s only truly integrated community.

  Divorce and relocation had been good moves. The marriage had been a mistake from the first. Not that Peter was a bad guy, nor could it be said that Edith hadn’t worked at the marriage. But if there had ever been a clash of cultures, it was between the Hispanic Edith and the decidedly WASP Peter. “Good God, Peter, you don’t even speak Spanish,” his mother had said to him after being introduced to her son’s choice of a mate. Edith laughed long and loud. She’d been born in the good ol’ USA, thank you, in El Paso, Texas, and her English was every bit as correct as Peter’s mother’s, albeit decidedly saltier. There was also the divide between how she and Peter spent their days. Each morning, he went to his white-collar job at a local bank where he did something with money, while she spent her days and nights chasing crack dealers down unlit alleys and trying to not get her shoes bloody at grisly murder scenes. Even their skin tones had created a breach. Peter was the palest human being Edith had ever known, constantly changing sides of the street to avoid the sun. Edith couldn’t get enough of it, turning her already dusky skin more like copper each summer day. Opposites certainly had attracted, and had repelled as quickly.