Corruption of Power

by Brenda English

  I opened the door and turned left down the hall, hearing the low tones of Bill and Lansing talking through Lansing’s open door, but unable to make out their words. As they heard my approaching footsteps on the tiled floor, their conversation halted.

  At the doorway I stopped just for a moment to try to tune my instincts’ antenna to whatever vibes were floating on the air inside the small office. I had found over the years that I often seemed to be able to pick up on people’s emotions even when I had no idea what they meant. More than once this ability had told me when someone was lying or avoiding the truth. More than once it had warned me to keep digging even though appearances said there was nothing there.

  Right now, as I looked at Lansing sitting at his desk and Bill leaning against the windowsill, my antenna was picking up a lot of frustration. I just hoped it was with the investigation and not with me.

  “Come in, Ms. McPhee,” Lansing said, looking at me steadily. Obviously, my earlier hint about my name had fallen on deaf or disinterested ears.

  “Hi, Sutton,” Bill said, smiling at least.

  I walked on into the office and took the blue chair again, but moved it into the corner closest to the door and turned it at an angle to face both men. I sat down, looked up brightly, and said, “So, gentlemen, the plot thickens.”

  Their look at each other told me they thought it had, too, but they were wondering how I knew it.

  “In what way?” Lansing asked coolly.

  I smiled at him, having decided he needed an object lesson. It was Lesson Number 1: Never Underestimate Sutton McPhee.

  “For starters, I understand you not only have heard from the medical examiner but that the autopsy shows Janet Taylor really died from a blow on the head and that the scarf around her neck either was a smoke screen or possibly a bungled attempt to strangle her when the skull fracture didn’t kill her immediately.”

  Bill looked down at his feet. He had known from my earlier question outside that I had something. He just hadn’t realized I had so much.

  Noah Lansing looked at me in cold fury.

  “Exactly where did you get that information?” he asked, pronouncing each word distinctly.

  “Now, now, Detective Lansing,” I chided, “you know a good reporter never reveals her sources, especially not the really accurate sources—which this one is, I would guess, judging from your reaction. It’s like I told you yesterday. Sometimes reporters know things, too.”

  “There’s no official medical examiner’s report yet,” Lansing said. “You can’t use—”

  “Noah,” Bill said softly, “it won’t work with her.” He stepped in front of the desk and closed the door to the office, then turned to face us and leaned against the door frame. “She obviously has another source.”

  “I can use anything I can get, Detective,” I told Lansing, “but if you’ll confirm what I’ve been told, I won’t attribute the information in my story to police sources.” I was hoping the implied threat of pointing the source finger at Lansing and the corresponding offer of a compromise would both motivate and placate him.

  Lansing looked at Bill, who nodded.

  “All right,” he agreed. “What have you been told?”

  “That, although she appeared to have been strangled, Janet Taylor actually died from a skull fracture. That she didn’t die right away. That she might have lain there alive but unconscious for an hour or more before she died. That that little tidbit adds a whole new dimension to who might have had the opportunity to kill her.”

  “I can confirm the cause of death. It was the skull fracture,” Lansing answered, the words apparently leaving a sour taste. “No, she did not die immediately. As to opportunity, I have no comment. You can draw your own conclusions there, Ms. McPhee, but I’d be careful which of them I printed if I were you.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m intimately familiar with the libel laws.”

  “No doubt,” Lansing answered.

  I wasn’t going to let him get the best of me. I laughed.

  “Okay, point number two,” I went on, wanting to keep him off balance, “I also understand that there were no signs of a struggle, other than her overturned wheelchair, and no defensive wounds or anything like skin or blood under her fingernails.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning either that she was taken totally by surprise, which would be kind of hard considering she was hit on the side of the head, probably from the front, or that she knew the person who killed her and had no reason to think she was in danger.”

  “Possibly.” Lansing wasn’t going to admit anything he didn’t absolutely have to, at least not to me.

  “Well?” I prodded.

  “Well what, Sutton?” Bill interjected, trying to defuse the tension he could see was building again.

  “Well, Bill, doesn’t that raise some interesting questions about who could have gotten that close to her without making her suspicious? Certainly not some random killer she didn’t know.”

  “Sutton, that’s speculation on your part,” Bill answered. “How can we confirm that?”

  “Okay,” I conceded. “Then how about this? She didn’t die right away. She probably died between two and three o’clock, but she could have been attacked as early as twelve-thirty, at least according to the medical examiner. Where was Hubbard Taylor at twelve-thirty? Or one-thirty? I’m sure you must have asked him that? What did he say?”

  “This is an ongoing police investigation,” Lansing said. “What we asked the subject of an interrogation and what that subject said are not part of the public record.”

  “Very good, Detective,” I said, unable to keep sarcasm completely out of my voice. “Check for your side. But not checkmate. Fortunately for me, you aren’t the only source of information I have. Now, if that’s all you can tell me about Janet Taylor, let’s move onto another case you’re handling.”

  “And what case is that?”

  “Ann Kane.”

  “What about it?”

  “Are you making any progress? Do you have any suspects there, yet?”

  “As I believe Bill told you yesterday, at least according to your story in this morning’s paper, we have no leads and no suspects. Any further questions?”

  At least he was reading my stories. I considered that progress of some kind. Still, I thought, it was time to play my ace, to mix a few game metaphors.

  “What if I told you, Detective Lansing, that Ann Kane wasn’t the first woman who worked on Capitol Hill to find herself the victim of an overdose of Demerol, that she was just the first one who died from it?”

  Bill Russell was looking at me with surprise and something approaching admiration. Noah Lansing, however, was glaring.

  “What are you talking about?” he demanded. “We’ve turned up no information to that effect.”

  “Guess you’d better do your homework a little better from now on,” I told him. “There’s a good chance Ann Kane didn’t do herself in, either on purpose or by mistake. She probably didn’t even know she was taking the Demerol until it was too late to do her any good. And she wasn’t the only one. Makes you wonder whether she really had sex with two guys or whether she was gang-raped.”

  Lansing slammed his fist down on the top of his desk, making Bill and me both jump and scaring the smile off my face.

  “Damn it, McPhee,” he yelled, dropping the more formal Ms., “if I find out you have information on the Ann Kane case and you’re withholding it, I swear I’ll charge you with impeding a police investigation.”

  “Noah,” Bill cautioned, surprised at Lansing’s threat.

  “Don’t worry, Detective,” I went on, “what I have right now is hearsay. If I turn up concrete evidence, why of course, as a concerned citizen, I would report it to the police.

  But I do seem to be ahead of you guys. It’s really too bad we all have to stand on correct procedures, so we can’t tell each other what we know.”

  “I’m warning you,” Lansing answered, ign
oring Bill, “don’t let me find out you’re withholding evidence. If you have any knowledge of how Ann Kane died, you’d better report it!”

  I stood up and moved toward the door.

  “Guys,” I said, my smile firmly back in place, “it’s been real. Sorry I have to run, but I have stories to write and deadlines to meet. You’ll understand if I can’t stay.”

  Bill stepped aside, openly shaking his head this time, and I opened the door.

  “Thanks again for all your help,” I said, looking back at Lansing, his arresting blue eyes full of anger—directed, unfortunately, at me. Then another thought prompted me to say one last thing.

  “Oh, and if you’re thinking about screwing me and my exclusive over by giving the autopsy results to anyone else from the press the minute I leave here, you should think about it some more. I suspect Chief Fielding would hate to have to explain to Supervisor Taylor why the police were volunteering such information. At least if I’m the only one with the story, I can make it clear I didn’t get it from you.”

  “Get the hell out of my office,” Lansing replied, apparently never having read Emily Post.

  * * * *

  Damn Noah Lansing to hell, I thought as I drove away from the police station to go back to the paper in D.C.

  Once I sat down in my car, I had realized how tense my whole body was, from the effort of trying to make him think I was way ahead of him and that I didn’t care what he thought of me. Only when I had taken some slow, deep yoga breaths and felt the muscles relax could I calm my mind enough to admit that I did care—much more than I should, considering how things had gone between us and considering what I did for a living.

  I had started the Beetle, backed out of the parking space, pulled out of the parking lot onto Crimmons Avenue, and drove west, pondering the effect this man had on me and what I was going to do about it.

  It wasn’t that I had sworn off relationships after Jack. There had been a handful, but none that I ever had expected, or even hoped, would go past the lovers stage. The closest had been Chris Wiley, who had been scared off by my emotional neediness after my sister was murdered. With the others, it often had come back to a choice between my job and the guy. The couple of guys I had known who were mature enough to want commitment and to think about things like marriage and children also wanted a commitment from me that my reporting career wasn’t going to take away time from what they expected family life to be. I was honest enough—with them and with myself—about the demands of my job to know better than to promise any such thing. Reporting and, for that matter, most jobs on the news side of a paper, are never an eight-hour, punch-the-clock kind of work. Covering cops is even less so. Crimes and accidents don’t show me the courtesy of happening only between 9:00 A.M. and 5:00 P.M. Frequently, the very best stories on the police beat happen at the most inconvenient times. I work hard to convince the police I cover to keep me informed, but a midnight call from the cops to invite me to a drug bust does little to improve the mood of the man I leave behind in bed.

  And there was another problem here that went beyond the demands on my time. Noah Lansing was not only a good-looking, intelligent guy who stirred my blood, but he was also one of the cops I covered. After one unpleasant dating experience with an assistant high-school principal while I covered education at my first newspaper job in Georgia, I had made it a strict rule not to date the people I wrote about. It just made things way too complicated when I had to do a less-than-positive story about something involving them.

  In Albany, Georgia, I had investigated a story about football coaches who were pocketing some of the money they raised selling advertising space in the game programs. The assistant principal, my lover, was one of the people I had to question about what the higher-ups knew. He had a fit. I refused to give my story to another reporter to cover. I refused to tell him what I knew and what I was writing. Naively, I expected him to understand that this was my job, that it was nothing personal. Of course, he had taken it all very personally, had forced a very ugly scene between us, and then had precipitated another at the paper when he went in to complain to my editor. The upshot was that he had ended up hating me, my editor had given me a chewing-out on conflicts of interest, and I had decided it was time to start looking for my next job. But it definitely had been a “learning experience” for me, and the painful lessons had become a permanent part of my psyche.

  Until now, anyway. But here I was, actually wondering what it would be like to spend time with Lansing under some other set of circumstances, to be someone he liked, to see him smile. Damn it, I had yet to see the man smile!

  You idiot, this man doesn’t even smile around you, and you’re wondering if he’ll go out with you?

  Guess who.

  Come on, Sutton, get a clue! He wants nothing to do with you under any circumstances whatsoever—not social, not work, not anything. The only thing about you that might make him smile is if he heard he never had to see you again.

  But slapping myself around made no difference. Noah Lansing attracted me—a lot. Whether it was the way he looked, or the pain I saw in his eyes, or something else, or everything else, I continued to think about him, to wonder about him. And there was that feeling that there was something between us already, something from some other time. Where was that coming from?

  Are you really this desperate? It was my little friend again. You’ve only known the guy twenty-four hours and here you are acting like those silly women you despise who can’t live without a man. Worse than that, you know what a mess it would make of your job, and yet you still would even entertain the possibility? What a dolt!

  I couldn’t even muster up the ire to argue. My voice was right. Getting involved with Noah Lansing would make a mess of my personal life and add to the problems he already was causing with my job. I decided I was going to have to find some solution to the Noah Lansing problem and find it fast. But throughout the entire drive into D.C. from Great Falls, I couldn’t come up with one. I didn’t like this at all.

  Eleven

  I parked in the garage a block away from the office, where the News leases parking for its staff, and walked across to the eight-story glass-and-metal building that had become the paper’s new headquarters ten years ago. As I went through the revolving glass door and said hi to George, the daytime security guard, I pushed my frustrations aside. I was on my way up to the city room on the third floor to check in with Rob and Ken and to get my copy written for Friday’s paper. I couldn’t do that with my mind in turmoil.

  When the elevator opened to deposit me across from the glass-topped wall of the city newsroom, I could see through the bank of windows that Ken was there and already had Rob’s ear. I went into the newsroom, where most of the reporters now were at their desks, writing stories for the approaching deadlines, and as I walked over to Rob and Ken, I thought about all the thousands of times I had walked into a newsroom over the years and how, each time, I knew all over again that this was where I belonged.

  The warehouselike openness, broken up in places by chest-high movable dividers, the clicking of fingers on computer keys, the phones ringing, the constant movement and conversation, the sense of urgency imposed by daily deadlines, the sense of doing something that mattered, that changed lives or even history, still spoke to me. I knew far better than our readers how imperfect newspapers—and their reporters—could be, but that never tarnished the job for me.

  “Hi, Sutton,” Ken said. “I have gossip.”

  “Which he was just about to tell me,” Rob added. “Let’s go into my office and talk about this.” Rob led the way into his office. Like the newsroom’s hallway wail, it was all windows from the waist up. Editors like to see what’s going on, even when they’re forced out of the newsroom and into their roles as administrators. While Rob used his office for private meetings and phone calls, and occasionally to get necessary paperwork done, he preferred spending his time out at the city desk, where he also kept a computer and a seat and where he cou
ld more easily be involved in the minute-by-minute of putting out the paper, as well as monitoring the output and interactions of his assistant metro editors and reporters.

  “Good work on the autopsy,” Rob said to me as he dropped into his well-worn “executive” chair. Ken and I took the two black vinyl chairs in front of the desk. “Ken’s been filling me in on what you found out.”

  “Thanks,” I said, pleased, knowing Rob handed out praise only when he really meant it. And for all our sarcastic back-and-forth, his opinion meant a lot to me. “The best part is, I think—knock on wood—we may be the only ones who have it.”

  “Even better,” Rob said. “Sy Berkowitz was in here earlier, making his own pitch for putting him on the story. This ought to be enough to get him and Lester off my back once and for all.” He turned back to Ken. “Okay, go ahead with what you were telling me.”

  “Wait’ll you hear this, Sutton,” Ken said, including me in the story he had begun telling Rob. “I talked to one of the secretaries for—well, let’s just say for another supervisor who has very little use for Hub Taylor—and she told me some interesting things. It seems that while their bosses don’t get along, she’s good friends with Taylor’s secretary, who says Taylor’s been acting very strange the last month or so.”

  “Strange how?” I asked.

  “She says he’s gotten paranoid. She also says he’s even been arguing with his wife on the phone, and in all the time she’s worked for him, including at his car business, she’s never heard him raise his voice to his wife until now. Says he’s real touchy about things, and his mind seems to be somewhere else half the time. And she says he disappears sometimes for several hours and she has no idea where he is. At least that’s what she told the secretary I got it from.”

  “What about yesterday?” Rob asked. He understood the possible implications of the autopsy results as well as Ken and I had.

  “Interesting that you should ask,” Ken said, smiling like the proverbial canary-eating cat. “The morning part of the meeting adjourned at eleven because a couple of the supervisors had to go to a lunch meeting downtown. Taylor was in his office when his wife called about eleven-fifteen. His secretary said his wife was really upset on the phone, very angry. She said she’d never heard Mrs. Taylor sound like that. The secretary put the call through to Taylor, and she could hear him trying to calm his wife down. He finally hung up and went out the door in a hurry, saying he was going home for lunch. And he didn’t get back into the office until about fifteen minutes before the afternoon meeting started. The secretary doesn’t know whether he might have been someplace else in the building, but she didn’t see him until one forty-five.”