The Blackmail Club

by David Bishop

  “If it hadn’t been for Uncle Harry, I don’t know what would have happened,” Mary Lou said. “He moved me right into his home, took me to his church, and helped me get a scholarship through the Police Officers Association. He’s been fab—oh, that means just great. After he retires next summer, he’s going to take me on vacation with him. He’s promised to tell me a lot more stories about my mom. I keep asking him now, but he insists that we’ll have more time then to really sit and talk. I can hardly wait.” She flushed. “Uh, when I interviewed for the position Nora said it would be okay if I took that time off next summer.”

  “No problem. Which church do you go to?”

  “Daddy and I always went to Uncle Harry’s church.” Her smile disappeared and she looked down. “Now, Uncle Harry and I go to Saint Thomas Apostle over on Woodley Road.”

  Jack furrowed his brow. “How come you changed churches?”

  “That’s a long story.”

  “I didn’t mean to pry.”

  She brought her hand to her mouth. “Oh, that’s okay. I just hadn’t thought about it for a long time.” She put her hand down. “I had gone to Father Michaels, the priest at our old church, for counseling after Daddy died.” She rubbed her hands together as if they were cold. “Father Michaels … well … he fondled me.”

  “Jeez, Mary Lou, I’m sorry.” Jack could think of nothing else to say out loud. Bastard.

  “When I told Uncle Harry he got madder than I’ve ever seen him. He went high up in the church, but nothing ever happened.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “The church transferred Father Michaels to a Boston parish.”

  “Bad deal.” Son of a bitch.

  “Yeah, it was a bad deal all right.” She clenched her hands in her lap and looked away. “There’s been so much of that kind of stuff in the papers. This will sound just horrid, but it’s reassuring to know I’m not the only person that kind of thing has happened to.”

  “I didn’t mean to bring up bad memories.”

  “Heck. You didn’t know, Jack. It’s no problem.” Her gaze moved to the wall above Jack’s head.

  “So where are you and your Uncle Harry going on vacation next summer?”

  She sat forward and again became animated. “Vanuatu. It’s an island in the South Pacific. He’s vacationed there every year since his wife died. He rents a beautiful home right on the ocean. I’ve seen pictures. The weather is super. He’s going to teach me to deep-sea fish. I’m going to teach him to play golf—although I’m not all that good. It’ll be a really cool vacation.”

  “I bet it will. You bring back lots of pictures, and be sure you’re strapped down while your deep-sea fishing. We don’t want some big marlin pulling you out of the boat.”

  She grinned. “Uncle Harry says those fish are really big, but don’t worry. I’m tough.” She pushed up the sleeve on her jersey and flexed her bicep.

  After sitting quietly for a moment, she asked Jack about being a federal agent. He told her what he knew about the career opportunities in the CIA and military intelligence, and the lifestyle that came with it. Then he reached for her hand.

  “Do you really want a career in law enforcement? You aren’t just doing it out of respect for your dad or loyalty to your Uncle Harry?”

  “Oh, no.” She made a dismissive gesture. “I’ve wanted it since before Daddy died. It’s a career that can make a difference.” She stiffened her shoulders. “Someone has to protect and serve.” She sighed. “That sounded corny, didn’t it?”

  “A little, maybe,” Jack answered, “but it’s true. There are a lot of good people … and some bad ones. You must learn to discern between the two. There will be times when people’s lives, even your own, may depend on your ability to do just that.”

  She stood up. “Along with Uncle Harry, will you help me learn how to tell the difference?”

  “Sure.” Jack nodded. “You know, with what you’ve gone through you’re an amazing young lady.”

  She blushed. “I’d better get back or Nora will kill me.” She kissed his forehead again and left.

  Is this an age thing? Do women start kissing foreheads when a man gets to a certain age?

  Jack smiled wistfully. All of us hope to make a real difference in someone’s life. Chief Mandrake had been there when Mary Lou needed him. It looked like the relationship had been good for both of them.

  Chapter 19

  The blackmailer casually walked along the side street that fronted Nora’s small rental house. When no one was in sight he ducked through the trees and swapped the CD from the recorder for a new one. He checked to be sure the coast was clear and walked back to the old car he had left parked around the corner.

  The wind was blustery and, being across from a park, strangers in the neighborhood were commonplace. And most people were so self-absorbed that they rarely focused on much outside themselves and their own activities.

  Twenty-five minutes later he pulled into a rental storage garage and turned off the pinging engine. From there he walked two blocks and got into the car he owned in his own name. When there were no cars or pedestrians coming, he placed his hat on the seat beside him and pulled off the mustache he had attached with spirit gum.

  After driving home, he pulled into his garage and touched the remote closer. After opening the driver’s door to turn on the car’s dome light, he plugged a CD player into his cigarette lighter and leaned back to listen to Nora Burke’s private conversations. At first, all he heard was her singing along with some music. She had a pleasant voice. Then she got a call from Jack McCall. He listened to them reason out that Chris had been blackmailed and likely had been murdered, although they conceded he might have killed himself as a result of being blackmailed.

  McCall also told her it had been Donny Andujar who had beaten him and threatened him to stay off the Andujar case. The blackmailer slammed the flat of his hand hard against the steering wheel, “You stupid punk.” No one could hear him inside his car, inside his garage. “McCall is the only thing standing in my way.”

  He went inside his house and fed the CD into his shredder, poured a glass of wine, and sat down to plan his next move.

  Jack’s internal stiffness meter registered high as he inched his hindquarter down to the front seat of Nora’s Mustang, a small price for leaving the hospital.

  At the corner he got a full view of a building under construction he had only seen a part of from his hospital window. Its steel girders rising like a skeleton against the gray six-o’clock sky.

  From the side-view mirror he watched a White Chevy Lumina pull from the curb to move in two cars behind Nora’s Mustang. The Lumina dutifully followed when she turned onto M Street toward Georgetown.

  “Let’s go for a drive,” he said. “Get some air.”

  “The doctor’s order was, ‘bed for thirty-six hours.’”

  “I need to move around some,” he said with a dash of petulance. “My God, they even made me ride out in a damn wheelchair.”

  “And just where do you want to go?”

  “Turn right here. Quick. Quick! You’ll miss it.”

  Nora jerked her wheel hard and held it firmly while her tires fought to hold to the lane nearest the curb. “Okay,” she said, “I’m on Twenty-ninth Street. Miss what?”

  “I thought we might mosey over to Chris’s office,” Jack said, keeping his eye on the mirror. “We can take this up to P Street, then right a few blocks, go around Dupont Circle and we’ll be on Massachusetts near his building. You’ve still got the key Sarah gave us, don’t you?”

  “Mosey?” she repeated with a smirk. “Does that go with the yep you say sometimes?”

  “Yep. It do. I picked up mosey from Max. I watch film noir. He watches westerns. We share slang from the genres. Here, I’ll use them both in the same sentence. Yep, let’s mosey over to Chris’s office. Did you know the circles were put in DC’s main arterial streets to slow opposing armies?”

  “Yep, I surely do know about the circles. And yep, I
’ve still got the key. But nope, we’re not stopping anywhere. We’re a headin’ fer your spread, podner.”

  “Come on. The building has an elevator. Go along with me here. Then you can drop me at home and I’ll do whatever you say. We have to go to Chris’s office. The lease will be up tomorrow, and we need to see his office before they clear it out.”

  Like all great salespeople, he had first created interest, followed by a sense of urgency.

  Nora frowned. “Then you’ll do whatever I tell you tonight and tomorrow?”

  “Whatever you say, little lady.”

  They laughed as she reined in her Mustang and rounded Dupont Circle. Two minutes later, Nora pulled into the lot of a seven-story brick building. Jack watched the Lumina drive on by.

  Nora turned off the engine and reached into her purse. When she brought her hand out it held Jack’s Beretta. “I took it from under your dashboard this morning,” she said, “before Max drove your car to your house. Don’t you think you oughta be packing in case the two thugs in the Lumina follow us inside?” She grinned. “You didn’t think I saw them?”

  He shook his head. “You’re smarter than the town’s new school marm.”

  She gently squeezed his thigh. “I’m gonna havta palaver with Max about this here westernizing of your lingo.”

  Nora held open the building door. Jack labored to keep up with her chattering heels as they crossed the marble floor. Coming out of the elevator she slipped her arm under his and tried to help support his weight.

  Chris’s office felt cool and smelled musty. It didn’t appear anyone had been in it for some time. “Looks like the janitors never came back,” he said.

  “I spoke to Sarah yesterday,” Nora said while flipping on the overhead lights. “The building manager is meeting the Goodwill truck at nine in the morning. She told them they could have it all.”

  Like doctors’ offices across America, a little double-paneled sliding glass window loomed like a sentry between the empty waiting room and the inner office. Four three-drawer lateral file cabinets obediently stood in the area normally accessible to only the doctor and his medical staff.

  The first three cabinets were empty. In the last one Jack found a single file folder laying flat on the bottom of the lowest drawer. On its flap were the handwritten initials: “TS.” The initials had been written hard and deep, and underlined three times, but the folder was empty. TS could’ve stood for Tino Sanchez, Mary Lou’s dead father. Could he have been one of Chris’s patients? Then again, the initials could refer to anyone with those initials, including Tom Sawyer, or even inanimate subjects like Time Slips.

  Jack picked up a paper clip from the top of the cabinet and shook it inside a loose fist, before throwing it against the window. He put his hand against his ribs and stood still until the pain let go of him. “Damn. I wish we had gotten this case before these files went to Dr. Radnor.”

  Chris’s private office looked to be about fifteen feet by twenty feet. His desk sat at the far end away from the door. The area nearer the door where he met with patients had two occasional chairs, a coffee table, and a couch. The shutters in the patient area were angled to show the Canterbury Hotel across the street while a patient stood, but to avoid it being a distraction after a patient had sat or lain down.

  The office had the aura of having died with Chris, the furniture holding their posts in sleepless vigil. A small closet held a man’s wool coat. On the shelf, a wool hat, stuffed with a muffler, sat on its crown. Nora lifted an umbrella that leaned into the corner.

  “There’s nothing inside the umbrella,” she said, “the coat, the muffler or the hat band.”

  Stale-smelling cigarette butts crowded the ashtray on Chris’s desk, a few bent and stubbed out after only a puff or two. A swelled butt, once soggy from floating in stagnant coffee, was stuck to the bottom of a foam cup, stained brown.

  “The anti smoking ads should have this picture,” Nora said.

  Jack sat at Chris’s desk and went through the drawers while Nora did the same to what had been Ms. Fuller’s receptionist desk. Except for two Bic lighters and a nearly full carton of unfiltered Camel cigarettes, the contents were not much different from what Jack would find going through his own desk. He pulled out the center pencil drawer and put it on top of the desk. Then he stacked the other drawers in alternating directions on top of the belly drawer. Nothing had been taped on the outsides of the drawers. He also wanted to look into the drawer holes, but he couldn’t bend low enough to see into the lowest slots.

  When Nora came back into Chris’s office, Jack asked, “Will you come over here and check inside while I’ve got the drawers out?”

  “Sure.” She came over, looked inside, and shook her head. “That was hard for you, wasn’t it? Asking for help, I mean.”

  He mumbled something on the way over to the couch where he sat with his back to the end with one leg stretched out across the cushions. She looked over and smiled.

  “Did I ever thank you for dropping me off when I got the new brakes put on my car?”

  “Yes. Yes, you did.” His face flushed a bit. “Thank you for helping with the desk.”

  “Glad to do it, podner.” She slid the drawers back in before holding up a photo of Sarah and Donny when Donny was a teen. In her other hand was a picture of Chris with Tyson, Engels, Mandrake, and Molloy.

  “Goodwill will toss these and just keep the frames.”

  “What are you suggesting?” he asked.

  “We can take them to Sarah.” She pried up the little metal stays and removed the pictures from the frames. “There’s nothing behind the pictures. You ready to split?”

  Jack saw no tail car when they pulled out of the lot. “Let’s take the pictures out to Sarah now. It’ll only take an hour to drive there and back. Hand me your cell phone. I’ll let her know we’re coming.”

  Nora shook her head. “No way, José, our bargain was we go to Chris’s office and then I’m the boss through tomorrow. You can call Sarah in the morning from home to tell her we’ll give her these pictures the next time we see her. That’s it, ponder. Live with it.”

  Jack frowned. “Yes Warden.”

  They laughed. He wouldn’t admit it but he was quite sore by the time Nora pulled up in front of his house.

  “Give me your car key,” she said. “I’ll pull your Concorde into the garage.”

  “Don’t bother. Thanks for driving me home.”

  Nora insisted on walking Jack into the house and up to his room. Then she went down to the kitchen and brought up a pitcher of water and a glass.

  “You sure you don’t want me to pull your car into your garage?” she asked, while handing him the remote for the television that sat on top his dresser. “It’s no problem.”

  “I can do it tomorrow. It’ll give me a chance to move around a little.”

  Chapter 20

  Jack watched the early sun give chase to the retreating night before heading downstairs to the kitchen. He stopped at the mirror on the wall at the landing halfway down. The face he saw more resembled a swath of Black Watch plaid, than the face he had worn before meeting Dumbo in the alley. The look wasn’t pretty, and he knew that as the beating further ripened it would get even less pretty.

  The coffee pot was finishing its cycle of hisses and gurgles so Jack wandered outside to get the morning paper. Halfway down the driveway, he saw Roy Parker, the ten-year-old boy who lived next door with his divorced mother, Janet. The boy came over to him.

  “What happened to you, Mr. McCall?”

  “A few bad men beat me up, Roy.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Yes. Do you remember when you broke your finger last year?” The boy nodded. “Well, I’m just trying to be strong like you were then.”

  “There must have been a bunch of ‘em to take you on.”

  Jack smiled and mussed Roy's hair. When Jack turned, he saw Roy's mother, Janet, on her porch. They waved. Inside, he poured another cup of coffee and went u
pstairs to the small desk in his bedroom and called Sarah.

  “Andujar residence, Sarah Andujar speaking.”

  “Sarah. Jack. We stopped by Chris’s office last night.”

  “Do we need to meet?”

  “No. I just called to let you know we brought back a couple of things we figured you’d want to keep.”

  “What?”

  “Personal photogra—”

  “Throw them out! I don’t want the damn things. None of them!” After a pause, she said, “I’m so sorry, Jack. I still react unpredictably sometimes when I’m unexpectedly reminded of Christopher. I apologize. It’s just, well, I have plenty of family photos, and the study is already filled with pictures of Chris and his pals. You’ll think me silly, but I’d rather not change the house at all from how it was with him … not yet … anyway.”

  Jack stood, taking care not to audibly moan, and switched the phone to his other hand so he could open the French door to the outside deck off the master bedroom. “It’s I who should apologize. I brought it up out of nowhere.”

  “Oh my, I forgot to ask, are you home from the hospital?”

  “They let me out late yesterday.” The outside air coming in through the screen felt cool on his battered face.

  “I’m so glad you’re doing better.”

  “I’ll go back to the office tomorrow.”

  “You men try too hard to be macho. Nora’s a levelheaded young woman. You should listen to her.”

  Sarah’s advice had been good, but Jack knew he would disregard it. The tendrils of the investigation were wrapping around his mind and the parts weren’t fitting together the way he had hoped. He had to get back to work.

  Chapter 21