Corruption of Justice

by Brenda English

  “And the guys Coleman was getting kickbacks from?” That was Rob again.

  “The feds aren’t being very cooperative in saying who they are, according to Peterson, who doesn’t sound real happy to have federal investigators poking around in his homicide case. Apparently, the Justice Department is still hoping to bring indictments against whoever the guys are, even with Coleman dead.” I turned to Sy. “If you could give Peterson some help with names, he’d owe us big on this.”

  “You see any problem with that?” Rob asked Mark, rather than asking Sy, who would have to cooperate if Mark ordered him to.

  “If he’ll agree to keep the source out of the investigation file so Sy doesn’t have the feds coming after him, no there’s no problem,” Mark said. He looked at Sy. “Go ahead and help him out.”

  I jotted Peterson’s name and pager number down on the top page in the notebook in my lap and tore it out, passing it over to Sy.

  “How much checking had you done into Coleman’s background before he came to Washington?” I asked Sy as he folded up the sheet of paper and put it in his shirt pocket.

  “Not much yet,” he told me. “Just cursory stuff. Everything the feds are looking at involves his job with The Phoenix Group here, and that has kept me hopping since I got onto it. I’d figured there’d be time to do the Tallahassee bit in detail once they indicted Coleman.”

  “One of us needs to go down there,” I said, turning to Rob.

  “She’s right,” Mark said, shaking his head in agreement. “It was a long time ago, but it’s hard to believe a guy like Coleman was squeaky clean until he got to Washington.”

  “Still,” Sy said, sounding defensive now, “if there had been anything big enough to have gone public in Tallahassee, he probably would never have gotten the Phoenix Group job. That’s a pretty sanctimonious board of directors.”

  Rob looked thoughtful for a minute.

  “I think Sutton ought to go,” he said, looking at Mark. “She’s lived there, she knows the city, she’s got some contacts. If Sy’s going to be in touch with Peterson anyway, he can handle the police end of things until Sutton gets back.”

  “Makes sense to me,” Mark said.

  Rob turned to me.

  “Any idea how long it might take?”

  “There’s no way to know. It could be two days. It could take a week or more. I have no idea what I might find, if anything.”

  “All right,” he said, “stay as long as it takes to either find something on Coleman or decide that there’s nothing down there to find. When can you go?”

  “How’s today?”

  “What about the car bombing? Don’t the Alexandria cops want you around while they look into that?”

  “They know I didn’t do it,” I told him, “and they probably would be just as happy to have me somewhere a long way away. Then I’m either out of reach of whoever tried to kill me, or if he gets me in Tallahassee, it’ll be in somebody else’s jurisdiction.” Although I hadn’t told Detective Moore yet that I might have to leave town, I fully expected that, given my refusal of a police guard, his reaction to the news probably would be exactly what I had just said.

  “Okay, make the arrangements,” Rob said. “Now, what about your other stories? Like the cop who was murdered?”

  “I can stay on top of them over the phone, and I’ll call Penny if I need any leg work on anything,” I assured him. “I’ll take another run at the Internal Affairs office to ask about Magruder before I leave town, but I’m not holding my breath waiting for them to tell me anything. And Noah Lansing, the detective in charge of that case, is still checking out the alibi of one of the former cops Magruder turned in. I’ll make sure I call Lansing again before I leave. The big thing on that one is the funeral tomorrow. Do you think Penny could catch it for me? It should be pretty pro forma, and I’ll call in anything I get on the investigation to be added to the story.”

  “I assume you’ll be talking to her about your car bombing story before you leave today,” Rob said. “Tell her I said to put the funeral on her list for tomorrow, and give her the names of anybody she needs to make sure to talk to.”

  “So have we covered all the bases?” Mark wanted to know. “Sutton, you’ll keep Sy and Rob updated on the Florida angle by phone, and one or both of them will keep me in the loop?”

  We all nodded or spoke up in agreement, looking around at each other. As we got up and filed out of Rob’s office, Sy gave me a smile that stopped at his mouth. It was obvious that working with me still left a bitter taste, but the idea of my leaving town probably cheered him up somewhat. Especially if he thought I was being sent on a wild-goose chase while he stayed where the real story was. I, on the other hand, wasn’t so sure that was the case at all. Like Mark Lester, I didn’t think Coleman had turned venal only after reaching Washington. I suspected that his shenanigans at The Phoenix Group probably had been perfected only after considerable practice, practice that might well have begun in Tallahassee. And at the very least, if there was nothing to find down there, then we could rule it out and turn our energies in more productive directions.

  Twelve

  Tallahassee is one of my favorite places: the prosperous, eclectic state capital, an amalgam of the cultural influence that comes with two universities, of the intrigue and activism that are intrinsic in a political atmosphere, and of the history of its very Southern roots. Which didn’t mean that coming back was a completely positive experience. Tallahassee also had been the site of my disastrously brief attempt at marriage to Jack Brooks.

  As the jet had dropped down toward the runway, I had felt my heartbeat speed up from more than just the adrenaline surge that a plane landing always induces. Jack, a city planner when I was married to him, was now, according to reports from friends still in the area, a private consultant. But he had remained in Tallahassee, and it was almost as if I could feel his presence even though I knew he probably was at work in his downtown office, several miles away.

  Gonna stop in and surprise him with a visit?

  What the hell do you care? I thought back. You never had anything good to say about him, anyway.

  A little defensive about the ex-husband, are we?

  I didn’t reply. What was the point? I was still defensive about the way our marriage turned out. I still hadn’t decided whether it was his fault or mine, whether the things he said about my lack of a heart were true, or whether I really was incapable of a real relationship with a man, or at least one that lasted. Since no one was meeting me, I had waited for the other passengers to clear the aisles before retrieving my one bag out of the overhead bin. I got it down now, hoping to shut out the voice in my head, and made my way out of the plane.

  * * * *

  In my second rental car of the day, this one a Ford Taurus for which I had picked up the keys at the rental desk inside the Tallahassee Regional Airport, I took a sharp right from Lake Bradford Road onto Gaines Street and followed Gaines east into downtown. The sedan’s air-conditioning, a luxury I was unused to in my poor Beetle, was working at a dull roar in the northern Florida heat and humidity. The car’s tires swished through the remains of a late-afternoon thunderstorm, probably the same one that had necessitated the pilot’s change of direction as we had approached the airport.

  All around me were the landmarks I remembered from a different chapter of my life, some four calendar years but a million emotional years ago. At Duval Street, I turned left, noting the Collins Building across the intersection to my right, a sign that I was entering the area dominated by the governmental offices of Florida’s capital city.

  I negotiated the one-way traffic heading north on Duval Street, now bumper-to-bumper in the late-afternoon exodus of the federal, state, city, and county employees whose offices clustered in a square mile of downtown real estate. Stopping and starting, I passed the Florida Supreme Court building on my left, directly opposite the rear entrance to the newer of the two state capitols, and I couldn’t help smiling. As that new
capitol had neared completion in the mid-’70s, the hoopla over its design by a noted architect and over its long-awaited construction had given way to gales of derisive laughter. Residents and visitors alike quickly discovered that, with its slim center tower and its two domed wings for the state senators and representatives, the new capitol had looked, from the westbound lanes of the Apalachee Parkway, like nothing so much as a giant phallus and testicles, reaching into the sky in priapic self-parody. It was a story I had heard repeatedly in my stint in Tallahassee almost two decades later, and the sight of the building never ceased to bring a grin to my face at the accuracy of the lewd nicknames that had appended themselves to the structure.

  When I finally reached the northern edge of the downtown governmental and historic district, I turned left onto the westbound lanes of Park Avenue. In reality, Park Avenue actually is a pair of one-way streets that run for seven blocks through one of the city’s loveliest and oldest tree-lined districts, from the Old City Cemetery on the west to Meridian Street on the east. At the west end of the block along which I drove was the Leon Collins/Leon County Public Library, to which I had decided to head first. I could have gone to the Tallahassee Democrat on Magnolia Drive and used their newspaper library. After all, I had worked there for five years, and several of my then-colleagues still did. But if the Democrat was following the Coleman murder and any local angles, I didn’t want to let anyone there know that they had competition. And if the news staff somehow had not picked up on the story yet, I certainly didn’t want to be the one to point it out to them.

  I parked the car and stepped out into the August oven, in which the streets and parking lot now literally steamed with the additional humidity added by the thunderstorm. Too brief to cool things down by any noticeable amount, the rain had lasted just long enough to pour more moisture into the already palpable air. Still, it was a familiar climate, one in which I had spent the first three decades of my life, in southern Georgia and northern Florida, and it brought back a flood of memories, both welcome and painful. Not the least of which, of course, involved Jack.

  Don’t start thinking about all that again, I chastised myself. You’ve got more important things to do at the moment. And that certainly was true. As I went through the glass front doors and into the cool, fluorescent interior of the library, I reflected that Jack was ancient history, no matter how painful it might still be. I could think about him after I had learned what there was to learn about Robert Coleman.

  * * * *

  What there was to learn, at least about Coleman’s years in Tallahassee and at least from the newspaper, apparently wasn’t much. I found only a handful of articles in which his name appeared, all but one of them local business-page stories about Three Rivers Development.

  Three Rivers, according to the stories I read, was a real estate development company that had thrived during the early and mid-’70s, and that had been owned by a former real estate agent named Arthur Williams. The company had been very much the golden-haired child of the Tallahassee/Leon County business community as Three Rivers bought up and developed real estate throughout the area, also taking in large amounts of investor money in the process. Robert Coleman had been the vice-president and Williams’s top deputy in Three Rivers until 1977, when Coleman left to join The Phoenix Group.

  To all appearances, the never-married Williams had lived the life of a successful developer, residing in baronial splendor in a near-mansion on the grounds of a golf course in one of his developments, where he regularly entertained the city and state’s movers and shakers. Then, in 1978, Williams’s housekeeper had arrived one morning to find that, at some point during the previous evening, he had gone into his study, put a loaded revolver into his mouth, and killed himself. Within days, Three Rivers had collapsed as investors learned it had been a veritable financial house of cards, almost a pyramid scheme in its last two years, in which Williams had gotten in over his head and had been using the money of new investors to keep up the facade that things were going well.

  Although Robert Coleman had been out of the Three Rivers picture for a year at that point, the final mention I found of him was in an article about Williams’s suicide and the shock waves that the company’s collapse had sent throughout the area’s business and social communities. The article quoted a Tallahassee-based spokesperson for Coleman as saying that Coleman had severed all financial ties with the company when he left the area, that he had admired Williams greatly, had considered him a mentor, and was saddened by Williams’s death. And that Coleman had no knowledge of any financial irregularities in the operation of Three Rivers up until the time of his departure.

  Eventually, I managed to locate several follow-up pieces to the Three Rivers debacle. They described in detail the ways in which Williams had played fast and loose with investors’ money until a couple of his developments failed and brought everything else down with them. But there was no further mention of Coleman, who either had covered his tracks well or really had not known what Williams had been up to. Given what I knew of Coleman’s activities in Washington, I found the latter difficult to believe.

  As the photocopy of the last of the articles slid out of the side of the microfilm reader, I flipped the switch to turn off the machine, leaned back in my chair, and closed my eyes to concentrate on what I had just read. Mentally, I sorted back through the details of each of the articles, looking for anything that might tell me there was something other than a dead end here. No pun intended. My skeptical, suspicious nature said that Coleman knew exactly what Williams had been doing at Three Rivers, that he probably had learned his lessons well at Williams’s knee, lessons that he had put to good use among the higher rollers and bigger stakes of Washington, D.C. But I also knew that Three Rivers probably had been audited and investigated three ways to Sunday after Williams’s suicide. If no one back then had been able to tie Coleman to the financial disaster that Three Rivers became, how could I hope to do it now, all these years later? Still, I knew I wasn’t ready to stop looking.

  Sighing, I opened my eyes and leaned forward to look back through the photocopied articles one more time. Halfway through the small pile, I uncovered Williams’s obituary, which I had only scanned previously. Now, in desperation, I read it in detail as it compressed the forty-four years of Williams’s life into three paragraphs and then gave the reader information on survivors and when and where funeral services would be held. None of that took much space either, since there was only one survivor listed, a Mrs. Marshall L. (Gladys Monroe) Williams of Panama City, Arthur William’s mother.

  If Mrs. Williams had been twenty or so when her son was born, which I thought was a reasonable guess for a woman of her generation, she would now be in her eighties. What were the chances, I wondered, that she might still be alive, and that she would, or even could, tell me anything useful about Robert Coleman? Not great, I thought, but what else did I have at the moment?

  I gathered up the photocopies I had made, folded them in half, and put them into my shoulder bag. In the process, I glanced at my watch and saw that it was 6:30. Given that I had had nothing to eat since breakfast and that I had not yet checked into a place to spend the night, I decided it was high time to do both.

  * * * *

  Pleasantly stuffed from my dinner at the northern location of Lucy Ho’s Restaurant on Halstead Boulevard, where one could enjoy the world’s best egg rolls as far as I was concerned, I sat down on the double bed in the room I had checked into at the Days Inn North and reached for the phone.

  I could have stayed in more elegant surroundings at anyone of several other hotels, of course. But the Days Inn certainly provided the basics, which was all I really needed at this point, and it offered two advantages that the downtown hotels didn’t. The first was that I was far less likely here to accidentally run into anyone I knew from my years in Tallahassee. The second was that the Days Inn’s proximity to the North Monroe Street intersection with I-10 meant I could avoid the bulk of the next morning’s r
ush-hour traffic if the phone calls I was about to make resulted in my needing to drive to Panama City.

  When the information operator for the 904 area code answered my call, I asked her for the Panama City area and then for any listings for either Gladys M. or Mrs. Richard L. Williams. Without a street address to narrow down the list, she eventually gave me four listings for the various name combinations, the second of which was for a G. M. Williams. It was that one that I dialed first, thinking that Mrs. Williams might very well have used only her initials in order to disguise her gender, a tactic often used by women who live alone or who want to avoid being identified as female for one reason or another.

  On the fourth ring, a clearly elderly woman’s voice answered.

  “I’m trying to reach Mrs. Gladys Monroe Williams,” I said.

  “This is Gladys Williams. Who is this?” Judging by the quiver in the voice and the apparent shortness of breath with which she spoke, I guessed that this Mrs. Williams was at least as old as I had estimated, if not older.

  “My name is Sutton McPhee,” I told her. “I’m looking for Gladys Williams who was the mother of Arthur Williams in Tallahassee.”

  “I’m that Gladys Williams,” she said, “but my son has been dead since 1978.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry that your son died. Mrs. Williams, I’m a newspaper reporter from Washington, D.C. I’m in Tallahassee investigating a man named Robert Coleman, who was murdered in the Washington area a few days ago and who used to work for your son at the Three Rivers Development Company. I was wondering if you knew Robert Coleman and, if you did, whether I might come to Panama City and talk to you about him.”

  I paused, waiting for her to respond, but except for her troubled breathing, there was silence on the other end.

  “Mrs. Williams?”

  “Robert was murdered, you say?” she asked finally, just when I had concluded she was going to hang up on me.