“But you might ask Lawson Thomas,” Mrs. Williams continued. “He worked for Ford at one point, although he’s a state senator now. Perhaps he would remember, if he was there during that time.”
“I will ask him,” I said, but I wasn’t optimistic. With the way things had gone so far, there was no guarantee that Lawson Thomas had even been on the state attorney’s staff at the time. He probably hadn’t known Robert Coleman from Adam. Frustrated, I questioned Mrs. Williams a little longer, but what she had told me already apparently was as much as she knew.
Finally, I gave her my card and asked her to call me if she remembered anything else that might be helpful. Then I took my leave of her, thanking her again for what she had been able to tell me and for agreeing to talk to me.
“There may not be any point to it all, now that Robert is dead as well,” Mrs. Williams said as she saw me to her door. “Perhaps we should just let the dead rest.”
“No,” I disagreed, “it’s possible that your son wasn’t the biggest bad guy in what happened at Three Rivers after all. Or at least not the only one. And I think there’s always a point to finding out the truth.”
“You may be right, dear,” Mrs. Williams said. She didn’t sound convinced.
Fourteen
The question, of course, was whether I would be able to find out the truth about Robert Coleman and his activities at Three Rivers. I wasn’t holding my breath in anticipation as I used my cell phone to call Tallahassee information and asked for the state senate office number of Lawson Thomas.
Although I had never spoken to him, I remembered Lawson Thomas from my years in Tallahassee, when he had been a junior member of the Florida Senate Education Committee and I had been covering the schools and universities in the area. He had struck me then as an intelligent, straightforward guy who genuinely wanted to do what he could to improve education in a state in which retirees already were well on their way to outnumbering children, retirees who saw no reason why they should pay higher taxes to support an education system from which they felt they derived no immediate benefit. I hoped that twenty years of pummeling in the rambunctious tumbler of Florida politics hadn’t made Thomas as smooth, unctuous, and hard to pin down as many of the other politicians there with whom I had dealt.
I dialed the number the operator gave me and worked my way through a couple of staff members until I reached one who could tell me that Senator Thomas was in the office, but that he was in a meeting at the moment.
“I apologize in advance for being persistent,” I told the secretary, to whom I already had identified myself as a reporter from Washington, “but I’m only in town for one more night, and I really need a few minutes with him. I need to ask him about a case he might have known about when he worked in the state attorney’s office. I’m driving back right now from Panama City, and I should get back to town around five. Could you do me a huge favor and please ask him if I could impose on him for just a few minutes then?”
Either I sounded so desperate that the secretary took pity on me or, more likely, she had dealt with enough reporters to know that the fastest way to get rid of me was to give me what I wanted. Or at least a little bit of it. She told me to hold.
“If you can be here by five,” she said when she came back on the line, “Senator Thomas can give you fifteen minutes. But he has a dinner appointment, so if you’re not here by then, he’ll have to leave anyway.”
“I understand,” I told her. “I’ll be there. And thank you very much for checking with him.”
I turned off the cell phone and nosed the speedometer on the rental car up to seventy, hoping the Florida Highway Patrol would give me a five-mile-an-hour benefit of the doubt. There was no way I was going to be late for my appointment with Thomas. I was beginning to feel like Hansel and Gretel trying to follow a disappearing trail. At the moment, Lawson Thomas was the only bread crumb I could find.
* * * *
“I’m Sutton McPhee, Senator Thomas. Thank you for seeing me.”
“Pleased to meet you, Ms. McPhee,” Thomas said, shaking my outstretched hand. “Have a seat.” He sat back down in the black leather executive’s chair behind a large mahogany desk and looked toward the office door where his secretary, a pleasant-faced brunette of about my own age, still hovered.
“It’s okay, Jane,” he said, smiling. “We’ll be fine. You go on and get out of here. Go home for a change.”
“If you’re sure…” Jane said, still hesitating.
“I’m sure.”
“All right then, I’ll see you tomorrow.” Jane turned and went back to her reception area desk. A few seconds later, she went out the office’s main door, purse in hand.
“Now,” Thomas said, once we were alone, “what is it I can do for you? And do I know you from somewhere? Your name sounded familiar.”
“I used to be a reporter at the Democrat,” I told him, surprised that he had remembered even my name. “I covered education.”
“Oh, that’s it,” Thomas said, nodding his head in agreement as my name clicked into place for him. “I remember reading your stories, now. So you went on to bigger and better things in Washington?”
“That’s certainly how people inside the Beltway would see it,” I answered.
Thomas chuckled, revealing a host of laugh lines around his brown eyes that did nice things to his approaching-fifty face.
“They do tend to take a fairly provincial view of things,” he said, evidently having had some experience with folks in Washington—and with their amnesia for what is important to people outside the Beltway—a time or two himself.
“Jane said you were interested in something about a case from when I was with the state attorney’s office,” Thomas said, bringing the conversation back to the point.
“That’s right,” I told him. “These days, I cover the Fairfax County Police in northern Virginia, instead of education, and I’m here about the murder of a man named Robert Coleman. He was involved in the Three Rivers Development company here back in the seventies with Arthur Williams, and he was murdered a few days ago in a park outside Washington. For the last ten years, he was the head of The Phoenix Group, a very large charitable foundation, and our paper was about to break a story that he was under investigation by several federal agencies for some illegal activities with the foundation’s money. I’m looking into his years here in Tallahassee to see if he might have been involved in similar activities here, and your name came up in connection with something.”
“My name?”
“Only indirectly,” I said quickly, realizing I probably had just given him a fright. “I was told by someone with reason to know that, before he left Tallahassee and Three Rivers, Coleman was being investigated by the state attorney’s office here. I understand that Mr. Truesdale has been dead for many years, so I can’t ask him. But I was told that you might have worked in the office during that time and might remember whose case it was.”
Thomas looked thoughtful for a moment. I couldn’t tell whether he was accessing his memory or trying to get a handle on me.
“I was working there at the time,” he said finally. “It’s funny. We all handled a lot of cases, and after all this time, many of them tend to run together in my mind, even some of the cases that I personally prosecuted. But, even though it never went anywhere, I remember the Coleman investigation because of the big argument.”
“What argument was that?”
“Between Ford and the assistant state attorney who was handling the case.”
“Who was that?”
“Oh, that was Henry Bryant.”
It took me a second, the way recognition often does when you run into someone you know in an unexpected setting.
“Henry Bryant, as in Judge Henry Bryant, nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court?”
“That’s right,” Thomas said, smiling at my surprise. “And he’ll be a great Supreme Court Justice.”
I had known Henry Bryant was from Tallahassee, but the stories I ha
d read had skimmed over his prejudge years. Although some of them undoubtedly had mentioned his time in the state attorney’s office, it hadn’t registered with me. I had been more interested in the praises being sung by almost everyone. Henry Bryant was nonpartisan, smart, respected, a judge who held to a centrist position strongly anchored in the law. He also had a large sympathy factor operating as a result of having lost his wife to cancer when she was only thirty years old, leaving him to raise their two young children alone. Bryant had never remarried, and one story I had read had quoted him as saying he had never found a woman he loved as much as he had his late wife.
“I still remember the day Henry went in to have a meeting with Ford about the Coleman investigation,” Lawson Thomas went on, interrupting my mental rehashing of the Bryant stories. “He was in there for no more than half an hour, but when he came back out, he looked pretty upset. He didn’t say anything then, but we had planned to have lunch that day, and at lunch Henry told me in confidence that Ford had refused to go any further with the investigation. He said Ford told him the evidence just wasn’t there and that it wasn’t worth wasting any more staff time on. Henry was pretty unhappy with the decision, and I was concerned about him, given what he was already going through. That was during the time his wife was dying, you understand, and he had enough problems on his hands without taking grief at work, too.”
“So what did he do about it?”
“Nothing, as far as I know. It wasn’t long after that, no more than a few weeks, that the governor appointed Henry to fill a vacant county judgeship. And I think Coleman left Tallahassee for Washington not long afterward, too. The investigation was never reassigned, and as far as I know, that was the end of it.”
“Did you ever ask Truesdale about why he told Bryant to drop the investigation?”
“No,” Thomas said, smiling. “Ford Truesdale wasn’t a man whose decisions you questioned. When he gave an order, it was final, and he didn’t tolerate second-guessing. I guess no one was surprised when he died from a stroke; he had very high blood pressure and the temper to go with it. And since the Coleman investigation wasn’t even my case, there was no way I would have broached the subject with him.”
“But didn’t you wonder about it later when Arthur Williams killed himself and Three Rivers collapsed?”
“A little,” Thomas agreed. “But by then I had decided to run for the Florida House of Representatives, where I spent a couple of terms before coming to the senate, and so I had left the state attorney’s office, too. I had a lot of other things on my mind. And of course, since it wasn’t my case, I knew none of the details. But if there had been anything more definite to tie Coleman to anything, I assume it would have turned up again later, in the investigation after the company collapsed. I just figured Ford had been right and there really wasn’t enough of anything there to proceed against Coleman.”
“So maybe I should talk to Judge Bryant?”
“Certainly he would know more about what went on than I do,” Thomas said. “But keep in mind that, even now, he really can’t talk about details of any investigation, especially one that was closed without any charges being brought.”
“I know,” I said. And I did know that those were the rules. Which any number of people bent whenever it suited their own purposes. The question was whether Bryant was as straight-arrow as his reputation. If he was, then I most likely would find myself staring at one more in a series of brick walls. I was about ready to start banging my head against them in frustration.
Clearly, Lawson Thomas had told me as much as he knew. There was no point in browbeating him. I thanked him for his time, let him go to his dinner appointment, and I drove back out to my room at the Days Inn.
Fifteen
I really wasn’t hungry yet, considering the size of the lunch I had eaten in Panama City, so I washed my face and hands to get the day’s grime off them, flopped down on the bed to see what CNN had to say for itself until it was time for the local TV news, and decided I had better put in some calls to Washington. There were several people, I knew, who were wondering what I was up to.
The first person I called was Detective Moore, who wasn’t in, of course. So I left a message for him that I wouldn’t need another guard yet because I was still out of town and that I would check in with him again tomorrow.
Rob Perry was in his usual predeadline terse mood when I called his metro desk extension, but he stopped reading copy long enough to talk to me.
“Well, just keep digging,” he said, when I finished filling him in on what I had been up to all day long. “Maybe Judge Bryant will have something useful to tell you. You do know he’s up here at the moment?”
“So I’ve read. Before I hang up, I’ll have you transfer me upstairs to Janice Lane to see if she can tell me how to get hold of him.” Janice was the reporter who covered the U.S. Supreme Court and who had been writing the stories about Bryant’s nomination and upcoming appointment hearings on the Hill. “What’s Sy got going on?”
“He’s got another piece going in tomorrow on the Coleman investigation at this end. The Phoenix Group is in absolute chaos at the moment, as you can imagine, and directors are running for cover every which way, saying they had no idea what he was up to. The police have nothing new on who might have bumped Coleman off, or if they do, they’re not telling Sy. Which wouldn’t be too surprising. Have you talked to them today?”
“Not yet. I’ve been a little tied up, but I was going to track down Peterson next and grill him. If I can get anything out of him, I’ll call you back. If not, just have Sy throw in a few sentences to the effect that the police are still checking alibis but haven’t yet identified any suspects in the case. And what about the Magruder shooting? Did Penny get to the funeral? I still have to talk to Lansing about that one.”
“Yeah, I’ve got the funeral piece in the system, all ready to go, and it’s pretty tear-jerking, from the copy I saw. You know what police funerals are like, anyway. Lots of formality, and rows and rows of uniformed cops from all over the country, looking big and strong while tears run down their faces. And media everywhere, of course. But Penny managed to corner the police chief at the service and got a couple of quotes from him as well as several other cops from the Mount Vernon Station and some from Magruder’s parents lamenting the fact that they’ll never be grandparents, since Magruder was an only child. I think James also talked to Lansing, too, but he was pretty close-mouthed.”
“I’ll wear him down,” I assured Rob. He laughed, having been subjected more than once himself to my stubborn persistence when there was something I wanted from him.
Rob and I agreed to talk again by lunch the next day, and he transferred my call up to Janice Lane who, fortunately for me, was still trying to get out of the office. When I explained to her why I was calling, Janice told me that Judge Bryant was staying at the Mayflower, a classic Washington hotel, completely and elegantly renovated in the last few years and not far from the White House and Capitol Hill. I jotted down the switchboard number she gave me for the Mayflower and hung up to make my calls to Peterson and Lansing.
Detective Peterson was still at work when I called him, buried, no doubt, in the mountains of paperwork that a homicide investigation generates.
“Not much new to tell you,” Peterson said, when I identified myself and said I was checking on the Coleman case. “The last time we can confirm that anyone saw Coleman alive was at lunchtime on Friday. He left the office and told his secretary he had some personal business to take care of.”
“Did he say what kind of business or who it was with?” I asked.
“Nope. She said she didn’t ask questions because he often left early for the weekend on ‘personal’ business. She just figured he was going to meet a woman. Which he may have been, although we haven’t found anybody yet who will admit to being with him then.”
“And that was the last time anybody saw or talked to him?”
“Or saw his car, either. We’re stil
l looking for it, too. Hold on.” I heard Peterson rustling through some papers and then he came back on the line. “Dark blue 1998 Volvo sedan. Virginia vanity license plate P-H-N-X G-R-P. In fact, I was about to call the TV stations to put it out on the air.”
“Somebody’s bound to notice that license plate,” I said, jotting down the car’s description.
“Well, we’re hoping so, if the car is in a place where other people will see it. But if somebody grabbed him to steal his car, it could be anywhere by now, including chopped into parts or dumped at the bottom of a river. Or even on a ship in the Baltimore Harbor, getting ready to head for the Middle East.”
“What about additional autopsy results?” I wanted to know. “Have they pinned down the time of death any closer than a day or three before the body was found?”
“The medical examiner says sometime between noon and midnight on Friday.”
“Can you say yet whether he was killed in the park or the body was just dumped there?”
“We’re pretty sure he was killed there. The amount of blood we found around the body says he died where the neighbor and his dog found him.”
Clearly, I was going to have to call Rob Perry back with all this information and dictate a sidebar to go with Sy’s story.
“I appreciate everything you’ve told me,” I said to Peterson. “But can I ask you one more thing?”
“You can ask.”
“Why didn’t you tell Sy Berkowitz all this when he talked to you?”
For a few seconds, Peterson didn’t say anything.
“Because you’re only a pain in the ass,” he answered finally. “But he’s a complete flamer.”
Flamer, I knew, was a favorite police euphemism for flaming asshole.
“Well, thanks,” I answered, as dryly as he had. “I think.”
When we hung up, I took a few minutes to sketch out the bones of the sidebar and then called Rob Perry. The part he liked best of all, however, was Peterson’s descriptions of Sy and me.
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