“And who’s this Tharpe guy?”
I picked up the article about Art Williams’s suicide and handed it to Sy, my finger pointing out the important paragraph.
“Oh man!” Sy said, after reading the paragraph and then scanning the rest of the article. Finally, he looked back up at me, the question in his mind reflected on his face.
“But what does any of that have to do with Coleman being bumped off up here twenty years later? You don’t think Bryant did it? Why would he kill Coleman? Coleman is the one who saved his nuts, even if it wasn’t a kosher deal.”
“I’ve been thinking about that while I talked through all this,” I said, “and I think that’s exactly why Bryant did do it. Something must have happened, now, to make Bryant see Coleman as a threat. Think about what Bryant has at stake here. Only everything he’s worked for his whole life: his legal career, his reputation, a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. By all accounts, he’s been an excellent judge, all the way up the line. Everybody likes him, on both sides of the political aisle. I don’t know, maybe being a good judge has been his way of making up for what he did back then to save his home and his kids. But he’s lived with the knowledge of what he did and with his guilty conscience for twenty years. Something must have happened recently with Coleman to frighten Bryant into thinking that it all was about to come out. Maybe the risk of losing everything that he got at the cost of his self-respect, here at the end, was just too much.”
Sy looked thoughtful, then excited.
“I’d be willing to bet a week’s pay,” he said, “that Coleman went to Bryant and wanted him to do the same thing he did before, to get this latest investigation killed. He probably figured that, as a federal judge, Bryant could pull enough strings here and there to do it, and maybe he threatened to take Bryant down with him if Bryant didn’t agree.”
“So,” I said, finishing his thought, “Bryant couldn’t handle the idea of having Coleman’s threats hanging over him forever. He either killed Coleman or had him killed to shut him up. Although I think he must have gotten someone to do it for him. I couldn’t see the man Magruder talked to in the park that day all that well, but I know it wasn’t Coleman himself, and I don’t think it was Bryant, either. I think he figured there was nothing that could surface in any investigation of what Coleman has been up to in Washington that could lead back to him. Ford Truesdale is dead. Art Williams is dead. The file in Tallahassee has disappeared. Killing Coleman would sever the last connection between Bryant and what went on down there twenty years ago.”
Sy looked at his watch.
“We’ve got time to put this together before the first deadline,” he said, looking back at me. “Along with the stuff on the same gun killing Coleman and Magruder, it’s just too much to sit on. If you’ve got plans, cancel them, and let’s get busy on this.”
“There’s nothing to get busy on,” I argued. “We don’t have the story yet.”
“Are you dense? What do you mean, we don’t have the story yet?” Now he was mad again.
“Where’s our proof?” I asked hotly. Sy’s I’m-in-charge attitude was pissing me off, and I saw a couple of the editors, who were starting to filter in to put the Sunday paper together, looking up at the sound of my raised voice.
“Right there in your hand,” Sy said, his own voice going up a notch or two in volume.
“No, it isn’t. All I’ve got here are some unexpected connections, some possible coincidences, and one great big chunk of money that Henry Bryant won’t explain. Yes, the bullets match. Which doesn’t tell us who pulled the trigger. I hate to break it to you, but no matter how we think those pieces fit together, we don’t have enough proof to go with this in print.”
“So what do you recommend we do with all this stuff then?”
That was what I had been wondering when Sy had turned up initially. Now, the answer popped into my head.
“I’m going to the cops with it.”
“What?” he shouted, standing up so quickly that it slammed his chair into the desk behind him, causing every head in the newsroom to look in our direction. “Have you lost your fucking mind?”
“No, and stop screaming at me,” I hissed back, standing up and moving in close so I could lower my own voice. “Peterson and Lansing are okay. If I take this to them, they might be able to use it to shake loose something that will put it all together. And they’ll give us the story first. I’ve dealt with them both before, and if I help them, they won’t screw me over.”
So what was that Lansing was doing last night?
I can’t fight with you right now, too, I thought. I’ve got my hands fidi here.
“And besides,” I went on, “I’m the one who has somebody trying to kill me, somebody who thinks I know who they are. But I don’t have any idea who it is, and I’ll take help anywhere I can get it. It’s my neck on the line here, Sy, not yours.”
“This isn’t just your story, McPhee. It’s mine, too. The biggest story I’ve had since I got to this goddamn town. I’m not going to let you blow it for me, and I’m going upstairs right now to call Mark Lester and Mack Thompson. And by the way, it’s not your neck you’d better be worried about. It’s your knees, and I’m getting ready to cut you off at them.”
He turned and started striding angrily away, only to stop again and look back at me.
“If I were you,” he said loudly, glaring at me in full-blown hatred, “I’d wait right here and not go anywhere, ’cause I think Mack Thompson’s going to have a few things to say to you real soon.”
With that, he stomped over to the stairwell door, yanked it open hard, and went through it.
I looked at the faces staring at me from the copy desk and various corners of the newsroom, gave them a weak grin, and sat back down. I was furious with Sy, but nothing he had threatened to do had changed my mind about taking what I had to Lansing and Peterson.
There was someone out there who was far more of a threat to me than Sy was, and the police might be the only ones who could help me find out who it was. I had, I thought tiredly, run out of places to look. And that was when I remembered who it was I had forgotten, someone who could have been the man in the park. My hand shaking, I picked up the phone and called down to the library but got no answer. So I dialed Cooper’s home phone number.
“Cooper,” I said abruptly when he answered, “I need some more information, and I need it as quickly as you can get it for me. And I don’t care how you get it, just get it now.”
“What’s the matter, Sutton?” he asked, apparently not liking the way I sounded.
“I don’t have time to explain now,” I told him. “Just track down everything you can in the next twenty minutes on this person and call me back with what you find. I’ll fill you in later.” I gave him a name, thanked him for his help, and hung up. And paged Noah Lansing.
* * * *
By now, no doubt, Lansing recognized my office number when it appeared on his pager. He called me back within a few minutes.
“I don’t want to hear anything about not coming back to the house tonight,” he said lightly when I answered.
“That’s not why I’m calling,” I replied. “I need to talk to you and Peterson this afternoon. I’ve got some information I think you need to see. Can you get hold of him and meet me somewhere?”
Apparently the urgency in my voice communicated itself to him. He dropped the teasing tone with which he had greeted me.
“If it’s important, I’ll find him,” he said, all business now. “Where do you want to meet us?”
“Name someplace that’s near where you are now. I’ll come out there.”
“It’s almost six o’clock, and David has gone to a friend’s house to spend the night. Do you want to do this over something to eat?”
“Fine. Fine. Just tell me where to meet you. Someplace that isn’t too busy and where I can just get a sandwich.” Although I hadn’t had lunch, the direction my thinking recently had taken also had dampened most of the a
ppetite I normally would have had.
“How about Joe’s Hole in the Wall Café? You know it?”
“Where’s that?”
“It’s a little restaurant at Little River Turnpike and Pickett. It sounds like the right kind of place.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’m waiting for one phone call, and then I’ll meet you out there.”
“Okay, I’ll track down Peterson in the meantime. And, Sutton?”
“What?”
“For God’s sake, watch your back!”
Ordinarily, I probably could have come up with some double entendre for a response, but right now I was all out of humor.
“I will,” I told him.
* * * *
Barely within the twenty minutes I had specified, Cooper called me back.
“I don’t have a lot, and I don’t know for sure what it means, although I don’t like the sounds of it,” he said, sounding concerned, “but here’s what I was able to find out in the little bit of time I had.”
“That’s okay, Cooper,” I reassured him. “Just tell me what you have.” He told me. Knowing my sudden inspiration had been right just made me feel worse, not better.
I thanked Cooper for his help, told him he might literally have saved my life, and hung up to call Sy’s extension up in the national newsroom. I got his voice mail.
“It’s Sutton,” I told him. “I can’t hang around here any longer. I’m on my way out to meet Peterson and Lansing. If you just can’t wait to fight with me, we’ll be at some little restaurant called Joe’s Hole in the Wall Café out in Fairfax. Otherwise, I’ll get back to you later and we’ll argue about all this then.”
Actually, I thought as I cleared the line and then punched in Rob Perry’s extension, argue was a gross understatement for the shit storm Sy probably was trying to bring down on my head. But if I were right with my latest idea about what had gone on, and if what I knew gave the detectives the push that they needed in the right direction, Sy Berkowitz could just kiss my ass. Not that he’d ever be lucky enough to get anywhere near it.
Rob didn’t answer, either, so I briefly told his voice mail what I had learned, that I was going out to Fairfax to talk with Peterson and Lansing about it, and that I also had had to tell Sy and he was on his way to throw a fit with Mack Thompson.
“Be prepared,” I said. Then I hung up, grabbed my purse, and left quickly before Sy could drag me into whatever mischief he was plotting.
Twenty-four
Joe’s Hole in the Wall was just about that, a tiny, nondescript café that one easily could overlook in the middle of the other storefronts that took up the two wings of the shopping center where Joe’s was located. But I spotted it without any trouble as I drove slowly through the parking lot. I parked a couple of spaces away from what looked like Peterson’s unmarked police car and Lansing’s Explorer, which told me that they both had arrived at Joe’s ahead of me.
Nothing inside the little restaurant belied its name, either. There were a handful of booths, upholstered in wine red vinyl, along the walls on either side of the door, and a small cluster of Formica-topped tables and simple wooden chairs in the center of the room. Across the back wall was the open kitchen area from which emanated a number of delicious smells and which was separated from the dining room by a waist-high countertop. Behind the counter was a somewhat beefy, dark-haired man of middle years and a nonspecific Mediterranean heritage. Behind him, a much younger man of similar coloring appeared to be cooking something on the grill.
Lansing saw me come in, from where he and Peterson sat in the third booth on the right, and he raised an arm to get my attention, as if I could have missed seeing him in such a small place. None of the other handful of diners scattered around the room paid me any attention whatsoever.
I walked over to join the detectives, sitting down beside Lansing when he slid over next to the wall to make room for me. By the partially eaten sub sandwiches and fries in front of him and Peterson, I judged that they already had ordered after tiring of waiting for me. At that moment, the young man from the grill appeared beside me to ask what I wanted to drink. I ordered a glass of iced tea and asked if I could get just a tossed salad. We discussed salad dressings, and after agreeing on the house vinaigrette, he returned to the kitchen.
“You don’t look so great,” Lansing said, eyeing me closely. “Did anything happen on your way out here?”
“No, nobody bothered me,” I told him. “I just have a lot of information going around in my head, and it’s coming together in a pretty ugly way.”
“So what was it you got us out here on a Saturday to tell us?” Peterson asked, biting a fry in half.
The cook reappeared with my iced tea, salad, and dressing, and I thanked him. I took a couple of seconds to drizzle the dressing over the salad before answering Peterson.
“I’ve found something else that I’m sure has to do with Coleman and Magruder being shot,” I said finally, spearing a tomato slice and then looking from Peterson to Lansing. “I’ll tell you what I’ve got, but I have to have your agreement not to let it out to any of the rest of the press. And you have to promise me that, if it pans out, you’ll make sure I know what you turn up before the rest of them do.”
“If you have concrete information about either of those cases, you have a legal responsibility to turn it over to the police,” Peterson said, predictably. I gave him a tired smile and an A for effort.
“Jim,” I said, using his given name for the first time, hoping it would make him pay attention, “we have this same conversation every time I cover one of your big cases, and every time, it turns out the same way. If I had firm proof of what I think went on, you know full well I’d give it to you, but I also would be going ahead with a story at the same time. The bottom line right now, however, is that I can’t prove it yet. But I’m hoping that if I give you what I do know, and that you apparently don’t, you might be able to prove it. I just want to make sure the competition isn’t going to scoop me on my own story. So can’t we just agree to a trade with first dibs on what the other one finds out?”
Peterson looked at Lansing.
“She’s dealt with us straight so far,” Lansing said neutrally.
Peterson looked at me and thought some more.
“All right,” he said finally, “we’ll keep what you tell us to ourselves and give you a heads-up about anything we find out as a result.”
* * * *
I took the two of them through the whole thing, laying out one by one the articles and reports that Cooper and I had collected, filling in the gaps with my guesses. They both listened thoughtfully, between bites of their food, while I gave them the outline, my salad forgotten now as I took them through the story of Henry Bryant’s earlier investigation of Coleman, through Lawson Thomas’s story of how it was halted and of the now-missing file, through Bryant’s financial woes and the timely appearance of the “loan” that saved him, through Gerald Tharpe’s recommendation of Bryant for the county court seat and Tharpe’s connection to Coleman. I gave them my conclusion on what it all meant and on why I suspected that Coleman and ultimately Dan Magruder had been killed.
“Where did you get all this stuff?” Peterson wanted to know, pushing his empty platter aside and leafing through Bryant’s financial records.
“Never mind that for now,” I told him. “You guys can get it all again through kosher channels.”
“I’m not so sure that all this fits together so neatly,” Lansing said, frowning. “You think Bryant had Coleman killed, and you may be right. But you’ve got nothing concrete that really connects him, nothing that would give us enough for a search warrant to get into all his records. We have to have something more specific before we’ll convince a judge.”
From my purse, I took out the notebook onto which I had jotted down the last bit of information Cooper had given me just before I left the paper.
“Judge Bryant doesn’t go anywhere these days,” I told Lansing and Peterson as I opene
d the notebook, “without a man named Dell Curl. Bryant calls Curl his personal assistant, and while he may very well be that, I came away from meeting Curl with the distinct impression that he’s there to protect Bryant as much as he is to assist him. He obviously keeps himself in good shape, and his appearance and the way he carries himself made me think he might be ex-military.”
“So what does he have to do with anything?” Peterson asked.
“Just before I came out here, I got a call back from someone who checked Curl out for me.” I looked down at my notes and back up at the two detectives.
“Dell Curl is a former Tallahassee police officer who was fired four years ago for pulling his gun when he found his wife in bed with a fellow officer and for holding the gun to the guy’s head while threatening to kill him and the wife. Curl apparently went to work for Bryant not long after that.”
“I think I see where you’re going with this,” Lansing said, “but none of that makes the guy a killer.”
“No,” I agreed, “but it does give him the body language of a cop and a uniform. Which might be what got Magruder to open his door. And while he isn’t a dead ringer for the sketch that Magruder’s neighbor helped you do, it certainly could be him.”
“Is that it?” Lansing asked.
“No, there’s still one other little thing.”
“What?” Peterson wanted to know.
“According to Curl’s records, he was an MP in the army before joining the Tallahassee Police Department. He got some training there in crime scene identification and the handling of explosives and who knows what else. When he joined the police, they sent him for still more training, and one of the things he did for them was to work with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the ATF on cases that involved explosives. You know, little stuff like car bombings.”
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