“Just Peterson and Lansing,” I told him. “Lansing suggested the place to me over the phone, and I left to go out there as soon as I hung up.”
“And nobody overheard you, and you’re absolutely sure Curl didn’t follow you from the paper?”
“I’m sure. And I didn’t tell—” But, I realized as a little more of my brain fog cleared, I had.
“Damn him all to hell,” I said viciously. “If that son of a bitch—”
“Sutton, what are you talking about?” Rob interrupted.
“I just remembered who else I told,” I answered heatedly. “I called Sy and left a message on his voice mail.”
“Berkowitz?”
“Yeah. We had been arguing about my telling the police what I knew and whether we had enough for a story yet. He had stomped back up to his office to call Mark Lester and complain about me. So when I talked to Lansing and decided to leave, I called up there to let Sy know where I would be in case he managed to convince Mark. But why the hell would he have been talking to Dell Curl?”
“I don’t know,” Rob said, now sounding as angry as I was, “but I intend to find out. Check back in with me when you’re done there.”
“Oh, don’t worry, I will,” I answered and cut off the call just as the nurse peered again around the privacy curtains that were drawn around my stretcher.
“I have to ask you not to make any more calls on your cell phone from here,” she said.
“But I’m fine,” I protested. “I’m certainly up to talking on the phone.”
“Yes, you’re fine” she agreed, “but that’s not the problem.” She pointed to the phone she carried in her hip pocket. “Except for the ones we carry, which are made for use in a hospital, cell phones can interfere with some of the equipment we use. So if you are up to talking on the phone, we’ll take you out to the pay phones. Now, are you also up to taking a short walk?” At her question, her expression changed from serious to a smile.
“This isn’t going to hurt, is it?” I wanted to know. I had thought they were finished poking and prodding me.
“I don’t think so,” she replied, walking over to help me down from the stretcher. “Detective Lansing is a little more aware of what’s going on now, and he’s asking for you.”
The trip from my side of the trauma area to the other side where Lansing was being treated was probably the longest fifty feet I had ever walked in my life.
* * * *
It was Bill Russell who showed up at the hospital to make certain Noah and I both were okay and to tell us what was happening.
“The doctor tells me they’re going to keep you overnight just for observation,” Bill said to Noah when the nurse showed him into the treatment room where I sat beside Noah with a death grip on his left hand. He still seemed a little foggy at times, and I knew, from the size of the purpling lump beneath the bandage that covered the eight stitches he now had on his right temple, that his head must hurt something fierce where it had struck the window. But his doctor and nurse both had assured me, in separate conversations, that although they would admit him to the hospital overnight for observation, they expected he would be fine as well. Which I quickly pointed out to Bill, not wanting Noah to think he was getting any sort of run around about his true condition.
“Do I need to call the neighbors where David is spending the night and let them know what happened?” I asked Noah. The little boy had not been completely out of my mind since the moment when Curl had rammed the car and forced us off the road. I wasn’t sure how much to tell him, but I knew he should be told something.
“It’s John and Debbie Fitzgerald, same street as mine,” Noah told me. “You can fill them in, but ask them for right now just to tell David that I got a cut on my head at work that took some stitches, and that I’m fine. And that I’ll see him in the morning at home.”
“I’ll take care of it,” I assured him.
“What’s going on out there with all this?” Noah asked Bill, meaning with Curl and Henry Bryant. “Has anyone let Jim Peterson in on what’s happened?”
“He’s in D.C. right now hooking up with a couple of District detectives who are going with him to meet Judge Bryant,” Bill said. “They’ve confirmed that the judge is at the hotel, and they’ve already put a uniformed officer up on the judge’s floor to make sure he doesn’t leave before they get there.”
Noah and I both breathed sighs of relief.
“As soon as Jim heard the first call over his radio about a car being run off the road and someone being shot,” Bill continued, “he thought the car description sounded like Sutton’s rental car, and he said he just knew immediately exactly what had happened. He turned around and drove straight to where you were. You probably didn’t see him there because he said they hadn’t brought either one of you up the hill yet. But as soon as the folks on the scene told him you and Lansing were alive and Curl was dead, he ordered them not to release your names to anybody without his okay, and then he got on the phone to D.C. to let them know he was coming in after Bryant. Jim’s supposed to call me as soon as they’re with Bryant, so I can deal with the press developments.”
At the news about Bryant, my overworked adrenal glands had started pumping again, but the last little tidbit threw me for a momentary loop. Shit, I thought, if I let anybody else from the press hear about Bryant being questioned before Rob does, I might as well stay right here in the emergency room and save myself a trip.
“Bill, could you stay with Noah for a few minutes while I go call his neighbors?” I asked.
“Sure,” Bill answered. “I’m not going anywhere until I hear from Jim.”
Checking outside the door of Noah’s treatment room to make certain I wasn’t going to be stopped by anyone official, I stepped out into the corridor and wound my way around through a couple more short hallways, past the registration offices and the triage desk and out into the emergency department lobby, which already was packed with people in various stages of injury, impatience, or sleep. Saturday night looks like a good time to avoid an emergency room visit, I thought, as I walked past the automatic glass doors that led outside and turned into the small telephone room in the corner.
When I reached the Fitzgeralds, they put David on the phone and let me tell him about his father being injured.
“But he’s okay?” David asked when I was done. His voice sounded very small and frightened. I could imagine what must be going through his mind.
“He’s fine,” I said, trying to sound as cheerful as possible. “When you both get home tomorrow, he can show you his lump and his stitches, and you can see for yourself.”
I spent a few more minutes reassuring the little boy and then told him good night. And then I called Rob again to let him know Bryant was being visited by the police.
“I’ll find James and have her get right on it,” Rob said, when I told him what was going on, “and I’ll get a photographer over to the Mayflower in case they arrest him.”
“I don’t think they’ll do that yet, but I’m pretty sure they’ll end up taking him out to Fairfax for questioning at some point. He’s a judge, with a lot at stake, so he’ll probably deny everything and refuse to answer any questions, especially without an attorney. Which means they’ll have to get official. So you probably should send someone out there as well, although they may or may not get any shots of him, depending mostly on how pissed off Peterson is at him by the time they get there and whether he’s ready to throw Bryant to the rabid dogs of the press.”
“I’ll do that,” Rob agreed. “You keep me posted on anything new from your end, and we’ll do the story under a joint byline for you and James.”
“What about Sy?” I asked. “Won’t he need to be in on it?”
“You called me just in time,” Rob explained. “I was about to go upstairs to Mark Lester’s office. He’s supposed to have Sy there, cooling his heels until I get there, so we can discuss just how it was that Curl knew where you had gone. Since you called me the fi
rst time, I’ve done a little investigating of my own and found out from a couple of people who saw him that Sy was down here at your desk shortly after you left. I have an idea about what might have taken place. Let’s just say that if I’m anywhere close to right, I don’t think you need to worry about Sy on this anymore.”
Next to hearing that Noah was going to be all right and that Dell Curl couldn’t try to kill me again, that was the best news I had heard all day.
“I’ll call you later for an update,” I told Rob. “This is definitely one story I know I’ll want to hear.”
Later Still
Twenty-seven
Noah Lansing went home from the hospital on that Sunday and sat out Monday at home, under protest and only on the order of his doctors and his supervisor, and only after major browbeating by Bill Russell and myself. Even then, I think it was really the concern he saw in his son’s eyes that finally convinced him to take a day off. On Tuesday, however, he told us all to shut the hell up, and he went back to work to make sure the case against Bryant was airtight.
Sy Berkowitz went back to New Jersey with his career and reputation destroyed and his tail between his legs. Rob Perry’s idea about what had happened was right on the money. As soon as he had heard my voice mail, Sy had come tearing back down to the metro newsroom to tell me I couldn’t leave, only to find me gone already and my telephone ringing. Which he apparently answered and found Dell Curl on the other end, saying he had a message for me from Judge Bryant and that he needed to talk to me in person.
Sy denied the whole thing, of course, so I can’t imagine what he was thinking when he did it. I don’t know whether he was so angry at me that he just blurted out to Curl where I was, or whether he was so calculating and completely without scruples that he told Curl deliberately, knowing full well what would happen. The reasons really didn’t matter, because other people saw and heard him. The result was that he was fired on the spot by Mark Lester, his former mentor, given ten minutes to clean out his personal belongings from his desk, and escorted from the building by a security guard.
Henry Bryant went to jail, and Dell Curl went to the cemetery. It took a while to sort everything out, of course. Initially, Bryant denied knowing anything about what Curl had been up to. But Noah, Peterson, and Detective Moore used the information that Cooper and I had gathered, and which the cops were able to get legally and directly from the sources, to make a convincing enough body of circumstantial evidence that Bryant finally confessed to his role in what had happened. The immense international publicity surrounding the arrest of a federal judge and Supreme Court candidate as a suspect in a multiple-murder case also destroyed Bryant’s nomination, his reputation, and his future on any kind of judicial bench.
So perhaps it was having to watch everything for which he had sold his soul being destroyed in spite of all his and Curl’s efforts that finally took the fight out of Bryant. I don’t know. Even when he admitted his involvement, he continued to insist that he had ordered only Coleman’s murder, that it was Curl who had taken it upon himself to try to silence Magruder and myself. And in the end, that really didn’t matter, either, as long as he paid for what he had done, whether it was done at his order or only with his acquiescence.
My hypothesis had turned out to be pretty accurate, according to what Bryant did tell the police. It was Coleman who had given him the money to pay off the debts under which he had been suffocating when his wife died, in exchange for Bryant’s agreeing to see to it that the investigation of Coleman and Three Rivers also died an early death. They had had little contact since, Bryant said, and he had worked hard to be a good judge. But Coleman had returned to haunt him when Bryant’s name was put forth for the Supreme Court, demanding that Bryant pull whatever strings he had access to in order to call off the federal investigators who were after Coleman.
Bryant said he refused, but Coleman said he would give Bryant up to the investigators if he had to, in order to make a deal for himself. It was then, Bryant said, that he knew he had to stop Coleman any way he could, and he turned to Dell Curl, whom Bryant had given a job when no one else would touch him.
So Curl had kidnapped Coleman from the parking garage underneath The Phoenix Group’s offices and had driven him, in Coleman’s own car, to Grist Mill Park, where he had shot Coleman in the chest and killed him. And then he walked back to Coleman’s car, where he was intercepted by Officer Dan Magruder and his drunken prisoner, and things rapidly had gone downhill from there.
Eventually, the police pieced together the rest. They found the explosives company in Fredericksburg that Curl apparently burgled in order to steal several sticks of dynamite. They matched Curl’s gun to the bullets that killed Coleman and Magruder. Magruder’s neighbor identified Curl as the uniformed man he had seen in the apartment building. Not that any of it made any difference to Curl any longer. But it all helped build the case against Bryant.
I went back to see my shrink, once the Fairfax County Police Department finished its investigation of my having shot Curl with a police detective’s gun and they and the commonwealth’s attorney decided no charges should be filed against me. Still, I had killed a man. Granted, he was a murderer who had killed three people and already had tried once to kill me. And I had shot him to keep him from killing Noah as much as to defend myself. But I didn’t want to find myself, weeks or months down the road, having recurring nightmares about what I had done or beating myself up with second-guessing whether I could have found some other way.
It was bad enough that I was dreaming regularly about the kid who was blown up with my car and who the police never could identify beyond his street name. So I spent several sessions with Elizabeth Parks, a therapist I had met when she was a high school guidance counselor and who once had helped me deal with the emotional aftermath when a U.S. senator had threatened to shoot me.
I also went back to my apartment in Landmark. Noah asked me to move in with him and David, and I turned him down. I told him that I wasn’t quite ready yet to take that step, that I thought we should give that big a decision some more time.
“Are you backing away from what’s going on between us?” he asked, as we sat in his living room on his one day of home recuperation.
“Not at all,” I told him. “I’ll admit I’ve resisted the way I feel about you, that it scared me because of my lousy track record when it comes to men. But when I saw Dell Curl coming toward us with his gun, when I knew he would kill you as well as me… well, let’s just say I had a moment of clarity about what was important to me. So no, I’m not backing away.”
“Not even if I tell you that I love you?”
I smiled. “Not even then. I love you, too. But I also want some time to get to know you and David, and for both of you to get to know me, before we take a step like living together. There’s too much at stake here if it turns out to be the wrong decision, for either one of us.”
He leaned toward me on the couch and put his arms around me.
“At least,” Noah said, “I know it’s not a permanent no.
“Oh really? And how do you know that?”
“Because now you’re calling me Noah.”
The next day, without my knowledge, he went to see the elderly woman who owns my building and convinced her that she shouldn’t throw a heroine, who had saved a police officer’s life and kept a little boy from becoming an orphan, out on the street. So I got to go home.
I also made a point of occasionally spending time with David, just the two of us. Although I knew that returning to my apartment was the right thing to do for now, it made me realize just how attached I already had become to Noah’s son. As Noah and I spent time together, I began to really believe that this might be the one that worked, that it might be the relationship I had wanted but never had, and I understood that David would be a very important part of it. So I began asking David out to do something with me every couple of weeks: a trip to get ice cream, a visit to the Air and Space Museum to see the real versi
ons of some of the toys in David’s room, even a jaunt to an Orioles’ game in Baltimore.
It was fun, and enlightening, because I had never spent much time with a young child before, and also frightening, because I soon came to love him as much as I did his father, and I couldn’t bear the thought that one or the other of them might not always be there.
* * * *
The final thing I did was to make a trip to the cemetery. Even after several sessions with Elizabeth, I still couldn’t get the image of the teenager who had died instead of me out of my mind. Detective Moore told me at one point that, if the boy remained unidentified, he eventually would be buried in a pauper’s grave at city expense. He had only been sixteen or seventeen, the medical examiner had said. And as part of their efforts to identify him, the Alexandria police had had a sketch of what he probably looked like before he was burned in the explosion produced for distribution around the country. Several street gang members in Alexandria had told the police that it definitely was the boy they called Espada. Once I saw that sketch, his face and his homeless, nameless status haunted my dreams night after night.
It didn’t take many of those nights before I called Detective Moore and told him I wanted to pay to have the boy buried decently, in a way his mother would have buried him if she had known where he was. So at my expense, he was laid to rest in a plot in the Mount Comfort Cemetery, just off South Kings Highway in southern Fairfax County. I had asked Father Paul Wynants, the Catholic chaplain at Fairfax Hospital, who I had met once when visiting a friend there, to conduct a graveside service for the unknown Hispanic boy. Moore and Noah joined me for the few minutes the service took, and then they and Father Paul went back to work.
I stayed on for a little longer, looking at the simple plaque that said Espada. It was the name he had chosen for himself, after all, and much better than John Doe. I put the flowers that I had brought down on the grave, grateful to be alive and for the chance I knew I had been given to find some happiness with Noah and David, my men with the blue eyes. Then I turned and walked out of the cemetery to life.
Corruption of Justice Page 22