by Mike Lawson
DeMarco was hardly unique. There were a lot of guys like him in D.C.—guys who worked in almost invisible positions to keep their political masters in power. Most of these people resided in the private sector. They were employed by political action groups and so-called consulting firms, and passed out business cards with job titles that gave no clue as to what they actually did. Then there were those like DeMarco who held government positions with equally vague titles and no clearly defined role in any organization. DeMarco’s title was “Counsel Pro Tem for Liaison Affairs”—and it was absolutely meaningless.
DeMarco was often used as a conduit, passing messages to and obtaining money from people who wanted Mahoney’s help but whom Mahoney couldn’t always acknowledge as supporters. Some of these folks were Democrats who desired to contribute more than the amount allowed by campaign finance laws; they knew that John Mahoney’s price was much, much steeper. Some were registered Republican businessmen trying to prosper in a predominately blue congressional district. One was a woman who operated the most profitable escort service in Boston. Another secret contributor to Mahoney’s coffers was the Archdiocese of Boston. But DeMarco’s activities weren’t limited to … well, Mahoney liked to call it fund-raising.
DeMarco’s most recent assignment had involved a Massachusetts state legislator and the renovation of a low-income housing project in Boston. Mahoney wanted the job to go to a general contractor who contributed to him, but the state legislator was accepting bribes from a different contractor. When Mahoney called the state guy and told him to back off, the legislator, apparently thinking the ex-Speaker was no longer the powerhouse he’d once been, told Mahoney to go to hell—and Mahoney dispatched DeMarco. It took DeMarco three weeks to determine that the churchgoing family man was having an affair with a twenty-year-old intern, a strapping young fellow named Jeremy.
When it comes to being gay, the State of Massachusetts is considered fairly liberal. Two gay people can get married there; a gay man can certainly hold political office there. What’s not okay is being a gay politician while claiming to be happily married to a woman—now we’re talking integrity, not sexual orientation—and the state legislator decided that Mahoney’s contractor was the best man for the job.
DeMarco learned that there were moral and legal lines, however, that not even Mahoney would cross, and the arbitrary placement of those lines had something to do with Mahoney’s interpretation of the word patriotism. There were even more lines that DeMarco would not cross, and more than a few times he had come close to being fired for refusing to follow Mahoney’s orders. So given a choice between working for a corrupt politician and being a normal lawyer who sued whoever was suable, DeMarco would have opted for normal lawyer. Unfortunately, he didn’t have any experience doing whatever normal lawyers did.
Brian Kincaid’s mother was a frail, gray-haired widow in her late sixties who lived alone in a small house badly in need of a gardener and a coat of paint. Her fingers were swollen and gnarled with rheumatoid arthritis. She gave DeMarco the same reception her son had given him: she hugged him with all the strength in her thin arms, telling him he was an “absolute godsend” for helping her boy—and, naturally, DeMarco felt guilty. He was about 50 percent certain that Brian Kincaid was a liar and a murderer—and 100 percent certain that he wasn’t going to be able to get him out of jail.
DeMarco had gone to Mrs. Kincaid’s house because that’s where all of Kincaid’s records were stored—everything related to his trial, motions and appeals filed by his lawyer, and reports from the private detective he’d hired. Kincaid’s mom led him down to her basement and showed him four cardboard boxes stacked next to her washing machine. DeMarco thought for a moment about taking the boxes back to his house to review the paperwork—and instantly rejected that idea. First, he didn’t want the boxes cluttering up his house. Second, he’d have to lug the boxes up Mrs. Kincaid’s basement stairs and out to his car, and then repeat the lugging procedure at his place. But the main reason he decided not to take the boxes was because if he took them, he’d have to return them—and that meant he’d have to face Kincaid’s mother again, which was something he didn’t want to do.
He asked Mrs. Kincaid if it would be okay to review the records there in the basement, and she showed him a dusty, folding card table and folding chairs stacked in a corner. Next, she brought him a Coke and a ham sandwich; if he’d asked her to, she would have stood over him waving a fan to keep him cool.
DeMarco, cynic that he was, believed that this was the most important part of his assignment. His job was not to free Brian Kincaid; his job was to get Mary Pat Mahoney off her husband’s back. The best way to do this, he figured, was to let Mrs. Kincaid see him sitting there for several hours poring diligently over her son’s case. She would be an eyewitness to his earnest toil, and she would then pass this testimony on to Mary Pat.
The trial transcript and police reports matched what Kincaid had already told him: that the case had been a slam dunk for the prosecutor. Downing’s body had been discovered at nine-fifty and Kincaid had left the building, per the security guard, at nine-thirty. Unfortunately, forensic medicine couldn’t determine if Downing had been killed between nine-fifteen and nine-thirty, when Kincaid and Downing were in the building together, or if he’d been killed between nine-thirty and nine-fifty, as Kincaid claimed. The prosecutor didn’t really have to determine the exact time of death, however, because he could establish that Kincaid hated Downing, that Downing had been killed with Kincaid’s gun, and, most important, that no one else had been in the building other than the security guard when Downing was killed. Regarding Kincaid’s defense—that someone else had killed Downing and framed Kincaid—there was no physical evidence or witnesses to support the theory that some unknown person had snuck into the building and shot Downing after Kincaid left.
An interesting twist to the case was that after Kincaid allegedly killed Downing, he went to a bar a block from his office and drank for two hours before going home. Kincaid’s attorney argued that this proved that Kincaid was innocent, because no sane person would kill a man and then calmly go to a nearby bar and have a drink. The prosecutor countered by saying that Kincaid was so rattled by what he had done that after he stashed the murder weapon in the trunk of his car, he had needed a drink. The jury liked the prosecutor’s explanation better.
The burning question—a question that Brian Kincaid had spent the last two years considering—was this: Why would someone want to frame him for Phil Downing’s murder? There were only two plausible explanations. The first was that somebody hated Brian Kincaid, wanted him to spend twenty-five years in prison, and shot Downing and framed Kincaid with this end in mind. The problem with this theory was that Kincaid couldn’t think of anybody who hated him that much, not even his ex-wife. And if somebody did hate him that much, why not just kill him instead of framing him for Downing’s murder?
The second explanation, which Kincaid favored, was that somebody wanted Phil Downing dead but didn’t want to give the police the opportunity to find the real murderer, so Brian Kincaid was framed to give the cops an immediate and perfect suspect. And that’s pretty much what happened. Once the police were convinced that Kincaid was their guy, they spent no time at all looking for another suspect—and DeMarco didn’t blame them.
Prior to his arrest, Kincaid had earned about ninety thousand dollars a year, and spent most of what he earned. To pay for his defense he exhausted his meager savings, sold his house and all his furnishings. To pay for the private detective, he sold his car. The private detective then spent a hundred hours—at a hundred and twenty bucks per hour—trying to find an alternative suspect for Phil Downing’s murder or evidence to force a retrial. He failed.
Two and a half hours after descending into Mrs. Kincaid’s basement, DeMarco emerged, carrying a single sheet of paper on which he’d made a few notes—and the complete conviction that Brian Kincaid was totally screwed
. As he was leaving, Mrs. Kincaid hugged him and thanked him again for everything he was doing—which made DeMarco feel just awful.
10
The private detective that Brian Kincaid had hired was a retired cop named Colin Gordon. He was a burly, bald-headed man with hound dog eyes and enormous ears, and he had a habit of tugging on his big right ear as he talked. His office was in a strip mall in Fairfax and there was a bail bondsman on one side and a personal injury lawyer on the other, guys who probably provided Gordon most of his business.
“I never could make up my mind whether Kincaid killed Downing or not,” Gordon said. “You look at the evidence, and you just have to believe he did it. But if you talk to the guy, you tend to believe he’s innocent. What about you, DeMarco? Do you think he’s innocent?”
“I don’t know,” DeMarco said, “but you’re right. He doesn’t seem like the type who would kill somebody, but maybe he’s just a good actor. And I’m probably wasting my time and yours, but I wanted to see if there was anything you didn’t put in the reports you gave Kincaid.”
Gordon frowned. “You think I held out on a client?”
“No, no. I’m not suggesting you did anything improper. What I’m asking is if there were things you didn’t report because they were just impressions, things you couldn’t verify. You know, a gut feeling you had but couldn’t prove.”
Gordon relaxed, satisfied DeMarco wasn’t impugning him. “Nah,” he said, “there wasn’t anything like that. I told Kincaid everything, but I never came close to finding something that could help him.” Gordon gave his big right ear another tug. “Kincaid probably told you, but my main job was to find somebody who had a reason to frame him for Downing’s murder. But there just wasn’t anybody like that. No one.
“When I was cop I worked robbery-homicide and never had a case involving a lobbyist, but based on what I read in the papers about people like Jack Abramoff, I was under the impression they were these slick-talking, evil guys that bribed congressmen and took them out on their yachts and hooked ’em up with beautiful babes. Well, if Downing or Kincaid did anything like that, I didn’t see any evidence of it. Mostly all they did was stay on top of laws that Congress was working on, see how the laws would affect their clients, and pass on what they learned. And Kincaid and Downing were about as ordinary as you could get. Neither one was rich, so stealing their money wasn’t a motive for murder or for framing Kincaid. They’d both been divorced, Downing twice, but their ex-wives had moved on and weren’t interested in some big vendetta. They didn’t have any enemies that I could find. They weren’t suing anybody. They weren’t screwing women who were with other men. They weren’t going to be federal witnesses against some slimeball congressman.”
“What about their clients?” DeMarco asked. “Maybe one of them was blackmailing a client because he discovered the client was doing something illegal, and the client decided to take care of the blackmailer.”
“Dumb as that idea is,” Gordon said, “I considered it.”
DeMarco was offended; he didn’t think it was such a dumb idea.
“In the case of Kincaid’s clients,” Gordon said, “I just asked Kincaid if he was doing anything like that. Since the guy had already been arrested for murder when he hired me, I figured he wasn’t going to lie to me if he was blackmailing someone. Well, Kincaid said that not only wasn’t he a blackmailer, he didn’t know anything his clients did that would make them targets for blackmail. All of them were these dink-ass European and Asian companies, he never visited any of their operations, and if they were using slave labor or dumping toxic chemicals, he wouldn’t have known a thing about it. So I’m pretty sure that one of Kincaid’s clients didn’t kill Phil Downing and frame him for murder because he was trying to extort money from them.”
“What about Downing’s clients?” DeMarco asked.
“At the time of his death, Downing only had one client. He’d lost the others when the economy turned to shit.”
DeMarco now remembered that Kincaid had told him this—that Phil Downing was just barely making ends meet before he was killed.
“And his client was the Warwick Foundation,” Gordon continued. “Do you know what the Warwick Foundation does, DeMarco?”
“No.”
“It’s a nonprofit that sends relief supplies and doctors and medicine to places that get hit by natural disasters. Or if there’s a war going on someplace like Lebanon or Darfur, Warwick tries to get supplies to the losers. As near as I can tell, Lizzie Warwick is the closest thing this country has to Mother Teresa.”
“That still doesn’t mean—”
Gordon silenced DeMarco by raising one of his big paws. “Even though I didn’t think it very likely that Lizzie Warwick had Downing killed, I still did some digging. The main thing I did was look to see if Downing had recently gotten rich. I mean, if you’re blackmailing someone it’s usually for money, so I checked Downing’s bank accounts, but I didn’t see any evidence of a large deposit or periodic payments from some strange source. I also looked to see if he’d bought any big-ticket items—a boat, a fancy new car, anything like that. He hadn’t. I even—and if you tell anybody I said this, I’ll call you a liar—I even broke into Downing’s house and searched it for a bagful of cash. I didn’t find one. The other thing I did was ask a lot of people about Warwick to see if anybody had heard anything funny about her—some kind of scandal, legal problems, boyfriend problems, anything off-color. Naturally, everybody I talked to thought I was nuts. And you know what I concluded after I did all this digging, DeMarco?”
“No. What?”
“I concluded that the only person who hated Phil Downing enough to kill him was Brian Kincaid.”
It sounded to DeMarco like Gordon had been pretty thorough. “What about this secretary they shared? Kincaid told me Downing was having an affair with her.”
“Strictly speaking, it wasn’t an affair, because Downing wasn’t married when he was dating her and she was single, too. I talked to her a couple of times to see if she knew anything that would help, but she wasn’t all that helpful. For one thing, she was convinced Kincaid had killed her boyfriend and she knew I was trying to help Kincaid. But it’s been over a year since I talked to her. Maybe she’s through grieving and will open up to you.”
DeMarco got the impression that Sharon Palmer spent a lot of time, effort, and money to make herself attractive to men, just as a skilled hunter takes care baiting a trap. Her clothes were fashionable; her dyed ash-blonde hair was nicely styled; her makeup was perfectly applied. Unfortunately, nature had conspired against her. Her eyes were small and set too close to a sharp nose, her lips were thin, and the lines bracketing her mouth were evident through her makeup. Her breasts, however, were outstanding. They were large, well formed, and very noticeable—and DeMarco was willing to bet that Sharon had taken out a loan to have them made just that way.
She worked for a trade association that represented scrap metal recyclers. Her office was near Dupont Circle, and DeMarco was fortunate to arrive there just as she was about to leave work for the day. This was fortunate because when he asked Sharon if he could buy her a drink while he asked a few questions about Kincaid and Downing, he could tell that the idea of a free after-work drink appealed to her even if the subject matter didn’t. He could also tell that he appealed to her.
They walked to a bar a block from her office. Sharon had a company security badge and a key card on a lanyard around her neck, and as soon as they arrived at the bar, she took off the lanyard and dumped the badge and key card into her purse, then dropped the purse on the floor at her feet. She ordered a Manhattan and, because that sounded good, DeMarco ordered one, too. He couldn’t help but notice that she looked better in the dim lighting in the bar and, with the body she had, he could understand why Phil Downing had been attracted to her.
“What did you do for Downing and Kincaid?” DeMarco
asked. He already knew she’d been their secretary, but he wanted to get her to start talking. He also wanted to get enough booze into her to get her to keep talking.
“Not much,” she said. “I’d mail stuff to their clients, print off articles from the Internet, get copies of bills making their way through the House and the Senate, make appointments for them. That sort of thing. Mostly what they wanted was for me to answer the phone and say, ‘I’m sorry, but Mr. Downing is having lunch with Senator McCain and won’t be back until two.’ Not that either one of them ever met with McCain or anybody else that important.”
“Did you handle their billing?”
“No, they billed the clients themselves and kept their own books. They had a joint account they put money into for office expenses—you know, the rent, the phone bill, my salary, that sort of thing. I’d pay the office expenses out of the joint account, keep track of the expenses, and about every two months they’d have a giant fight because something cost too much or one of them didn’t like the copy machine we leased or something stupid like that.”
“I heard that you and Phil Downing dated.”
She shrugged. “I’m an unmarried forty-year-old woman”—
DeMarco guessed she was closer to forty-five—“with a seventeen-year-old daughter who’s a complete bitch. Phil wasn’t totally unattractive, he wasn’t married, and he asked me out. I never figured he was going to marry me and take care of me for the rest of my life, but being with him was better than spending every night alone with my daughter.”