Bird's-Eye View

by J. F. Freedman

  I nod.

  “How does this place tie into the murder my cousin Marcus is investigating?” He leans toward me, across the table. “You ain’t involved in drug-running, or anything stupid like that, are you?”

  “No. I’m not involved in anything illegal. Stupid, maybe, but not criminal.”

  “Then where’s this coming from?”

  I freshen my coffee, top his off. “Let’s go back to the conversation we had that night at dinner. Your cousin is working on a murder case. The body was found in some dump in Baltimore, his city. Except he doesn’t think that’s where the murder took place. You remember that?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “He’s right. It wasn’t.”

  “How do you know that?”

  I trust Fred, but I have to be careful. “We’re off the record, right?”

  “Until you say otherwise. Or tell me you’ve committed a crime, in which case I’d be honor-bound to report it.”

  “I haven’t committed any crimes, so let’s keep going like we’re doing.” Now that I’ve started I don’t want to get bogged down and lose my courage. “Does the name James Roach ring a bell?”

  He thinks a moment. “Name sounds familiar. Didn’t he buy property down here a while back?”

  “Almost a hundred acres. On which he’s built a big house, a dock for his big boat, a runway for his own private airplane. He’s a rich man, he likes his toys.”

  “Sounds like it,” Fred says. “But what does that have to do with Marcus’s case?”

  “The murder happened on that property.”

  Fred leans back, arms clasped behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. “How do you know?”

  “I can’t tell you, not yet. You’re going to have to trust me.”

  His look to me is very skeptical. Casting his eye around my abode, the decor of which is ramshackle bachelor at its best—and these days it isn’t at its best—he says, “Do you still smoke weed?”

  “Come on, man, what does that have to do with anything?”

  “Easy there, big fella. I’m not a cop anymore, I’m not out to bust you. I’m just wondering if you’ve been hallucinating these days. I mean, that’s a pretty wild statement you just made.”

  “Maybe it is. But I didn’t imagine it, Fred. I know it for a fact.”

  “Did you see it? Did someone you know see it? What?”

  I shake my head. “I’ll tell you everything—when I can. I’m not ready yet. Can I keep going?”

  He sits back, waiting to be convinced, expecting not to be. “Go ahead.”

  “The man who was killed last night?”

  “Uh huh?”

  “He worked for Roach. He was his security chief. Before that, he was in the CIA.” I pause. “Roach, in case you didn’t know it, is an assistant secretary of state.”

  All of a sudden Fred’s not so skeptical. “Damn!”

  I take a deep breath. “I believe that James Roach is involved in both those murders.”

  Fred whistles, a sharp intake of breath. “You know how big a stink it would be if he was?”

  “Of course I do. Which is why, before I go any further down this path I’m already too far down, there are things I have to know.”

  “Like what?” Fred asks suspiciously.

  He should be leery of me, I’m a loose cannon, I’m accusing someone of multiple murder. A man of power and position. And if I’m right, a supremely dangerous man. “You’re not a cop anymore. You can walk a looser line than the authorities. I’m not going to ask you to do anything illegal,” I assure him. “I’m asking you to help me, before I cut loose with this officially.”

  He sits back, taking this in. We’re casual friends, but he doesn’t really know me. I could be a crackpot, a conspiracy freak. “What do you want from me?” he asks warily.

  “I need to find connections to Roach. I can’t do it by myself, I don’t have your resources.”

  He thinks about the gravity of what I’m telling him. “We should go to the cops with this.”

  “No! Not yet.”

  The vehemence of my response surprises him. “Why not? Two men have been killed, Fritz. My cousin’s already working on one of the cases. Let me go to him with this.”

  I shake my head obstinately. “I’m not ready.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Where’s the proof? My word that I know about a murder? Or two? We can’t move prematurely on this. Roach is an insider. You know how that works. Look how the Kennedy family’s covered their shit for generations. This breaks too soon, Roach will cover his ass ten ways to Sunday. This isn’t for the police yet,” I tell him insistently.

  “Maybe so,” he grudgingly admits.

  I reach my hand across the table. “You’ll help me? Just you and me?”

  He hesitates for a moment, then shakes my hand. “I’m in. But listen up, Fritz. If this gets real, we go to the cops straight away. We go to Marcus.”

  “Of course.”

  “I hear you say that, but I want to make sure you know what you’re in for.”

  “I do. Believe me, I do. My session with the cops sobered me up real good.”

  This is as far as we can go now. I’m not ready to show him the pictures of the murder. But I will, if we get any conclusive proof that implicates Roach. “There’s one thing I’d like to find out as soon as possible.”

  “What’s that?” He’s nervous; I don’t blame him.

  “Your cousin said there was a piece of physical evidence that led him to conclude that the diplomat’s murder wasn’t a random street shooting. Ask him if that evidence has to do with the caliber of gun used in the killing.”

  “Okay.”

  “And if that is the case,” I continue, “see if he can find out from the Prince Georges County police if the bullets that killed the diplomat came from the same kind of gun that killed Wallace, Roach’s security man.”

  “I’ll try. Marcus can get a ballistics report from them, see if the bullets match up, his case and this one last night. But I’ve got to take it careful how I ask him. I’ll figure something out,” he assures me pridefully. He’s excited about getting involved—beats the shit out of chasing down deadbeat dads. He puts a supportive hand on my shoulder. “Men like Roach have no conscience, Fritz. If you want to nail his ass to the wall, you’d better be airtight with your evidence. And if we do find out he’s dirty—know it for real?—it becomes the police’s business. Marcus’s business. We square on that?”

  “Yes,” I tell him. “We’re square.”

  • • •

  I need to get my head out of this morass. I grab my camera gear, jump into my boat, and go down to my island. The birds rustle about when I arrive, a massive cloud of feathers, beaks, talons. Do they recognize me, I wonder, do they know me as anything beyond a form with a feedbag? I don’t know, I’m not versed in bird behavior. That will be something I can explore with Maureen—learning more about these magical, wonderful creatures.

  Ollie won’t be part of that, though. Before Maureen leaves to go back to Boston he’ll be transported to some new place, for his own good. That he won’t decide whether it’s for his own good, but human beings will, is beside the point.

  Standing apart from the others, he stares at me with his gimlet eye from a safe distance, more for me than for him. Even though I’ve kept my distance, I believe that he knows me. If, as Jung postulates, there is such a thing as the collective unconscious, why should that not extend to all the creatures of God’s kingdom, the beasts in the field, the fish in the streams, and the birds in the sky, like Ollie? Why should it only be humans that are afforded this wonderful, ongoing participation in the universe? Don’t the Hindus believe that we return in another life as someone else? So why not as animals, or birds, rather than limiting the field to humans, such a young and imperfect species.

  I don’t stay long. It isn’t the same anymore. A secret’s no longer a secret when others know about it. And there’s something else, mor
e ominous. I have a strong premonition that, like Ollie, I’m being closely observed through someone’s binoculars or telescopic lens, a specimen under magnification, to be studied, analyzed, dissected. And when my watcher decides the time is right, or necessary, to be captured and taken away. Or worse.

  The two scary-looking men are waiting for me when I tie up at my dock. They’re dressed identically: muscle T-shirts, designer jeans, running shoes, intimidating mirrored sunglasses. Clones of Wallace, still warm in his grave. They’re polite, but firm. “Mr. Roach wants to see you.”

  “That didn’t take long,” I mutter to myself, under my breath. I push my way past them toward my shack, my gear slung over my shoulder. I’m putting on a brave show. Not how I feel. “I’ll give him a call, figure out a time,” I say over my shoulder, as if what they’ve told me is no big deal. The same bluff I tried to run unsuccessfully on the P.G. County lady cop.

  They don’t buy my act any more than she did. “He’ll see you now.” Not he’d like to see you now. A simple declarative phrase: He will.

  • • •

  They drive me to Roach’s estate in one of his Range Rovers. I sit in the back, alone. My escorts are in front. The windows are heavily tinted. We can see out, no one can see in.

  Security at chez Roach has been beefed up since my last visit. Two armed guards man a gated entrance. The gate swings open and the guards wave us through. I feel like I’m being driven through Checkpoint Charlie into the Soviet sector of Berlin, before the fall of the Wall.

  We take the cutoff that leads toward Roach’s house. After a couple hundred yards we enter into a clearing, and I get my first look at it—I’ve seen the airfield and the dock, but not the residence itself. Staring out the car windows, I catch a glimpse of water several hundred yards away, down a sloping lawn. The runway is located on the other side of the property, over a quarter-mile away. I can see only a sliver of it, not enough to tell if there are any planes there.

  The car pulls up in front and stops. One of my escorts opens my door. I get out and look around.

  The house is contemporary in design. Glass all around, supported by raw foundations of concrete overlaid with quarried stone and slabs of cedar siding, juxtaposed in a long, L-shaped one-story building. The front door opens. Roach steps out. “Thank you for coming on short notice,” he greets me, without a trace of irony in his voice. The way he’s acting it’s as if Wallace never existed, let alone that he was just killed, almost certainly murdered.

  We go inside. Roach shuts the door behind us. My escorts stay outside. This is going to be between him and me. No middlemen. No witnesses.

  I look around. Several paintings hang on the walls. I spot a Diebenkorn, a Miró, a couple of Hockneys. Originals, not knockoffs. The man has taste. And a fortune to express it.

  “The art wasn’t as pricey as you’d think,” he says as he observes me staring admiringly at his collection. We’re passing through an atrium-like room. The roof, at least thirty feet over our heads, is a skylight of leaded-glass panes, while the floors we’re walking on are marble. To put an exclamation point on the opulence there’s an irregular granite pond in the center of the space in which several large koi, some over four feet long, are swimming back and forth. There could be fifty thousand dollars’ worth of fish in that pool—koi are ridiculously expensive. One entire wall—glass, curtainless—faces out toward the water. I feel like I’m in a museum rather than a private home.

  “I’m a lucky collector, fortunately,” Roach informs me. “When I was young I had an older friend who was an art dealer. He took me under his wing, put me on to the artists who were going to appreciate. I have a Diebenkorn that I got for under five thousand dollars, for example. Same with my Julian Schnabels and David Salles. Hockney I had to pay considerably more, of course.” He laughs. “My first wife and I were eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches so I could buy art. Fortunately, I kept most of the good paintings when we divorced. I brought a few of them out here when I built this house, but most remain in my home in Washington. If I can ever manage to live here more permanently, I’ll bring more of my art. As you may have noticed, the house was built with showing art in mind.”

  He leads me into a small room, his study. It’s furnished traditionally—a room for work, not show. Papers and books are sprawled across a slab-stone desk. The floor, an exotic wood with an intricate pattern, is covered with a beautiful Persian rug. He indicates a leather chair in front of his desk. “Make yourself comfortable,” he says ironically.

  You’re an asshole and a bully, I think as I warily settle into the chair. Roach sits across from me, steeples his fingers, sights me across them. “I think you bear some responsibility for Wade Wallace’s killing,” he says bluntly.

  Okay—the shoe has dropped, with a thud. He wants to get into it? I’ll oblige him, I have no choice. I’m nervous about what he might do—I’d be crazy not to be—but I’m not scared shitless. And I know that the more I back down, the worse it will be.

  “You told the cops in Prince Georges County that I threatened Wallace, didn’t you?” I reply aggressively. “Assaulted him physically,” I snort. “It feels to me like you’re trying to set me up.”

  “I also told them that, in my opinion, you’re incapable of killing. You’re not the killer type.” The way he says it, it isn’t a ringing compliment. “When I said you had something to do with it, I didn’t mean directly.” He spreads his hands on the desk. I notice that his fingernails are manicured. “Let’s cut the crap and try to have an honest conversation. Can we?”

  An honest conversation with James Roach. I love it.

  “Wallace’s killing—murder—wasn’t a result of a robbery,” he says.

  “How do you know that?” I parry. I want to see what I can pry out of him. “Just because Wallace was a security expert doesn’t mean he couldn’t be robbed, the same as anyone else, does it? If he was working for you full-time he wouldn’t have been at his house much. An experienced burglar would have known that, wouldn’t he?” I take a beat. “Unless you were there.”

  He jerks—I’ve zinged him, and he felt it. Almost immediately, though, he regains his composure. “That’s too nonsensical a fantasy for me to even comment on. Wade was a professional. A common thief, even an experienced one, couldn’t have gotten the jump on him.”

  That’s how Buster had put it, which reinforces my concerns about him. Is he feeding information about me to Roach? What did he actually say to Roach, or to Roach’s friend, Clements? Did he tell them I’d shown him a picture of the diplomat’s killing? Does Roach know the murder happened on his farm? If he’s dirty, as I think he is, he must.

  Shit. My situation is getting worse by the day, it seems. Maybe I’m being watched around the clock, not just when I’m near Roach’s property. That would rip it completely. I feel like I’m a yo-yo on the end of a string. Up, down, up, down, around the world, walking the dog. I’m the dog.

  “What I do is very delicate,” Roach says. “Much of it is classified. Even what isn’t is extremely sensitive.” He leans forward. “You’re fucking things up, Fritz. You may not understand that, but you are.”

  “You mean I’m not playing the game by your rules?”

  My continuing belligerence startles him—he’s not used to being contradicted or challenged. But he maintains his outward calm.

  “It’s like this: there are actions I have to undertake that can be misinterpreted and used the wrong way. When that happens, catastrophic consequences can occur. Witness Wallace’s death.”

  Or the counselor on your runway. How much blood do you have on your hands? “Are you telling me that Wallace’s getting killed had something to do with your position in the government? That lets me off the hook as a suspect, doesn’t it?” I smile—I’ve trumped you, you bastard.

  His face clouds. He gets up, walks around the desk, hovers over me. “That’s the least of your worries,” he says darkly. “You’re messing around where you shouldn’t be, Fritz. That
’s what you really need to be worried about. Do you understand?”

  I go rigid. That’s a direct threat.

  I cannot let this man intimidate me. Or more important, let him know that he is. Of course he can scare me, he can scare the bejesus out of me, he’s doing it right now. But I have to put up a strong front. “No,” I tell him. “I don’t understand.”

  “You’ve been spying on me.”

  I grip the arms on the chair. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He points out the window. “From out there, on the water. You have a clear view of my compound. You’re the only person I know who does,” he adds ominously.

  I wince.

  “You didn’t think anyone’s seen you? You think you can outfox me, or outwit me?” He pats me on the knee, like a kindly country doctor patting a kid before he gives him a booster shot. Then he walks to the window and looks out. “I’ve worked hard for what I have. I’m not going to let some dilettante fuck things up. My work, my reputation.”

  He isn’t looking at me when he’s saying that. He’s looking outside, at the fulfillment of some dream. He turns to face me. “Stay away from my property,” he says harshly.

  “That’s fine with me,” I answer. “But don’t tell me what I can or can’t do on mine. I was here long before you, pal.” My feeling of proprietorship kicks in hard. “We owned this place, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “And now you don’t,” he throws in my face. “I repeat—you stay away from me. My work, the people I employ, everything.” He stabs me in the chest with his forefinger for emphasis. I flinch at the unexpected physical encounter. “I’m advising you as a friend of your mother’s, Fritz. Don’t push this any further. I went to Wallace’s funeral yesterday. I don’t want to have to go to any others.”

  • • •

  The two thugs drive me back to my house, and leave. I go inside. I’m shaken. One of my worst fears has been confirmed—Roach has been spying on me. For how long? Going back to when the counselor was killed? I doubt that. Roach wasn’t around, no one knew about me—but anything’s possible now.