My King The President

by Tom Lewis

  He was back in less than an hour, and Walt’s Plymouth was now parked in the employee’s area of the basement parking garage, next to the door marked “Hotel Staff Only”; a door, which took a personal magnetic ID card to unlock. Cecil handed me his card and assured me he wouldn’t get into trouble. “I’ll simply report it lost. They will issue me another one. Once you’re inside, take three steps to the right. There is a service elevator that goes to every floor. Anything else?”

  “No, not at the moment. You’re amazing, my friend.”

  “Glad to be of service.” Ever the gentleman, he pocketed the bills I handed him without counting them.

  I let him out and sat down with my rip sheet. The thing that was bothering me the most was the way Koontz had taken my bait. Okay, so he’d set the FBI dogs on me, looking for Mac’s non-existent diaries, and gotten me fired from the paper, but all in all, a relatively mild reaction. Practically anyone with his influence and a reputation to protect would have done the same in a snit. Also, what, if anything, did he have to do with Jean Tyndall’s death, which I knew could not possibly have been a suicide. All of a sudden, a flash came to me. “Walt?”

  He looked up from his work. “Yessir?”

  “I just thought of something that might narrow your search for those six men. Each of them would’ve had some personal connection with the Judge.”

  “Really? Well! That’ll certainly make the cross checking easier. We’re almost done here, and I can get started on it. I’ve tied into my home computer, too. All you need to do is type in my password, which is—”

  I grabbed the phone on the first ring. “Hello?”

  “Mr. Willard?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Betty Kucinski. Remember? Joe Mackenzie’s wife? Can I talk to you?”

  I took a quick breath. “Sure. Yes, ma’am, of course you can.”

  “I don’t mean on the phone.”

  “All right. I understand. Where are you?”

  “I’m in the hotel lobby. I took a bus down from Bethesda.”

  I had to think fast. “Please listen carefully, Miz Kucinski. Go outside and take a cab to Reilly’s Bar and Grill. It’s in Chelsea. Whatever the cab fare costs, I’ll pay for it. I can meet you there right away. Can you do that?”

  “Uh, huh. What’s the name of it again?”

  “Reilly’s Bar and Grill. On Flanagan Avenue. Got it?”

  “I think so. Reilly’s, on Flanagan Avenue. You’ll meet me there?”

  “I’m on my way right now.”

  I hung up, headed for the door at a run, hoping she had it right. “Walt, I’m borrowing your car for a while. Be back soon as I can.”

  I was halfway to the service elevator when Cal yelled at me, “I told Sammy and Pete to come here for dinner. Will you be back by seven?”

  “I don’t know. Just put it on my tab. See you later.”

  Betty wanted to eat first. Sean Reilly, after wringing my hand and thanking me profusely for what I had “done for that poor girl, Liz” had graciously offered their private dining room, and Moira served us enough food for a large family! I had little appetite, but “Old Sarge’s” common law wife ate enough for both of us, taking plenty of time to do it, too. By the time she polished off a huge piece of apple pie, it was after seven, and I was like the old long-tailed cat in the room full of rocking chairs; outwardly calm, but nervous as hell on the inside. Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer. “Has there been a miracle?”

  This brought a hearty laugh from my dinner partner. “Hey, I’ll tell you what the miracle was. Back when Joe was a foul-mouthed regular at the NCO club at Bragg—he was only a buck sergeant then, and I was the waitress he couldn’t keep his paws off of—I told him if he was ever gonna get to know me the way he wanted to, he’d have to take me to church on the first date and every other date after that first one. The miracle was, he did! I took him to my church and the second time, would you believe it, he got saved. He’s been a good born again Christian ever since.”

  I kept my smile neutral. “That’s wonderful. You must have had a good life together.”

  “We did, leastwise when he was home. Most of the time he was driving that mean old General around all over the world. Sent me his check every month, though, regular. You know, you have a good face, Mr. Willard. So did your daddy. You look like folks we can trust. God-fearing folks. Can I trust you?”

  “Yes, ma’am. You can trust me. My daddy, too.”

  “I believe you. Know what tipped me off? You’re polite. Ain’t too many men say yes, ma’am and no, ma’am any more. Joe noticed that, too.”

  “He did?”

  She laughed again. “Oh, yeah.” She leaned forward, her voice dropped to nearly a whisper. “Joe ain’t paralyzed, Mr. Willard. He can hear and talk just as good as he ever did.”

  I didn’t dare say a word.

  “He’s been faking that stuff for better’n two years now. Got ’em all fooled; doctors, nurses, orderlies, everybody. But when they let me take him out for walks with him strapped in his wheelchair, where nobody can hear us, he talks to me plenty. Now he wants to talk to you.”

  “That’s… that’s great. When?”

  “Tomorrow, if you want to. Only thing is, he don’t want you to write nothing in the papers about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Same reason he’s been play acting all this time. He’s afraid if he opens his mouth to the wrong people, he’ll be killed. Could I have some more coffee?”

  It was a miracle, all right. A blessing. Another crack in my reverse maze. I didn’t mind a bit driving her home to Bethesda. Didn’t mind a bit that she talked the whole way about how nasty General Tyndall had treated her husband. How he’d teased his driver—who couldn’t talk back—unmercifully about his being a holy roller. A Jesus freak. And worse. Didn’t mind a bit when she got out, promising to pray for Cal and me every night. I didn’t even mind the annoying extra hour it took me to change the slick right rear tire on Walt’s car that blew out halfway back to Washington, and messing up one of my new suits doing it.

  I felt pretty good about everything until I got out of the service elevator on my floor and found the hall full of cops and FBI men. I didn’t start to feel really bad until I shouldered my way through them, past Thurmond Frye, and into my wreck of a room, nearly stumbling over Cecil Hathaway, whose sensual lips were formed into a small circle of surprise and whose forehead now boasted a smaller circle. No, I felt it when I saw Walt’s body lying on the littered floor behind the coffee table, an identical hole between his still open eyes. That’s when I felt bad. Real bad. When I noticed his severed hands resting on the computer keyboard, I began to get sick to my stomach.

  And when Frye told me there had been an explosion at the Sheraton Marina in Georgetown, and that my boat had been blown up, I threw up on his raincoat, then felt my legs go out from under me.

  Chapter 10

  There is no kind of pain like the anguish of losing a close friend. None. And if you add to it the belief that you are responsible for their death, the hurt is unbearable. Experienced combat soldiers know not to allow themselves to get too close to a buddy for just that reason. When the guy next to you in the foxhole gets blown away, you still have to function. You can’t afford the time to be sorry or to ask, why him and not me? When I came to in Cal’s room, slapping away shock along with the hand holding smelling salts under my nose, my first thought was that I was the guy in the foxhole who survived. I had to function. To go on. To fight. Two people were dead because of me; one because he was trying to help me, and one simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I had to find some way to insulate myself from that agony of conscience.

  At least long enough to find their killers.

  And when I found them, I’d kill them. This I knew.

  Much later, Cal would say that when I came to, I had a different look on my face and in my eyes. One that scared him. A cold look. Like dry ice. He was absolutely right. W
hat I felt was not the torture of grief. Not sorrow. Not even recrimination. No, what Cal saw on my face was a mask. A mask of manufactured calm concealing rage. A pure, white-hot hatred that had begun building inside me like the first deep rumblings of a wakening volcano. I would do my grieving later. Blame myself later. Shed the private, bitter tears of loss later. Right now I had to think. Act.

  My head was crystal clear. I listened to and heard every word Thurmond Frye said. How it had happened: “The killer was after you, Jeb. He apparently forced Hathaway to let him in your room, shot him, and then shot Erikson, thinking it was you. At least we know who he is.”

  “You do?” Cal said. “Who?”

  “He’s a top-dollar pro. We don’t know his real name, but the arrogant son of a bitch always leaves one of two calling cards; either the chopped-off hands of his target, or his nickname—‘Hemiola’—written somewhere in the victim’s blood. We think he’s Latino. Maybe Puerto Rican or Cuban. Operates in both North and South America. Interpol thinks he’s responsible for maybe twenty or thirty assassinations, from Canada to Chile, mostly political, but we think most of the six or seven murders attributed to him in our country were Mafia hits.”

  When Frye mentioned Mafia hits, a name jumped into my mind, and a second later I was dead certain I knew who was calling the shots that had killed Walt and Cecil. Ezekiel Koontz had ordered my death sure as God made little green apples. If you can’t find the diaries, kill the guy who knows where they are, right?

  “But why blow up the boat?” Cal wanted to know.

  I watched Frye shrug, then give an honest answer. “We don’t know. Not yet, but we’ll find out. Count on it.” He turned back to me. “Jeb, somebody wants those diaries bad. Where are they?”

  “There are no diaries. I told your man Barnes that already.”

  “Why do I have such a hard time believing that?”

  “That’s your problem. You want me to take a polygraph?”

  “I might, later on, but first things first. What to do with you right now.”

  My mind was working hard. “Bury me.”

  “What?”

  “Bury me. Look, the killer thinks I’m dead. So does the bastard who paid for it. So let me stay dead. You’ll have a better chance of catching them that way. Besides, if they think I’m not dead, they’ll try again, and next time they won’t make any mistakes. Who were all those cops in my room?”

  “The Washington P.D. ‘M’ squad. Captain Frank Kemp and his men.”

  “They still in there?”

  “Every man, and my forensic team. Why?”

  “Can you please call Kemp in here?”

  It took thirty minutes to solidify the idea I’d had. Another hour to work out the basic details. Some of it was cruel as hell. The FBI would contact Walt’s wife, tell her that Walt had been suddenly called in to work with the CIA on some hush-hush computer project out of the country, and would later become “missing in action” somewhere in Europe. His body would be kept in the morgue until then. I would hide out at Cal’s mountain cabin near the Carolina-Tennessee border for as long as it would take. Cal himself would go there for a period of personal isolation; a fishing trip, accompanied by Sammy and Pete Suggs, who were sworn on the spot to secrecy, as was Captain Kemp and his squad.

  Neither Frye nor Kemp could think of a better plan. They didn’t have a lot of faith that the ruse would work for very long, but it just might, long enough to get a beachhead of progress on their joint investigation, plus it would keep me out of Frye’s hair permanently, which, I’m sure, was basically why he agreed to try it.

  Both also agreed to give me time to drive the Chevy to the cabin before putting the rest of the plan in place. We sent Sammy and Pete to the ramp, along with one of Kemp’s men, to pick up the car, with instructions to take it to the “back door” of the hotel. While Frye and the Washington cop went back to my room to give their orders, Cal tried to get me to lie down and rest a while. I couldn’t.

  I pantomimed writing a note. Cal nodded, fished out some hotel stationery from the side table and handed me a sheet, along with his pen. I wrote: “My room/phone was probably bugged. Yours may be, too, so don’t talk.’’

  Cal Willard hadn’t acquired my “Wom” nickname for nothing. He turned the paper over, took his pen back and wrote: “Don’t trust Frye. Don’t trust anybody. Take no more chances.”

  I shook my head. Then asked for the paper and pen back.

  “Going to cabin via Chapel Hill.”

  Cal arched one eyebrow, and nodded again. He knew as well as I did that if the plan failed, they’d go after Liz. She was Mac McCarty’s sister. Someone who might possibly know about his diaries, and dead women don’t talk any more than dead men do.

  I washed my face with cold water and waited for Frye to tell me Sammy and Pete were back with Cal’s car. I shook hands with Cal, and went back the way I’d come in to the employee’s parking area. Pete had something to say while Sammy distracted the two policemen with some unknown tactic.

  “Listen quick, Jeb. I was a Navy Seal until I retired, remember? That vessel was blown up by people who knew how to do it, and what to use. The boats on both sides of her weren’t even scorched. She imploded.” He cupped his big hands and clapped them together to show me. “Good thing Sammy and I were not aboard. Otherwise, there wouldn’t have been enough of us left to spread on a piece of toast.”

  I nodded, thanked him for the information, shook one of those big hands, and drove Cal’s Chevy out into the Washington dawn. It had begun to rain again.

  * * *

  In any normal year, this time of mid-autumn, many North Carolina natives become tourists, making annual treks to the mountains to see the enormous palette of color the forests become. It’s a kaleidoscope that’s as impressive as any drive through the New England fall foliage. This year, however, the unusual amount of heavy rain that had fallen all across the State was keeping most of them at home. Nonetheless, I-40 traffic, both ways, was enough to make me turn off and take the back roads. The ones I knew so well. I remembered the infrequent times I’d made the trip home by car, driving west to east, leaving the Great Smokies with their heads in the clouds and their toes in the Pigeon River, and rushing like a lemming down Black Mountain toward the coast, full of nostalgic anticipation. I remembered how the large cities had become larger, the small ones smaller; something that bothered me. What had bothered me more, though, had been the gaps in the pine forests, where loggers had taken what they wanted and left denuded acres looking like grainy news film of war zones. I’d pass rusting clusters of drooping mailboxes standing like squads of tired soldiers guarding dusty crossroads and rotting derelicts that had once been proud, whitewashed farmhouses. Most of them had been long abandoned to their swaybacked misery along with their broods of tobacco barns, all totally enveloped in vine and weed, like neglected graves.

  Sometimes I’d stop and get out of the car to stretch, and watch a large family scavenge a peanut field, mining the tender nuggets left behind by the harvesting machine. I’d enjoy the smell of it, chuckling softly as I noticed some of the women wearing old fashioned bonnets tied with sashes as faded as my memories of Grandma, who wore them with grace and dignity. Often, there would be a small cemetery next to the field. The closer I got to Tryon’s Cove, the more of them I’d see. Then I’d smell the brackish water lapping roots of the cypress trees, and I knew I’d be home soon.

  Those had been happier days, and seemed like a century ago. Now, I was driving in the opposite direction towards God knows what, and with a partner I had figuratively kidnapped. I hadn’t wanted to take any chance of seeing or talking to the Johnsons, so I’d parked a block down the street from their house. Luckily, Liz had emerged less than half an hour later, on her way to some class. I had gotten out of the car and waited for her. Lost in her thoughts, she hadn’t recognized me until she was no more than a dozen feet away, then she’d rushed into my arms, given me a quick kiss, “Jeb!” Then another one. Deeper and
longer. A kiss that under any other circumstances would have sent me into a different plane of existence altogether. I had shoved her into the Chevy and driven out of Chapel Hill as fast as legally possible. We were nearly south of Greensboro before I finished telling her everything.

  She was quiet, then. Not sullen, only pensive. For a hundred miles. I knew she was trying hard to think it through. Understand it all, and I wasn’t much help. She asked very few questions, and finally said, “Jeb, I don’t want to die, and I don’t want you to die either. Why don’t we just keep on driving? Like maybe to California?”

  That was a question I had a hard time trying to answer. I couldn’t tell her that three ghosts and the blue fire in my belly made such a tempting act impossible. The best I could do was, “You’ll be safe at the cabin. We both will.”

  I stopped at Wal Mart stores on the outskirts of Hickory, Statesville, and Asheville, sending Liz into each one with cash to buy a few warm clothes, hiking boots, and personal toiletries. Using a credit card was out of the question, and I didn’t want to drop a large amount in any one place, but thankfully, money was not a problem. I still had better than two grand in my wallet, left over from the five I’d taken out of the bank when I’d deposited Helene Fordham’s down payment.

  And so, we arrived at the cabin’s oak gate just before dusk. The first thing I noticed was the difference in temperature. Much colder than usual. The first thing Liz noticed was the noise. “What is it, Jeb? Sounds like the ocean.”

  “It’s the river. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  I took my time driving down the zigzag macadam driveway to the house, explaining to Liz that Cal had bought the cabin and the sixteen acres of sloping wilderness right after my mother had died. “There were no neighbors within ten miles then, and even fewer now. We always came up here for a few weeks each summer, and every other year Cal would bring his Boy Scout Troop up here for camping, fishing, and rafting. After we unpack, I’ll show you the cave we found, too. Real Robinson Crusoe stuff.”