Damage Control

by Michael Bowen

  The cops exchanged glances. In my mind I whistled in admiration. Is my guy good or what?

  “We were wondering if we could take a look at your shoes,” the black detective said.

  “Sure.” Rafe pulled off the same New Balance cross-trainers he’d run in that morning and handed them over. “I have two or three other pairs upstairs in my closet. We can go up together and get them, if you want.”

  “Only two or three?” the white detective said joshingly. “You must be a guy.”

  “‘Brilliant deduction, Holmes.’” Rafe matched the cop’s between-us-boys grin.

  In his stocking feet he led the white detective upstairs while the black detective compared the soles of the cross-trainers to a printout that looked to me like it had to be next to useless—but what do I know? When Rafe and the white cop returned, they’d left Rafe’s dress shoes—a pair of black Allen Edmonds Park Avenues and a pair of oxblood Hickey Freeman slip-ons—back at the bedroom. The only shoes they brought down were a pair of Rockport waffle-stompers that Rafe used for serious hiking. After a hard look at those, they shook their heads.

  “Do you own any other shoes?” the white detective asked.

  “I may have a pair in my kit-locker at Capitol Fitness. Can’t remember, to be honest. I don’t get down there as often as I should, and frankly it’s starting to show.” Rafe patted his almost board-flat gut while he unholstered his phone. “Hate to send you on a wild goose chase, but I guess you can’t leave any stone unturned. I’ll text Johnny to open it up so you can take a look if you think it’s worth the trouble.”

  The black detective turned back to me. I wouldn’t call his eyes hard. Gentle and coaxing, if anything. But I would definitely call them focused.

  “Do you know of any other shoes your husband might own, Ms. Kendall?”

  “No, I can’t say that I do.” I grinned—my winsome grin, the one that would make Pollyanna blush—as I gave the answer without hesitation. “I have an uncle who sometimes says if a man doesn’t own shoes older than his wife he’s not worth month-old crawfish pie, but Rafe isn’t that type.”

  “You’re sure about that walk in the garden thing, now that you’ve had a chance to think about it?” the white detective prompted. “That’s not something you and he did every time you went out there?”

  “Nope, can’t say that it was.”

  “Thanks,” both detectives said at once as they stood up.

  They left. They didn’t take any of the shoes with them. I retrieved my martini while Rafe mixed a G&T for himself. He sipped. I spoke.

  “Well, this sucks.”

  “Yep.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Rafe and I talked it through while we savored the cocktails and then fixed dinner together. Spinach salad and baked Atlantic cod with lemon sauce—nothing you could screw up just because you had your mind on something else.

  “They’re hinting at some half-assed theory that you collaborated with the killer.” Rafe took more than a sip from his diluted gin. You might almost call it a gulp. “That you arranged to get Schroeder to a particular spot at a particular time so the shooter could ambush him.”

  “That’s what it sounded like to me, all right. But it doesn’t make sense.”

  “It doesn’t have to make sense. It just has to scare you.”

  “Oh.”

  “They think you know stuff about who the killer is that you aren’t telling.”

  “Well,” I sighed, “at least they’re not targeting you anymore.”

  “Oh, no way they’ve given up on me yet. Ninety times out of a hundred in a murder like this the husband would be the killer, and those odds are too good for them to shrug off.”

  “But you have an airtight alibi.”

  “A solid alibi,” Rafe said, nodding, “no motive except dirty-minded locker-room insinuations, and they’re apparently coming up empty on physical evidence.”

  “Well, since you didn’t do it, of course, it would figure that there’d be no physical evidence.”

  “A comforting thought. So by now they have to be thinking that maybe someone else shot this guy. They believe you know something, and they’re hoping you’ll come across if you think that you’re a target of the investigation yourself.”

  “Then why did they question me in front of you? I’ve binge-watched enough cop shows to know that you question witnesses separately.”

  “Because they were trying the same psychology on me.” Rafe had suddenly gotten kind of intense. “They hope that if I think a cell door might be slamming behind you I’ll do some gallant Virginia cavalier thing to save your neck.”

  I took a couple of seconds and a nice long hit from my glass to process that. Belly drop. Hollow gut. Jelly legs.

  Rafe and I both knew what the real threat to me was. There was not much danger of anyone charging me with setting Jerzy up, but that wasn’t the point. Think about why Hillary Clinton scrubbed her e-mail server. Inside the Beltway, once someone starts investigating X, what you worry about isn’t so much X as Y and Z and all the other stuff they stumble over while they’re turning up squat on X. I’d spent six full-time years grabbing for the brass ring on the Washington merry-go-round, including occasional fund-raising for a Congressman and full-time dollar-diving for MVC. In all that time had I committed any felonies?

  I had no idea.

  That was the point. You can break the law without realizing it, without meaning to, without wanting to. And even if your heart is as pure as Snow White’s, a prosecutor can make it look like you’ve broken the law, or might have, if he really wants to. There is no such thing as raising serious political money without coming into contact with crooks—and that’s whether you’re raising it for Democrats or Republicans, liberal do-gooders or conservative true believers. Stuff that would never have been a problem becomes a PROBLEM when investigators run across it while they’re looking for something else.

  This epiphany triggered my standard defense mechanism: flippant denial.

  “I have nothing to hide. My life is an open book.”

  For the third time in our five years together, Rafe got a little macho with me. Okay, a lot macho. He’s never hit me. Even the one time I smacked him he hadn’t hit me back. I’d stood there waiting for a slap that didn’t come. Instead I’d gotten the mother of all hard looks, showing not just anger but disappointment. That had brought tears that no slap would have. But he doesn’t have to get physical. He has a low, calm, woman-now-hear-this tone, and he used it.

  “Drop the snark right now. The time for snappy patter is over.”

  Feeling tears sting the corners of my eyes, I waited for the challenge: WERE YOU CHEATING ON ME WITH THAT SLEAZY HOOD? ANSWER ME, JOSIE! YES OR NO? But nothing like that came. Rafe went on, still not yelling but with the same vibe. Intensity blazed from those brown eyes.

  “Dial it up, Josie. I mean way up.”

  I wasn’t looking at any twenty-first century cultivated East Coast metrosexual enlightened male right now—and I knew it. He reached me in one stride, flung my right arm aside to get my drink out of the way, grabbed me under each shoulder and just around my back with two powerful hands and pulled me roughly up against him. The soft Southern accent that he’d lost a long time ago came back to color his voice.

  “Listen, Josie. This is now officially about you as well as me. No more business as usual. We are at war.” His voice softened, but not all that much. “We’re in this together, babe. We’re all in. Doubling down. You and me against the world—which puts the odds slightly in our favor.”

  He squeezed me in a breathless hug that warmed me in a lot of places the martini hadn’t. I hugged him back with my left arm as tears slipped from my eyes. I don’t deserve this. We broke the clinch. I felt like a dewy-eyed prom queen getting her first kiss from the captain of the football team.

  “You are so…wonder
ful.”

  He grinned like Harry Truman after the news about Dewey.

  “I get that a lot.”

  Damage Control Strategy,

  Day 3

  (the first Saturday after the murder)

  Chapter Thirteen

  By Saturday morning, around the time we wheeled our grocery carts to the check-out line at Harris Teeter supermarket, I’d concluded that Rafe and I had overthought things a bit Friday night. The cops figured to be looking for an alternative suspect and they for sure thought I might have some dope that would point them in the right direction. We’d gotten that much right. But they couldn’t think they’d make me open up about that by actually coming after me for involvement in the plot. That would cause me to stonewall, not sing.

  No, the were-you-a-bad-girl insinuations had to be about Rafe. If your husband really didn’t do it then you must know more than you’re saying about who did and you’d better come across with it. The question about video cameras hinted that they suspected my slap-and-tickle with Jerzy, but Lordy me, if every adultery in D.C. produced a homicide the country would’ve run out of bullets during the nineties. So the police theory about Rafe’s motive was pour le merde, if you’ll excuse my French. Sooner or later the cops would get tired of drilling dry holes and shift their focus completely to another suspect. Once that happened, they’d have no reason to go over my life with a fine-tooth comb.

  So skip the gut-flutters, Josie, and keep focused on the damage-control plan. It’s working.

  We finally started piling food on the conveyor running toward the cashier. We could’ve gotten to the self-check scanner two aisles over a lot quicker, but Rafe hates that thing. I’m not crazy about it myself. Rafe, though, would cheerfully smash it to smithereens with his bare hands, just for the exercise. I think he’d wait half an hour to check out with a human cashier rather than use one of those robots.

  Even without buying anything for dinner tonight (we’d be noshing at an embassy reception) we had quite a load and the bagger the cashier called for took his time getting there, so she had to start sacking up herself. She kept at it even after the bagger arrived because she had to clear our stuff out of her work area before she could ring anything else up anyway. I started loading double-sacks into one of our carts, hoping that Rafe might take the hint and improve the optics a bit. By now, though, Rafe was immersed in Impolitic on his phone screen and wasn’t giving thought-one to how this scenario might look to people still waiting to check out.

  The man-mountain type in a royal blue Izod behind us had already gotten antsy. He scowled at his groceries as they sat there on a stationary belt. About a half-minute after I’d started loading he growled sarcastically at Rafe.

  “Are you really incapable of bagging your own groceries?”

  After a second or two of surprise Rafe looked up at the guy. If the gent had just said something halfway polite—you know, Excuse me, sir, but it would be big help if you’d speed things up by doing some of the bagging yourself—Rafe would have distractedly murmured, “Absolutely right. Wasn’t paying attention. Sorry.” Instead, though, the guy had come on like an asshole, so I figured he was in for a little Rafe-in-your-face. One look at Rafe’s broad smile confirmed that.

  “I am in fact quite capable of bagging groceries.” Rafe said this in an unhurried, irenic voice, relapsing joyfully again into a Southern accent. “Particularly in these troubled economic times, though, I feel that we should do everything we can to promote employment—and that means not doing for free labor that the management of this store should be paying workers to perform.”

  Definitely not the kind of soft answer that the Good Book says turneth away wrath. The guy looked confused, like he thought Rafe might actually be serious, but maybe was just mocking him, and he couldn’t decide which. Banter apparently wasn’t his long suit. It took him five seconds to come up with something, and what he produced wasn’t really worth the wait.

  “Hey! I work for a living too!”

  “I assure you, I had not mistaken you for a day-trader living on his income.” Rafe clicked his expression over to earnest. “Once the objective and subjective conditions of proletarian consciousness have converged in your mind, I’m sure you’ll grasp the soundness of my position.”

  Three tense seconds followed. Absolutely delicious. The big guy had two beefy, white-knuckled paws on the handle of his now-empty cart. His purple face clashed badly with that blue pullover. He was pushing the cart as hard as he could. It was going precisely nowhere. Without making a production out of it or getting red-faced or anything, Rafe blocked the cart’s front, pressing his thighs and groin against it. I noticed that he had also subtly nudged the outside front wheel so that it pointed toward the next register over. As unobtrusively as possible, I pulled our second cart out of the way to clear an exit route for Rafe.

  “You trying to be smart with me?” the guy demanded then.

  “That would strike me as a singularly unpromising approach,” Rafe said, still smiling and jovial. “By the way, don’t forget to put that toilet paper on the bottom of your cart on the belt so that the cashier can ring it up.”

  “What?”

  In the half-second the guy spent looking down at the empty rack underneath his cart, Rafe nimbly put some daylight between himself and the front of the cart. When the guy looked up he petulantly shoved the cart forward. Instead of slamming against Rafe, though, the cart dinged the working side of the other register station. By the time the guy had pulled his cart back and straightened out the wheels, Rafe had made it out of the narrow lane between the two registers and was helping me load the last two bags into our second cart. Glancing back at the guy, Rafe sketched a casual salute with his left hand.

  “See you at the revolution!” he called cheerfully.

  I managed to keep it together until we’d made it to the parking lot and were closing in on Rafe’s Ford Escape. Then I lost it. Started with a giggle, tried to control it, failed. Threw back my head and just laughed. Bent over the cart handle and laughed. Felt tears streaming from my eyes.

  The whole thing was perfect. Absolutely perfect. Man-mountain had started it, Rafe had finished it, brains over brawn, no blood—oh, Lord, forgive me, but I loved every second of it.

  We started loading groceries into the hatch. Rafe was flat out glowing.

  “You do realize that if that oaf had been exercising his constitutional right to keep and bear arms, you’d probably be dead now, right?”

  “True.” Rafe grinned “And the last two minutes of my life would have been the best.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Now, the only reason I brought up that male head-butting episode is that it saved my life.

  A thought began percolating below the surface on our way home. It reached full brew not quite six hours later. I was getting ready for that embassy reception. Freshly showered and made up in the understated way Mama taught me, I was fussing with an earring when I happened to glance at the open door to Rafe’s closet. Noticed those New Balance cross-trainers that he’d worn during our run. And did not see the fancy Nike Air things that, as I now remembered, I’d watched him fork over two hundred dollars in cash for two or three weeks ago.

  Cash. Who uses cash for a purchase that big? Someone who doesn’t want it showing up on a credit card bill? Boing! Almost dropped the earring. A lot of things came together.

  What if he did it? What if Rafe DID kill Jerzy? Unbidden, memories of Jerzy flooded my brain: Jerzy flashing his infectious smile, ladling out his smooth conman banter, hot-dogging it like a self-aware schoolboy with his violin. I imagined Rafe, the man I loved, the man whose children I hoped to bear, coldly gunning him down. All this time I’d taken Rafe’s innocence for granted. I’d pooh-poohed the jealous-husband motive because of how civilized we are here about matters of the heart, and related body parts. Did I need to re-think that?

  I thought about th
e self-scanning check-out thing. Uncle D used to quote my great-grandfather’s Sunday dinner rants against supermarkets. “Sure the A&P can charge rock bottom prices. They have a store full of free clerks working for them!” Great-gramps had grown up in a world where a clerk behind a counter in a general store fetched your order item by item as you called it out. He’d liked that world just fine. The world replacing it as he grew older, though—not so much.

  Rafe was a generation older than I was. Maybe self-scanning check-out was his A&P—a symbol of the ground shifting under his feet. The arrival of a lifestyle that he didn’t like as much as the way of life he’d grown up with. A lifestyle where no one knew what honor was anymore and people were rude in supermarkets and “white male” was a dirty word.

  Maybe Rafe had a lot more old school in him than I’d thought. Maybe he’d brought more Richmond with him to Washington than I’d imagined. That cast a new light on the motive thing. The American South outside Louisiana is a whole different country, brother. “Unwritten law” they call it down there. You blow away a man who’s fussing with your woman—that’s flat out justifiable homicide for nine juries out of ten.

  I started looking at things with different eyes. Sure, Rafe could easily have sold a rifle a few years ago without my knowing the first thing about it. But hunting rifles are almost like hound dogs for sons of Dixie. When one of them parts with a firearm that he’s used to kill large mammals, he can mope nostalgically about it for days. I sure didn’t remember anything like that.

  He’d told the cops his eyesight had gotten too weak for big game hunting. But he’d spotted the two cops behind their windshield from eighty feet away and nailed their descriptions.

  Rafe could have used someone else’s computer to find a conveniently dead gun dealer without documenting his curiosity on his own search-history. He could have forged a receipt. He could have paid cash for a pair of shoes for the express purpose of wearing them to an ambush site, and then dumped them somewhere just in case he’d left any footprints or picked up any incriminating twigs or soil. He’s a cocky rascal, for sure. If he’d planned the whole thing carefully, he wouldn’t have had any trouble pulling off the super-cooperative witness act with the police.