Damage Control

by Michael Bowen

  He could have bought a beaten up old car for a few hundred in cash, using a false name. Could have stashed the rifle in it after the murder and left the car to be stolen, just like the cops said. Could certainly have filed the serial number off the gun. Maybe he hadn’t known about the infra-red trick, or maybe the cops were just bluffing about that.

  But what about the air-tight alibi? He’d spent the day with Theo McAbbott, and his phone documented that.

  No, no, it didn’t, did it? The phone proved that the phone was in McAbbott’s house—not that Rafe was. The cops had obviously talked to McAbbott, though, and they hadn’t shown up with an arrest warrant after the chat. So McAbbott must have backed up Rafe’s story. That meant that either Rafe’s story was true, or McAbbott was an accessory to first-degree murder. You can die in jail for that one.

  Why would McAbbott risk life without parole for Rafe? McAbbott would have known from his FBI years how huge the risk of getting caught was and how many ways even a perfect plan could go wrong. Rafe couldn’t have gotten McAbbott on the Supreme Court. Couldn’t have gotten him on the Board of Tea Inspectors, for that matter. Sure, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, but as far as I knew they hadn’t shared a foxhole or backed each other up in a knife-fight or done any macho bonding stuff like that. They had a professional relationship. Rafe got McAbbott’s crime stories published and made a modest commission for his trouble. Nothing that would make you dive on a grenade for someone.

  That left money. Everyone has a price—and in politics it’s usually a lot lower than most people might think. I’ve been in committee hearing rooms in Baton Rouge where you could buy anyone at the table for fifty bucks and a ham sandwich. Add three zeroes and you could say the same thing about Washington.

  A vote on a pork-barrel project is one thing, though, and a one-way ticket to the slammer is something else. How much would Rafe have had to come across with to get McAbbott’s soul in his hip pocket? Hundred-thousand? No way. It was a nice piece of change, but wouldn’t change your life. A million? I suppose. Maybe.

  But how could Rafe possibly have gotten McAbbott a million dollars? Rafe and I aren’t really rich, although I guess a lot of people would say we are. Net worth of a little over two million—most of it Rafe’s under the pre-nup. But none of that wealth is just sitting around in cash in a basement strongbox. Mostly the house and stocks and bonds. Could Rafe have converted them into that kind of cash without leaving a paper trail wider than the road to Hell, as Uncle D would say? I sure didn’t see how. Besides, I would have noticed—wouldn’t I?

  Nope, offhand, I just couldn’t see any way to get there from here. That air-tight alibi was starting to look like your basic stonewall. Rafe couldn’t have killed Jerzy unless he had some way of getting to McAbbott that I just flat couldn’t think of.

  I suddenly felt a whole lot better. Looked like I wasn’t married to a cold-blooded murderer after all.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Some things never get old. Embassy receptions aren’t one of them. They started getting old for me around the third or fourth one I attended. Just another day at the office now. Sip, nosh, meet, greet, mingle, network, repeat.

  This Saturday night’s reception happened to be at the Indian Embassy, so we had curry instead of escargot or talapas on the steam tables. Otherwise it was pretty much the same as it would have been anywhere else. Embassy receptions these days usually have co-sponsors that are trying to promote commercial interests in the host country. Tonight: the Telecommunications Equipment Manufacturers’ Association. The evening’s tone generally comes more from the co-sponsor than from the flag on the roof.

  Rafe wore a white dinner jacket, black slacks and cummerbund, white shirt with onyx studs, and black bowtie. In Rafeworld, that’s what men wear to semi-formal affairs in summer. Period. The tuxedos and regular business suits vastly outnumbering dinner jackets in the reception room suggested that Rafeworld is a fairly small place. I guess that’s one of the things I like about it.

  We got our drinks together—G&T for him and seltzer with a lime twist in a Manhattan glass for me. Figured I’d better pace myself in case I had to do some serious drinking later on. Then we split up. Rafe spotted a couple of cable news producers in a loose group at the other end of the room and headed for them like a torpedo homing in on an aircraft carrier. Didn’t spot such obvious prey for myself right away, so I decided to circulate a bit and see what turned up.

  Nothing much at first. I greeted people right and left and blitzed through little snatches of casual conversation during my steady sashay toward the room’s center. As I clicked on each entry in the digital Rolodex in my head, though—House Democrat; Foreign Service Officer; Senate Judiciary Committee senior staff; print media; National Security Council junior staff; digital media; Commerce Department lawyer; cable/broadcast media—I didn’t see anyone I had any real use for at the moment. No SEC or Federal Elections Commission. No one with a hundred-million dollars burning a hole in his pocket who was passionate about Chinese unfair trade practices or excessive limitations on mining federally owned land.

  Then, out of the corner of my eye, standing not far from a sculpture of a glossy green elephant, I spotted Robin Vauss, chatting up a guy showing me the rear of his head and the back of a tux. I wouldn’t call Robin super-pretty, but no guy would kick her out of bed for eating crackers either, as we say in Baton Rouge.

  Robin has a full-bodied mane of chestnut hair framing a sculpted face suggesting a central European countess on some remote branch of her family tree. Not sure what color her eyes are because she switches daily among contact lenses in at least three tints—violet, green, and chocolate brown. Without sleeping with her—and I’m not planning on that—I guess I’ll never know the color nature actually gave her. Smallish frame, maybe a smidge shorter than I am, nice breasts, not-bad legs, and between cigarettes and forty-minute Elliptical workouts she keeps her hips and tummy from getting too prominent.

  Robin can be just the nicest semi-insider in Washington between the time she gets up and somewhere around four-thirty in the afternoon. From then until she’s had her third cosmopolitan, though, her default facial expression goes to something between pout and scowl, and her mean-girls streak starts showing. She has some kind of on-again/off-again thing with a Hoover Building suit named Vince Ashland. Not a special agent, a “process manager” or something like that.

  The guy with his back to me looked vaguely familiar but didn’t look like Ashland. Pickings tonight were slim, though, so I headed discreetly for the elephant. I figured that even a ten percent chance of talking to someone who gets a check from the Federal Bureau of Investigation every two weeks justified a tentative foray in that direction. You never can tell when one of those boys will let something slip.

  I edged closer. Nope, not Ashland. With a little start, in fact, I realized the guy she was talking to was M. Anthony York, my lawyer. Not all that much of a coincidence, really. Insider-Washington is a pretty small place—not quite Hooterville with monuments, but not Metropolis either.

  As hunks go, Tony is a Hell of an attorney. He can shift into smooth-mode when he wants to, though, and the first words I overheard him say were right there.

  “What’s the most interesting thing you’ve done this week?”

  “Had sex with an ex-president,” Robin answered. “How about you?”

  “Sang ‘Bye Bye Miss American Pie’ all the way through by heart.”

  “You win.”

  Off again, apparently. Oh well.

  I started to glide politely away. I pretended not to notice when Tony tried to catch my eye. Robin, however, didn’t pretend not to notice. The comment I heard from her just before I slipped out of earshot was, “Steady, boy. The last guy who flirted with her got his cerebellum perforated.” Hmm…That glass in Robin’s hand must be only her second cosmo.

  “Pretty snarky crack,” I heard someone sa
y from my right and just behind me. Recognized the voice: Lizzie Nygren. Staff reporter for the Washington Inquisitor. Regular panelist on a cable news/chat show with ratings just above local access. Got a ton of Facebook shares early in the race for the Republican presidential nomination when someone asked whether Scott Walker not having a college degree should make a difference and she answered, “Jimmy Carter had one and Harry Truman didn’t. Next question.”

  As I turned a big smile in Nygren’s direction I tried to think of one other thing I’d heard about her. Instead of dredging up that last datum, unfortunately, my mental Rolodex kept cycling through an endless loop like that maddening blue circle I sometimes get on my computer screen.

  “Still playing it close to the vest on Jerzy Schroeder’s murder?” she asked.

  “I’m just as sorry as I can be, Lizzie, but I’m afraid I can’t talk about that.”

  “Actually, you already have talked about it—just not to me.”

  “I believe we’ve already had this conversation.”

  I could see her gearing up for a world-weary sigh and a let’s-quit-playing-games pitch. As she started to deliver it, the last entry in my Lizzie Nygren data-set finally popped up. Air Force Academy. She’d left in the middle of her second year. Her permanent cover story was that she’d gotten tired of putting up with a culture of sexual harassment. Persistent rumors, though, said that she’d been expelled for cheating on her final exam in electrical engineering.

  “Look, Josie, the suspicion hanging over your husband isn’t going away—as Robin’s little rim-shot ought to tell you. If you really want to spin it off the stage with an alternative theory, you need someone with more horsepower than Terry Fielding has, to pump out the copy.”

  “I just want the police to catch the murderer—and the sooner the better. If I can help them by keeping my mouth shut, that’s what I’m gonna have to do.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” World-weary sigh, right on cue, accompanied by an eye-roll. “Look, Josie, you’re not playing this very smart.”

  “I very much appreciate your candor, Lizzie, which I am sure is well meant. I realized long ago that the words ‘Nobel Prize’ will not appear in the first sentence of my obituary. I did, however, manage to graduate from an accredited American university after passing all my examinations without any improper assistance. So despite my limitations I guess I’ll just soldier on as best I can.”

  For just a second I thought she was going to splatter my face with bourbon and sweet. Lord, that would have been wonderful. Every reporter in town would have had the full story on it within an hour. Nygren didn’t just think about it, either; her right hand actually twitched. But she dialed the impulse back just in time, did a one-eighty, and stalked off.

  Well, the hits just keep on coming, don’t they? Deep breath, squared my shoulders, kept going. Damage-control operation still functioning, but Nygren had a point. If I’d had to bet on how this would end I’d go with not soon and not pretty.

  I finally managed to track down Kent Ezekiel, a Republican Congressman from the southern part of Florida. I planted a seed about the good old days of the Apollo program returning; get America back into space; on to Mars—that kind of thing. His eyes lit up. Any self-respecting Congressman can make his eyes light up if all you do is give him your recipe for grilled cheese sandwiches, but I decided to take it as a good sign anyway.

  Time to find Rafe and see how he was doing. About two hundred seventy degrees through my systematic sweep of the room, I spotted him forty feet away, talking to Major Fitz. “Major” in this case isn’t a rank. It’s the first name Fitz’s mom and dad blessed him with. He is African-American. He is gay. Still has a little hitch in his step from an IED in Iraq, back when he was Lance Corporal Major Fitz. Taller than Rafe, slender, and with hair made for the cover of Ebony or Esquire—take your pick.

  Major has a twice-weekly column in Impolitic. He covers and comments on Washington politics as if that were a white-collar crime beat—not much of a stretch, if you think about it. Nicest guy in the world unless you’ve used your office to steer a defense contract to a company that has you lined up for a lucrative speaking engagement in Hawaii.

  I hesitated. Even from a good distance I could tell that Rafe and Major were having more than a casual chat. Shrugged and started working my way toward them. Rafe could wave me off if he thought I’d be in the way.

  It became moot point. Out of nowhere Tony intercepted me. Nudged me toward a quieter area, near a statue of a multi-armed Hindu goddess.

  “Why, Tony, I thought you’d be between the sheets with Robin by now.”

  “If by having sex I could justify bills like the one you’re getting for tonight, I’d be in the movies. We have to talk.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Tony ushered me out to a balcony that ran the entire width of the building, populated only by a handful of smokers. Even at foreign embassies, where D.C.’s cigarette police don’t have jurisdiction, public smoking in Washington is about as fashionable these days as men’s white dress shoes. I turned toward Tony.

  “You’re on. Go.”

  “Had a chat with Rafe’s lawyer today. Cops have nada. Alibi holding up, no holes in Rafe’s story, no physical evidence, no witnesses who can put him at the scene or going to it or coming from it.”

  “Good news.”

  “Up to a point. Their only hope is to shake the alibi by proving that Rafe somehow paid McAbbott off. So they want to have forensic auditors crawl through every account, stock, bond, and dollar you and Rafe have.”

  “Well, that sucks.”

  “Yep. On the bright side, it’s their last bullet. So to speak. On the not-so-bright side, will something like that be a problem for you?”

  I swallowed. Hard. Rafe and I play it pretty straight, but there’s no such thing as an audit that doesn’t turn up something a little smelly here or there.

  “If we tell them to get a warrant, they’ll think they’re finally barking up the right tree, won’t they?”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay.” Deep breath. “If Rafe can handle it, I can. I’ll go along with his call.”

  “Not so fast. Say the audit comes out empty. Rafe will be off the hook, but then they’ll need another suspect—and you’re the only lead they have to one. You didn’t even like being a sideshow. Now you might become the main attraction.”

  I took a breath—a shallow one this time, and a little labored. The only possible answer was the one Rafe had given me when the shoe was on the other foot.

  “If Rafe says yes to the audit, then I say yes.” I sipped seltzer and really wished it were gin. “But this audit-stuff comes from Rafe’s lawyer. If you’re going to bill me for schmoozing with Robin Vauss, I hope you learned something from her.”

  “Oh, I learned something from her all right.”

  “Spill.”

  “The local cops aren’t flying solo on Schroeder’s murder. The FBI has invited itself to the party—and its theory is the partner-in-crime angle that Terry Fielding is peddling for you.”

  Which meant that Fielding had an FBI source. Hmm…

  “You wormed that out of Robin—or did it just slip out because a couple of cosmopolitans loosened her tongue?”

  “Neither. She blurted it out to me, and not by accident. Tracked me down and dumped it on me two minutes after striking up a conversation.”

  “So, a calculated and deliberate leak.”

  “Yep.”

  “She told that to you, presumably at her boyfriend’s request, knowing that you’d tell it to me.” I finished my drink. “Why?”

  “Because the Feds are hoping you’ll give me a copy of MVC’s Schroeder file so that I can get it to them. Unless I miss my guess, they’re also dreaming that maybe you’ll tell them some juicy stuff that isn’t in the file. They’re betting that you’ll want to help them nail a crimina
l confederate as Schroeder’s killer because that would definitively clear Rafe.”

  I pondered that. The FBI wouldn’t waste time on a local murder unless it implicated a federal investigation that was already under way. An investigation involving Jerzy, for example, as subject or key witness. I had zero interest in auditioning for key witness—especially as understudy to a corpse. That’s why I’d come down with that sudden case of lock-jaw the first time the cops asked me who might have killed Jerzy. On the other hand, having the killer thinking I could finger him could get me dead just as fast as actually doing it—and if the FBI thought I could finger him, the killer probably did too.

  Wow. This was more complicated than a three-candidate election with no primary. I looked up at Tony.

  “What’s your recommendation?”

  “Depends on what’s in the file.”

  Tony favored me with a steady, penetrating gaze. I’m the only human being on the planet that you absolutely cannot lie to. He didn’t have to spell out the question: Does that file have anything in it that could make you thirty-seven months late for your next appointment? Simple truth: I flat didn’t know for sure.

  “Think it over,” Tony said then. “Let’s talk about it on Monday.”

  In other words, “After you’ve looked at the file.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Next stop, Rafe. I spotted him without any trouble as soon as I came back in. He and Fitz hadn’t moved much, and with the crowd starting to thin it took me less than a minute to work my way over to them. When I got close enough I could tell that Rafe was doing a genial o-tempora-o-mores riff.