“Sounds like someone your former colleagues at the Bureau might like to get their hands on.”
“No inside information, you understand”—he winked—“but I will guarantee you that a task force of blue suits has had him on its to-do list for at least a year. Hasn’t gotten any traction, though.”
“Why not?”
“My guess is that he has friends with Schedule C appointments who see to it that requests for information about him from other federal agencies get slow-walked.”
Whoa!
Schedule C appointments are senior positions in agencies made on political bases. Jerzy had wanted to get an investigation of Dierdorf’s company going. But if the FBI couldn’t get the responsible agency to take an investigation seriously, how could Jerzy have hoped to do it? So…what? So whoever hired Theo had leaked the picture to us through Theo, expecting us to get it to Jerzy without the fingerprints of Theo or his client on it. Why? So Jerzy could put it together with dope he already had—dope about Ann DeHoic, for example—and use it to motivate a GS 15 or two at Commerce or Energy or Interior or maybe even Homeland Security. That meant Jerzy hadn’t hired Theo. So who had? And why was he—or she—so bashful?
“You look like you’re getting a headache,” Theo said as he stood and started picking up the pizza and paper plates.
Grabbing the beer bottles, I followed him through the back door into the kitchen. Typical bachelor kitchen: almost spotless, because it seldom gets used. Harvest gold. Really. There was something almost violent about the way Theo forced the pizza box’s thick cardboard into folds and bent it over itself until it was compact enough to stuff in his recycling sack. Then he wrapped the two surviving pizza slices in aluminum foil—no Baggie; no wax paper; guys!—and tossed them in his refrigerator.
For the first time since he’d shown me in, I started getting an intriguing vibe from Theo, a little whiff of bad-boy/danger, sort of like the one I’d picked up from Jerzy, except dialed back about six clicks. Here was a guy who’d carried a gun on the job, put people in cuffs, maybe been shot at, probably roughed some folks up, or even shot someone himself. A little chill and a little thrill arm-wrestled to a draw in my belly.
“What I hear you saying,” I told him as he rinsed out the beer bottles, “is that Dierdorf probably had Jerzy killed and wouldn’t be shy about doing the same to me if I got in his way.”
“Or if you started playing footsie with him.”
Red flag. Chill just kicked thrill’s butt. Theo was showing me a replay of DeHoic’s warning/threat. If they were working together, this thing just got way more complicated. On the other hand, if they weren’t working together and I’d been independently warned off by two pretty smart people, I’d better pay attention.
“Just out of curiosity,” I asked, “where did ‘playing footsie’ come from? The only dog I have in this fight is my husband who has had cops crawling up his rectum since the day Jerzy went to Heaven.”
“Or the other place.” Theo did his aw-shucks grin one more time. “This might sound like a frat-boy line, but it’s not. Would you mind coming down to my workshop in the basement? Something I’d like to show you.”
Red flag and alarm bells. Looked in Theo’s eyes. Question answered: Not gay. Tinge of lust in those shifty gray peepers for sure. Involuntary reflex; guys can’t control it. Didn’t mean he’d stop being a gentleman when we got downstairs, but…I took a breath.
“Sure, let’s go.”
Chapter Thirty-five
I expected to walk into a man cave with a wet bar and carefully positioned horizontal surfaces. Nope. Theo actually led me into an honest-to-Pete workshop. Dark gray concrete floor—clean, I noticed, which meant Theo thought this room was important. Weight bench and free weights against the far wall. A rig with a big round saw and other manly power tools that I didn’t recognize dominated the room’s center. And, over by the wall to my right, an oil-cloth-covered table with a rifle resting just above the table’s surface on a couple of braces.
Near the rifle lay a scope, a set of mounting rings, and enough implements to fill up a standing tool box: a box of Q-Tips; what looked like a very long, very thin screwdriver; two silver-colored cylinders; a bottle of oil; a couple of miniature wrenches; one of those frames holding a transparent tube with liquid inside it that you use to see if something is level; a long, fist-sized pencil with an ultra-thin white lead point; and, just to top everything off, a small bathroom scale.
“Please tell me that rifle isn’t a Winchester three-oh-eight,” I said.
“It’s not.” Theo pulled a wooden, ladder-back chair up to the table and looked over his right shoulder to catch my eye. “Remington two twenty-four. Much higher muzzle velocity. Varmint gun. Prairie dogs, rabbits. Small things that are quick but don’t need all that much killing.”
“Okay.” I parked my fanny on a red-lacquered stool against the near wall.
“What I want to show you is me mounting that scope there on this rifle.”
“I’m watching.”
“Get comfortable.”
I am not going to lay out a blow-by-blow description of the mounting process, which went on for almost thirty solid minutes. Loosening and removing the eight screws in the mounting rings the first time he did it—three turns on one screw, then three on the one diagonally across from it, then three on the one directly across from that one, then three on the fourth screw, directly across from the first, then back to the first screw and so forth—took two minutes all by itself. And that was after putting his fingers on the scale to remind himself of what two pounds of pressure felt like, as he explained to me, so that he wouldn’t over-tax the screws.
“These puppies are more delicate than a senator’s ego,” he muttered. “You can strip the threads on the suckers just by looking at them sideways.”
He asked me to hand him a dowel, which I took to be the guy-term for what looked like one-third of a broom handle in the corner. I did. He fussed with that thing and the two rings a bit, then used the two metal cylinders to make sure he’d gotten the rings lined up right, and finally laid the scope gently in the cradles formed by the lower halves of the two rings.
But he wasn’t anything like almost through. Used the Q-Tip to oil the screws before delicately screwing the top halves of the rings on over the scope, alternating among screws again, making the process look like open-heart surgery. When he finally set the screwdriver back down on the work bench, I exhaled.
“Done,” I whispered, provoking a gently patronizing smile from him.
“Nowhere near done.” He stepped back. “Come on over here and take a look through the sight.”
I obeyed. Saw nothing but a blur at first. Then he turned a knob near the rear lens, and the paneled wall twenty-five feet away come into focus.
“You see that strip of Day-glo orange tape running down one of the grooves in that section of panel?”
“Yep,” I said.
“Is the vertical bar on the cross-hairs lined up on it?”
“Pretty much.”
“‘Pretty much’ won’t cut it.”
I got out of the way. He gazed through the scope. Grunted. Stood up straight. Drew diagonal lines across the mounting ring halves with the pencil, did some more open-heart surgery with the screwdriver, backed the scope up by imperceptible millimeters until the diagonal line on the top half matched perfectly with the diagonal line on the bottom half, then tightened the screws—again.
He looked through the scope again. He stood up and gestured toward the sight.
“Tell me what you see now.”
I squinted through the coated glass.
“The vertical bar is lined up exactly on the tape, but they look like they’re slanted just a little.”
“It’s your head that’s slanted, not the bar. ‘Canted,’ the gravel guts call it. We know the tape isn’t slanted, and therefore w
e know the bar isn’t slanted. That’s the important thing.”
I stood up. He put the spirit-level—the frame with the tube of liquid in it—on top of the sight.
“Dead level,” he said. “We won’t need the wrenches. Thank God for that.”
“That looked like a lot more trouble than I would have thought it was.”
“Yep. Older weapons like Rafe’s or this one, that’s the way you have to do it. At least if you want it done right—and if it’s not done right, what’s the point?”
“Can’t think of one, I guess.”
He turned toward me. I could see sweat that had beaded across his forehead while he concentrated on mounting the scope.
“Someone who just wants to go out there on the first weekend of deer season and blow away Bambi’s dad from a hundred yards, that’s one thing. He can slop the thing together. Miss the first shot, he’ll probably get at least two more.”
“I’ll have to take your word for that.”
“But a single kill-shot for a human target at long range—different story, sister. That scope has to be in place exactly, without a speck of wobble to it. Has to be tighter than a…uh, well, tight as it can be. Say it like that.”
I would have given anything to know what was supposed to come after ‘tighter than a’ before Theo remembered he was talking to a lady. At the moment, though, I had a more important question to ask.
“Point being—what?”
“Point being this: having a subscription to Field & Stream when you were a kid and going hunting with your drinking buddies once a year doesn’t qualify someone for this gig. Mounting the scope right would be the easiest part of a professional hit, and that was plenty hard enough, as you just saw. Not the kind of thing someone takes care of during commercial breaks on Meet the Press.”
Got it. No need to draw me a picture.
“In other words,” I said, “Rafe didn’t do it.”
“Not without professional help, he didn’t.”
“Right.” I managed a look of wide-eyed innocence straight from The Sound of Music. “Well that is a big relief. Because where in the world could Rafe have gotten professional help?”
Chapter Thirty-six
“…at a reception before the White House Correspondents’ dinner. Big deal, right? Talking to Laraine Keesh, who I’ve known for, what, twenty years anyway. And we haven’t been talking more than thirty seconds before I notice her looking over my left shoulder to see if she can spot someone more important than me to talk to. Twenty years! I mean, I don’t know what it is. Like Washington has turned into some kind of giant frat party. What is it? Do you know what it is?”
Matt Crisscut’s voice, coming from our living room. I heard it as I slipped, quietly as a water moccasin, into our kitchen through the back door after getting home from Theo’s. Matt didn’t sound slurred yet, but the bad grammar—“who” instead of “whom” and “me” instead of “I”—told me he wasn’t completely sober, either. Glanced at my watch. Not even nine yet. Rafe had a long night ahead of him.
No sense trying for discreet, so I just made a grand entrance. Matt jumped up like I was his mom. Or long lost sister, anyway. Rafe rose a bit more sedately. Hugs, air kisses, squealed greetings, followed by the disclaimers I knew were expected of me.
“No, don’t be silly, I don’t need a drink. And ‘adjourn to the basement’? Don’t even think about it. You two stay right where you are. I have tons to do upstairs.”
Exit Josie. Clean getaway. Up to our bedroom. Skirt, blouse, and pumps off; jeans, tee, and ballet slippers on. Fired up the iPad. Checked Impolitic. Nothing. Daily Boot. Nothing. Inquisitor. Nothing. RealClearPolitics. Nothing.
A snatch of Matt wafted upstairs as his voice got a little loud.
“…like one of those high schools in the movies where most of the kids are okay but there’s this in-crowd of seven bitchy cheerleaders and a dozen inflated-ego jocks, and they poison the atmosphere for everyone. That’s what Washington has become. That’s what Washington is right now.”
Okay. I guess. He was talking about me, of course. Not me personally, but all the twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings who’d come to Washington with calculation in our souls instead of stars in our eyes and let the serpent into paradise. Maybe he was onto something. Or not. Couldn’t fuss with that now.
Checked Rotunda. Nothing. Checked my e-mails. Spam. Checked my phone. No messages, no texts. What next? Stream House of Cards? Or Veep, even?
I sighed. No. No way to put off thinking through the Theo-chat. Propped two pillows vertically against the headboard of our bed, leaned against them as I scooched onto the bed, and started parsing what I’d picked up.
Or would have started parsing it if a distracting question right out of left field hadn’t popped into my head.
What would I have done if Theo had come on to me? Said no, that’s what. You sure about that, Josie? Yes. Never gonna cheat on Rafe again. And I’m for sure never gonna get Rafe and myself mixed up in a big mess because I can’t keep my Spanx on in mixed company.
Now, dammit, girl, focus.
Josie, you’re a moral infant.
FOCUS!
I focused. Finally.
Theo had moved Heaven and Earth to convince me that Rafe just didn’t have the skill set to have killed Jerzy. Really wanted to buy that, because I had a lot of trouble seeing Rafe as morally depraved enough to shoot a man from behind over adultery. Yeah, honor, unwritten law, man rules, I get all that. But what’s honor got to do with bushwhacking a cad from almost a different zip code? Not exactly pistols at ten paces, is it? I didn’t just love Rafe, I looked up to him, admired him. I wanted him to keep on being my hero.
The more I flipped the Theo coin, though, the plainer it was that it had two sides. What the alibi and Theo’s gunsmithing demonstration and the other Theo stuff proved was that Rafe couldn’t have killed Jerzy without Theo. So if the cops ever finished their eternal forensic audit of our accounts and failed to trace a huge chunk of our money into Theo’s pockets, everything would be just peachy. But what if the audit showed Rafe had somehow paid Theo off? That would put my frivolous, thoughtless little fling in a whole different light, wouldn’t it?
All of a sudden, I found myself in a Mirror Meeting. At Sigma Tau Delta, my sorority, a Mirror Meeting meant going into a quiet room with two or three sisters and taking a good, hard look at yourself; at where you were letting the sorority down and not pulling your weight and not living up to the ideals and all that stuff. With my head nestling back in the top pillow, trying to find a soft spot that was just right, I started that self-examination.
You messed up, girl. You flat messed up. True.
Right then I started missing Papa something fierce, like I hadn’t in years. It had all happened so fast, that summer I turned twelve. Everything seemed fine, mostly, Papa just a little tired. Then he goes to the doctor and they run some tests. A week later he’s in the hospital. Two months after that a priest is sprinkling holy water on his rosewood coffin. Pancreatic cancer. So fast. No time to get used to the idea.
All at once, right on the verge of my first period, the closest thing I have to an adult male in my life is Uncle D. A charming rogue, a brawler with blood on his bruised knuckles and the occasional broken nose, a hustler who’d show you a forty-five if fast talk and finesse didn’t get the job done, a can-do Louisiana pol who viewed bribes as incidental sweeteners and payoffs as business as usual, an authentic scoundrel, true to himself, who’d smiled through the prison term when his chickens finally came home to roost.
A lovable rogue, but a bad dude all the same. A dangerous man, physically and morally. Can’t you just imagine Freud getting his teeth into that one? “Father-substitute with no super-ego on the eve of pubescence? Nurse, hold my calls for the rest of the afternoon.”
A little tear rolled down my right cheek, and I just let it go
all the way to my jaw until it dropped off. I wanted Papa to show up magically and chew me out a little and then reassure me: Josie, you’re better than that. You’re not a moral infant. You’re a moral adolescent. You have a big heart and there’s not a mean bone in your body. But you’re impulsive and sensual. You go with what feels good right now and you don’t think about the consequences. You messed up, for sure. You’re better than that, though.
I guess I could blame the bad-boy thing on Papa. Or on Sandy Jane or Nappy Lejeune or Charles Darwin or Sigmund Freud. But I think I’d better just blame it on Josie Kendall. Twenty-seven is about time to grow up.
Went ahead and had my cry. Nothing special. Just sort of wrung out the self-pity, kicked myself in the butt, and decided that I’d do whatever I had to in order to straighten things out.
And just like that, everything seemed real clear in my head. Real calm. Doubts all gone. Right then and there I knew that Rafe hadn’t killed Jerzy over my affair. Knew it. No logic, no analysis, no assessment of probabilities, no mental spreadsheet, no decision-tree. I was just sure as I could be—“apodictically certain,” as Uncle D might have put it if he were Dixie-pontificating in undiluted Henry Clay mode—that Rafe hadn’t killed Jerzy for sleeping with me.
Okay. Felt a lot better. Still a big problem to deal with, but I was past the really hard part now. I’d call Uncle D tomorrow to debrief him, talk it over with Rafe, and go on from there. I was actually humming as I bounced out of bed.
The phone rang. Still humming, I answered it.
“Josie, this is your Mama. I’m here with Uncle Darius. We just got in from Denver.”
We? WTF?
“Oh, Mama, hi. Listen, I was gonna call Uncle D tomorrow to see what he found out, and I was thinking we could talk then.”
Damage Control Page 13