House Divided

by Mike Lawson

  He also thought back to the day he met Charles Bradford for the first time. Bradford had been a colonel then and his commanding officer. It was midnight and Levy was sitting alone in the sentinels’ changing room, only nineteen years old, feeling totally alone and more depressed than ever. Bradford sat down next to him and asked how he was doing, and he was shocked to find Bradford knew about his father and brother. And when Bradford spent an hour with him, talking to him about the army, about the country, about patriotism, Levy was moved to tears. He never forgot that night. He didn’t speak to Bradford again for ten years, and when he did, he was astonished Bradford remembered him.

  He was even more astonished by the job Charles Bradford asked him to do.

  By one A.M., Merker and her neighbors appeared to be sleeping. Levy put on a ski mask, took a small gym bag from the trunk of his car, and picked the lock on Merker’s back door. He wasn’t particularly good with lock picks, and it took him almost five minutes. As he entered the house, he noticed a pleasant odor. Merker might have been burning incense or candles before she went to bed.

  Merker slept on her back, her mouth slightly open, and there was a lamp on a small table next to her bed. Levy placed the gym bag on the floor, found the lamp’s switch, then pulled the Colt from his shoulder holster. He placed the barrel of the gun against the center of Merker’s forehead and turned on the light.

  Merker came awake instantly and saw Levy looming over her, the gun in his hand, the ski mask covering his face. She opened her mouth to scream but Levy prodded her head with the gun and said, “Don’t.” She clamped her mouth shut; her brown eyes were huge with fear.

  “If you scream,” Levy said, “I’ll pistol-whip you. If you fight me, I’ll pistol-whip you. I’ll make your face look like a Halloween mask. Do you understand?”

  Merker nodded. He noticed that although the woman was clearly frightened, she wasn’t panicking, she wasn’t on the verge of hysteria. She was thinking about how to escape. She was a professional, of some sort.

  “What do you want?” Merker said.

  Levy didn’t answer. He threw back the sheets covering Merker. She was wearing what looked like men’s boxer shorts and a Garfield-the-cat T-shirt.

  “Roll over on your stomach,” Levy said.

  “I have money in the freezer,” Merker said. “There’s five hundred dollars in a little Tupperware thing. My credit cards are in my purse.”

  “If you don’t turn over onto your stomach immediately,” Levy said, “I’m going to hurt you.”

  Merker turned over and Levy reached down into the gym bag for a roll of duct tape. He used the tape to bind her hands, then took her by the shoulders and turned her so she was lying once again on her back.

  “What do you want?” Merker asked again.

  “I want to know who you work for,” Levy said. “I want to know who sent you to Arlington Hospital to get that man’s fingerprints.”

  “What?” she said, feigning confusion, but Levy could tell she wasn’t confused.

  “Alberta, tell me who you work for and I’ll leave. If you don’t tell me, then … well, I’m going to make you tell me.”

  “I work in the commissary at Fort Meade. I buy stuff: you know, the produce and meat and shit. You got me mixed up with somebody. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, about fingerprints.”

  Levy shook his head. “Stand up.”

  “Look in my purse if you don’t believe me,” Merker said. “You’ll see my badge for the commissary.”

  He was sure she did have such an ID badge. That meant nothing.

  “Stand up,” Levy said again.

  Merker rose from her bed and for an instant she seemed relieved, probably thinking that if Levy wanted her out of the bed he wasn’t planning to rape her.

  “Go to the kitchen,” he said, and gave her a small push in the back.

  In the kitchen, Levy turned on the lights. “Sit down in one of those chairs near the table.”

  “Look, you got me confused with—”

  He backhanded her. He didn’t slap her that hard but she stumbled against the kitchen table.

  “Sit in the chair,” he said.

  He took the roll of duct tape and wrapped the tape around her chest and legs, binding her to the chair. Her hands were still taped behind her back.

  “What do you want?” Merker said.

  “I told you. I want to know who you work for.”

  “I work for the goddamn army! I work in the commissary at Fort Meade. How many fuckin’ times do I have to tell you? You’re making a mistake.”

  Levy took a cloth sack from the gym bag and placed the sack over Merker’s head.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  Levy didn’t answer. He tipped back the chair she was sitting in so that she was now lying on her back, her head on the floor, bound to the chair. He then searched the cabinets in the kitchen until he found what he was looking for: cooking pots. One was a five gallon aluminum pot that she probably used for making spaghetti or stews. Two other pots were cast iron and about half that size. He filled all three pots with water.

  Waterboarding is a very effective form of persuasion. The prisoner is immobilized, usually on a board or table, a cloth sack is placed over his head, his head is placed in a position lower than his feet—and then water is poured onto the sack. It sounds harmless, and the prisoner isn’t marked in any way—except psychologically. Prisoners subjected to this procedure can have nightmares for life and often develop a number of phobias, some of them completely debilitating, such as an inability to take showers or having panic attacks whenever it rains.

  During waterboarding, as the water cascades over the prisoner’s face and into his nose and mouth, his gag reflex kicks in. He begins to choke and cough uncontrollably, and the sensation is identical to drowning, a drowning that never stops. Interrogators have found the technique so effective that hardened men, fanatical terrorists, will sometimes confess in less than five minutes.

  “Who do you work for?” Levy said.

  “I told you. I …”

  Levy began to pour the water onto Merker’s face and she whipped her head from side to side, coughing and choking and gagging, straining against the tape binding her to the chair, the chair bucking off the floor. He poured for almost two minutes—two minutes that would have seemed like an eternity to the woman. When he stopped pouring, Merker sucked in air in huge, ragged gasps, her chest heaving.

  “Who do you work for?” Levy said.

  She didn’t answer. It sounded as if she might be hyperventilating because of the panic she was certainly feeling, but she didn’t seem to make any attempt to speak.

  He began to pour the water again.

  Then something strange happened: Merker stopped moving. She just lay there, not choking or trying to evade the water. It appeared as if she’d passed out, but that didn’t make sense. That was one of the nice things about waterboarding: prisoners normally remain conscious, or at least semiconscious, throughout the process.

  Levy reached down and felt for a pulse in Merker’s throat.

  There was no pulse!

  Levy ripped the sack off Merker’s head and performed CPR on her for five minutes. It did no good. Merker was dead.

  Levy knelt next to the woman, breathing heavily, completely shocked. There was no way she should have died, not from what he had done to her. She must have had a heart attack or a stroke. She was a chunky woman, but she wasn’t obese. In fact, she looked like she was in pretty good shape. She must have had some sort of preexisting medical condition. That was the only thing that made sense.

  What the hell had he done? He hadn’t wanted to kill her—and he wouldn’t have killed her if she’d told him what he wanted to know. She hadn’t seen his face. But now she was dead—and, worst of all, she was the only lead he had. He had just killed the one person who could tell him who their opponent was.

  He cut the tape binding Merker to the chair, examined her body, and
was relieved to see that he hadn’t taped her so tightly that he’d bruised or marked her. He took a washcloth and soap, gently scrubbed the tape residue from her legs, and pulled the wet Garfield T-shirt off her. He carried her back to her bedroom, placed her back in her bed, put a dry T-shirt on her, then found a hair dryer and blow-dried her short hair. He noticed that her lower lip was somewhat puffy from where he’d struck her, so he took her out of the bed and laid her face down on the floor. That was better: it would look as if she’d risen from her bed and collapsed when she had the first symptoms of whatever killed her, and falling to the floor would account for the bruise he’d caused when he slapped her.

  Levy returned to the kitchen, placed the cooking pots back in the cupboard, and, using rags he found in a closet, mopped up the kitchen floor. After he placed all the wet rags in a clothes hamper, he spent the next hour looking for anything that might identify Merker’s employer. All he found was the Fort Meade commissary ID in her purse. He walked back to the bedroom for one final look around and noticed a photo of Merker and another black woman who might have been Merker’s sister. She and the other woman were wearing sombreros and grinning and drinking drinks that looked like margaritas.

  First Witherspoon and now this young woman. Witherspoon had been a brother in arms and Merker … well, she had been a soldier in her way as well. She had been his adversary—but not his enemy.

  This was not the way John Levy wanted to serve his country.

  18

  DeMarco was a lawyer who had never practiced law. And what he had learned about estates and wills back in law school wasn’t even a distant memory; he had no memory of those subjects at all. So he looked in the phone book, found the name of an Arlington lawyer who specialized in wills and estates, and made an appointment.

  He told the lawyer his problem, that his cousin had been killed and he was the only relative young enough and close enough to deal with Paul’s estate. But he couldn’t find Paul’s will and he needed to clean out Paul’s apartment and do something with the four grand Paul had in the bank.

  The lawyer—a crusty, ill-tempered old fart named Crenshaw—said if Paul had died intestate, DeMarco or some other relative would have to deal with the state of Virginia to probate Paul’s will.

  “So can you give me the form I have to submit?” DeMarco asked.

  “It’s not quite that simple,” Crenshaw said, after which he went through a mind-numbing discourse about how DeMarco would have to qualify as the administer of the estate, get something called a surety bond, provide lists of all of Paul’s known assets and heirs, and submit reports on a periodic basis to some bureaucratic entity known as the Commissioner of Accounts Office. Then, after what sounded to DeMarco like a decade of paper shuffling, the state would divvy up Paul’s possessions to his relatives in accordance with formulas they used.

  “But his only relatives are me, my mother, and an aunt who’s eighty-seven years old,” DeMarco whined. “And none of us want his furniture, and me and my mom both agree Paul’s aunt can have the money. Can I at least clean out his apartment and get rid of his sh—his stuff?”

  “No. Mr. Russo’s possessions don’t belong to you,” the lawyer said.

  “But what’s Paul’s landlady supposed to do with his furniture? Store it someplace until his estate is settled?”

  The lawyer shrugged. “She could get rid of the furniture, I suppose. But if she did, and if one of Paul’s relatives wanted the furniture or the money that could have been obtained if the furniture had been sold, well, then she might have a problem. Someone might sue her.”

  “We’re not gonna sue her! I already told you: none of his relatives want the furniture. It’s a bunch of secondhand crap. And his landlady would have to pay about a hundred bucks a month to put it in storage.”

  “She could be reimbursed from Paul’s estate,” the lawyer said. “The other thing is that if Paul made a will, he might not have left his possessions to his family. He could have left his estate to a charity or a close friend.”

  This was hopeless.

  Before he left Crenshaw’s office, the lawyer gave him a stack of paper that contained all the rules and forms—and charged him a hundred and twenty bucks.

  DeMarco’s curses trailed behind him as he walked back to his car.

  DeMarco stopped at a restaurant in Georgetown to get lunch—and a martini. It could be said that dealing with all the bullshit associated with Paul’s death was driving him to drink, but DeMarco didn’t need to be driven to drink. Like his boss, he drank too much as it was.

  Which reminded him to check on Mahoney. This time, he called Mary Pat and asked how her husband was doing. Not good, she said, and started to cry. Mahoney was still in a coma, his vital signs were getting weaker, and the doctors were noncommittal. To all this, DeMarco responded with the usual useless platitudes people are reduced to in these situations: Don’t worry. He’ll be fine. He’s strong. He’s getting the best medical care in the country. I’ll pray for him.

  And he would.

  He sat there a few minutes, sipping his martini, thinking about the walking contradiction that was John Mahoney: corrupt yet intensely patriotic, self-serving and self-centered but incredibly loyal and generous to those he considered friends, a serial adulterer who was deeply in love with his wife. He hoped Mahoney had made a confession before he went into surgery; he wasn’t sure God knew about Mahoney’s good side. He finished his drink and his lunch and then called Hopper at the FBI. Agent Hopper did not sound delighted to hear from him.

  “Did you happen to come across Paul’s will?” DeMarco asked.

  “No, why would I?” Hopper said.

  “Because you searched his house and you took the computers from his home and his office.”

  Hopper didn’t say anything for a moment. “How do you know that? Are you bird-dogging my investigation, DeMarco?”

  “I’m not bird-dogging anything. I went to Paul’s place because I gotta deal with the crap in his apartment, and his landlady told me you’d been there. And when I went to the place where he worked, his boss told me the same thing: that you searched his desk and took his computer. Anyway, I looked through the desk in his apartment and—”

  “You were in his apartment?”

  “Yeah. Like I was saying, I looked through his desk hoping to find his will, but I didn’t. I was thinking maybe it was on his computer, that maybe he made one of those online do-it-yourself wills. Or maybe his lawyer’s identified in the address book in his e-mail.”

  “I didn’t find anything related to a will in his computer,” Hopper said. “Nor did I see anything about a lawyer.”

  “Why did you take the computer?”

  “Because we’re investigating his death and we’re looking for a drug connection.”

  “From what I’ve been told about him, it’s pretty unlikely he was dealing drugs.”

  “Is that right?” Hopper said. “Well, it may interest you to know that I found a bottle of Librium capsules in his apartment, and your cousin’s name wasn’t on the prescription label. It was only twenty pills, but—well, you know.”

  “Yeah, I see what you mean,” DeMarco said, but he was thinking: Horseshit, you found any pills.

  “And DeMarco, one other thing,” Hopper said. “Stay out of Russo’s house. It’s part of a crime scene.”

  “A crime scene? I thought he was killed at the Iwo Jima Memorial.”

  “Just stay out of his house,” Hopper repeated, and hung up.

  DeMarco sat for a moment, spinning his empty martini glass in his hand, and reflected on his discussion with Hopper. The guy was lying to him; no doubt about that. There was no way he had found a stolen bottle of pills in Paul’s apartment. But why was he lying? Once again, he thought about the fact that General Breed had been Paul’s last patient and that maybe Hopper was lying because there were national security issues involved.

  Then another thought occurred to him. When he searched Paul’s desk he’d been looking for f
ile containing a will or a bill Paul had received from a lawyer. He hadn’t come across an address book in Paul’s desk, but then he hadn’t really been looking for one. DeMarco didn’t have a paper address book; he kept addresses on his computer at home and all the important phone numbers were in his cell phone. But maybe Paul was like his mother. His mom kept the addresses and phone numbers of her friends in a little black notebook, and she kept the notebook in a drawer in the kitchen near the phone.

  He should take one last look in Paul’s place, try to find an address book stashed in away in a drawer, and see if the book contained the name of a lawyer. No way in hell was he going to go through the hassle of dealing with the state to settle Paul’s estate if he didn’t have to. Then he thought about Hopper’s warning—or maybe it had been a legal directive—for him to stay out of Paul’s place. And then he thought, Fuck Hopper. He wanted to get this bullshit with Paul’s estate settled and go play golf.

  19

  Charles Bradford watched through his office window as an Asian man wearing a stained gray fedora slowly pruned a rhododendron. He wondered what it would be like to have a job like that, a simple job, a job with no real responsibility, a job where other people worried about protecting the country.

  “So all you know is that she worked for the Department of Defense,” Bradford said.

  “Yes, sir,” Levy said. He paused and added, “I’m sorry I let you down, but she was a young woman. There was no reason to think—”

  “Do you think she might have really worked at Fort Meade, John?”

  “It’s possible. She had a badge to get on base, for the commissary like she said.”

  Bradford didn’t say anything for a moment, as he mulled over what Levy had told him. “Fort Meade. Could someone have heard you that night, John?”

  “Heard us? Do you mean could someone have intercepted our radio transmissions during the operation?”

  “Yes.”