Official Privilege

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Yes?”

  “Greetings.”

  The captain.

  “Greetings indeed. You called,” Malachi said.

  “Yes, I did. Remember the Hardin boy? Went missing a few years ago, up in Philadelphia? Guess what?”

  Malachi didn’t answer. He did not like guess-what games.

  “He’s no longer missing,” the captain said.

  Malachi sat up straight and muted the television. Not possible, he thought. But watch what you say.

  “Where? And what’s he done?” he asked, trying to lodge the impression that, as far as he knew, the boy might still be alive.

  “What he’s done is turn up very dead in the boiler room of a mothballed battleship in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. And now there’s going to be an investigation.”

  “Dead?”

  “Very dead. So dead, he’s even mummified. It seems he’d been confined in one of the battleship Wisconsin’s boilers ever since he went missing.

  You see, there’s no air below the main decks in a mothballed capital ship— they replace it with nitrogen gas. It was something of a shrinking experience. I’m sure you’ll be hearing about it pretty soon on the news.”

  Malachi sipped some whiskey and tried to think.

  “Well,” he said, “I guess the operative question is, So what? If he’s dead, he’s not going to be telling any interesting tales to anyone. You can remind your principal of the pirate’s first rule.”

  “It’s the investigation that concerns us, not Lieutenant Hardin. But we are hoping that two years will leave such a cold trail that nothing will come of it.”

  “Sounds reasonable to me. Most homicides are solved in the first seventy-two hours or not at all.”

  “Is this a homicide, Malachi?” The captain’s voice was silky. Malachi grinned into the phone.

  “You tell me, Captain—it’s your guys’ investigation, right?”

  “Yes, exactly. And like all investigations, we’ll have to see where it leads us. There’s actually a political dimension to this issue that may give me the opportunity to influence the course of the investigation. In a way that can help us all. But—”

  “Yeah, I hear that ‘but.’ What do you want from me?”

  “Just wanted you to hear it from us first, Malachi. We may be in touch.

  Stay tuned, as it were.”

  “Okay. You know where to find me. But remember that it’s your investigation. Hold that thought, as it were.”

  Malachi hung up and stared at the muted television and worked on his bourbon while the color images of a commercial flickered across the screen. A sexy young woman in a short flip skirt was bending over a store shelf, with the camera behind her, while supposedly focusing the keen minds of the viewers on the decision of which spray cleaner was best for her and the rest of mankind. Women’s liberation at work, Malachi mused.

  The voyeuristic shot of the woman’s thighs was undoubtedly supposed to titillate, but Malachi felt nothing —not now and not since that night in Frankfurt, when a routine bar roust had gone horribly wrong. Malachi and an MP sergeant named Terry Eastman had been sent down to the Sachsenhausen district to pick up an AWOL Air Force warrant officer who was reportedly holed up in a bar on a three-day toot. Malachi and Eastman had gone into the bar. It should have been ho hum: “a no big deal, roust the drunk, pour him into the MP van, and then make the long drive back to Rhein Main” evolution. Eastman could have done it in his sleep, but Malachi had gone along with an eye toward maybe doing a little forty-eight himself in Frankfurt afterward, if things worked out.

  Things did not work out. A barfly got into it—Inge.

  He hadn’t known her name then, just that there was this plumpish hooker sitting at the bar when they went in after the warrant officer. As Sergeant Eastman was breaking the news to the warrant, who was so drunk he couldn’t even lift his head, the blowsy barfly with the too-red lipstick and the big floppy front had swiveled around on her bar stool and started yelling at Malachi in German. Malachi had been surprised—there was no big deal going down, no fight, no real problem at all. He was the officer, not the MP, and he was in uniform. He had put up a hand to tell her to shut up and stay out of it, the other customers starting to look up, when Inge had reached behind her, grabbed a beer bottle, smashed the top off, and in one smooth swinging motion shoved the jagged edges into Malachi’s crotch. The pain had been so incredible that Malachi couldn’t even scream as he sank down into a crouch by her bar stool, his hands clutching at his sodden trousers, his mouth open but nothing coming out, and then the bitch had jabbed the bottle into his throat. Malachi had remembered only one thing after that, one thing besides the wetness that was flooding his pants and pumping down his arms, all over his shirt front, and that was Terry, good ole Sergeant Terry, eyes wide as white dinner plates, unlimbering that big .45 and opening fire at the whore, emptying that cannon and all the shelves behind the bar with five thundering blasts, the sounds of the bullets buzzing by Malachi’s head in counterpoint to the red muzzle flashes, the thunking noises as two slugs hit Inge, one in the chest, the other tearing her right arm, the bottle-wielding arm, right off at the elbow, the rest blasting big holes in the wood of the bar and shattering everything behind it in a noisy cascade of glass and schnapps. Malachi and Inge had ended up on the floor together, Malachi bent in half, eye-to-eye with the whore, his eyes seeing, but barely, her eyes glassy and seeing nothing, the echoes of a glass avalanche behind them somewhere, and Sergeant Terry screaming his name, and the smell of blood, gunpowder, and urine.

  Malachi had ended up spending four months convalescing in the Army hospital at Wiesbaden, fighting off a huge infection and then learning how to form sounds in his mangled voice box again. They hadn’t told him of his castration until the end of the third week.

  He stared at the television screen, unseeing, for a long time, reliving that night for the millionth time, and then came back to the present. He discovered that his hands were shaking, and his shirt felt too tight.

  Shit.

  Where the hell had that come from? He took a deep breath, got up, and went out into the kitchen to get some more whiskey and a cigarette. It was amazing what brought it all back sometimes—seeing a woman on the Metro who looked like Inge, seeing something on the TV, like tonight. He often wondered if he might not be just a little crazy. Her face sometimes materialized on the faces of women he passed in the street, or when some woman at a desk gave him a hard time. It always disoriented him when it happened. Like the morning he had taken out that black girl—what, two years ago?—her face, her angry, distorted face, had triggered the image just before he hit her. Which was maybe why he had hit her.

  And living on Capitol Hill didn’t help: It seemed like all the little basement flats around the neighborhood had one or more beautiful young women living in them, women who came strutting by his windows every morning, headed for the Hill, dressed like Parisian call girls, every one of them with a “my shit doesn’t stink” expression on her face.

  Hundreds of them. For all the good it did him. Malachi had no use for women.

  He came back into the living room and sat down again. So the Hardin kid had turned up, after all. In the boiler of a battleship, for God’s sake.

  Nice try, Angelo.

  Nothing if not original. He closed his eyes and waited for Mr. Harper’s elixir to infuse his brain with some new capital. He had worked for a master sergeant once who was full of little homilies about getting by in the Army. One seemed to apply now: Don’t waste your time and energy on things you cannot do anything about. Killing the girl had been an accident, a bothersome accident, but there you are. After what a woman had done to him, he felt that womankind in general owed him a whole shitpot full of opportunities for— what? Revenge? Retaliation? Call it justice. Maybe she hadn’t slipped out there on the street. Maybe he had seen Inge’s face and had simply touched the wheel a tad, just enough to alter the balance, just like that German whore had altered his balance,
and his voice, and his sex life—forever.

  Taking her brother off the boards had also been something of an accident. Like brother, like sister, apparently: They had been a pair of shit-magnets. Angelo had warned him, and, just like with the girl in Foggy Bottom that morning, things got away from them. Shit happens in the big city. But now the body had been found and the Navy was going to do an investigation.

  Can’t do anything about the body being found, and Angelo wasn’t the kind of guy to hand him his money back; the paisans were not into warranties.

  He considered the implications of an investigation. A Navy homicide investigation—that would be the Naval Investigative Service. He snorted. The Navy’s lame attempt to emulate the Army’s CID, only dumber.

  In his Germany days, he had had some experience with an NIS crew up from their Naples office when he had been setting up a Marine corporal for a drug fall to protect some friends. He had wired the thing so tight that all the NIS weenies had to do was be there, but, no, they wanted to dick around, talk to some people, almost queering the deal. They were just a bunch of ex-sailors running around in polyester suits from Sears and trying to use three-syllable words in their reports. He had not been stunned to read that the NIS had had a heavy hand in the Navy’s recent PR problems with the Tailhook scandal. But none the less, they would start snooping around and talking to people. And while it was better having the NIS on it than, say, the FBI, it still meant that a federal police outfit was going to be poking around. That was going to make the captain and his principal nervous sooner rather than later. Already had, in fact.

  He went back into the kitchen and refreshed his drink. When he came back to the living room, an especially homely car dealer was screaming silently at the screen. Why did car dealers and furniture salesmen always have to scream? He was convinced that the mute.

  switch on TV remote controls had been invented because of car dealers and furniture salesmen. He sat down again. Even the NIS might eventually connect the girl and her brother, both dying within a two-week time frame. But over and above that regrettable coincidence, there was nothing to connect him to the girl or her brother. Oh, Angelo, maybe, but Angelo was about as safe as anyone could be. Safer, actually. You might not admire their business, but the Guidos observed their own rules and regulations a lot better than most elements of American society.

  And the captain. He thought about that. If the NIS weenies did stumble across something, the weakest spot in Malachi’s own personal-security perimeter was the captain—the guy who had handed him the money to scare off the girl two years ago, and the guy who had invited him in the Army-Navy Town Club to see what her brother looked like. “What I really wish is that the son of a bitch would just disappear,” the captain had said to him. The captain was the only guy in this whole Hardin deal who could finger him.

  Malachi drained his glass, savoring the familiar expanding ball of comfort in his stomach and the certainty that his brain was computing at top end. This whole mess had started with an honest, straightforward job: to go see some twist, warn her off some great man’s very busy, very important life in the big city. Little scare didn’t work, so he’d set up a medium scare, only the bitch had messed it up for everybody. Any way you looked at it, that one had been just an accident. Then the not-such-an-accident to her mouthy younger brother.

  How had his master sergeant put it? “If you’re gonna get into it, get into it.” Maybe, just maybe, and depending on what the captain decided to do, he’d have to take one more pass at the Hardin case. The girl had been a shit-happens deal. Her brother … well, her brother had run his mouth in front of the wrong honkies. Now he might have to take one more guy off the boards to cover his own ass. That would leave the principal, the great man, out there all alone if the NIS somehow happened to wander down the right road. Malachi decided he could get his arms around that picture. He liked it; liked it a lot, in fact. Damn near as much as this fine bourbon. He also realized that he was thinking in circles, and perhaps that he was medium drunk. What a surprise.

  on tuesday morning, Grace walked into the District Municipal Center on Indiana Avenue and consulted the directory listing mounted over the unmanned information desk. The lobby was spacious and rather dark, with streams of people moving through it. There were citizens coming in to deal with automobile paperwork, jackbooted motorcycle cops, plainclothes cops, and many other people milling around whom Grace could not readily identify. The terrazzo floors amplified the noise of people talking, asking for directions, or just coming in and out. The sign above the information desk told her that the Homicide Division was on the third floor, so she went to the elevator bank and pushed a button, joining a small crowd of people who were waiting.

  Every so often, the request light would go out, and then someone would push it again, with no visible effect.

  Just like the District, she thought.

  She fished in her purse for the name of her point of contact: a Captain Goldsmith. She had called yesterday afternoon for an appointment. She had called again this morning before taking the Metro over to the District, and Goldsmith’s secretary had confirmed the appointment.

  When the elevator finally came, she had to move quickly to get in. At the third floor, she went left, read a door number, turned around, and walked all the way to the end of the corridor to the next-to-the-last office, whose door was open. The room numbers were missing from most of the doors.

  Inside the office were two desks, a secretary standing by a coffee maker, and a doorway that led into a larger and better-furnished inner office. A well-dressed black man in a charcoal gray suit was talking to the secretary when Grace walked in. He immediately asked if he could help her.

  “I have an appointment to see Captain Goldsmith,” she said. “Can you tell me where his office is?”

  “I’m Captain Vann,” the man said. “Captain Goldsmith is the head of the Homicide Division; that’s next door. Lemme show you.”

  He took her next door, where there was another secretary guarding the corner office. Vann stuck his head into the inner office, showed Grace in, and left. well dell Goldsmith was a white man in his mid-fifties, who looked more like a prosperous lobbyist than the chief of Homicide in a city like Washington, D.C. He was florid

  faced and showed the beginnings of a double chin, and he filled out his expensive suit with what looked like the lifetime result of feeding well and often in the city’s finer restaurants. He had the careful eyes of a long term bureaucrat, and he was polite but reserved in his greeting when Grace presented her credentials. Goldsmith glanced briefly at her badge and ID while motioning her to a chair. Grace noticed that he made sure the door between his office and the secretarial area remained open.

  “Well, Miss. Snow, what can I do for the NIS today?”

  He had a pleasant voice, devoid of any particular emotion.

  Grace wondered if he was a political appointee or if he had ever been a working police detective.

  “Captain Goldsmith, thank you for seeing me on such short notice. As I told your secretary, I’m working on an investigation for the Navy, and it involves the apparent homicide two years ago of a lieutenant in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard.”

  He just looked at her, not voicing the obvious question.

  “The reason I’m coming to see the D.C. police is that this individual’s sister, who was also in the Navy, was the victim of a fatal hit-and-run accident here in the District about two weeks before the lieutenant was murdered. Apparently, the case was never solved.”

  “Has your investigation established some kind of link between the two deaths, Miss. Snow?”

  “No, not on a factual basis. But it does seem a bit too coincidental to us: a brother and a sister, both in the Navy, dying within two weeks of each other.”

  “I see,” Goldsmith said politely. I doubt it, thought Grace, but she pressed ahead.

  “I’d like to be able to sit down with the people who did the investigation of the hit-and-run incident. The
victim’s name was Elizabeth Hardin.”

  Goldsmith wrote the name down on a pad and appeared to consider it.

  “If it was a hit-and-run,” he said finally, “or so classified by the department, it would have gone to the hit and-run division in the Traffic Bureau. They’re actually over on New York Avenue. If the case was resolved, the case files will be stored here, in central records—that’s down on the ground floor, where you came in.”

  “And if it was not resolved?”

  Goldsmith shrugged. “It would be an open case; they’d have the original records downstairs, and a duplicate set over in Traffic. The chances of resolution at this late date …” He shrugged his shoulders and looked at his watch.

  “I understand, Captain. Can you refer me to someone in the Traffic Bureau?”

  “I can, but we have a standard procedure for letting other law-enforcement agencies look at police records.

  You’ll have to go through that drill first. Your agency has to make a formal request—a fax will do it, though.

  Want to make a call?”

  She had to wait almost an hour down in the records center before Robby Booker was able to get a fax sent over from NIS with the approved records request. Finally, a very thin, elderly black lady produced an equally thin police file. She had Grace sign an access sheet, then indicated a combination chair-desk of the type that Grace had not seen since high school over in one corner of the records area’s lobby. Grace thanked her and squeezed into the chair-desk to review the file.

  It was a thin file indeed. The old refrain from the Jack Webb TV show of the fifties flitted through her mind: “Just the facts, ma’am. Just the facts.”

  Facts were all that was in the file. The preliminary report stated that, on April 12, 1992, a citizen had called 911 to report finding a young woman, apparently deceased, on his front steps on 23rd Street at 6:35 a.m. Emergency services were dispatched at 6:37, and arrived on the scene at 6:45 a.m. They confirmed that the victim, a black female, had expired at the scene due to what appeared to be multiple blunt-force trauma injuries indicative of the subject being hit by a vehicle.