Official Privilege

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Curiouser and curiouser.”

  She appeared to hesitate. “I didn’t want the Hardin case to be the only reason to call you,” she said finally.

  “I’m glad you called me yesterday afternoon.”

  He laughed. “I want you to know I took civvies to the boathouse this afternoon. I was going to call you again, but I chickened out. How’s about we do lunch tomorrow, after seeing Vann? That would also give me good cover as to why I’m out of the building in the middle of the day.”

  “Sounds fine. Although I’ll bet you hear about it from Snapper. I’ll wait for your call tomorrow.”

  Dan groaned as he hung up. He would undoubtedly hear about it from Snapper, probably for days. The question was what to tell Summerfield.

  As it turned out, Summerfield did not seem to care.

  Dan told him he needed a couple hours off in the middle of the day to take a lady to lunch.

  “Tell Miss. Snow hello for us,” was all he said as Dan stood in the doorway to Summerfield’s private office, with Snapper eavesdropping dramatically, a hand cupped to his ear.

  Snapper’s reaction was suspiciously muted: He looked at Dan over the top of a Marine field manual and gave out a series of hell-hell’s, showing a lot of teeth. Dan knew that the real harassment would come later, when there was a bigger audience. But he finished his Wednesday-morning staff drills and then called Grace to let her know he was coming. Summerfield and Snapper had to go to a meeting at ten o’clock, so Dan was able to leave the Pentagon and catch the Metro at ten-thirty without attracting undue attention.

  Grace was waiting for him in the lobby of the Municipal Center. Dan was wearing his service dress blues, and Grace had on another one of those simple but expensive-looking suits of which she seemed to have an infinite supply. They took the elevator up to the third floor, and Grace remembered the way to Vann’s office.

  Vann himself was waiting in the reception area.

  “Miss. Snow. Commander. Thanks for coming in.

  Coffee? No? Okay, let’s go into my office.”

  Dan followed Grace as she followed Vann, closing the door behind him.

  Vann went behind his desk and Dan and Grace sat down in the chairs.

  “First,” Vann said, “lemme say that this is an official policy matter and is not to be discussed with anyone outside of the metropolitan police department. I trust you both to be discreet, but I’m required to say that.

  And, second, what I’m about to reveal to you is for the purpose of obtaining unofficial input. In other words, this is a nonmeeting. It also means I don’t know what to do with this little chili pepper, okay?”

  Dan grinned and nodded. He ran into at least one of those a day back in the Pentagon.

  “Okay. What we got was an anonymous phone call from a pay phone at Metro Center; nice private place.

  We have this crime-solver’s hot line; there’re posters with the number all over town and the Metro cars.

  Crime-prevention sort of thing. We caller-ID each call, or course, but most people’ve seen enough TV to know that. Like this … person.”

  “

  “Person’?” Grace asked.

  “Yeah, person,” Vann replied. “On accounta because I can’t tell if it’s a he or a she makin’ the call. It almost sounds like someone placed the call and then turned on a tape recorder to play the actual message.

  Anyway, what he says is this, and I’m going to read it to you word for word:

  ” This is about the body in the battleship. What’s the connection between a certain very senior naval officer’s secret affair with Elizabeth Hardin and her brother’s murder?’ “

  Dan listened carefully while Vann reread the question.

  “That’s it?” he asked.

  “That’s a lot,” Grace interjected. “It shows that our theory was correct—that what’s behind his murder had something to do with his sister’s accident.”

  “Whose theory?” Vann asked.

  “Well, mine, actually,” Grace said. “We’ve talked about this, remember?

  When we did a case board, we both noticed the seeming coincidence of Elizabeth Har din’s death by accident and then her brother’s death by homicide about two weeks later. Only at the time, no one knew it was a homicide, he’d just disappeared.”

  Vann nodded. “So you’re thinking that maybe Elizabeth Hardin’s death wasn’t an accident?”

  “I saw no evidence that it was anything but an accident.

  But the sister’s death could still be related to the lieutenant’s murder, if there’s any truth behind this phone call.”

  “Uh-huh,” Vann said, looking at Dan. “And how would someone go about finding out who this certain high-ranking naval officer might be who had something going with Elizabeth Hardin?”

  This case is getting crazier by the minute, Dan thought. “Beats the shit out of me,” he said. “Grace, didn’t you tell me that Elizabeth Hardin’s postmortem showed that she was pregnant?”

  “Yes, it did,” Grace said excitedly. “Which at least would prove that she was on intimate terms with someone.”

  Vann was shaking his head. “Prove, hell. Slow down, everybody. It’s not like we got evidence, here. This could be someone just throwing some shit in the game, or some loony tune makin’ a phone call. We get all kinds of shit on that hot line.”

  “What will you do with this?” Dan asked.

  “I’m probably gonna have to give it to the Navy,” Vann replied. “It’s their case, It’s just that …” He paused, looking at Dan, who understood at once.

  “I’d have to assume that very senior naval officer is an admiral. And if this is an admiral we’re talking about here, then giving it to the Navy might be the same as giving it to the bad guys, whoever they are. And let me guess. You’d like me to sniff around, see if I can find out who was having it on with Elizabeth Hardin before she got hit by that car, right?”

  “You were all wrong, Miss. Snow,” Vann said with a grin. “This guy is smart.”

  But Grace had a worried look on her face. “Dan,” she began, “I—”

  “It’s okay, Grace. I know this wasn’t your idea. And I wish I could help, Captain Vann, but I doubt there’s any way in hell I could find that out. First of all, she worked in CHINFO a couple of years ago.

  There’s not likely to be anyone there now who was assigned there then.

  And if she was having an affair with a flag officer, she would want to keep it very damned secret. For one thing, it’s illegal fraternization.

  They would both want to keep it very damn quiet.”

  “And they’d have another damn good reason to keep it quiet—especially him,” said Vann.

  “What’s that?” Grace asked.

  “If he was a white flag officer.”

  “Wow,” Dan said. “I see what you’re saying.” And then he felt a bit embarrassed at having said it. But Vann did not seem to take offense. He got up and stared out the window behind his desk, thinking. Dan looked over at Grace, who raised her eyebrows at him as if to say, Now what?

  “Suppose we could find out who it was,” Vann said, his back still turned toward them. “Suppose we could find that out—the boyfriend. What would we have, Miss. Snow?”

  Grace tilted her head and looked at Vann’s back.

  Then she put her hand up in front of her mouth.

  “Oh,” she said. “My God. Yes. We might have a suspect.”

  “You mean because Lieutenant Hardin found out that his sister was dating some senior officer, a white guy?” Dan asked.

  “No,” Grace said as Vann turned around. “Because Lieutenant Hardin found out or suspected there was a connection between Elizabeth’s death and her senior officer lover.”

  “Holy shit!”

  “Yeah,” Vann said. “A threat to expose the affair might be grounds for retaliation, but probably not for murder. I knew Wesley Hardin—he would be upset with the situation, but he would raise hell with his sister, not the bo
yfriend, specially if he was some senior white dude in the Navy. But if he thought ‘Lizbeth’s accident wasn’t an accident, well that would be something else again. Wesley’d be on that like a snake on a rat.”

  “Which would tie in with your suspicions about all the coincidence,” Dan said to Grace.

  “That’s right.” Vann nodded. “Although they’re probably not directly related, in the sense that there probably weren’t two murders. But if Wesley thought her death wasn’t accidental, he’d do something, even something stupid,” Vann said.

  “So either way, the two deaths are connected.”

  “Well, they might be. Let’s not run too fast down this road,” Vann said, sitting back down. “We got some slick-sounding theories and zero proof or evidence. But you see, Commander, why I was in no big hurry to hand this phone call back to the Navy just yet.”

  Dan nodded. “I surely do. But can you just sit on it?

  Eventually, you’ll have to give it to them.”

  Vann grinned. “Oh, I can sit on it. This is the District, remember? We have no active cases involving either Hardin, just one open but aging hit-and-run. I guarantee you nobody would be surprised if we sat on it, or even lost it.”

  “How did it get to you?” Grace asked.

  “The only reason it didn’t go into the unknown pending card file was that the hot-line dispatcher put it on internal E-mail,” Vann said, patting his computer monitor.

  “Anything they can’t correlate with existing cases, they circulate for a day or two on the E-mail in what they call the ‘jeopardy’ file: Here’s an answer—anybody working a related question?”

  It was Dan’s turn to get up and stretch. These chairs must be for prisoners and suspects, he thought. “Suppose this does go over to NIS,”

  he said. “You realize there might be another problem with that.”

  “Why’s that?” Vann asked.

  “Because you’re talking about a flag officer involved in at least a scandalous situation, and maybe in murder,” Grace interjected. “I was there long enough to realize that flag officers receive very special treatment when it comes to being investigated by the NIS.”

  “They get very special treatment throughout the whole Navy,” Dan said.

  “It’s part of their official privilege.

  Hell, these guys run the Navy. And they protect one another—there’s even a term for it: the ‘flag protection’ circuit.”

  “Does that extend to murder?” Vann asked, his face in a scowl.

  “No,” Dan said emphatically. “No, I think if there’s evidence of a serious crime on the part of a flag officer, the other flags would swallow hard but do what they have to do.”

  “Ah, the E word,” Vann said, and they all went silent.

  Grace stood up. “Let’s think about it,” she said.

  “Let’s all just think about it and see if we can come up with a course of action. I know I need time to think.”

  “So do I,” Dan said. “I can still see the poor bastard stuffed into a boiler. And now, well, now I don’t know what to think. But I do want to help. I just don’t know how, right at the moment.”

  “Okay,” Vann said. “Thinking always helps a case.

  I want to run this by some of my people, see if we’re out to lunch or what. And I need to talk to some folks in the community.”

  “Meaning, I hope, Mrs. Hardin,” Grace said.

  “Let’s do a teleconference,” Vann said, ignoring Grace’s remark. “I’ll call you both when I’m ready.

  Commander, you got a card?”

  Dan left one of his Opnav business cards, and then he and Grace took the elevator downstairs. By mutual consent, and since they were already on the Metro’s Red Line, they decided to have lunch at the American Cafe in Union Station. It being the beginning of tourist season, they had to wait fifteen minutes for a table. After the waitress had left with their orders, Dan looked around the crowded court.

  “This Hardin thing won’t let go, will it?” he said, thinking of what he had said to Vann.

  “I’m sorry,” she began. “I—”

  “No, it’s not you. I’m glad you called me. What I didn’t tell Vann up there was that one of the reasons the EAs might have folded in their little turf fight with MS was because somehow, somewhere, one of ‘em knows about this boyfriend angle. That might be why they shut us off.”

  “Wow. Do you know that?”

  “Well, no, I can’t prove it, if that’s what you mean.

  But the EAs are a network; that’s where that flag protection circuit I mentioned operates. If they smell a scandal, they work together to protect the sanctity of all flag officers and thereby the Navy’s good name.”

  “But not for murder.”

  “No, of course not, but, you see, they’re not thinking of murder; they’re thinking about a white flag officer, probably married, having an affair with a black woman officer who’s also a junior officer. That’s a medium-sensitive nerve these days in the USN. They’re thinking Tailhook and National Enquirer or Hard Copy, and they’re thinking damage control, the good of the Navy, the image of flag officers everywhere. Hell, that’s their job.”

  Grace toyed with her iced tea. “So if that’s going on, what are the chances of penetrating the smoke screen?”

  “For me, slim to none. But I think I need to talk to Captain Summerfield. He used to be an EA until his wife had her stroke. He knows the system, and he’s good buddies with a lot of flags. He might be able to sniff out what’s going on.”

  “Vann said we shouldn’t talk to anyone about this.”

  “He also said he wanted my help. He needs somebody inside the flag EA system for this, and Summer field has at least been there and done that.

  I know I can’t do it, but somebody like Summerfield might be able to.

  What do you suppose Vann’s game is, anyway?”

  She hesitated. “I still have the impression that it’s personal. I would imagine the D.C. police have their hands entirely full, and no homicide bureau looks for more cases to work, so he’s being cautious. But he’s an ex-chief of detectives, and I think his interest is amplified by whatever this personal relationship with the Hardin family is.”

  “And that’s probably why he’s being so protective of Mrs. Hardin. Yeah, that computes. Here’s lunch.”

  They spent the next half hour enjoying their lunch and the pleasant surroundings of the grand gallery of the train station, which had been elegantly refurbished into a first-class tourist attraction. The dominant feature was an enormous polished marble central hall, around which there were dozens of small restaurants, cafe’s, shops, and bars.

  With Metro access, it was a very popular place for lunch for both tourists and government workers, while also offering first-class intercity train station services.

  When their table had been cleared away and coffee brought, Grace looked pensive.

  “A penny,” Dan said.

  “You know, you asked what Vann’s game was,” she replied. “I’ve been wondering a little bit what my game is, staying involved in this Hardin mess.”

  “Investigator’s instincts, I suppose.”

  “Well, partly, but this is murder. I’ve been dealing with intricate fraud schemes, manipulations of securities rules and procedures, so-called white-collar crime.

  Nice and clean. No wide-eyed, mummified bodies staring at the innards of a ship’s boiler.”

  Two women at an adjacent table looked away suddenly, and Dan and Grace smiled as they realized the tourists had been eavesdropping.

  “When we would make a case in SEC,” Grace continued, “we usually ended up around a big mahogany table in some executive conference room, making yet another deal: how big a fine, who would or would not admit wrongdoing, who would be sanctioned or banned from the trading business, that sort of thing. Then the so-called criminals would be whisked off in their big black limo to lunch at the Four Seasons. For an investment banker or a bond trader, getting caught
usually turned out to be just another business expense.”

  “You make twenty million a year, a one-million-dollar fine is just that,” Dan offered.

  “Exactly. But my point is that those cases were almost an intellectual exercise: Could the government’s lawyers and experts outfox the insider traders’ lawyers and experts. It was about taxes and protecting small investors, and at least making a pretense about keeping the playing field level. But I never took a case home with me in the sense that I lost sleep over it. But this—”

  “Yeah. I see where you’re going: Are we sticking our noses into this because we might get some kind of vicarious thrill?”

  “Well, partly. Or because it offends us. But maybe we ought to just butt out, like the EAs, this NIS, and even Vann says.”

  “Like Vann said. But not anymore. He called you, remember? Look, let me take a giant step. If I land on your toes, say so.”

  She smiled. “And what’s that?”

  “The main reason I came today was because you asked me to. I’ll play in this game, whatever it is, but not if it screws up the chance to … to … Hell’s bells, I don’t know how to say this.”

  She reached across the table and put her hand on his.

  “You mean if we can get something going between us, let’s try not do anything or say anything that messes that up. How’s that?”

  “Damn lawyer.”

  She laughed, then grew serious. “I hope that’s possible.

  I could always hand off a SEC case to another lawyer or investigator. I sense that a murder case is very different: It’s a game that once you’re in, it’s not so easy just to up and leave it. I feel like this one’s becoming a threat of some kind, like that guy following me.”

  “Glad you mentioned that. I talked to a waiter I know down at the corner bistro. He told me that some guy ran out of the place without finishing his dinner the night you took the taxi home. And then he saw a big pickup truck make a wild turn onto Union.”

  “He see the driver?” she asked.

  “No. But it kind of ties together.”