Official Privilege

by P. T. Deutermann

“I’m fine. He slapped me around, but that was all.”

  Her eyes were telling him not to bring up the rest in front of Vann.

  There was still a hint of panic in her face.

  “We need to get a statement,” Vann said. “And sooner is better than later. We’ve gotta find this guy. I don’t think it was in his plan that you two were gonna get away.”

  “The cops check around the neighborhood?”

  “Yeah, but he vanished. He may have gone over the Key Bridge to Virginia. By the time our guys talked to their guys …” He shrugged.

  “I’ll bet,” Dan said. “Let’s do this. They’ve got my neck braced. At these prices, I’d sleep better in my own tree. Can you maybe give us a ride over to my house in Alexandria? Grace is going to need somewhere to stay, and I can talk to your guys there as well as here. Or even in the car.”

  Vann pursed his lips. “You’d be safer here than at home; remember, Ward also got away.”

  “My guess is we’re okay, at least for tonight. He wasn’t in any shape to mount another attack,” Dan replied, watching Grace’s face. Her mouth was working, and her eyes jumped every time there was a loud noise outside the curtains.

  Vann finally nodded. “Yeah, okay. The docs are gonna hassle you some; man said he wanted to check you in, get some more pictures on that neck tomorrow.

  But what the hell. I hate hospitals, too.”

  It took a full hour to get discharged, but finally they were on their way back to Old Town in Vann’s cop car.

  Another unmarked car was behind them, with two Homicide detectives from the District on board. Dan was able to salvage his uniform trousers and shoes and socks, but he had to wear a hospital pajama shirt when he left the ER. His bloody shirt had been cut away when he had been brought into the ER, in the mistaken belief that he had been shot. Grace had had to acquire a pair of hospital slippers, having climbed out of the window barefoot.

  After they arrived at Dan’s house, the two cops debriefed both of them for an hour on tape, and then Vann, seeing that they were starting to droop, shut it off. It was close to midnight when the Homicide cops gathered up their taping equipment and went out front.

  Vann, Grace, and Dan remained behind in the kitchen for a few minutes.

  Dan’s neck hurt with a steady, throbbing pain, but he was running on caffeine for the moment, and some industrial-strength painkillers.

  “We’ll talk some more tomorrow,” Vann said, taking his cup to the sink.

  “Now that this has happened, we have an active case. Kidnap and attempted homicide, not to mention a little first-grade arson. I’ve had people tossing Ward’s house on Capitol Hill tonight. We’ll see what we get. But we mostly have to figure out why he came after you two.”

  Grace shook her head. Dan could see that her face was gray around the edges, and she sounded exhausted.

  She had refused coffee, and now she was slumping in her chair. “I told you,” she said wearily. “He was trying to find out if we’d been hired by someone, someone he thinks is you. There’s something else going on, but I don’t know what it is.”

  “But hired to do what?”

  “Come after him. That’s what he said … Dan, I think I better go lie down now.”

  “Right,” Vann said, getting up quickly, looking over at Dan. “Gimme a call in the morning, okay? And we’ll ask the Arlington County cops to cruise by tonight.

  Can’t hurt.”

  Dan thanked him and Vann let himself out. Dan put his mug in the sink and pulled Grace close.

  “Nifty date, Miss. Snow. But I don’t think your old man likes me.”

  But she didn’t smile. She was shaking, and her breathing was getting ragged. He hurried her upstairs to his bedroom, but she recoiled when she saw the bed, starting to cry and holding on to him, her face buried awkwardly between the neck brace and his shoulder.

  He sat her down on the edge of the bed, stroked her hair, and tried to calm her, but she was keening, speaking incoherently, shaking almost uncontrollably, and then suddenly she sat up straight.

  “Bathroom,” she gulped, her face ashen.

  He steered her into the bathroom, where she became violently ill, vomiting into the toilet bowl with great retching heaves, crying the whole time, and finally hyperventilating again. Dan could only kneel at her side and hold her, awkwardly because of the neck brace.

  When her convulsive heaves had stopped, he got a wet towel to clean her face, making a mask out of it to stop her roaring inhalations as she fought to recover her breath. When she finally subsided onto the floor, it became obvious that she had lost control at both ends, and when she realized that, she began crying again, but this time with less hysteria and more anguish at what had just happened. Dan reached over and turned on the shower, adjusting the temperature until it was just past the warm stage, and then he took her clothes off and eased her into the shower.

  He slowly raised the temperature while he held her, standing at the side of the tub, letting the water wash away the horrors of the night. He used a hand towel and soap to scrub her body. At first, she recoiled again when he touched her, but he kept murmuring, “It’s me, Grace. It’s just me.

  It’s all right. We’re safe now; we’re safe.” Then she started to calm down. The nipple of her right breast was swollen and bruised. She stood in the shower until the house’s elderly hot-water heater began to lose the fight, and then he shut the water off, sat her down on the toilet seat, and went to fetch towels from the linen closet across the hallway, his neck brace dripping all over the floor.

  After drying her off, he gave her one of his ancient flannel nightshirts and a pair of wool socks, after she complained in a small voice that her feet were cold, then put her in bed. Ever since the shower, she had kept her eyes closed, as if she could keep the night at bay as long as she did not open her eyes. He pulled the covers up to her neck and pushed her damp hair away from her face. He undressed and found a second nightshirt for himself, then went downstairs with the soiled clothes and threw everything in the trash. He saw his Courvoisier bottle on the sideboard, and he went to find two snifters. He double-checked the door locks and then turned on every light on the ground floor before going back upstairs with the two glasses of cognac. He left the hall light and bathroom light on, with both the bedroom and bathroom doors cracked to let some light into the bedroom. He turned off the bedroom light and carefully sat down beside her in the bed, staying on top of the covers.

  She was almost completely under the covers, nothing but the top of her head showing. He gently touched her hair.

  “I’ve got some cognac,” he said softly, in case she was sleeping. He got a definite

  “Unh-unh” from somewhere down in the covers. Okay, be that way. He tried some of the cognac and found that it tasted wrong. Probably the pills, he thought. He decided to get rid of the neck brace for the night, putting it over on the night table, from which it promptly rolled onto the floor. He wondered fleetingly about his car, and what the hell he would tell Summerfield in the morning about all this.

  Then he noticed Grace’s arm was out of the covers, tugging on the edge of the blanket and the top sheet up by the pillow.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Get in here,” she said, her voice still muffled by the covers. “Hurry.

  I’m freezing.”

  at midnight, malachi lay on his back on the couch in the darkness of the Randolph Towers apartment. His right leg was propped up on a chair in front of the couch, with an ice pack covering the golf ball-sized knot on his shin. His head was thrown back on the arm of the couch, with another ice pack covering the whole right side of his face. He held the bottle of Harper between his legs, his right hand clamped onto the neck of the bottle, his functioning left eye closed, and his brain focused on getting the next breath in and out of his chest. He could hear the sounds of a television laugh track coming from the next apartment; another insomniac in his box. A faint smell of cumin invaded the night breeze that was blowing
gently through the curtains covering the partially opened balcony door.

  The trek across the Key Bridge and up the hill to the Metro station had been hell on wheels—defective wheels, at that. There had been a moment out on the bridge when the cold black waters of the Potomac had beckoned. He had been furious at his body’s incapacity to handle pain from what should have been two fairly low-level hits: a crack on the shin and a smack in the eye. And, although he sensed that the eye injury was serious, the pain from his shin had been incredible. The diciest part had come when the Rosslyn Metro station manager had come down onto the lower platform to see if he was all right after one of the people waiting for a train had said something.

  “Jesus, mister, you get mugged? You want a cop or a paramedic?”

  Malachi, sitting on one of the concrete benches in a fog of pain, had had to think fast when he heard the word cop, despite his throbbing shin.

  “My boyfriend caught me with another guy,” he said.

  “I’d just like to be left alone right now, if that’s all right.”

  The station manager, an elderly black man, had retreated with a peculiar look on his face. Malachi, thankful that prejudice against gays was alive and well in America, was counting on the probability that a spat between homosexuals was not worth a call to the cops.

  The deskman at the Randolph Towers, an elderly Pakistani gentleman, had also reacted to his appearance, but Malachi told him he’d been mugged and had been down at the police station for hours and just wanted to get to bed. The deskman was appropriately sympathetic, then went back to his television.

  He had taken a handful of aspirin when he got in, washed down by two quick jolts of the Harper. He had had to cut part of his trousers leg off his right shin— there had been bleeding and swelling down there that he hadn’t known about, and the fabric had matted into the cut. The eye was a more serious problem. He had tried to examine it in the bathroom mirror with his good eye, and the image staring back at him almost made him ill. He had been very lucky the Metro station manager had not called 911. Where his eye had been, there was this puffy black, red, and blue mass the size and texture of a large ripe plum. The eye was still leaking a clear fluid out of both sides. There was a sympathetic black-and-blue ring starting around his other eye, as well.

  When he went to doctor his eye, he discovered that his hand was stinging from several small glass cuts, and he had to spend twenty minutes picking out bits of glass before building an ice pack for his eye and getting a cigarette. Now he wanted a shower—his clothes stank and he stank, and he was a god damned mess. He would have to remember to bundle up everything he had worn tonight into a plastic bag and put it in the garbage chute down the hall. Although that wouldn’t matter much if those two had made it out of the fire. The papers would tell him, or, actually, the early-morning TV news.

  He took another hit of the bourbon and sighed out loud as the cacophony of the nearby Arlington fire engine squad echoed through the high-rise canyons behind the building, probably on their way to a problem out on 1-66. It was amazing how loud they were. He had heard fire engines on their way into Georgetown when he was about three blocks away from her house, but there would have been nothing left for them to do, not with both gasoline and natural gas in the game.

  He’d done only one house fire before, that one with the connivance of the owner, a married lawyer who had fallen in lust and wanted to disappear. The lawyer’s girlfriend worked at the D.C. General Hospital, and she . had smuggled body parts out of the labs for six months, 11, with the lawyer storing them in his basement freezer.

  With the wife out of town, they had put together the greater part of a corpus for the night of the fire, arranging the parts in the lawyer’s bedroom. Malachi had rigged a hose made out of the cylindrical cardboard cores of paper towel rolls to pipe natural gas from a stove burner in the kitchen up to the second floor. It being Christmas time, he had set a yule candle burning on the mantelpiece downstairs, cracked open three windows for good oxygen flow, and then everyone had cleared out. The resulting gas explosion had dismantled the house and incinerated everything in it, leaving only some charred bits of bone and human tissue burned into the frame of the mattress to lead the investigators to the conclusion that another esquire had gone to his just reward.

  If the two of them had made it out of that little deal tonight, they could tell their tale, but usable corroborative forensic evidence was going to be really tough to come by—except maybe those medical instruments.

  Well, screw it, he thought, sipping some more whiskey.

  He was pretty close to end game here.

  So now what? The time line depended on whether or not they had gotten out and talked to the cops. If they’d become toasts, he would have time to develop a pretty clear shot at the captain and then blow town. But for practical purposes, he had to assume Collins and Snow had survived, and that the captain would be alerted that Malachi was now an active threat. Navy was going to have to watch how quickly he turned his head for a while. And the woman … well, she wasn’t going to be anxious to tangle with Malachi anytime soon. Not after being treated to hearts and minds.

  So, options. First, get gone, right now. Get down the road. The cops know who you are, and you talked about Hardin in front of the woman, so they’re gonna put it together. There will be federal records on you from the Army, and probably even some old CID stuff to complete the picture.

  Anonymity was what you’ve had to offer all these years, big hands and a face with no name.

  That cover’s blown. So the smart thing to do is to get yourself gone.

  You could do it. You could leave tonight.

  The cop car was excellent cover, and in two hours you could be into West Virginia, a state filled with people who understood all about anonymity.

  The pickup truck would be even better.

  He took another hit from the bottle, thinking exceptionally well now, the pain beginning to retreat to the margins of his consciousness. He acknowledged the logic of making his creep and forgetting about the captain.

  So his employers had cut him adrift at the first sign of real heat—big deal: It’s what anyone in Washington would do. The captain was just playing by the rules. But something about this Hardin thing had begun to really piss him off. Both of the Hardins would still be alive and kicking if His Eminence there had been able to keep his pecker in his pants. None of this shit had been Malachi’s fault. And now these pretty boys were trying to put him in the shit, after he had clearly taken care of business for them—twice. If the captain had dumped him like Nixon’s aides had dumped the Watergate boys, that would be one thing. He remembered reading that unlovely metaphor in the Washington Post: “twisting”— “twisting in the wind.” But to send someone in, even an inept like Snow … well, that made it personal.

  He took another hit of Harper and coughed violently when some of the hundred proof went down the wrong way. His right eye felt like it was sloshing around in its socket when he coughed. Terrific. He wondered what he would do if it fell out. Probably feel better. He lit up another cigarette. He sat up to take the ice pack off his face, which felt like it was beginning to freeze. The towel on his leg, mostly water now, slid off onto the floor. He took another hit of whiskey, corked the bottle, put it down on the floor, and lay back again to think some more.

  Was it really necessary to chuck the whole thing?

  What did the cops or the NIS really know? All they’d have would be some hysterical noise from the woman and some trembling, whiny stuff from rowboat man. He had not been face-to-face with the Navy guy for more than three seconds all night, and even Navy would have to admit that he had been preoccupied at the time. The woman had probably memorized his face, but he’d provided some distractions for her, too. Hearts and minds.

  He closed his eyes. Had the cops been to his house on Capitol Hill yet?

  Probably, if the woman had survived the fire and talked. They’d have probable cause after the fireworks in Georgetown. />
  Hell, let’s go see, he thought. Wait until it’s two, three in the morning, then drive over there. Scope it out. Nobody there, get into the house and pull those tapes. He could get in and out of the garage from the alley, and he could use the cop car to get into the neighborhood—there were always lots of cop cars prowling D.C. at that hour of the morning.

  So, option two. Go see what the cops were up to, and then, he decided, what he really wanted to do was have one last little seance with his dear friend and client the captain. Then he would bail out, get himself down the road and gone. Meantime, let the ice do its thing. He put the remains of the ice pack back on his throbbing face. The ice and the Harper, his old friends in need.

  He set the alarm on his watch for 0200, squinting hard with his one good eye to see it, stabbed his cigarette out on an ice cube, and dozed.

  at around two in the morning, Grace awoke with a shout and started a frantic bout of kicking at the covers, startling Dan out of a deep sleep and causing him to wrench his neck again as he sat up in the bed. When he realized what was happening, he grabbed her, trying to pin her flailing arms, shouting at her to wake up. At first, she struggled harder, babbling incoherently, but then she did wake up. She sat up in one violent motion, nearly knocking Dan back out of the bed. When she realized where she was and recalled the dream, she started crying again, filling the bedroom with great heaving walls that nearly broke his heart. He held her and comforted her as best he could, his neck on fire again, a fact she finally recognized when her own misery subsided. She turned in the bed, saw the mask of pain on his face, and reached to comfort him. They lay entwined in each other’s arms, making small noises and holding each other until they both fell asleep again.

  at 3:30 monday morning, Malachi slid back into the driver’s side of the sedan and locked all the doors, puffing from the exertion but buoyed by the excitement of getting in and out of the house without being caught.

  The car’s windows were covered with enough condensation to prevent anyone from seeing that the car was even occupied. He took a deep breath and then laughed. He’d made it into the duplex from the alley in two minutes, after spending nearly forty minutes watching the alley from the next block to see if there was anyone waiting for him near the darkened house. He had originally parked one block away on his own street and phoned both phones in the houses to see what would happen, but there had been no reaction—no lights, no machines, no nothing. There had been no strange vehicles parked out on the street, either.