Keeping Secrets

by Penny Mickelbury

  Washington was a low-to-the-ground city: no skyscrapers here. The law forbade any structure to be taller than the Washington Monument—bane to the real estate developers, boon to those who preferred grass to steel in city living. Washington was a city of wide, tree-lined streets and avenues designed for presidential motorcades; of narrow cobble-stoned streets and alleys built for horse-drawn carriages; and engineered in a way that required a stop at practically every intersection. Ancient elms and quietly dignified stone row houses lined block after block, the size of the houses sometimes, though not always, the only indicators of economic status. By the time she reached the quasi-industrial strip of Rhode Island Avenue in the northeast quadrant of the city that housed the gym, Mimi was relaxed and mellow.

  An hour into her workout and Mimi felt every one of her thirty-seven years. Her hamstrings quivered and quit in the middle of the third set of leg curls. “I’m too old for this shit,” she muttered to herself in perfect imitation of Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon as she reduced the weight from forty to thirty-five pounds. Her triceps still burned from the kick backs, and her calves told her not to even try toe raises. Her head agreed with her body, and, stripping en route to the steam room, she pledged a long, leisurely run through Rock Creek Park in the morning since she didn’t have to go in to work early. She threw her clothes into the locker, grabbed a towel from the freshly laundered stack, and was anticipating the relaxing heat of steam when the door opened and out of the mist stepped a woman who caused Mimi’s breath to catch in her throat. We are, thought Mimi, looking into clear hazel eyes, exactly the same height. She backed up a step to let the woman pass, and turned to follow with her eyes the perfectly muscled, long-legged, body as the woman crossed to the pile of towels. When she turned, she looked directly and coolly into Mimi’s eyes; so directly that Mimi was forced to look away. So she looked down, at full perfect breasts, and stopped breathing altogether. Then she turned quickly away, stepped into the steam room and closed the door, thinking that where she really should be was under a cold shower. The heat inside her must have added ten degrees to the temperature in the steam room.

  For the remainder of the evening, Mimi puzzled at her reaction to the woman. She’d seen dozens of beautiful—and naked—women. Weight training had been her hobby for the last eight years, and though she had no interest in competition, she thrived on the pure physicality of the sport and enjoyed the camaraderie of the women. And she’d received more than a few admiring—and occasionally lustful—glances at her own physique.

  She lay on the couch listening to old Dionne Warwick tapes and seeing again the five feet-eight inches of perfection. Besides, she told herself, she’d never been especially attracted to white women.... She closed her eyes and saw the clear, cool hazel gaze and quickly sat upright. “Sex,” she said out loud. Dionne said, “Walk on by.” Over a year without sex, Mimi reasoned, can make a person behave oddly. Over a year since her stormy breakup with Beverly. She remembered so clearly Bev’s frustration with her unpredictable work schedule; Bev’s annoyance that the only activity they routinely shared was Sunday jogging down through Rock Creek Park to the Potomac; and finally, Bev’s anger. “All you care about is your precious job and your damn classic car and your souped up computer! And you only want me when it’s convenient for you!”

  And somewhere deep inside, unwittingly and unwillingly, Mimi had acknowledged the truth of her charge and though she never spoke the words, Bev had heard and all her anger turned, in an instant, to sorrow, and she’d said to Mimi, “Do the women of the world a favor, Mimi, and stay away. Men treat us this way. We don’t need it from you. Don’t do to another woman what you’ve done to me.” And Mimi hadn’t. She worked her mind and her emotions through her investigative reporting; she worked her body at the gym; and when there was time, she put the top down on the car and took long drives: deep into the lush, gentle Catoctin Mountains of Eastern Maryland or the steeper, more rugged Blue Ridge Mountains of Western Maryland, usually pretending that she was on a country road somewhere in southern Italy.

  Mimi squeezed her eyes shut and smacked herself on the forehead in an exaggerated display of recognition of the truth: She was so attracted to the woman because she was Italian! The heavy dark richness of her hair, the hint of olive in her skin, the clear brown of her eyes—She reminds me of Italy, that’s all, thought Mimi with a sigh of relief. Then she saw again the full breasts, the brown of the nipples. She turned face down and pressed herself into the sofa, wondering what in the world she would do about the electric pulsing at the center of her.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Nobody in homicide, nobody in forensics, nobody in pathology or in the ME’s office—nobody in the entire bleeping system could ever remember seeing a victim shot in the genitals, and here they had the fourth such victim in as many months—and one of them a woman. They’d bled to death, all four of them, in agonizing, excruciating, paralyzing pain, and then they’d been arranged in their cars—seated upright, hands folded gracefully in their laps. Lieutenant Maglione sat behind her desk across from the most senior and most junior members of her team. One photograph, of Phillip Tancil seated inside his white Lincoln Town Car, lay face up. She looked at it again, experienced the same sense of revulsion, and returned it to the folder marked “Tancil, P.” She had ordered the case files closed to everyone except members of her team and, of course, the department brass, shuddering at the thought of all the gory details being bandied about on the evening news programs. And though the Hate Crimes team understood the rationale for the news black-out, several of them worried about potential fall-out.

  “Boss, we’ve got to tell them something,” Eric said.

  “I don’t have to tell them anything,” she said matter-of- factly. “The last thing I need in my life is a flock of those vultures hovering around, getting in the way of the investigation.” She pushed her chair back from the desk and close to the window that offered a view of the courthouse flanked by rows of marked and unmarked police vehicles. She briefly looked out, then turned her gaze back front, though she did not roll the chair forward.

  “Anna, you know what’ll happen if they ever get wind of this,” Eric said, a look of intense distaste clouding his face.

  “Yeah, boss,” intoned Cassandra Ali, the youngest member of the team and the resident cynic. “They’ll accuse us of covering up information, not cooperating with the press, deceiving the public, and God knows what all.”

  “I don’t give a good damn what the press thinks,” the Lieutenant snapped. “We’ve got a murderer to catch and having those idiots babbling about bullets in the balls won’t help us do it.”

  She heard herself speaking as if she were someone else: the edgy, angry tone so completely out of character that she knew she’d better get herself under control. These crimes had everybody jumpy, even the jaded veterans of homicide and the ME’s office who’d seen every kind of crime and victim and who could make a joke out of every cruel circumstance and who usually did, no matter how tasteless or offensive the joke. But nobody was laughing at the brand of depravity that had left four people sitting in their cars in deserted parking lots in the middle of the night with their genitalia blown away by an automatic weapon. Nobody was laughing because these were more than murders; these were like the brand of destruction visited by the crazed gunman who empties his Uzi into a schoolyard full of children or into a crowded restaurant at lunchtime. Nobody was laughing because these were the kinds of crimes that scared cops, even well-seasoned cops like Lieutenant Maglione who, in eighteen years on the force, worked undercover masquerading as a junkie, a dealer, a hooker, and a for-hire hit man; who was shot by an illegal alien resisting deportation because he believed jail in America preferable to jail in El Salvador; who was dumped into the Potomac River in the middle of February by the head of a stolen car ring, an old man angry about being busted by a “fuckin’ broad.”

  Lieutenant Maglione had never, in all those years, through all the danger, been afraid. But
she was afraid now, and not because the responsibility for finding the killer fell to her, but because no part of her understood these killings. Murder she understood. Random, senseless violence she understood. Even cold, calculated, motivated crime she understood. But the deliberate humiliation by mutilation in the most personal and intimate of ways—this was something different. There was no way she could remain locked inside her office, directing the investigation by reading reports. She rolled the chair back to the desk and opened the Tancil file, the image of death still right there on top.

  “Do we know for sure this latest guy was gay?”

  “Not yet, Anna, but can there be any doubt—”

  “That’s just the point, Eric. There can be no doubt. Either we’re looking for somebody who systematically, deliberately and specifically kills gay people in cars in parking lots at midnight, on the same day of the month, or we’re not.”

  “But you can’t really think we’ve got a copycat killer?” Cassandra looked at her in youthful, wide-eyed amazement.

  “We can’t afford to think anything, Cassie; we’ve got to be certain. Suppose our killer thought Phil Tancil was gay and he wasn’t? Suppose Liz Grayson was an accident?”

  “Dammit, Anna!” Eric jumped to his feet and stalked about the cramped office. “Elizabeth Grayson was a lesbian and she was shot in the ba—in the genitals like the guys! How can you think she was an accident? She’s part of the pattern!”

  “Eric, we’re playing catch up here. We’re the scrub team, thrown into the game in the third period to clean up the mess the big guys made. If we win, we got lucky. If we don’t, we’re the assholes the big guys always thought we were. Either way we’re walking uphill in cement boots.” She was still smarting over the fact that the Hate Crimes Unit hadn’t been assigned to the case until after the third murder, when Homicide realized that all the victims were gay. By that time, information, interviews and peoples’ memories were three months old.

  “Your confidence is inspiring, oh great leader.” Eric deserved his right to sarcasm and she grinned her acceptance at him.

  “We’ve pulled out all the stops on this thing, Anna. We know everything there is to know about these victims—”

  She interrupted him gently but firmly. “No, Eric, we don’t. We don’t know why these four people are dead.”

  “Dammit, Anna, they’re dead because they’re gay!”

  “That’s a factor, Eric, but it’s not the reason.” She stood so abruptly that the chair rolled backward, crashing solidly into the radiator beneath the window. “The truth is, not only don’t we know the reason for these murders, we’re nowhere close to finding out.” She was very still, her voice low and controlled, and it had the desired effect of calming and quieting him. He squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his forehead. Cassandra, barely breathing, looked from one to the other of her superiors, waiting.

  “Homicide treated these cases as ordinary murders, meaning they only looked for clues that would lead them to a killer.”

  “Don’t we have to do the same thing?” Cassandra ventured.

  “No, Cassie, we don’t and we can’t. These specific people were killed in a specific way for a specific reason. We have to find that reason. If it’s as simple a matter as sexual preference, why doesn’t the killer drive by Traks or DuPont Circle or P Street Beach or Badlands on any given Friday or Saturday and just open fire?” Calmer now, Eric continued with his report.

  “We’ve had people on Tancil’s background around the clock. His wife seems not to understand the word ‘homosexual’ any more than the people at his job. Totally foreign concept. But there’s this group he golfed with every weekend and if there’s a crack in the wall, that’s where it’ll be.” Eric added wearily, “We should have some word pretty soon.”

  Cassie, her boss noted, had observed this rare public conflict between superiors in guarded silence. Now she exhaled deeply, apparently relieved at the break in the tension. Exhibiting a degree of intuition rare in one so young but crucial to expert police work, she stood and made for the door.

  “The pseudo-intellectuals at the lab called me a nuisance and threw me out, but screw ‘em. I think I’ll go harass ‘em some more. See you guys later.” She closed the door silently behind her. Anna retrieved her errant chair, leaned back gratefully, and put her feet on the desk.

  “So. Eric. What’s really bugging you?”

  “You know me too well,” he said with a rueful smile. She returned the smile. They’d known each other for almost twenty years—they’d been in the same Training Academy class and had become fast friends one night during a celebration party after a big exam. Eric had come swiftly and forcefully to her rescue when one of their classmates drunkenly accused her of being the dyke she was when she resisted his advances. Later, Eric explained that a childhood of defending an effeminate older brother against schoolyard toughs had made him totally intolerant of those who attacked people because they were, simply, who and what they were. They’d maintained and nourished their friendship even though they worked different details and different shifts, and when she was picked to head up the newly created Hate Crimes Unit, she’d chosen him to be her second in command, not only because he was her friend, or even because he was a good cop, but because his anger complemented hers and between the two of them they got things done: the hotter his anger burned the icier she became. With his unruly bright red hair and his brilliant bright blue eyes, he looked like a choirboy but was one of the toughest, hardest cops she’d ever seen, and his overflowing fury at the brutality of these crimes matched her own seething anger.

  “These people thought they were safe, Anna. They thought their lives were their own. They were wrong and now they’re dead and that scares the hell out of me and I know it scares you just as much.”

  “I’ve been trying not to think about that aspect of it. I can’t catch a killer if I’m spending time worried about keeping my own closet door locked.”

  She had struggled mightily to keep those thoughts from her consciousness. What she allowed herself to think was that the killer had used the same gun for all four murders—and a damn big gun it was, too, to obliterate so thoroughly and savagely. She allowed herself to wonder why Phillip Tancil—why any of the victims— would let somebody with so powerful a gun into the front seat of their cars with them, for there was no evidence of forced entry into any of the victims’ vehicles. And she allowed herself, finally, to wonder how many more people would die before she found the answers to those questions. But she didn’t say any of those things to Eric.

  “Why is it that only on TV are murderers dumb?” she asked rhetorically. “If real life followed the TV scripts, by now we should have all kinds of clues and our killer should be suffering from a guilty conscience and ready to surrender.” She smiled but it was bleak and didn’t really lift either of them.

  Eric said, “But we do get a little more each time, Anna. We do get just a little closer...”

  She thought about how very far she was from understanding these murders and a shudder of dread ran through her. As much as she wanted to quiet Eric’s fears, her own would not permit it.

  “It’s not enough, Pal. Not nearly enough.”

  *****

  By the time Mimi finished filling the second bag of trash, she could see the top of her desk. She could also see how much of life she’d missed while engrossed in this latest investigation: a half dozen invitations to cocktail parties; a request to sponsor a friend in the AIDS Walk; a personal invitation from the Chief of Police to meet the female lieutenant heading the newly created Hate Crimes Section; a plea from her sorority to attend its annual scholarship dinner; a request to lend her name to a United Negro College Fund solicitation; a 10K charity run to benefit the shelter for battered women. She made a note to send checks to the UNCF, the shelter, the sorority, and the AIDS hospice, tossed the invitations in trash, and stood up to haul the bag across the newsroom to the recycling bin. From behind her came a low, slow wolf whistle.
She’d stopped paying any attention to Len Broward about ten years ago, so she didn’t even turn around.

  “How long did it take to pour yourself into those Levis, Patterson?” Len whistled again as she dragged the bag of trash away. Mimi knew the jeans were tight but after last night’s humbling experience at the gym, she needed to prove to herself that they still fit, that her body was still the well-honed, perfectly sculpted specimen she’d spent the last eight years creating. She’d have preferred notice from somebody other than Len.

  “Patterson! See you a minute?”

  She ambled to Tyler’s desk, wondering whether her day to get caught up was over so soon.

  “You free for lunch?”

  “Lunch?” She was genuinely surprised by the question.

  “Lunch, Patterson. Food. Something most of us eat. Though judging by the size of those Levis, I’d say it’s not something you do on a regular basis.”

  Mimi grinned. “Yeah, Tyler, I’m available, though I wish you’d asked me on a day when I was more appropriately dressed.”

  “Since when you do you worry about protocol?”

  She shrugged in admission of his correct perception.

  “Besides, you look better than most of the people who’re supposed to be dressed for work. Meet you in the lobby at one-thirty.”

  “I’ll be there,” she said, sauntering back to her desk. She was struck by the fact that Tyler had actually looked at her while he talked, looked her in the eyes, noticed her clothes. Something is up, she thought, something big. Tyler wouldn’t take her to lunch on the expense account at the hoity-toity Le Petit Paris favored by the newspaper execs if something major weren’t in the air. She looked down at herself—the honey-colored silk blouse, the clean if very tight Levis, the blue suede loafers, the fawn-colored soft suede jacket hanging on the back of her chair—and remembered that her first impulse had been to wear sneakers and a sweatshirt to work.