A Simple Act of Violence (15 page)

Roth frowned.

‘The word that was missing at the end, remember? “A victory would give Venezualan president, Hugo Chavez, a strong ally in the region but the U.S. administration has already cast serious doubt on the transparency of the . . . election.” That was the word missing off the end of the clipping.’

‘What’s the date?’ Roth asked.

‘The tenth.’

‘Day before she was killed.’

‘Someone was killed?’ Carly Newman asked, and Miller looked at her and saw the expression he’d seen so many times before. Something real had touched her life. Something dark and awkward, something that would give her pause for thought several times before she forgot it . . . and then tomorrow, perhaps the day after, perhaps next week, someone would say or do something, someone would use the word ‘election’ or she would meet another person named Miller, and all of a sudden it would remind her of the vague and insubstantial transience of it all.

‘Yes,’ Miller said. ‘Someone was killed.’ He looked at Roth. Roth held out his hand for the clipping. Miller asked if Richard Grantham would be available should they need to speak with him.

‘Not now,’ she said. ‘Most of the day staff are gone. We just have the night staff here now,’ she said. ‘But he’s here most of the time.’ She smiled. ‘Richard is a legend around here, you know?’

‘A legend?’

‘He’s about seven hundred years old,’ Carly said. ‘He looks so amazing for his age. He was here when Woodward and Bernstein went after Nixon.’

‘Is that so?’ Miller said.

‘Sure is,’ she said. ‘Richard did the copy-editing on their articles before they went to the typesetter. He has some stories, real interesting stories.’

Miller thanked her again, and as they turned to leave Carly said, ‘The person that was killed? Did that have anything to do with the paper?’

Miller smiled reassuringly. ‘About as far from the paper as you could imagine,’ he told her, and he could sense the small relief she felt. Perhaps, after all, she wouldn’t think about it again. Perhaps she deserved never to think of such things at all. Some people chose this life. Some people just shouldn’t be subjected to it.

Outside, now close to eight, Roth and Miller stood silently, their breath visible, the sky clear.

‘You take the car,’ Miller said. ‘I’m about seven blocks north. Say hi to Amanda for me, okay?’

‘Sure I will . . . see you in the morning.’

 

Robert Miller stood for a while longer, hands buried in his overcoat pockets. He exhaled and watched his breath disperse. Winter had set in. What did The Keener’s Manual say? ‘Minutes trudge, Hours run, Years fly, Decades stun. Spring seduces, Summer thrills, Autumn sates, Winter kills.’

He started walking, trying to think of nothing but the sound of his footsteps on the sidewalk. When he reached his apartment he went up the back stairwell. He turned on the central heating, kicked off his shoes, stood before the open drapes and looked through the window toward the lights of Corcoran and New Hampshire Avenue.
This
, he thought,
is my life. This is the world I have created for myself. Is this what I really wanted?

Remembered standing on the stairs as a child, overhearing a conversation between his parents.

‘He’ll be a lonely man,’ his father had said. ‘He doesn’t make friends easily. I worry about him.’

‘He’s independent, that’s all,’ his mother had replied.

‘It’s not independence, it’s a lack of social interaction. He should join some clubs, go out, meet other kids.’

‘He’s happy by himself.’

‘Happy? What the hell is that when it’s at home? The kid’s not happy. Jesus, look at him. Has to stretch his face sideways to break a smile.’

‘Leave him be, he’ll be fine. So he doesn’t mix well. He’s smarter than most kids, you ever think of that?’

Evidently not, for Ed Miller had chided his son until the day he died.

Miller had joined the Washington Police Department at twenty-four. Wondered if such a decision had contributed to the coronary that ultimately killed his father.

Nothing further was said. Ed Miller acted as if his son was someone else entirely, but this attitude did not last. Robert was there when his father collapsed. Used his police training - mouth-to-mouth, cardio-pulmonary resuscitation - but the coronary was bigger than the man and it crushed him effortlessly.

Miller’s mom hung in there a couple years more. Saw him graduate, watched him rise rapidly within his department, saw him grow serious and intense and spend too much time with books instead of girls and friends and social situations. Worried some, like now Ed was gone she’d taken on the job, but things didn’t change. Her son stayed the same. Excelled as a cop. Had she hung in there a while longer she would have seen him promoted to detective, youngest to date in Washington’s history. Proud smile, discreet tear, a wish that Ed could have been there beside her to see what his son had made of himself. But no, not to be. Both of them dead long before Robert Miller stood on the podium and shook hands with the Washington chief of police, took his badge, turned to face the snapping, flashing camera. It had been important, a moment of significance, but all of it was now behind him, a series of fractured memories, meaningless in the face of these recent months.

From his pants pocket Miller took the baggie with the shred of newspaper inside. A clipping from a Washington Post article about a South American election. A murdered woman with cancer who appeared not to have registered with a doctor, appeared not to be taking any medication at all. A coroner whose hunch and intuition told him that the first three killings had been perpetrated by a different man . . . if this was so, there was someone within the police, the emergency services, even the coroner’s office who’d copied a brutal killing for their very own particular reasons. And still he and Roth had not really confronted the fact that there was almost nothing to be known about Catherine Sheridan’s life. They had not found out where she worked or where her income originated; they did not have the names of her friends, her parents or brothers or sisters . . .

And even her own name became someone else’s when they looked beneath the surface.

Evening of Monday November the 13th. Eight months since the first killing. No solid leads.

He figured this was the kind of thing that fucked up a performance review.

The kind of thing that made some people resign.

Robert Miller longed to sleep; knew he wouldn’t.

He was exhausted. His eyes were heavy, his head hurt, but still he sat there for a while, something haunting the back of his mind, something he knew bore some significance.

James Stewart, Miller thought. I keep thinking about James Stewart, the film that was playing . . . the music I could hear when we were upstairs . . .

There had been no fingerprints on the DVD other than those of the victim herself. The killer would not have been so foolish as to leave prints behind, but Miller had hoped there would be a smudge, a rubber smear from his latex gloves, something that told him that the killer had put the DVD in the machine and set it to play. Why? Because it would have been something else to consider about their perpetrator, something that could have shone a light toward the truth. He had put on a movie and ordered pizza. Put on a movie and ordered pizza . . .

Some time close to midnight Miller finally rose from the chair and made his way through to the bedroom.

Despite once again passing the boxes in the hallway, the last reminder of a wasted fourteen months, it was not Marie McArthur that occupied Miller’s thoughts. He did not think of the final slow demise of their relationship, the seemingly endless nature of its death, like falling from a cliff, walking toward it in slow-motion, believing perhaps that the edge would never come . . .

No, it was not these things that consumed his thoughts, for he now believed he had expended more than adequate energy trying to understand all that had happened.

His final thought - the one that closed his eyes - was of Marilyn Hemmings. The way she’d looked through the porthole in the door as he’d reached the end of the corridor. The slight nod, the awkward smile. He remembered how she felt when he hugged her after the coroner’s inquiry, the moment before the camera flash, before they realized how it would look - as though something was going on between them, that she had conspired to fabricate evidence to exonerate him from manslaughter . . .

He recalled the image of them together in the Globe. The caption beneath had said nothing significant. Nothing significant needed to be said. The world believed what it wanted to believe.

Robert Miller slept at last but he did not dream. And though he woke in the early hours of the morning and replayed everything that had occurred, he reached no better understanding of its meaning. He felt invaded.

That was the only way he could describe it: invaded.

 

Middle-aged man in a dark grey pinstripe suit. Stood in the hallway of his house. Held a newspaper, a copy of the Washington Post. Stared at the grainy photograph of Catherine Sheridan. She looked back at him, expression on her face like she was waiting for him to say something.

The man walked down the hallway and into his study, and despite the late hour he lifted the receiver and dialled a number.

Paused, patient expression on his face.

Line connected.

‘You’ve seen Sunday’s Post?’

Nodded, then a slight frown.

‘She was one of ours? Did we do this?’

Shook his head.

‘I thought we put a stop to that bullshit with the luggage tags—’

Frowned intensely. ‘I don’t care if it is or not. This is getting attention now. Last thing in the world we want is press, for God’s sake.’

Listened, shook his head.

‘No, you listen to me,’ he retorted, his voice louder, the tight edge of anger approaching. ‘Bullshit theatrics I can do without. This isn’t some made-for-TV movie. I give you a job and I trust you to use the right people, not some burned-out psycho who thinks he’s playing games.’

Clenching his fist, trying so hard to be patient.

‘No,’ he snapped. ‘Evidently that is not the case. I don’t care what the fuck happened to him. Right now I have a newspaper story in front of me that says this shit is still going on. Find out where it came from. Put a stop to it. There isn’t anything—’

Interrupted, he listened, started nodding.

‘So deal with it. Fucking well deal with it. This is the last I want to hear about this shit, you understand?’

Nodded.

‘Good, make sure it is.’

He hung up, looked once more at the face of Catherine Sheridan, and then tossed the newspaper onto the desk to his right.

‘Fucking assholes,’ he whispered through clenched teeth, and then turned and left the room.

 

 

 

 

‘
A
nchor to windward, son,’ my father used to say. ‘Anchor to
windward.
’