Collateral Damage (15 page)

“That trial was a travesty,” Ursula said. “Manslaughter they gave her, not a murder conviction. Her lying trickster lawyer Walt Young convinced those idiots it was a crime committed in the ‘heat of passion,' I believe is the exact legal term he used.”

“And just how did he manage that?”

Here Ursula leaned forward and lowered her voice. “He convinced those sheep on the jury that Grant had another woman. As if my brother would have strayed, even from that lowlife, before his divorce was settled. She admitted she came to the house that night because she got the final papers and was trying to talk him out of it. If only I'd been home. Dean heard them arguing about the divorce. Poor Grant finally stuck to his guns about something and she…she…and poor Dean had to see it.”

Hannibal wondered why he was not inclined to comfort this woman. “Yes, and Dean told a court that he saw his mother with the knife.”

“Yes, that's right. If he hadn't that whore might have gone free.”

“So I gather,” Hannibal said. “But Dean now says he didn't see his mother at all. He lied, Miss Voss, to please the grownups, he says.”

The drapes were parted, and the blinds threw prison stripes across Ursula's form. Her mouth held firm but her eyes moved down and for a moment Hannibal let her stew in the silence. When she finally spoke she had left the past behind. “I'm a busy woman, Mister Jones. What did you come here for?”

“I gather you and Thompson are old friends,” Hannibal said with an edge in his voice. “You wouldn't have called him otherwise. He thinks he's got his killer, Miss Voss, but I think he's wrong. I saw a man running from the deceased's house just before we found the body. But I need time to find him. All I want is for you to ask your good friend the police detective to back off Dean for a few days. Give me time to find the real killer.”

When she looked up at him he saw indecision on her face so he pressed harder. “You know he'll accept anything as evidence to prove a shaky case. Give me a chance to find the truth.”

“I'll call him.”

The Silver Spring Boys and Girls Club wasn't far from Ursula Voss' home, just off Forest Glen Road. The practice field behind it was a vast space of sparse grass bordered by closely planted oaks whose denuded branches swayed gently, sweeping the underside of the clouds above. Hannibal sometimes wondered why trees planted in a line often seemed to stop at an agreed upon height, forming a clean line at the top.

The man waiting for Hannibal near the goal post stood with his hands deep in the pockets of a black windbreaker. Hannibal didn't recognize the logo on the jacket, sort of an orange claw striking from under the word “Predators.” The man inside the jacket flashed a bright smile from the middle of a very dark, round face. Even at a distance, he seemed too pleasant to be a football coach.

“Thank you for meeting me here, Mr. Lee,” Hannibal said, offering a hand.

“No problem, I've got to be here tonight to run the practice anyway. And please call me George.” The man had a strong handshake that challenged Hannibal to match it. “Now you said you wanted to talk about one of my boys, Ingersoll. Is he in some kind of trouble?”

“I'm involved in a dispute with his wife,” Hannibal said carefully. “She has asked me to advise her. But if I'm going to be fair I need to know a little more about Isaac.” Lee would probably think Hannibal was a lawyer, which was fine for now.

Lee nodded, then started walking toward the sidelines. “He hit her didn't he?”

Hannibal followed, enjoying the quiet of the unused field. “I understand he has a problem with his temper. Is that your experience?”

Lee laughed, turning along the sideline and strolling slowly down field. “Yeah, he's a hothead. But he's a hell of a guy to have on the line. The Predators wouldn't do nearly as well without him. I just wish he wasn't such a sore loser.”

“I'm surprised he's even on a semi-pro team like the Predators,” Hannibal said. “I mean, if a guy's too violent for the Redskins, he must be downright dangerous.”

Lee stopped at the thirty-yard line, turning an eye toward Hannibal's face. “Is that what he told you?”

“That's what she told me.”

Lee shook his face at the ground. “Well that's probably what he told her. Too violent? Not sure if that's even possible. Mister, Ingersoll was cut from the Redskins for the same reason guys usually get cut. He just wasn't good enough. The fact that he didn't get along with most of the guys, well, that was just an added incentive to show him the door.”

“So is this the usual next step? Drop down to a semi-pro team?”

Lee turned again, stepping farther away from the street, into the private peace of the football practice field. “Sometimes. If you can play at all, you can usually get a spot somewhere, like the Diamond League where we play.”

Hannibal looked to the side and imagined Isaac Ingersoll crashing through a line of defenders, racing down the field to crush a quarterback. It would certainly be where he felt most alive, most at home. “I guess a guy like him just needs to play.”

“Lot of the big guys do,” Lee agreed. “I just hope he comes up with his dues, or else I can't even allow him to practice with us tonight.”

The grass must have been mown just that day, the sweet smell of freshly cut grass bringing a gentle smile to Hannibal's face. “Dues? Is he getting fined for something?”

Lee spun at the fifty-yard line, one foot erasing the chalk line as he did so. “You don't know a damn thing about football, do you?” Hannibal snapped back, startled by Lee's sudden burst of energy. “You're looking to get money out of him for the wife, is that it? You come down here thinking Ingersoll's getting paid for playing.”

“Isn't he? I guess I just assumed…”

“What, you think this is like baseball? You fail in the majors so you go down to triple A ball?” Lee stepped in close to stare into Hannibal's lenses and suddenly, he looked exactly like what Hannibal expected a coach to look like, a mama grizzly bear protecting her cubs. “Those guys swinging a bat, they play for money. These guys are different.”

“They really don't get paid? How do you recruit them?”

“Don't have to, brother,” Lee said. “They find us. They play for the love of the game, something you couldn't possibly understand. There's more than four hundred of these little teams around the country you know. Minor league teams in forty different leagues like the Diamond league. And not only don't these guys get paid to play, they have to pay their dues to get on a team. Plus they buy the gear. Most of the time, they have to pay for their own transportation to and from games.”

“I feel like an idiot,” Hannibal said. “That's why you have to practice at night.”

“Yeah. You got to have a job to be able to get the chance to come out here and grunt, and sweat, and get run into by another bunch of guys who love this game.”

When his car was moving again, Hannibal pushed a CD into the player. After his football lesson, Hannibal needed noise. Only when he was alone did the serious rock and roll come out. He grew up on this music thanks to the American Forces Radio and Television Service but, for reasons too hard to think about, he stuck with R&B or jazz in public. But the truth was, he could think more clearly surrounded by Sammy
Hagar's power chords. He didn't want to believe yesterday's murder was in any way related to the one that cost Dean his parents, but if the acts were as similar as Dean thought, it seemed likely they were. It would help to know more about the older killing from a more objective source.

Once on the Beltway heading south and east, Hannibal set his cruise control at seventy and pressed a preset on his car's hands-free phone. Within a minute he had Cindy's voice filling the car with him.

“So do you get a consultant's fee?” he asked her.

“I'll take it out in trade, lover. What do you need?”

“How hard will it be to get the records of Francis Edwards' trial?” he asked.

“Depends on what kind of detail you're looking for.”

The long ribbon of asphalt stretched out before him, and it would have been easy for Hannibal to think he had all the time in the world. “Well, what I really need is a transcript of the court proceedings. I want to hear the other side of this case.”

On the other end of the phone he heard a familiar huff. He could see Cindy in his mind, jaw forward, top lip curled in, blowing a puff of air upward. “Right,” she said. “You don't have the date of this event, do you? Or happen to know for sure where it took place? How about the prosecuting attorney's name?”

Hannibal dodged a tractor-trailer and eased down into the right lane. His exit wasn't that far off. “What I know, baby, is that Francis Edwards was convicted of manslaughter. That her lawyer raised the specter of another woman and must have convinced the jury it was a crime of passion. That little Dean Edwards at nine years old was forced to testify against his mother in open court after he'd just lost his father. And that the murder victim Dean just saw yesterday looked very much the way his father did when Dean found him.”

For a while Hannibal heard nothing but Steve Perry's crystalline tenor as Journey eased through
Open Arms
, but he knew she was just putting it all together. He knew his woman
well enough that he almost heard her answer, “I'll see what I can do,” before she said it.

“Knew I could count on you, darling. Think you can get away for dinner? I don't expect much movement on this case in any great hurry.”

Driving through his neighborhood, Hannibal was still struck by the study in contrast. The boarded up buildings of Southeast Washington DC were painted a rainbow of pastel colors, as if someone wanted to make sure they would be able to find their way back to the right abandoned tenement. Men and women, almost all black, walked the streets in the most expensive designer clothing or in rags, neither noticing the other's mode of dress. Just a few blocks away in one direction, the Navy Yard did mostly administrative business for the sea service. A few blocks the other way the grand buildings of the Smithsonian Institute hosted millions of tourists every year.

Hannibal pulled into his parking space, the one right across the street that no one ever seemed to park in. In the late summer sun his block looked a bit cleaner than the surrounding area. He knew his neighbors were working class people, struggling to make a living, but it always seemed to him that a bubble existed around his building that separated him and his neighbors from the surrounding depressed area.

As he climbed the front steps to the stoop, his mind wandered backward down his life's trail to the days when he and a handful of new friends first walked into this three-story brick monstrosity that had become a crack house. With Sarge and the others, he had driven every sort of human garbage out of there: drug dealers, winos, the lot. And for reasons still beyond his own understanding, he had stayed here to make a place for himself.

The outer door stayed unlocked during the day. As he pushed inside, the glaring sun was replaced by a shadowed darkness some might find gloomy, but which he always found somehow comforting. For a moment he was undecided if he would go left to his apartment or right to his office.

The decision was taken from him by a huge fist that closed on his right shoulder and shoved him into his office door. The frames of Hannibal's Oakleys dug into his cheek and the blackness deepened for a second.

“Where is she?” It was Isaac's beer-laden breath in his ear, Isaac's hand on his right shoulder, Isaac's elbow pinning his body to the door. The pressure kept him from catching a good deep breath and his feet could barely gain purchase on the floor. But the brief flash of fear he felt quickly transformed into anger.

“I called all the shelters.” Isaac said. “They wouldn't tell me nothing. I been to the police. Where the hell is she?”

Hannibal's right hand formed a claw. With stiffened fingers he snapped back toward the voice behind him. The strike wasn't very hard, but it didn't have to be. Isaac released him and backed off. Hannibal turned to face his huge attacker, who stood with one hand pressed to his eyes.

“I guess she just got tired of taking your shit,” Hannibal said, drawing himself up into a fighting stance. “And frankly, asshole, so have I.”

Isaac Ingersoll was very big, very strong, and quite fast for a man his size. But Hannibal had been kickboxing since high school and right then was filled with the kind of rage that comes when frustration gets overlaid with a layer of indignation. It was quick, and it was ugly.

A series of jabs flashed between Isaac's upraised hands until blood from his nose was running freely down onto his lip and chin. Then Hannibal got serious and started mixing it up with side kicks to his opponent's right thigh. Isaac swung. Hannibal dodged and attacked - left, right, kick - until Isaac finally just stopped trying and stepped back absorbing the punishment.