Murder Inside the Beltway (18 page)

“You don’t know Walter Hatcher.”

“Oh, I think I do,” said his father with a chuckle. “You’ve told me he’s a good cop.”

“That’s what they say.”

“So, you’re learning to be a good cop from him. Ignore his bullying side and look for the good things about him.”

Matt said nothing.

“I’m not saying that you aren’t right, Matt, and if you decide to quit, you have our blessing. But be sure you’ll be able to live with yourself if you allow this fellow to force you out—which is exactly what he wants to do. Sure you want to give him that satisfaction?”

“I’m not sure of anything anymore.”

“A good night’s sleep and you’ll come to the right decision. When will you be coming home again? We miss you.”

“Maybe sooner than you think. Thanks for the pep talk. You always make so much damn sense.”

“That’s what fathers are for, son. Take care. Mom is at her book club but told me to send her love when I called.”

The conversation with his father had initially put a few things into focus for Jackson, but it didn’t last long. He’d found himself pacing the apartment and having conversations with himself, and with Hatcher, vacillating between trying to reason with the older detective and telling him off in no uncertain language. He tried calling Mary a few times, but only reached her answering machine. He finally went to bed, but tossed and turned for what seemed the entire night. When he awoke that morning, he was tired and more confused than when the evening had started. By the time he arrived at work his mood was almost as sour as his stomach.

He looked across at the MPD building from outside the fast-food restaurant and thought of what his father had said, that Hatcher would love to see him fold and slink away, the half-black college nerd with a degree in sociology unable to take the heat.

No! He wouldn’t allow that to happen.

As he stared at the building, he saw Mary come through the doors and stand on the steps, shielding her eyes against the sun as she peered in his direction. She navigated the busy avenue and came to where he sat, his Styrofoam cup empty. She pulled up a plastic chair. “Taking the day off?” she said, playfully.

“Not a bad idea. What’s up?”

“I got hold of Patmos in Senator Barrett’s office. He’s meeting us in an hour at a coffee shop in Georgetown.”

“These pols sure don’t want us coming to their offices, do they?”

“Can’t blame them. Come on. I reserved a car.”

“Yeah, okay.”

As they prepared to retrace steps to Metro, Matt asked, “Has Hatch said anything about that other guy on the tape, Yankavich, who owns that joint in Adams Morgan?”

“No, I don’t think so. He was following up on him.”

“I never saw a report. Did you?”

“No. We can ask.”

“Yeah. Let’s do that.”

James Patmos, Senator Charles Barrett’s chief-of-staff, had told Mary that he’d be wearing a tan suit, blue shirt, and green tie. They spotted him the minute they walked into the coffee shop. He was seated at a table he’d obviously chosen because it was relatively distant from the others. He stood as they approached, smiled, and extended his hand. “Jim Patmos,” he said as though campaigning. “Pleased to meet you.”

A waitress took their order, coffees all around.

“Now,” said Patmos, “I understand you want to speak with me concerning the murder of a woman in Adams Morgan.”

“Rosalie Curzon,” Mary said.

“Yes. I knew her. We dated at one time. Not for long. Nothing serious.”

“Dated?” Jackson said.

An expansive smile came across Patmos’s tanned face. “Yes. Does that strike you as unusual?”

“Well, I guess it does,” Jackson said. “Ms. Curzon was a prostitute.”

Patmos’s expression went serious, as though he wore the twin masks of comedy and tragedy, each there to be called upon when needed. “Prostitute?” he said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t believe that.”

“Believe it or not, sir,” Jackson said, “that’s what she was. You had no knowledge of it?”

“None whatsoever. I will tell you what turned me off, though.”

“Yes?”

“Turns out she went both ways.”

“Meaning?” Mary asked, knowing the answer.

“Men, women. She was really turned on, but the lesbian thing turned me off once I heard about it.”

Mary surveyed their surroundings. It was not the sort of conversation to be shared with others. Confident that their words stayed between them, she leaned closer to Patmos and said, “Sir, we have tapes from her apartment. Her customers are on them.”

“Are you saying that I’m on a tape with her?”

Jackson was tempted to lie, to say that Patmos had, indeed, been photographed by Rosalie’s video camera. But he didn’t. Hatcher probably would have, but he wasn’t Hatcher. “No, sir,” he said, “but a friend of yours was. He gave us your name as the person who’d introduced him to Ms. Curzon.”

Patmos laughed. “Maybe I did,” he said. “Who told you that?”

“I’m not at liberty to divulge that, sir,” Jackson replied. “But it’s our understanding that you sent this friend to her because she was a prostitute.”

Patmos thought for a moment, then said, “Which would make me a pimp.”

Jackson was glad Patmos had said it, not him.

“Look, Mr. Patmos,” Mary said, “we’re not interested in everyone’s sex life. We’re investigating the murder of a woman. We’re following up every lead we have, every person we know to have had contact with the victim. I personally don’t care whether you engaged the services of a hooker or not, or whether you passed her number along to a friend. What we
are
interested in is when you last saw the victim, and what you were doing the night of her murder.”

He said nothing. Mary’s thought at the moment was that he was a very handsome young man, well dressed and with a powerful job in a city of powerful jobs. He undoubtedly had attractive young women falling all over him. Then again, she reasoned, he might be one of those men who doesn’t have time to date women, preferring to get his sex by paying for it rather than having to wine and dine a woman into bed, which was time consuming, and probably more expensive.

“When was she killed?”

They gave him the date and approximate time of her death.

He smiled. “I know exactly where I was and what I was doing,” he said. “I was with Senator Barrett at a fundraiser at the Mayflower Hotel.”

“All night?”

“A good portion of it.”

“I’m sure there are people who were with you who can vouch for your presence there,” Jackson said.

“Of course. But I wouldn’t want you approaching them. That would be embarrassing for me—and for Senator Barrett if it got back to him.”

“We’ll be as discreet as possible,” Mary said. “Could you give us some names?”

“You know,” Patmos said, “I find this to be a form of harassment.”

“It isn’t meant to be,” Jackson said. “Names?”

“There were so many people there,” the chief-of-staff said. “Hundreds.”

Easy to get lost in the crowd, slip out, and spend an hour with Rosalie Curzon
, Jackson thought.

“Just give us the names of a few who were with you all night,” Mary said.

“I’ll have to think about that,” Patmos said.

Mary took a sip of her now-cold coffee. “We’re in no rush,” she said sweetly.

Jackson and Hall left the coffee shop with two male names, who Patmos said would vouch for his attendance at the fund-raiser. He’d turned on the charm at the end of their meeting, apologizing for anything he might have said that could be construed as arrogant or combative. “Anything I can do to help, please call,” he said.

They stood on Wisconsin Avenue and watched him disappear into a crowd of window-shopping tourists.

“What do you think?” Mary asked.

“I’m thinking that all we have to go on are the few people caught on those tapes. She must have had dozens of other clients we’ll never know about. Shame she didn’t keep a little black book like they’re supposed to.”

She laughed. “I didn’t know that was a rule with hookers, Matt.”

“It should be,” he said.

As they drove back to Metro, Mary said, “I was thinking in the coffee shop about something you said the morning after the murder.”

“What’s that?”

“That she wasn’t wearing that red kimono she wore on the tapes. Sweatpants and sweatshirt. Maybe whoever did her in wasn’t a john, wasn’t there for sex.”

T
he Colgate campaign for president was picking up steam every day, which meant increased involvement for Jerry Rollins. He wasn’t happy about that. Colgate was calling upon him for advice at all hours of the day and night, asking that they get together to discuss strategy, or to mediate spats between members of his staff. While Rollins’s displeasure had much to do with the time it took from his law practice, to say nothing of eating into his fragmented domesticity with Sue and Samantha, he also had to admit to himself that he was trying to avoid Deborah.

He’d never imagined he would end up in a quandary like this, not the trap-minded, focused, clearheaded, insightful attorney that he’d always been. Along with the guilt, it was anger at having succumbed to such a basic instinct, cognition overruled by sheer passion and lust.

He’d cheated on Sue. That was bad. He’d slept with one of his wife’s best friends. That was worse. And the woman with whom he’d been arranging sexual trysts was poised to become the nation’s first lady. Certainly that transcended mundane adultery.

His furtive lunch with Deb had been unsettling, at best.

He’d known for some time, certainly for the past few months, that she was close to unraveling. During recent assignations, there had been more talk than sex. That didn’t disappoint Rollins. A chill had set in between them that was hardly conducive to steamy, naked romps. He was actually relieved that their occasional meetings involved no more than a cursory kiss, maybe a squeeze or two, and long and occasionally intellectual conversations of the sort that had drawn them to each other in the first place.

He sat in his office pondering the situation. He’d been doing a lot of that lately, trying to codify his thoughts and feelings, attempting to cram sense and inject order into what were, damn it, jumbled thoughts. He knew that were he and Deborah no more than a married man and married woman who’d lapsed into an affair, the ramifications would be purely moral, with the possibility of something legal injecting itself should their affair be discovered and result in divorce. He and Sue had friends for whom that scenario had played out, creating domestic turmoil, accusations and guilt, damaged children, and hefty counseling and attorneys’ fees.

But this was different, as any third-party observer would certainly agree. He’d found himself sucked into the cortex of a presidential campaign. His friend of many years, Robert Colgate, former governor of Maryland and poll leader in the presidential race, depended on him to offer sage counsel, and to always do the right thing, say the right words, do nothing to derail what had become Colgate’s freight train to the White House. That the man himself had acted recklessly countless times wasn’t the issue, at least not for Rollins. He’d always prided himself on the ability to compartmentalize and to detach himself from a situation in which he’d been fully attached. Take Colgate’s marital transgressions, as an example. Rollins was not only aware of some of them, he’d played the beard at times, booking a hotel room for his politically ascending friend, knowing all too well what would transpire in that room. But here was detachment at its finest. Booking the room, and forgetting that he had if asked, had nothing to do with who was in that room, or what he did there. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Ignorance is bliss. My hands are clean.

If only he’d been able to do that with Deborah Colgate. There was no ignorance of what he’d done, nor was there bliss beyond the purely physical type. His hands were dirty.

He fielded a call from the insufferable Karl Scraggs, who asked what Rollins had thought of his book proposal.

“Very interesting,” Rollins said, as he told friends who’d performed poorly in a community theater production and awaited his evaluation backstage.
A very interesting performance
. That seemed to placate them, although God knew what a cliché it was. We hear what we want to hear.

“I thought you might have a check for me for a half-million bucks,” Scraggs said, laughing. Always laughing.

“I want to give it some more thought, Karl,” Rollins said. “I’ll need a few more days.”

“You take all the time you need, Jerry Boy. I’m not going anywhere.”

No, you’re not
, was Rollins’s thought as he hung up the receiver.

His secretary appeared at the door. “Jerry, there’s a reporter on line two.”

“A reporter. From where?”

“
City Paper
. His name is Langdon.”

“What does he want?”

“He wants to talk to you.”

“About what?”

She shook her head and bunched her lips together.

He sighed, swung around in his swivel desk chair, stared at the phone for a few seconds, and picked it up. “Rollins here.”

“Hi, Mr. Rollins. I’m Josh Langdon. With
City Paper
.”

“Hello.” It occurred to Rollins at that moment that he knew the name of the reporter, not from
City Paper
, but from a blog the reporter ran that purported to expose corruption in Washington, sort of a poor man’s Drudge Report.
Watch what you say
, Rollins silently told himself.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Langdon?”

“I’m wrapping up a story on the murder of that prostitute in Adams Morgan, Rosalie Curzon.”

“Yes?”

“I understand that videotapes found in her apartment included some of her clients on them.”

“That’s interesting. But why call me about it?”

“My sources tell me that your friend Governor Colgate might have a… well, a tangential connection with the victim.”

“Is that so?”

“I thought you might be able to help me shed some light on this.”