Official Privilege Read online

  He took a deep breath, shuddered, and then smiled. Ah well, at least the truck was clean. A clean machine. Cleanliness was next to godliness. And what the hell. An accident, that’s all it was. And an unnecessary accident at that: All she had to do last night was say, Okay—I’ve got the message. I’ll be good, and I’ll be quiet. But no, she had to pull a god damned knife on him, cut his hand, forcing him into having to try again.

  Another god damned treacherous woman with cutting on her mind.

  He put the flashlight back, shut off the light in the garage, and checked the locks on the electric door.

  Squeezing by the truck, he went through the backyard door and up the broken concrete walk toward the house, lighting a cigarette on the way, sending a huge puff of blue smoke into the dawn air. Hell, he had only meant to scare her; it was her fault she had chosen to look instead of leap. One of life’s little choices, as Monroney used to say. Besides, Mr. I.W. Harper knew how to deal with unpleasant images. The only unsettling part of it was when his brain had flickered that overlay of Inge’s face onto the lieutenant’s face. Bad sign, seeing that face again. The girl had essentially killed herself by not getting out of the way. But where was the image of Inge coming from after all these years?

  He walked up through the tiny, neglected backyard, up the wrought-iron back steps, and through the kitchen door of the left side of the duplex, hesitating for a moment in the kitchen to stare at the whiskey bottle but then continuing on through the house and grabbing his black windbreaker as he went out the front door. He walked the seven blocks over to the Eastern Market Metro station and caught an Orange Line train heading back into town. He got off at the Foggy Bottom station and surfaced on 23rd Street, across from the George Washington University Hospital complex. Something appeared to be causing a traffic jam down on 23rd, just a few blocks away. He stopped in at a 7-Eleven for coffee and a doughnut and asked the Korean proprietor what was going on down on 23rd.

  “Hit-and-run. Some lady got killed by a car,” the proprietor replied.

  “Got traffic all screwed up. You want a bag for that?”

  the following morning, Malachi went out early to get a morning paper and some cigarettes from the convenience store over on East Capitol Street.

  He walked across the street to the bakery and bought a coffee and a prune Danish, then walked the four blocks up to Capitol Hill. It was a pleasant spring morning, with a solid green haze showing among the tree branches and a hint of warmth in the air. A few commuters trying to avoid the major avenues sped through the quiet neighborhood streets, paying only very casual lip service to the stop signs. He felt the rumbling vibrations of a passing Metro bus on the uneven pavement as he crossed 2nd Street behind the Library of Congress. His head no longer hurt, because this time he hadn’t made the mistake of interrupting his whiskey intake. He had not slept last night, or at least not for more than a half hour at a time. He had watched a series of increasingly boring night talk shows, smoked all his cigarettes, and killed a quart of Harpers. But he wasn’t drunk, just pleasantly—stable, yeah, that was the word. The bourbon was warm in his veins and the lurking headache was being kept firmly at bay.

  Reaching the small park behind the Supreme Court building, he found a bench that was upwind of the lumpy vagrants sleeping in the bushes, spread out his paper, and scanned the Metro section. He found it right away: A female Navy lieutenant had been the victim of an early-morning hit-and-run accident on 23rd Street.

  She had been DOA at George Washington University Hospital of multiple fractures and blunt-force trauma.

  She had been identified as Lieutenant Elizabeth T.

  Hardin, USN, age 27 attached to the Chief of Information (CHINFO) Office at the Navy headquarters in the Pentagon. She was survived by her mother, one Mrs. Agnes Hardin, of District Heights, in Southeast Washington, where the lieutenant had been born and raised, and a younger brother, who was a lieutenant (junior grade) supply corps officer stationed on a ship in the Navy. According to the paper, there had been no witnesses to the accident, nor were there any leads. Good, if true.

  The article closed with a police spokesman— correction, spokesperson—making some remarks about the dangers of jaywalking, especially in the early-morning darkness. Two column inches. Ho hum. He spent the next half hour drinking his coffee, finishing the Danish and the paper, and watching the flow of women staffers clicking their way up the street to the various Hill office buildings. Every one of them was a looker.

  No wonder all those congressmen can’t keep their pants zipped. Go ahead and look, Malachi: Locking’s all you got left.

  When he returned to the duplex, however, his answering machine was not ho-hum. There was a belligerent, almost hysterical message from the captain, directing him to call in at once on the private number.

  Treating him like a junior officer again. Malachi grinned and erased the tape. Let him stew for a while. The phone rang as he headed up the stairs. He stopped to listen to a second call from the captain, a repeat of the first message. The captain was trying to sound slightly more threatening, but came off sounding mostly frightened.

  Malachi gave the machine a mock salute and went upstairs to shower and shave.

  He went back downstairs a little after 9:00 a. m., squeezed one last cup of last night’s coffee out of the percolator, added a small—well, maybe a medium— whiskey helper, lit a cigarette, and called the captain’s direct number, sipping the whiskey-flavored coffee.

  Gotta keep the levels right, he thought. A yeoman said the captain was not available and asked if he could take a message. Malachi left his number and the agreed upon cover name. While he was waiting, he found the personnel file on Elizabeth Hardin and ran it through his shredder.

  The captain called back twenty minutes later, and Malachi let him talk to the machine again.

  Finally at around 10:00 a. m., the phone rang again, and this time Malachi picked up.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “What the hell have you done!” whispered the Captain.

  “Can’t talk?” Malachi asked innocently. “Got people around with their ears on fire?”

  “You heard me, goddamn it!” A stage whisper now.

  Malachi sat down on the bottom stair, his customary position when talking on the hall phone.

  “Hell, I did what you wanted,” he began. “I went to see her, got in right after she came home, told her I was an FBI guy. She bought the FBI bit, and once I was in, I brought up her love life and gave her the word. But she didn’t want to play ball. She got all righteous and excited, threw me out. That’s it. What’s the problem with that?”

  “The problem is that she’s dead, for Chrissakes!”

  Malachi feigned surprise. “Dead? Dead? She was damn well alive when I left her—calling me names, but very much alive and very pissed off.

  What do you mean dead?”

  “Don’t you read the goddamn papers? Watch the TV news?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, you should. She was run down on Twenty-third Street early yesterday morning, the morning after you paid your little call.”

  “No shit. So?”

  “Well, I assumed you had something to do with that, Malachi.”

  Malachi put a little metal in his voice. “You assumed wrong. You specifically said not to hurt her, so I just did the monster-mash routine—gave her the word, just like you wanted, and then beat feet when she went herman tile. I figured you’d be on the receiving end next, shit she was saying. That’s what I was going to report when I called, see what you wanted to do about it.”

  “What kinds of things was she saying?”

  “Like she was gonna go see the great man and ream his ass out. Like she was gonna get extremely public.

  She reminded me that she worked in public relations, emphasis on that word public. I figured you were calling me this morning to tell me about a bitch kitty scene in the great man’s outer office.” Malachi was enjoying this.

  There was a moment�
�s silence on the line. Then: “He doesn’t know about it yet.”

  “What, doesn’t he read the damn papers? Watch the TV news?”

  More silence.

  “Ah,” said Malachi. “I get it. You’re elected to go tell him.”

  “Probably.”

  “Wonderful. Well hell, you’re a big captain now, so go tell him. Or tell his wife, and let her tell him; that would be interesting. But get off my case. I talked to the little bitch. I did not do anything else. And like I said, she didn’t scare so good. So you go tell your big guy.

  And here’s a freebie: When he gets all teary-eyed and melancholy, point out to him that he’s in the clear vis-avis any Anita Hill scenes, right?

  Silver lining sort of thing.”

  “Silver lining.”

  “One on every black cloud, Captain. See ya.”

  Malachi hung up and walked into his kitchen, whose rear windows overlooked the tiny backyard and the dilapidated fence running along the alley. He shook out another cigarette and then tore the filter off before lighting up. Every true addict knew that the tobacco they put in filter cigarettes had to be twice as strong as the unfiltered ones. The coffeepot was empty, so he got out the makings, eyeing the scant remains of the Harper hundred. Okay. Now, just those two little loose ends: the phone calls and the knife. The knife was simple.

  If the cops thought it was what the paper said it was —a hit-and-run and not a homicide—there’d be no detectives going to her apartment. So he ought to be able to just go over there, middle of the day, when everyone was at work, punch in the code, slip the locks, find the knife, clean it, and put it back under the couch, where she’d kept it. Where a friend or relative might know she’d kept it. But then he paused and thought about it. She’d probably already done that, and cleaned it off, too. But either way, the knife bit was simple if he moved right now.

  He filled the percolator with water and plugged it in.

  The phone calls were more troubling. Depending on whom she had been talking to for nearly an hour, the cops might yet be coming around after all. Like if she’d called her mother, told her what was going down, and told her about the night visitor with the big hands. He held his right hand up and looked at his bandaged fingers again. Deep skin cuts. Hurt like hell. He’d had to change the bandages three times so far, but the sulfa powder was working its magic—there was no sign of general infection. If she had talked to her mother and the mother had told the cops, then he had better not go over there with his bandaged hand and walk into a stakeout. He sat back down at his kitchen table and thought about it as the coffeepot began making intestinal sounds.

  Without knowing about the phone calls—whom she had called and what she had said—he really couldn’t go take care of the knife. He conjured up a picture of the young woman in his mind. What would you do, Miss. Navy Lieutenant, you cut some guy with a knife you kept under the couch pillows? A big guy with big hands who was scaring you? You’d run him out of the apartment, and now you’re standing there in your living room with a bloody knife in your hand. That’s right:

  you’d go into the kitchen, drop it into the sink, and then wash it off, and your hands with it. And probably put it back. You wouldn’t be thinking forensics; you’d be slightly sick to your stomach at seeing a man’s blood running down his arm after you slashed him. You’d wash it off and then wash your hands really good. So screw the knife—go find out what the cops were doing with the incident and who’d been talking to them about what. He got up and found a mug, poured the last of the Harper into it, sucked on his tattered cigarette while he waited for the percolator to finish.

  When he was ready to make his calls, he went to his office, which had once been the dining room of the town house back when it had been a home. He sat down at his desk and activated the voice synthesizer.

  After what had happened to his voice in Germany, the machine had become a necessity. No one who heard his real voice would ever forget it, especially on the phone.

  And phones were his life. It was Monroney who had introduced him to the fact that you could find out almost anything in Washington simply by picking up the phone, Washington being as big a phone town as LA.

  That, plus the fact that every government organization published their phone book, which allowed you to find anyone who was connected with the government.

  He chose voice program six, then made his first call to the Washington Post, asking for the reporter who had done the piece on the hit-and-run.

  While the operator was putting him through, he opened the Yellow Pages to

  “Attorneys.” The phone rang four times and then he got voice mail. He hung up, then tried again a half hour later, and this time he got a human voice.

  “Kit Freeman.”

  “Mr. Freeman, I’m calling about the piece in the Metro section today about the young Navy lieutenant who got run over.”

  “Yes? And your name?”

  “My name is Farrell Greenberg, Mr. Freeman. I’m an attorney at Lyle, Spencer, Watkins and King, out here in Bladensburg.” He closed the phone book.

  “Oh, Jesus. I don’t believe this, Greenberg. Let me guess, you’re a personal injury liability guy, and—”

  “No, no, Mr. Freeman. Not every attorney in this town is an ambulance chaser.” Malachi wrote down the name Farrell Greenberg on a pad next to the synthesizer, and the number 6.

  “Now that’s news,” Freeman said. “So what’s your angle?”

  “Our firm represents a client who is compiling statistics about the District of Columbia Police Department’s solution rate on fatal traffic incidents—especially hit and-runs. Your article today identified Lieutenant Har din as being a black woman. My client believes that the police department relegates black traffic deaths to the back burner in terms of putting in the hours to find the perpetrators.”

  “The article didn’t say she was black.”

  “It said she was from Washington, and her mother lived in Southeast, in District Heights. I concluded that she was black. Was I mistaken?”

  “No.”

  “So, regarding what our client—”

  “That’s bullshit, and you know it.”

  “I said that our client believes that. Our—that is, my :—instructions are to follow up on all such incidents in the city, such as the one that involved Lieutenant Har din, to see what the police have done with it.”

  “So why are you calling me?”

  “Because when I called the police hit-and-run division, I got stonewalled—investigation in progress, that sort of thing. I fully appreciate that it’s been only one day, but most vehicular homicides are ‘solved’ about fifteen minutes after they happen. I’m calling you to find out if they know any more than they’re telling, or perhaps to see if this incident is going to just dry up and blow away.”

  There was a moment’s silence on the line. Malachi sat back in his chair.

  He was counting on the lawyer bit to distract the reporter from making any mental connections between the caller and the accident. It had been an accident, after all.

  “Tell me, Mr. Greenberg,” Freeman said. “What do your stats show so far?”

  Malachi rustled the pages of his notebook, as if looking up the data.

  “In twenty-four cases of vehicular homicide or manslaughter in the past thirty months in the District, eighteen have involved black people, and sixteen of those are, quote unquote, ‘solved.’ That’s eighty-eight percent. In two other cases, the witnesses told such convoluted stories, nobody could make sense of them. The remainder were either white people or other races, and about the same rate applies—eighty five percent.”

  “So why doesn’t your client just give it up?”

  “My clients are not the kind of people who necessarily let facts distract them from their political agenda.”

  “Ah, an interest group. Right. That makes more sense, the way people act in this town. Okay: the Har din case. The cops are stumped, literally stumped. Guy came out of his town h
ouse, on his way to work, found the girl’s body draped across the trash cans next to his stairs. Deader than hell. No screech of brakes, no witnesses, no signs of robbery or any other crime than hit and-run. Cops feel it’s just what it looks like—a hit-and run. They’re going to work the usual guilt angle: Whoever you are out there, you know what you’ve done.

  Give yourself up—right now, it’s an accident. We gotta come find you, it’s manslaughter or even murder. That usually works, by the way.”

  Malachi went silent for a moment, then said, “Sorry, taking notes. So, there’s nothing to indicate that they’re sluffing it off.”

  “Nope. Although—”

  “Yes?”

  “The girl’s mother. The detective on the case said the girl’s mother was really strange about it. I mean, there was the expected grief reaction when a parent loses a child, even a grown child, but this was as if she had been expecting something to happen to her daughter.

  Not the normal reaction, whatever that is, but … Hell, I don’t know.”

  “Oh dear. We never know how grief will manifest itself, do we?”

  “You see a lot of grief in your business, counselor?”

  “People rarely call their lawyers to celebrate one of life’s little triumphs, Mr. Freeman. But I guess I need to put this one in the open column for now.”

  “Yeah, well, this being D. C., a hit-and-run can’t compete with last night’s umpteen drug shootings, so it isn’t on the front burner, but it’s not on the back burner, either. They just have nothing to go on so far. But as to that theory that the D.C. cops put black incidents—”