Access to Power (6 page)

“Empty his pockets before you get started,” Randolph said to her.

She nodded and switched on her flashlight. Everyone stood back as she approached the body, step by step, careful not to disturb the scene. Then she dug her small gloved hands into the kid’s pockets and emptied the contents into a plastic evidence bag.

“He’s not carrying any ID,” she said. “Just credit cards and cash.”

She stood up, backing away from the corpse as cautiously as she had approached it and handing the bag to Randolph.

Frank moved closer, leaning over the detective’s shoulder as he held his flashlight to the bag. He saw Woody’s name on the credit cards and knew that Randolph was counting the cash. After a moment, Randolph turned to him, his voice not much more than a whisper.

“Looks like your partner got his man.”

“Yeah,” Grimes added loudly. “Right in the back.”

Chapter 12

Ozzie Olson, former candidate for the U.S. Senate, took another long swig from the bottle and tried to get a grip on things.

He’d heard the story on the radio and parked just across the street. But making out faces through the rain and all those flashing lights was giving him the willies. He tried to shake it off and opened the window. Two figures were wheeling a body out on a gurney and lifting it into the coroner’s van. Then Frank Miles stepped outside, alive and kicking. He was with two men dressed in suits and raincoats. Detectives, Olson figured, getting into an unmarked car and driving off.

The bottle dropped onto the passenger seat, flooding the cushion with whisky. Olson snatched it up and guzzled another big pull. When he came up for air, he capped the bottle and tossed it under the seat.

His head was spinning. He knew that it was Woody Darrow zipped up in that body bag and that there had been a major screw up. Olson wanted to get home. He needed to find out what had happened. What the hell went wrong.

He started the engine and grabbed hold of the wheel. The view out the windshield ran together like a bad watercolor painting until he remembered the wipers. Switching them on, he tried not to look at them pivoting back and forth as he eased the pickup away from the curb.

What the hell happened?

He took a deep breath, keeping his eyes on the road ahead and trying to imagine a straight line. As the pickup gained speed and began to tack like a sailboat, he lost his balance and slowed down some.

There was a cop at the corner, directing traffic in a bright yellow rain slicker that vibrated like a warning light on the dash. Olson knew that the cop was looking at him, staring at him. He pulled forward, the pickup swaying in the rough seas and wind. When the cop began shouting at him and knocked on the driver’s side window, he didn’t know what the fuck to do. He was over his limit. He was gassed.

Chapter 13

As Randolph and Grimes drove him down to the station in a car that rattled and shook and reeked of spent cigarettes, Frank wiped the steam off the window and looked out at the empty sidewalks and the rain spilling over the curb.

His mind was drifting. He could see what had happened that night as if he’d actually been there. Woody at his desk, grinding out scripts, frantically searching for the message that would save his clients even though they couldn’t raise enough money for any message to save them. Then the kid broke in and shot Woody, and somehow Woody shot back.

Woody.

Frank looked up front at Randolph guiding the car through the storm. Grimes sat beside his partner staring out the windshield. No one spoke, the only sound coming from the rain pounding on the roof like a steal drum. When they hit a deep pothole, rode out the bounce and both detectives remained silent, Frank wondered if they were thinking about the seventeen dollars and twenty-three cents Woody had died for. Probably not. This was their life. Their everyday. He guessed that they were immune.

Randolph pulled into the lot and they got out of the car.

The Metropolitan Police Department was still open for business. The lobby, busy like Union Station at rush hour. Frank hadn’t expected it. He knew it was late. Past two in the morning. But all of the interview rooms were taken, and Randolph told him that it would be about twenty minutes before the next one opened up.

When Randolph and Grimes walked off to check their messages and get started on their reports, Frank followed them down to the detective bureau at the end of the hall where a pot of coffee was said to be waiting.

The room was set up like a campaign office with desks pushed together to form long tables assigned to what Frank assumed were various divisions. Where one table would have been delegated to the field campaign in Frank’s world, another to fund-raising, and the next to press relations, here the cluttered tables were dedicated to gangs, robberies and murder. Each campaign a real life race without a day when anyone involved could say it was finally over.

Frank found the coffee pot. As Randolph and Grimes picked up their phones and glanced at him, he poured a cup and decided to wait in the hall.

The coffee had gone bitter, probably brewed two or three hours ago with the shift change. But it was strong and the concentrated jolt of hot caffeine in his system revived him slightly. He checked his hands. The shaking had stopped. Then he noticed the row of doors before him and became aware of the muffled voices behind them.

Interview rooms. Suspects being interrogated.

One door had a sign on it that read
Booth 7
. Detectives kept walking in and out of the room on the other side, giving Frank dirty looks as he stood there in his wet tuxedo. Their faces were intense, hungry, their words rushing out of their mouths in excited whispers.

Frank managed a glimpse inside before the door swung closed. It was a long narrow room, five feet wide at best. The lights were dimmed, with folding chairs facing what looked like a window that extended the length of the room. Frank could hear the metallic sound of voices over a small speaker in the background. The detectives were watching someone through the mirrored glass in the next room. It seemed like they were getting somewhere with someone important. Like they were having a good time and dinner was served.

Interview 7 finally opened up and that important someone turned out to be a fourteen-year-old boy, led out of the room in handcuffs by two detectives and a woman in a cheap suit who must have been the designated public defender on call that night. Frank looked at the boy’s feet. They were shackled, and it didn’t appear the boy would be headed for the lobby anytime soon. As they passed, the boy smiled at Frank and started to mumble something like
you’re next, motherfucker
, but a cop jerked him away like a leashed dog before he could say anything more.

After a few minutes, Grimes appeared, opening the door for Frank and showing him into the room that had just been vacated. It looked like a small conference room with a beat-up table and a set of chairs. The linoleum floor was cracked and beginning to break up along the edges. The walls were whitewashed and left blank, except for the long mirror on the inside wall. Before he could ask why they had to meet here, Grimes thanked him for coming, excused himself and closed the door.

Frank sat down at the table. He’d peaked. His body was starting to go cold again and the bright walls lit up by the fluorescent lights felt like they were closing in on him.

The door opened. He heard Linda call out his name and looked up to see her rushing toward him a half step ahead of Jason Hardly. She wrapped her arms around him and buried her head in his chest. He could smell the rain in her hair. He could feel her trembling beneath her jacket as she clung to him.

“Are you okay?” Hardly asked.

Frank nodded. Hardly was standing over them, watching them hold each other. Then he picked up Frank’s coffee and made a point of examining the pasty mixture.

“You don’t look okay,” he said. “Neither does this coffee. I’ll go see if I can get them to make a fresh pot.”

Hardly walked out of the room. Wiping her cheek, Linda turned from the door, her eyes moving over Frank’s face gently, lovingly.

“I’m sorry, Frank. We were together when Lieutenant Randolph called. Jason wouldn’t let me come alone.”

Frank looked about the small room, realizing that Hardly had used the coffee as an excuse to give them time together. It was an elegant gesture and it hurt. Linda had found someone real.

“He thinks of everything, doesn’t he,” Frank said.

She nodded, still holding him.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She nodded again. “What happened?”

“I don’t know.”

She let go of him and moved to the next chair. As she wiped away the tears that were still coming, the shock of seeing Woody’s dead body staring at him began to lift and Frank got his first glimpse of the reality beneath. In the end, Woody fought for what he believed in and was right more often than he was wrong. He had been the better half of their partnership, Frank thought. The good one, the one with all the heart. Since their beginning, Frank was the one with brains, the one who always seemed to be getting into trouble. In Woody’s death, Frank had lost his part-time guide, his part-time conscience. And there was an emptiness that came with the loss. A loneliness. A fear of the vacuum ahead. Watching Linda struggle with her emotions only seemed to deepen its reach.

“It’s three weeks before election day,” she said. “What are we gonna do?”

He shook his head. They were in a crisis. He needed to think, but couldn’t.

“In the morning,” he said in a low voice. “We’ll call Woody’s clients in the morning. We’ll see who wants to stay and who wants to go.”

She was leaning toward him. He felt her breath against his face and watched her green eyes wander down to his mouth. A moment passed. Before he could tell what she was thinking, the door opened and Hardly walked in with three cups of coffee. He passed them out and sat down beside Linda, sipping the fresh brew. No one said anything. As Frank watched them, he wondered how long they had been together, how far they’d gone.

His mind was drifting again. Going places.

He dug into his pocket for his cigarettes and stepped out of the room. He took a deep breath and glanced down the hall. The lobby had thinned. Two people who looked like worried parents were talking to the cop at the front desk. Frank wondered if they were the mother and father of the boy with the smile who had just been led away in chains. When the public defender joined them, looking tired and bored, his thoughts were confirmed. She was saying something to them. The boy’s mother burst into tears. Then the father sat down in the corner and began sobbing as well.

He heard a door open behind him and turned. Grimes walked out of the observation booth, stiffened and gave him a long look. The detective had been watching him, listening to his conversation with Linda.

“You’re all business, aren’t you,” Grimes said evenly.

It wasn’t posed as a question. Grimes thought he was a mind reader. Frank could see the disapproval on the detective’s face, the attitude and ignorance, before the man turned and made his way down to the detective bureau. Frank lit a cigarette, leaning his head against the wall and trying to suppress his anger. There was no escape, the horror all around. And the night felt like it still had legs.

Chapter 14

Frank’s car was parked on the street across from their office. Linda dropped him off with Hardly asleep in the backseat. There wasn’t much to say that hadn’t already been said. Linda wanted to take a short nap, but would be in by nine to help out.

Frank watched them drive off, then got into his car, keenly aware that he was alone. The sun had just cleared the horizon, the bright light raking the city in what looked like fool’s gold. He switched on the radio and scanned the dial, avoiding the news and talk stations as he made the fifteen minute drive home to Georgetown. He needed a break to sort things out, if only for an hour or two. And he had a hungry dog waiting—a one-year-old Labrador retriever. Buddha had probably eaten most of the furniture and was bouncing off the walls by now.

Frank’s house sat on three-quarters of an acre of prime real estate. A big Victorian with trees and a fenced-in backyard so Buddha could be outside if he wanted while Frank worked at the office. Buddha must have heard Frank’s car pull into the drive and run inside through the doggy door off the back porch. When Frank entered the kitchen, Buddha was sitting by his empty bowl wagging his tail and looking Frank straight in the eye like he’d just been picked as poster dog by the National Humane Society.

The guilt trip worked, as it always did. And Frank put a little extra in his bowl, last night’s dinner and this morning’s breakfast, all rolled into one. As he watched the dog snap up the food, he remembered what his mother had told him as a young boy. She had said that the humanity in a person who didn’t love animals wasn’t finished yet. That their souls were somehow incomplete.