Murder on K Street (27 page)

He’d tried to codify his feelings, to make sense of them. He’d even resorted to writing down his inner thoughts as a means of structuring them. A business writing class he’d taken at his father’s school, the University of Illinois, had stressed that often the act of writing helped clarify thinking, rather than thinking being a prerequisite for clear writing. Horse before cart? He’d been bored in that class, as he had been in most classes, his GPA reflecting it, mediocre at best but enough to graduate.

As he cowered in his king-size bed, legs drawn up in the fetal position, the covers pulled up to his chin, he tried to cry but couldn’t. His reservoir of tears was empty. He wanted to cry out but the energy wasn’t there.

He wanted to die, but didn’t have the will to bring about his death.

He hadn’t meant harm to come to anyone as a result of what he’d done.

It seemed so right at the time, so noble.

And it had turned out so wrong.

T
he taxi driver dropped Rotondi at the general aviation section of Reagan National Airport, where a sleek, twin-engine Gulfstream III jet aircraft stood waiting on the tarmac. Senator Simmons’s chief of staff, Alan McBride, and Press Secretary Peter Markowicz were already inside the operations building when Rotondi walked in.

“Where’s the senator?” Rotondi asked.

“On his way,” McBride said. “Should be here any minute.

“Is Polly coming?” McBride asked Markowicz.

“She begged off,” Markowicz replied. The men exchanged knowing glances.

“Polly was supposed to be with us?” Rotondi said.

“Yeah,” said Markowicz. “The senator thought she’d enjoy a day in Chicago. Didn’t work out.”

They looked through a window as Senator Simmons’s black Mercedes pulled up, Walter McTeague at the wheel. The senator got out, said something to McTeague, and strode into the building.

“Good morning,” Simmons said. “Looks like a nice day for a flight.”

“Couldn’t be better, Senator,” McBride agreed.

“How are you this morning?” Simmons asked Rotondi.

“Just fine. You?”

“Must have slept wrong,” Simmons said, rotating his head. “I’ve got a crick in my neck.”

The flight’s captain led them to the plane, where his first officer was conducting a last-minute walk-around visual check.

“That’s a mean-looking machine,” Simmons commented.

“Top of the line,” the captain said. “Ready to board?”

“Yes, sir,” said Simmons. “Let’s go.”

The interior of the sleek business jet was all leather and chrome. It looked to Rotondi that it would seat a dozen people, and he wondered whether others would join them. The closing of the passenger door answered that question. There would be just the four of them in the back, with the two-man crew up front. The first officer came to where they’d chosen their overstuffed, swiveling tan leather club chairs and announced that he’d be back to serve coffee and pastries once they were at cruising altitude. “There’s a bar, too. Help yourselves. It’s fully stocked.”

Rotondi was impressed with the aircraft’s power as it lifted from the runway, the nation’s capital falling away below. They soon reached their assigned cruising altitude, and the first officer fulfilled his promise of a continental breakfast. Markowicz, who sat next to Simmons, said, “How about moving to the rear, Senator? There’re some things to discuss.”

Simmons replied, “Anything can be discussed in front of Phil, Peter. He knows why we’re going to Chicago.”

“Fair enough,” Markowicz said, smiling at Rotondi. He said to the senator, “Some press has gotten wind of the meeting and the reason for it.”

“Who?”

“I got a call this morning from a reporter at the
Post
. She wanted to know who would be attending the meeting, and whether they’d signed on to your campaign.”

Simmons laughed. “Campaign? What campaign? I haven’t announced anything. I assume you straightened her out.”

“I don’t know whether she’s straightened out or not, but I told her that you were going to Chicago to attend a fund-raiser for your next senatorial run. I don’t think she bought it.”

“What about the Chicago press? Do you think they’ll be on it?”

“Beats me” was Markowicz’s response. “I’m working with our PR people there. They’ve got their finger on things. We won’t be blindsided.”

As Simmons and his two top staff people continued to discuss the upcoming meeting and possible media interest in it, Rotondi reclined his leather chair and contemplated where he was and why he was there. Should he, Philip Rotondi, son of a shoemaker from Batavia, New York, feel privileged to have been included in this inner circle, seated next to a possible future president of the United States and listening to conversations to which few were privy? The most influential journalists in the land didn’t enjoy this level of access.

His overnight bag sat on the carpeted floor next to him. In it was the file Jeannette had given him when they were together on the Eastern Shore. There was a certain irony, he knew, in having such damaging information within a few feet of the man who might one day end up in the White House. He’d considered pulling Simmons aside and laying it all out for him, and knew that the time would probably come when he would do just that. But at this stage, he preferred to keep his friend’s confidence and to wait until he’d had a chance to learn more about the source of the salacious, damning material. That’s why he’d agreed to accompany Simmons to Chicago. The answers to his questions, he now knew, were in the Windy City.

As he sat in the opulent private plane flying at thirty-one thousand feet, the whoosh of its twin jet engines the only ambient sound, he shifted his attention between what Simmons and his aides were discussing, and his own thoughts about everything that had transpired since receiving Lyle’s phone call announcing that Jeannette had been killed. Had his friend of so many years played a role in his wife’s murder? There was certainly speculation about that around Washington. The senator’s own daughter harbored such suspicions. Was she right? He knew he had to consider the source, a free-spirited, iconoclastic daughter estranged for years from her powerful father. Still, one had to at least not arbitrarily rule it out, nor summarily dismiss anyone else in the Simmons family with the exception of Polly, who wasn’t anywhere near D.C. the day of the murder.

He glanced over at Simmons, who’d slipped into his lecture mode, with McBride and Markowicz his eager students.

If Lyle Simmons had nothing to do with his wife’s death—and Rotondi fervently hoped that was the case—what kind of president would he make? Rotondi had abandoned interest in the political scene since leaving the U.S. attorney’s office in Baltimore. Not that he’d ever been a keen observer of it, or participant in it, even back then. He didn’t trust politicians. As far as he was concerned, their only interest was retaining power, loftier societal needs be damned. He realized that his disdain for elected officials represented a level of cynicism that was probably uncalled for, and sometimes wondered whether he should change his tune. It hadn’t happened, and he remained content to be an onlooker, regular voting serving as his conscience salve.

The Gulfstream landed smoothly at Chicago’s Midway Airport, where a stretch limo awaited them. They were whisked to the Ambassador East Hotel, home of the famed Pump Room bar and restaurant. Rotondi had been treated to evenings there by Lyle’s father and mother when the two college students visited the Simmons home on the city’s Near North Side. On many occasions, they were seated in the famed Booth One on the east wall, mirroring the elder Simmons’s stature in Chicago. Myriad high-profile celebrities had enjoyed the vantage point of that booth; Bogart and Bacall celebrated their wedding in Booth One, as did Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood. Sinatra held court there on many nights, John Barrymore roared for more champagne, and noted Chicago columnist Irv Kupcinet used Booth One as his office away from the office. It was a heady, albeit uncomfortable experience for the college-age Phil Rotondi to be seated there as part of the Simmons family.

“Afraid you’re on your own, Phil,” Simmons told Rotondi as they headed for their rooms. “I’ll be tied up in these meetings all afternoon. Meet you in the Pump Room at five for a drink before the fund-raiser.”

“Sounds good to me,” Rotondi said, meaning it.

After being shown to the small suite to which he’d been assigned, Rotondi sat at the desk and placed a phone call. Kala Whitson answered on the first ring.

“Hi, Kala. It’s Phil.”

“My gimpy friend made it,” she said in a husky voice. “Nice flight?”

“Fancy private jet, all the comforts of home. No, better than home.”

She laughed. “Sounds like you’re selling out, Phil. Private jets were never your style.”

“They still aren’t, but when in Rome—”

“Don’t go getting literary on me, pal. Are we on for this afternoon?”

“I hope so. I have to be back at the hotel by five. I’m free until then. Where and when?”

“My apartment. I don’t think it’s bugged, although everyplace else seems to be. The war on terrorism and all…or is it the war on the Constitution?”

Rotondi smiled. His friend from the Baltimore U.S. attorney’s office hadn’t changed a bit since being transferred to the Chicago office ten years ago. They’d worked closely in Baltimore on some of the toughest prosecutions, and he valued her no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners attitude. They’d stayed in touch after her transfer and his retirement, sending amusing e-mails back and forth, making fairly regular phone calls, and swapping books they knew would interest each other. Kala was an avowed, prideful, unabashed lesbian, as comfortable in her skin as any heterosexual. She looked mannish. She wore her hair in what could only be described as a designer-styled crew cut, and was fond of tailored black suits that tended to slim down her square body. She talked tough and had a raspy voice, enhanced by chain smoking. She also possessed the most beautiful green eyes Rotondi had ever seen—and his deceased wife, Kathleen, had a pretty spectacular set of green eyes herself.

Kala Whitson was one of his favorite people.

“I assume you’ve come up with what I need,” he said.

“Of course I have, Philip. What the hell did you think I was doing, inviting you to my apartment to seduce you?”

“I was hoping.”

“Hope on, my friend. Maybe you noticed you’re not my type. Two o’clock?”

“On the button.”

Rotondi carried the envelope containing the damaging material about Lyle Simmons and the Marshalk Group with him to the Pump Room. He sat at the bar and enjoyed a beer and sandwich. The doorman hailed him a cab, and he arrived at Kala’s apartment building in the Old Town Triangle section of the city, adjacent to Lincoln Park. It had been settled in the mid-1850s by German immigrants and remained a German American enclave until an influx of other nationalities created a melting pot of Germans, Hungarians, and Russian Jews. Gentrification followed, and real estate prices soared, forcing out many of its original residents. Kala bought her condo there because she enjoyed the ghosts of what had been, including saloon-keeper aldermen like Mathias “Paddy” Bauler, who was fond of telling reporters, “I’ll talk about anything with you, as long as the statute of limitations has run out.” Kala was right for the neighborhood, and the neighborhood was right for her.

Kala and her two rescued stray cats welcomed Rotondi to the apartment. “Drink?” she asked.

“Please.”

“Still drinking Scotch?”

He nodded and followed her into the kitchen.

“I hope you know how much I appreciate this, Kala.”

“You’d better appreciate it, Philip. My neck’s way out on this one.”

“I know.”

“When you called and told me what you had, I was ready to kill the little weasel, only somebody beat me to it.”

“Who is this weasel?”

She handed him his Scotch over two cubes and led him back into the living room.

“Show me the stuff you ended up with,” she said, lighting a cigarette.

He opened the folder and laid out its materials. She rifled through it for thirty seconds, shoved the papers back, said, “Yeah, the same stuff.”

“Gathered by a weasel?”

“A no-good, rotten little double-dealing weasel. I’d use some other words to describe him, only I wouldn’t want to offend you.”

“Thanks. So, tell me.”

She took a long, sustained drink of club soda, sat back, fired up another cigarette, and said, “Where do I begin? Okay. We flipped a guy who was inside one of our fair city’s leading crime families. Despite all the Russian and Jamaican and Haitian mobs, we still have the Eye-talian variety, not as powerful as they used to be but still with plenty of fingers into everything, mostly construction and trash hauling, with side ventures in prostitution and drugs. This guy we flipped, Joey Silva, started bringing us the sort of material you have in the folder, links between his crime family and a certain U.S. senator who happens to be an old friend of one of my favorite prosecutors, now happily retired. At first, the info was sketchy, and it was tough to connect the dots. The route the money took to the senator was convoluted, no straight lines, which you would expect from somebody as smart as your college buddy. But the more Silva gave us, the more the picture started to take shape. The family used front companies that moved the money from their hands to a middleman, namely a lobbying firm in D.C. headed by a gentleman named Marshalk.”

“A familiar name,” Rotondi said.

“Another familiar name is president of Marshalk, Simmons’s kid. But of course, you already know this.”

“Everything but the weasel. Go on.”

“The weasel, Mr. Joey Silva, lowlife that he is, kept hitting us up for more money. Every time he did, he said he had more and better information, so we went along. The little bastard was getting rich off us, but he was delivering the goods.” She tapped the file folder on the coffee table. “Juicy stuff, huh, Philip?”

“Not for the senator and Marshalk.”

“Who cares about them? Oh, you do, of course.”