A Vote for Murder (14 page)

“Yes.”

“I think they’re on the wrong track, but I don’t have any control over that.” His laugh was grim. “You’d think as a senator you’d have all sorts of power, could control the destiny of everything. But that isn’t true. Look, all I can ask is that you continue to stand by Pat’s side in this difficult time.”

He picked up the phone and told someone to arrange for a car to pick me up in front of the building.

“That’s not necessary,” I said.

He ignored me, picked up the phone again, and said, “Richard, there’s a car coming for Mrs. Fletcher downstairs. Please escort her there.”

“No, no need for that,” I said. “I can find my way out.”

“Nonsense. I insist.”

I lingered another few minutes in his office until he was informed that the car had arrived. We shook hands. As he was about to open the door for me, a female scream erupted from the other side of it.

“What the hell?” he said.

“Get down!” a male voice yelled. The sound of people scurrying about could be heard.

“What are you, some sort of a madman?” someone yelled. “Put down that damn gun!”

Nebel’s face was ashen. We both took a few steps back, away from the door, just before it was thrown open by Richard Carraway, his face a mask of fear and confusion. Behind him stood an older man pointing a handgun at us.

Nebel left my side and sought refuge behind his tall desk chair, leaving me staring into the face of the gun-wielding man. Carraway, who’d come through the door, ducked behind it, leaving the man and me to lock eyes.

“Oscar?” I said.

“Mrs. Fletcher?”

Like every town in America, Cabot Cove has its resident eccentrics, and Oscar Brophy was one of them. He lived by himself on the outskirts of Cabot Cove and was known as a loner, a man with a temper, although I’d never heard of him actually hurting anyone. Despite a rough-hewn appearance and way of speaking, he was a voracious reader, spending his days at the local library, where he checked out dozens of books each week, most of them on history and current events. I’d often bumped into him there, and he regularly attended talks I’d given at the library, always the first person to arrive to secure a seat in the front row. He’d worked at a mill, had been injured on the job, and now lived on disability payments and his monthly Social Security check.

“What are you doing with that gun, Oscar? I suggest you put it down
now!
”

His eyes darted left and right and his lips trembled. Still, he held the gun in both hands, aimed directly at me.

“He ain’t going to build no nuke plant next to my house,” he said, his quavering voice mirroring the flustered expression on his craggy face. He wore a frayed brown corduroy jacket over a plaid flannel shirt and overalls. “These damn politicians don’t care anything about us regular people, sell their mother to get elected.”

“That may be true, Oscar,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady, “but coming here like this with a gun and threatening people is not the answer. Please put down that gun. I promise I’ll try to help you, but only if you do what I say.”

For a moment I thought he was going to pull the trigger, maybe not deliberately, but because of a tremor causing both arms to shake. Then, to my profound relief, he lowered the weapon. As he did, two of Nebel’s young male staff members jumped on him, wrestling him to the floor and pinning his arms behind him.

“Don’t hurt him,” I said, approaching. Someone in the outer office had called security, and a half dozen uniformed Capitol Hill policemen came bursting through the door, guns drawn.

“You know him?” Carraway said to me after the police had gotten Oscar to his feet and placed handcuffs on his wrists and shackles on his ankles.

“Yes, I know him,” I said. I thought back to the newspaper article claiming that Senator Nebel had received death threats, and wondered whether they’d come from Oscar.

The senator came out from behind his desk and joined me in the outer office.

“How the hell did he get through security?” he demanded.

Sandy Teller, who’d stayed in his office with the door closed during the fracas, now entered the outer office and said, “I’ll get to the bottom of it.” He ran from the office, followed by Carraway and the two male assistants who’d tackled Oscar.

“My God,” Nebel said to me. “We might have been killed.”

I’d taken a chair because my legs were shaky. I looked up at him and said, “I think you’d better worry about how someone carrying a gun got through that metal detector downstairs.” I stood, brushed off my skirt, and said, “In the meantime, that car is waiting for me, and I intend to take it.”

I rode an elevator down to the lobby and approached security from the inside of the building, where Teller, Carraway, and the others were in an animated conversation with the security guards. By this time, a SWAT team from the Capitol Police had descended on the building and taken up positions in the lobby and out on the sidewalk.

Teller saw me heading for the door and stopped me.

“Looks like you were in the wrong place at the wrong time again, Mrs. Fletcher.”

“I’m afraid you’re right,” I said, “and hopefully it will be the last time while I’m in Washington.”

I stepped outside and went to where an older gentleman in a black chauffeur’s uniform stood next to the open passenger door of a Lincoln town car.

“I’m Jessica Fletcher,” I said. “Are you here for me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The driver closed the door behind me, got behind the wheel, and we pulled away from the Dirksen Building. He asked over his shoulder, “What’s going on there? Somebody was yelling that a guy with a gun was trying to kill a senator.”

“So I heard,” I said, “but I’m sure everything turned out all right. The Library of Congress, please.”

When I arrived at the Madison Building, a discussion group had just commenced, led by the Library of Congress’s head of the rare books section. I apologized for being late and slipped into a chair at a far end of the table. It was a spirited discussion about ways to encourage young people to read more, suggestions running the gamut from mounting a television ad campaign on shows popular with youth, to paying students for each book they read. I tried to focus on the conversation, but kept thinking back to Oscar Brophy and his woefully misguided attempt to influence Senator Nebel’s vote on the nuclear power plant.

I was pleased to see that Patricia Nebel was there, although I had the feeling she would have preferred not to be. She looked as though she hadn’t had much sleep the night before, her expression vacant and distracted, wrapped in sadness. She barely acknowledged my arrival, and I wondered what her night had been like, whether she’d had discussions with her husband about Nikki Farlow’s death, now termed a homicide, and about the allegations that he and his aide had been involved in a sexual relationship.

I’d been there a half hour when Eleanor Atherton, the library’s public affairs representative, interrupted the meeting and asked if she could speak with me. I followed her into the hallway.

“I just heard about what happened this morning at Senator Nebel’s office,” she said. “What a fright it must have been.”

“It was upsetting,” I said.

“They say you knew the man who attempted to kill the senator.”

“Oh,” I said, “I really doubt if Oscar would have shot him. I—”

“They say you talked him out of it,” she said.

“Who is ‘they’?” I asked.

“The media. Reporters have tracked you down here and are clamoring to speak with you. The phone is ringing off the hook in my office.”

“Oh, my,” I said, thinking of Sandy Teller’s comment that I’d ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time—again. I certainly wasn’t in a position to argue with him.

“Would you like to come to my office, Jessica?” Ms. Atherton said. “To return calls?”

“I’m not sure I want to return calls from reporters, but I would like some time to gather my thoughts.”

“Of course.”

I declined an offer of tea or coffee as she led me into a small room off her office that appeared to be a multi-use space. Floor-to-ceiling steel shelving held boxes of paper, envelopes, and other office supplies. A TV set was tuned to one of the cable news channels; two young women sorted papers on a round table in one corner.

“We use this room to gather and file press clippings about the library,” Atherton explained. “These are two of our interns from GW’s journalism school.”

After I’d been introduced to them, Atherton politely asked them to leave, and closed the door behind them. She, too, left me alone for a few minutes before returning with a handful of phone messages she’d collected for me.

“All these?” I said, hearing a constantly ringing phone on the other side of the closed door.

“Afraid so.”

“I’m sorry to be putting you to all this trouble,” I said.

“Don’t worry about that, Jessica. Happy to help in any way we can.”

I pulled my cell phone from my purse. “I left it off this morning,” I said as I powered it up and saw a small icon on the screen indicating that messages had been stored in its memory. I pushed a few more buttons on the keypad and listened as a recorded female voice told me who had called. “You have three new messages,” she said through the speaker. They were from George Sutherland, Seth Hazlitt in Cabot Cove, and Detective Joe Moody.

“Jessica,” George said, “I’m in my hotel room watching the telly and the news came on about your being in Senator Nebel’s office when some madman with a gun tried to kill him. They say he’s a friend of yours. Are you all right? Please call as soon as you receive this.”

Seth said, “Been watchin’ television, Jessica, and heard about Oscar Brophy pullin’ some dumb stunt in Senator Nebel’s office. Damn fool. Glad nobody got killed, including you. The fella on TV said you were the one who talked Oscar into givin’ up his gun. Sounds like we’d have a dead senator if you weren’t there. Give me a call, heah?”

Detective Moody’s call didn’t have anything to do with the scene in Nebel’s Capitol Hill office: “Mrs. Fletcher, this is Joe Moody, Fairfax police. I’d appreciate a chance to speak with you at your earliest convenience. It has to do with the Farlow case. Thank you.” He left his number.

“I’d better return these,” I said.

“Sure,” Atherton said. “I’ll leave you alone.”

Seth wanted to know everything that had happened in Nebel’s office that morning, and I gave him a quick rundown, ending with, “Poor Oscar. He’s—Oh, wait. There’s something on TV.”

I’d not seen any TV reports about the incident, and listened and watched intently as a female anchor recounted what had happened. It was reported as an attempted murder of a United States senator, and that Capitol police had turned Brophy over to local authorities. The closing words made me wince: “Noted mystery writer Jessica Fletcher, who’s reported to be a friend of the accused, is said by others in Nebel’s office to have talked the assailant into surrendering his weapon. Mrs. Fletcher, here in Washington from her home in Maine as part of a literacy initiative mounted by Senator Nebel and his wife, Patricia, was also present when the senator’s aide Nikki Farlow was found murdered following a dinner party at Nebel’s home two nights ago, and was the one who discovered the body along with another guest, a Scotland Yard inspector.”

“What are they sayin’?” Seth asked.

“Nothing that I haven’t told you already.”

“Well, all I can say is that you take care while you’re down there in Washington. Got the highest murder rate per capita in the whole darn country.”

“I will,” I said. He obviously hadn’t heard yet about Nikki Farlow’s murder.

George answered on the first ring. “Where are you?” he immediately asked.

“At the Library of Congress. I was in a meeting when—”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes, fifteen at the most.”

“George, I—”

“No argument, Jessica. You need a—what do your politicians call it?—you need a handler to keep you out of trouble.”

“Oh, George, that’s—”

“Will you be in front?”

I sighed. “Yes, I’ll be in front.”

I went into Ms. Atherton’s office and told her I was leaving.

“What shall I tell the others from your group?” she asked.

“Tell them I was called away unexpectedly, but that I’ll catch up with them later.”

She walked me to the building entrance. “Sure you’re all right?” she asked.

“Yes, I’m fine.”

“Sometimes the shock of what you’ve been through takes a while to hit home.”

I smiled to reassure her. “Don’t worry about me,” I said. “Thanks for all your courtesies.”

I waited inside the main entrance until I saw a taxi pull up, and George jumped out. I left the building to meet him and was immediately accosted by a reporter holding a microphone tethered to a video camera on a colleague’s shoulder.

“Mrs. Fletcher, Jean Watson from Fox News. Tell us what happened this morning at Senator Nebel’s office.”

“Please,” I said, “I have nothing to say.”

George came to my side.

“Are you the Scotland Yard inspector who discovered Nikki Farlow’s body with Mrs. Fletcher?” he was asked.

George maintained his silence as he led me to the waiting cab. Once settled inside, he told the driver to take us to his hotel, the Westin, where we went into the hotel’s café fronting M Street. An iced tea in front of me, iced coffee in front of him, he said, “Tell me about what happened to you this morning.”

I filled him in between sips.

“Looks like you’re on your way to becoming the most famous person in Washington,” he said.

“Hardly what I aspired to when I came here,” I said. “That reporter knew who you were, too.”