Gospel (9 page)

Croker and his partner Gloria Sanchez had barely knocked on the door when Rita appeared, saw the two badges and proceeded to run from one end of her ornately decorated home to the other, smashing a myriad of china figurines, vases, pottery and one very large porcelain Dalmatian on her way. The profanities that came from her mouth were enough to make a trucker blush. They were loud and bawdy and full of contempt. And all this before the two detectives had a chance to say a single word.

The woman was expecting us
, thought Croker.
We're not so much a surprise as a foregone conclusion
.

One hour, three vodkas and two Valium later, Rita Walker was still highly agitated and, despite the best efforts of the two detectives to calm her, she was also still unable, or unwilling, to answer any of their questions.

She did manage however, in between her hysterical screams, to explain she had ‘
no fucking family, no fucking friends, basically fucking nobody'
she would like them to contact, except for her teenage son Chase who was currently on a school excursion to some confectionery factory, an excursion which turned out to be Chase ditching school to line up for Limp Bizkit tickets.

It was then that Detective Sanchez made an executive decision that there were two very important phone calls to be made. One to Mrs Walker's GP and the other to Father Roy McNally, the local Catholic priest, for the woman had progressed to yelling a series of religious profanities and the detectives, in their desperation, thought a man of the cloth might be able to help.

‘Fuck Matthew, fuck Mark, fuck John, they all fucked Luke
,' screamed Rita Walker.

‘Jesus,' said Sanchez.

‘Not yet,' said Croker. ‘But I sure as hell hope Father McNally gets his holy ass here soon, because my guess is, she is working her way on up.'

‘T
here's something missing,' said Joe Mannix, accepting another cup of black tar from Detective Susan Leigh.

Mannix was perched on the front edge of his metal-legged, birch laminate desk in the new Boston Police headquarters in downtown Roxbury. His office was a ten by ten box with three glass walls and one solid divider which backed onto the main corridor running down to the elevator bay on HQ's level two. As usual, the venetians, which covered the bulk of the glass-partitioned box, were set on the horizontal plane of ‘open', his door jammed so far back against the side wall that the new grey carpet appeared to have grown up around it, defying anyone attempting to close it on the hard-working Homicide crew beyond.

‘What do you mean?' said Leigh. ‘Chief, I think this is a major breakthrough. They have sent us everything. I have cross-checked it with our request list. Interview transcripts, crime scene photographs, even the video material, it's all here. Whatever you said to Special Agent King, and whatever King said to ADIC Ramirez it worked.
We're in
.'

Mannix could tell Susan Leigh was finding it hard to contain herself. He knew the girl was keen – hell, keen was putting it mildly – more like fanatical when it came to attacking an investigation and carving another notch on her crime fighting belt. But he also knew those who thought
she was driven by pure ambition were probably a little off base. Susan had lofty aspirations, no doubt about it, but she also did this because she
loved
it. She enjoyed the chase, got great satisfaction from nailing the perp, and in many ways liked the idea she was some sort of crusader against the evil doers in our society.

‘That's not what I meant,' said Mannix. ‘It's a detail – something in these photographs.'

‘Gimme a look,' said Detective Frank McKay, chewing on a smelly concoction of tuna and rice salad that he had brought to work in a very old Tupperware dish. ‘You two have been staring at this evidence since sun up. You need a pair of fresh eyes.'

It was true. Mannix had asked the guys on the late shift to call him the minute the packages from the FBI arrived. And they had – at 5.30am.

Mannix had arrived at 6.30 to find Susan Leigh already at her cubicle, over an hour before her official shift began. She had asked the late guys to tip her off too. When Joe arrived he found her practically salivating over the five brown paper satchels which she had placed on her desk so they didn't go astray.

Frank McKay went to his boss' desk and pulled out the photographs of the crime scene. He began by laying them in what at first appeared to be some random order on Mannix's office floor. He started with those that depicted a broad view of Bradshaw's suite and finished with the more close-up varieties – of Bradshaw's bedroom, his body, clothing and so on.

From where Mannix and Leigh were standing it looked like a disorderly mess, but when Mannix moved around McKay to look at his display from the detective's point of view, he realised what he was doing.

‘You're recreating the scene,' said Joe, ‘. . . from the hotel suite door to the bedroom.'

‘Yep, sometimes it helps,' said McKay. ‘Creates order. Clears the fog.'

Susan Leigh moved next to Mannix, looking down on her partner. All three detectives had been permitted access to the Presidential Suite, if briefly, on the night of the Vice President's death and McKay's ‘arrangement' was effectively taking them back to the crime scene, step by step.

McKay laid the last photograph, a shot showing the contents on
Bradshaw's bedside table, before standing up and surveying the collage of images alongside his two colleagues.

‘Susan,' said Mannix. ‘Hand me that evidence bag will you, the one marked with the number three.'

Leigh grabbed the bag and handed her boss the index list on its cover which was headed with the filing notation # 3/7. Mannix then took the bag and removed six items, each placed inside its own plastic evidence bag. There was the syringe, the empty vial, the rubber tourniquet, the latex glove, the single Tiffany cufflink and the half drunk bottle of Evian, in other words all the paraphernalia on the Vice President's bedside table at the time of his death.

‘Look at this picture,' said Mannix, pointing at the last image in McKay's menagerie. ‘See how neatly these items are arranged – in perfect symmetry, equidistant from one another, from one side of the table to the other?'

‘I see what you mean,' said Leigh. ‘If the man decided to get high, why the hell was he so neat about it?'

‘And if he was reaching across from the bed, stoned out of his brain' said McKay, ‘how did he manage to keep them in such perfect order, and why aren't the bed covers mussed where his body would have turned to reach the far side of the table.'

‘Exactly,' said Mannix. ‘And that's not all. Like I said before, something is missing.'

The three of them looked at the photograph again, now completely drawn into the mystery which pretty much confirmed someone else was in the room when the Vice President died.

‘
Well, I'll be
,' said McKay.

‘What is it?' asked Leigh, obviously frustrated with her inability to see what the others had discovered.

‘The seventh item,' said Mannix. ‘The bag is marked # 3/7. Evidence bag three, with seven items enclosed. But we only have six.'

‘Jesus,' said McKay.

‘Not exactly,' said Mannix, ‘but close enough. They didn't give us the Bible.'

‘Why the hell not?' asked Leigh.

‘I have no idea,' said Mannix, moving behind his desk to grab his jacket and his shield. ‘But I am going to find out.'

CIA Director Richard Ryan stretched back in his ergonomic leather chair, in his larger than average Langley office and felt, well, about as comfortable as a baby on a bed of nails.

It wasn't the chair and it wasn't the office, and it definitely wasn't his job. He loved the job. It was, after all, above and beyond any post an ex-cop from Jackson, Alabama could have dreamed of. It wasn't even his location. CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia was, in the very least, somewhat removed from the powers that be in that big White House in DC. In fact there was something uplifting about walking over that famous granite seal built into the floor of the headquarters' original building – the eagle symbolising strength, the sixteen-pointed compass star representing the convergence of intelligence data from around the world, and the shield speaking reams about their brotherhood with all law enforcement agencies who carry similar badges on ‘the job', day in, day out.

But Washington was different. It was the nucleus of good and evil – a place where on one hand honest men and women strived for a better America, and on the other where players with the façade of a honourable intent clawed their way to the top with no regard to the bloodbath they left in their wake.

The irony was, of course, that Washington was born out of an ideal – a small circle of geography built on justice and liberty and purity and truth. And the fact that there were those so open to sullying her – with politics and power and manipulation and greed – was perhaps the greatest tragedy of them all.

Ryan never understood why Tom loved it so much. But then again, Tom was cut from a different cloth and would have slipped into any town on the globe like a smooth hand into a velvet glove. But Dick had always found it harder, and even more so of late. No doubt due to the fact he was surrounded by enemies, both overt and disguised.

He glanced instinctively to his right where a US flag stood sentry to the same eagle-bearing CIA insignia carved on a plaque behind his desk. His walls were covered with black and whites of others who had occupied this office and served their country in the process. He was late for a meeting with his head of intelligence but for some reason could not banish the philosophical meanderings from his all-too-crowded head this morning. His brain had been taking him on several similar tangents of late, as he
wondered how his middle class Alabama ass had made it into this bourgeois black leather resting place and whether he was really cut out to be here in the first place.

But he knew it was Tom – or rather what had happened to his closest friend that had started him down this road of uncharacteristic contemplation; the injustice of it, and the maze of possibilities surrounding his overdose. How ironic, he thought, that he was the first one to offer his closest friend a bullet all those years ago, when Bradshaw had hit rock bottom and Ryan, who had spent months trying to jolt his Harvard buddy out of his drug-induced haze, saw no alternative than to hit him between the eyes with his future – literally.

He remembered that night like it was yesterday. He could see himself now, marching to his dorm, knapsack in one hand and shotgun in the other. He knew what he had to do, and nothing or no one was about to stop him.

Ryan reached his Wyeth Hall nine by twelve dormitory and kicked down the door, knowing knocking would have been pointless. It was late and Tom would have ‘passed out' for the night. He saw him in the corner, half in the narrow, student issue bed and half out, one leg suspended on the adjacent laminated dresser, the other hanging limply on the worn grey carpet. He moved forward quickly, kicking clothes, food wrappers, soda cans and opened books aside to grab his friend around the waist and heave him over his shoulder.

Within minutes he had made his way through the building and out the western gates, oblivious to the stares of other night owl students who watched in reproach as the dribble from Bradshaw's mouth fell freely onto Ryan's coat.

He reached Massachusetts Avenue, pulled out his keys and shoved Tom into the back of his fifteen-year-old Volkswagen. Then he squashed his tall frame into the front seat and, on the third try, started the engine.

From Cambridge he headed north along Highway 1 towards a buddy's weathered seaside cabin, just north of Manchester. Every few miles he would pull over to re-adjust his companion's head so that it angled out of the VW's back passenger side window. And then he would wait for the trail of vomit that would glow like a sickly gush of poison in the blaze of the compact car's tail lights.

‘What the hell,' he heard Tom mumble at one point, temporarily rocked from his drug-induced stupor.

‘Shut the fuck up,' Ryan replied, but he doubted his friend heard him, for he was unconscious again, the stench from his snoring now making Ryan gag.

An hour later they found themselves outside the run-down wood shingle hut, and Ryan dragged his friend from the rust-covered sedan.

He dumped Bradshaw onto the dusty two and a half seater sofa, went back to the car for his ‘ammunition', and stormed back into the stifling confines of the two-room cabin, slamming the door behind him.

‘The problem is,' he said, once his companion, now in the early stages of withdrawal, had finally woken from his fitful sleep, ‘that I know you too well. You're a stickler for detail, Tom. Anything less than perfect is never good enough – am I right?' He rose from the old wooden chair to open the warped timber shutters, relishing the ocean breeze that whipped through the windows, lashing the faded gingham curtains in its wake.

‘So, I figure, if you wanna kill yourself, it makes sense that you, Tom Bradshaw, go for the most efficient method. Stop fucking around with the pills and blow your brains out right here, right now,' he said placing the rifle in front of him. ‘Go ahead. It's loaded and I promise I'll clean up after, even tell your parents some bullshit tale about an accident with a hunting rifle.'

Ryan leant forward and slid the gun across the splintered white oak coffee table between them, his eyes never leaving those of his despairing, exhausted, humiliated companion.

‘Yes, sir, that's just the kind of friend I am. I'll hand you a way out, bud, even say the eulogy at your funeral, but I will not – I repeat, I will
not
– sit back and watch you destroy yourself the long way around. So, here's the deal. You got two options. You either give it all up – every last pill and grain of powder – or you pick up that rifle and check out permanently. It's your choice, bud – cold turkey or cold slab. Either way, I promise I'll be here afterwards to clean up all the mess.'