Murder at Union Station (7 page)

Mullin hitched up pants that seemed always to be slipping below his belly and pushed through the crowd.

“Who was he?” a woman who’d been there from the beginning asked. “A political big shot? Nobody else worth shooting in Union Station.”

“Go get a cup of coffee,” Mullin told her. “It’s over.”

“Are you a detective?” a teenager asked as Mullin gestured for him to get out of the way.

Mullin muttered something profane at the boy and continued walking through the train concourse until he reached Exclusive Shoe Shine, where Joe Jenks had just finished a customer’s shoes. Mullin was no stranger to the bootblack station and its employees, especially Jenks. Although never accused of being a fashion plate—sloppy was a more precise description—Mullin liked clean shoes and often stopped in Union Station to have Jenks practice his own special brand of spit-shine magic, minus the spit. At the same time, Jenks was one of dozens of people Mullin had cultivated in the area to lend their eyes and ears to any crime. Joe was at his post in Union Station every day, and on more than one occasion had called in a tip about someone he considered an unsavory character, or a potentially troublesome situation.

“Hey, Mullin, my man,” Jenks said. “Caught yourself a big one, huh?”

Mullin climbed up into Jenks’s chair.

“What happened, man?” Jenks asked as he pulled cloths and polish from a drawer beneath the chair. “Somebody says an old guy with a cane got it. I think I seen him.”

“Is that so, Joe?”

“Yeah. He limps on by and I ask him if he wants a shine. He looks at me like I just called his mother a dirty name, says somethin’ in Italian or Greek or somethin’, and goes on his way.”

“Italian or Greek?”

“He talked foreign, that’s all I’m saying. You nab the perp?”

Mullin gave forth what could be considered a laugh. He always found it amusing when people tried to speak cop talk.

“No, we didn’t nab the perp, Joe. Maybe you saw him.”

A shrug from Jenks as he brushed off Mullin’s shoes in preparation for shining. “Maybe I did. You know what he looks like?”

“We had a couple of descriptions. A black guy, skinny, expensive suit, maybe carrying a raincoat. Light, mulatto style they say.”

Jenks leaned back and his eyes opened wide. “Oh, I know the dude you’re talking about, man,” he said. “Four dollars.”

“You do?”

“Shined him up. Very cool, like aloof, you know. No field hand or house slave. Uppity is what I thought.”

“You gave him a shine?”

“Yup. I didn’t much care how he acted ’cause he tipped big.”

Mullin pulled a narrow steno pad and a pen from the pocket of his suit jacket. “I’m listening, Joe. Tell me all about this cool one who tips big.”

Shoes polished to a mirror finish, and notes made of Joe Jenks’s description of his customer—brand of shoes, kind of socks, knife-edge creases, label in the raincoat,
New York Times
—Mullin continued his walk through the station, stopping to ask those in a position to observe whether they’d seen the man now described as Louis Russo’s killer.

“I noticed him,” a shopkeeper in the travel accessory store near gate A-8 told him. She was in her deep thirties. “He was standing near the gate reading a newspaper.”

“How come you noticed him?” Mullin asked. “Was he doing something that caught your eye?”

“He was—” She smiled sheepishly. “I thought he was really good-looking,” she said.

“Anything else?” Mullin asked.

There wasn’t. But the details checked.

Mullin concluded his walk-through by entering the East Hall, where the rolling kiosks were located. Two detectives were already there asking questions of the kiosk owners.

“This lady says she saw the guy we’re looking for,” Mullin was told by one of the cops. A conversation with her revealed that the tall, thin man had passed her kiosk and gone into the bar behind B. Smith’s restaurant. Mullin and one of the detectives went in and talked to the maître d’ at the front door of the restaurant. It featured southern cooking, which attracted a sizable African-American clientele.

“Yeah, I remember him,” the maître d’ said in response to Mullin’s question. “You say he shot somebody inside the station? Boy, he sure didn’t look like someone who just shot somebody.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was—well, he was very casual, didn’t seem in any rush. I asked if he wanted a table and he said he didn’t, but he wasn’t out of breath or anything. I mean, he didn’t run out of here. He just told me he didn’t want a table—I think he said ‘not today’—and left through those doors.” He indicated the restaurant’s main entrance leading to Massachusetts Avenue at the front of the station.

After noting what the maître d’ said and informing him he’d be asked later for a formal statement, Mullin told the two detectives to work the outside to see if anyone remembered seeing the alleged killer, and returned to the crime scene. The medical examiner was finishing up his preliminary examination.

“We ID him?” Mullin asked.

He was handed Russo’s wallet, as well as an Israeli passport. The wallet contained an Israeli driver’s license, a single Visa card, a photo of a woman posing on what appeared to be a beach, and slightly more than a hundred U.S. dollars in cash. Other travel documents included a round-trip airline ticket between Tel Aviv and Newark, with a plane change in Barcelona, Spain, and a one-way Amtrak ticket between New York’s Penn Station and Washington’s Union Station.

“Louis Russo?” Mullin said aloud. “That’s Italian. What’s he doing with an Israeli passport?”

Those around him didn’t have an answer.

Mullin handed the wallet and travel documents to an evidence technician and left the station, climbed in his car, and drove to First District headquarters on North Capitol Street N.W., where he sat with fellow detectives who’d been at the murder scene. They began to compare notes, speculate, joke, and put together a preliminary report.

“What do you figure the old guy was doing in D.C.?” someone asked. “Or going to do?”

“Visit family maybe,” someone else answered.

“Next of kin?”

“Back in Israel maybe,” Accurso said.

“You checked Russos in the D.C. directory?” Mullin said.

Accurso nodded. “You figure the shooter knew Russo?” he asked. “It comes off like a mob hit.”

Mullin laughed as he said, “Russo. Italiano. Maybe he’s some geriatric godfather nobody ever heard of. Or from some family the New York cops know well. Get New York on the phone.”

“Or the computer. It doesn’t make sense. Doesn’t make sense,” the youngest of the detectives said.

“What doesn’t?”

“Why some black guy would come up behind an old Italian guy named Russo, who’s here from Israel, and do him in public. The witnesses say the shooter was cool, unflustered, in no rush. A pro. So why pick Union Station? Who is Louis Russo, and why would a certified hit man want to whack him? For what? It doesn’t make sense.”

“You ever see a murder that made sense?” Mullin offered.

“Yeah, sometimes. You know, some people, well, deserve to get killed,” the young detective said. “Sometimes it’s justifiable. Justifiable homicide. That’s how they get off. Like a guy whose wife is screwing around and gets caught, and he pops her or the boyfriend. In Texas, that’s justifiable murder.”

“In Texas, that’s routine.”

Mullin glanced at Accurso, who was putting the finishing touches on their initial report. “See what you can learn by hanging around here, Vinnie?” he said, his voice mirroring his amusement. “Your wife plays around, it’s okay to pop her.”

“I didn’t necessarily mean that,” the young detective said defensively.

“You up for a drink?” Mullin asked Accurso.

“Thanks, no, Bret. Got to get home.”

“Anybody?” Mullin asked others in the room.

Heads were shaken, excuses made.

“Well, I’m packing it in. After a pop or two. See you tomorrow.”

Mullin’s apartment was in a four-story town house on California Street, between Dupont Circle and Adams-Morgan. It was too early to suffer the loneliness of the one-bedroom, perpetually untidy place he’d called home for the six years since Rosie, his wife of nineteen years, and he had called it quits, sold the house in Silver Spring, and gone their separate ways. She’d settled in a high-rise up near the National Cathedral and continued to work as a receptionist for a K Street law firm. They seldom talked unless something troublesome arose about their two kids, a son and daughter, who’d flown the coop and were doing pretty well, the girl in Denver where she worked as a personal trainer, the son a cop in a small West Virginia town. He hadn’t heard from his daughter in over a year; she blamed his drinking for the breakup of the marriage and had viciously condemned him the last time they spoke. His son kept in touch with an occasional phone call and Christmas and birthday card, but Mullin didn’t have any illusions about the depth of that relationship, either.

He was thinking of his dismal family situation when he entered the private entrance to the Jockey Club, in the Westin Fairfax hotel on Massachusetts Avenue. When it came to choosing bars, Mullin was an equal opportunity drinker. He’d been to most of them in D.C. over the years, although he had his favorites, depending upon his mood at the moment. Most nights, he opted for inexpensive neighborhood places near his apartment. But there were times when he felt expansive—or the reverse, particularly depressed, which triggered expansiveness—times when he preferred settings more genteel than the run-of-the-mill. This was one of those nights.

He was treated nicely at this bastion of Washington society—Jackie Kennedy and Nancy Reagan had been regulars; Mrs. Reagan’s chicken salad was still on the menu—although he sensed that his arrival wasn’t always as welcome as the serving staff made it seem. The arrival of a cop at a fancy spot like the Jockey Club caused a certain unease to set in, even though he wasn’t there to hassle or arrest anyone. There were establishments that liked having cops around. They provided color with their stories of life on the streets, and if a customer threatened to act up, there was muscle to handle the situation.

But in posh places, particularly where political movers and shakers tended to gather, sanctity was threatened, especially for those whose reasons for being there weren’t exactly aboveboard. Like the old silver-haired guy in a corner booth with his arm around a thirty-odd blonde who laughed too loud and long at anything he said. Or the two men in another booth who spoke in whispers. Mullin chalked them up as a lobbyist and pol cutting a deal that would probably cost the average citizen above-average money, hopefully not worse.

He ordered a bourbon on the rocks on his way to a wine-red leather chair in the bar area, where the AC countered the fireplace glowing on this hot summer evening—form over function. When he drank during the day, it was vodka, always vodka, its relatively odorless quality a necessity. But at night, with no one to smell his breath except his cat, Magnum, it was bourbon, Wild Turkey or single barrel.

He knew the bartender, who came to the table.

“Have a good day, Bret?”

“Good day, bad day, just another day,” he said, downing the drink too quickly and holding up the glass for a refill. “How about crab cakes and some slaw?”

“You got it, Bret.”

Other customers came and went as Mullin continued to consume bourbons, nursing them more slowly as time passed, and enjoying the crab cakes for which the Jockey Club was noted. He felt the effects of the drinks and welcomed the feeling. Each drink seemed to shut a door on an unpleasant memory, and he visualized that happening in his brain. Clank! A door shut on the divorce. Clank! His rancorous relationship with his daughter walled off. Clank! The strained relationship with his superiors at MPD locked away.

Sufficiently free of painful thoughts, he paid the tab, left the bar, and got behind the wheel of his six-year-old Taurus. He knew he shouldn’t be driving, but he’d never hesitated to drive after drinking. He could handle it, he reminded himself as he pulled from the curb and headed home, where after he fed Magnum, blessed sleep would hopefully come quickly.

But it didn’t. In pajamas and slippers, and with a contented Magnum on his lap and a nightcap in hand, Mullin turned on the TV. He considered himself conservative, although his political philosophy was probably better characterized as anti-politician, no matter what the party affiliation. He turned to WTTG, Channel 5, the Fox News channel in Washington, whose right-wing slant usually suited him. He watched the evening newscast through watery eyes, his fingers kneading the cat’s fur, and fought to stay awake. Finally, acknowledging it was a hopeless battle, he gently pushed the cat to the floor and reached for the remote to turn off the set.

The TV talker’s words stopped him.

“A murder took place today at Union Station, the cold-blooded killing of an elderly visitor to Washington who was shot twice. For more on the story, we go to Joyce Rosenberg, who’s standing by at Union Station. Joyce?”

“Yes, Bernie. A murder did take place today inside the station. According to eyewitnesses, the assailant was a well-dressed light-skinned black man who left the scene through B. Smith’s restaurant and disappeared into the crowd outside. The police originally intended to withhold the name of the elderly victim until next of kin had been notified. But while getting ready to report earlier today from in front of the station shortly after the murder had taken place, I had a brief conversation with a bystander, a young man who happened to be there. He asked me if I knew the identity of the victim. When I said I didn’t, he provided a name and quickly walked away. I reported the name to the police, and they’ve confirmed he was right. The deceased’s name is Louis Russo, who’d evidently traveled here from Israel.”