Murder in the Supreme Court (Capital Crimes Series Book 3) (19 page)

“Oh God… I’m sorry, Chester…” Her body was heaving.

“We’re all sorry, Eleanor. Sorry… I’ll sleep downstairs…”

Martin Teller glanced at a wall clock as he moved through the bull pen at MPD headquarters. It was a quarter to nine, fifteen minutes until his morning ritual with Dorian Mars.

A detective assigned to the Sutherland case stopped him and said, “Got a new Polish joke, Marty.”

“Not interested. Besides, Polish jokes are in bad taste these days.”

The detective looked at a colleague and shrugged.
“Sorry,”
he said. Teller continued toward his office, entered it and slammed the door behind him.

It had been a bad morning. His cats had gotten into a fight during breakfast and spilled his coffee all over the rug. A few minutes later his ex-wife called from Paris, Kentucky,
to inform him that their younger daughter was dropping out of college because she was pregnant. “Who did it?” Teller asked, now knowing what else to say. “I don’t know, Marty, she’s coming home in a few days and I’ll let you know.” Then, as he was leaving his apartment building, he read a notice posted on the wall that there would be no hot water for three days while the boiler was being serviced.

The detective who’d offered the Polish joke opened the door and asked, “You playing tonight, Marty?” He was referring to an intrasquad poker game.

“No, and instead of playing poker I suggest you and the rest of the brilliant young sleuths assigned to me spend the night hitting every bar in town, especially the singles’ joints, with Clarence Sutherland’s photo in hand.”

“
Every
bar?”

“Start in Georgetown. Ask the bartenders, the broads hanging out, guys on the make. I want a list tomorrow morning of every joint you hit, and I want it before nine o’clock.

“That’s a lot of overtime, Marty.”

“You complaining?”

“No. What’s with you? How come you’re so uptight this morning?”

“The position of the moon relative to my sun.”

“No kidding.”

“No kidding. You got any kids?”

“None that I know of.”

“They break your heart. Get moving.”

“Yeah, have a good day.”

Teller picked up a coffee cup stained from the day before, went into the bull pen and poured from a communal pot, leaving a quarter in a dish. He returned to the office, hung up his jacket and sat behind his desk. It was now 9:10. He punched in Dorian Mars’s extension on his phone. “Marty?” Mars said. “Where are you? I’m waiting.”

“Let’s skip the meeting this morning, Dorian. I’ve got nothing to report. It would be a waste of time.”

“Doesn’t matter. We should meet anyway, every day. Brainstorming can open things up. You run a case like this through a grinder enough times and out comes the perfect hamburger.”

“What?”

“Come up, Marty.”

“No. I’ve got a lot of sorting out to do. Let’s catch up later.”

Mars sighed loudly. “All right, Marty. By the way, are you okay? You sound strange.”

“I’m terrific, Dorian, tip-top, at peace with my fellow man. Life is truly a bowl of cherries, a virtual perpetual cabaret.”

“Take it easy, Marty.”

Teller called the desk and instructed the sergeant on duty to hold all calls until further notice.

“One just came in for you, detective. I was about to put it through.”

“Who is it?”

“Your Miss Pinscher, from Justice.”

“
My
? Oh, all right, I’ll take it, but that’s it for a while.”

“Good morning,” Susanna said.

“Good morning. How’ve you been?”

“All right. I thought you might have called me.”

“I’ve been busy as hell. Sorry.”

“That’s not what I called about, though. I wanted to fill you in on a conversation I had with Laurie Rawls.”

Teller found a pad of paper and uncapped a pen. “Go ahead,” he said.

“Remember when I said I thought I might be able to establish a sort of big-sister relationship with her? Well, it happened… I had dinner at her apartment and she opened up.”

“What did she say?”

She read from notes she’d made right after leaving Laurie’s apartment—Laurie back clerking for Conover, the preliminary vote in
Nidel
v.
Illinois
in Nidel’s favor, confirmation that Cecily Conover and Clarence had had an affair and that Justice Conover had confronted both of them about it. Teller listened, made his own notes until she got to the part about Clarence sitting in the Court at night and playacting, and that he and Laurie had almost made love there.

“In the Supreme Court? That is mighty high-level making out.”

“Well, his liking for the Chiefs chair could explain why Clarence was there the night he was killed. No one had to entice him into the room. He went there on his own almost as a matter of routine…”

“Go on.”

“Laurie says that Clarence once bragged to her that he had… How did she put it?… He had the key to every lock and person in the Court. Evidently Clarence knew something damaging or embarrassing about everyone. At least that’s what he told her.”

“Where’d he get the information?”

“I asked her that too. She says he picked it up while working as closely as he did with the justices.”

“What about his father? Did he come up?”

“In what context?”

“The fact that he treated the high and mighty, and that Clarence might have learned things through that connection.”

“We didn’t discuss it.”

“Okay, anything else?”

“Laurie says that Justice Poulson is sort of a puppet of President Jorgens and that the White House plays a direct role in most everything Poulson does on the Court. She also
claims that Clarence had documents to prove it that would… here’s exactly what she said… ‘had documents to prove it that would blow the lid off the Court.’”

“Is the phone you’re using secure?”

“I think so—”

“Don’t think. Be sure.”

“I’m in my office at
Justice
.”

He wanted to tell her that a telephone in the Justice Department was probably as unsecured as any phone in Washington, but didn’t. He wanted her to go on.

“There’s not much more,” she said. “She told me that Clarence knew that Justice Childs was a phony hero and that he could prove it.”

“How?”

“I don’t know and I don’t think she does either. Anyway, her advice was to look for a man—”

“Seems I’ve heard that before.”

“Childs said look for a woman. Remember?”

“Yeah… Do you think she did it?”

“Laurie? No, but my opinion doesn’t mean anything. What do you think?”

“Who knows? You can’t tell the players in this thing without a scorecard.” He glanced up at his empty flow chart on the wall.

“Well, Detective Teller, I’ve shown you mine. Now, it’s your turn.”

“I’d love to, but I’ve never found that the phone was a substitute—”

“
Teller
… cut it out… have
you
learned anything new?”

“Not a thing.”

“Sure? I’d hate to think this was a one-way street, my telling and your holding back.”

“Free for dinner this week?”

“No. I’m taking a few days off and going with one of my kids to California to visit my father. By the way, did
you know that Mozart wrote
The Magic Flute
because a theater owner in Vienna commissioned it?”

“Yeah.”

“You did?”

“Sure. He started off writing a light piece but it turned out to be a serious work—”

“Damn.”

“Call when you get back.”

From the carton that had contained the wall chart he took an assortment of colored, magnetic plastic symbols and labels, spread them on his desk, then used an erasable marking pen to write the names of each suspect. He considered categories to group the names under—
personal
and
Professional
,
male
and
female, Court
and
family
. He decided on the last, wrote the words on the largest of the magnetic labels and put them on the board. He added a third heading,
personal
, to include those not in the Court or family.

He ran into a snag grouping names beneath headings. Those from the Court, people like Poulson, Conover and Childs, might well have had personal rather than professional reasons for killing Clarence. Or both? He’d let it go, at least where the chart was concerned.

When he was finished, the chart was resplendent in red, green, yellow and blue:

He considered where to place Vera Jones. Seeing her at Club Julie and convinced that she’d had a personal relationship
with Clarence certainly made her a good suspect. He started to put her name under
Personal
, then changed it to
Family
. A close call.

He narrowed his eyes and took in the chart as a blur of color. He slapped colored magnetic arrows on the board to link the names, realized it accomplished little. Besides, he wanted more room next to each name to write comments. He rearranged the board into a vertical configuration.

He wrote Clarence’s name in large letters and put it at the top of the chart, then took it down, changed it to DECEASED and returned it to the board. Next he sat at his desk and wrote out motives to be put next to each suspect.

Poulson—father’s patient, White House sellout.

Childs—phony hero????
(He found orange magnetic
question marks and strung four of them next to his comment.)

Conover—jealousy, wife and deceased.

Dr. C. Sutherland—violation of his files????
(Again, a string of question marks.)

Mrs. Sutherland??
—He didn’t know, and had used up the supply of question marks. He took two from the other lines and placed them after her name.

Sister—nothing.

Vera Jones—woman scorned, possible affair.

Friends
—He’d taken Laurie Rawls’s name from the Court list and put it here. Next to her name he put
Jealousy
.

He created another heading, MISC. No suspects yet here; he left it blank, a category-in-waiting.

He decided he didn’t want the others to see the chart so he called around the department until he found a large roll of brown paper that he taped over the chart. Finally he went downstairs to a public phone booth and called Paris, Kentucky. His ex-wife answered.

“Anything new?” he asked.

“She called. She’ll be home tomorrow.”

“What’d she say?”

“She was crying.”

“Look, be sure she tells whoever this guy is that her father’s a cop.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why? Maybe he won’t run so fast if he knows I’m a cop.”

“Or maybe he’ll run faster… except I don’t think he’s trying to run anywhere, Marty. She says they’re in love.”

“Wonderful. Call me the minute she gets home.”

“I will. Please don’t get all riled up about this. I’m sure it will all work out.”

“Sure it will… just like everything else.”

Susanna, feeling better than she had in weeks, reveled in her first day at her father’s modest, yellow stucco home in St. Helena. She sat on the patio, a tart, icy banana daiquiri from the blender on a wrought-iron table next to her, her feet in sandals, sunglasses shielding her eyes from a blinding afternoon sun as she watched her father and her son toss a baseball about in the backyard.

Later, after a barbequed chicken and corn-on-the-cob feast, she sat with her father on the patio, illuminated by a single flattering gas lamp. They sipped coffee and caught up on their lives.

“I wish you could stay longer,” he said. “It’s good having you here.”

“Me, too…” And she told him about the Sutherland investigation and the strain she was under.

“Do you think you’ll ever find out who did it?”

“We’d better… I thought I’d spend part of tomorrow looking up Dan Brazier.” She’d told him about Brazier’s link with Morgan Childs and her hunch that the former journalist just might be able to shed a little light on the case.

“Is a Supreme Court judge really a suspect?”

“Could be.” She cut it short, not saying that not one but at least three, Childs, Conover and Poulson, were legitimate suspects.

“By the way, who’s
we
?”

“People working on the case, including a detective from the Metropolitan Police Department named Martin Teller.” She told him a little about Teller. When she was through, he smiled. “What’s funny?”

“It sounds like you’re falling a little for a cop.”

She laughed. “Who knows? He’s not your everyday cop… loves opera, calls his female cat Beast and male cat Beauty.”

Her father shrugged, changed the subject, as he most always did when she began to talk too much about men in her life. “This Dan Brazier,” he said. “Do you have an appointment with him?”

“No. I was going to call but decided I’d just drop in. I have his address.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Don’t like what?”

“Any of it, you involved in investigating a murder. Why don’t you get out of it, get out of Washington for that matter, come back here.”

“I couldn’t be that far from the kids, dad.”

“Bring ’em with you. They belong with their mother anyway.”