Murder Inside the Beltway (2 page)

“Oh, no, no, sir, you are wrong. I do not care what the tenants do as long as they don’t bother nobody else. I say live and let live.” He forced a smile in the hope it would indicate sincerity.

“How much every month? A couple of bills? Five?”

“I told you that—”

Hatcher closed the gap between them, his face now inches from the super’s. “You’re lying to me, scumbag. That’s a crime, pal. I’m going to look into every corner of your life, and when I come up with what I know I’ll find, you’re going to be dead meat. Tax fraud. Obstructing justice. Lying to a cop. In the meantime, we’ll go to MPD and have a nice, long chat.”

“Sir, I—”

“You stay in this room until I’m through in there. You hear me?”

The super nodded.

Hatcher returned to the bedroom, where the ME was finishing up his initial examination. “Blunt force trauma,” he told Hatcher, “and apparent strangulation. Can’t tell which one killed her until we autopsy.”

“No weapon?” Hatcher asked.

“That’s your department, Hatch. From what I can see of her wounds, whoever did it used his hands. I’d say he was pretty pissed off.”

One of two uniformed officers who’d been first to arrive at the scene entered the room. Since the arrival of the detectives, he’d been stationed in the hallway to keep the curious at bay. His partner had taken up a position downstairs at the building entrance. Hatcher ordered them to remain at the scene and to make sure no one entered the apartment. “There’ll be reinforcements soon to canvas the neighborhood and the rest of the tenants.”

He rejoined the super and told him to take him to where Detective Hall was questioning the husband and wife.

The door to the apartment directly beneath Rosalie Curzon’s was open when they arrived. Hatcher told the super to wait in the hall and joined Hall in the couple’s living room.

“You about finished?” Hatcher asked.

“I think so, Hatch.”

Hatcher returned to the open door and ran his fingers over its peephole. “You must see a lot of what goes on here, huh?” he said to the wife.

“I mind my own business,” she said, looking nervously at her husband, a thin, tense man wearing glasses with thick, clouded lenses.

“I tell her all the time to mind her own business,” the husband said, “but she won’t listen. She never listens.”

Hatcher ignored him and asked the wife if she’d seen anyone coming or going that evening.

“I don’t pay attention to who comes and goes,” she said.

“That’s all she does,” countered the husband. “She’s always standing at that damn peephole to see who’s coming in and going out.”

“And who’d you see tonight?” Hatcher repeated.

“No one,” she said, vigorously shaking her head.

“Let’s go,” Hatcher said. Mary Hall snapped her notebook shut, thanked the couple for their time, and left the apartment with Hatcher. On his way out of the building he locked eyes with the super, who looked as though he might cry at any minute. “I’m going to give you overnight to decide to be straight with me, José. I’ll be back tomorrow. You got twenty-four hours to take some memory pills. Got it?”

“
Sí
, yes,
gracias
. Thank you.”

Hatcher pressed his index finger against the super’s fleshy lips. “Twenty-four hours, my friend. Don’t disappoint me.”

The detectives walked to where Hatcher’s car was parked crookedly at the curb. Hall and Jackson had arrived together in Jackson’s car, which he’d taken back to headquarters.

“Damn, I’m hungry,” Hatcher complained as he and Hall headed for MPD on Indiana Avenue.

“Stop and get something,” she suggested. “We going back to headquarters?”

“Yeah. You ever watch porn movies, Mary?”

“I’ve seen a few.”

“Feel like watching some tonight?”

“Oh, Jesus, Hatch, what the hell are you doing, entering your dirty old man phase?”

He laughed. “Jackson’s back in the office with a batch of amateur porn for us to watch.”

“Great. You and Matt get your jollies. I’m off-duty.”

“No you’re not, Mary. We’ve got a long night ahead of us. I think I will grab something to bring back. Chinese?”

“Whatever turns you on, Hatch.”

M
att Jackson anticipated what Hatcher would want when he arrived at MPD headquarters. He secured a seldom-used interrogation room that contained a TV set and video/DVD player. Once inside with the doors closed, he drew drapes across the one-way mirror, and turned off the harsh overhead fluorescents, leaving on only a small lamp. The evidence bag containing the tapes and camera from Rosalie Curzon’s apartment sat between his feet underneath the scarred table. He hoped no one would come in and ask what he was doing there. Hatcher had made it clear that the tapes were to remain within his possession, at least until Hatcher had a chance to view them.

Could it possibly be that the prostitute’s killer
was
caught on tape? Obviously, the tapes cataloged and stored in the slipcase couldn’t contain such material. But there was that half-used tape in the camera. Had the camera been running during the attack? If so, Rosalie Curzon’s case might possibly avoid joining the ranks of MPD’s burgeoning file of unsolved murders.

His mind wandered as he sat alone in the room. He was tempted, of course, to pop a tape into the player, but knew that Hatcher would be angry if he did. Barely a year ago, when he’d been promoted to the rank of detective after four years as a uniformed patrolman and assigned to Walter Hatcher’s squad after a brief stint with another team, it seemed a golden opportunity to learn from one of the force’s most decorated cops. He didn’t harbor any illusions that working with Hatcher would be easy. The man defined hardnosed, impatient, and unforgiving. There were rumors that he had taken the law into his own hands on more than one occasion, but as far as Jackson knew, the senior detective had never been brought up on departmental charges. Or, if he had, nothing had ever come of it.

Working side by side with Hatcher had been the learning experience Jackson had expected. He knew he had a lot to absorb and excused Hatcher’s tendency to berate him for every mistake. Jackson wasn’t thin-skinned and didn’t take Hatcher’s sarcastic comments and bombastic eruptions personally. What
did
bother him also had to do with his skin—its color.

He was the product of a mixed marriage, his father a black man, his mother white. Fair-skinned, he sometimes passed for white, although he never tried to conceal his African-American roots. Hatcher used slang for every minority—blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, Jews, and women, an equal-opportunity bigot. That provided some solace for Jackson. At the same time, he sensed a deeper, darker disdain that Hatcher had for him because of his mixed parentage, and because he was a college graduate, his major sociology. As far as Hatcher was concerned, college was a waste of time and money for anyone seeking a career in law enforcement, and he never hesitated to say so. Too, Hatcher often said that Jackson didn’t
look
like a cop, whatever that meant. True, Jackson was reed thin and not tall, and leaned toward tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, button-down shirts, knit ties and desert boots, not a cop out of central casting. But this wasn’t Hollywood. This was Washington, D.C., with a police force of almost four thousand, two-thirds of them African American, twenty-five percent female. What did a typical cop look like? Like Walter Hatcher, big and rawboned, thick-necked, red-faced, and with a perpetual nasty scowl?

Jackson often considered confronting his boss about his feelings, but hadn’t, deciding instead to ride out his apprenticeship and hope for a transfer when it was over. He wasn’t especially proud of his willingness to allow Hatcher to verbally abuse him, but rationalized that discretion was the better part of valor, at least in the short term. He was determined to get through this initial phase of his training without incident. He wanted to be a cop, the best cop he could be, and allowing Hatcher to derail that dream was anathema to him.

He was deep into these thoughts when Hatcher and Mary Hall arrived. Mary carried a large take-out bag from a nearby Chinese restaurant that stayed open late. “I got you General Tso’s chicken, and brown rice,” she told Matt.

“Great.” He wasn’t hungry, but it was nice of her to think of him.

“Where’re the tapes?” Hatcher asked.

“Right here,” Jackson said, pulling the bag from beneath the table.

“Let’s get started,” Hatcher said. “Gimme the one that was in the camera.”

Hatcher turned on the TV monitor, slid the tape into the video recorder, and pushed
REWIND
. Mary opened food containers and distributed them.

Once the tape had rewound, Hatcher pushed
PLAY
.

“What are these?” Mary asked. She’d posed that same question to Hatcher during the drive to the Met, as headquarters was called, but never received an answer.

“We found them in the apartment,” Jackson said. “The victim had a video camera up on one of the bookshelves. Hatch figures that—”

“Shut up,” Hatcher said as the screen came alive, and sound hissed through the speaker.

They watched in silence as a very much alive Rosalie Curzon was seen walking into the frame, followed by a man. She wore the red kimono she’d worn in her still photo. The man was dressed in a suit.

“Long time, no see,” Curzon said.

“I haven’t been back to D.C. in a while,” he said.

Jackson was surprised at how good the picture and sound were.

“Got something for Rosie?” she asked.

“Sure.” He reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out an undetermined number of bills that he’d obviously counted out beforehand. He handed them to her, and she disappeared.

“Let’s get rid of these clothes,” she said when she came back, reaching for his tie.

They moved out of camera range. When they reappeared, both were naked.

“Look at that,” Hatcher said. “She’s turning the john so that he’s facing the camera. The bitch knows what she’s doing.”

She led him to the bed, where their gyrations were captured on the tape. When they were finished, she complimented him on his lovemaking. She slipped back into her kimono, and he dressed. She kissed his cheek. “Don’t be such a stranger,” she cooed. The screen went black.

“Do we have to watch this stuff?” Mary Hall asked.

“Turn you on?” Hatcher said.

“Turns me off.”

Hatcher used chopsticks to shovel beef and broccoli into his mouth. Images and sound appeared again on the screen. The same scenario was played out, but with a different man. When that segment had run its course, the screen went blank again, and stayed that way.

Hatcher muttered an obscenity.

“Looks like she didn’t have it rolling when she was killed,” Jackson offered.

“Another brilliant observation from Detective Jackson,” Hatcher said. “Let me have another tape.”

“Do we have to watch more?” Mary asked.

“Yeah, we do,” said Hatcher.

Neither Jackson nor Hall ate while sitting through scene after scene of Rosalie Curzon entertaining her paying male customers. For Jackson, the initial scenes had been sexually arousing, but numbness soon set in, the sameness of the act becoming anything but erotic, sometimes even silly. But after the third tape started to play, everyone’s attention perked up. The john’s face was all too familiar, a six-term pol with a penchant for publicity. There was no mistaking him—Congressman Slade Morrison of Arizona.

“What’a you know,” Hatcher muttered, writing down the name.

On the fourth tape, Hatcher recognized another john, although neither Jackson nor Hall did. “The guy’s name is Joe Yankavich,” Hatcher said. “Runs a bar in Adams Morgan, Joe’s, bad food and watered drinks.”

Hatcher rewound and again played the portion where Rosalie Curzon had turned the naked man toward the camera.

“I recognize him now,” Jackson said. “I’ve been there a few times. It’s a couple of blocks from my apartment.”

Hatcher noted Yankavich’s name on the pad.

In the middle of the final tape—it was now almost six in the morning—Mary, who’d had to fight falling asleep and had nodded off on a few occasions, let out an involuntary gasp.

Hatcher stopped the tape. “You recognize him, Mary?” he asked.

“Ah, no. Forget it.”

“Hey, Mary, this is a murder investigation,” Hatcher said. “If you know the guy, speak up.”

“He’s a cop.”

“Yeah?” Hatcher said.

“An instructor at the academy. Defensive tactics, baton training,” she said glumly.

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Get it for me.”

“Okay,” she said.

After the final scene had played, Hatcher stretched, yawned, and turned on the overheads. He looked at Jackson, who rubbed his eyes.

“So, we’ve got us three live ones to talk to,” Hatcher said.

“What are you going to do with the tapes?” Jackson asked.

“Take ’em upstairs and let ’em know what we’ve got. I can see political fallout written all over this.”

Hatcher placed the tapes in the evidence bag and opened the door. He looked back at Jackson and Hall, who remained in their chairs. “Coming?” he asked. “Go grab a couple of hours. I want to get back on this at noon.”

Jackson and Hall wearily pushed themselves up from their chairs and followed Hatcher through the door. “Funny,” Jackson muttered.

“What’s funny?” Mary asked.

“Every time the victim is seen on the tapes, she’s wearing that red bathrobe.”

“It’s a kimono,” Mary corrected.

“Okay, a kimono. But she’s wearing it every time.”

“So what?” Hatcher said.

“So, she wasn’t wearing it tonight when she was murdered.”

“Sooo?” Hatcher said.

“She was wearing a sweat suit,” Jackson said, “like runners wear. Maybe whoever killed her wasn’t there for sex, hadn’t made an appointment or anything.”

Mary looked at Hatcher. “Good point,” she said.

Hatcher grimaced and said, “See you back here at noon. We got some horny johns to talk to.”