Shot Through Velvet (32 page)

“You can’t trust a thieving weasel who’d send us all down the river to Crystal City,” Wiedemeyer was grumbling away. “You can bet that’s one rat bastard who’s feathered his own golden parachute. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass for the rest of us.”

Wiedemeyer had worked himself into a lather of mangled metaphors on her behalf. The pudgy little elf was pretty adorable, his loyalty touching, his courage encouraging. And maybe Wiedemeyer’s jinx factor would work, if not in her favor, at least to the detriment of the evil Pojack.

The elevator doors opened onto the marble floor of the executive suite. Lacey straightened her shoulders and held her head high. Wiedemeyer pulled up his waistband and licked doughnut crumbs from his fingers. They marched down the hall to Pojack’s office, where the door was slightly ajar. His accommodations were well-appointed, but not nearly as sumptuous as Claudia’s.

Lacey adjusted the recorder’s microphone, clipped beneath her lapel so it couldn’t be seen. If Pojack had any sense, he would know that everything was always on the record. She turned on the recorder’s voice actuation. The next voice it heard would start the tape rolling.

Pojack had his back to the door and did not turn around when she knocked, which made her mad.

“Rude bastard,” Wiedemeyer said under his breath. Lacey heard the soft click of her recorder switching on.

She knocked again, harder. “It’s Lacey Smithsonian. Here at your request,” Lacey said. “What’s so important that I had to come in on a Saturday?” She was thinking she should have simply refused to come.

Pojack didn’t answer. They entered the room slowly. Pojack was too quiet. A familiar sense of dread descended on Lacey and she held her breath. Wiedemeyer followed so close he bumped into her when she stopped. Lacey spoke first.

“Oh, damn.”

Pojack was slumped in the chair, his head thrown backward, his face turned to the ceiling, his eyes glassy and unseeing. His skin had taken on an ashy pallor. He was dead.

Lacey hoped for one desperate second that Pojack had died of natural causes. A clogged artery could have closed up and his cold heart failed, but the hole in his forehead said otherwise. Pojack’s eyes were open and he looked terrified.

“Oh my God,” Wiedemeyer said. “That is one cold, dead bastard.”

This is what I get for coming to work on a Saturday,
Lacey thought.

She inched closer to the corpse, careful not to touch anything. Wiedemeyer leaned over Pojack’s face to get a good look at the bullet hole. His face drained of its normally rosy color.

“Holy smokes! This son of a bitch has been whacked.”

“Don’t touch him.” Lacey was feeling queasy. She’d seen too much death lately.

“Nothing to fear, Smithsonian. I was just going to feel for some vitals.” He felt Pojack’s wrist. “No pulse. It’s as flat as Kansas.”

“That usually happens when you die.”

“Oh, no. You think the jinx worked?” Wiedemeyer looked stricken.

“Don’t be silly, Harlan. There’s no such thing as a jinx.”

“Yeah, but Smithsonian, I put the whammy on the bastard. Not the death whammy—more like the sperm-freezing whammy. I guess his swimmers are really frozen now.”

Lacey circled the body and saw something clutched in Pojack’s left hand, a trailing coil of dark blue. “Damn it.”

“What is it, Lacey?”

“Blue velvet ribbon.” Her words came out a bit strangled. Lacey hadn’t divulged anything about the blue velvet ribbons in her stories. Not yet. She tried to remember everyone who knew about the ribbons. Vic. Claudia. Turtledove. The cops in Black Martin. Agent Caine. Congressman Flanders. And the killer. And there could be more.

Was the Black Martin killer here in the District? Was Claudia Darnell the next victim in his crosshairs? And possibly Congressman Tazewell Flanders? But why Pojack? Was he in the wrong place at the wrong time? Pojack had nothing to do with the velvet factory, but he had everything to do with threatening Lacey’s job.

And yesterday too many people had heard his name, especially after Stella’s take on his presumed penile size. News in a small town could go viral instantly, without the help of the Internet. Had someone decided to rid the world of another job-killing boss? Was Pojack’s death her fault? Her stomach roiled.

First Harlan and his jinx, and now you? Stop it.

“I have to call Vic. Claudia too. She’ll want to know.”

But Claudia’s words came back to her. She said she would “take care” of Pojack. It wouldn’t be hard to find another blue velvet ribbon. And a gun. Was the Avenger a convenient excuse to cover up an unrelated murder? Using Lacey to discover the body? Too convenient. Too confusing.

This is crazy, Lacey
. This wasn’t the time for hypotheticals. This was the time to step away and let the police do their job.

“You’re right.” Wiedemeyer stood still for a moment, as if his legs were stuck to the gold-and-green oriental carpet on Pojack’s floor. “Well, I suppose we should call the cops first.”

“Right. I’ll call the police. As soon as I call Vic,” Lacey said. “You call Tony. And get Hansen up here. He works Saturdays, right?”

“Good thinking, Smithsonian. We want our own crime scene photos for
The Eye.
Hey, you know what else this means?”

Lacey arched her eyebrow as delicately as she could. “No, what?”

“Trujillo’s got to have a cocktail party now.”

“Oh, Harlan, hush! Don’t let anyone hear you say such a terrible thing.”

Her warning didn’t faze the death and dismemberment reporter. “He said if the bastard died, that’s all. Nobody specified a cause of death. Ipso facto: cocktail party.”

Lacey took out her phone and gestured that he should do the same. He reached for Pojack’s desk phone. “No, no, use your cell phone.”

“Right.” The lightbulb in his head switched on. “Fingerprints.”

Wiedemeyer made his calls to
The Eye
’s photographer and police reporter. Lacey called Vic, who said he was on his way. She took a deep breath and called the D.C. Metropolitan Police. She sent up a fervent silent prayer.
Please, send anyone except Broadway Lamont.

Hansen arrived draped with cameras, film as well as digital. “Whoa, Lacey, what the hell! This is a little close to home.”

“Way too close, Hansen.”

He clicked on a new lens and started shooting photos. “The cops really hate it when I get there first.” Lacey moved out of his field of view.

Wiedemeyer contemplated the corpse. “Pojack might go to Hell, Hansen, but at least the bastard doesn’t have to go to the dark tunnels of Crystal City. He’ll be underground, anyway.”

“That’s always the way with these bastards, Harlan.” Hansen was usually good-natured with Wiedemeyer. Not everyone was. The photographer straightened up and put an arm on Lacey’s shoulder. “You doing okay?”

“As long as you don’t take my picture,” Lacey said.

“That’s asking a lot,” he said. He pointed to himself. “Photographer here.”

Police reporter Tony Trujillo trailed far behind Hansen, but he still made it with time to spare before the D.C. cops got there. He was Saturday casual, in jeans, a leather jacket, and a pair of black cowboy boots with silver tips.

“Tony, I didn’t know you were in the building.”

“I wasn’t, but I was close. Luckily, Wiedemeyer thought to talk to me.” He sniffed. “So why didn’t you call me, Brenda Starr? I thought we were a team, Lacey.”

“I told Harlan to call you, and you can have this story. I’ll just go home and have a quiet little nervous breakdown, okay?”

“Brenda Starr would never have a nervous breakdown, and anyway it’s not covered under our insurance.”

“That figures,” Lacey said.

It was pandemonium when the cops arrived. It took all their authority to prevent everyone else on the weekend shift of the paper from barging in and spoiling the crime scene. The sports writers were particularly difficult to fend off. Like a bunch of baboons, they treated the episode as if it were a sporting event. Detective Broadway Lamont arrived after the uniformed cops responded to the scene and he was not happy.

“I got a special call to come here, on my day off,” Lamont said. “Somebody shot dead at
The Eye Street Observer
, and let me tell you, Smithsonian, damned if I knew whether to hope it was you getting shot or doing the shooting.”

“I’m honored,” Lacey said.

“I said to myself,
It can’t have anything to do with one fashion reporter. That would defy the damned law of averages
.” Lamont got in Lacey’s face and she backed away. “And then the dispatcher told me it was called in by one Lacey Smithsonian. And since I got personal knowledge of one troublemaking fashion reporter named Smithsonian, I got to be the one to respond. Do you know it’s Saturday?!”

She wasn’t prepared for Broadway Lamont and his tough-cop routine, and she felt her eyes begin to sting. Things were going downhill very fast.

“You are not crying, Smithsonian.” Broadway stepped back. He looked very much afraid that she might fall apart. “Reporters do not cry. Not even fashion reporters.”

“I just have something in my eye.” She blinked and rubbed her eyes. “I’d spit nails before I’d cry for you, Lamont.”

“That’s better.” He looked much relieved. Broadway Lamont was a big, gruff bull of a man, but even though he looked irritated that his basketball game had been interrupted, she knew he wouldn’t have missed this call. “Don’t be crying on me.”

“Gee, Broadway, sympathy? From you?”

“I take a personal interest in this newspaper, ’specially when someone’s killed here. Kind of puts together two of your specialties, don’t it, Smithsonian—the news business and murder? Just why in hell were you here? Ain’t you covered enough blood this week?” Lamont snapped on his latex gloves and bent down to get a closer look at the bullet hole. “What’s his name?”

“Walt Pojack, chief of operations.”

“He married?”

“Divorced, three times,” offered Wiedemeyer. “Three lucky ladies.”

“Why were you here, Smithsonian? I’ll get to your comrade in a minute. Well?”

The detective stared at Lacey and she fought to remain calm. She had observed Lamont in action. She understood that the intimidating cop act was his stock-in-trade. Bad guys might not have wept at his feet, but they quivered. She took a deep breath.

“He called me this morning and insisted that I come in.”

Lamont folded his arms. “Why?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Smithsonian was called by the Terminator here,” Wiedemeyer added. “Perhaps I should say the terminated? We suspected Pojack was going to lower the boom on our fashion reporter, put the kibosh on her job, send her to the long, cold unemployment line. It was RIF time. And I was probably next in line.”

Lacey didn’t need Harlan Wiedemeyer to go all purple prose for the homicide detective. But Wiedemeyer lacked certain filters that most reporters had.

“That true, Smithsonian?” Lamont said.

“You just like saying my name, don’t you?”

He favored her with the big Broadway grin. It was rather like that of a devouring lion. “Yep. It’s museum quality. Now?”

“The paper’s going through some changes. Earlier this week, Pojack told me I should polish my résumé.”

“I’d say you’ve got yourself a motive.”

“You think I’d kill that imbecile for the fashion beat?” Lacey leaned against the wall, not caring that it was a crime scene. “I have been trying to get off this damn fashion beat from the day it landed on me.”

“That’s true,” Wiedemeyer said. “Our Smithsonian denies her gift, although she can read a seam like a clue, a neckline like a poem, an outfit like a novel.”

Lamont grunted. “Anything else?”

“The word
imbecile
just slipped out,” Lacey said.

“Don’t matter. You can’t hurt his feelings now. Or mine. Anything else?”

“Yes,” Wiedemeyer broke in. “He’s trying to move
The Eye
to Crystal City. The dumb bastard.”

“Crystal City? Other side of the Potomac? Out of the District?” Lamont made a face. “So you got an even stronger motive.”

“Are you through?” Lacey asked.

“Through? I haven’t even begun to talk to you, Smithsonian. We’re going to go into this nice conference room across the hall, and we’re going to sit and talk.”

“I should have stayed home in bed this morning.”

“Amen.” Lamont cast an evil eye toward the two of them as he directed them to the small management conference room. “After you.”

“You know we didn’t have anything to do with it,” Lacey said.

“I don’t know nothing. You getting gun happy, Smithsonian? After that incident last month?”

“That was self-defense. And I didn’t kill anybody! And it was in Virginia.”

“You draw nutcases like lightning bolts,” Lamont said. “Maybe you or your little buddy here decided to take care of today’s victim.”

Wiedemeyer puffed himself up and thrust his hands into Lamont’s face. “Maybe you’d like to run some gunshot residue tests on us?”

Lacey hoped Wiedemeyer wouldn’t insist on it. Maybe he didn’t know that he could refuse a test and the cops would only pursue it if a suspect was charged. Maybe he just liked playing tough guy for a change. Lacey’s PI class had taught her that most GSR tests were not performed on the living but on the dead, especially in the case of suicides, to make sure the victim pulled the trigger. Everyone else knows to wash their hands.
Like Pontius Pilate. Or Lady Macbeth.

Lamont glared. “I am not interested in wasting my time with goofballs.”

“Careful, Detective. You’ll hurt my feelings,” Lacey said.

“Yeah, right. Follow me.” Broadway Lamont turned to Wiedemeyer, trying to remember if he knew the man. Perhaps he remembered seeing Wiedemeyer hanging around Felicity’s desk while Broadway was flirting with her. And her tarts. “What can you tell me, Mr.—?”