Sweepers (7 page)

Von Rensel was completely different from Sherman, who was a tall, dark, and handsome type, if ever she had seen one-the picture of a Navy success story. Right. Here he was, in his first year as a flag officer and involved, however tangentially, in a Fairfax County homicide investigation.

Congratulations of! that fine promotion, Admiral, sir; may we have a few minutes of your time?

She looked at, her watch again. Eight more minutes. He would probably drive up at the stroke of seven. She wondered again about Elizabeth Walsh, what she had looked like. And why there was not even a mention of a family in the admiral’s biography. What had he said at the meeting with the police-that he had told her from the start that he did not want to get married? No, he had said “remarry.”

“I did not want to remarry, ever.” So he had been married once. She wondered about all that vehemence. A flare of headlights in her mirror announced his arrival, and she got out of her car.

“Commander,” he said formally.

“Admiral Sherman,” she replied, nodding. She had almost saluted. He locked his car and they went across the street. As they approached the corner town house, its front door opened and a short elderly lady with bright white hair came out and down the stairs. She met Sherman at the sidewalk.

“Tag,” she said emotionally. They embraced for a MOMENT, then stepped apart so that Sherman could make introductions. Mrs. Klein looked over at Karen and nodded a greeting; then she looked back at Sherman with an unspoken question on her lips.

“Commander Lawrence is a Navy lawyer,” he explained.

“She is going to try to find out what the police have found out. I want to go into Elizabeth’s house. I still have a key.

When we’re done, I’d like to come back and talk to youunless you want to come with us?”

“No, Tag,” Mrs. Klein said, shaking her head. “I don’t want to go in there anymore-The police have been there.

They just took down all that awful yellow tape this morning.

This is just so terrible. I can’t believe it happened. I miss her so much.”

“I know, Dottie. I do, too. We won’t be, long. I just had to come see.

I’m having a hard time accepting all this.”

Mrs. Klein kept shaking her head from side to side. She fished a handkerchief out of her sleeve. “I just don’t understand. Why her? She was so young. And such a good person. It doesn’t make any sense. But you go ahead. I’ll make us some coffee.”

“Thanks, Dottie.”

Mrs. Klein walked back up her front steps and went inside. Sherman produced the key to the adjacent town house and went up and unlocked the front door. The mailbox was stuffed with what looked like mostly junk mail, -with m ore on the foyer floor, and he gathered it up before stepping inside. Karen followed him in. He turned on the light in the front hall. The air was slightly musty, with a faint hint of perfume.

Karen looked around while he turned on some more lights. Fairly standard town house layouq carpeted stairs on the left going up to the second floor. A hallway straight ahead, leading back to the kitchen, and a spacious living room to the right. She noticed that the living room was devoid of the clutter of everyday life, which meant that, like many city commuters who lived alone, Elizabeth Walsh had Orobably lived in her kitchen. She followed him back through the living room and dining room and into the kitchen, which had a breakfast nook overlooking a walled garden in back. He was walking around the kitchen, turning on every light. She had been right: The kitchen table was stacked with mail and magazines, a phone, and Day-Timer book; there was a small and very cluttered desk and a television.

“It even feels empty,” he said, sweeping his eyes around the room. Karen felt like an interloper. “Yes, it does,” she said. “I can wait in the living room, if you’d like, Admiral.”

No,” he answered quickly. “No. I’m not sure why I’m doing this. I guess I don’t really believe it yet.” He looked at a door next to the refrigerator. “That goes downstairs.”

Karen didn’t know what to say to that. After a minute of looking around the kitchen again, he went over to the door, opened it, and flipped on the light.

“What’s down there?” Karen asked, already pretty much knowing the answer.

“Finished basement: family room, fireplace, wet bar.

Storage rooms, utility room.”

“And the laundry?”

He turned to look at her with a peculiar expression on his face. “Well, no, not really. I mean, yes, there’s a laundry room down there. But she didn’t use it. Couldn’t see the sense of hauling clothes up and down two flights of stairs, so she had one of those over/under was I her-dryer units put in upstairs about a year after her divorce.”

She frowned, remembering his reaction when the policeman had mentioned laundry. “So why was she carrying a laundry basket full of clothes?”

“Yes,” he replied, frowning. “Why indeed?”

He turnedaway and started down the stairs, with Karen following reluctantly behind him, unsure of what they would see down there. He flipped on a second light switch at the top of the stairwell, which turned on recessed overhead lights downstairs. He stopped halfway down when he saw the chalk outline of a human figure on the carpet below, just beyond the landing. No mistaking what that was, she thought as they resumed their way down the stairs. Karen noticed that the stairs were steep but fully carpeted, with handrails on either side. There was a long green scrape mark on the left side wall about halfway down, and a dent in the wallboard that had been circled in chalk.

The basement smelled faintly of chemicals, and she saw traces of what she’assumed was fingerprint powder here and there around the room. While Karen waited on the next to the last step, the admiral stepped around the chalk outlin e at the bottom of the stairs. He appeared to be trying not to look at it. The outline did not appear Karen to be to . large enough h to contain a human. But she remembered how Frank had looked in the CCU, his sleek lobbyist figure shrunken into the metal bed, nested among all those ominous tubes and hoses, as if to make himself small for the dangerous journey that was coming. There was an empty green plastic laundry basket parked on one end of the couch. Next to the basket, there was a pile of clothes in a tagged clear plastic bag. A second, smaller plastic bag held a pair of slippers.

Sherman walked over to the couch and examined the bags.

“This really doesn’t make a lot of sense,” he said finally.

“Are those her slippers?” Karen asked, pointing to the second bag.

Tag looked at the other bag, then looked harder. Then he swore.

“What?” Karen asked.

She hated those slippers. She never wore those slip lxrs. I I

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, damn it. I bought them for her. Christmas present, two years ago.

They were too big, wrong style, wrong all the way around.

Even the soles were too slippery for the carpet in this house. She made a joke out of it to protect my feelings, but it was one of things, before we really knew each other, just a dumb present. But the thing is, she never wore them. If they found her wearing those slippers, something’s way out of whack with this picture.”

Karen followed the admiral out of the house ten minutes later. She had decided to wait in her car while the admiral went in to talk to Mrs.

Klein. She was disturbed by what he had said in the basement and was beginning to wonder about what was going on. He had shaken off his funk after finding the slippers and gone through the house like a man possessed, leaving her standing in hallways while he went through each room on all three floors, turning on every light in the house. He didn’t say anything the whole time, but she could hear him muttering occasionally under his breath, He was obviously thinking what she was thinking, and what the detective was probably thinking: The “accident” might have been staged. Except the detective would certainly not know about the slippers. The admiral would have to tell them about that. So what had twitched their antennae? The fall itselp Those stairs were steep, although well lighted, carpeted, and with railings on both sides.

One could certainly trip or stumble, even with an armful of laundry. But she should have been able to grab something on the way down’ Karen also wondered about the admiral’s distracted look when he had arrived this evening. He looked far less confident and commanding than he had seemed in the conference room this morning. It was as if he had come here tonight preoccupied with something over and above the weight of this somber visit. But it probably was just the emotional stress of returning to the place where his loverhis ex-‘lover, she reminded herself-had died. She could re-. late: The hotel lobby where Frank had been stricken was not a place she would ever go again.

He came out of Mrs. Klein’s town house after ten minutes, walked over to his car, and stood next to the driver’s window, putting both hands -on top of the car. She got out and walked back to his car. She waited while he gathered his thoughts’ “Now I don’t know what to do,” he said finally.

“Mcnair apparently picked up on the bit about the laundry.

And Dottie says she was wearing those slippers, or that they were down there at the foot of the stairs. I guess there’s probably a logical explanation for all that, but I can’t put it together. Do you suppose these are the forensic ambiguities Mcnair was talking about?”

Karen shook her head. “They couldn’t know about the slippers. The laundry, maybe.”

“Right.-But laundry isn’t really forensics. And my fingerprints will be all over that house.”

“Which is perfectly logical, given your past association with Ms. “Yeah.

But there must be something else.”

She decided this would be a good time to remind him.

“Sir, as I told you, Admiral Carpenter has asked that I follow up on their investigation. Perhaps I can find out what the rest of those forensic ambiguities are.”

“And tell them about the slippers?” he asked, looking sideways at her.

“Well, yes, sir, I think we should. Oh, you think they’ll attach significance to the fact that you came here tonight?”

“They just might.”

She shook her head. From her perspective, it was a perfectly normal thing for an ex-lover to do. “I disagree, sir,” she said. “But I do think they ought to hear about the slippers from you, or from you via me. If they think this is a murder, they’ll be back to see Mrs. Klein anyway.”

“And find out I was here, and maybe what we talked about.

“Yes, sir.”

He nodded. “You’re right. See what you can find out tomorrow, and please keep me informed. Now I’m going home. I’ve had a long day with a depressing ending. No offense intended, Commander.”

She tried to smile, but there was that bleak look in his face again.

Still waters, she thought. Be careful. You know nothing about this man.

But then he gave her a sudden, almost intuitive look that said, I know what you’re thinking, and then he did smile. It transformed his face, revealing an unexpected charm. “Thanks for coming tonight, Commander. I mean that. Call me when you have something.”

“Yes, sir. Good night.”

She smiled to herself as she started up her car. “Call me when you have something,” he’d said. It was almost amusing, how he just assumed she was working for him. Admirals did that, she had noticed: They automatically assumed that everyone in the room was acting in support of the Great . Man at the head of the table. She would call the police first thing in the morning and see if she could arrange another meeting with Mcnair. As she drove away, she glanced back at the Walsh house, and she realized Sherman had left all the lights on. The windows blazed out at the’ dark street as if to defy the lingering presence of death inside.

WEDNESDAY At 10: 15 on Wednesday morning, Karen Lawrence met with Detective Mcnair in Fairfax. He offered her coffee, but she declined; they sat down in his office. “So, Commander Lawrence. What can we do for you?”

“As I said when I called, Detective, I’m working for Admiral Carpenter.

He asked me to act as liaison between you and your efforts to solve the Walsh, um, situation and Navy headquarters.”

Mcnair kept a neutral expression on his face. “And the reason for establishing this liaison, Commander?”

Karen looked right at him. “To be perfectly frank, Detective, I think Admiral Carpenter wants to know right away if Admiral Sherman becomes a suspect in a murder case.”

“I see,” Mcnair said with the hint of a smile now. “Forgive me, when someone says they’re being Perfectly frank, I usually expect quite the opposite. So you are not working for Admiral Sherman, then?”

“No. I work for the JAG, Admiral Carpenter.” ‘5Tell me, that insignia on your sleeves means you’re a lawyer, right?”

“That’s right.”

“So, if this Admiral Sherman tells you something in confidence, is that privileged information? You know, lawyer client privilege and all that?”

No. I’m not representing Admiral Sherman in the lawyer-client sense. I’m not operating ‘of counsel.’ I’m operating as a staff officer on the Navy headquarters staff.” Okay,” Mcnair said. “When you called this morning went in to see Lieutenant Bettino. He’s the boss of the Homicide Section. I explained about this liaison proposition, and he said he could understand the politics of it. But he needed to know what you were. If you were Sherman’s lawyer, then we wouldn’t talk to you, of course, until we either charged him or gave it up for Lent. But, secondly, he didn’t feel we needed a whole lot of help with this case as things stand.

“Are you saying you would prefer there not be a parallel Navy investigation?”

“Yes I guess I am. I mean, of course the Navy can run any, kind of investigation it wants on any of its personnel.

You’ve got jurisdiction over naval personnel. But we’d prefer that any such investigation or related ‘activities not interfere with anything we might have going down in our jurisdiction.”

Karen understood the implied warning immediately and moved to put his concerns to rest. “First, we wouldn’t think of interfering with your investigation, Detective. And, second, since Ms. Walsh died in Fairfax County and not aboard a naval installation, our position is that you have exclusive jurisdiction. Besides, we’re not conducting an investigation.