“Hello?”
“Yeah, I’m here. Look, if Dan wants to talk to you he’ll talk to you. You call him. He’s in the book.”
“What, the phone book?”
“That’s right. I gotta go.”
He hung up. I felt foolish. I never even considered the phone book because I never knew a cop who put his name in it. I dialed information for Baltimore again and gave the former detective’s name.
“I have no listing for a Daniel Bledsoe,” the operator said. “I have Bledsoe Insurance and Bledsoe Investigations.”
“Okay, give me those and can I get the addresses, please?”
“Actually, they are separate listings and numbers but the same address in Fells Point.”
He gave me the information and I called the investigations number. A woman answered, “Bledsoe Investigations.”
“Yes, can I speak to Dan?”
“I’m sorry, he’s unavailable.”
“Do you know if he’ll be in later today?”
“He’s in now. He’s just on the line. This is his service. When he’s out or on his line it rings through. But I know he’s there. He checked for messages not ten minutes ago. But I don’t know for how long. I don’t keep his schedule.”
Fells Point is a spit of land east of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. The tourist shops and hotels give way to funkier pubs and shops and then old brick factories and Little Italy. On some streets the asphalt has worn off the underlying brick and when the wind is right there is the damp tang of the sea or the smell of the sugar factory just across the inlet. Bledsoe Investigations and Insurance was in a one-story brick building at Caroline and Fleet.
It was a few minutes after one. On the door of his small street-front office was a plastic clock face with adjustable hands and the words BE BACK AT. The clock was set at one. I looked around, saw no one making a run for the door to beat the deadline and decided to wait for him anyway. I had nowhere else to go.
I walked down the market on Fleet, bought a Coke and went back to my car. From the driver’s seat I could see the door to Bledsoe’s office. I watched it for twenty minutes until I saw a man with jet-black hair, a middle-age paunch peeking through his jacket and a slight limp walk up, unlock the door and go in. I got out with my computer satchel and headed for him.
Bledsoe’s office looked as though it had once been a doctor’s office, though I could not figure out why a doctor would have hung a shingle out in this working district. There was a little entry room with a sliding window and counter behind which I imagined a receptionist at one time sat. The window, glazed like a shower door, was closed. I had heard a buzz when I had opened the door but no one responded to it. I stood there a few moments looking around. There was an old couch and a coffee table. Not much room for anything else. A variety of magazines were fanned across the table, none of them fresher than six months old. I was about to call out a hello or knock on the door to the inner sanctum when I heard a toilet flush somewhere on the other side of the sliding window. Then I saw a blurred figure move behind the glass and the door to the left opened.
The man with the black hair stood there. I noticed now that he had a mustache as thin as a freeway on a map traveling over his lip.
“Yes, can I help you?”
“Daniel Bledsoe?”
“That’s right.”
“My name’s Jack McEvoy. I’d like to ask you about John McCafferty. I think we both might be able to help each other.”
“John McCafferty was a long time ago.”
He was eyeing the computer satchel.
“It’s just a computer,” I said. “Can we sit down someplace?”
“Uh, sure. Why not?”
I followed through the door and down a short hallway that had three more doors lined along the right side. He opened the first one and we stepped into an office of cheap faux maple paneling. His state license was framed on the wall as well as some photos from his days as a cop. The whole thing seemed about as cheesy as his mustache but I was determined to play it out. The thing I know about cops, and I guessed that it extended to former cops, was that looks were deceiving. I knew some in Colorado who would still be wearing pale blue polyester leisure suits if they made them anymore. But nevertheless they were some of the best and brightest and toughest of their departments. I suspected it was that way with Bledsoe. He took a seat behind a desk with a black Formica top. It had been a poor choice when he’d bought it at the secondhand office furniture store. I could plainly see the dust buildup on the shiny surface. I sat across from Bledsoe in the only other chair. He accurately registered my impressions.
“Place used to be an abortion clinic. Guy went away for doing third-trimester jobs. I took it over and don’t care about the dust and looks. I get a lot of my work over the phone, selling policies to cops. And I usually go to clients, the ones that want an investigation. They don’t come to me. The people that do come here usually just leave flowers out by the door. Memorials, I guess. I figure they must be working off old phone books or something. Why don’t you tell me what you’re looking for here.”
I told him about my brother and then about John Brooks in Chicago. I watched his face fill with skepticism as I talked. It told me I was maybe ten seconds from being thrown out the door.
“What is this?” he said. “Who sent you here?”
“Nobody. But it’s my guess that I’m maybe a day or so ahead of the FBI. But they’ll be coming. I just thought you’d maybe talk to me first. I know what it’s like, you see. My brother and me, we were twins. I’ve always heard that longtime partners, especially on homicide, became like brothers. Like twins.”
I held up for a few moments. I had played everything but my ace and I had to wait for the right moment. Bledsoe seemed to cool down a little. His anger was maybe giving way to confusion.
“So what do you want from me?”
“The note. I want to know what McCafferty said in the note.”
“There was no note. I never said there was a note.”
“But his wife said there was.”
“Then go talk to her.”
“No, I think I’d rather talk to you. Let me tell you something. The doer on these cases somehow gets the victims to write out a line or two as a suicide note. I don’t know how he does it or why they oblige him, but they do. And every time the line is from a poem. A poem by the same writer. Edgar Allan Poe.”
I reached down to my computer satchel and unzipped it. I pulled out the thick book of Poe’s works. I put it on the desk so that he could see it.
“I think your partner was murdered. You came in and it looked like a suicide because that was how it was supposed to look. That note you destroyed, I’d bet you your partner’s pension that it’s a line from a poem that’s in that book.”
Bledsoe looked from me to the book and then back at me again.
“You apparently thought you owed him enough to risk your job to make his widow’s life a little easier.”
“Yeah, look what it got me. A piece-of-shit office with a piece-of-shit license on the wall. I sit in a room where they used to cut babies out of women. It’s not very noble.”
“Look, everybody on the force knew there was something noble about what you did, else you wouldn’t be selling any insurance. You did what you did for your partner. You should follow through, now.”
Bledsoe turned his head and looked at one of the photos on the wall. It was him and another man, arms around each other’s neck, smiling with abandon. It looked like it had been taken in a bar somewhere during the good days.
“ ‘The fever called living is conquered at last,’ ” he said, without looking away from the photo.
I slapped my hand down on the book. The sound scared us both.
“Got it,” I said and picked up the book. I had bent the pages of the poems where the killer’s quotes had been taken. I found the page with the poem “For Annie” on it, scanned until I knew I was right, then put the book on the desk and turned it so he could
read it.
“First stanza,” I said.
Bledsoe leaned over to read the poem.
Thank Heaven! the crisis—
The danger is past,
And the lingering illness
Is over at last—
And the fever called “Living”
Is conquered at last.
19
As I hurried through the lobby of the Hilton at four, I envisioned Greg Glenn slowly making his way out from behind his desk and heading toward the daily news meeting in the metro conference room. I needed to talk to him and I knew that if I didn’t snag him first he’d be holed up in that meeting and the weekend meeting that followed for the next two hours.
As I approached the elevators I saw a woman stepping through the open doors of the one available car and quickly followed her in. She had already pushed the 12 button. I moved to the rear of the car and checked my watch again. I thought I was going to make it. The editors’ meetings never seemed to get off on time.
The woman had moved to the right side of the car and we had settled into the slightly uncomfortable silence that always comes when strangers are enclosed in an elevator. In the polished-brass trim on the door I could see her face. Her eyes watched the lights over the doors that marked our ascent. She was very attractive and I found it hard to turn away from the reflection, even though I feared she would turn her eyes and catch me. I imagined that she knew I was watching her. I’ve always believed that beautiful women know and understand they are always being watched.
When the elevator opened on twelve I waited for her to step out first. She turned to the left and headed down the hall. I turned right and headed to my room, stopping myself from taking a backward glance at her. As I approached my door, pulling the card key out of my shirt pocket, I heard light steps on the hallway carpet. I turned and it was her. She smiled.
“Wrong way.”
“Yeah,” I said and smiled. “After a while it’s all a maze.”
Dumb thing to say, I thought as I opened the door and she passed behind me. As I entered the room, I felt a hand suddenly grip the back of my jacket collar and I was shoved into the room. As this happened another hand went up under my jacket and grabbed onto my belt. I was slammed facedown onto the bed. I managed to hold on to the computer bag, not wanting to drop a two-thousand-dollar piece of equipment, but then it was roughly yanked out of my grasp.
“FBI! You’re under arrest. Don’t move!”
While one hand stayed on the back of my neck and held me facedown, the other hand patted my body in a search.
“What the fuck is this?” I managed to say in a voice muffled by the mattress.
Just as suddenly as they had gripped me, the hands were gone.
“Okay, up. Let’s go.”
I turned and raised myself until I was seated on the bed. I looked up. It was the woman from the elevator. My mouth dropped open a little. Something about being handled so easily by her, and her alone, burned me deeply and anger flushed my cheeks.
“Don’t worry. I’ve done it to bigger and badder men than you.”
“You better have an ID or you’re going to need a lawyer.”
She pulled a wallet out of her coat pocket and flipped it open in front of my face.
“You’re the one who needs the lawyer. Now, I want you to take the chair from the desk, put it in the corner and sit there while I go through this place. It won’t take long.”
She had what looked like a legitimate FBI badge and ID. It said Special Agent Rachel Walling. Once I read that I began to get an idea of what was going on.
“C’mon, chop, chop. In the corner you go.”
“Let’s see the search warrant.”
“You have a choice,” she said sternly. “Go to the corner or I take you into the bathroom and cuff you to the drain trap under the sink. Make it.”
I stood up and dragged the chair into the corner and sat down.
“I still want to see the fuckin’ warrant.”
“Are you aware that your use of coarse language is a rather lame attempt to reestablish your sense of male superiority?”
“Jesus. Are you aware that you are full of shit? Where’s the warrant?”
“I don’t need a warrant. You invited me in and allowed me to search, then I arrested you after I found the stolen property.”
She stepped back to the door, her eyes on me, and closed it.
“I didn’t invite you anywhere. You try that shit and you’ll crash and burn. Do you believe any judge is going to believe I was stupid enough to invite a search if I had stolen property in here?”
She looked at me and smiled sweetly.
“Mr. McEvoy, I am five feet five and weigh one hundred and fifteen pounds. That’s with my gun on. Do you think a judge will believe your version of what happened? Would you even want to reveal what I just did to you in open court?”
I looked away from her and out the windows. The maid had opened the curtains. The sky was beginning to lose the light.
“I didn’t think so,” she said. “Now, you want to save me some time? Where are the protocols you copied?”
“In the computer bag. I committed no crime in getting them and just having them is not a crime.”
I had to be careful of what I said. I didn’t know if Michael Warren had already been found out or not. She was going through the satchel. She pulled out the Poe book, looked at it quizzically and threw it on the bed. She then pulled out my notebook and the sheaf of copies of the protocols. Warren had been right. She was a beautiful woman. A hard shell but beautiful just the same. About my age, maybe a year or two older, her hair was brown and falling to just above her shoulders. Sharp green eyes and the strong aura of confidence. That was what was most attractive about her.
“Breaking and entering is a crime,” she said. “It came under my jurisdiction when it was determined that the documents stolen belonged to the bureau.”
“I didn’t break into anything and I didn’t steal anything. What this is is harassment. I’ve always heard that you bureau people get upset when somebody else does your job for you.”
She was leaning over the bed looking through the papers. She straightened up, reached into her pocket and pulled out a clear plastic evidence bag with a single sheet of paper in it. She held it up for me to look at. I recognized it as having been torn from a reporter’s notebook. There were six lines written on it in black ink.
Pena: his hands?
after—how long?
Wexler/Scalari: the car?
heater?
lock?
Riley: gloves?
I recognized my own handwriting and then it all tumbled together. Warren had torn sheets from my notebook to mark the spots of the file we had pulled. He had torn a page with old notes on it and somehow had left it behind when he returned the files. Walling must have seen the recognition in my face.
“Sloppy work. After we get the handwriting analyzed and compared, I think it’ll be a slam dunk. What do you think?”
I couldn’t even manage a fuck you this time.
“I’m seizing your computer, this book and your notebooks as possible evidence. If we don’t need any of it, you’ll get it back. Okay, we’re going to go now. My car’s right out front. The one thing I’m willing to do for you to show I’m not such a mean girl is take you down without the cuffs. We’ve got a long ride down to Virginia, though we might beat some of the traffic if we get going now. Are you going to behave? One false move, as they say, and I’ll put you in the back with the cuffs on as tight as a wedding ring.”
I just nodded and stood up. I was in a daze. I couldn’t meet her eyes. I walked toward the door with my head down.
“Hey, what do you say?” she said to me.
I mumbled my thanks and I heard her soft laughter behind me.
She was wrong. We didn’t beat the traffic. It was Friday evening. More people were trying to get out of the city than most nights and we crawled along with them as we crossed the city
to get to a freeway. For a half hour neither of us spoke, except when she cursed at a traffic snarl or a red light. I was in the front seat, thinking the whole time. I had to make a call to Glenn as soon as possible. They had to get me a lawyer. A good one. I saw that the only way out was to reveal a source I had promised I would never reveal. I considered the possibility that if I called Warren he would come forward and confirm that I hadn’t broken into the foundation. But I discarded it. I had made a covenant with him. I had to honor it.
When we finally made it south of Georgetown the traffic opened up a little bit and she seemed to relax, or at least remember I was in the car with her. I saw her reach into the ashtray and pull out a white card. She put the dome light on and held the card on the top of the steering wheel so she could read it while she drove.
“You have a pen?”
“What?”
“A pen. I thought all reporters carried pens.”
“Yes. I have a pen.”
“Good. I’m going to read you your constitutional rights.”
“What rights? You’ve already violated most of them.”
She proceeded to read from the card and then asked if I understood them. I mumbled that I did and she handed me the card.
“Okay, good. I want you to take your pen and sign and date the back of that.”
I did as instructed and handed the card back. She blew on the ink until it dried and then put the card in her pocket.
“There,” she said. “Now we can talk. Unless you want to call your lawyer. How’d you get into the foundation?”
“I didn’t break in. That’s all I can say till I talk to a lawyer.”
“You saw the evidence. Are you going to say that’s not yours?”
“It can be explained . . . Look, all I’m saying is I did nothing illegal to get those copies. I can’t say anything more without revealing . . .”
I didn’t finish. I’d said enough.
“The old can’t-reveal-my-sources trick. Where were you all day today, Mr. McEvoy? I’ve been waiting since noon.”