Margaret Truman's Experiment in Murder
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Authors: Margaret Truman
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CONTENTS
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In the French poet Jean de la Fontaine's fable “The Monkey and the Cat,” the cat, duped by the monkey, uses its paw to pull chestnuts from a hot fire, burning its paw in the process while the monkey happily gobbles up the chestnuts.
“A cat's paw” has come to mean one used unwittingly by another to accomplish his own purposes.
It happens in Washington, D.C., every day.
No assassination instructions should ever be written or recorded.
â
FROM
A STUDY OF ASSASSINATION,
A CIA TRAINING MANUAL, 1954
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CHAPTER
1
WASHINGTON, D.C.
He'd crossed Virginia Avenue a thousand times since taking an apartment across the street from his office three years ago. It meant jaywalkingâone summons in the three years, a small price to pay for not having to trudge to a corner crossing, especially in the sweltering heat of summer in the nation's capital. His morning sprint across the broad avenue involved more than avoiding a ticket, however. Dodging speeding cars was a greater hurdle, with more dire consequences. He'd come to consider it a contest, a test of his agility and quickness of foot, a game he'd always won.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
His move to the apartment followed the divorce from Jasmine, his wife of twenty-two years. Until the breakup he'd commuted from their home in Chevy Chase to his downtown office, where he spent the day listening to the trials and tribulations of his patients as they reclined on his couch, a box of tissues always within easy reach, and poured out their troubles to Dr. Mark Sedgwick.
“Dr. Mark,” as his patients called him, at least those with enough tenure on his couch to be comfortable with it, graduated from the University of California Medical School in San Francisco in 1964. He'd aspired to become an orthopedic surgeon, but his manual dexterity was judged lacking by his professors. They suggested a medical specialty demanding less physical challenge. What could be less physical than psychiatry?
He wasn't disappointed at this shift in direction his medical studies had taken. He quickly discovered that he enjoyed delving into the human psyche more than peering into spinal columns or replacing arthritic knees and hips.
What
prompted people to do things became infinitely more interesting to him than
how
they did them.
He'd intended to do his residency in San Francisco, where he'd been born, and to establish a practice there. But an offer from the George Washington University Department of Psychiatry in Washington, D.C., lured him east. Fresh with an M.D. after his nameâand now better able to secure restaurant reservations as Dr. Sedgwickâhe would have followed through on his intention to return to San Francisco. But he met Jasmine, a nurse at the hospital.
Jasmine Smithâher parents chose the more exotic first name Jasmine to counterbalance her mundane last nameâset her sights on the handsome resident Mark Sedgwick from the day he walked in. Her feminine charms were evident front and back, but it was her wide, ready smile that derailed his plan to return home. He accepted a staff position at the hospital, and they were married after a relatively short courtship. Two children later, a boy and a girl, they bought the house in Chevy Chase and settled into what was to be blissful domesticity. But the bliss soon came off the rose, to mix metaphors, and they grew increasingly apart, especially when Sedgwick resigned from the hospital to open a private practice on Virginia Avenue N.W. The pressure of getting an office up and running, coupled with a growing involvement with a psychiatric institute in San Francisco, meant little time at home for the good doctor and led to the eventual dissolution of the marriage, which Sedgwick choreographed in order to, as he told Jasmine, minimize the hurt to all. He was, after all, a psychiatrist.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
Now, three years later, he began his day as he always did. Sedgwick was very much a creature of habitâroutine was essential. His alarm went off at seven twenty, its backup buzzer sounding at seven thirty. Coffee had been ground and mixed the night before, and the coffeemaker was timed to begin brewing at seven fifteen. Because it was summer, Sedgwick took his coffee and a bowl of yogurt with mixed fruit and nuts to the balcony of his third-floor apartment, shady in the morning before the sun swung around to make it uncomfortably hot. He downloaded that day's
Washington Post
to his BlackBerry and read the news while eating.
At eight o'clock he was in the shower, dried off by eight fifteen, dressed by eight forty-five, and on his way downstairs at eight fifty-five. His first patient would arrive at nine twenty for her forty-minute session.
He prepared to cross the avenue the way he always did after having received his jaywalking ticket a year earlier, looking up and down the street for signs of the police. Seeing none, he stepped off the curb and took in the traffic. It wasn't unusually busy at that hour, men and women driving to work in the city's major industry, government and all its elements. He waited until a stream of cars had passed and there was a break in the traffic. The sun to his left blinded him as he looked in that direction, then he observed the situation to his right. It looked good, and he started across.
He was halfway to the other side when he became aware of a car bearing down on his right. He hadn't seen it, but he sensed it. He turned in that direction, and his mouth opened and a prolonged “Nooo” came from it. The vehicle, a white sedan, raced toward him, going at least sixty miles per hour, probably faster. Because he stood in the middle of the avenue, the driver could have opted to go either in front of him or behind. But the car straddled the median stripe, its engine revving loudly, no sound of brakes being applied, no sign of trying to stop. It struck Sedgwick head on with a thud that was heard up and down the street and sent him flying onto the hood, his head crashing into the windshield and creating a spiderweb of cracks on the driver's side. Sedgwick's body was propelled off. He hit the pavement and tumbled thirty feet before coming to rest, a pool of blood oozing from his crushed skull and creating a crimson circle around it.
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CHAPTER
2
Shrieks were heard up and down Virginia Avenue. People turned from the scene and covered their eyes with their hands. Some cried. “Call for help” was a chorus. Cars came to a screeching halt to avoid the body.
The 911 calls poured in to police operators, some from the street, others from people who'd witnessed the scene through their office windows. Within what seemed like only a few seconds, uniformed officers in patrol cars arrived and took control of the swelling crowd. Other police vehicles joined them. Virginia Avenue was shut down in both directions. An occasional horn blew as though that would miraculously open the street. An officer walked up to one horn blower's car that was only a dozen feet from Sedgwick's body and said, “You blow that freakin' horn again, pal, and you're toast.”
Some of the officers stood over the body. There was no need to press fingertips against the neck to seek a pulse. The victim's life was all over the pavement, bits of white brain matter, bones jutting through skin, and blood glistening in the morning sun. An ambulance with two EMTs joined the tragic scene, followed by an unmarked car. Two detectives got out.
“Hit-and-run?”
“Yeah.”
“Driver just took off?”
“Seems so.”
One of the detectives surveyed the crowd. “See if anybody can describe the car that hit the guy,” he told an officer. “Whoever's car it was gotta be mangled, too.”
“Got an ID on him?” asked the second detective.
None of the uniformed cops wanted to admit that they'd been reluctant to touch the grotesquely battered body. A detective bent down and fumbled for Sedgwick's wallet in his rear pants pocket. He stood and went through its contents. “He's a doc,” he said to no one in particular. “Sedgwick. Mark Sedgwick.” He consulted another card and looked across the street to a four-story office building. “He's got an office over there,” he said, pointing. He turned. “Lives in that apartment building.”
Sedgwick's body was photographed from every angle, as was the street in the direction from which the car had come. It had rained earlier, and close-up photos of tire tread marks were also taken. Measurements were made, although there wasn't much to measure aside from where the initial impact had occurred to where the body had come to rest. The area was searched for anything that might have fallen from the car, but nothing was found aside from a piece of clear plastic that presumably had come from part of a headlight. While one detective dictated into a small handheld tape recorder, the other went to the sidewalk where officers questioned bystanders.
“Anything?” he asked.
“A lot of people saw it but don't remember much about the vehicle. That woman over there, though, says that she saw the whole thing and can describe the car.”
The detective went to her, introduced himself, and asked what she'd seen.
She spoke rapidly, and he asked her to slow down.
“You say you can describe the car?” he said.
“I think so.”
He hated hearing “I think so.”
“Go ahead,” he said.
“It was white, a white car.”
“What kind? A sedan? SUV?”
“I don't know much about cars. This one looked like any other car, normal, you could say, with four doors.”
“A sedan,” he said.
“Yes, a sedan. Like my parents drive. Just ⦠just a normal white car.”
“I don't suppose you caught a glimpse of the plate.”
“It had the American flag on it, I know that much.”
“D.C. plate,” he said.
“Yes. I see them all the time in the city. I live in Virginia.”