Murder on the Potomac (22 page)

“Mad enough to kill her?” said Eikenberg.

“Maybe. Want some advice?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“No. We have to pour on the steam and do it now. Have you spoken again with members of Tierney’s family? The son, daughter, mother, Cheong?”

“Cheong? Let the feds question him.”

“No, Darcy, he has two positions before the law. His status as a murder suspect is still our jurisdiction.”

“My people questioned him. He claims to have no knowledge.”

“As I remember, he didn’t have much of an alibi.”

“Nobody does,” Eikenberg replied.

“What about the natural son?”

“He’s on my calendar for today. I want to see what I can get out about the rumors he and Pauline Juris had been lovers. I also intend to catch up with his fiancée, Terri Pate, to see whether she had any inkling that there was an affair between them.”

“Good.”

“Money laundering?”

“Huh?”

“Cheong. Is his boss, Tankloff, involved?”

“I have no idea. I’ve told you what I know, and even what I know didn’t come from official channels. Law enforcement in this city is just one big happy family.”

“Could have been money then,” Eikenberg said.

“What could have been?”

“Pauline Juris was almost certainly killed for one of two reasons. Money. Or passion. She might not have been high on everyone’s list of sex objects, at least from what I understand, but loneliness or anger or revenge or simple availability can make any man or woman more desirable. And she was somehow close to nearly everyone in the Tierney household, I gather. Maybe she got wind that number-one adopted son was playing banker for funny money.”

Joe looked at her, thinking, You must be number one on a lot of lists, not just the dean’s. He said, “What kind of funny money?”

“Just guessing. Money only needs to be dry-cleaned offshore, or someplace else, if it’s big enough, like from organized crime, stock market or financial manipulation, maybe embezzlement, big-time blackmail, the casino skim—Mr. Cheong has been known to press his luck, which was usually bad—and drugs, of course.”

“Which one of those do you like?”

“Gambling, naturally. He moved in those circles like a roulette ball. Maybe big-business cash; he is supposed to be a financial whiz. Maybe he was whizzing it past everybody until even the federals got wise.”

Horton shrugged. “What else?”

“If Juris did know about it and it got her killed, it’s likely somebody else in the household might be aware of it. Chip Tierney. Suzanne Tierney. That could put them in jeopardy.”

“If they knew, and if Cheong knows they know, and if Pauline Juris knew and he killed her to keep it quiet … Too many
if
s. Hey, before you go, let me show you something.” She came around the desk and looked over his shoulder at a flyer he held in his hand. Across the top in red letters was
THE SCARLET SIN SOCIETY
. The letter began, “Dear Law Enforcement Professional.”

“What is it?” she asked. He handed it to her and said, “Take it home and read it. You’re a law-enforcement professional. Maybe you’d be interested in joining these loony tunes.”

Eikenberg laughed. “Is that what they want you to do, join?”

“Yeah. And give them a talk some night about police work. They outline a case that’s going to be discussed at one of their future meetings. A little ironic. It’s about some Chinese students who were in Washington years ago as guests of the government. They ended up stealing funds from the agency that sponsored them and gunning down a couple of the agency’s leaders.” He snorted. “You know the problem with organizations like this? They stir up the crazies. My dentist gave me a copy of a letter he got asking him to join the group. The
case they outlined for him was a dental student who got dead in a seedy hotel years ago. Like the one who was shot the other day.”

Eikenberg started to respond, but Horton kept talking. “We’ve got the scum of the earth roaming these streets at night raping and mugging and murdering, and we end up supplying a hundred cops tomorrow to keep order while these head cases put on an amateur play and
glorify
a murder that happened long ago. Maybe some whack-job decides it would be fun to help re-create old murders, only using real bullets.” He muttered an obscenity under his breath, then said loudly, “The pension can’t come fast enough. Go on, get moving before this case gets old enough to be history.”

An Hour Later

It was drizzling when Smith left for the Potomac Palisades and Wendell Tierney’s home. By the time he arrived, it had turned to a monotonous rain.

Across the entrance to the estate was an unmarked green sedan. A uniformed guard stood next to it.

Smith rolled down his window: “I have an appointment with Mr. Tierney.”

“Name?”

“Mackensie Smith.”

The guard consulted a slip of paper. “Okay. You’re cleared.”

“You from Tony Buffolino’s agency?” Smith asked.

“Yup.” He climbed into his vehicle and backed up enough for Mac to pass.

Another security man stood at the rear entrance to the
house. Smith recognized him from the last time he was there, another of Tony’s men. He was waved in and had no sooner stepped into the foyer when Tierney came through the kitchen to greet him. “Hello, Mac,” he said. “As usual, my good friend heeds the call. A friendly face. Exactly what I need this morning.”

“I imagine you do from what I heard on TV. I see Tony has beefed up security around here. Expecting a frontal attack?”

“Nothing would surprise me,” Tierney replied. He looked haggard, as though he hadn’t slept much, and was visibly nervous; a tic in his right eye was new to Smith. “I’ve been up all night,” he said. “It may sound paranoid having more security people around, but the way things have been going lately, I could believe there’s one hell of a conspiracy against me and my family.”

“I hope you’re wrong.”

“Come on, let’s go upstairs,” Tierney said. “I’m reasonably certain we can be alone there.” He motioned Smith to a high-back red leather chair and sat in a shorter version of it. “I can’t believe this thing with Sun Ben,” he said. “It’s got to be a setup, a goddamn setup.”

“Why would the government set up Sun Ben?”

“To get at me,” Tierney said without hesitation.

“But why?” Smith asked. “To what end?”

The tenor of Tierney’s laugh accused Smith of being naive. “You’ve been around this town long enough, Mac, to know that when somebody with clout wants to get somebody else, the government’s always there to do their bidding provided there’s enough money or votes to spread around. Sun Ben involved in money laundering? Tax evasion? Nonsense. I know all about his weakness,
that damn baccarat table in Atlantic City and Vegas. So he loses once in a while. Who doesn’t?”

Smith didn’t respond.

“Sun Ben is a young man who loves this country and what it’s done for him. He loves this family and what
it’s
done for him.”

Smith chewed his cheek. “They arrested him as he was returning from the Caymans. Did he maintain bank accounts there?”

“Sure. For Sam’s benefit.”

“Tankloff? Is he involved in this?”

“I don’t know, but he should be. If Sun Ben had accounts there, it was to accommodate Sam. Sam isn’t quite the straight shooter he comes off as, Mac. He’s no different than any other guy who makes a bundle and looks for ways to keep it. That’s fine. I’ve done it myself. But if he used Sun Ben to take the fall, I draw the line.”

Smith’s face said nothing.

Tierney sat back and crossed his legs, a statesman poised to proclaim significant truths to a historian. “I know there are some people you can trust in this world. I also know that when the sun goes down and we retreat into our dark private lives, we aren’t always what we’ve been in the daylight. Follow?”

“Yes.”

“Sun Ben is aggressive and ambitious. Very American. He might have made mistakes in judgment. Youth. That’s what youth is for, to take great leaps and fall on your face.”

“Has he fallen on his face this time?”

Tierney started to answer, stopped, shook his head, and smiled. “Trust Mackensie Smith to ask the right
questions. Maybe he has. Know what I did this morning?”

“What?”

“Sent Tony to Atlantic City to check on Sun Ben’s gambling losses. The government’ll make a big deal out of it, claim he owed the casinos and had to launder money to cover his debts. Tony’s there now proving them wrong. I want the facts in front of me before I counterattack.”

Tierney continued his monologue about Cheong, conspiracies, and life. He suddenly stopped, fatigued, and said, “Here I am rattling on when it was you who called and said
you
wanted to talk to me. What’s up?”

Smith had made a decision while driving. The only person to whom he would give the copied letters was Darcy Eikenberg. But he would tell Tierney that he’d seen and read them. Which he did. The result was a temporarily speechless Wendell Tierney. He managed to ask, “How did you get to see them, Mac? Who gave them to you?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I knew you could do it,” Tierney said.

“I didn’t
do it
, Wendell. They fell into my lap and, frankly, I wish they hadn’t. But they did, and here’s the conclusion I’ve reached. You didn’t write those letters.”

Tierney laughed heartily. “Finally, somebody who makes sense.”

“I know you didn’t write them because I also read the family history Pauline had written.”

“I gave that to Monty Jamison to read.”

“I know, and please don’t think poorly of Monty for passing it on to me. He’s been up to his neck with tomorrow’s Tri-S production and thought I might find the
history interesting. He was right. Pauline came from a fabulous family. I guess all families are fabulous, in their own way … that is, full of foibles. But that’s irrelevant. As it happened, I read the letters and the history in the same evening. The letters are filled with words and sentence structures that appear in the history. Pauline had a convoluted way of expressing things on paper. Phrases are often out of order—‘up the street, the soldiers, they are coming down,’ that sort of thing.”

Tierney looked puzzled.

Smith didn’t bother explaining. “The similarities between the two documents are, at least to me, remarkable. Add to that the fact that she did the last portion of her history on the same typewriter used to type the letters. Of course, that’s only my amateur evaluation. No science involved.”

“Can you prove it?”

“Not yet. But knowing you’re not the author of the letters carries us one step ahead.”

Tierney had trouble containing his pleasure at the news. He appeared to be ready to burst from his chair and wrap his arms around Smith, which Smith fervently hoped wouldn’t happen.

Smith continued. “The name—your name—that appears on the bottom of each letter, was typewritten. People don’t type their names to love letters.”

“Of course not,” Tierney said quickly. He paused before asking, “Then who wrote the letters?” The meaning of what Smith had said caught up with his question. “Are you saying Pauline wrote those letters?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“That boggles the mind,” said Tierney. He stood and
went to the liquor cabinet hidden behind the wall. “Join me?” he asked. “I need something.”

“No, thank you,” Smith said.

Tierney carried a glass of white liquid to his chair. “The obvious question is
why
she would do that,” he said. “Was she nuts, and I didn’t know it?”

“It’s possible she was disturbed and living out a fantasy. On the other hand, she might have been creating a situation in which she could—well, to be blunt about it, blackmail you with Marilyn, or use the threat of blackmail to entice you into an affair with her. One thing is certain from those letters, Wendell—and this is assuming that she did write them herself—she was very much in love with you.”

“That kind of love I don’t need,” he said. “I mean, from a head case.”

Tierney’s crude characterization of Pauline made Smith uncomfortable. Even if she had written them out of a warped psychological need, she was to be pitied, not scorned. Mac silently reminded himself, however, that even if Pauline had written the letters, it didn’t rule out her having had an affair with Tierney. Nor did it mean that Tierney wasn’t aware of the letters even if he hadn’t written them. Perhaps he’d already been on the receiving end of blackmail threats from his loyal, smitten assistant.

The drink calmed Tierney. He stood and slowly paced the room, hands on his hips, face furrowed. Eventually, he stopped and said, “I would like to see those letters, Mac. I mean, see them for myself.”

Smith shook his head. “Sorry, Wendell, but I think that would be inappropriate. When I leave here, I intend
to go directly to the detective, Eikenberg, and tell her what I’ve told you.”

“Do you think she’ll believe you? Will she buy what you’re saying?” Before Smith could respond, Tierney added, “That would be wonderful. If you could convince her that I didn’t write those letters and had no romantic involvement with Pauline, it would go a long way toward clearing me of her murder and getting them off my back, off my family’s back.”

Smith stood. “I have to be going, Wendell.”

“I’d like to be with you, Mac, when you confront the police with this evidence.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Wendell. In the first place, it isn’t evidence, just a theory of mine based upon having read both sets of documents. I’d like to give Detective Eikenberg Pauline’s family history to read so that she, and others in the department, can make their own comparisons and draw their own conclusions. Is that acceptable to you?”

“You bet it is, Mac. Give them anything you want so they learn the truth.”

Tierney walked Smith downstairs and to the back door. “Where’s Sun Ben?” Smith asked.

“In his apartment. The attorneys brought him back here last night after the arraignment. I’ve advised him to stay out of sight, to lay low for a couple of days. That’s exactly what he’s doing. Would you like to talk to him?”

“No. Just tell him I hope things work out.”