Authors: Gerald Petievich
"Jack, I can tell by the look on your face this isn't an assignment you relish. I know the responsibility you must feel."
"Now that you mention it-"
Sullivan left the desk, adjusted the combination dial on the safe, and opened the heavy drawer. He took out a business-sized envelope and handed it to Powers. "Here's five thousand dollars to cover expenses. This is headquarters confidential fund money, so you don't have to keep receipts. If you need more, let me know."
Powers slipped the envelope into his inside jacket pocket. It felt heavy. "I've never seen this woman. How-?"
"When the man wants to see her, he goes through Morgan. I'll have him set up a meeting and then cancel at the last minute. You can initiate the surveillance at that point. It won't alarm her. He's had to do this before when the President had a last-minute change in schedule. I'll phone you tomorrow at your apartment with the details."
"This whole thing could blow up in our faces, Pete," Powers said.
"We're not going to let that happen."
After the meeting, Powers took the elevator to the ground floor and walked out onto G Street. The air was oppressive. Standing there on the crowded sidewalk, his mind racing with what Sullivan had told him, he wished he could have asked more questions. But Sullivan had told him exactly what David Morgan had authorized him to say and no more.
As he stood perspiring in the humidity, Powers considered going back up to Sullivan's office and begging off the assignment. Then he took out a clean handkerchief, wiped his brow and neck, and headed down the street to his car.
****
SIX
Landry finished writing a duty roster for the following week and reviewing the stack of teletypes concerning security arrangements for the President's trip to California. There were long passages listing motorcade routes and hotel arrangements, police liaison problems, and the simple logistics of just getting off-duty shifts of agents from airport to hotels and from hotels to God knows where before the President arrived. Each Teletype had been written by a different member of the Secret Service advance team. Landry could tell each agent was copying from the format of the previous presidential trip to Los Angeles and simply filling in the names of the different streets and locations. At the end of each Teletype was the phrase POLICE LIAISON IS BEING MAINTAINED. Dozens of people were spending hundreds of man-hours making sure that manhole covers were welded shut and post office collection boxes were locked, that every room in every building the President was to visit would be checked by bomb experts, that all foods and beverages destined for his lips were analyzed beforehand by the Secret Service chemist (known as Dr. Death), that all service employees in hotels and restaurants, airports, and every other location the President would visit would have their names checked against the master threat list on file in the Secret Service protective intelligence computer.
Since it appeared that the advance team had done its job properly and was ready to keep the President safe while he visited Los Angeles, Landry locked the paperwork in the W-16 safe. He hated paperwork, actually. Though attention to paperwork and the ability to write slick memos often helped agents get ahead in the Secret Service, he considered 90 percent of it totally unnecessary. Hell, years ago one good advance man would have done the work of today's entire advance team, with all their lap-top computers and endless teletypes. But in the old days, he told himself, a black man would never have been promoted to Agent-in-Charge of the White House Detail.
Having spun the dial on the safe, he signed off on the supervisor's tog. He found Bob Tomsic, the on-duty shift leader, in the hallway briefing a new agent and told him he was leaving for the day. Heading toward the EOB exit, Landry stopped for a moment. Something had been at the back of his mind all day. Though because of work he hadn't spent much time with his wife and kids lately, he now took time to move to a phone on a small table a few feet away and dial a number.
"Homicide."
Landry asked to speak with Lyons. The phone clicked and Lyons gave his name.
"Landry here. I thought I'd stop by and pick up a copy of the Stryker report."
"I was just heading for the Grille. Feel like a drink?"
"Sounds good," Landry said, though he seldom drank alcoholic beverages.
"I'll run off a copy and bring it with me."
The English Grille in Georgetown was like a lot of other cop bars. Located near the university on a busy street lined with restaurants and shops, it had a small parking lot in back where detectives drinking on duty could hide their official cars from the view of passing police supervisors. Over the front door was a vertical neon sign with a martini-glass logo and the word ENGLISH illuminated. The GRILLE part of the sign had never worked.
Inside, the fifteen bar stools and six booths in the dimly lit bar were filled with men in suits-mostly white men but a few blacks-and a couple of women who looked like police secretaries. There was a crude oil painting of a reclining Victorian nude above the bar. The bartender, a blotchy, red-faced man with a black toupee and dyed mustache, was busily pouring drinks.
Art Lyons waved at Landry from the end of the bar. He'd saved a stool. Landry joined him and Lyons introduced him to the bartender and some of the regulars.
Landry shook hands a couple of times and ordered a light beer.
Lyons reached inside his jacket and gave Landry a folded police report. "You'll need this," he said, also handing him a small flashlight. Landry said thanks. The bartender set down a beer.
The homicide report, which listed Stryker's name and physical description, gave no address for the deceased. In the location box Lyons had written
Location #I-see Chief of Police log of this date
to hide the fact that the body was discovered in the White House. Landry read further. "It says there was evidence of tattooing."
Lyons touched his temple. "Right inside the hairline near the wound. The pathologist noticed it during the autopsy. A little gunpowder embedded in the skin."
"What do you make of this, my man?"
Lyons twisted his wrist and demonstrated as if aiming a gun at himself. "It's possible to shoot yourself like this. Uncommon, but certainly possible. See, most suicides have a contact wound. You touch the barrel right to the skin. This way he fires while holding the piece a few inches away." He picked up his drink and took a sip. "It's possible that he was ready to do it, then just sort of halfway chickened out, pulling his hand away as he pulled the trigger. Only the Big Kahoona knows for sure."
Landry completed reading the report. There was nothing else in it that differed from what he had learned when Lyons had conducted his investigation in the Special Projects office. He shoved the report in his inside coat pocket. "I'd like to ask you a hypothetical question."
"Shoot."
"Is it possible this could be a murder?"
"Anything is possible. The astronauts went to the moon."
"If this suicide was in fact a murder-and just pretend it was, for the time being-how could it have been done?"
"Someone would have to take Stryker's gun, shoot Stryker in the temple from close range, then find someone to forge Stryker's signature on a suicide note. Ridiculous."
Landry shook his head. "You said it was uncommon for a man to shoot himself while standing up."
"It is. Truthfully, that's the only thing I find out of the ordinary about the damn case. Other than the fact that you didn't have a hint of Stryker being depressed. A man doesn't kill himself on impulse. He thinks about it first. And to even consider the possibility, there has to be something in his life making him believe he's up shit creek without a paddle."
"Ray Stryker worked for me. He wasn't the suicidal type."
"I once worked with a guy in Vice who told me over and over again how happy he was his wife had left him. How overjoyed he was to finally get rid of the bitch. One night he went to her apartment, kicked the door down, and ate his lead right in front of the ex-wife and her boyfriend. You just never know."
"I wouldn't have a man working for me in the White House if I thought he had suicidal tendencies."
"You can't take this personal-"
"I want you to test-fire the gun," Landry interrupted.
Lyons finished his drink and spit some ice back into the glass. "If it'll make you feel better, I'll take it down to the lab and have it done tomorrow morning."
In the morning Powers rose early. He'd experienced a fitful night's sleep and felt as tired as he had when he'd climbed into bed. While showering and dressing he still couldn't get the events of the previous day out of his mind.
There was nothing in the refrigerator to eat for breakfast, but rather than make a trip to the supermarket and chance missing Sullivan's call, he found a Weight Watchers manicotti TV dinner in the back of the freezer compartment and warmed it in the microwave for breakfast.
To kill time, he filled in some Secret Service daily report forms, a stack of which he kept in a kitchen drawer. Every Secret Service agent was required to complete a report for each day's work. After filling in the top section, which listed his name, date of birth, social security number, shift status, rank, and address of permanent record, he filled in the narrative portion under DAILY ACTIVITY. On each, he wrote
Protective duties-POTUS
. POTUS, of course, was the Secret Service abbreviation for President of the United States. All special agents assigned to the White House Detail wrote the same vague phrase on their daily reports. Though filling in such meaningless memoranda had been a constant source of irritation to Powers for years, he had finally accepted the ritual as part of the job. As Landry always advised, where else but in government service could one get paid to waste time filling in the same worthless form each day? In fact, recalled Powers, it was Ray Stryker who had used a calculator to figure that, during a thirty-year career, the average agent would spend two years and eleven months just filling in daily report forms.
By 5:30 P.M., Powers had not only caught up on the two months' worth of reports he was behind but had completed enough reports for the next six months-which he would hand in, one each day, as required.
The phone rang.
He picked up the receiver. It was Sullivan.
"Do you know La Serre? The French restaurant?"
"Twenty-first and K Street?"
"That's the one. She'll be there at seven ... at the counter. She's expecting Morgan to pick her up and drive her to meet the man, but he'll phone her at the last minute and cancel. She's yours from there on out."
The phone clicked.
Dressed casually, Powers left the apartment and took the Metro to the corner of 21st and K Street.
The restaurant faced north on K Street, raised from the sidewalk by about ten steps covered by a red awning on which was painted LA SERRE. He ambled along the sidewalks in the area for a while, checking entrances and exits to the place as well as any nearby Metro stops and parking garages Marilyn might use. In a surveillance, such things could take on great importance, Then he checked his Rolex, inserted his flesh-colored Secret Service hearing-aid-style radio receiver into his ear, plugged it into the HL-20 radio attached to his belt under his sport coat, adjusted the volume, and trudged up the steps. He was early, but arriving early was the custom in Secret Service work. Whether it was getting to the location of a presidential visit or going on surveillance, arriving late was considered an inexcusable mistake, one of the few infractions that could cause an agent to be transferred from the White House Detail. "The President of the United States," as the legendary Special Agent Clint Hill of the Kennedy Detail used to say, "doesn't like to wait."
Powers entered the restaurant. Inside were about twenty-five wooden tables, with checkered tablecloths and cane-backed chairs, and a butcher-block counter he guessed would seat ten or twelve. Less than half the tables and only three of the counter seats were occupied. The college-age waiters and waitresses wore white aprons and black pants. A chalkboard on the wall noted the daily specials: Algerian couscous and
fruits de mer
. Powers imagined the pseudo-cosmopolitan atmosphere would be popular with yuppies who'd once backpacked around Europe for a summer.