Murder at The Washington Tribune: A Capital Crimes Mystery Read online

  Moving to Adams Morgan had reunited her—mother Mexican, father half Spanish and half Irish—joining more than a quarter-million Hispanics living there: Cubans and Dominicans, Brazilians and Mexicans and a token number of Puerto Ricans. Plus, a growing Muslim population, plenty of African Americans, and Asians. Happily renting an apartment with a roof garden, she was free to spend her leisure time up there in a canvas recliner, a tall travel mug of iced Cuban coffee at her side, and ideally never again hearing Peter say, “You’ll end up with skin cancer.” That he was probably right wasn’t the point.

  She caught the busy waitress’s eye, wrote in the air, and the check was placed before her as the man on the adjacent stool ordered another plate of hash.

  “You get the papers yet?” the waitress asked Edith.

  “Any day, says my lawyer. He’s been saying that for weeks. Can’t wait to get it over with and drop the hyphen in my name.”

  Although she’d been told repeatedly that she never needed to pay for her breakfast at the Diner—“Nice having a cop around,” she was told—she always paid full price. She’d seen too many cops get in trouble for less than cornflakes and bananas. She left the Diner and started walking south briskly to catch the nearest Metro at Dupont Circle, a good hike, when her cell phone vibrated, then rang.

  “Hello.”

  “Buenos dias.”

  She smiled. He always greeted her in Spanish.

  “Hello, Joe. Como está usted?”

  “Bien, gracias. You didn’t know I was a linguist, did you?”

  “I still don’t. What’s up?”

  “Jean Kaporis. What else could be up for me?”

  “Nothing new, my friend, but I haven’t clocked in yet.”

  “Morehouse is on the warpath. Or will be soon.”

  “Until he puts on war paint and starts carrying a spear, I wouldn’t worry.”

  “What about poison arrowheads? He has several.”

  “Then I suggest you buy yourself a big shield and keep your distance. Look, I can’t walk and talk at the same time. Chew gum either. I’ll catch up with you later—if there’s a break in the case.”

  “Thanks, Edith. Any scrap will do to feed the animals.”

  As Violent Crime Branch Detective Vargas-Swayze, soon to lose her hyphen, picked up her pace again, she couldn’t help but think of the night she and Wilcox had ended up in bed together. Tell someone to not think of pink elephants and . . . A one-night stand, it was called, although they spent little of that night in a standing position. It had just seemed to happen, and it only happened once. Plenty of excuses on her part—the divorce, pressures at work, too much to drink, too long since she’d been in bed with a man. Him? He’d been riddled with guilt, which she’d tried to assuage, successfully, it seemed. “Let’s forget about it,” she’d said. “It was a one-time thing, Joe. Let’s not let it get in the way of the friendship? Okay?”

  “Okay,” he’d said.

  They hadn’t mentioned it since.

  Wilcox wasn’t thinking of that night as he logged on to his computer in the Trib’s vast, carpeted, smoke-free, peaceful, and virtually silent newsroom, which had all the ambience of an insurance company. Only the barely audible tap dance of keyboards being stroked intruded on his thoughts.

  His meeting earlier that morning with Paul Morehouse had gone poorly.

  “Look,” Morehouse had yelled once Wilcox and Rick Jillian, a new reporter assigned to the Kaporis story, had settled in chairs across from him, “they’re eating our lunch. Jesus Christ, she gets killed right here off our own newsroom and we’re last on the MPD food chain. Come on, Joe, you used to be sourced over there, better than anybody on the beat. What’s happened? How come all of a sudden they’re stonewalling you?”

  “They’re not,” Wilcox responded. He resented a need to go on the defensive. As far as he was concerned, he’d been working the case hard. “Nobody’s eating nothing. All the other outlets have is speculation, and they make that sound like inside info. It’s all BS.”

  “Even your daughter?” Morehouse asked.

  “What about her?”

  “She claimed on the tube that an interview she did with Jean’s mother revealed possible suspects and motives. Was she right? What did the mother say?”

  Wilcox didn’t respond.

  “You interviewed the mother. Right?”

  “Right, and she didn’t say anything that would point to a suspect or motive.”

  “Maybe you didn’t ask the right questions.”

  “I asked the right questions. Paul, the decision was made upstairs to not turn Jean’s murder into a tabloid circus, not here at the highly respected, above-the-fray Washington Tribune. Remember?”

  The younger reporter turned in his chair to physically look away from Wilcox’s sarcasm. Morehouse pretended to take in something interesting in the airshaft outside the office’s single window before slowly returning his attention to the reporters. “Rick,” he told the younger one, “run another check on visitors who signed in the day Jean died. I know, I know, we’ve been over it a hundred times but do it again.”

  Jillian and Wilcox stood.

  “Stay a minute, Joe,” Morehouse said.

  The door closed, Morehouse said, “Come on, come on, Joe, lay it out for me.”

  “Lay what out?”

  “What’s eating you.”

  Wilcox started to respond but Morehouse pressed on.

  “You know damn well what I’m talking about. You’ve been walking around lately with a chip on your shoulder, or looking like you swallowed one. That doesn’t do me any good, or the paper. You’re the best cops reporter I have, or am I talking past tense?”

  Again, he didn’t allow Wilcox to reply.

  “I met with Mary yesterday. She’s greenlighted a task force for the Kaporis story: you, Rick, a couple of researchers, a graphic artist, and that computer whiz, Kahlia, from Research. I want you to spearhead it—but not if you’re about to go off the deep end and start seeing a shrink five times a week.”

  When Wilcox said nothing, Morehouse asked, “Are you?”

  “No.”

  “Good. As long as we’re leveling with each other, what’s going on at MPD?”

  Wilcox shrugged. “They’re working the case. That’s all I know.”

  “They’re not talking to you?”

  “Yeah, they’re talking to me, but they don’t have a hell of a lot to tell me.”

  “Because of Roberta? They punishing her old man because of the stuff she did on them?”

  “No. That’s not happening.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just—know.”

  “How far did you get talking to people here?”

  “Staffers MPD questioned?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I hit most of them, I think, at least those I know about.”

  “You think there are others? You think the cops talked to someone we don’t know about?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Get the list from MPD.”

  “They won’t release it.”

  “Jesus, Joe, I don’t care about it being released. Get it off the record. They spent days here interviewing people.”

  “And they still think she was killed by one of us.”

  “If that’s true, then everybody upstairs would be very happy if we solved it in-house. Jean’s murder is still high profile a month later. Still hot, and will continue to be. There are actually people out there who think the world would be better off if all reporters got whacked. Maybe we can’t play Sherlock and bust the case ourselves, but we should at least be out front with coverage. We’re it. Come on, Joe, suck it up. Get your team together and pull out all the stops. You’ll have your own account number to bill the team’s expenses against. This could be the story you’ve been waiting for your whole goddamn career.”

  When Wilcox returned to the newsroom, Rick Jillian was there along with Kathleen Lansden, one of two researchers recruited
to join the Kaporis task force. Wilcox sat heavily in his chair and looked up at them. “Task force,” he said. “Why didn’t they come up with a task force a month ago?”

  “I guess because—” Jillian started to say.

  “Yeah?” Wilcox asked.

  “I guess because they figured you were all they needed, Joe. You know, with your sources and—”

  “And they were wrong. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “No, I’m not saying that. Anyway, you want me to get the others together?”

  Wilcox smiled to break the tension. “A meeting is a good idea,” he said. “How about the end of the day, say six? Nail down a conference room and we’ll lay out everything we have. You’d better get on what Morehouse said, check that list again of visitors the day Jean got it: guests up here in editorial, tradespeople, everybody.”

  “Okay.”

  Wilcox said to Kathleen, “Pull up that database again, Kathleen, the one listing interviews other media did with Jean’s friends and family. Compare it against the interviews I did—we did. Let’s see who we missed.”

  “Shall do.”

  Now alone, Wilcox pulled out notes he’d made. The list was long, more than forty names, many of them editorial coworkers known to have been in the building the night Kaporis was murdered. Interviewing them had brought out overt resentment in some: “What the hell are you saying, Joe, that I might have killed her?” Many of them had also been interviewed by a team of MPD detectives headed by Edith Vargas-Swayze, who’d asked tougher questions than Wilcox. He’d placed a red dot next to their names, and a green dot for those individuals claiming to have seen her in the newsroom that night. But even they had little to offer: “No, I didn’t see anything unusual.” “No, I didn’t see her talking with anyone in particular.” “No, I don’t know anybody who was getting it on with her.”

  Wilcox knew that the list of men and women working that night couldn’t be conclusive. It was built upon those names scheduled for the night shift, which didn’t, of course, include anyone from the day side who’d decided to work late, or to come back after hours to follow up on a story. There wasn’t any record of employees coming and going in and out of the building. All you did was wave your badge at the private security officer on duty in the front lobby and you were in. Had Kaporis’s killer been an editorial staffer who’d come in late that night but denied having been there? Unless someone testified to having seen him (or her) there, they were home free, their word the last word. Which was the case with him, Joe Wilcox. After dinner at home with Georgia, he’d returned to the newsroom a little after nine to put the finishing touches on an article about a new MPD initiative to combat gang warfare in the District’s southeast quadrant. He’d told the police of his movements and activities on that night, and his own name headed the list on his desk, a tiny red dot next to it.

  His questioning of colleagues hadn’t produced anything even resembling a lead, any more than MPD’s efforts had—unless, of course, their probing had been fruitful.

  He studied the list carefully, made checkmarks next to those he wanted to see again, and started calling. Jean’s parents, who lived in Delaware, had returned home with their daughter’s remains after authorities had released her body. He didn’t relish a drive to Delaware and decided to not follow up with them that day. Instead, he called Roberta at the TV station.

  “Hey, Dad, I just got in. What’s up?”

  “Not much. Let me ask you something.”

  “Hold on.”

  He heard her shout to someone to arrange for a camera crew at two that afternoon. She came back on the line. “Sorry, Dad. Shoot. You said you had something to ask me.”

  “Right. Did you say in one of your reports that Jean Kaporis’s mother said something that pointed to a suspect or motive?”

  There was a telling silence on her end.

  “That’s right,” she finally said.

  “Look, I know I’m intruding into your turf, but I’d really appreciate knowing what she told you.”

  “Dad, I—”

  “I know, I know, I’m out of bounds here. But—”

  “She told me that her daughter had said she was seeing someone at the Trib.”

  “She said that? I mean, Jean told her mother that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you report it? I’m sorry, but I don’t catch every one of your newscasts.” He laughed. “Some father, huh?”

  “About dating somebody at the Trib? No, I didn’t. She didn’t have any names so there wasn’t anything to report. The MPD spokesman had already said they were focusing on her coworkers.”

  Wilcox heard her say to someone, “Hey, get your hands off the cookies.”

  “Roberta?”

  “Sorry. I baked a batch of peanut butter cookies, Mom’s recipe, to take to the cop whose mother died from that botched operation last week. You heard about it.”

  “Yeah, sure. You’re baking cookies for him?”

  “My secret weapon. Amazing how much information a few cookies will buy.”

  “I don’t wonder,” Wilcox said, barely audible.

  “Dad? You okay?”

  “Oh, sure, Robbie. Just checking in with my daughter, the crack reporter. If anything comes up—I mean, I’m getting a lot of pressure here and—”

  “I’ll keep you in the loop,” she said. “Have to run. Covering an MPD news conference this afternoon, and got to deliver these goodies before the cookie Mafia cleans me out. Love you. Bye.”

  He hung up, sat back with his arms behind his head, and smiled. Roberta’s enthusiasm was palpable, uplifting. There’d been a time when he attacked each day with that same zeal, the world something to be conquered, obstacles no more than minor bumps in the road to be easily vaulted. Age had something to do with it, of course. Roberta, like so many other wide-eyed young professionals, awoke each morning with a sense of immortality and youthful superiority bordering on arrogance. Like the smug, ambitious Gene Hawthorne sitting three cubicles from Wilcox, whose appreciation of experience and history, of the Trib’s founders, leaders, and outstanding newsmen whose photos lined the corridor walls, was nonexistent.

  Roberta’s zest was replaced by the unpleasant realization that Morehouse had been right—he hadn’t asked the right questions of Kaporis’s mother, actually her stepmother. He’d asked only about young men Jean might have been dating, which elicited a denial by the mother of knowing anything about her daughter’s social life. Why hadn’t he followed up with specific questions about her life at work, about whether she’d ever mentioned dating a coworker? He would have done that automatically a few years ago. Silently, and emptily, he pledged to get his act together.

  He made two other calls that morning, the first to see whether a friend from the Associated Press, John Grant, was free for lunch. He was, and they arranged to meet at noon at the Press Club. His next call was to Mary Jane Pruit, Jean Kaporis’s roommate.

  “Hello, Mrs. Pruit, it’s Joe Wilcox from the Trib.”

  “Hello, Mr. Wilcox.”

  “I was wondering whether I could grab some of your time later today.”

  “Why?”

  “To go over a few things, some loose ends.”

  “I have nothing else to say,” she said in a sleepy voice. “I told you and the police everything I know.”

  “I’m sure you did, but there are a few issues I’d like to clarify. I won’t take much of your time. Promise.”

  “What time?”

  “Your call. Whatever works for you.”

  “Three would be okay.”

  “Three it is. Your place?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Great. See you then.”

  He thought about the interview he’d done with Mary Jane Pruit the week following her roommate’s murder. He’d asked her about men in Kaporis’s life and basically received the same response he’d gotten from the mother. But while he’d accepted the mother’s denial of knowing anything, that answer didn’t ring true in
retrospect coming from a roommate. He was chewing on that thought as he entered the National Press Club at Fourteenth and F Street, NW and went directly to the Reliable Source Bar. Grant was sitting with other members at the bar, a drink already in front of him. Wilcox slid onto a stool next to his AP buddy and ordered a white wine.

  “How goes?” Grant asked.

  “I’ve been better,” Wilcox said. “You?”

  “Good, considering the terrorism Popsicle is now orange flavored. You realize our Muslim friends never have to actually attack us again? All they have to do is keep chattering, as our security experts term it, and we spend another billion protecting targets that aren’t going to be hit in the first place. What’s new with the Kaporis murder?”

  Wilcox sipped his wine. “What’s new? Not a thing. You pick up anything around town?”

  A shrug and an order for a second drink. “Just the ex-boyfriend,” he said to the glass.

  “What ex-boyfriend?”

  Grant turned to Wilcox. “I was working that real estate scandal—excuse me, alleged real estate scandal—involving Congressman Coakely from Maine. Somebody at MPD, who shall remain nameless, told me Kaporis broke up with a boyfriend a month or so before the murder. Hell hath no fury like a spurned boyfriend, especially when the fox you lost in the hunt looked like her. I was looking at pictures the other day. Man, she was gorgeous.”