Murder at the Pentagon Page 3

  Foxboro bounded up steps in front of the narrow, two-story taupe brick house with the Federal blue shutters and door, and announced his arrival with a sharp rap of the brass knocker. Annabel answered. She held Rufus, their Great Blue Dane, by his collar to keep him from planting large paws on Foxboro’s shoulders. “Hello, Jeff,” she said pleasantly. “Come in. We were getting a little worried about you.”

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “Been a hectic couple of days at the office. Or years. I forget which.”

  “Decades,” said Annabel, taking his coat and leading him to the living room, where Margit sat, a glass of white wine in her hand.

  “Hi, honey,” Foxboro said, kissing her cheek, lingering a little. To Annabel: “Where’s the prof?” Foxboro was never sure how to address Mac Smith. In his student days, of course, it was Professor Smith. Now that Foxboro was a full-fledged attorney and a senatorial aide, he’d been asked by Smith to call him Mac, which he did but always with a modicum of unease.

  “Where else?” Annabel replied. “In the kitchen whipping up another culinary triumph. Something to make Burger King limp with envy. Drink?”

  “Yes, please,” Foxboro said. “Scotch on the rocks would be help for the needy.”

  Annabel returned with a large glass filled with ice and Knockando. Few blends in the Smith household, Jeff thought appreciatively. All the scotch was single blend, and the bourbon came from a single barrel. Smith poked his head out of the kitchen to shout a greeting. He wore a long apron over a blue button-down shirt and red paisley tie. The illustration on the apron was a stream running through a forest. Two oven mitts shaped like trout were attached to the apron with Velcro.

  Annabel sat next to Margit on a love seat, Rufus sprawled at their feet and halfway into the next room. Foxboro wandered into the kitchen, where Smith was busy rubbing a beef tenderloin with soy sauce. He further seasoned the meat with fresh pepper, then placed the platter on top of the refrigerator. “The last time I cooked a beef tenderloin, I made the mistake of leaving it on the counter,” Smith said. “One swallow, and Rufus enjoyed another hors d’oeuvre.”

  Foxboro laughed. “A Big Mac for him.”

  “And Chinese takeout for us. How have you been, Jeff?”

  “Pretty well, although I feel as though I’ve taken up residence in Senator Wishengrad’s office. By the way, he sends his best. I didn’t know you were friends.”

  Smith looked up from a large cast-iron skillet into which he’d placed a tablespoon of olive oil. “We’re not friends. I spent some time on the senator’s commission on the cities, and I got to know what a good man he is. Not much came out of the commission, I’m afraid. Your boss is in the minority where federal aid to cities is concerned, but we did what we could. You have a drink. Good.” Smith picked up a heavy cut-crystal glass filled with ice and a velvety brown liquid, raised it to his lips, and sipped slowly and noisily. “Excellent. I know the trend these days continues to be wine spritzers, or bottled water with little bubbles, but a good single-barrel bourbon is a lot more soul-satisfying. At least for me. Rufus doesn’t much care for it.” He turned on the oven, adjusted the temperature dial to 450 degrees, and leaned against the counter. “I haven’t caught up on the news yet today. Anything on the Joycelen murder?”

  Foxboro shrugged. “About the only thing Rufus doesn’t care for, except burglars. Not much talk about the murder where I’ve spent the last few days. Oh, there was some speculation right after it happened, but our Arab friend with his new toy is center stage.”

  “Damn shame,” Smith said. “Any movement on the UN resolution to condemn him?”

  “Not enough. Everybody seems to have their own notion how to deal with it, which means it probably won’t be dealt with, at least for a while.”

  Margit appeared in the doorway, and Foxboro put his arm around her waist. Annabel joined them, causing Smith to ask, “Why is it that everybody always ends up in the kitchen? My sexual magnetism?”

  “In this case it’s not your cooking prowess, or any other. It’s four fierce appetites,” Annabel answered. Smith enjoyed cooking, although he didn’t do much of it. He considered himself an able chef, but it was the quiet consensus of those who knew him best that the key to his success in the kitchen was in the markets, buying the best ingredients, and keeping the menus simple.

  “What’s the scuttlebutt at the Pentagon on Joycelen?” Smith asked Margit.

  “Not much that I know of, though we seem to manufacture gossip with greater productivity than anything else. Well, maybe with the exception of paperwork. The Defense Criminal Investigation Service is in charge. Whether they’ve gotten anywhere isn’t being broadcast outside their offices. Strictly information blind for the troops. Which, of course, must be driving the press crazy. It’s all over TV, radio, and the papers, but they just keep repeating the few facts they know, which are damned few.”

  Annabel felt a chill that was not the result of the central air-conditioning that pumped cool air into the house. She wrapped her arms about herself and said, “Eerie, the whole business of Dr. Joycelen being murdered inside the Pentagon.” She said to Margit, “You must feel on edge being there.”

  “A little. But there’s more than twenty thousand of us. I suppose that the victim was a man of Dr. Joycelen’s stature contributes to it.”

  “To say nothing of how it could have happened in one of the most secure buildings in the world,” Smith added. “Gives credence to the adage that you can never make anything completely secure. Or anyone.”

  Margit said, “What I imagine we’re all thinking is that because security is so tight—and there’s no doubt that it is—the murderer obviously had to be someone with clear access to the building.”

  “Which means, of course, that Joycelen was done in by one of your own,” Foxboro said.

  “I’d rather not think about that,” Margit said.

  “Hard not to,” Foxboro said.

  Margit glanced at him; was he about to take a dig at the military establishment? He was fond of doing that, and they’d had words in the past, resulting in his promise to curtail the tendency. He knew what she was thinking, smiled broadly, and pulled her closer to him.

  Margit, Jeff, Annabel, and Rufus watched with appropriate respect as Smith browned the beef on all sides in the skillet. He then transferred it to the oven: “Should take about twenty minutes,” he said, “just enough time to enjoy a relaxing drink together. Old American custom, although we allow young Americans to play, too.”

  Glasses refilled, they repaired to the living room, where, for no apparent reason, Margit started to giggle. The others looked at her. “I feel like I’m back in law school,” she said.

  Annabel smiled. “I wouldn’t mind being back in law school.” She’d been a tough-minded but fair divorce attorney when she met Mac Smith after his wife and son had been killed by a drunk driver on the Beltway. Smith was, at the time, one of Washington’s most respected trial lawyers. Not long after meeting Annabel, and after many long, soul-searching conversations with her, he closed his practice and accepted his present post at the university. Annabel had enthusiastically supported his decision, which certainly made it less taxing, and taxable, for him. Then, about a year later, they had a similar series of conversations, only this time it was Annabel voicing her desire: to stop practicing law and to pursue what had become a fervent interest in pre-Columbian art. She disposed of the cases she had and rented a small, pretty storefront in Georgetown in which she established a gallery devoted to her passion. It did well, and she eventually took over adjacent space to accommodate the growing number of pieces she’d successfully obtained. Of course, not only Mac’s but their combined income was dramatically cut, but as Smith often said, the first debt to be paid was the one they owed themselves, and now and then to society. Not only criminals should do so, he pointed out. Neither of them ever regretted the decision.

  “How about you, Mac?” Annabel asked. “Still view Margit and Jeff as students?”

/>   “Certainly not, although I do feel a little older sitting with former students, one now a major in the air force and a helicopter-flying lawyer of all things, the other a trusted key aide and brain-truster to one of our country’s prime legislators.”

  As in Washington it’s wont to do, the conversation turned to local gossip. Each of them had enough contributions to that theme to make it lively, and there was much laughter until Smith raised his nose in the air, sniffed, stood, and said, “Enough! I don’t want to overcook the beef.”

  They were soon seated at a nicely laid table in the dining room, and Smith opened a bottle of “house red, by the glass or bottle.” “Gallo by the gallon,” Annabel put in helpfully.

  Mac asked, “Anybody ever meet Joycelen?”

  They hadn’t.

  “I heard him speak once,” said Smith, enjoying the garlic-touched mashed potatoes. “As brilliant as he obviously was, I had the impression he wasn’t the sort of fellow you’d want to end up sitting next to on a long plane trip.”

  Foxboro laughed. “His personality didn’t seem to turn off the ladies. Married twice, and engaged, I understand.”

  Margit said, “I’d completely forgotten about a conversation I had at the picnic. There was a woman there. Christa Wren was her name, I think. She said she was at the picnic with Dr. Joycelen, although I never saw him with her. The minute they brought the news out of the building that there had been an accident, she left. But then, everybody was leaving.”

  Smith said to Foxboro, “You say he was engaged? Maybe that was his fiancée.”

  “Yes, it was,” Foxboro said, returning his attention to what was left on his plate.

  “How do you know her name?” Margit asked.

  “I heard someone mention it once,” Foxboro replied without looking up.

  Smith sat back, dabbed at his mouth with his napkin, and said, “Jeff, I get the feeling you know more about Joycelen than you’re willing to admit.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, it makes sense that Senator Wishengrad and his staff would have a distinct interest in Joycelen. After all, as deputy director of DARPA and the brains behind that advanced weapons system … what is it called?”

  “Project Safekeep.”

  “Right. Project Safekeep. Your boss has been criticizing that program since it was first announced. Did the senator have dealings with Joycelen?”

  “Not that I know of. Maybe before I joined the staff.”

  Smith looked at Annabel and Margit, whose faces mirrored what Smith was thinking. Foxboro did not wish to discuss Joycelen on any level other than what the papers were saying. Fair enough, Smith decided. Drop the subject. After they finished the main course, with much lip-smacking and noisy commendation for the chef, he went to the kitchen and returned with a platter of four cheeses—a Tuscany Caciotta, an English Somerset Cheddar, the French Fourme d’Ambert, and an Italian Toma. Smith’s fondness for cheese rivaled Annabel’s love of pre-Columbian sculpture.

  The evening was extended into the living room, the topics of conversation changing with regularity and rapidity. The discussion would have gone on longer had Foxboro not announced his fatigue, saying that if he didn’t get home to bed, the Smiths would have an overnight houseguest on the couch. Margit had driven there and had found a parking space—as rare as Jeff’s taxi—relatively near the house. “Come on, let me get Senator Sleepyhead home,” she said, taking Foxboro’s hand and pulling him from the couch with exaggerated difficulty.

  “How are your quarters at Bolling?” Smith asked at the front door.

  “Wonderful,” Margit said. “Not only does Bolling have the best commissary, PX, and gas station in the area, I wake up each morning to a stirring pageant. The Air Force Band is headquartered there and rehearses every day, and the Presidential Honor Guard goes through its drills. I love it. I only wish it were still an active flight center. I’m going to have to get in my chopper time at another base.” Despite its rich history—Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis was housed there following his historic 1927 flight to Paris, its hangar now the commissary—no aircraft had landed at the air-force base since 1962. An F-105 Thunderbird cemented in place at the base’s entrance was the only plane to be seen. Bolling’s role since 1962 had been strictly support.

  “I’m sorry you’re so exhausted,” Margit said to Jeff as she drove to his apartment in Crystal City, an area in Virginia just across the Potomac that owed its rapid growth to its easy proximity to Washington and to the presence of the Pentagon, with all its related activity and personnel.

  “Goes with the game, I guess,” he said sullenly.

  “Nice evening,” she said. “They are a terrific couple.”

  “Yes, they are, only I wish the professor didn’t have a need to probe as though you were on a witness stand.”

  Margit laughed. “I don’t think he does that. He’s just an intensely interested man who picks up on what people say and who wants to know more.”

  “Maybe. Anyway, the food was good.”

  They sat in silence in front of his apartment building before she said, “I hope we can find more time together, Jeff. Even though I’m back in Washington, our lives seem to drift further apart.”

  “We’ll have to work on it,” he said. “Look, Margit, I’m a noncontributory to any further conversation. Damn, I’m beat. Hate to end the evening, but I have to.”

  “I understand,” she said. She leaned over and kissed him lightly on the lips. For a second she thought he was about to leave it at that, but then he shifted in the passenger seat and put his arms around her. This round of affection was conducted with considerably more fervor, and went further and lasted longer.

  As she watched him enter his building, she realized how much he meant to her. Did she mean as much to him? She liked to think she did, and with that thought she headed for Bolling and a good night’s sleep.

  4

  The twenty-eight-passenger blue air-force bus that traveled Route 15B every thirty minutes between Bolling AFB and the Pentagon was almost full when Margit boarded it in front of Building 1300. She’d driven her red Honda Prelude to work the first few weeks, but decided that the bus was a better bet. Her rank entitled her to a Pentagon parking space roughly in the middle of the sixty-four acres designated for such use, which meant she had a quarter-mile walk from her car. Those of lower rank faced a half-mile hike each morning. The parking, coupled with a chaotic traffic situation (though in a capital city of high tech, not a traffic light is to be seen within the Pentagon’s grounds) caused her to leave her car at the base most mornings, unless she had evening plans that called for its use. Of course, she could have joined the “Bolling Blasters,” a club of runners who jogged to the Pentagon each morning. But that sort of sweaty start to the workday didn’t appeal.

  As she joined a long line of men and women flashing badges at security guards, she felt a familiar exhilaration at entering the building. Military and civilians alike seemed to share a sense of urgency that, Margit reasoned, had nothing to do with whether their daily tasks were urgent. It was the pace of the Pentagon that caught you up, a briskness, the crisp uniforms and close haircuts, the sheer numbers of people, many of them extraordinarily intelligent and dedicated, aside from the predictable corps of pay-promotion-pension types, the knowledge that the security of the country rested in your hands (sort of), all of which generated a cadence that even the slowest-moving found impossible to deny—except, perhaps, for the cleaning crew, who seemed to find a more deliberate gait to be more appropriate.

  The offices of SecDef’s general counsel were located off corridor 9, on the third floor of the D ring. Margit’s office was 3D964; a visitor could find her if he knew that the 3 designated the floor, that D designated the ring, and that the first numeral specified the corridor off which her office was located.

  “Five” seemed to have been the rule for the designers of the building back in 1941, when fifteen thousand workers went about the task of constructi
ng a center to house America’s military establishment—fragmented into fiefdoms under what was then called the National Military Establishment, unified six years later into the Department of Defense. The building’s five sides went with five floors, each floor connected by wide ramps to allow for quick evacuation in the event of an emergency. There were five interior rings marked by the first five letters of the alphabet. The A and E rings were most prized; offices in the A ring looked out over the center court. The E ring, which circled the exterior of the building, gave views of the river, the city, Arlington Cemetery—depending upon which side you were on. Most offices in the B, C, and D rings lacked windows through which the sun could brighten space or spirits.

  It was claimed that no two offices in the Pentagon were more than a seven-minute walk from each other, assuming, of course, you knew where you were going. Margit now felt secure in finding her own office; she made sure to take the same route each day. She’d been successful locating a few other offices in the month she’d been there, but had once become hopelessly lost when searching for one on the fifth floor of the Β ring. Lots of jokes about strangers entering the Pentagon and finding their way out days later, all undoubtedly apocryphal, but then again …