Murder in Havana Read online

  “And?”

  “I said no. I want to spend all my time watching you.”

  “Go ahead,” he said. “I know how much you love it.”

  “Not as much as I love this bigger-than-life character named Max Pauling. You’ve taken years off my life—but made it sweeter.” She wondered what he was thinking but didn’t intrude. He’d been so open after arriving home, more than she’d ever experienced with him before. But once he’d spun his tale about having been in Cuba and everything that had ensued, he’d fallen silent again, not sullen, never unpleasant, but closed, guarded, insular.

  “Sure you wouldn’t mind if I go with Roberta?”

  “Not at all, sweetheart.”

  What he’d been thinking at that moment was what he’d been thinking ever since leaving Cuba. Celia Sardiña. Would he ever have that chance to sit with her and learn the truth? He doubted it. All he knew was that she would enter his thoughts every day, at odd moments, and probably for the rest of his life. He wondered where she was, what she was doing, and who she was doing it to. Would she affect other men as she did him? Of course. He hadn’t the slightest doubt that she’d murdered Price McCullough, and had set him up to take the fall.

  Would she be willing to kill again for the Cuban cause? Or for some other cause?

  Could she live comfortably with herself for the rest of her life as someone who killed strangers for causes, looked them in the eye and pulled the trigger, a smile on her lovely lips, a hot temperament but blood so cold that ice wouldn’t melt in her mouth?

  He knew the answer. Chances are she would marry, have children, and assign the murderous portion of her life to that segment of the brain in which youthful indiscretions, faddish teen behavior, and hurtful lies are relegated.

  Like himself.

  “How did you feel when you killed him?”

  “How did I feel?”

  “Yes.”

  “I—I didn’t especially feel anything.”

  “Nothing? Not a moment of doubt? Of guilt?”

  “No.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “I knew of him.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I knew who he was. I knew what he was.”

  “What was his reaction?”

  A bemused raised eyebrow preceded, “He didn’t have time to react. It’s the best way.”

  “I see.” He added to notes he’d been making. “How do you feel now?”

  “Fine.”

  “Trouble sleeping? Nightmares?”

  “Of course not.”

  The sound of a window air conditioner gently bridged the lull.

  “You’ll be gone for two months,” he said. “On leave.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where will you go?” he asked, knowing it was a question that would not be answered. His was not a need-to-know.

  Silence.

  He made another note and closed the black leather portfolio resting on his lap. “Thank you for coming in.”

  After watching her departing figure, great legs and all, he opened the portfolio and stared for a moment at the name on the file. Celia Sardiña. He wrote CLEARED, which reflected his psychiatric judgment, closed it, went to a safe in a corner of the austere room, opened it, placed the folio inside, closed the door, spun the wheel, checked the door, then returned to his desk and dialed a number.

  “I’m leaving,” he said. “See you at home.”

  He left the building and got behind the wheel of his black Jeep Cherokee. If the traffic cooperated, he’d be in time to catch the final few innings of his son’s Little League game. Usually, as a psychiatrist cleared by the Central Intelligence Agency to treat that agency’s operatives and to do an assessment following any assignment in which the operative had been called upon to kill, he had trained himself to immediately forget about the interview and the person. But this woman was different. She was terrifically appealing, bewitchingly beautiful, and smart—a degree in biochemistry—analytical, and in control of her emotions.

  Who had she killed on behalf of the agency? Where? Why? What had the victim done to prompt it? Where would Ms. Sardiña go on her two-month mandatory leave? And after that, would she ever be called upon to kill again, and do so without hesitation?

  Strange people, those who work undercover, he thought as he pulled into a parking space next to the ball field. His son’s team, in their green shirts and baseball hats, was at bat. The boy stepped into the batter’s cage as his father reached the long wooden bench on which other parents sat.

  “Come on, Joey!” he shouted, hands cupped around his mouth. “Good eyes, son. Take a good cut.”

  His eyes followed the ball as it left Joey’s bat, shot between the third baseman and shortstop, and rolled to the outfield fence.

  For my son, William Wallace Daniel, who was killed tragically at the age of forty-one

  Don’t miss Margaret Truman’s next Capital Crimes novel

  MURDER AT FORD’S THEATRE

  Available in bookstores everywhere from Ballantine Books

  Here’s a sneak preview.…

  Travel guides claim that the average high temperature in Washington, D.C., in September is seventy-nine degrees Fahrenheit. But on this particular Tuesday, the day after a long Labor Day weekend, the thermometer read eighty-one at seven in the morning, which meant ninety was a possibility by noon, a hell of a time for Johnny Wales’s air conditioner to decide to crash. It had ground to a halt sometime during the night; it had to have been between two in the morning when Wales returned from a night of drinking with his buddies, and five A.M. when he was awakened by the sound of the vintage window unit seizing up.

  He rolled his sticky body out of bed at seven and stood in front of an oscillating table fan, raising his arms to allow the moving air to wash over his nakedness. Understandably, his mood was palpably foul; his mutterings were mostly four-lettered as he poured orange juice, washed down a handful of vitamins, and entered the shower. The weather was bad enough, and you couldn’t do anything about that. But Bancroft’s early crew call at Ford’s was arbitrary. What was the big deal? he wondered as he readjusted the faucets to add cooler water to the mix. It was only a teenage drama workshop production.

  As he moved about getting ready in his room above an army-navy store on Ninth Street, not far from the Capitol City Brewing Company, the final stop on last night’s toot, and only a few blocks from Ford’s Theatre, where he’d been employed as a stagehand for the past two years, his size—six feet four inches tall and 220 pounds—made the cramped studio apartment seem smaller. He pulled on a faded pair of blue jeans, Washington Redskins T-shirt, slipped tan deck shoes over bare feet, attached a black fanny pack to his waist, and checked himself in the mirror. Building and erecting stage sets hadn’t been his ambition when graduating from the University of Wisconsin seven years ago. He’d been a leading man in university productions, a big, handsome guy who might make it in Hollywood one day if the chips fell right. He’d tried that for a year, but left Tinseltown weary of failure and wary of tinsel and followed a girlfriend to Washington, where his stagecraft courses at Wisconsin landed him after a while membership in the union and a job at the theatre. It wasn’t acting, but at least it was showbiz: No jokes about following circus elephants with shovels, thank you.

  He stopped at a Starbucks, eschewing an effete latte at scandalous prices for a large coffee light and sweet, and walked through the stage entrance of Ford’s Theatre at precisely eight. His pique at having to be there early was eased by the welcome blast of AC. A uniformed park ranger stood backstage with some of Wales’s fellow stagehands, drinking coffee and laughing about something. The ranger in the drab brown uniform was one of many who would conduct hourly, fifteen-minute lectures for tourists later that day as they wandered into America’s most infamous theatre, the three-storey, solid brick building where, not playacting, Abe Lincoln had been shot to death by the actor John Wilkes Booth.

  “Hey, big guy, good weekend?”

&n
bsp; “Yeah,” Wales said, leaning against a piece of stage furniture and sipping his coffee. “Over too soon.” A pulsating headache had developed between leaving the apartment and arriving at the theatre. No sense mentioning it; he wouldn’t get any sympathy anyway. “Where’s Sydney?”

  “Who cares?”

  “I care,” said Wales. “He called this stupid meeting.”

  “Don’t speak ill of the famous Bancroft,” someone said.

  “Screw the famous Sydney Bancroft,” Wales said, pressing fingertips to his temple. “Besides, he’s not famous anymore. He was famous.”

  “I sense a hangover, Johnny.”

  Wales laughed. “You sense it, I feel it.”

  “Snap to. Our leader has arrived.”

  Attention turned to an open yellow door linking the theatre to the adjacent attached building in which the Ford’s Theatre Society offices were housed. While the National Park Service maintained the theatre as an historic site, it was the nongovernmental Ford’s Theatre Society that used the venue to mount its ambitious schedule of theatrical productions. Heading that society, and coming through the door, was the theatre’s producing director, Clarise Emerson, a former Hollywood TV producer who’d been recruited three years earlier to replace the departing Frankie Hewitt. Hewitt had been brought in almost thirty-five years before by then Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall to help develop a plan for the theatre following its most recent renovations, and to choreograph fund-raising efforts. Hewitt was a tough act to follow. The former wife of 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt, Frankie had guided Ford’s Theatre from being solely a government museum chronicling the Lincoln assassination to one of America’s preeminent resident theatres, a living tribute to Lincoln’s well-known love of the performing arts. More than twenty musicals had received their world premieres there since the beautifully restored theatre opened in January 1968, including Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope, and Your Arms Too Short to Box With God, many moving on to Broadway. And hundreds of plays had been performed, all adhering to Ford’s stated mission: “To produce musicals and plays that embody family values, underscore multiculturalism, and illuminate the eclectic character of American life.”

  “Dull theatre!” some critics said.

  Certainly noncontroversial. Avant-garde playwrights need not apply. Nothing to ruffle the feathers of members of Congress who decided how much to include for the theatre in the yearly congressional budget, particularly eighty-six-year-old Alabama Senator Topper Sybers, chairman of the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources. Unlike some “reviewers” who never saw a play or painting or book they didn’t like, Sybers had never seen a play or piece of art that wasn’t lubricious. But Clarise had more than financial reasons these days for not wanting to provoke the elderly, feisty senator from Alabama. The president, Lewis Nash, Clarise’s lifelong friend, had recently nominated her to chair the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Sybers’s Labor and Human Resources Committee would conduct her confirmation hearing.

  Clarise’s appearance that morning was surprising to the assembled. She seldom set foot inside the theatre, delegating virtually every creative aspect to others. Her time was better spent, she often said, squeezing money out of wealthy patrons, individuals and corporations alike.

  “Good morning,” she said brightly to the half-dozen stagehands marking time.

  “ ’Morning, Clarise,” they responded.

  Because of her status on the Washington scene—not only was she a personal friend of the president and headed for the NEA, she’d once been married to Bruce Lerner, senior senator from Virginia, a handsome, sixty-year-old bachelor often seen on the arm of beautiful, high profile women—there was the natural tendency for younger people at Ford’s to address her as Ms. Emerson. But she’d put an end to that shortly after taking up her post there, and everyone called her Clarise.

  That she was youthful in appearance and manner helped. People took her to be considerably younger than fifty-four. Good genes had given her not only beauty but boundless energy; Clarise didn’t walk, she moved at an almost constant trot, up on the balls of her feet, looking as though she might suddenly decide to become airborne. She stood military erect, like her father, who’d served twenty years in the air force, retiring to their small farm in Ohio to die of a coronary three years after exchanging his blue uniform for coveralls. She was, in fact, like her father, Luke Emerson, in almost all ways, physically and philosophically, except for her sense of humor, which was decidedly her mother’s, a short, plump woman better suited to the role of farmer’s wife than military spouse, subservient to her dour husband when in his presence, but wickedly prankish about him when chatting with women friends.

  “Early start,” Clarise said. “What’s the occasion?”

  “Sydney called a meeting,” a stagehand said.

  “Oh?”

  “The teenage show,” Wales said.

  “Is there a problem with it?”

  “Not that we know of, Clarise.”

  “Sydney’s not even in town,” she said.

  “That’s just terrific,” Wales said, dropping his empty cup into a trash can. “Anybody got an aspirin?”

  “Do you know why Sydney called a tech meeting?” Clarise asked.

  Shrugs all around.

  “Well, sorry you’re here so early for nothing. I’ll speak with Sydney when I see him.”

  Clarise turned and retraced her steps to the door connecting the buildings. The four men and one female apprentice watched her retreat from where they stood backstage, the men appreciating the attractive sway of her tall, lithe figure, a gazelle in an expensive, tailored gray pantsuit, neck-length reddish blond hair bobbing, hips moving in perfect rhythm with her long strides.

  “That is one good-looking woman,” the oldest of the stagehands said quietly. He’d been at Ford’s for twenty-two years.

  “Yeah, I’ve noticed,” Wales offered.

  “Hate to see her go,” the older man said.

  “Better Sydney should go,” Wales said. “We going to hang around?”

  “Might as well.”

  “I’m going out for a cigarette,” Wales said. He’d cut back on his smoking, limiting himself to ten cigarettes a day, except when he was out drinking. He didn’t keep count those occasions.

  “I’ll go with you,” said the young female apprentice. As Wales and the girl headed for a door at the rear of the stage leading to a narrow area behind the theatre called Baptist Alley, the older stagehand laughed and said to the others, “She hangs around Johnny like a puppy dog. Really got the hots for him.”

  “He could do worse. She’s a fox.”

  “I’ll take Clarise,” the older man said. “Women aren’t any good until they’ve got a little wear and tear on them.”

  “ ‘You’ll take Clarise’? Fat chance. She’s strictly money and power.”

  “You never know,” the older guy said, chuckling. “My wife’s too good at homicide anyway. Let’s put this furniture in place as long as we’re here.”

  Wales and the girl, Mary, had paused at the door to the alley while he fumbled in the fanny pack for his cigarettes. “Just got ten,” he said. “You owe me one.”

  She punched his arm and turned the security lock on the door.

  “Got ’em,” Wales said, retrieving the crumpled half pack and pulling two cigarettes from it.

  “Every time I go through this door,” she said, “I think of Booth.”

  “John Wilkes? Crazy bastard. Got his fifteen minutes of fame.”

  “He escaped through this door. He had his horse tied out in the alley.”

  “I know, I know. I’ve heard the tourist pitch a thousand times.”

  Wales grasped the doorknob and pushed on the door. It opened only a few inches. Something was blocking its way. He pushed harder, resulting in another inch or so.

  “What the hell?” he muttered.

  He leaned his body against the door and exhaled a rush of air as he tried again. This time
the opening was wide enough through which to poke his head.

  “What is it?” Mary asked.

  He’d been looking straight ahead, up the long alley that forked left and exited onto F Street. He wedged his shoulder into the gap and twisted his head to look down at whatever was preventing the door from swinging open.

  “What is it?” Mary repeated, envisioning some drunk sleeping it off against the door. Baptist Alley had become a downtown lovers’ lane for couples looking for smooch time, drug addicts shooting up, or alcoholics deciding to nap.

  “Jesus!”

  “What is it?” she repeated.

  “Jesus!”

  “Johnny.”

  “It’s Nadia,” he managed, his voice raspy and higher than normal as though the horror on the dead girl’s face had reached up and gripped his throat.

  Also by Margaret Truman

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  SOUVENIR

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  LETTERS FROM FATHER: THE TRUMAN FAMILY’S PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCES

  WHERE THE BUCK STOPS

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  IN THE CAPITAL CRIMES SERIES

  MURDER IN THE WHITE HOUSE

  MURDER ON CAPITOL HILL

  MURDER IN THE SUPREME COURT

  MURDER IN THE SMITHSONIAN

  MURDER ON EMBASSY ROW

  MURDER AT THE FBI

  MURDER IN GEORGETOWN

  MURDER IN THE CIA

  MURDER AT THE KENNEDY CENTER

  MURDER AT THE NATIONAL CATHEDRAL

  MURDER AT THE PENTAGON

  MURDER ON THE POTOMAC

  MURDER AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY

  MURDER IN THE HOUSE

  MURDER AT THE WATERGATE

  MURDER AT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  MURDER IN FOGGY BOTTOM

  MURDER IN HAVANA

  MURDER AT FORD’S THEATRE

  MURDER AT UNION STATION

  MURDER AT THE WASHINGTON TRIBUNE