Margaret Truman's Undiplomatic Murder Read online

  “I’m fifty-one years old, Michael. Sounds to me like you should be looking for Young Turks. Plenty of them crawling the streets of D.C. and New York.”

  “I need investigative experience, Robert. Young Turks, as you call them, are a dime a dozen. You’ve been around the block. Besides, Young Turks don’t possess your infectious charm.”

  “Glad somebody recognizes it.”

  “Take a couple of days and come down to D.C. Your daughters still live in the area?”

  “Yeah. I’m a grandfather.”

  “A loving, doting one, I’m sure. Look, I don’t want to make a big deal out of this. I just thought that—”

  “Day after tomorrow?”

  “Perfect. Call me when you get in, and we’ll grab dinner. Looking forward to seeing you again. By the way, you still get pissed off when people call you Bobby?”

  “I shoot people who call me Bobby.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind—Bobby.”

  Laughter accompanied his quick hang-up.

  * * *

  Brixton drove to Washington, where he spent a day with Kogan and visited his ex-wife and his daughter Jill, mother of his only grandchild. Kogan was convincing. The list that Brixton made of the pros and cons of taking the job was decidedly lopsided: a couple of minor cons and a lengthy list of pros, headed by a good-sized, steady paycheck and a chance to be back in some capacity of law enforcement. He signed on and endured a one-month condensed training period at FLETC, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, in Glynco, Georgia, which included the handling of the weapon he’d been issued—a SIG P226 9mm pistol, the same weapon used by Navy SEALs.

  He began his new career as one of six plainclothes investigators for SITQUAL’s New York office, located in a tall building on Manhattan’s west side, which afforded a splendid view of the traffic-clogged West Side Highway and New Jersey beyond the Hudson River. The first three months on the job were relatively peaceful, and he enjoyed the paycheck and the official status his State Department ID gave him. He befriended a couple of NYPD detectives and had fun kidding them about not having hired him twenty-five years ago: “Savannah’s gain, New York’s loss,” he was fond of saying.

  It was toward the end of his third month that an event occurred that turned his life upside down.

  There had been reports that some members of the Russian delegation to the Russian consulate on East Ninety-first Street had been using their sacrosanct diplomatic pouches to bring drugs into the city. Brixton had been effective while on the Savannah force in developing informants, and he applied his skill to fostering a relationship with a Russian member of that country’s New York consulate team.

  He’d met him while frequenting the bar at the W Hotel on Broadway, fifteen minutes from the Russian consulate and a favorite hangout of consulate workers. They got together early one evening for drinks at the W. His informant had begun to balk: “I have to be paid more,” he said in a low, convincing voice over his half-consumed double vodka.

  “More?” Brixton said, exaggerating his shock at the request. “I’ve already upped the ante, Gregory. I can’t get you more.”

  The Russian sat back and slapped his hand on the small table. “I get more money or I tell you nothing. Nothing!”

  “Hey, pipe down,” Brixton said, aware that there might be others from the consulate in the room. He leaned closer to the Russian and said in a low but convincing voice, “What you’ve given me so far isn’t worth a plugged nickel.” Brixton laughed. “Or a plugged ruble. You give me some hard info, Gregory, and I’ll see whether I can get you more money. Unless you do that…”

  A rowdy trio of vodka-fueled Russians at the other end of the room got into an argument with two African-American customers. The fracas intensified, the voices got louder, and the scrum eventually spilled out onto Broadway.

  “Get lost,” Brixton told Gregory, standing and pressing his elbow against the SIG 9mm in his shoulder holster. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  “Money, Brixton,” Gregory said as Brixton took steps away from the table.

  “Yeah, money, Gregory. Tomorrow.”

  When Brixton emerged from the hotel onto Broadway, a Russian had pinned one of the black men involved in the argument against the wall. He pulled a knife and held it to the American’s throat. Brixton glanced up and down the street looking for uniformed cops, but saw none.

  “Hey, put down the knife,” he yelled.

  The Russian sneered at him and returned his attention and knife to the American’s throat, muttering racist slang as he did.

  Brixton wanted to draw his handgun, but a crowd had gathered and pressed in close; too great a chance of an innocent bystander getting shot. Instead, he repeated his call for the Russian to drop the knife, and moved in closer until he was within a few feet. The Russian, taller and beefier than Brixton, turned from the American against the wall and thrust the knife at Brixton, who avoided the blade by stepping aside. The Russian thrust again. As he did, Brixton grabbed his arm, twisted it, and the knife fell to the sidewalk. The Russian cried out in pain as Brixton increased pressure on his arm until he heard a bone snap. He forced the Russian to his knees and brought his left knee up into his face, smashing his broad nose and sending him tumbling backward.

  Wires in Brixton’s brain crackled with conflicting thoughts. He considered for a moment stepping back and walking away. Instead he pounced on the Russian, digging his knee into his stomach and driving his fist into his already battered face. He would have continued pummeling him were it not for the arrival of a NYPD patrol car. Two uniformed officers jumped out and dragged Brixton from atop the bloodied Russian. A few bystanders applauded.

  Brixton identified himself and told the officers what had happened. They asked him to come to headquarters to give a statement, which he did. The Russian was taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital, where he was treated for his injuries and released. As far as Brixton was concerned, that was the end of it. He filed the requisite report with Mike Kogan at SITQUAL in Washington and forgot about the incident until a few days later, when the Russian embassy filed its own report with the U.S. State Department claiming that its employee had been savagely attacked and beaten by someone representing the United States government. It demanded that the attacker be punished.

  The Russian’s protest and demands reached DSS in Washington, which instructed Kogan to interview Brixton and take appropriate action. Kogan summoned Brixton to Washington to get his side of the story.

  “The guy threatened a U.S. citizen with a knife,” Brixton told Kogan as they sat in Kogan’s Washington office above a Thai restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, “and he tried to slash me with it. What was I supposed to do, take him back in the hotel and buy him a drink?”

  “I know, I know,” Kogan said, holding up his hands in defense, “but things are tense with the Russians these days.”

  “When weren’t they?”

  “My bosses at DSS want you removed from the New York office.”

  “Fired?”

  “They didn’t say that specifically, but you can read it that way. Look, Robert, I don’t have any choice.”

  “So I get canned because I save a guy and myself from this drunken Ruskie. Great system we have.”

  “I didn’t say I was going to fire you, but I have to follow orders and get you out of New York. I have an opening here in D.C.”

  “I hate D.C.,” Brixton said.

  “As much as you hate losing a good job? You’re not getting younger, Robert. Jobs for a guy your age aren’t that plentiful. I’m sticking my neck out for you. DSS would just as soon see you gone. Look, I know what you did was warranted. It’s up to you. I tell my boss at DSS that you’re gone from New York, like they wanted. You come to D.C., get settled, keep a low profile—and keep your job. I don’t want to lose you, Robert, but if you don’t get down off your high horse, I won’t have a choice.”

  Brixton took the job, moved what little he possessed to D.C., and found a place to
live on Capitol Hill through his old friend from Savannah, Willis Sayers, now Washington bureau chief for the Savannah Morning News. Robert “Don’t Call Me Bobby” Brixton was back in Washington, in a one-bedroom apartment with a nice little balcony, reintroducing himself to the city that he loathed.

  CHAPTER

  5

  Brixton settled into his new job in Washington with SITQUAL. While he wasn’t thrilled about being back in the nation’s capital, he reminded himself that Kogan had stuck his neck out for him, and Brixton pledged to do nothing to violate the faith that Kogan had placed in him.

  He and Donna Salvos worked as a team, which pleased Brixton. She was a sharp gal who had the ability to separate her disdain for the bureaucratic nonsense from the job she was paid to do, which suited Brixton perfectly. Thirty years old and compactly attractive with short blond hair, she’d been hired by SITQUAL after serving four years as an armed member of the 1,800-strong Capitol Police. What made her especially attractive to SITQUAL, a private agency reporting to the State Department’s DSS security division, were her linguistic skills. She spoke half a dozen languages, which proved helpful when dealing with staffers from the more than 175 foreign embassies in Washington, D.C.

  Most of the cases they caught—more like incidents—were minor-league stuff. But one day they were called in to help investigate the murder of Peter Müller, an employee of the German embassy.

  * * *

  The story of Peter Müller’s murder started in Marigold’s, a gay bar in Dupont Circle. According to his friends, Müller had intended to leave an hour earlier but kept being drawn back into the conversation. That meant more Blue Velvet martinis, a drink made of vodka, and blueberry schnapps, introduced at The Abbey in West Hollywood in 1994 in honor of the movie National Velvet, starring Elizabeth Taylor, one of the gay community’s favorite leading ladies.

  Tall, blond, blue-eyed, and unmistakably Teutonic, Müller had moved to Washington, D.C., from his native Düsseldorf, Germany, four years earlier to take a job on the Defense Attaché staff at the German embassy. Armed with a degree in ambient intelligence from the Technical University of Kaiserslautern, he’d been recruited to join the team responsible for coordinating German defense initiatives with the U.S. Department of Defense. The position sounded more impressive than what his duties actually comprised, poring over reports and analytic papers and summarizing their content for his superiors. “I’m a glorified clerk,” he often told his friends at Marigold’s and other gay watering holes.

  Müller had been a closeted homosexual during high school. In college a number of female students had their eye on the handsome young man, and he’d dated a few, but not because he was attracted to them. He did it to counter rumors about his sexuality, the coeds his “beards,” as gays sometimes refer to such women.

  He’d continued to keep his homosexuality under wraps when he applied for the embassy job. Although sexual orientation was not a line on the application, nor was he asked about it during interviews, he was aware of a tacit understanding that homosexuality was frowned upon when it came to government employment. Too easy to be compromised, blackmailed, manipulated. And so he kept it to himself until reaching Washington and securely settling into his job. That’s when he began exploring the city’s thriving gay community in and around Washington’s Dupont and Logan Circles.

  Being with other gays was liberating for Peter Müller. He made friends, and a few months earlier had initiated a romantic relationship with Eduardo “Lalo” Reyes, a young Spanish man who worked in the Spanish embassy’s Public Information Office. On this particular night Müller and Reyes were supposed to meet for dinner, but Reyes had to work late, so Müller caught up with a group of friends for dinner and went barhopping with them, their forays into D.C.’s vibrant gay-bar scene extending well into the steamy summer D.C. night and ending at Marigold’s.

  “No, I have to go now,” he said more than once in defense of having announced that he was leaving. He had an eight o’clock meeting the next morning; to be even a few minutes late and groggy would not sit well with his boss.

  It was 1:00 A.M. The bar was hopping. Shirtless bartenders made drinks, flirted with customers, and sold vials of “poppers”—amyl nitrate—over the bar to couples about to consummate their evening. Two supple young men in loincloths danced to ear-splitting music on a tiny stage at the rear of the long room.

  “Come on, Peter,” a friend said, his words slurred, “one more Blue Velvet before you go.”

  “No, no, I can’t.”

  “Then come back to my place, Peter. Let’s not let this night go to waste.”

  “No, I—”

  “Afraid that Lalo will know? My lips are sealed unless—”

  “What?”

  “Unless they are attached to yours,” he said, giggling.

  “Das Luder,” Müller said playfully as he threw money on the bar and waved to other friends.

  “Huh?”

  “German for ‘slut.’”

  “I love it when you talk dirty. Best to Lalo.”

  They hugged, and Müller walked unsteadily from the bar into the oppressive night air. A dome of heat and humidity had descended on the city two days earlier, and forecasters said it would remain in place for at least another day. Was there anyplace more hot and humid than Washington, D.C., in the midst of summer? He doubted it.

  He looked up and down the street for a taxi. His apartment wasn’t that far, but he wasn’t about to stumble to it. Did other people on the street notice that he was drunk? It would not be good if they did. It invited trouble.

  He fought not to stagger as he walked to the intersection. Still not a cab in sight. Probably having their turbans cleaned, he thought angrily as he turned the corner. So many taxi drivers in this city seemed to wear them.

  He was now on a poorly lighted and less-populated street. Ahead was another major intersection, and he headed for it in the hope of finding a cab there. He concentrated on walking steadily and not tripping, unaware that someone who’d been loitering outside the club had fallen in behind him.

  He paused halfway down the block and placed a hand on a lamppost. He was tempted to sit on the sidewalk but drew deep breaths against the urge and continued.

  “Hey,” he heard someone say.

  Müller stopped, turned, and was face-to-face with a short, stocky man wearing a tan safari jacket.

  Müller squinted against the dim light to better see the man’s face.

  Not another word was spoken. The man, who held a handgun at his side, raised it and fired two shots. One struck Müller in the face, the other in his chest. His assailant quickly walked away as Müller twisted and fell, his extended hands no help in keeping his face from crashing into the hard sidewalk. The contact wasn’t painful. Peter Müller was dead before he ever reached the ground.

  CHAPTER

  6

  A young couple discovered the body minutes after the shooting. The husband called 911 on his cell phone. A man who’d left the club turned the corner, saw what was happening, and ran back inside to spread the news, which prompted dozens of club-goers to flock to the grisly scene. A marked MPD cruiser came to a screeching stop where the husband and wife had remained, followed by an unmarked police vehicle with two plainclothes detectives. The uniformed officers kept the onlookers at bay while the detectives bent down to get a better look at the body.

  “It’s Peter,” a patron from the club exclaimed.

  “You know him?” asked one of the detectives.

  “Yes, of course,” he answered. “Peter Müller. I was just with him at the club.”

  “What club?”

  “Marigold’s.”

  “The gay bar?”

  “The nightclub” was the testy reply.

  More police vehicles and personnel arrived. The street was closed off. A crime scene technician went to work photographing the body and outlining it on the sidewalk with yellow chalk. Uniformed officers took names while the detectives went to Marigol
d’s. The dancers had stopped; the bartenders had donned shirts.

  “Turn off the damn music,” one of the detectives yelled at the owner.

  The abrupt silence after the deafening music was jarring. Some patrons headed for the door but were stopped by the detectives.

  “We have a homicide victim around the corner,” the owner was told.

  “Someone from here?”

  “Right.” The detective consulted what he’d noted on a pad. “Peter Müller.”

  “I don’t know him,” the owner said.

  “I do,” a customer said. “Is it true? Peter was killed?”

  The detectives asked who else knew him. A number of young men affirmed that they did.

  “He have a problem with anybody here tonight?”

  The stunned patrons looked at each other and shook their heads. One said to the man next to him, “You were talking to him just before he left, Jimmy.”

  A detective took Jimmy’s name and asked, “You have some sort of a beef with him?”

  “No. We were friends. We kidded around a lot.”

  One of the detectives returned to the crime scene and dispatched two uniformed cops to the club to take down more names and contact information. “Nobody leaves there,” he ordered. He turned to the crowd. “Who was at the club tonight when the victim was there?”

  One man spoke up. “Somebody has to tell Lalo.”

  “Who’s Lalo?”

  “Peter’s partner. The victim’s partner.”

  “You mean his lover?”

  “Yes. They were close.”

  “This Lalo, he wasn’t with the victim tonight?”

  “No. Peter was stag. Lalo—his real name is Eduardo, Eduardo Reyes—had to work late at the embassy.”

  “Where the victim worked,” a detective who’d examined the contents of Müller’s pockets commented to his partner.

  “No,” he was corrected by the man in the crowd. “Peter worked for the German embassy. Lalo works at the Spanish embassy.”