Murder at the Opera Page 8

  She opened her eyes and observed the singer. She was tall and heavy, which fit the stereotypical belief about female opera singers. But Charise Lee had been described in the report as small, perhaps even petite. Asian-Canadian. In Washington to further her career, ending up stabbed to death. God must have had a bad hair day.

  Christopher Warren and the singer finished the piece and conferred about the sheet music.

  “You said it was an aria?” Johnson asked. “That’s a solo, right?”

  “Right, but it’s more than that. Arias give the singers an opportunity to express their inner feelings and emotions musically, like a spoken soliloquy in a play.” She smiled. “A large percentage of opera audiences come just to hear the arias.”

  “I see,” Johnson said, wondering whether what she’d just been thinking would qualify as an aria.

  McCarthy led Johnson to the piano, where the two musicians were preparing to leave, and introduced the detective.

  “I’m sorry about your friend,” Johnson told them.

  The singer’s eyes misted and her fist went to her mouth. “Excuse me,” she said, and ran from the room.

  “I’d better go after her,” Warren said.

  “I will,” McCarthy said. “Detective Johnson wants to ask you a few questions.”

  Johnson and Warren faced each other. She pegged him at six feet tall, five inches taller than her. He appeared to be in good physical shape beneath his jeans and powder-blue T-shirt with a silk screen of Mozart on the chest. He was good-looking in a conventional sense, facial features where they were supposed to be and of the proper size. More interesting to her were his eyes, as cold as a gray winter’s day, and his hands, large and strong, with long fingers. A pianist’s hands, she decided.

  “I have nothing to say,” he said flatly.

  “You don’t have a choice,” she said, her tone matching his.

  “What kind of a person are you?” he asked. “My best friend has been murdered, and you want me to talk about it? Give me a break.”

  “Your ‘best friend’ didn’t catch a break, Mr. Warren. I’d think you’d want to do everything you can to find her killer.”

  “That’s your job,” he said. “Sorry, but I have nothing to say.” With that, he angrily grabbed the sheet music from the piano’s music desk and started to walk away.

  “Mr. Warren,” Johnson called after him.

  He stopped and turned. “Just leave me alone,” he said.

  She pointed an index finger at him. “I can detain you as a material witness,” she said. “Maybe you’d prefer that.”

  “I told you, I don’t know anything about what happened to Charise.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Then you shouldn’t mind answering a few questions.”

  “I’m going to call my embassy. I’m Canadian. I’m not an American citizen. I have rights.”

  Johnson closed the gap between them. “I’m losing patience,” she said. “Either we sit down and have a nice, friendly chat, or we can have a less friendly talk at police headquarters. Your choice. And don’t pull your ‘I’m not an American citizen’ BS with me. When it comes to a murder, all bets are off. Get it, Mr. Warren? You may be Canadian, but we do speak the same language.”

  His face scrunched up as though trying to locate a file or program in his brain that would provide him with an answer. She noticed that his hand not holding the music was curled into a tight fist.

  “Time’s up,” she said.

  “All right,” he said glumly.

  And so they talked.

  TWELVE

  The two o’clock meeting at the Washington National Opera’s administrative offices ended at three, and Mac and Annabel Smith and Ray Pawkins spent a few minutes outside the building.

  “I’m glad they gave you what you wanted, Ray,” Mac said. “Unlimited access to anyone and everything.”

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Pawkins said. “The minute someone throws up a roadblock, you know you’re in trouble.”

  “Where will you start?” Annabel asked.

  “The Kennedy Center,” Pawkins replied. “I have some friends there who might help shed some light. I’ll also make contact with Ms. Lee’s family and friends. By the way, you were interested in what had been stuffed into her wound that kept her from bleeding too much. I said it was a sponge. Turns out to have been a theatrical sponge.” He reached into a briefcase and withdrew the one he’d purchased that morning.

  “That’s it?” Annabel asked, incredulous.

  “Similar,” Pawkins said, laughing gently. “I’m confident this is very much like the sponge that was actually used. I’ll know more after I’ve seen the bloody one. I’d better get going. See you tonight at rehearsal, Mac.”

  “There’s a rehearsal tonight?”

  “Afraid so,” Annabel said lightly.

  “I thought you might drop out now that you’re investigating the murder,” Mac said to Pawkins.

  “To the contrary. I can’t think of a better situation than to be a super at this time. Amazing what you can pick up in a dressing room. You two take care.”

  The Smiths watched the tall, lanky detective saunter away, very much like a tourist out for a stroll through an Italian piazza.

  “Interesting guy, huh?” Mac said as he and his wife headed for their car.

  “Yes, interesting—and strange.”

  Mac stopped. “How do you mean ‘strange’?”

  “I don’t really know,” Annabel said. “There’s something about him that’s—well, that’s off-kilter, if you know what I mean.”

  Mac smiled, and they continued walking. “Have you ever known a Homicide detective who wasn’t off-kilter?” he said. “You have to be a little crazy to work Homicide. Either that, or it makes you crazy.”

  “Not having known many Homicide detectives, I’ll take your word for it.”

  They got into their car and headed without delay for their Watergate apartment. Rufus would be waiting to be walked.

  “What I find interesting about him, Mac, is the dichotomy between having spent a career investigating grisly homicides, and loving opera and art. He said he’s handled some private cases where rare musical manuscripts have been stolen, and works of visual art, too. There are two very different sides to your Mr. Raymond Pawkins.”

  “There are two sides to everyone, Annie.”

  “Including you?”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s your other side, Mac? I only know one, the one I love. Will I love your other side when it emerges?”

  “Surely not. That’s why I keep it securely under wraps. If it ever broke loose—well, it wouldn’t be pretty.”

  “Show it to me.”

  “Is that an advance, lady?”

  “Take it as you will, sir.”

  “I intend to.”

  Detectives Johnson and Portelain had their own two o’clock meeting, with their boss, Carl Berry.

  “Okay,” Berry said, “run it past me. Willie, what did you get from the roommate?”

  “Nothing. Nada. He wasn’t there. He was—”

  “He was accompanying a singer at Takoma Park,” Johnson said.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Portelain said.

  “I interviewed him,” Johnson said.

  “He’s playing the piano right after his roommate dies?” Berry said.

  “That’s what I thought,” Portelain said.

  “So did I,” Johnson concurred. “Strange guy, Carl. Cold as ice, somber, never saw him break a smile the whole time I was with him. Told me to call his embassy, claims he has rights because he’s Canadian.”

  “Cold? Like in cold-blooded killer?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Alibi?”

  “Nothing ironclad. He claims he was out partying the night before last. Hadn’t seen the deceased all day. Claims he was worried about her, but also said she often disappeared for a day or two.”

  “‘Disappeared’?” Portelain said. “What did
he mean by that?”

  “I think he meant she sort of went underground now and then, maybe needing time alone. At least that’s what I took from it.”

  “Other people with him when he was partying? Where was the party? Has he got any receipts? From the way you describe him, he’s not the partying type.”

  “He said he had too much to drink and can’t remember who he was with or where they went,” Johnson reported.

  “The more you talk,” Berry said, “the less he talks, the more I’m interested in your piano player.”

  “Might be he decides to go home to Canada,” Portelain said. “I’d haul him in and yank his passport till he checks out.”

  “I’m thinking the same thing,” Berry said. “What else did he tell you, Sylvia?”

  “That he hadn’t seen her for more than a day, that she never came home the night before last. By the way, he was at the Kennedy Center last night when they discovered her.”

  “Right. I have his name on the list I took. He’s an extra in the opera they’re rehearsing.”

  “He didn’t sound too happy about it,” Johnson said. “He told me it was humiliating for a pianist like himself to be an extra—no, he called himself a ‘super,’ I think—and cursed whoever arranged for him to be in the show.”

  “Temperamental, huh?”

  “According to the woman I spoke with at the Young Artist Program, they discourage temperament.”

  “I’ll go upstairs and see if we can get a judge to issue a hold on this guy to keep him from skipping. Where’s he staying?”

  Johnson responded, “He says he’s at the apartment he shared with the deceased.” To Portelain: “You were there, Willie?”

  “Yup. Obviously, the kid wasn’t around, because he was with you, but a guy who claims to be their agent was there.” He consulted his notes. “Name’s Philip Melincamp. He’s from Toronto, Canada. Got a partner named Zöe Baltsa.”

  “You meet her?”

  “Nope, Professor. She’s staying in a hotel. Melincamp bunks at the deceased’s apartment.”

  Berry grunted, tilted back in his chair, and ran his fingers over the short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair on his temple. Willie often called him “Professor,” not because of any wisdom or advanced degrees he possessed. It was the way he dressed—chinos, button-down shirts, always blue (he owned a dozen of them), nondescript ties, and tan, thick-soled desert boots. To Willie, men who dressed that way were usually seen on college campuses.

  “Bring the Warren kid in,” the professor-cum-cop said. “We’ll talk to him again, see if his story changes.”

  “Let’s go,” Willie told Sylvia, getting up with difficulty. “Buy you a chili dawg on the way.”

  Berry raised his eyebrows and didn’t try to stifle his smile. “Bet you haven’t had an offer as good as that in a long time, Sylvia.”

  “You’re right—fortunately. Come on, Willie, you can have your chili dog and I’ll provide the Pepto.”

  “I love this lady,” Willie announced loudly as they left Berry’s office. “Love her!”

  THIRTEEN

  “Based upon an elevated level of intercepted terrorist ‘chatter,’ the alert level in Washington, D.C., has been raised from yellow-one to orange-two.”

  That terse announcement was delivered at five o’clock that afternoon by the Department of Homeland Security Secretary, Wilbur Murtaugh. The newest cabinet member declined to elaborate, and left the podium without taking reporters’ questions, leaving them, and by extension the American public, to speculate on how, where, and when they might die.

  It had been a day of press conferences around Washington, each producing a news story of greater consequence than the mere murder of a promising opera singer. The president had spoken that morning in the Rose Garden about progress, or lack of it, in Iraq and Korea, contradicting military leaders who painted a less rosy picture than the Commander in Chief. The Treasury Secretary delivered a glass-half-full analysis of the economy to Congressional leaders, despite numbers that indicated considerably less in the glass. The leader of the air traffic controllers’ union predicted a bleak future for airline safety unless more controllers were hired. And then there was Secretary Murtaugh’s announcement that some vague, unstated threat to national security had changed the color of the threat meter.

  Wearing his customary turquoise bolo tie and pointy, tooled cowboy boots—he’d recently served a lackluster one term as governor of Oklahoma—he made his announcement in the Homeland Security department’s temporary headquarters at the Nebraska Avenue Complex. The complex, consisting of thirty-two buildings on thirty-eight acres, was the permanent home to the Naval Security Station. Heavily guarded, it was surrounded by residential neighborhoods.

  The Department of Homeland Security’s decision to become tenants of the complex did not thrill its neighbors. A citizen’s committee had been formed to protest the traffic congestion and parking violations that had developed since late 2002 when DHS began moving in personnel and material. The complex’s community relations staff did what it could to soothe neighbors without resorting to what it considered the ham-handed truth, that a few traffic jams was an economical price to pay for protecting the neighbors and the nation against terrorist annihilation.

  It hadn’t been easy finding appropriate space to house the Department of Homeland Security’s headquarters and many of its almost two hundred thousand employees. The situation was one of few that could not be attributed to the current president. The major problem could be traced back…well, to George Washington’s administration. The first president had signed into law a statute requiring that all government “offices” be located within the District of Columbia, unless exempted by legislative act. The CIA, Department of Defense, and Nuclear Regulatory Commission had received such dispensation and had located their agencies outside the District. But DHS, despite its lofty mission to protect the homeland, had not as yet, and so it was limited to finding space within D.C., settling on the Nebraska Avenue Complex, at least for the time being.

  The secretary’s one-sided press conference had resulted from a frantic series of meetings held since early morning in secured conference rooms throughout headquarters.

  The genesis of those meetings had occurred three days earlier in an alley off King Feisal Street, in Amman, Jordan, where Ghaleb Rihnai played a spirited game of tric trac, the Arab name for backgammon, with a dour young Iraqi who’d moved to the Jordanian capital soon after the Americans invaded his home country. The table on which the game board rested was an overturned crate. Rihnai sipped from a lethal cup of strong black coffee. His opponent looked up from the board only occasionally to inhale from his narghile. Whenever he exhaled, the smoke from the water pipe created a haze over the board, like morning fog on a river. It was four in the afternoon, two months to the day since the Jordanian, Rihnai, and the young Iraqi had first met, or to be more accurate, two months since Rihnai had made an effort to befriend the Iraqi.

  “You’re winning,” the Iraqi said, not attempting to conceal his displeasure.

  “Yes, I see that I am, but the game is not over. Roll the dice and pray for good fortune, my friend.”

  The Iraqi’s prayers were answered. Twenty minutes later he emerged victorious.

  The Iraqi carefully returned the board, dice, and small disks to the bag in which he kept them, and the two men left the area, where others continued their games. They walked slowly and seemingly without purpose, stopping at an occasional stall to look at goods and foods being sold, or to chat with familiar shop owners. They eventually climbed the hill leading to ancient Amman, where the Jebel Qala’at, the Citadel, an ancient fortress rebuilt by the Romans during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, provided glorious views of the surrounding valleys and of Raghdan, the Royal Palace. They sat without speaking beneath a gnarled olive tree alongside a stream known as Seil Amman, a tributary of the Zerqa River.

  “You saw your brother in Baghdad?” Rihnai asked, breaking the silence. His friend
had returned from the beleaguered Iraqi city only days earlier.

  “Yes, I saw him.”

  “He is well?”

  “He has been arrested twice by the Americans.”

  “Bastards. He is free now?”

  “Yes, for the moment.”

  “His arrests have not changed the plans, I pray.”

  “The plans go forward. In fact…”

  “Yes?”

  “They are ready.”

  Rihnai turned to face the Iraqi, whose youthful, almost angelic olive face and black eyes beneath a wet mop of jet-black hair defined sadness. At the same time, there was fire behind the eyes, simmering coals waiting to burst into flame.

  “That is good news, indeed,” Rihnai said. “Tell me, what part can I play?”

  “You have already been of great help, Ghaleb,” the Iraqi said, “but you will be called upon to play an even greater role in the days ahead. You have many friends in America.”

  “There are some I consider friends,” Rihnai said. “My Arab friends. The Americans I know from studying at their university are not friends. They are the enemy and always will be. My friends are here, in Jordan and Iraq. You are my friend.”

  “And I am grateful for that. The money you have given me is so important.”

  “No, no,” Rihnai said, wagging his index finger, “I gave you nothing. You worked and earned it.”

  The Iraqi’s lips parted in a semblance of a smile. “The American goods you arrange to have shipped here are much in demand. I don’t ask how you avoid the government and its red tape, but you obviously have your ways.”

  “My years with the infidels were not wasted. My degree is in business, the American way of doing business, cheat and lie, make your fortunes on the backs of the workers, and abandon them when it is time.” Rihnai laughed. “I was a good student, huh?”