Chasing justice, p.10
Chasing Justice, page 10
5
At the Milton diner, an old man bellowed out from the far corner, over the long counter and tables filled with lunch patrons. “Here they come, sister Naomi and the judge.”
Naomi said under her breath, “Uncle Edgar, my Daniel’s brother. He’s all bark with a heart of gold.”
Ten people sat around two tables shoved together. All were middle-aged to elderly, and all peered at me. I spotted more than one cane. Nine of the ten stood up. The one who must have been Uncle Edgar remained seated in his wheelchair.
Every one of them reached for my hand. Some leaned into me and pulled me into gentle hugs. Through the hand clasps and hugs, I felt their hope that I might ease the agony, the constant burden left behind by one of their own. Melvin was the family star, a man who made them all feel good from sharing just one loop of his DNA. The police had told these ten around this table and all their offspring that the star of the family had blown out his brains in a most peculiar place for no good reason. The act would now become their legacy. The date of it would mark the date for all other big family events. Remember that was a year after Melvin died . . . . it was the month before Melvin . . . three summers before, they would say around tables like this one. Some of them here and those who came after would at dark times wonder if they too tended to suicide. That kind of impulse does tend to run in families.
Edgar motioned me to sit next to him with Naomi on his other side, in the only two empty chairs.
After their many questions about my cases, about Peter and the girls, where I had matriculated, how long I had worked in law firms and as a judge, and after telling me how much younger I looked than my age, after they told me in a chorus that Melvin could not have killed himself and begged me to keep pushing the authorities until the truth came out, and after they had ordered from the big menu, their food had come and they all quieted down, I leaned over to Edgar. “Did you get a call from someone official about Melvin?”
Edgar set his spoon on his empty plate. “Sure did. How did you know?”
“Naomi said she got one too.”
“Ah, yes.” Edgar pointed around the table. “He called most of us. Very thorough, that FBI.”
“Did you get his name?”
“Yes, yes, I did. Harlan Smaltz, retired but on assignment now, for this case, he said.”
“Anything strike you about that call?”
“No, not the call. But for the life of me, none of us has the slightest idea about why he would call us, want to talk to us. Melvin never gave us a clue about anything troubling him, his health, his workload, anything. Everything bad happened to him a long, long time ago. That’s why we put all the files—the originals—in the vault. Too many people are interested in nephew Melvin’s files. That’s why we were so glad you could come see us, help us sort this out.”
The FBI had opened a case, was calling all family members—despite the local police conclusion of self-inflicted death. Oh my, no routine suicide in this FBI case. I’m not going crazy, not crazy to be here, but what can I do?
Chapter Fourteen
Angela
N
aomi pointed at the open police report. “Now you know our family a bit. None of us saw anything that would make him do this, not now, not ever. If there were, he would have ended his life a long time ago.”
I had not dared scratch off the scabs while Melvin was alive. But now . . . maybe something had reminded him of Madeline, of that life ended, of their lives together lost, and he decided to be with Madeline at last. Maybe his insides died a long time before he ended what was left on the outside. I had to ask about her, though I knew it would hurt Naomi, would hurt me. “Tell me about Madeline . . . if it’s all right.”
Naomi looked off to the tall window, the afternoon light sprinkling in through the laced curtains. “Yes, you ought to know.” She blinked away tears as she talked. “Oh, God of all life, of all love, theirs was a union made in heaven.
“At their wedding, we danced until the morning song birds joined in—we danced better than they danced in Fiddler.” Naomi tapped her fingers on her knees. “Such a wedding. Our neighborhood, some we had not invited, hardly knew, danced in the street with us. They met in his last year at Yale Law. She was a senior undergrad. Two bright beautiful people in a country free of the boots that have been on our necks since before Moses. Oh, their children would have been loved, surely loved. And it all ended before their third anniversary.”
Naomi paused, but didn’t want to stop, too much to tell me, too much pent up. I sensed that among her family she had been the strong one, had held it all together, had done the thinking for all of them.
“In our time growing up, Brooklyn was a neighborhood. We knew everyone, looked out for every one of our youngsters. When women came home after dark, as soon as they stepped off the elevated everyone knew them, looked out for them. Washington was not like that. There were riots down there after Dr. King’s assassination. For years they called our nation’s capital Murder City, USA. Melvin and his bride couldn’t afford much of a place but wanted to stay close in so they wouldn’t need two cars. He started as a G-9 lawyer. She worked on the staff of the Secretary of State—the great Henry Kissinger himself—got the job right away. Both together on the path to a wonderful life. Until that night when she didn’t come home.”
Naomi put a hand to her mouth, bit on the side of her finger and shut her eyes. “Two years after that night . . . the police found her. They studied what they found for a long time, then gave us what they found, just bones and teeth, nothing more . . . no DNA back then, no national database of fingerprints. Never found anyone who used her credit card, never found her purse or any clothes. They never found who did it, how it happened. If the FBI ever told Melvin any of it, he didn’t tell us. He never talked about what he knew. We didn’t ask, wouldn’t have helped him or us.”
Naomi stopped, had to, had to let the tears flow and let her elegant wrinkled face scrunch up. She turned away and didn’t try to fight the sobs. “Old people aren’t supposed to cry . . . sorry. I got over Madeline . . . but not yet Melvin . . .”
I slid closer to Naomi, hugged her gently and waited.
Naomi recovered a bit. “Melvin died back then with her. We all did. He holed up in the beach house on weekends and holidays. After they released her bones to us, he came out of that room but hardly talked to us, to anyone—as if he had been struck dumb. He packed what he could carry and took off for California. I expect his judging the big criminal cases helped him make amends for not picking her up from work that evening, for not looking for her, for not moving to a safer neighborhood.
“One of the folders in that box has her name on the tag—but it’s empty. If Melvin ever put anything in that file, in her file, it was only in his head and is gone with him.”
Naomi stopped but was not done. She peered at me, into my eyes with the look of a beggar who could not survive another night on the street in winter’s cold. She took my hands into hers. “You’re a judge. You know how these things work. You knew him. Keep after them, please. I—we—beg you to keep after them until they find the one who did this, so our family can have some peace for how he died.”
“I’ll do what I can . . .” I wanted to add, no promises, though. I had to get into the box of files. Melvin kept them all for a reason, and all the reasons might have drawn a killer to him. I had to dive in, had to for Melvin, for his Madeline, for these lovely people.
I ticked my thumb nail along all the tabs of all the folders in the box—maybe twenty something folders. “The checks are all copies, but the file folders look old, like the real file folders he set up before computers.”
“Oh, yes. Some of the folders and papers have little markings that wouldn’t copy at all. We thought you should have the real folders and the best copies. Our other set has the copies of the file folders as best as we could get.”
“Well, I can start looking now.”
Naomi patted my arm. “Excellent. I’ll leave you alone. Spread out on the dining room table. Sorry none of these rooms is set up as an office. One of the last things Daniel made us do is get a decent Internet connection. So, we can look up anything that’s out there . . .” She laughed softly. “We have the weakest Internet password in the universe. It’s password, spelled out.”
“That table will do fine. I’ll get my laptop. It’s in the car.”
As we walked out the front door, Naomi pointed at her book on the porch chair. “I must finish that, been slogging through it for our book group. I don’t get these writers puffing like peacocks, roiling around as if every character needs therapy from the day she was born. Real people don’t think what modern writers cram into their heads.” Naomi’s eyebrows raised in a new thought. “We’d never get a thing done if we stopped every second to analyze what everyone around us just said, how they glanced our way, what mommy did to us when we were five. Takes this writer two pages to get the damn olive from the plate into the mouth, what with all the analysis of all the looks exchanged across the dining room table.
“Winter is supposed to come early. Won’t be able to sit or nap out here too many more days. Holler if you need anything. Oh, and talk to me before you open up that envelope in the P. J. file.”
I spotted the file tag with “P. J.” handwritten on it and started with a deeper look into the copies of checks. More than a hundred cashier’s checks, not including extra copies, the earliest was December 10, 1961, and the most recent September 3, 1976. The largest amount, $4000; the smallest, $100. Some of the checks had tiny hand notations scratched on them, mostly tiny numbers which didn’t seem to correlate with anything. Some checks were copied multiple times.
All the checks totaled $340,500. They were written by different banks, seven in all. The total amount from each of the banks ranged between $30,500 and $52,000. Maybe that’s the going price for something back then, a price with no name, not the name of the one who bought the cashier’s checks, not the name of the one who got the checks. Unless every recipient was named Johnny Cash, I thought. Likely none of the checks was deposited into an account, more likely each turned into large green bills very fast.
I Googled the value of constant dollars. In 1962, twenty thousand dollars bought ten new cars, or a decent house. The jab of recognition poked me, an uncomfortable jab. The total dollars added up to far more than walking around money for a young lawyer on a government salary, even one with a working wife.
The next thought flashed in—the person who got the money would not hold receipt copies of the checks. The copies belonged to the ones who paid, the ones who bought the original cashier’s checks at the bank. And young lawyer Melvin did not buy blank cashier’s checks and then pay seven or more people over $300,000. He had no way to get his hands on that kind of money, not even from Uncle Edgar. But someone had given Melvin the receipt copies, or he, with whatever legal force he could muster, made the banks give him the copies. Or maybe the people who bought the cashier’s checks, who received the pressure receipt copies, gave them to Melvin.
Patterns seeped up to the surface. Mega banks—Bank of America, Bankers Trust, Citicorp, Chase, Chemical New York, First Chicago, JP Morgan, Manufacturer’s Hanover—issued all the checks. Big people doing big business used these big banks, people who wanted branches in many places, foreign branches, people who wanted large sums for individuals but the amounts routine, even small, in the money flows of these mega banks. And maybe the people ordering the cashier’s checks wanted the traces buried under so much paper activity every day that no one would ever find them. And not one check had an amount that by itself would attract attention or need to be listed on daily large-transaction bank reports.
I turned to the rest of the files. Twenty-five of the twenty-eight file folder tags had names in alphabetical order, from A. D. Burdick, down to S. Yerkes. Most of the files were empty.
Admiral Douglass Burdick’s file held a copy of his newspaper obituary in 1984. An Annapolis graduate, he rose fast in the Pacific naval battles against Japan, served again in support of the Korean War, and finished up in Washington as someone in a “clandestine” service that sounded a lot like the CIA. He, like many Admirals, retired to Coronado in San Diego County. He drowned on his morning swim in a rougher than normal sea; the paper said too rough for an eighty-two-year-old man. The first hundred or so Google threads brought up nothing more on the dead admiral, no suspect who might have helped him drown, no court case files, no autopsy.
S. Yerkes stood for Senator Yerkes. Google did better on him, handsome and vibrant junior Senator from Texas, served only one term from 1970-76, and decided to not run for a second term, wanted more time for his family, for “his lovely wife and five young children all still at home.” Senator Robert D. Yerkes died of natural causes at age seventy-three in 1988.
Some of the other files in between these two collected up no information on lesser people. Except for a name on the tab, they were empty. M. Brown, according to Google, might have been a civilian engineer who had published some papers on the most effective metals for bullets of different types—those meant to tumble on impact, or expand fast, or penetrate in a straight line and keep moving.
P. Davenport might have been the Congressman from Indiana. He sat for two terms, lobbied hard for farm subsidies—and then by all accounts faded away.
Niles Garland collected old rifles. Maybe Melvin had been a gun guy after all.
And Henry Grant might have been a Navy seal.
C. W. Thomas Googled into a State Department employee possibly posted to Mexico or Cuba. His boss might have been C. Orloff.
“JE Memo” on the file tab had nothing in the folder.
More patterns. All the people I could find anything about connected to Washington in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, all men located close to the center of power, of big decisions. All but Admiral Burdick and Senator Yerkes lived small enough lives that their passing, if they had already passed, didn’t generate enough Google hits to land on the first five pages of threads under their names. All but the Admiral and Senator Yerkes seemed to come from the quiet side of humanity.
As the afternoon shadows lengthened and the dining room light softened, I got to the “P. J.” file. I checked inside the few files past this one and then came back to it. Inside the folder sat an unsealed manila envelope. Both the edge-curled folder and the envelope had lost their sheen and crispness from age and humidity. To me, PJ was short for “Presiding Justice”, the judge in charge of the local courthouse or of the branch of a higher court. What the hell did PJ mean? Back then, maybe President Johnson, and I chortled at my stretch of a guess.
I found Naomi asleep; her novel sat pages down in her lap. I nudged her shoulder. “It’s me, need to ask you. May I look in this P. J. envelope, open it?”
“Sure, Angela, do open it and let’s talk. That’s really the one that made me beg you to come see us. I have not shared that one with any of the family and made its copies myself. But we better go inside. We must look at that one in the house.”
I wondered what made Naomi say that last, and I studied the front yard grass, the driveway out to the road, listened for the sounds of birds. They now chirped and sang louder than earlier, readying for their night perches. Nothing out there to set the birds off into warning screeches or to make them go quiet. Yet Naomi closed and bolted the front door behind us.
Back at the big table, I said, “Are all these hand-written initials on the tabs in Melvin’s writing?”
“Yes, yes.”
I pulled four glossy eight-by-ten black-and-white photos from the envelope. It held nothing else. Not three inches out of the envelope, the top photo made me stop, look at Naomi, and pull it all the way out.
Taken from above as from a ceiling, the first photo showed the two dark-skinned men, bare-chested, lying on floor bedding, arms and legs thrown over and around each other. The sheets wound a tangle of torsos and limbs. Black pools of blood joined contorted faces and stained large swaths of bedding in black streaks and odd shapes. Exit wounds had blown out the sides of each face, the good sides frozen in twisted mouths and eyes wide open. I found it hard to look, but harder not to—and imagined the final expression on dear Melvin’s face.
The next caught a young mustachioed American-looking man in the company of two dark-skinned men, all three in loud shirts and plain shorts, strolling on the sidewalk of a busy street, next to buildings crowded on each other, glaring signs in Spanish, and nighttime street lights. The two dark-skinned might have been brothers. Cars and people, intermixed, extended down the middle of the road. The three smiled broadly, as if laughing at a joke. Slim, handsome, the three faced the camera unaware. They were not posing.
The third photo showed the same young white man and another man about his age, balding, both sitting in an open-top Mustang at a beach parking lot full of American cars. Again, both men unknowingly faced the camera.
The fourth and last showed the same Mustang in the driveway of a little bungalow and a small front lawn. Police tape cordoned off the entire scene.
“My ever loving . . . Help us now.” I pointed to the one photo. “Melvin must have wondered if this could happen to him. Maybe that’s why he got the gun . . .”
For a long time, Naomi stared in silence from the other side of the dining room table, her hands clasped to form an A. “Maybe it’s all nothing. Probably from an old case file, some unsolved murders Melvin was on before he left for California, probably nothing. But . . .” She said more quietly, “If it is something and your local police call his death a suicide . . . well, I didn’t want even the police to know.” She stood up and laughed. “I’ve seen too much TV, but you never know, do you?” She laughed, more a snort than a laugh. “Maybe Detective Pitts knows a whole lot more. Maybe this—" She pointed at the police report folder off to the side, “is one great big whitewash. I didn’t ask Detective Pitts to send along whatever photos he had of Melvin. He must have scores of them, but they’re not part of the report. Makes me wonder. Well, that’s the worst of the strange files in the box, for sure.”
