The Poet (18 page)

He rolled onto his back and looked at the water-stained ceiling. Tears filled his eyes. He closed them and tried to sleep, tried to forget. But his Best Pal was there in the darkness behind his eyelids. As always, he was there. His face set, a horrible slash for lips.

Gladden opened his eyes and looked at the door. There had been a knock. He quickly sat up as he heard the metal scrape of a key going into the outside knob. He realized his mistake. Sweetzer had had a trace on the line. They knew he would call!

The door to the room swung open. A small black woman in a white uniform stood in the doorway with two towels draped over her arm.

“Housekeeping,” she said. “I am sorry I’m so late today but it’s been a busy day. Tomorrow I’ll do your room first.”

Gladden exhaled and noticed that he had neglected to put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the outside knob.

“It’s okay,” he said, quickly getting up to stop her entrance into the room. “Just the towels today, anyway.”

As he took the towels he noticed embroidered on her uniform the name Evangeline. She had a lovely face and he immediately felt sorry that this was her job, cleaning up after others.

“Thank you, Evangeline.”

He noticed her eyes go past him into the room and fall down to the bed. It was still made. He hadn’t pulled the covers down the night before. Then she looked back at him and nodded with what he guessed was a smile.

“That’d be all you need?”

“Yes, Evangeline.”

“Have a nice day.”

Gladden closed the door and turned around. There on the bed was the open laptop computer. On the screen was one of the photographs. He moved back to the door, opened it and stood under the door frame where she had been. He looked at the computer. He could tell. The boy on the ground and what else could that be against the perfect white canvas of snow but blood.

He quickly went to the computer and hit the emergency kill button he had programmed himself. The door was still open. Gladden tried to think. Jesus, he thought, what a mistake.

He walked to the door and stepped out. Evangeline was down the walkway standing next to a housekeeping cart.

She looked back at him, her face revealing nothing. But Gladden knew he had to be sure. He could not risk everything on reading this woman’s face.

“Evangeline,” he said. “I changed my mind. The room could probably use a going-over. I need toilet paper and soap, anyway.”

She put down the clipboard she had been writing on and stooped to get toilet paper and soap out of the cart. As Gladden watched he put his hands in his pockets. He noticed she was chewing gum and clicking it. An insulting thing to do in front of someone else. It was like he was invisible. He was nothing.

When Evangeline approached him with the items from the cart, he made no move to take his hands from his pockets. He took a step back to allow her to go into the room. After she stepped in, Gladden walked down to the cart and looked at the clipboard she had placed on top. After room 112 was the notation “Just Towels.”

Gladden looked around as he headed back to the room.

The motel was a courtyard design with two floors of about twenty-four rooms each. He saw another housekeeping cart on the upper floor across the way. It was parked in front of an open door but there was no sign of the maid. The pool at the center of the courtyard was empty of guests. Too cold.

He saw no one else anywhere.

He stepped into the room and closed the door as Evangeline came out of the bathroom holding the bag from the trash can.

“Sir, we have to keep the door open when we’re working inside a room. Those are the rules.”

He blocked her way to the door.

“Did you see the photograph?”

“What? Sir, I have to open the-“

“Did you see the photo on the computer? On the bed?”

He pointed to the laptop and watched her eyes. She looked confused but didn’t turn.

“What photo?”

She turned to look at the sagging bed and then back to him with a look of confusion and growing annoyance on her face.

“I didn’t take anything. You call Mr. Barrs right now if you think I took somethin’. I’m an honest lady. He can have one of the other girls search me. I don’t got your photo. I don’t even know what picture you mean.”

Gladden looked at her a moment and then smiled.

“You know, Evangeline, I think maybe you are an honest lady. But I have to be sure. You understand.”

14

The Law Enforcement Foundation was on Ninth Street in Washington, D.C., a few blocks from the Justice Department and FBI headquarters. It was a large building and I assumed other agencies and foundations funded from the public trough were housed here as well. Once I was in through the heavy doors I checked the directory and took the elevator to the third floor.

It looked like the LEF had the entire third floor. From the elevator I was greeted by a large reception desk behind which sat a large woman. In the news business we call them deception desks because the women they hire to sit behind them rarely let you go where you want to go or see whom you want to see. I told her I wanted to speak to Dr. Ford, the foundation director quoted in the New York Times article about police suicides. Ford was the keeper of the database to which I had to get access.

“He’s at lunch. Do you have an appointment?”

I told her I had no appointment and put one of my cards down in front of her. I looked at my watch. Quarter to one.

“Oh, well, a reporter,” she said as if the profession were synonymous with convict. “That’s entirely different. You have to go through the public affairs office before it is even decided that you may speak to Dr. Ford.”

“I see. You think there’s anybody in public affairs or are they out to lunch, too?”

She picked up the phone and made a call.

“Michael? Are you there or are you on lunch? I have a man here who says he is from the Rocky Mountain News in-No, he first asked to see Dr. Ford.”

She listened a few moments and then said okay and hung up.

“Michael Warren will see you. He says he has a one-thirty appointment so you’d better hurry.”

“Hurry where?”

“Room three oh three. Go down the hall behind me, take your first right and then it’s the first door on the right.”

As I made the trek I kept thinking that the name Michael Warren was familiar but couldn’t place it. The door to 303 opened as I was reaching for it. A man of about forty was about to step out when he saw me and stopped.

“Are you the one from the Rocky?”

“Yes.”

“I was beginning to wonder if you took a wrong turn. Come on in. I only have a few minutes. I’m Mike Warren. Michael if you use my name in print, though I prefer you don’t use it and talk to the staff here instead. Hopefully I can help you with that.”

Once he was behind his cluttered desk I introduced myself and we shook hands. He told me to take a seat. There were newspapers stacked on one side of the desk. On the other side were photos of a wife and two children, angled so that Warren could see them as well as his visitors. There was a computer on a low table to his left and a photo of Warren shaking the president’s hand on the wall above it. Warren was clean shaven and wore a white shirt with a maroon tie. The collar was frayed a bit where his afternoon whiskers rubbed against it. His jacket was draped over the back of his chair. His skin was very pale and set off by dark sharp eyes and straight black hair.

“So what’s up? Are you in the Scripps D.C. bureau?”

He was talking about the parent company. It maintained a bureau of reporters that fed Washington stories to all papers in the chain. It was the office Greg Glenn had suggested I go through earlier in the week.

“No, I’m out from Denver.”

“Well, what can I do you for?”

“I need to talk to Nathan Ford or maybe whoever is directly handling the police suicide study.”

“Police suicide. That’s an FBI project. Oline Fredrick’s the researcher handling that with them.”

“Yes, I know the FBI is involved.”

“Let’s see.” He picked up the desk phone but then put it back down. “You know, you didn’t call ahead on this, did you? I don’t recognize the name.”

“No, I just got into town. It’s a breaking story, you could say.”

“Breaking story? Police suicide? That doesn’t sound like deadline stuff. Why the hurry?”

Then it struck me who he was.

“Did you used to work for the L.A. Times? The Washington bureau? You that Michael Warren?”

He smiled because he, or his name, had been recognized.

“Yes, how’d you know?”

“The Post-Times wire. I’ve been scrolling it for years. I recognized the name. You covered Justice, right? Did good stuff.”

“Until a year ago. I quit and came here.”

I nodded. There was always a moment of uneasy silence when I crossed paths with somebody who had left the life and was now on the other side of the line. Usually, they were burnouts, reporters who grew tired of the always-on-deadline and always-need-to-produce life. I once read a book about a reporter written by a reporter who described the life as always running in front of a thresher. I thought it was the most accurate description I’d read. Sometimes people got tired of running in front of the machine, sometimes they got pulled in and were left shredded. Sometimes they managed to get out from in front of it. They used their expertise in the business to seek the steadiness of a job as a person who handled the media rather than was part of it. This is what Warren had done and somehow I felt sorry for him. He had been damn good. I hoped he didn’t feel the same regret.

“You miss it?”

I had to ask him, just to be polite.

“Not yet. Every now and then a good story comes along and I wish I was in there with everybody else, looking for the odd angle. But it can run you ragged.”

He was lying and I think he knew I knew it. He wanted to go back.

“Yeah, I’m beginning to feel it some myself.”

I returned the lie, just to make him feel better, if that was possible.

“So what about police suicides? What’s your angle?”

He looked at his watch.

“Well, it wasn’t a breaking story until a couple days ago. Now it is. I know you only have a few minutes but I can explain it pretty quickly. I just … I don’t want to be insulting but I’d like for you to promise me what I say here is in confidence. It’s my story and when it’s ready, I’m going to break it.”

He nodded.

“Don’t worry, I understand completely. I won’t discuss whatever it is you are going to tell me with any other journalist unless that other journalist specifically asks about the same thing. I may have to talk about it with other people here at the foundation or in law enforcement, for that matter. I can’t make any promise in that regard until I know what we are talking about.”

“That’s fair.”

I felt myself trusting him. Maybe because it is always easy to trust somebody who has done what you have done. I also think I liked telling what I’d learned to somebody who would know its value as a story. It was a form of bragging and I wasn’t above it. I started.

“At the start of this week I began working on a story about police suicide. I know, it’s been done before. But I had a new angle. My brother was a cop and a month ago he supposedly committed suicide. I-“

“Oh, Jesus, I am sorry.”

“Thank you, but I didn’t bring it up for that reason. I decided to write about it because I wanted to understand what he had done, what the police in Denver said he had done. I went through the routine, pulled clips on a Nexis search and, naturally, I came up with a couple references to the foundation’s study.”

He tried to surreptitiously look at his watch and I decided to get his attention.

“To make a long story short, in trying to find out why he killed himself I found out he didn’t.”

I looked at him. I had his attention.

“What do you mean, he didn’t?”

“My investigation has so far determined that my brother’s suicide was a carefully disguised murder. Someone killed him. The case has been reopened. I have also linked it to a supposed cop suicide last year in Chicago. That one also has been reopened. I just came in from there this morning. The cops in Chicago and Denver and I think that somebody might be moving around the country killing cops and making it look like suicide. The key to finding the other cases may be in the information collected for the foundation’s study. Don’t you have all the records on cop suicides for the whole country over the last five years?”

We sat in silence for a few moments. Warren just stared at me.

“I think you better tell me the long story,” he finally said. “No, wait.”

He held up his hand like a crossing guard signaling stop, picked up the phone with the other and pushed a speed-dial number.

“Drex? Mike. Listen, I know this is late but I’m not going to make it. Something’s come up over here … No … We’ll have to reschedule. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Thanks, bye.”

He put down the phone and looked at me.