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  Later that day, she phoned the seventeenth district congressional office in Washington and received a very chilly reception when he told them she was Charley Dukes’ defense attorney. “Look,” she said, “I’m not trying to get Dukes off, for insanity or actual innocence or any other reason. He did it. He shot your boss; I know that. But I think there’s more to it. I’d like to come by and meet with you. Tomorrow?”

  “I’ll ask the – Mr. Sandelli,” the chief of staff said. A minute later, “Yeah, OK. He says come on by. I think he just wants to keep us busy and out of his hair, but our time is his time. I’ve got another Hill position lined up starting next week, anyway.”

  Late the next morning, Liv found the right building and the right floor and the right office, passing security checks each time, and walked in. She was greeted by a man of about thirty who enthusiastically said, “Hi! You must be the lawyer from Grantwood. I’m Sam Sandelli, your very abbreviated Congressperson.”

  “What?”

  “The governor picked me to fill in after Ezra’s death, maybe because I’m the governor’s mother’s next door neighbor, knowing no one in his right mind would ever mistake me for a real Congressman!” He smiled broadly. “I’ve got one more week until the new incumbent is sworn in and I’m really excited to be such an honored person – the ‘Temporarily Honorable Samuel Sandelli,’ actually, with no worries and no duties, what with Congress out of session right now and the staff doing all the constituent work.” He winked at Liv. “What a great job! And lots of free health care if a disgruntled constituent – ah – guess I shouldn’t have said that. Anyway, come into my office.”

  Liv immediately liked Sandelli, but knew he’d be of little use to her.

  She briefly explained the puzzles she’d found concerning Charley Dukes’ motives, and mentioned the drug-buying aspect.

  Sandelli paused and called in four members of his staff. “Look,” he said, “Ms. Saunders here is trying to help us understand what happened – why that incredible unbelievable event – happened. So please help her out in any way you can. Now you’ll please excuse me, I’m speaking to a business something or other in a few minutes and I have no idea what I’m going to say!” He pulled on his suit jacket and left.

  The staff members sat down, and Liv briefly explained what she hoped to accomplish. “Now, The Post said that Congressman Barnes had been investigating some misdoings – I don’t know what, but perhaps you do. Maybe he was getting too close on the trail of a big contractor or – something.” she finished lamely. “Help me out here, if you can. I swear there’s no way Charley Dukes is going to be found not guilty, and I’m not going to plead him not guilty, either. So anything you can think of –.”

  The staffers looked at each other, and finally one said, “There was this thing, ah, he asked us to see if Tom Conning had been up to – well – selling his Senate vote. There was some rumor Conning was in the hip pocket of one of the big defense contractors. But we analyzed his voting pattern for the past five years, and couldn’t find anything, even at the committee and subcommittee levels. No vote-selling, or even vote giving-away. Conning is a loyal back-bencher and mostly just does what the party whip says.”

  Another staffer added “When we’d come up empty on the vote-selling idea, the Congressman said we’d found something useful against Conning anyway. None of us knew what he was talking about.” The other three staffers nodded.

  Liv cleared her throat. “What about Congressman Barnes’ personal life? Was there…?” All four smiled at the same time. One said “You mean mister straight arrow himself? No drinking, no smoking, not even chewing gum! And none of us were allowed to use that stuff either. At least anywhere where he could see it.”

  A third staffer chimed in. “No sex, except with his wife and sometimes I even doubted that!” The other staffers gave him an annoyed look, but let it pass.

  Was all that virtue just too damn innocent? Just the sort of cover a drug dealer, or a white-slaver, or an agent of Al-Whatever would love to have? Liv asked more questions, especially as to how well Barnes’ staffers knew him, how they could have known about any secrets he might have had. No luck. He socialized with his staff frequently, they said, and his only close friends were other congressmen and some old friends from Grantwood.

  Finally she mentioned illegal drugs, but the others just laughed.

  Baffled, Liv thanked the staffers and rose to leave. But then she had a thought. “Charley Dukes lived in D.C., you know. How would I find out where to look for his friends, if he had any; where he hung out?”

  The others looked at each other. Finally, one said “Dunno. I guess the D.C. police could help you. Dukes had a record, right?

  “Do you know anyone…?”

  There were several shaking heads. One said “Sorry, D.C. cops don’t come to the Hill very often. I don’t know anyone there.”

  Liv thanked Barnes’ staff for their help and left. On the way out of the building she ran into Sandelli, who was returning from his meeting. He wished her well and asked her to let him know if she was ever in the market for a new Hummer. She drove home slowly, considering her options.

  The next morning, Liv phoned the D.C. Metropolitan Police and lied, saying she was with the State’s Attorney’s office for Grantwood County.

  “Brent Nielsen?”

  “That’s right; I work with Brent.”

  “This must be about that killer; he lived around here.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “How can I help you?”

  “I need to know where he hung out, places he went to, friends he had. Anything like that.”

  “Why do you care? He confessed, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, but he may have had accomplices.”

  “Oh, OK. – possibly.”

  “Can you help me?”

  There were three “hmm”s and four “haw”s, and then “We have some regular patrols in that area, where he lived I mean. Give me your number and I’ll ask a couple of the guys where he was likely to hang out if they know, ask them to call you.”

  “Thank you very much, Chief.”

  “Ah - that’s lieutenant.”

  Liv felt good: she’d made progress.

  After a few hours of worrying she’d be fired even before the trial for impersonating a member of the Despised Opposition, Liv’s phone rang. It was a Sergeant Delray, making a call he clearly felt was a stupid bother. She had to “please” the Sergeant a few times, and “I’d be awfully grateful” twice more, but he finally came up with the names of six bars or clubs within walking distance of Charley’s home. Patrolmen think they’d seen Charley in or near some of these places, most likely the Bottoms Up! or the Starfleet Academy or the Stirrup. Couldn’t be sure you know, nobody paid attention to Charley until he killed that Congressman, y’know.

  “But wasn’t he a dangerous criminal?”

  Sergeant Delray laughed. “Never hurt anybody, just stole stuff and made a nuisance of himself. He’d wave a gun around, and actually fired into the ceiling of a drugstore once. – ‘use of a firearm in a felony’ – but overall he was pretty harmless. –That was before, of course.”

  “Do these clubs have security cams?”

  “No way. Nobody in that part of town would go there if they thought they’d be on camera.”

  “How about cameras on the street?”

  “Digitally recycled after thirty days, and they’re mostly just for traffic violations anyway.”

  “Well, thank you, Sergeant,” she said.

  “Any more questions,” the Sergeant said, “call somebody else.” He hung up.

  So Charley Dukes was harmless. What had happened?

  Chapter 14: Three Months After the Assassination

  The next day, Liv put on her weekend sloppies instead of business attire. She dressed as sexlessly as possible, which wasn’t difficult, since that was the way she usually dressed. She put her hair in a bun to look ‘severe’, she thought, not like long-haired women who – w
ell, maybe none of that was true. What the hell. She took a deep breath. She felt nervous. But those clubs – they lived in dread of being shut down by city inspectors or the police, so they couldn’t be too bad, could they? Could they?

  She drove toward D.C., parked at an outlying Metro lot, and took the Red Line to the NOMA stop. By this time it was almost dark, so she had a leisurely dinner and waited until the nearest bar on her list might have acquired a crowd.

  There was a notice posted on the door of her first bar, Starfleet Academy. It had been shut down by D.C. health inspectors two days before for persistent rodent infestation and lack of hot water. If that was Charley’s favorite haunt, her trip had been for nothing.

  She arrived at the Bottoms Up! just after nine, walked up to the bar, ordered a beer, and asked the bartender if he’d ever met a Charley Dukes, and did he used to hang around here? She showed him Charley’s picture.

  The bartender professed ignorance. In all those Hollywood movies, this was the time to slip him a hundred-dollar bill and ask “how’s your memory now?” but she didn’t have that kind of money to spend, and she thought what she could afford – about ten dollars – would insult the traditional film cliché. So she didn’t offer him money. She was almost expecting him to rub two fingers together and say something like “I could remember, with a little persuasion,” but he didn’t.

  He gave her a look of friendliness, not lust or suspicion. It was obvious the name “Charley Dukes” meant nothing to him. “Just a minute,” he said. He headed to an older man several stools away at the bar and asked him something Liv couldn’t hear. They spoke for a few seconds and then the bartender returned. “Jake, over there, knows Charley Dukes a little but, hasn’t seen him in a year or so. Jake’s always here, so I guess Charley isn’t around these days. Sorry I can’t help you. But if you’ll give me your cell number, …” The lust appeared. Liv thought of giving him her wicked witch face, but refrained and thanked him instead.

  She showed Charley’s picture around to the rest of the suspicious but small crowd, without mentioning his name. Someone asked her if she were undercover, and she immediately said “Yes” without thinking. Oddly, that seemed to relax the gathering. She felt uneasy about telling them she was undercover, but she hadn’t actually used the word “police.” Not her problem if they thought she was a cop. Too late, it occurred to her that undercover cops wouldn’t say they were undercover cops or they wouldn’t be under cover.

  “OK,” one man finally said. “That’s Charley Dukes. Used to come here but I haven’t seen him since …” He looked around, a few others nodded. “March? End of winter, anyway.”

  “So you don’t know where he hangs out now?”

  “How about the D.C. jail?” came a voice from the back of the room. Tried there?” There was general laughter.

  The bar crowd retreated into their usual feigned ignorance. Liv thanked them and left.

  Liv was running out of bars. She looked at the notecard she’d brought. The next place was the Stirrup Bar and Grill on New York Avenue, several blocks away. She could have walked, but took a cab instead.

  About nine thirty she entered the rundown place and sat at the bar. Males approached her one by one, but a few fierce looks sent them hurrying back to their seats.

  There was a small stage in back, where a stripper was going through her bumps and grinds without enthusiasm. Only a few men were watching her, the rest concentrating on their drinks. All the place needed was Humphrey Bogart with a dangling cigarette, but smoking was illegal here.

  “Hi,” she said to one man carefully, “I’m told Charley Dukes used to hang out around here. I’m his lawyer and I’d like to speak with someone who knows him.” There was no immediate response.

  After she had asked more people in the bar about Charley Dukes, feeling more exposed and foolish and uneasy by the minute, one bar-fly who introduced himself as Mike, offered to give her information for a double shot of bourbon. They retired to a table.

  “Yeah,” he said, “we’re all proud of our local hero here, in the news and all that. Quite a jump from sticking up 7-11s! A real pro – who’d have thought? – but I guess we’ll never see him anymore.”

  By this time, several men and women had gathered around the pair nodding, and saying that they too remembered Charley, knew a whole lot about him, and how about a drink for us, too?

  A woman said, “Yeah, a man called Art asked for Charley and then came by a few more times and I saw them talking together, very serious.”

  “When was this?”

  “Oh, two-three weeks maybe. But Art hasn’t come in here since that shooting.”

  Mike said he remembered an Art hanging around with Dukes once in a while for the last few weeks, too, but he didn’t know any more except Art was expensively dressed and seemed to have good taste, at least as far as the whiskey brands he asked for that the Stirrup didn’t have, and (Liv thought) in comparison with others at the Stirrup, whose liquor expertise began and ended with proof divided by price.

  Asked to describe Art in more detail, Mike could say only that he was medium height, medium build, a white male about forty – a description that fit millions of Americans. “Oh yeah,” he added, “I think he was wearing a wig. Maybe not. If it was, it was a pretty good one.”

  Two men told Liv that Charley used to carry a gun and he’d held up some stores, but sometimes it wasn’t even loaded. That confirmed the Sergeant’s comments, she thought. But – perhaps Art hadn’t known how harmless Charley really was.

  A “Snookie” joined in: “Art paid for Charley’s drinks, but only took a sip or two of his own.” Considering the quality of the bar drinks, thought Liv, I wouldn’t wonder.

  “Do you know what kind of business Art had with Charley?” she asked. “Specifically, that is, if you can help me out here.”

  No one offered an answer. Then a man at another table, who’d been listening, offered Charley seemed increasingly nervous during his meetings with Art. Another offered that Art had “acted strange.” When asked to define “strange,” he couldn’t do any better than say, “not like us.” Another added Art hadn’t been back to the Stirrup since the last time they saw Charley with him, a comment Liv had heard before.

  Someone else said, “Art didn’t know any of us but Charley, didn’t pay attention to us, seemed like a kind of snob, wouldn’t say Hi to anybody but Charley.”

  Liv had taken all this in, and it certainly sounded like a conspiracy of some kind. They could have been planning a holdup. But wasn’t Charley an improbable conspirator for a murder, just as Brent had said?

  “What do you suppose Art wanted Charley for?” she asked.

  A Max said, “Don’t know” (he glances at the others). “Something, I guess. Well – a job of some kind, I guess. What else could Charley do that was worth anybody’s time or money?”

  So there was something, after all. An “Art” who could well have bought Charley’s services. But no one in the club professed to know Art, and she believed them. So Art had picked Charley out some other way than hanging out in bars, had zeroed in on him. A one-applicant job search. Interesting.

  Later, a little wobbly from the watered drinks she had downed to look ‘normal’ to the bar crowd, Liv drove carefully back to Grantwood. She felt energized in spite of the liquor. A good bunch of people, she thought. They’re real. But then a speeding car brought her attention back to the road. ATTORNEY DRUNK DRIVING CHARGE she imagined the headlines reading. In her firm, that was a near-fatal no-no, and they wouldn’t help with her legal defense.

  Eventually she arrived home, flung herself on her bed, curled up in a ball, and went to sleep just as the first uneasy light was beginning to appear from the general direction of Philadelphia. She dreamed she was back in the Stirrup, having drink after drink, asking for more, gradually becoming too drunk to lift her head, asking the others to just turn her over and pour it into her mouth, please. One more? Please? Please?

  She woke up late in the m
orning, wondering if that’s what her father had gone through, that night he died on the floor of a bar when she was twenty-eight, and hated him, and had to do something about the body.

  Later that day, Liv returned to the county jail and asked for Charley Dukes. This time, they were put in a small room alone. The guards had concluded, apparently, Charley was the tamest hardened criminal they’d ever met and he didn’t need six keepers at all times.

  Liv smiled. Charley stared at her, not in a mean way, but as if to say her time on his case was a complete waste, so why bother?

  “You’re wastin’ your time,” he said, confirming his look. “I did it. Go home.”

  Liv paused; dramatically, she hoped. After a few seconds Charley seemed to know that something was about to happen. He frowned. Enough, thought Liv; I’ve got his attention. “Who the hell is Art!” she almost yelled.

  Charley jerked in his seat and his eyes widened, but he controlled himself quickly. He said nothing.

  “Well,” said Liv, “I guess I’m on the right track. I was at the Stirrup in D.C. yesterday, so I know about Art. Tell me about him.”

  “Nothin’,” said Charley. She noticed he didn’t bother denying that there was an Art.

  “Nothing what?” she insisted. “Your drinking buddy.”

  “So? I’ve got lots of drinking buddies.”

  “I think he paid you to kill Ezra Barnes.”

  “No,” said Charley, “no. I had my own reasons.”

  “What were those?”

  “I told the cops.”

  “They didn’t believe you.”

  “Well, tough shit.”

  “No, Charley,” she said, “none of your stories were true. You were paid. And you’re covering for the man who paid you. Or maybe he stiffed you; the police didn’t find any money.

  “Why are you covering for ‘Art’? How can you feel any loyalty for him now?” Charley said nothing. Liv decided to lie, a practice she’d never been good at but it was honorable in the trade, and what the hell. “I’ve got security footage of Art,” she said, “from outside the Stirrup. If you help us catch him, I’ll try to get you a break on your sentence. But the D.C. police are on his trail; they could have him any time now. We could ID him first. That might go a long way for you.”