Read Washington Deceased Online
Authors: Michael Bowen
“Nice?” Marjorie blurted, unable to suppress the smile that played around her lips.
“Yeah. Nice. What's so funny about that?”
“Well,” Marjorie said judiciously, “it's a little bit like saying that a surgeon isn't clumsy or that an engineer isn't particularly poetic. I mean,
nice
isn't really what you look for in a Foreign Service Officer. Richard is loyal, competent, morally and physically courageous, charming when he wants to be, vastly interesting to talk to and be with. But I have to agree with you. He certainly isn't very nice.”
“Then why do you like him so much?”
“Charming and vastly interesting are what appeal to me. That and the fact that he never kids himself.”
“What's that supposed to mean?” Wendy persisted.
“Maybe we're just having trouble finding a common language here,” Marjorie said. “Maybe I can give you an example. Richard and I had our last discussion about the war in Vietnam six months after Nixon's inauguration. I was morally certain that he no longer believed in the position he defended. I told him he was losing his son over the war. He said, âA lot of Americans have lost their sons over this war. I took an oath to serve my country.' I almost hit him. I said, âYou can serve your country when it's right.' Do you know what he answered?”
Wendy shook her head.
“He said, âMy country doesn't need me when it's right. When a country's right, most any well meaning bachelor of arts will do.' ”
Marjorie realized that this reminiscience had about as much resonance for Wendy as an airy allusion to Crecy and Agincourt would have. Before she could come up with anything more concrete, however, Carrie called over the information that Michaelson wanted her on the telephone.
“Excuse me a moment, if you would please,” Marjorie said, and threaded her way through the store to the nearest extension while Wendy returned her attention to the personals.
“Hello, Richard.”
“Hello, Marjorie. I'm just on the verge of getting in to see Senator Gardner's lawyer, and I thought I'd call and see if you'd had any luck on the Blair project.”
“Well, in a manner of speaking I have.”
“By all means tell me about it.”
“Under no circumstances would the Blairs accept an invitation from us for tomorrow night or the night after.”
“Unfortunate.”
“Fortunately, however, the Blairs themselves are having a dinner tonight.”
“Splendid. And you think I might be able to crash the gate?”
“Actually, Richard, they have invited youâbut only on the condition that you bring me along.”
“
T'es formidable
, Marjorie. You are a marvel.”
“If you're going to speak French, Richard, please do get the pronunciation right.”
“My pronunciation is impeccable.”
“Impeccably American. We should try to be there by 6:45.”
“I'll pick you up by 6:30. Thank you immensely.”
“Very good, Richard. You're quite welcome.”
Marjorie hung up and turned back toward the table where she and Wendy had been sitting, with the idea of returning to continue her conversation with the young woman. But the table was empty and Wendy was gone.
“When your most recent service to a client was to represent him at his sentencing,” Jeff Logan said, “I suppose you can't be particularly surprised when he rejects your advice.”
On this note of mordant self pity, Logan shifted his gaze so that he was looking over Michaelson's right shoulder at the view of Benjamin Franklin and the old Post Office Building visible through his office window.
“Your advice, I take it, related to me?” Michaelson probed.
“Yes. Once that dead body turned up in the vicinity, I told Desmond Gardner that he oughta drop you like a bad habit. âNo one from the government is there to help you, no one from the government is your friend.' That's what I told him.”
“I take it he wasn't persuaded.”
“You wouldn't be sitting here if he were. His instructions are for me to tell you whatever you want to know, since he can't safely do it himself. I don't like it, but it's his call.”
“Well then, perhaps you could begin by telling me what Gardner's own account of his conduct around the time of the killing is.”
“Pretty simple,” Logan shrugged. “He was supposed to give the tile in the lateral basement hallway a once over. He lugged his bucket and stuff over there and slogged away for awhile. Then he decided that it was a pretty dirty job and he wanted the pair of work gloves that he wears when he cleans the latrine.”
“The gloves weren't issued to him when he began that afternoon's work detail?”
“He says no. Anyway, he went out the basement door to look for Stepanski to get the card key to the Supply Room so he could get the gloves.”
“Stepanski was working outside?” Michaelson asked.
“Yes. Stepanski assigned the jobs, and according to Gardner he always gave himself something outside if he could.”
“Very well. Sorry to interrupt. Please go on.”
“Okay. Gardner found Stepanski in back of the building, spritzing the grass with fertilizer or something. He talks him out of the Supply Room card key and goes back in the building through the basement door.”
“Wait a minute,” Michaelson said. “I thought that the basement door could only be opened from the inside, except by guards.”
“That's right,” Logan conceded. “Gardner was heading around to the front of the building to go in by the main entrance. As he approached the basement door area, though, he saw another inmate named Lanier in the process of coming out through that door.”
“Isn't Lanier the one who had a large and unexplained amount of cash in his room?”
“Yes. It looks like he was dealing happy dust to anyone who wanted to score it. So, seeing Lanier, Gardner had Lanier hold the door open and Gardner reentered that way. He went to the Supply Room, unlocked the door, went in, saw the body, came out in a hurry, and ran for help. Hurrying upstairs, he almost knocked the guard over, but by that time the guard already had word that something was up and he didn't stand around to listen to Gardner. He told Gardner to go to his room and Gardner did. That's the story.”
“You sound unconvinced,” Michaelson said.
“My clients pay me to prove their stories, Mr. Michaelsonânot to believe them.”
“As it happens, I do believe Gardner's story. Every word of it.”
“That is your privilege.”
“Your skepticism intrigues me,” Michaelson said. “I realize that it's probably outside the scope of your instructions, but would you mind telling me why you balk at your client's account of things?”
“You're putting words in my mouth,” Logan said.
“I certainly don't mean to be.”
“Maybe it's just a difference in our ways of looking at things. To a trial lawyer defending a criminal case, what actually happened is a tactical parameter, not an absolute value. It isn't important for its own sake but because it's a practical limit on what you can expect a jury to believe. When Tony Martinelli was killed, for example, you were chatting with the warden at least a quarter of a mile away from the scene of the crime. Therefore, I can't very well base my trial strategy on convincing a jury that you might've killed Martinelli. For my purposes in defending Desmond Gardner, the fact that you didn't kill Martinelli, in and of itself, is completely irrelevant. What's relevant is the fact that I can't plausibly create a reasonable doubt by raising the possibility that you might have killed him.”
“In other words, you don't make judgments about truth, only about provability.”
“Right,” Logan said.
“And you find Gardner's story unprovable.”
“Right again.”
“Why?”
“Is that a serious question?”
“Entirely serious.”
“All right, I'll tell you. There is a locked room. A man was killed in that room. His death was recorded on videotape. Therefore, someone killed him.”
“So far, it's safe to say we agree.”
“Now comes the hard part. From and after the time Martinelli was killed, only one person came out of the Supply Room: Desmond Gardner.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I've been energetic enough to find out from my client and a couple of other sources the gist of what the videotapes show. If anyone besides Gardner had come out of the Supply Room, he either would have had to stay in the main basement corridor, in which case he would have shown up on the tape of that area, just as Gardner did; or he would have had to go up the back stairs to the first floor, in which case he would have been seen by the guard, Smith; or he would have had to go down the lateral hallway and out the basement door, in which case he would have been seen by Gardner.”
“But Lanier did do exactly thatâthe third one, I mean. And Lanier has a background in computer technology.”
“What's that got to do with anything?”
“I believe Warden Stevens told me that the videotape system is computer-controlled. Suppose Lanier got to, say, the computer work station in the B-4 Building Security Office, rigged a modem to communicate with the computers in the Central Administration Building, and instructed those computers to manipulate the videotape record.”
“Those are neat concepts you're throwing around there, rigging modems and manipulating videotape records. There's a lotta nuts and bolts between theorizing about something like that and actually accomplishing itâassuming that it can be accomplished.”
“I leave that in your more than capable hands,” Michaelson said serenely. “In the State Department, I was always known as a big picture man. If I had a question about details, I sent a memo to the lawyers.”
“Well, I have a problem with this big picture you're drawing: We can account for Lanier practically every relevant moment, and so we know he didn't go into the Supply Room, much less come out of it. He shows up on the basement videotape pushing a wide dust mop down the basement corridor. He stops and tries to go in the Supply Room at one point, but the door is locked and he gives up. He pushes his dust mop some more, then heads down the lateral hallway. Between then and the point where he held the basement door open for Gardner, he couldn't have gone into the Supply Room because to do so he would have had to go back into the basement corridor and show up again on the videotape from the camera covering that area.”
“How about before he ever shows up on the basement corridor tape in the first place?”
“I don't follow your question,” Logan said.
“Let me ask you another one then. Where is the tape recording the images transmitted by the various video cameras physically kept? Each camera doesn't include its own tape, does it?”
“No. They aren't camcorders. They're essentially transmitters. The actual recording's done on a master video-tape-recorder in the central administration building.”
“How? Physically, I mean. Is there an individual cassette for each camera or what?”
“No,” Logan explained. “The transmissions are recorded on two continuous bands of six-inch tape on reel-to-reel spoolsâyou know, like you sometimes see on old-fashioned main-frame computers. Each camera in the prison is electronically assigned a set of recording heads and an eight-minute segment of the tape on those spools. Whatever a given camera transmits is recorded on that camera's segment.”
“And when the recording heads for one camera reach the end of that camera's segment, I take it, they automatically go back to the beginning of the segment and start recording over.”
“Correct.”
“Thereby erasing whatever has been recorded before.”
“Correct again.”
“It seems to me,” Michaelson remarked mildly, as if he were thinking out loud rather than arguing, “that everyone has been making a rather critical assumption about the different videotapes.”
“To wit,” Logan prompted.
“To wit: that the tape retrieved for the Supply Room camera was running during the same eight-minute interval as the tape retrieved for all the other cameras.”
“What alternative possibility is there?”
“That the Supply Room tape recorded Martinelli's shooting, and was then disabled, well before the other tapes began recording the segments that were frozen and retrieved. In other words, someone shot Martinelli and the Supply Room camera lens which thereupon stopped transmitting. Because it stopped transmitting, the video-taperecorder in the Administration Building stopped recording on the segment of tape for that camera. Because the video-taperecorder stopped recording, it stopped erasing.”
“Damnation,” Logan said. He sat up straight in his chair, then leaned forward. For the first time in the conversation his eyes showed a flicker of excitement. “Go on,” he urged.
“Gladly. Let's see. We have Martinelli dead and the Supply Room camera disabled. The killer comes out of the Supply Room and goes about his business. His exit is of course recorded on the basement corridor camera. Exactly eight minutes later, however, that exit is erased, to be replaced by a recording of whatever is happening thenâsay, of Lanier dust mopping the basement corridor.”
“That's great,” Logan nearly shouted, his voice almost childish with delight. “Sonofabitch. That's really terrific. I can really do something with that.”
“Glad to be of help,” Michaelson said with a smile.
“Let's see, ifâNo.” Logan's face instantly clouded over.
“What's wrong?”
“No, it doesn't work. Your theory depends on the central VCR no longer recording for the Supply Room camera once it's disabled.”
“That's right.”
“But it had to be recording.”
“Why?”
“Because otherwise we would have had eight minutes of images on the Supply Room tape. What we had was the killing and then the rest of the tape taken up with snow. If the VCR had stopped recording, then the snow wouldn't have been recorded over whatever was on the tape before.”
“My word,” Michaelson acknowledged. “You're absolutely right. I'll have to think this through more thoroughly before I talk to the people at the Justice Department about it.”
“No!” Logan bellowed.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Don't under any circumstances talk to anyone at the Justice Department about this. I don't want them to hear about this until the jury does.”
“But you just said thatâ¦.”
“Exactly. As a matter of logic, your theory's a piece of shit. No offense. But the hole in your theory isn't obvious. It took someone as brilliant as me to spot it.”
“Obvious or not, though, the hole's still there.”
“Of course it is. But if I spring it on the feds by surprise, near the end of trial, they might not spot it until it's too late.” Logan rubbed his hands together in gleeful anticipation. “Trial by ambush. I love it.”
“You're overlooking something.”
“What's that?”
“Securing Desmond Gardner's acquittal by fancy footwork at trial still leaves Gardner in prison on the bribery conviction, at the mercy of the parole board. In his soul, he's the next thing to dead already. The only thing that's keeping him going is the hope of getting out of prison in time to rebuild a semblance of his life. If he ends up having to serve his full sentence for bribery, the acquittal you hope to secure on the murder charge will be a hollow victory.”
“I think that the appropriate approach has to be one problem at a time,” Logan said.
“That is your privilege.”
“Anything else I can do for you?”
“There is one other area of inquiry, actually.”
“What's that?”
“It relates to the bribery conviction. I understand that Gardner was videotaped by the FBI while accepting a bribe from someone to whom he gave an early copy of the mark-up version of a tax bill.”
“That's right.”
“In other words, he was set up.”
“That's putting it mildly.”
“Set up, presumably, with the help of the person who gave him the bribe.”
“Not presumably. That one's a mortal certainty. No doubt about it, the guy was in bed with the feds on that little number from the word go. He set Gardner up and then he sold him out. I came down real hard on him during closing argument.”
“A source, I'm certain, of infinite chagrin to the gentleman,” Michaelson said. “But it brings us to the next question: Why did he do this?”
“To save his ass. Why else?”
“Can you possibly be a bit less generic?”
“The feds had the guy on hanky panky with a pension fund or some damn thing. So the guy says, âI've had a United States Senator on my payroll for years, let's make a deal.' He hands 'em Gardner on a silver platter and gets off with restitution, a stiff fine, and ninety days on work release.”
“I see. And what is this scoundrel's name?”
“Henry Gunderson. Chief executive officer of Gunderson Union Merchant Company inâ¦.”