Deadly Grace

“Yes, you did. Look, if you like, I can go up there with you to check it out.”

The super looked him up and down for a moment, as though trying to decide whether or not Cruz made a suitable bodyguard. “Nah. It was over an hour ago already. If the guy was up to anything, he’s been and gone already. I’ll hear about it soon enough. So what about you? What do you want?”

“Like I said, I’m trying to locate someone who I understand lives in the building. A Jillian Meade?”

“Oh, yeah, sure, I know her.”

“She around, do you know?”

The super hefted his thin, blue-clad shoulders. “I dunno. You buzz her?”

“Yes, but there was no answer.”

“Then she’s probably at work.”

“Do you know where that is?” Cruz asked. “Where she works, I mean?” He was answered with another shrug. “How long has she been living here?”

“Oh, I dunno, couple, three years, at least. Yeah, at least that, come to think of it, ’cause she was here during the Bicentennial, I remember. She was one of the ones decked out her balcony in red, white and blue bunting.”

“What kind of tenant is she?” Cruz asked, pulling a notebook out of his hip pocket and making notes.

“What can I say? Pays her rent on time, quiet.”

“She’s single? Lives alone?”

“Uh-huh. Kinda shy, but okay, you know. Goes to work early, comes home between, oh, six and seven most nights, I’d say. Never had any trouble outta her.” The old man peered over Cruz’s shoulder, trying to see if he was getting this all down in his notebook.

“Any friends you can point me to? A boyfriend, maybe?”

The super thought about it, his stained fingernails scratching across the stubble on his chin. “Not really. All the time she’s been here, can’t say I seen her go out on many dates. Now and then, there’s this older guy comes around. Not that I’m spyin’ twenty-four hours a day or nothin’ like that, but my place is right down here on the ground floor, and I keep an eye on things. You gotta, in a city this size. Stuff goin’ down all the time.”

“Uh-huh. But this man who comes to see Miss Meade?” Cruz prodded. “You got a name, by chance?”

“Nah. Seen him come and go with her a few times, is all. Not a real social butterfly, is Miss Meade.”

“And he’s the only one?”

“Only one I ever seen. She ain’t ugly, that’s for sure, ’specially if you catch her without those glasses on. But she ain’t no girl no more neither, know what I mean? I figure she’s just another one of those career office gals this city’s full of. But, hey! At least she don’t make trouble, right? All my tenants should be so easy.”

“Okay,” Cruz said. “You say she gets home from work around six or so? But you don’t know where she works?”

“Well, now, hang on a minute, lemme think about that.” The old man’s bristly eyebrows skidded together over his nose as he frowned, thinking hard. “I asked her that once, now you mention it. A few months back, it was. I was up in her apartment fixin’ a leaky john. Just tryin’ to make a little conversation, ’cause God knows, that woman hardly says ‘boo’ herself. And I did ask her what she did for a living. Now where did she say she worked? It was someplace, you know, like…oh, hey!” He snapped his fingers. “I remember. The Smithsonian. Yeah, that’s it!”

Cruz’s pen paused in midair over the notebook. “Like, at that big old castle, do you mean, or at one of the other related museums? ‘Smithsonian’ covers a lot of territory.”

“Ah, well, now, that I can’t tell you. Anyway, what does the FBI want with Miss Meade? She in some kind of trouble?”

“It’s just a routine inquiry.”

“I had a guy here once worked for the State Department. FBI came around, then, too, checkin’ him out. For a security clearance, they said. That what this is about?”

“Something like that,” Cruz said. A flash of light bounced off the stained glass of the lobby door, and both men turned to see a black and white cruiser pull up to the front of the building, cherry lights rotating. “Looks like the police finally made it.”

“Well, it’s about friggin’ time.”

“I’ll leave you to deal with them, then, sir,” Cruz said, pocketing his notebook. “I appreciate your help, Mr.—?”

“Ripkin. No problem. I run a nice quiet buildin’, you know. Don’t want any funny stuff here.”

“Sure thing. Listen, Mr. Ripkin, I’m going to try to contact Miss Meade through her office, but if I miss her there, I’ll check back here again this evening. If you see her or hear from her before then, though, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t mention I came by.” Cruz had no idea whether or not Jillian Meade presented a risk of flight, but there was no point taking unnecessary risks.

“Whatever,” the super said distractedly, the glare returning to his beetle eyes as his attention shifted to the street, where two beefy D.C. patrolmen were lumbering up the building’s front steps. “About bloody time you guys showed up!” he hollered as the front door opened.

Cruz gave the patrolmen a sympathetic nod and slipped out around them.

There was a drugstore at the corner of the street. Cruz ducked into it to use the pay phone and put in a call to the Smithsonian Institution main switchboard. The operator, after consulting a master directory, was able to tell him there was a Jillian Meade listed on staff at the National Museum of American History, one of several buildings scattered around the capital that fell under the Smithsonian’s broad organizational umbrella.

The museum was located just across Constitution Avenue from the red-roofed buildings of the Federal Triangle. Its architecture was boxlike, a pink marble mausoleum that housed a vast collection of Americana, from the original star-spangled Banner that Francis Scott Key had seen “by the dawn’s early light,” to a pocket compass used by Lewis and Clark—a massive assemblage of memorabilia that ran the gamut from priceless national icons to sentimental kitsch.

In the main lobby, Cruz waited to ask the busy guard at the Information desk where he could find Jillian Meade’s office. All around him, the halls echoed with the shouts and laughter of children, the hissing and shushing of their teachers, and the valiant efforts of docents to be heard above the din of young voices and feet tramping across Italian marble floors. Once he’d gotten directions, Cruz dodged kids careening up and down the stairs as he made his way to the third floor, where, according to the guard, he would find Miss Meade in a corner suite of administrative offices next to the military history display.

Most of the third floor was taken up with exhibits of ceramics, printing presses, money and medals, but on the far northeast side of the floor was the permanent exhibit on the history of the American armed forces. Passing through it to reach the admin offices, Cruz ran an uneasy gauntlet past mannequins dressed in U.S. military uniforms from down through the years, standing on sober guard. There were artifacts and photos linked to various conflicts, from the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the First and Second World Wars and the UN action in Korea, all laid out in glass-covered display cases, a proud collection of weapons, tactical plans, strategic maps and portraits of victorious men and officers.

By contrast, Cruz noted, the exhibit on Vietnam was pitifully small, tucked away in the farthermost corner of the section. It was a case study in controversy avoidance, set up to carefully dodge the temptation to assign blame for the debacle that had taken fifty-eight thousand American lives in a war that couldn’t be won. Five years after the fall of Saigon, emotions were still running too high for any kind of national consensus on that war, and the display reflected the national mood, treating the period like the historic equivalent of a drooling idiot relative whose embarrassing existence the family preferred to ignore. One day there would be a reckoning, Cruz thought. But not yet.

He was almost past the exhibit when a photograph in a case near the end of the display area caught his eye. He stopped and stared, his attention snagged not so much by the platoon of grunts in familiar jungle camouflage peering out at the camera, looking pitifully young in their face paint and false bravado, as by the buildings and hills behind them. He knew this place, he realized. Had stood on that very spot. It was a staging area outside Da Nang, a camp from which a small recon unit of seven men, himself included, had set out one day in 1966 under the command of an incompetent 1st Lieutenant named Darryl Houghton. A scared kid from Dayton, Ohio, Houghton had tried to cover his fear with bullying and intimidation, then issued one dumb order too many and never came back.

Cruz felt the air move and he looked nervously over his shoulder, but there was no one else around except for a uniformed guard standing watch over a Civil War cannon. For the moment, he was alone, falling through time and space. Logically, he knew the drumming sound in his ears was the rumble of kids’ feet running up and down distant halls and not the drone of helicopter blades, but he couldn’t explain why his nostrils had suddenly picked up the distinctive odor of heated gun oil—the familiar smell of petroleum steam that issued from the red-hot muzzle of an M-16 rifle after it had been fired. And there was something else: the sour stench of rotting plant material, the kind that always managed to work its way inside his clothes and ears and nose as he crawled on his belly on the jungle floor, trying to stay beneath the sight line of roving VC patrols. Worst of all, he was smelling black vinyl body bags, the way they got when they’d been filled and left out too long in the brutal heat.

An eruption of childish giggles brought him back to the present as a school group guided by a harassed docent spilled around the corner and spread out across the armed forces exhibit. Shaking ghosts off his back, Cruz moved on.

Passing through a door marked “Museum Staff Only,” he found himself in the reception area of the corner suite of offices to which the Information guard had directed him. A woman sat at a secretarial desk, turned away from him so that he was out of her peripheral field of vision. Fingers flying over the keys of an IBM Selectric, she seemed not to notice the click of the door or the raucous group outside.

Approaching the desk, Cruz saw why. She was wearing a set of headphones, half-hidden in the feathery, swept-back layers of her blond hair, connected to a Dictaphone machine on the desk beside her. Putting a hand to his mouth, he coughed once, then again, louder. She glanced up, then did a startled double take.

“Oh, my Lord! You scared the you-know-what out of me!” she cried, ripping off the headset with one hand as her other hand flew to her heart. Her chair swiveled around. Her eyes were heavily shaded with blue, her lashes blacker and thicker than Nature had ever been capable of producing without the help of the cosmetics industry. Early twenties, Cruz guessed.

“I’m really sorry,” he said. “I tried to make as much noise as I could coming in.”

She waved a dismissive hand. “Oh, it’s okay. Never mind. Happens all the time. I just get so absorbed in what I’m doing, you know?” He nodded sympathetically and she gave him a smile. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m here to see Jillian Meade.”

A perturbed crease marred the smooth expanse of her forehead. “Did you have an appointment?”

“No, but I was hoping to catch her in. It’s important.”

Deeply pink lips twisted in a grimace of regret. “You should’ve called ahead. Could’ve saved yourself the trip. She’s not in.”