Murder at Ford's Theatre - Margaret Truman [4]
“You get to see your pretty little lady friend over the weekend?” Johnson had asked his partner as they sat in the unmarked car.
“Yes,” replied Klayman. “We had dinner last night.”
Johnson’s laugh was low and deep and rumbling, like a poorly tuned outboard engine. “Candlelight and all that?”
“Come on, Mo, why are you always asking me about Rachel? We had dinner. No big deal.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why do you care whether I get married or not?” Klayman asked.
“Just looking out for your best interests, my man,” said Johnson. “Married men live longer. You never heard that?”
Klayman looked over at his partner, smiled, and shook his head. He’d been hooked up with Mo Johnson since making detective a year ago after only five years on the force. Johnson was a twenty-two-year veteran, skilled, black, a good teacher, who’d seen it all: “The kid is bright, Mo, but wet behind the ears. Show him the ropes,” Johnson’s supervisor had said after the veteran’s partner of many years had retired, and Johnson had been told he was to be paired with the rookie detective.
Mo wasn’t happy being handed Klayman as a partner. As he’d told his wife, Etta, that night, “Out of thirty-six hundred cops, most of ’em black, I end up with a skinny little Jewish kid from New York. Maybe it’s time to grab the pension and walk.”
Which he didn’t do. The truth was, he’d come to like Rick Klayman, even respect him. Klayman had proved his mettle on more than one occasion, facing down dangerous situations with steely resolve and audacious fearlessness. “The kid may look like a nerd,” Johnson told friends in the department, “but he’s all right. He-is-all-right!”
That was when the female voice crackled through the speaker: “Reported unconscious person, alley behind Ford’s Theatre, Tenth and F.”
“Seventeen responding,” Johnson barked into the handheld microphone as Klayman pulled from the curb and turned the corner down Tenth, coming to a hard stop a minute later in front of the theatre. They bolted from the car and entered, flashing their badges at two uniformed park rangers standing at an interior door leading down into the theatre itself.
“Where’s the unconscious person?” Johnson asked one of them.
“Really unconscious,” a ranger said. “She’s stone-cold dead.” He pointed to the stage. Sirens could be heard from both in front of and behind the theatre. The detectives moved quickly down an aisle, skirted the narrow orchestra pit, and bounded up onto the stage.
“Police,” Klayman announced. “Where’s the victim?”
The older stagehand’s nod indicated the door leading to Baptist Alley.
Johnson went to it and stuck his head through the partial opening. He was faced with four uniformed MPD officers who’d driven into the alley from F Street. They were looking down. Johnson did, too, and saw the young woman whose lifeless, bloody body blocked the door. He turned to Johnny Wales sitting on a wooden chair, head in his hands. “Another way out there from here?”
“Huh?” Wales’s head came up. “Yeah, over there.”
Klayman beat Johnson to the second exit door and went through it, followed closely by his partner. A few people had walked up the alley from F but were kept away from the scene by one of the officers. Another uniform held a scruffy man against the brick wall with a straight-arm. The man’s advanced dishevelment made it hard to determine his age. Thirty? Seventy? His hair was a helmet of matted salt-and-pepper hair, his scraggly beard hanging far below his chin and cheeks. Large, dark circles on the crotch of filthy, baggy chinos testified to his not being housebroken. Klayman took special note of his eyes; they were large, wild, and watery, giving him the look of a crazed soldier who’d just emerged from behind enemy lines. He