Murder at Ford's Theatre - Margaret Truman [6]
“No. Well, Clarise was here.”
“Who’s she?”
“She’s the boss.”
“Where is she?”
“Up in her office, I suppose. The building next door.”
Mo Johnson pulled his cell phone from his belt and called headquarters: “This is Johnson. We need backup here. Plenty of witnesses.” He clicked off and told uniformed officers who’d entered the theatre to go next door and round up anyone there, including a woman named Clarise. “She runs the place, I think,” he explained.
He looked down at the front row of seats. “Come with me,” he told Wales, indicating the stagehand was to follow him down to the house, where they settled into adjacent seats. Johnson asked for a brief explanation of why Wales was there that morning, asking him to describe what he’d seen, and gathered his full name, address, phone number, e-mail address, and other specifics. “We’ll go to headquarters after we get all the informal statements.”
“What for?”
“To get your formal statement. So hang around. Don’t talk to anybody except me. Got it?”
“Yeah.”
“Next!”
Klayman entered the theatre after Dr. Ong had released Nadia Zarinski’s body to be taken to his office and lab. An autopsy would be performed that afternoon. The members of the stage crew who’d been questioned by Johnson, or by a backup team of detectives, had been told to take seats throughout the theatre with plenty of space between them, and were instructed to not talk to one another until their formal statements had been taken at headquarters.
The slight young detective stood on the stage and stared up to the box in which President Lincoln had been assassinated, kept pretty much as it was that fateful night. Klayman was no stranger to Ford’s Theatre. He’d spent many hours there soaking in its historic meaning and listening to tourist lectures delivered by park rangers. The presidency of Abraham Lincoln and his tragic death were passions of his; he’d read countless books on the subject, and attended lectures presented by Lincoln scholars. In the good weather, on days off, or when he convinced Johnson to accompany him with their brown-bag lunch, he enjoyed sitting on the steps of the gleaming white marble Lincoln Memorial, the soaring figure of a seated, serene Lincoln peering down on the millions of tourists who visited his shrine, the small children racing up and down the steps, citizens paying homage to the man who’d freed the slaves. Others simply enjoyed the view across the Reflecting Pool, inspired by Versailles and the Taj Mahal, to the Washington Monument and beyond to the Capitol.
Mo Johnson had never had a particular interest in Lincoln history—until he’d teamed up with the bookish Klayman. One day, after reading an account of the design, building, and dedication of the Lincoln Memorial on Memorial Day 1922, he asked Klayman—as they were eating sandwiches on the steps—“Did you know, Rick, that when it was dedicated, the president of Tuskegee Institute—he was black, you know—they wouldn’t let him sit with the other speakers—he was supposed to speak—and made him sit across the street with the rest of the black folk?” Anger edged his voice.
“I know,” Klayman replied. “Ironic, huh?”
“That’s all you have to say?”
“What do you want me to say? It was wrong. If Lincoln had been there, he would have denounced it. I denounce it. Okay?”
“Okay.” After a thoughtful pause, Johnson asked, “Do you think your people had it worse? You know, the Holocaust. Slavery. Who had it worse?”
Klayman stood, brushed off the seat of his pants, crumpled his brown bag, and said, “I think everybody got screwed, Mo. Everybody.”
Their discussion was interrupted by a call on the police radio Johnson carried. It wasn’t the first discussion they’d had about race, nor would it be the last. Johnson liked talking about it; Klayman didn’t, concerned that no matter what he might say, Johnson would never fully accept that his white partner, Jewish at that, didn’t harbor some deeply buried prejudice.
“HEY, RICK,” Johnson called, interrupting Klayman’s momentary reverie on the stage. Their attention turned