Murder at the Washington Tribune - Margaret Truman [100]
Roberta and Michael walked to her car. The tension in Michael’s body was transmitted to her through the hand he’d placed on her arm.
“I’m so sorry you have to put up with someone like that,” she said. “You never know what your neighbors will be like until you move in.”
“He’s scum, that’s all,” Michael said, attempting to control the tremor in his voice and his rapid, shallow breathing. “I might have made a mistake when I was young—a very big mistake—but people like him make me look like a saint.”
She wasn’t sure she agreed with his thesis, but didn’t express her reservation. Instead, she said, “Thank you again, Michael, for a lovely time. I’d like to do it again soon.”
“Any time you say.”
He placed his hands on her upper arms, looked into her eyes, and planted kisses on her cheeks, one on each, then a second.
“Good night,” she said as she climbed into the car, started it, looked back at him, and drove away.
It wasn’t until she was home and preparing for bed that it came to her, one possible reason for thinking she’d recognized the pages of his manuscript. They looked as though they’d been typed on the same typewriter as the note from the serial killer to her father. She rummaged through a pile of newspapers until coming up with the edition in which the letter had been reproduced as part of the article.
“Wow” was what she said. And to herself: Oh, wow!
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Vargas-Swayze was happy to work late that night. Not so for Dungey. He’d pulled a hamstring during a basketball game and had asked for time off, but was pressed into an extra shift because the full moon seemed to bring out the homicidal urges of some. For her, working an extra shift would keep her mind off the divorce and the nasty turn it had taken. For both, the overtime pay was welcome.
A woman stabbed her boyfriend to death after she found he’d been seeing their voluptuous female neighbor. A sixteen-year-old boy had been beaten to death by a gang whose members coveted his jacket and sneakers. While these incidents occurred in the city’s less affluent neighborhoods, the evening’s homicides weren’t restricted to those areas. A German industrialist, in Washington on company business, was mugged and shot to death not far from the State Department in relatively upscale Foggy Bottom. So much for diplomacy on the streets. And another man had been found bleeding to death in Franklin Park, the scene of Colleen McNamara’s murder not many nights before. He died en route to the hospital without having identified his assailant.
“How’s your leg?” Vargas-Swayze asked Dungey as they left the building at three in the morning and headed for his car.
“Hurts,” he replied with a crooked grin. “They say you’re supposed to play through the pain, but that’s BS. I hurt, I don’t play.”
She laughed. “Did you want to play in the NBA when you were a little kid?” she asked.
“Nah. I wanted to be a major-league baseball player, but it wasn’t for me. I’m built more for basketball. Want something to eat?”
“I’m hungry,” she said.
She told him over platters of eggs and bacon at the Diner, her favorite haunt in Adams Morgan, the latest details of her ongoing financial hassle with Peter Swayze.
“The guy is slime,” Dungey said as they pulled up in front of her apartment building. “You’re a lot better off without him.”
“You don’t have to tell me that,” she said. “I’m more aware of it every day. By the way, you never said what you thought of our visit with LaRue.”
“I was wrong about him I guess,” he said. “I don’t get the same bad vibes I did the first time around. You?”
“He seems okay. When are you going to run an ID on him?”
“Maybe I’ll get around to it if I work twenty-four seven. See you tomorrow.”
“Today. It’s today.”
“Yeah, it is, isn’t? Good night, Edith.”
“Good night.”
She’d almost reached the front door to the building and was fishing in her purse for her keys when a honking horn caused her to turn. Dungey had switched on the lights in the car and was waving for her to rejoin him. She leaned in the open window on the passenger