Murder at the Washington Tribune - Margaret Truman [128]
“He promised he’d be here,” Wilcox told his wife as he got behind the wheel. “And I promised Edith he’d show up.”
“Maybe he ran out for a few minutes,” she said, checking her watch. “We’re a few minutes early. Let’s wait. I’m sure he’ll be back.”
Twenty minutes later, Wilcox muttered a string of curses as he drove away. They were almost to the First Precinct building when Georgia said, “Michael must be terrified.”
“Of what?”
“Of having his history made public, and people wondering whether he might have killed again.”
“Disappearing won’t help him,” Joe said, pulling into a driveway that ran alongside the precinct, and parking in a marked spot.
“It’s reserved,” Georgia said.
“What are they going to do, arrest me for illegal parking? Come on before I’m tempted to disappear, too.”
Vargas-Swayze was at the front desk when they entered, and motioned for them to follow her into the precinct’s recesses. “Hi, Georgia,” she said, opening a door into an interrogation room. “I’m sorry for this.” She asked Joe, “Where’s your brother?”
“I don’t know,” Wilcox said, slumping in a straight-back wooden chair. “He said he’d come with me, but when we got to his apartment, he was gone.”
“That’s foolish of him,” the detective said.
Their attorney, Frank Moss, arrived, escorted by a uniformed officer from the front desk. “Sorry I’m late,” Moss said, breathing heavily. “Damn traffic this time of day.”
“Anyone want some station house coffee?” Vargas-Swayze asked. There were no takers. “Excuse me,” she said, and left the room.
• • •
She went to Bernie Evans’s office where he was meeting with detectives Jack Millius and Ron Warrick.
“Wilcox is here?” Evans asked after she’d pulled up a chair.
“Yes,” Vargas-Swayze replied. “His wife is with him, and his attorney. The brother never showed.”
She recounted what Wilcox had told her about Michael’s failure to appear.
“Why was it left to Wilcox to bring his brother in?” Evans asked, his displeasure not lost on her.
“I thought it was the best way,” she replied defensively.
“Looks like it wasn’t—the best way,” Evans said.
“Do you want to talk to Joe?” she asked.
“Yes, I do. But first, I think you should hear what Jack and Ron have come up with.”
“We’ve been talking to people at Franklin Park, Edith, about the Grau knifing,” Millius said. “We came up with a live one this afternoon.”
“Good,” she said.
“We have an eyewitness to the killing,” Warrick said.
“Even better,” she said.
“It was the neighbor, LaRue.”
Her heart sunk. She forced her thoughts into a semblance of order and asked, “This eyewitness knows LaRue?”
“Right on,” Millius said. “He’s an old guy who hangs around the park, downs too much vino, I think, but pretty clear-headed most of the time. He was there when the McNamara girl got it, too. Saw nothing. He says he knows LaRue from when LaRue would come to the park, usually with a book to read, or wearing one of those Walkman kinds of things.”
“I-Pod,” Warrick corrected.
“Whatever. This witness says LaRue always had some jazz type music playing. He thinks it was a guitar, only it might have been a banjo, he says.”
“And he was there the night Grau was killed?” she asked, trying to maintain calm.
Warrick nodded and continued consulting a notepad. “He says—by the way, his name is Olson, Swedish I guess—he says that he was sitting against a tree—”
“Thinking great thoughts,” Millius said, laughing.
“…sitting against a tree when LaRue and Grau come into the park. He says they were arguing, and that Grau got pretty nasty, lots of four-letter words directed at LaRue, claims he called him a fag and a pervert, a sicko, stuff like that. It got pretty heated, according to Mr. Olson. Next thing he knows, LaRue is running from the park. Olson gets up from where he’s sitting and goes to the bench where he finds Grau bleeding to death.”
“He called it in?” Vargas-Swayze asked.
“No. He says he left the park, too, and