Murder at the Washington Tribune - Margaret Truman [3]
That kind of break hadn’t happened during her time at the Trib. But she had one advantage. She was lovely. Male heads turned and pulse rates sped up whenever she sauntered through the newsroom wearing skirts, sweaters, and blouses that accented her ripe body, donning a linen blazer in summer now and then as a nod to corporate correctness. No doubt about it, Jean Kaporis was a splendid example of young womanhood, every curve and bump properly placed, good genes in ample evidence, and especially a pleasant, willing personality to go with it, all of which attracted many people to her—including whoever had strangled her to death.
A maintenance man found her early one morning a month ago in a secluded second-floor supply closet at the far end of the main newsroom, bruises on her neck, pretty mouth going in the wrong direction as though someone had removed it and carelessly pasted it back on. The autopsy reported that she’d died from manual strangulation, her throat and larynx damaged from pressure exerted by her assailant’s hands and fingers. The presence of petechial hemorrhages in the mucous membrane lining the inner surface of her eyelids provided presumptive evidence of strangulation. She’d bitten her tongue, a not-uncommon occurrence with victims of strangulation. The struggle with her attacker had been brief. Although laboratory analysis indicated she’d engaged in sexual intercourse within twenty-four hours of death, there was no outward sign of having been sexually assaulted.
• • •
“No, nothing new,” he told his daughter. “They’ve been questioning everyone at the paper. Makes sense.”
“And?”
“No ’ands,’ Roberta. That’s all I know. Maybe you know something you’d like to share.”
She shook her head.
“Let you know if anything breaks,” he said.
She smiled and squeezed his arm. “And I’ll do the same.”
“Back to the house for a drink?” Georgia asked their daughter.
“Thanks, no, Mom. I promised the guys from the station I’d go out with them.”
“Ah, youth,” Wilcox said. Wasted on the young. To his wife: “What say we call it a night?”
Georgia nodded and kissed her daughter on the cheek. “Not too late,” she said. “You need your beauty sleep.”
“Mom!”
“I know, I know, but—”
“Not too late,” Joe Wilcox echoed, a wide grin crossing his craggy face. “And eat breakfast. You should always start the day with a good breakfast. Diane Sawyer does.”
As the Wilcoxes and hundreds of others poured out of the Washington Hilton and Towers on to Connecticut Avenue NW, they were confronted with a chaotic crime scene. A half-dozen marked police cars, lights flashing and radios crackling, had blocked off the wide thoroughfare. Yellow crime scene tape marked an area of the sidewalk almost directly in front of the hotel’s main entrance. A body covered by a white cloth lay on the sidewalk inside the taped-off section.
“Hey, Joe!”
A colleague from a competing paper, with whom Joe had covered myriad crime scenes, came up to the couple.
“What happened?” Wilcox asked.
“A drive-by. Middle-aged white guy.”
“He’s dead?” Georgia asked.
“Very.” To Joe: “You covering?”
“No. Night off. This is the same spot where Hinckley shot Reagan back in eighty-one.”
“That’s right,” said the reporter, making a note in his pad. “Forgot about that.”
“Let’s go,” Georgia said.
Wilcox took a final look at the body, shook his head, took his wife’s arm, and maneuvered through the crowd in the direction of the parking garage. As they pulled onto the street, Georgia said, “If you want to go back, Joe, I’ll drive home. You can take a car service.”
“Thanks but no thanks. I’m not missing anything. There’ll be another murder to cover tomorrow. There always is. No, this is Roberta’s night, and I don’t want anything to spoil the memory of her up there getting her award. Damn, she looked good.”
It was, he knew, what his wife wanted to hear. She squeezed his thigh and said, “Let’s stop for ice cream. I’m in the mood.”
“Then ice cream it’ll be.”
CHAPTER TWO