Murder at Union Station - Margaret Truman [18]
“Louis Russo?” Mullin said aloud. “That’s Italian. What’s he doing with an Israeli passport?”
Those around him didn’t have an answer.
Mullin handed the wallet and travel documents to an evidence technician and left the station, climbed in his car, and drove to First District headquarters on North Capitol Street N.W., where he sat with fellow detectives who’d been at the murder scene. They began to compare notes, speculate, joke, and put together a preliminary report.
“What do you figure the old guy was doing in D.C.?” someone asked. “Or going to do?”
“Visit family maybe,” someone else answered.
“Next of kin?”
“Back in Israel maybe,” Accurso said.
“You checked Russos in the D.C. directory?” Mullin said.
Accurso nodded. “You figure the shooter knew Russo?” he asked. “It comes off like a mob hit.”
Mullin laughed as he said, “Russo. Italiano. Maybe he’s some geriatric godfather nobody ever heard of. Or from some family the New York cops know well. Get New York on the phone.”
“Or the computer. It doesn’t make sense. Doesn’t make sense,” the youngest of the detectives said.
“What doesn’t?”
“Why some black guy would come up behind an old Italian guy named Russo, who’s here from Israel, and do him in public. The witnesses say the shooter was cool, unflustered, in no rush. A pro. So why pick Union Station? Who is Louis Russo, and why would a certified hit man want to whack him? For what? It doesn’t make sense.”
“You ever see a murder that made sense?” Mullin offered.
“Yeah, sometimes. You know, some people, well, deserve to get killed,” the young detective said. “Sometimes it’s justifiable. Justifiable homicide. That’s how they get off. Like a guy whose wife is screwing around and gets caught, and he pops her or the boyfriend. In Texas, that’s justifiable murder.”
“In Texas, that’s routine.”
Mullin glanced at Accurso, who was putting the finishing touches on their initial report. “See what you can learn by hanging around here, Vinnie?” he said, his voice mirroring his amusement. “Your wife plays around, it’s okay to pop her.”
“I didn’t necessarily mean that,” the young detective said defensively.
“You up for a drink?” Mullin asked Accurso.
“Thanks, no, Bret. Got to get home.”
“Anybody?” Mullin asked others in the room.
Heads were shaken, excuses made.
“Well, I’m packing it in. After a pop or two. See you tomorrow.”
Mullin’s apartment was in a four-story town house on California Street, between Dupont Circle and Adams-Morgan. It was too early to suffer the loneliness of the one-bedroom, perpetually untidy place he’d called home for the six years since Rosie, his wife of nineteen years, and he had called it quits, sold the house in Silver Spring, and gone their separate ways. She’d settled in a high-rise up near the National Cathedral and continued to work as a receptionist for a K Street law firm. They seldom talked unless something troublesome arose about their two kids, a son and daughter, who’d flown the coop and were doing pretty well, the girl in Denver where she worked as a personal trainer, the son a cop in a small West Virginia town. He hadn’t heard from his daughter in over a year; she blamed his drinking for the breakup of the marriage and had viciously condemned him the last time they spoke. His son kept in touch with an occasional phone call and Christmas and birthday card, but Mullin didn’t have any illusions about the depth of that relationship, either.
He was thinking of his dismal family situation when he entered the private entrance to the Jockey Club, in the Westin Fairfax hotel on Massachusetts Avenue. When it came to choosing bars, Mullin was an equal opportunity drinker. He’d been to most of them in D.C. over