Murder Inside the Beltway - Margaret Truman [22]
Mae returned to the kitchen and cleared the table.
“Home for dinner?” she asked while walking him out to his car.
“Hard to say. I’ll give you a call.”
“How’s your headache?”
“Fine. Better.” It had abated slightly, but was now back with a vengeance. He put on dark glasses to shield his eyes from the sunlight.
“That’s good.” She kissed his cheek and watched him drive off to spend another day experiencing Washington, D.C.’s underbelly. Retirement and Florida couldn’t come fast enough.
• • •
Matt Jackson also woke with a headache that morning, although it was minor compared to Hatcher’s. Wine had, indeed, contributed, along with a lack of sleep.
After leaving Hatcher, he and Mary had gone to dinner at the Reef on 18th Street, known for its organic and free-range foods. From there they walked to Columbia Road to catch a local blues band at Chief Ike’s Mambo Room. That’s where the argument ensued.
Like most of their spats—and there hadn’t been many—he couldn’t remember the following day what had triggered it, although he knew it had to do with their racial differences. He splashed water on his face, made a cup of instant coffee, and sat by a window that overlooked the street. Looking down into the cup, he remembered that a previous argument had erupted over his using instant coffee, rather than brewing fresh. Mary refused to drink his instant concoction. To add insult to injury, she accused him of not having taste buds, or standards. He found that to be an unnecessary assault on his character and told her so, which sent her from his apartment back to her place, near Dupont Circle. Silly, they both knew, and they were back together the following day, sipping coffee he’d brewed in a coffeemaker she’d delivered that morning, along with herself. But, alone at the moment, instant would do just fine.
As he pondered the previous night at Chief Ike’s, he realized why MPD had a policy of cops not becoming intimately involved. It would be one thing if they’d had a fight and went off the following morning to their different jobs. But that wasn’t the case. They’d both have to arrive at headquarters on Indiana Avenue and spend the day together, much of it in the close confines of a car, tempted to bring up the previous night but knowing they couldn’t, or shouldn’t, especially not with Hatcher around.
The genesis of the argument came to him as he stepped into the shower and stood beneath the streaming water.
He’d fallen into a sour mood as the evening progressed, nothing to do with Mary, all having to do with Walter Hatcher. The senior detective’s persistent jibes at Matt, especially those with racial overtones, gnawed at him.
It wasn’t as though Matt was obsessed with race. While aware that prejudice existed despite advances made by African-Americans, he’d suffered little of it growing up in an affluent, multi-racial area of Chicago. His parents were professionals—his father was an optometrist, his mother a high school teacher, a thesis away from her Ph.D. Yes, there had been schoolyard incidents, but his slight stature had invited more taunts than his color. He was aware that there was plenty of racism in Washington, and within the MPD, but most of it was veiled, certainly less overt than forty or fifty years ago. Jackson witnessed those subtle messages but usually dismissed them.
But there was something about Hatcher as the messenger of bias that particularly irked him, which was very much on his mind last night. The bottle of wine at dinner, and drinks at Chief Ike’s, did a good job of allowing his feelings to surface and his tongue to loosen. As the Mose Allison lyrics went: “Your mind is on vacation, your mouth is working overtime.” Mary was usually effective at changing the subject whenever he fell into a funk about it, but she’d failed this time.
She’d indulged his obsession for most of the evening, which didn’t mean always agreeing with him. At one point at Chief Ike’s,