‘There’s still a lot I don’t understand, about what’s being claimed,’ protested Parnell.
‘Me, too,’ conceded Jackson, soberly now. ‘I didn’t know how right I was last night, about opening up cans of worms. There could be some we don’t want to see.’
The usher was lucky with a meter very close to Parnell’s apartment, outside of which there was already a waiting phalanx of cameramen. The usher said: ‘I suppose I’ve got to come in with you. This is a first for me as well.’
‘Come and get your moment of fame,’ said Jackson.
They endured the flashlights and strobes and Parnell was conscious of faces at windows, as there had been when he’d left the Dubette building. Inside the apartment, he went directly to the bureau and retrieved the passport. As he turned away, offering it to the usher, Jackson nodded towards the telephone and said: ‘Your light’s flashing. You’ve got a message.’
All three men stood looking down at the apparatus while the message rewound. Then a bright voice said: ‘This is the Acme Toyota garage, 9 a.m. Monday, responding to Ms Lang’s message of Saturday. Sorry we haven’t been able to get back to you sooner, Mr Parnell. You want to call us on 202-534-9928, we’ll fix a time either in DC or McLean to sort a repair estimate for your Toyota. Like we told Ms Lang, our estimates are free and we are the authorized Toyota repair shop in the DC area. Look forward to hearing from you.’
Jackson extracted the tape from the machine with a surgeon’s delicacy and said: ‘This has gone beyond luck. We’re now into I don’t know what…’ He looked Parnell up and down, disdainfully. ‘I’ve got calls to make. And while I’m doing that, you got time to clean yourself up and put on something you haven’t slept in. You got to start making yourself look good for the cameras, because there’s going to be a lot more of those around before the day’s out.’
Thirteen
Richard Parnell showered for a second time to wash off the imagined smell of detention and chose a collar and tie to go with the discreetly patterned sports jacket to match Jackson’s conservatism. The lawyer nodded at his reappearance and said: ‘That’ll do fine for whatever the hell else is going to come today. I’ve lit a lot of fuses and there could be a very big bang.’
‘I don’t understand a word you’ve just said and I need to know when I’m going to,’ protested Parnell. He felt like a specimen under one of his own microscopes, an essentially alive but inanimate object blindly writhing and twisting.
‘You’ll know when I know,’ promised Jackson. ‘For the moment, we’re going an inch at a time, starting from when we leave here. If we get ambushed again you say nothing. I do all the talking. But we don’t hurry. Guilty people hurry and, sure as hell, Richard my friend, we ain’t guilty. But other people are, exactly of what I’m not at this moment quite sure. So we’re lighting as many more fuses as we can.’
There was the expected media encirclement outside the apartment, and Jackson murmured it was just what he’d wanted, and waited patiently for them all to get into position with their cameras focused before announcing that there had been a sensational development which he was unable to disclose until it had been brought before Judge Wilson, with whom he had been in telephone contact and who had delayed for one hour the original court resumption for this new evidence to be produced. That new evidence had elevated the investigation into the tragic death of Rebecca Lang to a federal level, the circumstances of which would become clear later that day. In the car, the usher once more at the wheel, Parnell demanded: ‘What federal level?’
‘Flight AF209,’ said Jackson. ‘It rang a distant bell. I had my office check it out while you were cleaning up. And then spoke to guys I know at the J. Edgar Hoover building. It’s a Paris to Washington DC flight that was cancelled four times about three months ago after intelligence electronic eavesdropping picked up a reference to a terrorism attack.’
‘It was in Rebecca’s bag!’ said Parnell, disbelievingly.
‘You heard what Bellamy and the Montgomery woman said in court.’
Had it anything to do with the mystery French consignment? wondered Parnell, at once. ‘Why this one number?’
‘That’s a question you’re going to be asked a lot of times over the next few days,’ predicted Jackson. ‘Like I said, I’m not sure we’re going to be happy with all the cans of worms we’ve opened. This is now an FBI and Homeland Security investigation.’
‘You’re not suggesting Rebecca could have been involved… no, that’s too absurd even to think about…’
‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to think about it a lot,’ said Jackson.
‘There was some stuff from Paris that didn’t arrive in the usual way,’ disclosed Parnell, at last. ‘Rebecca was curious. It turned out to be some check experiments that didn’t work out. According to the research vice president, the project was cancelled.’
‘You think it’s connected with that?’
In the driver’s seat the usher shifted and said: ‘I’m becoming uncomfortable about the confidentiality restrictions of this.’
Jackson said: ‘You’re bound by a specific court order – the judge is going to be told.’ To Parnell he said: ‘In court you leave everything to me, understood?’
‘With as much difficulty as I’m having understanding anything,’ said Parnell.
Suddenly alert to where they were, Parnell said: ‘Hey, you took the wrong turn – we’re going back into Washington!’
‘Stop to make first,’ said Jackson. ‘We’re going to Crystal City, to the Acme body shop. No need for you to come in when we get there. You just stay in the car.’
‘Remember who I am?’ demanded Parnell, rhetorically. ‘I’m the person accused of what amounts to murder. I have the right!’
‘I’m not contesting that right,’ shot back Jackson. ‘And I haven’t forgotten who you are or what you’re accused of. You stay in the car because I think it’s best – the best for you. So that’s what you’ll do.’
‘I’m a client!’ protested Parnell. ‘And I’m not used to being talked to like that!’ and winced at his own pomposity.
‘Look at it as a learning curve,’ dismissed Jackson.
They went over the Potomac high, at the Arlington Bridge, to miss the traffic build-up, and as they turned along the George Washington Memorial Parkway, Parnell saw the Tidal Basin to his left and remembered boastfully rowing Rebecca upriver and unthinkingly said: ‘Oh Christ!’
‘What?’ demanded Jackson, beside him.
‘Nothing.’
‘You said something.’
‘It’s not important.’
‘Everything’s important!’
‘I just thought of something.’
‘Everything you think about is important,’ insisted the lawyer.
‘This wasn’t,’ refused Parnell. Except that it was: it was the first proper, deeper realization – deeper than that which had registered with him in Burt Showcross’s overcrowded office the previous day. Rebecca was dead, he thought, stepping the words out in his mind. He wasn’t any more going to take her rowing on the river or to a restaurant where their meal and wine was chosen for them, or to a shack on a bay that looked as big as an ocean, to glue themselves up eating crabs so small you ate everything, shells and all. Someone had killed her, murdered her! And tried to make him a victim – frame him as the murderer – as well. Why? What had she – they – done for anyone to do all that? Hate them so much to do all that? Parnell rejected the threadbare phrase that came automatically to mind. He’d make it make sense! What could AF209 mean except Rebecca’s obsession with that damned French business? Who – where – was the runaway lover? Rebecca would have taken him to her uncle’s restaurant – introduced him, given the man a name, just as she’d introduced Parnell. A place, the obvious place, to start. Bethesda! Even more obvious. There had to be a clue there, among her personal belongings: a photograph, a letter, a name in an address book, no matter how much she might have despised the man for her abandonment. Belongings he had no way, no right, to examine, he reminded himself. He had to find a way, any way. He’d do it – find it. Parnell came out of the reverie at their entry into an industrial park, conscious that Jackson was leaning forward to guide the court official at the wheel, actually gesturing directions from an earlier torn-off page from the much used legal pad. Almost at once Parnell saw the neon sign of the Acme repair facility, the lettering of its Toyota appointment almost as big as the name itself. The forecourt and a lot of what he could see behind the warehouse-sized building was a dead cars’ graveyard.