1 7 6
H I G H P R O F I L E
“Some of it was schmoozing,” Lutz said. “You know, be pals with you, how you see they’re not afraid, and no hard feelings. But in fact he actually seemed interested. Few weeks later he called and asked if we could talk.”
“What did he want to talk about?”
“Police work,” Lutz said. “Weeks was going to do a fullhour commentary on his TV show about police work, and wanted to research it. I said okay. By that time the lewdbehavior charge had sort of gone away. So I talked with him. He rode around in the cruiser with me. I liked him. He was a pretty nice guy. You know? He was interested in everything. He wasn’t full of himself. He seemed to get it. He never got in the way. And finally, when he did the commentary, I liked that, too. He was fair. He didn’t whitewash cops. But he didn’t blackball us, either. He knew the score.”
“He mention being arrested for public lewdness?”
Lutz grinned and shook his head.
“He was honest,” Lutz said. “But he wasn’t crazy.”
“How’d you end up as his bodyguard?” Jesse said.
“He got some death threats. Never clear who they were from. Weeks said that telling the truth in public was inherently risky.”
“So he called you?”
“Yeah. We’d become pretty friendly. We used to talk now and then. Have dinner once in a while. He offered a lot more than Baltimore County was paying. So I went with him.”
“Any follow-up on the death threats?”
“Not till now,” Lutz said.
1 7 7
R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
“You think this murder is about that?”
“I don’t know what this murder is about,” Lutz said. Jesse nodded.
“I talked with the doormen here,” Jesse said.
“Yeah?”
“No one remembers seeing Walton and Carey walking up Franklin Street,” Jesse said.
“Why would they?” Lutz said.
“Nobody remembers you asking about it, either.”
“For crissake, Jesse, they talk to a hundred people a day.”
“Do you remember specifically who you talked with?” Jesse said.
Lutz shook his head.
“Not really. White guy,” he said. “Looked Irish. You know, they all look the same in the monkey suit.”
“Not many Irish doormen around the city,” Jesse said. “If we got them all together, could you pick him out?”
“Probably not, it was a while ago. I just don’t remember.”
“But someone did see them that day,” Jesse said.
