Sixteen years before, when he’d bought the dilapidated row house on Olive Street, all the windows had been painted shut. A contractor had wanted to install thermopaned windows. The more Frank thought about it, the less he’d liked it. Old houses had old windows. So he’d learned how to disassemble the original windows, strip layers of paint, replace pulleys and sash cords, and he’d put everything back together so it worked as it had when the house had been new and Grover Cleveland had been president.
It was warm enough to run in shorts and T-shirt, and ten minutes later, he was striding at an easy pace down M Street. He crossed Key Bridge, ran along Teddy Roosevelt Island, then down the riverside path to Memorial Bridge. Once across the bridge, he circled the Lincoln Memorial, then picked up speed for a hard run up the Potomac and back into Georgetown.
Despite the exertion, the dream kept replaying. Skeeter’s head… the pistol… Skeeter just sitting there… a captive actor in a deadly play… the shot.
He finished the run winded, sweaty, and nagged by a rasping sensation that something somewhere somehow had gone very badly wrong.
A half-hour later, showered, shaved, and standing at the kitchen counter, he sipped coffee and scanned the Post. Skeeter’s killing ranked front page above the fold, complete with photos. Bad-boy rating about eight or nine on a scale of ten, Frank figured, reading between the lines. A follower of the flamboyant Juan Brooks. Inherited the business when Juan got life in max security at Marion, Illinois. Then the obligatory boilerplate editorial equation: Young boys plus inner-city poverty plus guns equals crime.
He felt a brushing against his trouser leg and looked down.
“Hello,” he said to Monty.
The big gray cat sat with the steely expression of a drill sergeant. Cats had always intrigued him-how they watched people in the curious but detached way people watched parades. But until Monty, Frank hadn’t thought of himself as a cat person.
Frank tapped the newspaper. “Les Miserables,” he explained.
Monty wasn’t interested.
Monty had literally dropped into Frank’s life. Frank had been laying a patio in his courtyard one Saturday. He’d been on his knees, tapping a brick into place, when a very thin kitten landed in the impatiens by the wall. Frank was startled, and assumed the animal had jumped or fallen from an overhanging branch of his neighbor’s tree. Showing no fear, the kitten approached Frank and sat just out of reach. For an hour, it watched him work. When he went into the kitchen for a beer, the kitten followed.
The cat didn’t beg. It just sat, staring, beaming a telepathic command. Frank obediently opened a can of tuna.
The cat made himself at home. He had no collar. Frank put an ad in the lost and found. He watched for lost- cat flyers taped to Georgetown lampposts. The first week, he hoped an owner would show. The next week, he was afraid one might. One never did, and Monty took over as master of the small row house on Olive Street.
Food!
Frank saluted. “Right away, sir.” In the years with Monty, he’d come to the conclusion that if cats could talk to humans… they wouldn’t.
Monty had accumulated a variety of bowls from Kate, Jose, and a loose coalition of neighbors Frank had come to think of as “the Olive Street Gang.” From a cabinet, he picked out a bowl featuring a Delft-blue cat with a crown.
“This okay?”
Move it, move it.
Frank filled the bowl with dry food and put it down near Monty’s swinging door that led into the garden. Monty sniffed at the offering, then grudgingly tried a bite. Soon the food was disappearing, swept up by a furry vacuum cleaner. As he finished his coffee, Frank watched the big cat eat. Then, after stuffing the newspaper into a canvas briefcase, he went through the ritual of setting the alarm system and locking up the house.
On his front steps, Frank glanced up and down the street, taking a second or two to recall where he’d had to park the night before. He found his car on Thirtieth Street and said a silent thank-you prayer for no new dings and the still-intact side-view mirrors.
WGMS was playing the 1812 Overture. It was too early in the day for booming cannons, so Frank switched to WOL and Joe Madison. Concentrating on the Pennsylvania Avenue traffic, he paid little attention until he realized that Madison was talking about Skeeter Hodges. He turned up the volume.
Madison was refereeing a bare-knuckle brawl between Oliver North and Sarah Brady. North, the former Marine, was arguing against gun control, while Brady, the gun control activist, was arguing for. The two counterpunched with the now familiar prefabricated sound bites-Second Amendment rights, Founding Fathers’ intent, the definition of an organized militia.
All the old answers. Any new questions?
Madison cut in.
“We got a call from a listener, Mrs. Frances Morrow. Mrs. Morrow, you’re on.”
“Mis-tuh Madison-” An assertive chocolate-brown voice. Frank tugged at a memory, then gave up.
“Where you from, Mrs. Morrow?”
A pause. Then, crossly, “Eads Street.” As though laying down a challenge, she added, “Forty-five-oh-four Eads Street.”
Again the voice sounded oddly familiar, and Frank recognized the address. Two blocks from Bayless Place.
“Go ahead, Mrs. Morrow. You got words for Mr. North and Mrs. Brady?”
“I do, Black Eagle,” she said, using Madison’s nickname. “Where you folks live?”
Dead air.
Frank imagined North and Brady, sensing a trap, exchanging wary glances.
“Well?” Morrow demanded.
“Ah”-North cleared his throat-“Great Falls. Great Falls, Virginia.”
“Potomac,” Brady answered, her voice tentative.
“Unh-hunh! Yeah,” Morrow replied, a sneer in her voice. “An’ how many a your whitebread friends in Puh- toe-muck or Great Falls ever had to chase drug dealers off their front porches?”
More dead air. It hung there, embarrassing, like a bad smell.
“I tell you how many!” Morrow’s voice rose with indignation. “None!”
Frank rapped the steering wheel and smiled.
Frances Morrow bored in. “You give us all these downtown arguments about the Constitution… You’re talking about Puh-toe-muck living. About how you folks in Great Falls live. I tell you what”-righteous anger rolled in her voice-“I tell you what-you come down to where I live. Or you go over to Bayless Place. You’ll find one thing, Mistuh North, Missus Brady-you’ll find the only thing wrong with guns is that the wrong people got them.”
Madison, recognizing a dramatic closing line when he heard one, took a break for a commercial. Frank imagined North and Brady wondering what the hell had just hit them.
Two large wooden desks dominated the center of Frank and Jose’s small office. Years earlier, they had pushed the desks together so they could work facing each other. A random collection of file cabinets and bookcases lined the walls. Above the bookcases on one wall was an Ipswich Fives dartboard that Frank had picked up in a London secondhand shop, surrounded by holes in the drywall attesting to sloppy marksmanship. The single window faced south, its sill home to an eclectic parade of potted plants over the years. Today, a variegated pothos shared its perch with a struggling African violet that Frank had bought at Eastern Market and a spider plant that Tina Barber had given Jose.
Jose stood looking out the window. He turned slowly when Frank walked in. He glanced up at the wall clock.
“You run this morning?”
“Yeah.” Frank saw that Jose had already made coffee. He picked his mug up off his desk, regarded the dark brown remainder of yesterday’s coffee, poured it out, then poured a refill. The coffee was scalding.
“Frances Morrow,” he said, and blew across the steaming mug, “on-”
“Joe Madison this morning.”
“Yeah.” Frank tried another sip. “Where’d we-”
