Read Online Murder at the Watergate by Margaret Truman - Free Book Online Page B

Doe.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Robbery?”
    “Or a hit. Man, that was a clean shot to the back of the head. Perfect spot. And close. Singed his hair.”
    “You know what doesn’t speak to me, Wendell?”
    “What’s that?”
    “Why the guy was where he was.”
    “The Watergate? Maybe he was heading for the thing at the Kennedy Center.”
    “Nah. He had no car. They’ve all been accounted for.”
    “What gets me was that his body was right outside the door leading up into the office building. Was he trying to get in there? You have to have a key for that.”
    “Maybe he did.”
    “And what? The shooter stole the key, too?”
    “Sure. Maybe he figures to come back and use it, rip off the offices upstairs.”
    Jenkins said, “Doesn’t figure. If I had a bet on the line, I say he was whacked.”
    Peterson pondered what his partner had said. “A Mexican mob hit?”
    “Our Latino friends from the south are getting more active here in DC every day, Joe. Vicious bunch, huh? Bad as the Jamaicans and Russians.”
    “I’ve got a Mexican family on the block. Nice people. Quiet, you know? When they moved in I figured all-night parties with those—whatta you call them?—those bands.”
    “Mariachis.”
    “With the big hats.”
    “Yeah. They don’t?”
    “What?”
    “Your neighbors. Wear big hats and sing all night?”
    “No. Like I said, real quiet.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Forensics will ID him. All those gold fillings, the scar. You notice his hands?”
    “Small.”
    “Very. How come the shooter didn’t take the two rings off him?”
    “In a rush.”
    “Probably. I’m outta here,” Peterson said. “My daughter’s coming over with the grandkid. Cute little guy. Only a year old but smart.”
    Jenkins grinned. “I’ve got two married kids but no grandchildren. My wife is getting impatient. Wants to be a young grandmother in the worst way.”
    They signed out and went to where their cars were parked.
    “Enjoy, man,” Jenkins said. “See you Tuesday.”
    “Yup. Glad tomorrow’s off. You know what?”
    “What?”
    “I think it
was
a hit. Take it easy.”

14
Four Days Later
London
    The ladies were to meet for lunch in the salmon-pink River Restaurant of the Savoy hotel, overlooking the Thames. Previous luncheon gatherings had been in that same hotel’s Savoy Grill, but it was the ladies’ consensus that the grill’s food and service had slipped of late, and so they changed venues to the larger, more genteel River Room.
    Elfie was, as usual, late.
    “I don’t care what he claimed, Constance, I never trusted him,” Phyllis Vine said of Elfie Dorrance’s second husband, Dieter Krueger, a German industrialist who’d prospered during the war as a supplier of die-cast metals to the Nazi military effort. Ms. Vine was a big woman in all ways, whose square jaw moved curiously sideways when she spoke, accentuated by too much, and too red, lipstick.
    “Elfie obviously believed him when he said he was never a Nazi sympathizer,” said Constance Dailey, a tiny, sparrowlike woman whose pretty face had a gray castthat almost matched her suit. “Good Lord, Phyllis, I mean, after all, she did marry him.”
    Phyllis’s nose moved. “He claimed his company—which I understand was very successful before the war broke out—was conscripted along with other German manufacturers with products useful to the paperhanger’s military machine. Typical story, I’m afraid. No German knew what was going on, of course.”
    “Of course.”
    “What Elfie ever saw in him is beyond me,” Phyllis said.
    Constance guffawed. “Deutsche marks, Phyllis, and plenty of them.”
    “Yes, quite. She was terribly young, wasn’t she, when she married him? He was twice her age, at least.”
    “At least. She’d had that failed first marriage, which I understand was sordid but mercifully brief. Has she told you about it?”
    “Well—just the bare bones. Where is she? Perhaps we should order. The usual?”
    “I suppose so.”
    “We