Free A Murder of Justice by Robert Andrews Page A

been any other city but Washington, the place would have been under martial law. I thought things had gotten better. But they haven’t. We’ve given birth to a lawless culture. It’s passed on from generation to generation. . .like a family business. Brutal, unforgiving enterprise. You make a wrong decision and you get a nine-millimeter retirement or life in an eight-by-ten cell. Theones who succeed . . . who make it big . . . become even more deadly than their parents.”
    “Survival of the fittest,” Frank mused. “Criminal Darwinism at work.”
    Tom Kearney shrugged and rolled one hand in a gesture of futility. “Now, the numbers business doesn’t surprise me. You let politicians play with numbers, it’s turning the proverbial fox loose in the henhouse.” He got up from his chair, unfolding slowly to stand. He reached for Frank’s empty plate, stacked it on his own, and made his way to the sink.
    “Fella with the lathe said he’d meet me at the flea market.” Tom Kearney said. “He ought to be there by now.”
    L ike so many mushrooms, the Georgetown flea market sprang up on Sunday mornings in a school parking lot on Wisconsin Avenue, just across from the Safeway. From Frank’s house, it was a good walk: up Thirtieth to R Street, past Katharine Graham’s home, Oak Hill Cemetery, Montrose Park, and Dumbarton Oaks.
    At the market, his father went off to deal with the fella with the Shaker lathe, leaving Frank to wander through the aisles of vans. Canopies stretched out from them, over everything from honey, tomatoes, and home-baked breads to chandeliers, wicker chairs, and Bavarian beer steins.
    He stopped to admire a bowling trophy awarded to one Norville “Splits” Casey in 1939. A nearby cigar box filled with marbles caught his eye. He picked out a marble and held it up, taken by a white ribbon twisting through the clear green glass.
    “That there’s a corkscrew.” The speaker, a stocky older woman with short white hair, in red slacks and a Carolina Panthers T-shirt, held a Marlboro in the corner of her mouth.
    “See how it cuts through the middle? That’s why they call it an auger. Augers go through the middle of a marble. When the corkscrew is on the surface, they call it a snake.”
    “Akro Agate?” Frank asked.
    The woman squinted at Frank through a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Yeah. Akro. You know marbles?”
    “Some. How much for the box?”
    H e found his father, standing by the Shaker lathe, handing a check to a grizzled man in a red tank top.
    Tom Kearney smiled. “Joe here’s going to deliver it, aren’t you, Joe?”
    Joe nodded. “Wednesday, Judge?”
    “Wednesday’s fine.” Tom Kearney stowed his checkbook away. He pointed to the cigar box under Frank’s arm.
    “What do you have there?”
    “Marbles.”
    Tom Kearney acted as if it was the most natural thing in the world. He nodded approval. “Man can’t have too many marbles. You ready to head home?”
    For several blocks, the two men walked in silence.
    “I’ve been thinking,” Tom Kearney finally said.
    “Marbles? Shaker lathes?”
    “Hodges . . . the numbers. Fifteen hundred cold cases?”
    “Yessir?”
    Tom Kearney shook his head. “My years in court . . . for a while, a long while, I thought I’d seen it all. Took years for me to discover that all I’d actually seen was what had managed to get into court. And by the time it had gotten to court, it had been prettied up.”
    After another silence, Tom Kearney continued. “The stories were still pretty damn grim. But in court, they’d become just that . . . stories. Wasn’t until later that I realized there was a lot of very nasty stuff that never got to court. That stayed out in the streets.”
    “Kate said it teaches a lot of people they can get away with murder.”
    Tom Kearney took that in, then asked, “Ever hear of the Plimsoll line?”
    “A railroad?”
    “No. In heavy seas, a ship that rolls over past a certain point isn’t