Even the Wicked

I spent a couple of hours reviewing press coverage of the case, then spoke to Wally Donn and checked the security arrangements they'd made. Whitfield had called first thing in the morning, but not before Wally'd seen a paper, so he'd known right away what the call was about.

"Let me get your thinking on this," he said, "since you know the guy and steered him over here, which incidentally I appreciate. We're basically looking at him in three places, the courtroom and his home and his office. In court it's a crowded public place, plus you have to go through a metal detector to get in."

"Which doesn't mean somebody couldn't wheel in a howitzer."

"I know, and this is a guy who walks through walls, right? Has he used a gun yet? He mostly goes for the throat. He strung up Vollmer and garroted Patsy S. and what was it the right-to-lifer got, a coat hanger around the neck?"

"First he'd been stabbed."

"And what's-his-name got his head chopped off, the black guy.

Except that doesn't count on account of his own man did it. Skippy, whatever his name was."

"Scipio."

"Anyway, no guns. The point is he's not afraid to work close, and he always manages to get the vic in private. Which means Whitfield's gonna have men around him all the time, but he's especially not walking in anywhere by himself. Like the john in the Criminal Courts Building, for example. That's where he got Patsy, isn't it? In a toilet?"

"That's right."

"His MO's all over the place," he said, "which is a pain in the neck.

You're right about the abortion guy, he got stabbed first, and Vollmer pretty much got his head beat in, if I remember correctly. So the point is he's not married to a single way of doing it, which means you can't rule out a rifle shot from across the street."

"That's hard to guard against."

"It's close to impossible," he agreed, "but there's still precautions you can take. I got him wearing a Kevlar vest, which won't stop everything but it's still a lot more protection than he was getting from his Fruit of the Looms. For transportation he's getting an armor-plated limo with impact-resistant glass all

around. He's got two men with him at all times, plus the driver who never leaves the vehicle."

He went on to run it all down for me. I couldn't think of a way to improve it.

"He's never the first to walk through a door," he said. "Makes no difference if it's a room that got checked ten minutes ago. Before he walks in, somebody checks it again."

"Good."

"This fucker's spooky, Matt. 'The People's Will.' Thinks he's Babe Fucking Ruth, calling his shots and then hitting the ball out. And he's batting a thousand, too, the son of a bitch. This time we're gonna strike him out."

"Let's hope so."

"Yeah, let's. Personal protection work's supposed to be boring. If you do it right, nothing ever happens.

But it generally doesn't come with front-page headlines attached to it. 'WILL TAKES AIM AT LEGAL

WHIZ.' And everywhere you go with the guy, there's reporters and film crews, jokers sticking a mike in his face, other jokers pointing a video cam at him."

"Now you know what the Secret Service goes through."

"I do," he said, "and they're welcome to it. I never cared for Washington anyway. The streets go every which way, and the fucking summers there are enough to kill you."

* * *

I found things to do over the next several days. I saw Joe Durkin at Midtown North, and he made a couple of phone calls and confirmed that the open letter to Adrian Whitfield had been written by the same person (or at least laid out in the same fashion and printed in the same typeface) as Will's earlier correspondence. I'd assumed as much, just on the basis of literary style, but it was something I'd wanted to confirm.

Even so, I spent a little time looking for someone with a personal reason to want Whitfield dead. He'd been divorced twice, and was presently married to but legally separated from his third wife, who continued to live in Connecticut. Each of the marriages had produced children, and I remembered that one son (the eldest, it turned out) had been arrested two years previously for selling a few hundred dollars'

worth of Ecstasy to an undercover police officer. Charges had been dropped, evidently in return for his rolling over and giving up his supplier. That looked promising, but it didn't seem to lead anywhere.