8

I was backstage with an FBI agent at each elbow. That’s where I encountered the attorney general for the United States, George Shazzar, surrounded by more tough-looking men with earbuds. Probably Secret Service. Much whispering to the attorney general about something I couldn’t hear. Shazzar glared at me with a look of disgust.

I tried to approach Shazzar, planning to suggest to him that he do the right thing, take another look into the Jason Forester death.

“Attorney General Shazzar, can I urge . . . ?” I started out, launching into my short monologue.

But my FBI escorts closed it down, yanking me in the opposite direction and yelling for me to “get away from the attorney general.”

I heard Shazzar say something about “a rotten apple at the bottom of every barrel” before he was politely but quickly whisked away.

Just as quickly I was escorted out of the convention center by a gaggle of FBI agents, though not as courteously as they’d handled the AG.

Next, placed between two special agents in the backseat of a bureau vehicle, I was driven across town, past the Army Reserve building and over to the FBI headquarters on Leon C. Simon Boulevard. The agent who drove us stayed with the car, while the other two walked me up to the red-and-tan brick building. Beyond the white arched entrance I encountered a security screening, where agents patted me down, confiscated my watch and cell phone to be kept “until later,” and returned my wallet only after taking it into another room —likely to photograph the contents. An interesting procedural question from a search and seizure standpoint, but ultimately irrelevant as things turned out. The agents escorted me up in an elevator before depositing me in a nondescript beige room that was empty except for a table, two black plastic chairs with metal frames, and a TV set at the other end, probably for video evidence viewing. They told me to sit down, while they left the room and I heard the electronic click as the door was locked from the outside.

I glanced over at the large mirror on the wall that must have housed the one-way glass.

Minutes went by. And more minutes. Maybe close to an hour, but I couldn’t tell.

I knew, as I sat in the beige room with the one-way glass, what to expect. The routine procedure. This was the observation stage. They were watching on the other side of the mirrored glass. Was I fidgeting? Any furtive movements? Signs of emotional stress?

After a while, I heard a heavy click as the door unlocked and two different agents entered, one young, one older. The younger remained standing. The older introduced himself as Special Agent Roger Fainlock, sat down across from me, and asked me if I needed anything.

“No.”

“Water? Coffee?”

“No thanks.”

They then lit into me with questions.

“Who booked your room at the hotel?”

“I did.”

They followed up with some questions about my credit card, which I pulled out from my wallet. I handed Agent Fainlock my American Express, along with my driver’s license, then dug into my pocket and retrieved the little folder from the hotel with my plastic room key inserted inside, and I tossed that onto the table in front of him too.

All of that to show that I was who I was, and how I had booked the room, and that yes, I had the key to the room. Which, to the naive observer, might seem to imply guilt, given the fact that a dead man had been found in my hotel room. But I knew the FBI must already have all that information anyway and my volunteering it, unprompted, ought to count for something. A small token in favor of my innocence perhaps.

Then questions about my travel route to New Orleans, which led to my telling them that there was an e-mailed boarding pass from United Airlines on my iPhone if they wanted to check it out. The agent pulled my iPhone from his pocket, and I typed in my passcode, accessed my e-mail, and showed him the boarding pass.

He didn’t ask me for my cell back, so I slipped it into my coat pocket. Things were looking up.

Until he shot a question about my “traveling companion” and whether we had flown together.

“First,” I shot back, “she’s not my ‘traveling companion.’ She’s my daughter. Second, yes, she traveled with her father so she could sit in the audience and watch me deliver my message to the American Bar Association. Witnessed by, oh, I’d say maybe a thousand lawyers and judges at the convention center. All of which you already know, of course, considering that your FBI agents were there and must have caught my speech, because the millisecond it was over, they grabbed me and whisked me off the stage.”

That’s when there was a quick eye contact back and forth between the agents, followed, finally, by an interrogation into the heart of the matter. Namely, what exactly did I know about Paul Pullmen, assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division at the Department of Justice in Washington?

“I never met Mr. Pullmen personally,” I explained. “I handled a white-collar crime case in New York City once that was being reviewed by the DOJ in Washington, and I saw Pullmen’s name on correspondence as the supervising attorney overseeing the case. So from that I knew about Mr. Pullmen’s position at DOJ.”

“Did you ever talk to him back then?”

“No. Only through his deputy, another lawyer I happened to know at DOJ, a guy named Gil Spencer. Once upon a time Gil and I both worked in the New York City public defender’s office for a short period. Anyway, having some knowledge of DOJ personnel, I speculated that Mr. Pullmen would be the logical person for me to try to contact in the Forester matter.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. The death in Washington, DC, of Assistant US Attorney Jason Forester.”

Agent Fainlock eyed me closely on that one, which came as no surprise. That immediately led to a waterfall of questions from him, all having to do with why I would have any interest in the Forester matter in the first place.

“A friend of mine is in law enforcement,” I explained. “A police detective. He had some inside information about the death of Attorney Forester, and he shared it with me. And that piqued my interest. Plus the fact that there might be an occult connection, which is an area of special interest to me.”

The agent’s eyes widened slightly. “And the detective’s name is?”

“It wouldn’t be fair for me to share his identity without his permission. . . .”

The agent leaned forward an inch but no more. Yet an important inch. His face hardened and his eyes narrowed. “You used to be a lawyer, Mr. Black,” he said, his voice rising a notch. “So you know we can hold you in custody.”

“Perhaps, but not for very long,” I bulleted back. “Unless you have a warrant or probable cause. And we both know you don’t have either. There’s no reasonable suspicion to connect me to this terrible crime, because as for Mr. Pullmen —and I assume he’s the victim and that is why you brought up his name —at the moment he was being killed by the real murderer, I was giving a speech in front of an army of witnesses that included FBI agents from this office.”

The agent leaned back in his chair, his eyes never leaving mine. “Remember this: the place where a high-ranking Department of Justice lawyer was murdered was your hotel room. Not someone else’s, but yours.”

“Oh?” I replied. “Your forensic investigators have determined that? That he wasn’t murdered somewhere else and then moved to my room and staged in a way to deliberately implicate me?”

Maybe that sounded a little paranoid, but it was a possible scenario.

“Mr. Black, I don’t have to tell you what our forensics unit has determined. . . .”

“And, Special Agent Fainlock, I don’t have to tell you the name of my detective friend without his consent.”

A long pause. The FBI agent across from me had the age —maybe early fifties —and the calm demeanor of an experienced investigator in the Criminal Investigative Division of the New Orleans bureau. So I gauged that he had probably reached the GS-15 level, pulling six figures, and wasn’t about to make a rookie mistake, say or do something reckless, especially with the video camera rolling on the other side of the one-way mirror. That was my guess.

But it was time for somebody to blink. Hopefully him. The bad thing was, he wasn’t blinking. I wondered whether I had underestimated the trouble I was facing. Good heavens, did they really think I had anything to do with this?

The senior agent pulled out a remote control for the TV. “Mr. Black, I want you to see something.” Then he added, “By the way, do you have a strong stomach?”

The special agent didn’t wait for my answer. Instead, he clicked on the TV at the other end of the interrogation room and a video began running. Just images, no audio. I braced myself. It quickly became clear what I was watching: the FBI forensic guys documenting the crime scene. Meaning my hotel room.

As the camera slowly swept into the entrance, it caught the familiar opening to the bathroom on the left. I recognized my suitcase on the luggage rack on the right. But then an object that I did not recognize. A paper coffee cup, the kind with the plastic travel top that has a slit opening to drink from. Something you get at a coffee shop. However, I didn’t put that there. Someone else must have.

The video camera moved forward a few steps and then to the left, toward my bed. Something became visible: a pair of feet extending over the end of the bed. One shoe on, one shoe off.

They had to belong to the victim, Paul Pullmen. Movement of the camera farther into the room, taking in the full view of my bed. When I saw it, I couldn’t inhale. Or exhale. Or make sense of it. Not at first.

The camera was fixed on the scene. One second, two seconds. After maybe ten seconds staring at this grisly footage, I was finally able to figure out the carnage.

Pullmen was stretched out on the bed, one arm dangling off the side, his suit coat and white shirt soaked with blood. Blood everywhere.

Then I was able to see the truly horrifying aspect of the crime. His head had been slashed from his body and had been set to the side of the bed, facing upward to the ceiling. A large machete, with blood along its blade, had been carefully placed lengthwise just below the head.

The police camera zoomed in on Pullmen’s right arm. More blood. Of course there was. Because his right hand had been severed at the wrist and was nowhere to be seen.