Removal (10 page)

Involuntarily, Kelly put down her fork, reached across the table and put her hand on his.

‘Oh, Jeff, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. I…’

‘No. I’m the one who started this line of conversation. There’s no reason not to talk about it. It runs in her family, but the other women who died of it were much older. She never really worried about it, and by the time she had a reason to be concerned, it was too late. It’s strange. You always think you’ll have enough time, don’t you?’

They both became aware of Kelly’s hand on his. Her first instinct was to withdraw it, but she decided to leave it where it was, and he did not try to pull away.

‘How long has it been?’

‘Almost three years.’

‘Do you have children?’

‘No. We hadn’t gotten around to it.’

Kelly allowed their fingers to intertwine.

‘You’re right. You don’t think about it happening to someone so young. I don’t think about it happening to me. I think about getting shot in the line of duty, but not about something going wrong with my body.’

They said little for a while, but Kelly kept her hand lightly in place until the main course was served. They finished their pasta with light talk about families, colleges, and careers. The waiter brought cappuccinos, and a dessert menu, which they returned unopened.

‘That was good,’ Kelly smiled. ‘I’d come here again any time.’

‘Yes, it’s not bad.’

‘Well, we probably can’t put it off any longer. You want to show me what you’ve got on Middle and Near East Holdings, Inc.?’

‘Sure.’

Jeff reached into the slim leather briefcase he had brought with him from the D.C. Police Headquarters, and handed Kelly several pieces of paper.

‘Don’t get too excited. All this really tells us is that the company was incorporated in Delaware, which we knew already, and that five guys with foreign-sounding names claim to be the directors and officers. They have a P.O. Box mailing address and a phone line which is always answered by a machine.’

Kelly scanned the documents.

‘Has the company filed any returns?’

‘Not yet.’

‘OK. Well, I guess we’ll check these characters out, just in case we turn up anything interesting.’

‘Yeah. What do you figure about the apartment?’

‘Probably just a corporate hideaway for the directors to screw Lucia Benoni and others while taking a tax deduction. I should have known better than to expect too much.’

Jeff smiled and opened his briefcase again.

‘Well, perhaps I should at least show you the pride of the collection.’

‘There’s more?’

‘I saved the best for last. Actually, this came in as a fax while you were saying goodbye to Linda. I made you a copy. I haven’t even had a chance to read it properly yet.’

He gave Linda a stack of photocopied pages with hand-written entries in a neat, feminine hand.

‘What is this?’

‘You remember we asked NYPD to turn over Lucia’s apartment in Manhattan?’

‘Sure.’

‘Well, they took away a lot of stuff. They haven’t made a full inventory of it yet, but they thought we should see this right away. It appears to be her address book. Names, addresses and phone numbers. I bet it’s going to be worth following up.’

‘No kidding.’

Kelly thumbed quickly through the first few pages.

‘I’m seeing one or two fairly prominent Washington names in here.’

‘Yes,’ Jeff said. ‘I noticed a couple myself when I scanned it. I’m sure we’ll find more as we go through it.’

Kelly flicked rapidly through the pages, trying to find her way farther into the alphabet.

‘Please, Jesus, let it not be the President or Senator O’Brien,’ she said.

Jeff grinned.

‘Definitely not the President,’ he reassured her. ‘That I did check.’

To her relief, Kelly found no mention of Senator O’Brien under ‘O’.

She smiled.

‘Perhaps we ought to be a little more systematic.’

They had been sitting opposite each other at the table, but now she moved to sit beside him so that they could read through the pages together. They read at a leisurely pace, finishing the coffee, sipping the wine, exchanging occasional glances when they came to an especially recognizable name. When they had worked their way to the end, Kelly laid the pages on the table between them, idly scanning the front page, which seemed to contain nothing but Lucia Benoni’s own address and telephone number. Suddenly, she picked the page up.

‘What are these markings here, at the foot of the page?’

Jeff held the page up to his eyes.

‘Difficult to tell in this light. Maybe something very faint in the original which didn’t copy.’

‘Written in pencil, maybe. It looks like it could be a number of some kind. It may be nothing.’

‘Or it may be something,’ Jeff said.

He took his mobile phone from the briefcase and dialed a number.

‘Detective Wernick, please… Lieutenant Morris with the D.C. Police. I spoke with him earlier in the evening… Thank you.’

He placed his hand over the mouthpiece to talk to Kelly.

‘If he hasn’t gone home and he hasn’t logged the original into the evidence room yet, he may be able to give us a quick answer.’

‘If not, I’ll ask them to messenger it to me tomorrow,’ Kelly said.

‘Hello, Tom? Jeff Morris in D.C…. Yeah, listen could you do me a favor? Do you still have the address book in front of you? Good… Look on the front page, where her name is, and tell me whether you see anything written in the bottom right-hand corner. Could be in pencil. It didn’t copy well.’

Jeff took a pen from his jacket and wrote on a napkin, which he showed to Kelly.

‘Is that it? Great, Tom. I appreciate it. Talk to you later.’

Jeff had written a seven-digit number.

‘Phone number, no area code,’ Kelly said. ‘If the area code was too familiar for her to bother writing it down, it’s probably where she spent most of her time.’

‘Either New York or Washington.’

‘Right. You want to check it out?’

‘Yeah. But not from the office, and not from here. Just in case…’

‘Phone booth. I agree. Let’s go.’

They paid the check and walked outside into the cool night air. A block away they found a phone booth outside a twenty-four hour launderette. They decided to try Washington D.C. first, a local call for which no area code was necessary. Jeff held the receiver between them so that they could both hear. A sequence of clicks on the line suggested that the call was being rerouted several times, but they finally heard a ringing tone. After three or four rings, a male voice answered with the single word ‘Hello’. Jeff’s eyes opened wide as he turned to Kelly. She placed her hand over his and forcibly returned the receiver to the hook, cutting off the call. The voice had been unmistakable to both of them.

They walked some distance towards Kelly’s car without speaking.

‘His private line,’ Jeff said eventually. ‘I just called the President of the United States on his private line.’

‘His very private line, I’m sure. You can’t call the White House and get straight through to the President. The official lines are answered by receptionists twenty-four hours a day.’

‘So, now what?’

‘I’ll report to Director Lazenby first thing in the morning, and then it’s up to him. I suggest you do the same with Chief Bryson. And then, let’s get to work checking out the names in the address book.’

They had reached Kelly’s car. After she had unlocked the door, he held it for her as she climbed in.

‘I enjoyed this evening, Kelly,’ he said, with a hint of shyness.

She gave him a warm smile.

‘I had a good time too, Jeff. I’ll call you tomorrow.’

At home, Kelly checked her messages. There was one from Linda Samuels asking her to call back, and one from Frank announcing that he was leaving for an unexpected road trip early the following morning. Kelly decided not to return either call that night.

T
HE
W
ASHINGTON
P
OST’S
White House correspondent, Mary Sullivan, did not like her source, Selvey. She found him vulgar and unnecessarily direct, qualities which her upbringing in a wealthy part of Boston had taught her to avoid. She did not like the way he always seemed to be amused at her. Nor did she care for the run-down cafés in which he insisted on meeting. But, like him or not, she had to admit that Selvey was good; in fact, all things considered, the best she’d ever had. His information was consistently of the highest quality, and his insights, if crudely expressed, right on target. For the life of her, Mary could not begin to imagine where he got it. Selvey did not seem the type to mingle with Washington’s élite. She could picture him far more easily in a beer joint on the wrong side of town, or placing bets at a dog track. And he did offer her some pretty exotic material from time to time, the kind of thing that would be of more interest to
People
magazine than to the
Post
. Mary had developed the habit of listening patiently, knowing that when he came to the serious political material, he would be right on point. She could always pass on the stuff she couldn’t use to contacts at other publications. But Selvey was an enigma. One thing Mary could never quite understand was that he never seemed interested in money. He never asked for it. When he did accept a gratuity, it was always with an amusement which seemed almost contemptuous. Nor did his material seem to be strongly biased in favor of either political party, even if it was often slanted against the President. Mary might have understood this better if she had known of Selvey’s connection to John Mason and the Wilson Foundation. But Selvey had never spoken a word to her on this matter, and never would.

Usually, Mary took her time evaluating and checking Selvey’s material before deciding what to write, or how to move a story forward. That was what she was known for. Her success at
The Washington Post
had not come easily. There were those who found her unimaginative, too prosaic for really top-flight political reporting. The Pulitzer Prize, of course, silenced her critics overnight. But she had won the Prize, not for her imagination, but for a painstaking trudge through thousands of pages of Freedom of Information Act material which many reporters would have found too daunting even to begin; a trudge that exposed a well-concealed political scandal, which took down several well-known public figures in its wake. Method was Mary’s strong point. Always check, and never rush in.

But not this morning. After this particular early morning meeting, which Selvey had virtually ordered her to attend – the impertinence of the man! She ran to her car and drove as fast as she dared from the café to the
Post’s
offices. On the way, she used her mobile phone to demand an appointment with her editor as soon as she arrived, and her seniority to refuse to take his secretary’s ‘No’ for an answer. She parked crookedly in her assigned spot in the garage and took the elevator to Philby’s office.

Harold Philby, a patrician by temperament, and a veteran newspaper man, was tall and thin, with distinguished looks including a fine head of silver hair. He looked ten years younger than his sixty-eight years. He enjoyed an enviable reputation for sound judgment and discretion and, over the course of his working life, had gained the trust of even the most skeptical of Washington insiders. The cluttered state of his usually neat desk bore witness to the prospect of an unusually hectic day. He looked up quizzically as a harried Mary Sullivan rushed into his office without even knocking.

‘What’s got you so fired up today, Mary?’ he grinned at the sight of the normally composed reporter in such a state of excitement. ‘I’ve never seen you like this. You look like the cub reporter who just caught the mayor with his hand in the cookie jar. Is the White House about to fall down about its foundations?’

Philby’s secretary shot Mary a disapproving glance, and left them alone.

Mary took a seat, trying to catch her breath, trying to rearrange her hair, trying unsuccessfully to look like Mary Sullivan. She smiled.

‘Quite possibly, Harold,’ she said. ‘Quite possibly.’

* * *

Kelly arrived at Ted Lazenby’s office that morning with equal haste, but already frustrated. Her first call of the morning, to Frank, was too late to catch him before he left for the airport, and her second interrupted a tearful Linda Samuels during an argument with Bob. Linda had promised to call back, but had not done so before Kelly had to leave her apartment to drive to the Hoover Building. But Kelly did succeed in the most vital task she had set for herself. She made sure that she had the Director’s undivided attention for an hour before he went into meetings which would take up the rest of his morning. As briefly as she could, she outlined for Lazenby the events of the previous evening, and handed him a copy of the pages of Lucia Benoni’s address book. With some apprehension, she told him about the phone call she and Jeff Morris had made to the mysterious number, assuring the Director that they had not been mistaken in identifying the President’s voice. Lazenby had turned away from her in his chair, staring at the wall as she spoke, but now turned slowly back towards her.

‘No, you’re correct,’ he said heavily. ‘That’s the President’s private line. It’s for his own personal calls. A few of his close friends have access to it, myself included, but we would never use it except for social reasons, you know, to arrange a game of golf or a nightcap, off the record.’

‘Well, it’s a relief to know we were right,’ Kelly said.

‘You have a strange idea of relief,’ Lazenby remarked.

‘Yes, Sir,’ Kelly grinned.

‘Are there any interesting names in the address book?’

‘At this stage, we don’t know which are interesting and which aren’t,’ Kelly replied. ‘There are quite a few you’ll find familiar. We’re running checks on all of them, of course, and at some point we’ll interview them to see what they have to offer, including any alibis for the night of the murder. It’s going to take some time, and it’s going to be rather delicate, but I don’t see any other way.’

Ted Lazenby flipped through the pages of the address book, smiling thinly from time to time on finding a name which registered with him, while Kelly sat concentrating on a spot on the wall above his desk, trying to force her mind not to stray into thinking about Frank and Jeff Morris. Abruptly, Lazenby sat upright in his chair and stared at the page in front of him in apparent disbelief. His reaction was so marked that Kelly sat up in her own chair in response.