Dead Heat (27 page)

He opened the door cautiously. The hallway was clear. Spraggue closed his eyes and heard faint footsteps. To the left or right? He chose the left, guided by memory. Heineman's office had been to the left. He remembered the name plaque on the door.

He walked quickly now, silently, staying close to the side of the corridor, his right shoulder an inch from the cinderblock wall. He took a right at an intersection, pausing and peering around the corner before committing his body to the turn. He saw a door swing shut: Heineman's office door.

He stood outside the door in the darkened hallway, pressed his ear against the smooth-grained wood and listened. First, a whoosh, as if another door had opened and closed, then nothing. He twisted the doorknob and walked into Heineman's secretary's domain. Empty.

Applying his ear to the inner door, he heard the unmistakable sound of someone dialing a telephone. The noise was faint and far away. Heineman's voice was a distant, undecipherable rumble.

He glanced quickly at the secretary's desk. A red light shone on a beige, touch-tone telephone. Line I was engaged. He slid along the beige carpeting, holding his breath, carefully lifted the receiver.

“Listen,” Heineman was saying, his normally mellow voice as tense as Spraggue had ever heard it, “Put Mrs. Donagher on immediately. This is urgent, understand?”

Spraggue thought it was Eichenhorn's voice on the other end, wasn't sure. Whoever it was didn't want to bother Mrs. Donagher at this ungodly hour.

Heineman said, “Goddammit, just get Mrs. Donagher. You'll be sorry if you don't.”

Spraggue's eyebrow shot up. He heard reluctant acquiescence from the unidentified voice, followed by a click on the line. It took almost five minutes for Lila to come to the phone. Spraggue, crouched over the desk in the dark, hoped Heineman wouldn't give up. If he heard the receiver slam, he'd have to bolt out the door. Or confront the reporter.

“Lila,” Heineman said eagerly.

“Ed, honey, is that you?” The voice was Lila's, but different. It had a wildness about it. Spraggue wondered if she'd been drinking.

“I have to know something fast. Answer me, tell me the truth, and we can find a way out. I'll protect you—”

Her laugh rippled across miles of telephone company wire. “Do I need protecting?” she asked incredulously. “Is this really you, Eddie? Say the password.”

“Lila—”

“Come on, I was fooled once by that damned snoop and I'm not going to be fooled again.”

Heineman cleared his throat and mumbled, “And now here's Channel 4's own Ed Heineman.”

“Okay.” She giggled and the giggle almost got out of control. “Now what are you so upset about?”

“Your name … It's listed on everything as Lila Bennett.”

“My maiden name. Yes.” She seemed puzzled, maybe wary.

“Didn't you tell me once that wasn't the name you grew up with?”

“I may have.”

“Then it isn't?”

“What is this all about?”

“Di Bennedetto.” Heineman said. “Not Bennett.”

“I'm surprised you remembered,” she said. There was an icy stillness in her voice, as if she'd snapped abruptly out of an alcoholic haze. “Ed, I can't stay on the phone chatting over old times in the middle of the night. I'll call you later, okay?” She waited for a nonexistent reponse. Two clicks followed.

Spraggue got ready to sprint for the door but before he put the receiver down he heard quite clearly, over the phone, not through the doorway, Heineman's moan. “Oh, Lila,” he murmured. And again, “Oh, Lila.”

Spraggue left him in his office, raced back to the conference room. Mary was shuffling through the file Heineman had abandoned in his hurried exit.

“I think this is the sheet he shoved under the rest when he left,” she said in answer to her nephew's inquisitive stare. “It's from Collatos' police files.” The piece of paper had been folded in thirds, creased, smoothed out. The top right-hand corner was missing, the result of a jagged tear. The paper was brittle, crackled as he touched it. It bore a smudged date: 3/14/68.

“Di Bennedetto,” Spraggue said. “Does the name mean anything to you?”

Aunt Mary repeated it twice, under her breath, hummed a few notes of her tune, snapped her fingers. “Of course it does. But not in conjunction with all this.” She waved her hands at the cluttered tabletop. “Someone named Di Bennedetto is one of the untraceable straw owners of that building I want to buy on Commonwealth Avenue, the one I've been after you to tell the police about.”

Spraggue ran his finger down the worn page. L. DiBennedetto was listed as a property owner in the North End, a property owner whose buildings seemed to have had a marked attraction for spontaneous combustion.

“I haven't gotten to the financial reports yet, Mary,” Spraggue said. “How did Donagher come up with the money to afford his original campaign?”

“The same old tune,” Mary said. “A wealthy wife.”

“Oh, Lord,” Spraggue said under his breath, and then loudly, “Get Heineman out of his office and keep him here. And then call the police. Tell Hurley, no one but Hurley, to meet me at Donagher's. Fast.”

THIRTY-FIVE

When Spraggue jerked the car door open, Sharon scuttled past him, barefoot, and scrambled into the passenger seat.

“I'm going with you,” she said. “I won't be any trouble. There's no point in telling me to stay put.”

“I wouldn't dream of it,” he said. “You're terrific.”

“You're wasting time.”

The house on Sparhawk Street was dark except for a rectangle of light in a third floor dormer and a glow from a side window on the first floor. The street seemed deserted. Spraggue parked right in front of the house, in a tow zone, wondered as he did so whether Donagher still had police protection, whether the so-called protection was slumbering as soundly as the rest of the silent neighbors. The wind groaned like a bow drawn across a cello's lowest string; it made him shiver.

Sharon followed on her noiseless bare feet while he hurried up to the front door, and rapped sharply with a bronze, bull's-head knocker, waited for a count of ten, rapped again. This time they heard reluctant footsteps pad across a wooden floor, heard a deep yawn as the door creaked open.

Eichenhorn blinked at them, started to say something, thought better of it, and began to close the door. Spraggue pushed against the wood and Eichenhorn, surprised, drew back. “Hey,” he said in an injured tone, “what the hell do you think you're doing? I could call the police. Shoving your way in here in the middle of the night—”

“Where's Mrs. Donagher?”

“Where's—?” Eichenhorn shook his head in disbelief: “It's—it's past twelve o'clock. I suppose she's sleeping. She gets up early with the kids. What do you care?”

“Half an hour ago she was talking on the phone. Is she upstairs? Is Donagher home?”

“Brian's—he's in his study. Wait—!”

Spraggue burst in through the doorway. The room was as calm as a still-life drawing. The senator glanced up from the armchair in the corner, dog-eared the page he was reading in a bound document, stuffed a pair of reading glasses into his pocket. He said nothing, but his look was one of gentle inquiry, first directed toward Spraggue, then at his outraged campaign manager, finally at Sharon.

“I have to see your wife,” Spraggue said.

“Oh, come now,” Donagher said. “No melodrama, please. No bursting into the house after midnight with threats. I'm tired. My wife is tired. She went to bed hours ago.”

“Did she?” Spraggue said, suddenly wary. “Wake her up.”

“Murray,” Donagher said. “I think you'd better call Captain Menlo.”

“The police should be on their way.”

The senator stood. “What is this all about? Who is this woman? What are you doing here at this time of—”

“It's about your wife. I'd rather not accuse her when she's not here to defend herself.”

“She doesn't need any defense, as you put it. She's not on trial.”

“All right,” Spraggue said. “Let's talk about your wife. She's had a secret all these years, maybe more than one secret. But at least one absolutely vital secret that she had to keep quiet. And you invited a man into your house who could have blown her whole life sky-high.”

“My wife—” Donagher began with indignant spluttering, regained control and continued with intense sarcasm. “Are you crazy? Lila? What secrets—”

“When you married her, you thought her name was Lila Bennett.”

Donagher nodded. His mouth moved but no words came out.

“It may be. She may have had it legally changed. But it was as L. Di Bennedetto that she inherited real estate all over Boston. And as L. Di Bennedetto she became part of a scam to raise real estate values and then burn that real estate down for the insurance.”

The senator took his reading glasses out of his pocket, started to put them on with shaky hands, changed his mind, and placed them absently on the end table near the chair.

“No one connected L. Di Bennedetto with Lila Bennett who was Lila Donagher,” Spraggue continued. “It happened years ago, when you were first married. There may not even be enough evidence for a criminal prosecution. But she was terrified that the facts would come out and be exposed in the press. Terrified that they might influence a judge when she filed for divorce, that they might make her, in the eyes of the law, an unfit mother, that she might lose the children—”

“She hasn't filed for divorce, not yet—not until after the election. She promised—”

Spraggue's eyes narrowed. “Senator, we have to talk to her, before the police arrive—”

“Have you told them any of this?”

“No.”

“Do you have to?”

“She killed Pete Collatos. Because he was putting the pieces together—”

“I don't believe you.”

“Ask her.”

“Murray.” Donagher took four or five deep breaths before making the decision. He sat down, folded like a sail bereft of breeze. His head sank slowly to his hands and his call to his campaign manager was faint and muffled. “Ask Lila to come down here.”

Eichenhorn, puzzled, nodded. He took the stairs two at a time.

“Oh, God.” Donagher's soft words exploded in a room so quiet the ticking clock sounded like a giant metronome. “I know I shouldn't be thinking things like this, not now, but it will ruin me … I've worked so hard … I've done so much and there's so much left to do. I've got a deskful of legislative proposals: tax reform, gun control … Things I've worked for my whole life. So much I could do—And now this. It will take everything away. I might as well withdraw from the Senate now, before the election. How can I justify going on? Lila will need me. The kids …”

Donagher let his head drop back into his hands. They waited long enough for the silence to get uncomfortable. Sharon sat on the sofa and folded her legs up under her. In profile, Spraggue realized how much she resembled her dead brother—not just in the dark coloring, the round forehead, the prominent chin. He'd seen that resolute defiance in other brown eyes than hers, in this very room, when Pete Collatos had told his old friend of his intention to catch the anonymous letter writer.

They heard Murray's steps echo downstairs, twice as slowly as they'd gone up.

“She's not in her room.” Eichenhorn said. “Or she's not answering. The door's locked.”

“Hurry up,” Spraggue was already in the hallway, pushing past Eichenhorn on his way to the stairs. “Do you have a key?”

“Lila!” Donagher hollered on his way up the stairs. He used the bannister to help himself negotiate a sharp turn at the landing and stopped outside a heavy oak door. “Lila!” No answer. “Murray,” he said urgently to the man who was trailing behind, “Go upstairs and make sure the kids don't come down. Tell them it's okay, but under no circumstances to come down. Then get back here.”

Spraggue said. “We'd better call an ambulance.”

“No. Please. She may just be asleep. She sleeps heavily … She may have forgotten to unlock the door. It might be stuck. She may—”

“You're clutching at straws.”

“Please. Help me break the door down. If there's any way to keep it quiet—I'm begging you.”

The two men put their shoulders against the door, backed up, thudded against the door.

“Let me kick it in,” Spraggue said grimly.

“Can you?”

“I can try.”

Donagher stood back. The door quivered with the first kick, gave off a shower of splintering wood. The second kick knocked it wide.

“Oh my God,” Donagher mumbled.

Lila was dressed for a sleep much less permanent than the one she seemed to have achieved. Her nightgown was white, dotted with small pink roses. Her hair, brushed into a smooth, yellow silk curtain, partially hid her face. The smell in the air was alcohol and vomit. The pill bottle anchoring the sheet of paper to the bedside table was empty.

Donagher moved first. He snatched the note off the table, flinging the pill bottle on the floor. He kept repeating those three words—oh my God, oh my God—over and over.

“Call an ambulance,” Spraggue said.

Sharon was a foot from the bed, her hand on Lila Donagher's motionless shoulder. “I'll start CPR—” she began.

“No!” Donagher pushed her away with a force that made her stumble. “Don't touch her. Leave her alone.”

“Is she dead?” Eichenhorn breathed, just outside the door.

“She will be if you don't call an ambulance,” Spraggue said. “She will be if your boss doesn't let us help her.”

“Murray,” Donagher said. “Don't call. She'll be okay. Get these people away from here. They're trying to pull something political. If Lila gets carried out of here on a stretcher, it's political suicide. We can bring her around ourselves. Black coffee. We'll make her throw up, make her walk off whatever she took.”