House Odds (15 page)

So he had three problems: he had to come up with a boatload of money he didn’t have; he had to get his daughter off for a crime that he now knew she’d committed; and he had to divert a hundred million dollars of the taxpayers’ money to a construction project that would benefit organized crime. That’s all.

No, wait a minute. He didn’t have three problems. He had four problems.

The fourth problem was that Ted might kill his daughter if he thought she might testify against him.

19

Big Bob Fairchild needed his wife’s advice.

Fairchild had met Barbara Jane Evans at the University of Arizona when he was a junior and she was a freshman, and he decided the day he met her that he was going to marry her.

Barbara Jane’s father was dead now, but he’d been a real estate mogul, one of those guys who would—repeatedly—buy a seemingly useless vacant lot in a run-down neighborhood. The next month, Hilton would decide to build on that very spot or the state would decide it needed the land, and offer him a hundred times what he originally paid for the lot. At the time Fairchild met his bride-to-be, there were four Arizonans richer than Sinclair Evans—but being the fifth richest man in the state was still a pretty good thing to be. And Barbara Jane Evans was an only child and her mother had died when she was sixteen.

Barbara Jane was a gold mine.

She was a tall girl, and she had the broadest shoulders that Fairchild had ever seen on a woman. Her breasts were small—at least then they were—but she had a nice ass and good, long legs. And she wasn’t exactly
ugly;
homely
was probably a better word. She had mousy brown hair, her nose was a bit too long, and her ears . . . Well, she didn’t look too good when her hair was short. And although she had the misfortune to have inherited her daddy’s face, she’d also inherited his brains, and she’d always been Robert Fairchild’s principal adviser.

“You say his daughter owes this casino a hundred thousand?” Barbara Jane said.

Barbara Jane was now forty-seven, and maybe the best-looking forty-seven-year-old woman in Tucson. Hell, maybe she was the best-looking forty-seven-year-old woman in the entire Southwest. The reason she now looked so good was because at the age of thirty, she overcame her fear of cosmetic surgery in a major way. Her hair was now ash blonde and perfectly suited to her face—a face that she’d picked from a catalogue in her doctor’s office:
I’ll have those cheekbones, and that chin, and ooh, give me that cute little nose, too.
And her body, now that she had the same-size breasts as Marilyn Monroe and sag-proof implants inserted into her butt, was flawless.

They were seated by the pool of Barbara Jane’s D.C. mansion. (Barbara Jane had lavish homes in half a dozen places around the world—and all the property was in her name alone.) Fairchild was dressed in a suit that was too hot for the weather; his wife was wearing a white one-piece bathing suit and painting her toenails as they talked. The polish she was applying was a garish, candy-apple red.

Fairchild didn’t know why his wife painted her toenails. She had a lady that gave her manicures and pedicures, but for some reason she liked to put the polish on herself. All he knew was that it was irritating talking to the top of her head, and the little balls of cotton stuck between her toes looked stupid.

“Yeah,” Fairchild said, answering her question. “And right now the SEC and Justice don’t know that. They think Molly’s motive was credit card debt and they’ve probably figured out from her statements that she spent a lot of time and money in Atlantic City, but they don’t know about the money she owes the casino.”

“So if you leaked that she owes the casino money, all that would do is
confirm
she’s a gambler,” Barbara Jane said. “Sounds bad, but so what? I don’t see how her being a gambling junky hurts Mahoney any more than the insider trader charges against her have already hurt him—which is to say that they haven’t hurt him at all. And the fact that she owes money to a casino doesn’t really make the prosecutor’s case any stronger, I mean, not really.”

“But there has to be some way to take advantage of . . .”

“How do you like this color?” Barbara Jane asked.

“What?” Fairchild said.

“This nail polish. How do you like it?”

“Uh, it’s fine. It looks great.”

“You know what it’s called?”

Now, how in the hell would I know that?

“No,” Fairchild said. “Look, there has to be some way . . .”

“It’s called
I’m Not Really a Waitress
.”

“What?”

“The name of this color is: I’m Not Really a Waitress. Don’t you just love that?”

“Goddamnit, Barbara Jane, will you . . .”

“And you say the casino’s connected to some mobster in Philadelphia?”

“Yeah, a man named Albert Castiglia.”

“How did you find out about him?”

“I talked to a guy in the Bureau. He said that when Ted Allen was a kid he worked for Castiglia in Vegas, and Castiglia took a shine to him and sent him to college. The FBI figured that a nice-looking, college-educated yuppie like Ted would be the perfect front for Castiglia. There was no way Castiglia was going to get a gaming license, but Ted could. The bottom line is that the Atlantic Palace Casino is probably laundering money for the Mob, but there’s no proof of that. And Ted Allen almost certainly works for Castiglia but there’s no proof of that, either.”

“Well, sugar,” Barbara Jane said, “journalists don’t need proof. You know that.”

“Yeah, but so what? How does leaking that Ted Allen is tied to the Mob hurt Mahoney?”

“Baby, baby, you just gotta learn to think outside the box.”

Fairchild just hated that expression. “What box? What are you talk—”

“What if the casino was to cancel
Molly Mahoney’s debt?”

“What?” Fairchild said again. She just confused the shit out of him.

“Now, I don’t know about you, honey, but I can see the headline right now:
Mob Controlled Casino Absolves Mahoney’s Daughter’s Debt.
And the sub-headline, or whatever it’s called, would say:
Is Mahoney Tied to the Mob
?”

“But why would the casino cancel . . .”

“And you said that this Ted person wants federal funds for some project?”

“Yeah.”

“So even if Mahoney can’t get a rider attached to a bill, all you need is someone willing to say that Mahoney is
trying
to get one attached.”

“I still don’t see . . .”

“Can’t you just see the next headline?
Mob Controlled Casino Cancels Mahoney’s Daughter’s Debt for Federal Funding.
Well, maybe that’s kind of a long headline, but you get the idea, don’t you? That kind of press just might be enough to get his big butt bounced right out of the House.”

“But why would Ted Allen cancel the girl’s marker?” Fairchild asked again.

“Why, he wouldn’t, of course. But if someone was to give him a hundred grand, and maybe just a little more as sort of a . . . a service fee, he’d probably be willing to
say
that he did.”

Before Fairchild could say anything else, Barbara Jane wiggled her toes and laughed. “That just cracks me up! I’m Not Really a Waitress.”

20

“I’m sorry, Mr. DeMarco, but the doctor doesn’t have another opening on his schedule until August.”

“August! That’s four months from now! This tooth . . . Look, I’m not kidding you. I’m in agony here.”

“Sorry.”

“You’re pissed, aren’t you? You’re doing this because I walked out on you.”

“I am not . . .”

“You know I work for Congress. I can’t tell you why I had to leave because it’s classified—you know, national security—but believe me, I had to go. I didn’t have a choice.”

“Sorry.”

The woman was a rock—and she had a heart of stone. Not an ounce of compassion in her entire body.

“Well, is there some sort of dental emergency room somewhere?”

“Not that I know of, but I believe there’s a free clinic in Southeast. A place where dental students practice on the underprivileged.”

* * *

DeMarco had seen
All the President’s Men,
the Watergate movie starring Redford and Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein. He figured Randy Sawyer had seen the movie, too, because Sawyer had decided to re-create the scene where Woodward meets Deep Throat in an underground parking garage, a cavernous space of eerie shadows with concrete pillars to hide behind. DeMarco thought the meeting place Sawyer had picked was not only overly dramatic but downright uncomfortable. Any bar in the District would have been safe enough—and a lot more pleasant—but apparently Randy Sawyer didn’t think so.

“I’m telling you,” Sawyer said—or whispered, to be precise, “if Kiser finds out I looked at her case files, she’ll have my nuts.”

“I thought she worked for you,” DeMarco said.

“Have you ever supervised people, DeMarco?”

DeMarco figured that Alice at the phone company didn’t count, so he said no.

“Well, let me tell you how it is. You have two kinds of people. First, there are the ones who are afraid of you and always do what you tell them. That’s most of them. Then you have people like Kay Kiser who aren’t afraid of anybody and do any damn thing they please.”

“I don’t get it,” DeMarco said. “You sound like you’re afraid of her.”

“I am afraid of her. And it’s because she would hand me my head on a platter if I did anything that she construed as preventing her from doing her job. She’d go over my head, she’d go to the press, and she’d call the cops if she thought I did something illegal.”

“But looking at her files isn’t illegal and is certainly within your purview as a manager,” DeMarco said.

“But leaking information to Molly Mahoney’s lawyers
is
illegal.”

“Randy, nobody is ever going to know that we talked.”

“You better be right about that,” Sawyer said.

“So what did you find out?” DeMarco said. He was tired of hiding behind a concrete pillar like he and Sawyer were two guys having a quickie.

“Kiser checked out Douglas Campbell’s finances five or six years ago. There’s hardly anybody at Reston Tech she hasn’t looked at, but Campbell was on her list because she thought he lived above his income.”

“She thought?”

“Yeah. But then she found out that Mrs. Campbell has a trust fund that was established by her late father and whoever manages the trust is doing a pretty good job. Kiser didn’t have all the numbers in the file, but from her notes it looks like the annual proceeds from the trust more than double Campbell’s salary.”

“Who manages the trust?”

“Ah, shit, who is it? A local bank. Oh, yeah. Riggs.”

“So after she found out about the trust, she quit looking at Campbell?”

“I guess. The other thing with Campbell is that he’s a personnel guy not a scientist or an engineer and he’s not involved with the research Reston Tech does with other companies. So if Reston came up with some kind of big breakthrough that was gonna drive somebody’s stock through the roof, I’m not sure he’d even be in the loop.”

DeMarco thought Sawyer might be wrong about that. According to Molly, Campbell was a social creature, always inviting folks out to his beach house. And one thing DeMarco knew for sure: people talked. They always talked. DeMarco could envision Campbell chatting with engineers and company executives, subtly pumping them for information, and these days, with everything stored in computers, maybe he had a way to access whatever databases contained the right info. So Campbell may not have been an engineer but he was probably bright enough to listen to corporate scuttlebutt and figure out which big deals were in the company’s pipeline.

But DeMarco didn’t bother to say any of this to Randy Sawyer.

“Regarding this guy Praeter,” Sawyer said, “Kiser had a file on him too. A big one. Remember I told you that twenty years ago we looked at Reston Tech for insider trading on that water treatment thing and how one investor made about five million bucks? Well, the investor was Richard Praeter, but we could never prove he had any connections to anybody at Reston Tech or did anything illegal.”

“You’re shittin’ me! And what do you mean you couldn’t tie him to anyone at Reston? He went to UVA with Campbell and they were both involved in the case of that kid falling out a dorm window.”

“I know that
now,
but only because of you,” Sawyer said. “There’s no record of Praeter being involved in the kid’s death. You told me that yourself. You said the only way you found out was because you talked to that cop in Charlottesville. And Praeter never graduated from UVA. He left UVA a couple months after that kid died and he eventually graduated from George Mason. So just going through standard databases—you know, financials, tax returns, criminal records—there’s nothing that connects Praeter and Campbell. Kiser even subpoenaed phone records, and I’m sure if Praeter and Campbell ever talked to each other, she would have found out about it and made some note in her files.”