House Secrets (19 page)

DeMarco crossed Harvard’s famous campus to reach the bookstore, periodically checking over his shoulder to see if anyone was following him. If anyone was, he couldn’t see them. As he walked he also examined the kids who attended Harvard. He figured they had to be fairly bright to have been admitted to the place, but they all looked pretty ordinary to him, especially the boys. The majority of the boys wore wrinkled clothes, and judging by their hair, appeared as if they’d just gotten out of bed. Those who weren’t hungover were running because they were late getting to wherever they were supposed to be. The girls were neater, more mature, more focused, seeming as if they were actually attending college to learn instead of drink.

DeMarco entered the bookstore and asked a saleswoman if Patrice Hamilton worked there. Yes, she did. DeMarco then asked if Patrice was there at that moment and was informed that she was, at the back of the store, restocking a shelf. He wandered to the back of the store and saw a stunning young woman putting barcode labels on books. She was tall and slim and had the face of a cover girl. She was also black.

DeMarco watched Patrice for a couple of minutes while pretending to look at a rack of sweatshirts, and while doing so, had one of those rare moments of inspiration, as if he’d just gotten a telegram from God. He walked outside the store, called his friend Alice at the phone company again, and asked her to see if Patrice Hamilton had
called people belonging to certain related professions. Yes she had, Alice said.

The lovely Patrice had called an ob-gyn twice and Planned Parenthood once.

DeMarco reported back to Maggie Dolan. “The kid’s girlfriend is pregnant,” DeMarco said. “And she’s black.”

DeMarco, cynic that he’d become, cynic that Mahoney had made him, figured the kid was pulling out his hair because the girl refused to get an abortion and he was going to have to tell his Beacon Hill parents that they were about to become the grandparents of a child of color. DeMarco realized there were other possibilities, other scenarios that put the Harvard rich kid in a better light, but he didn’t care. Now that Maggie Dolan knew the basic problem, one or more of her personalities would help the boy resolve it.

DeMarco arrived home that night feeling about as low as he’d felt in a long time. He thought about calling Elle in Iowa to congratulate her on her upcoming marriage, but he knew that was a bad idea. He really wanted to tell her how he wished that things had worked out differently between them—and she’d most likely say that if he really felt that way, he should have done something about it. No, calling her wouldn’t make him feel any better and would just make Elle feel bad too. She didn’t deserve that. She deserved to marry her fireman.

So instead of picking up the phone he picked up a bottle of vodka, one made in Hungary, and tried not to think about anything at all. Not Elle, and not Paul and Lydia Morelli either. He found out that the more vodka he drank the more he thought about all the things he didn’t want to think about, so he finally just went to bed.

The next morning, DeMarco stepped out of his house wearing nothing but sweatpants and a T-shirt. It was a bright, crisp, gorgeous autumn morn. It was not possible to be depressed on a day like this, he told himself. He stood for a moment on his porch, feeling the sun on his face, and exercised a homeowner’s prerogative to scratch his belly while surveying his small domain. Spotting his newspaper lying ten feet from the door, he tiptoed through the damp grass in his bare feet and retrieved it. He slipped the rubber band off the paper and flipped it open to the front page.

The headline screamed: SENATOR MORELLI SHOT, WIFE KILLED.

DeMarco’s brain spat out the news of Lydia’s death. It couldn’t instantly reconcile that a week earlier she had been living, breathing, angry—clutching his forearm with her thin fingers, begging him to help her—and was now forever silent, beyond all help.

He sat down in shock on the top step of his porch to read the paper. The lead article said that a man had broken into the senator’s Georgetown home and had shot Lydia once in the head as she lay sleeping next to her husband. The shot woke the senator. The man then shot Paul Morelli in the left shoulder but the senator was able to wrestle the gun away from the intruder and kill him. The policemen who responded to Morelli’s 911 call said that when they arrived
at the scene, they found the senator unconscious, holding the phone in his hand. Morelli was currently at Georgetown University Hospital in stable condition. His doctor said there was a possibility he might end up with some permanent damage to his left arm, though so far the prognosis looked good.

Lydia Morelli’s killer was an eighteen-year-old African American named Isaiah Perry who had a juvenile record for armed robbery. Juvenile records were supposed to be sealed, but the
Washington Post
had more willing sources than the CIA. Before his death Perry had been a part-time janitor at the Senate Office Buildings and it was likely that Paul Morelli had met his wife’s killer. The police suspected Perry was in the process of robbing the Morelli home when the shootings occurred, but they were still investigating.

Other articles in the paper discussed Morelli’s phenomenal career, the near certainty of his being the Democratic Party’s next candidate for president, and his stepdaughter’s tragic death. The brief biography of Lydia Morelli provided more information about her father than about the woman herself. It noted that the week she was murdered, Lydia had been staying at Father Martin’s for treatment and that she had left the clinic for the night to attend a function with the senator.

Still reeling from the news, DeMarco went inside his house to see if there was any coverage of the incident on television. Before he could turn on the set, the phone in his den rang. The caller ID said it was Emma. He didn’t want to talk to her, to have her make him feel worse than he already felt, so he didn’t answer the phone and Emma didn’t bother to leave a message. He started toward the television set a second time but again the phone rang. Goddamnit, she was persistent. This time he picked up the phone and said hello. A gruff voice said, “Get over to my office.”

Maybe because it was the weekend Mahoney wasn’t dressed in a suit. He was wearing khaki pants, a gray sweatshirt, and penny loafers with baggy white socks. A Red Sox baseball cap sat atop his big, whitehaired
head. He looked like a guy you might see sitting in a Back Bay bar drinking boilermakers at nine in the morning. But he wasn’t that guy.

“Check out what happened to Lydia Morelli,” he said without preamble.

“What do you mean?” DeMarco asked.

“What do I gotta do, start drawin’ you road maps now? Find out what the hell happened, anything not reported in the papers.”

“Do you think Morelli—”

“I don’t think nothin’. Just do what I tell you. Make sure everything’s on the up and up.”

DeMarco looked into Mahoney’s bloodshot blue eyes. He couldn’t believe it. Mahoney had called Morelli to tell him about his wife and now Mahoney’s
conscience
was bothering him. DeMarco had always suspected that if John Mahoney had any conscience at all, it had to be the size of a quark—one of those invisible particles a zillion times smaller than an atom, so small physicists had to divine their presence.

“Well what are you waitin’ for? Get goin’,” Mahoney said.

DeMarco rose to leave, stunned by the implications of what Mahoney was surely thinking. As he was leaving, Mahoney said, “Joe.”

DeMarco stopped and turned back to face his boss. Mahoney’s eyes lacked their normal twinkle, the one that said life was but a game.

“You pull out all the stops on this thing. I gotta know.”

This was as close as Mahoney would ever come to saying that he might have screwed up.

DeMarco felt a sudden desire for a drink—and for altitude. He drove to the Marriott Hotel on the Virginia side of the Key Bridge. The hotel had a restaurant on the top floor that provided a panoramic view of the District. One of the things DeMarco disliked about Washington was that there are no towering vistas, no mountain bluffs, no lofty lookouts, where a man can sit and view his environment and reflect
on his place in it. One needs height to enhance perspective, and right now he desperately needed perspective.

He took a table near a window and ordered a bloody mary from a waitress who moved like a zombie on Prozac. When the drink arrived, he had a sudden overwhelming urge for a cigarette. He gave in to the urge, went to the hotel gift shop, and bought a pack of smokes that claimed to have less tar than a dewdrop. He had stopped smoking after he started dating Elle. She wasn’t a smoker, and after their third date, she began giving him the usual sermons the righteous reserve for the less righteous. Quitting smoking for a woman was, in his opinion, the most romantic thing a man could do. But now he had no woman, so he could be as foul-smelling and unhealthy as he wanted to be.

As he smoked his cigarette—it tasted like shit—he gazed out on a landscape famous for conspiracy and deceit. The discriminating suites of the Watergate were in plain sight across the river. As far as DeMarco was concerned, the Watergate complex was a national monument, as significant as the Lincoln Memorial, because it was a permanent reminder to the gullible that corruption could reach the upper tier. Due south of the Watergate, across the Potomac, was the Pentagon. He grimly recalled those days when the generals juggled the body count to keep the game from being called on account of darkness. And then there was the Capitol’s shimmering white dome. The list of villains who had hung their hats beneath that structure was too long to recall at a single sitting.

The whole damn town disgusted him.

He was angry. He was angry at himself because he hadn’t helped Lydia. He was angry at Mahoney for initially refusing to accept the possibility that Paul Morelli might be anything less than perfect. And, of course, he was angry at Paul Morelli because he knew in his heart, if not his head, that at least some of what Lydia had said about him had to be true.

But it was Lydia Morelli who made him the angriest. She had burdened him with her allegations against her husband but had been
so evasive that he couldn’t be positive about anything she had said. He had been ready to let her disappear into the back passages of his mind, ready to convince himself that everything she had told him was nothing but rum-soaked fantasy, and then she had to go and get herself killed—leaving DeMarco lugging a stinking carcass of guilt like the Ancient Mariner and his damn bird.

Why didn’t she just go to the press as she had threatened? Probably because it was just that—an empty threat—something she ranted about when she drank, then lost her resolve the next day when greeted by daylight and her perpetual hangover. Or maybe she didn’t go because her husband, after a helpful phone call from Mahoney, imprisoned her at Father Martin’s clinic before she could.

And so now she was dead. Conveniently dead. And because of Mahoney’s once-in-a-millennium attack by his microscopic conscience, DeMarco now had orders to go mucking about in something way too big for him to handle. Shit. Shit on ’em all.

Too impatient to wait for the slow-moving waitress to reappear, DeMarco walked up to the bar to order another drink. The television over the bar caught his eye: the screen was solid blue with a white banner warning that a special news bulletin was imminent. A reporter appeared next, dressed in his man-in-the-street look in a belted trench coat, and he announced in grave tones that he was speaking live from Georgetown University Hospital.

The bartender stopped wiping glasses and walked over and joined DeMarco as he gazed up at the set. The reporter informed them that Senator Morelli, who had been admitted to the hospital only ten hours earlier, was being released momentarily, alive and well. The bullet had passed through his left shoulder without causing significant damage. He’d been given three pints of blood, a few bandages, and was being released at his own insistence. The reporter rehashed the circumstances of Morelli’s injury and his wife’s death, and before he had to start repeating himself, the senator exited the hospital.

Serious-looking guys in suits, Secret Service agents or plainclothed U.S. Capitol cops, surrounded Morelli as he slowly made his way
through a crowd of reporters and hospital personnel blocking the entrance. Judging by the number of white coats in the vicinity, it appeared the entire hospital staff was there to wish the senator God-speed. Abe Burrows was at Morelli’s side making irritated get-away gestures at the reporters.

Morelli motioned for his bodyguards to give him some room so he could address the media. He had a black sling on his left arm and bandages covered his shoulder. He was wearing a white sleeveless T-shirt that showed off his lean physique. A borrowed jacket was draped over his shoulders. He looked tired, his face somewhat gaunt, as would be expected of a person who had recently lost a lot of blood. Yet even haggard and unshaven, he was still handsome, still photogenic, still marvelously appealing. A good part of the population—the female part—realized that they were looking at a man who was not only rich, handsome, and powerful, but also now single.