House Secrets (20 page)

In his remarks to the press, Morelli stated that his beloved wife’s death was just one more heartbreaking reminder of America’s failure to deal with drugs, poverty, and gun control. As grief-stricken as he was, he had to put aside his personal tragedy and focus, with more vigor than ever, on legislation that would keep others from experiencing the loss he was now feeling—the loss he would always feel.

And he was so good that for a moment even DeMarco believed him.

Detective Lieutenant David Drummond was in his mid-fifties. He had a broad chest, heavy shoulders, and Popeye forearms. His white hair was thick and crew-cut—a drill sergeant’s bouffant. His hands looked as if they’d been used to drive concrete pilings, the knuckles misshapen and knobby, and his nose appeared to have stopped several heavy objects moving at full speed. DeMarco looked around the office for a trophy celebrating Drummond as the one-time heavyweight champ of some D.C. precinct, but didn’t see one. Maybe the cop was just clumsy, but that wasn’t a theory he was eager to test.

Drummond’s office contained a battered gray metal desk and two wooden chairs. The windows were fly-specked and as transparent as brick. The walls, originally white, were now yellow from the smoke of a million cigarettes exhaled under stress. Drummond’s muscular forearms rested on the desk, his hands squeezing a chipped coffee cup. On the corner of the desk was a picture of him and a fragile-looking, middle-aged woman posing on a swing in a rose garden gazebo. The woman held one of his oversized paws in her two small hands—King Kong held in check by Fay Wray.

“So,” Drummond said. “Emma said you wanted to talk about the Morelli shoot-out. What do you wanna know?”

“Are you in charge of the investigation?” DeMarco asked.

“No. But I’m the only one in the department willing to talk to you, and the only reason I’m willing is because Emma called me.”

DeMarco wondered how it was that Emma had any influence over a D.C. cop. His best guess was that Drummond hadn’t always been a cop, but with Emma anything was possible. “I appreciate you taking the time, Lieutenant,” he said.

“Yeah, right. So what do you wanna know?” Drummond said again.

“Details. Whatever wasn’t printed in the
Post
.”

Drummond hesitated. “I’m not too comfortable giving you a lotta inside dope on a case this hot. How do I know you’re not gonna run off and blab to the press?”

DeMarco smiled and said, “If I do, you can beat me up.” Drummond smiled back but it wasn’t a friendly smile. What big teeth you have, Grandma, DeMarco thought.

“Maybe where you come from, pal,” Drummond said, “you think that’s a joke. Where I come from, it’s a distinct possibility.”

Drummond stared hard at DeMarco for a second, then relaxed, putting spit-shined, ankle-high boots up on the edge of his desk. “The papers pretty much had it all,” he said. “This yahoo Perry breaks a window in the back door of the senator’s house, sneaks up to the bedroom, and puts one round through Lydia Morelli’s temple. The senator wakes up when he hears the shot and the kid plugs him in the shoulder. The senator grabs the scumbag—he wasn’t all that big—tries to wrestle the gun away from him, and the kid gets plugged through the heart. Morelli wasn’t trying to kill him—or so he says. And I say if he was, who cares?”

“But why did he want to kill the senator?”

“You know he was a part-time janitor at the building where the senator worked?” Drummond said.

DeMarco nodded. “I saw that in the papers.”

“Well, according to Morelli’s aide, that guy Burrows, the senator caught Perry trying to steal a calculator from his desk the day of the shooting. The senator told the kid he was going to have to report him.
We figure the bastard tried to kill Morelli to keep from losing his job—which is the most that would have happened to him. Or maybe Perry thought he might end up going to the can, but I doubt it. Those people know the system plea-bargains everything.”

Those people?

“Why would he steal a calculator?” DeMarco asked.

“Shit, I don’t know. To hock it, maybe.”

“What kind of calculator was it?”

“One of them handheld jobs. They probably give one to all those senators to keep track of the national debt.”

DeMarco ignored Drummond’s attempt at humor. “Hell, Lieutenant, these days you can buy a top-of-the-line calculator for fifty bucks. Banks give ’em away when you open a savings account. I’ll bet you couldn’t get ten bucks for one in a pawnshop.”

Drummond shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows what the asshole was thinking? Burrows said that when Morelli walked into his office the kid was just putting the calculator in his pocket. Maybe that was just the first thing he grabbed. Maybe he was planning to go through the whole room looking for small things to boost, petty cash, whatever he could find.”

“Seems like an odd thing to risk your job over,” DeMarco persisted.

“Or maybe he was some sorta kleptomaniac,” Drummond said. “Like that movie star. Why would a movie star shoplift a hat? Who knows why people steal.”

“Did Perry have a record for shoplifting?” DeMarco said.

Drummond frowned. DeMarco’s interrogation was starting to irritate him. “I don’t know, but I do know that I don’t give a shit. What difference does it make if he was a shoplifter or not, or if he was going to hock the calculator or not?”

“How ’bout motive, Lieutenant? Don’t you think the threat of losing a job is a pretty weak motive for killing two people in cold blood?”

DeMarco’s tone was a bit sharp and Drummond responded accordingly. “Motive my ass! I could come up with a million motives.
Isaiah Perry was a punk from a family of punks. His older brother’s a pusher and a suspect in at least one murder. I think little brother just decided to join the family business.” Slapping one thick palm on the surface of the desk, he concluded, “I don’t give a shit about motive!”

DeMarco decided not to press Drummond further on the subject of motive. He asked a few questions about Isaiah Perry’s criminal record, the armed robbery he’d committed as a juvenile, then another thought occurred to him.

“Why would he shoot Lydia Morelli first?”

“What are you getting at?” Drummond asked.

“If you were going to shoot two sleeping people, Lieutenant, wouldn’t you shoot the man first, the one more likely to take away your gun and shoot you with it?”

“Maybe I would and maybe you would, but maybe this kid wasn’t as smart as us. Or maybe it was dark in the bedroom and he couldn’t tell who he was shooting first.”

Before he could ask another question, Drummond said, “You’re asking some funny questions, pal, and I don’t think I like where you’re going with ’em.” He studied DeMarco a moment, his eyes narrowing with suspicion. “Are you trying to cause the senator problems? Is that your game?”

DeMarco decided it was time to disengage from this discussion.

“No, Lieutenant. I knew Lydia Morelli and I’m just disturbed by her death.”

Drummond pinned DeMarco with his hard, cop’s eyes. “Yeah, well I’m going to be real fuckin’ disturbed myself if you use anything I told you to hurt Morelli. I like that guy. I liked him before this happened, but now that he shot this little prick, I like him even more.”

Paul Morelli had flown to New York ostensibly to consult with a doctor about his arm, a sports-medicine specialist whom he’d used in the past. There were any number of doctors in Washington he could have seen—several had even called and offered to see him for free, hoping to become his personal physician when he moved into the West Wing—but Morelli said he had confidence in the Manhattan physician.

His real reason for coming to New York was to meet with the old man.

He finished with the doctor at five p.m. No worries about the arm, the doc had told him, and then he gave Morelli a set of exercises to keep things from stiffening up. Morelli would follow the exercise regimen religiously. He went back to his room, rested for an hour, then took the stairs down to the parking garage. The nine-story descent was no problem at all. Harry Foster was waiting for him in the garage, parked in a handicapped parking space. Morelli didn’t approve of this but said nothing.

Harry would drive him to the meeting. If he was seen with Harry, that wouldn’t be a problem. He’d just say he’d been consulting with Harry on the upcoming campaign. He glanced at his watch. He had to be back at the hotel in two hours to meet some people for drinks but he had no idea where Harry was taking him or how long it would
take to get there because the old man, as paranoid as ever, hadn’t set the location for the meeting until the last minute.

The meeting place, fortunately, turned out to be a nearby office building in Manhattan. Harry pulled into the underground parking garage and handed Morelli a key to a room. The office building was used by lawyers, accountants, and other professionals. Most of the people who worked there had left for the day, but if Morelli should run into someone, there were plenty of legitimate reasons for him to be in such a place.

He got off on the sixth floor, looked down the hall, and didn’t see anyone. It was so quiet on the floor that he wondered if anyone worked there at all. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the old man had picked a suite of offices that had just been vacated. Morelli walked down to room 623 and slipped the key in the door. Eddie and the old man were already there.

Eddie, as usual, was standing off to one side, in a corner, near a window. He was like a massive rock: silent, unmoving, and strangely ominous. Morelli had always wondered how Eddie had gotten the scars on his hands. They weren’t burn scars and seemed too wide to have been made by a knife blade. It almost looked as if his hands had been mangled—slammed in a car door or smashed with a hammer—then surgically rebuilt. They were functional but not quite human, like hands that Frankenstein might have sown onto the wrists of his monster.

The old man rose from the chair where he’d been sitting. He moved slowly forward, his face solemn. Neither he nor Morelli were huggers, and the two men shook hands, Morelli making sure he didn’t squeeze the old man’s hand too hard.

The old man looked as he always did: his soft white hair was carefully combed, his complexion burnished bronze, his stern face hinting at his potential for brutality. He was wearing a brown suit, a white shirt, and a wide green tie. Morelli bet the suit and tie were at least fifteen years old. The old man had enough money to buy his own chain of clothing stores but he had stopped caring about being fashionable years ago.

“How are you?” the old man asked.

Paul nodded his head, feigning a sadness he didn’t feel. “Okay. And you?”

The old man shook his head. “You know, I hardly knew her. It’s not like when Kate died, but . . .”

“I know,” Morelli said. “I haven’t slept since it happened. I should have taken better care of her. I should have been a better husband.”

The old man nodded. “I know how you feel. When my wife died, I felt the same way.”

They said nothing for a moment, both thinking of wives lost, neither feeling any real remorse.

“This kid, this black kid,” the old man said. “Is there anything more than what the papers said?”

“No. He was just some young guy who worked in my office.”

The old man shook his head. “I guess it goes to show: no matter who you are, no matter how powerful you are, you can’t protect yourself from fate.”

“The thing is,” Morelli said, “we have an alarm system for the house but we never set it at night when we were there. We just used it when we went out. If I’d just set the damn alarm . . .”

“Yeah,” the old man said, “but back to the black. You’re sure he’s not connected with anyone?”

“Yes. He was just a kid. Maybe he belonged to some local gang, I don’t know, but he certainly wasn’t working for anyone with a political agenda.”

“Okay, as long as you’re sure. We’ve come too far, Paul. We’re too close. If there’s anything I need to do, anything, you need to tell me.”

“You know I will,” Morelli said.

They sat in silence for a minute, the only sound in the room the old man’s labored breathing. “Did you ever figure out why those women were on the reporter’s list?” the old man said.

Goddamnit! He
had
to get the old man’s mind off that subject but lying to him was so terribly dangerous. The old man had killed men just because he suspected they were lying.

“Just what I told you before,” Morelli said. “The one woman, the one who lives in New York, she worked for a while on a zoning study when I was mayor and we fired her. She just wasn’t competent. I think this reporter figured we may have fired her because she saw something and objected to it. I don’t know if you remember this, it was quite a while ago, but the zoning study was done to help some people you knew in Brooklyn and you put some pressure on the borough president at the time. Anyway, this woman, she didn’t know anything about that. She just worked on the project for a couple of months, not doing anything important. But the reporter didn’t know this; he was just hoping that someone who’d been dismissed would talk to him.”

The old man nodded. “And the other woman, this decorator?” he said.

“Same thing. Lydia hired her and later fired her. I guess she wasn’t a good decorator. I don’t know. But this reporter, he must have talked to her for the same reason. She was in my house for a few days, and maybe he thought she might have heard something or seen something, and if she was angry about being fired, maybe she’d talk. Finley was grasping at straws,” Morelli concluded, “running around talking to people I’d fired, hoping they’d have something to say.”

“That must be a pretty long list, people you’ve fired,” the old man said.

“You know, not really,” Morelli said. “I’ve been lucky with most of the people I’ve hired, and when they get fired, Abe usually does it. That’s what’s so odd about this woman in New York. I don’t think I even met her when she worked for me.”

“Good,” the old man said after a moment. “So we’re done with the reporter?”

“Yeah,” Morelli said. “Although I still don’t know how he caught on to the doctor.”