House Secrets (28 page)

To lure Isaiah to the senator’s home, they concocted the idea of Burrows buying a gun from him, and Burrows set about immediately to blackmail him into complying. They also came up with Isaiah’s motive—the story of Morelli catching him stealing from his office.
In retrospect, Isaiah’s motive had been the weakest part of their plan, but it had still been good enough for the police.

As DeMarco sat there in the darkness, he could see exactly how it had happened: The afternoon of the murder, Morelli travels to Havre de Grace and convinces the clinic staff that his wife needs to leave for the night to attend the Ellen Jascovitch dinner—which of course she never did. Morelli leaves Lydia with Burrows while he attends the Jascovitch function, telling Burrows to let Lydia drink all she wants. Burrows may have even spiked her drink with a sedative to keep her docile or put her to sleep. If evidence of a sedative was found in her bloodstream during an autopsy, the ME would think nothing of it, Lydia being the certified addict that she was.

After the Jascovitch affair, Morelli returns home and at midnight that night, Isaiah Perry approaches the senator’s door and tentatively knocks. Burrows, not the senator, opens the door; it would have been Burrows because all Isaiah’s dealings had been with Burrows, and they wouldn’t want to alarm the boy prematurely. Inside the house, Isaiah sees the senator for the first time, and Morelli, with his incomparable charm, immediately puts him at ease. He tells Isaiah the gun is really for him and asks to look at it. He compliments the young man, thanks him for performing such an unusual service, then under some pretext, gets Isaiah to follow him to the master bedroom. Once inside the bedroom, the senator—DeMarco was sure it was the senator and not Burrows: even Burrows might have balked at murder—walks up to Isaiah Perry, presses the gun against his chest, and shoots him through the heart.

Lydia Morelli stirs in her sleep but doesn’t awaken because of the amount of booze she drank earlier in the evening. Morelli walks over to his wife’s sleeping form, and without hesitation, shoots her in the temple. He wouldn’t have hesitated because he had no conscience.

After the killings, he and Burrows survey the room and arrange a few things to make it look as if the senator and Isaiah had struggled for the gun. This explains the time lag between the first two shots and the last shot that Marcus Perry had heard.

Then came the hard part. The senator positions himself in the location where he supposedly was when Isaiah shot him. He hands the gun to Burrows, then assists Burrows by placing the barrel in the exact spot on his shoulder where the gunshot victim in the emergency room was wounded. DeMarco could imagine Burrows hesitating, unwilling to pull the trigger, until Morelli screams at him to get on with it. He could imagine the bullet burning through Morelli’s shoulder, and Morelli overriding the pain with his incredible will.

After Morelli is shot, Burrows waits to make sure his boss doesn’t pass out, dials 911 for him, then watches as Morelli tells the police to hurry, to come to his house, that his wife has been killed. After the call is made, Burrows rushes from the house, probably going somewhere nearby so he can call 911 again if the medics don’t show up quickly.

Yes, Paul Morelli had killed his wife. DeMarco could see it all, exactly as it had happened—and he knew without a doubt that no one else would see it his way.

There was only one thing that DeMarco could not explain: If Morelli had a powerful ally who had committed crimes for him in the past, why didn’t he use that same person to kill Lydia?

Mahoney owned a thirty-two-foot sailboat that he moored at a marina near Annapolis. His wife, Mary Pat, was an excellent sailor and so was one of his daughters. When DeMarco was still married, Mary Pat had taken him and his wife out sailing once, on a day when the wind was gusting twenty knots, and Mary Pat had put the boat so far over on one side that the handrails had touched the water. She’d scared the crap out of DeMarco, but his ex, dimwit that she was, had thought it was a hoot.

Mahoney never went out on the boat with his wife. He claimed he got seasick as soon as it left the dock but DeMarco suspected that he too was terrified of Mary Pat’s reckless seamanship. Mahoney only used the boat when he wanted to brood. He didn’t take it out of the harbor; he would just sit on the deck with the boat tied to the pier and smoke cigars and drink and think. He and DeMarco now sat beside each other on canvas deck chairs, sipping Jamaican rum. There was a full moon over their heads and small whitecaps danced on the water.

“He murdered her,” DeMarco said.

The Speaker closed his eyes and his lips moved in a silent curse. “What happened?” he said.

DeMarco told him. When he finished, Mahoney said, “Are you sure?”

Was he sure? He was sure O. J. had killed Nicole; he was sure Lee Harvey Oswald hadn’t acted alone—and he was just as sure that Paul Morelli had murdered his wife. He couldn’t prove it, but he was sure.

“Yeah,” he said.

“But you have no proof?”

“No.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“At this point I don’t think there’s anything I can do. But
you
can do something.”

“Like what?” Mahoney said, his eyes narrowing with suspicion. “Talk to the cops. I’ll meet with them after you’ve talked to them, tell them everything I know, but I if go to them on my own they’ll blow me off.”

But they sure as hell wouldn’t blow off John Fitzpatrick Mahoney. No, sir. They’d reopen the investigation and find some physical evidence tying Morelli to the crime. They’d make Marcus Perry admit to seeing Burrows leave the house. They’d whack Abe Burrows with a rubber hose and make him talk. But it would take a big push from Mahoney.

The Speaker responded immediately. The brain inside his large, handsome head could calculate self-serving strategies faster than any computer. It didn’t take him a nanosecond to reject DeMarco’s suggestion.

“No way,” he said. “If I go to the cops and tell ’em I think Morelli’s a murderer, and if they can’t prove it, my ass is fried. Can you imagine the fuckin’ headline? Speaker of the House Accuses Presidential Contender of Murder. No goddamn way is that gonna happen, not with what you’ve got. No, you go to the cops on your own.”

“It won’t work!” DeMarco protested.

“You make it work, goddamnit!”

DeMarco just shook his head.

“You know if I go to the police,” DeMarco said, “there’s a good chance it’ll get back to Morelli. Are you going to support me if he comes after me?”

“Of course,” Mahoney said.

Of course, my ass, DeMarco thought.

“And there’s something else you need to know,” DeMarco said.

“What!” Mahoney snapped.

DeMarco could tell that his boss wanted this meeting over, that he wanted DeMarco to leave, but DeMarco didn’t care. He launched into a discussion about Charlie Eklund conducting surveillance operations on Morelli, and van Horn and Suttel’s deaths, and the unknown man who’d been helping Paul Morelli throughout his political career. As DeMarco talked, he could see Mahoney’s frustration building. DeMarco’s tale was complex—and John Mahoney didn’t have the patience for complex tales. But what he did have was the ability to get to the core of an issue.

Mahoney stopped DeMarco mid-sentence by yelling, “Enough! Enough with all this bullshit about the CIA and some guy who’s been helping Morelli. Forget all that crap and focus on one thing: focus on Morelli.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Joe,” Mahoney said, looking directly into DeMarco’s eyes, giving him that look—the look he used to convince other politicians to follow his lead, the look he used to get young women to crawl into his bed. “Focus on Morelli. If we nail him, son, he’s of no use to this CIA guy. And if we nail him, whatever he’s done in the past and whoever’s been helping him in the past becomes irrelevant. We gotta get
him
. We can’t let him get away with what he’s done.”

DeMarco didn’t bother to ask Mahoney why he kept saying “we” when he wanted DeMarco to do all the work and take all the risks.

DeMarco wanted to take Mahoney out on his damn boat and feed him to the fishes.

Lieutenant David Drummond put down the newspaper he’d been reading and looked up at DeMarco in irritation. Before Drummond could speak, DeMarco said, “What I’ve got to say is going to shock you.”

Drummond’s expression of annoyance was instantly replaced by one of amusement.

“You couldn’t shock me, pal,” he said, “if you dropped your pants and showed me a rose where your dick’s supposed to be.”

“Okay,” DeMarco said. “I believe Senator Paul Morelli, abetted by his chief of staff, Abe Burrows, killed Lydia Morelli and Isaiah Perry in cold blood.” Judging by the way Drummond’s jaw dropped, DeMarco figured that he had given the detective a jolt even without undoing his belt.

Drummond didn’t say anything for a moment. He just sat looking at DeMarco as if he was trying to measure his mental stability. Finally, he cleared his throat and said, “Say what you came to say, bub, but I’m telling you up front that I think you’re a nut. If I didn’t owe Emma, your ass would be out on the street already.”

DeMarco took a seat in the wooden chair in front of Drummond’s desk. He took his time telling what he suspected, making sure Drummond had a clear understanding of all the nuances, of all the things he had learned that had led him to his conclusion. While he
was speaking Drummond sat with his hands steepled under his chin, staring at DeMarco, the only indication of his feelings a skeptical droop to his lips.

When DeMarco finished, Drummond leaned back in his chair and placed his thick boxer’s hands behind his crew-cut head. He was completely relaxed—not looking at all like a man who had just been given the conspiracy murder of the decade.

In a voice dripping with sarcasm, he said, “Let me see if I got this straight. Lydia Morelli, who’s blotto ninety percent of the time, convinces you that her husband, God’s gift to America, molested his stepdaughter and drove her to suicide. The fact that the highway patrol ruled Kate Morelli’s death an accident is a small detail which you’ve apparently decided to ignore. Then when Lydia is put in a dry-out clinic, which even you admit is something she needed, you think it’s because she’s threatened, half a year after her daughter’s death, to go to the media and tell them all the nasty things her husband’s done. Oh, and she’s also going to tell some other secret—about this powerful man who’s been helping Morelli his whole career—but you don’t know who this guy is. Have I got it right so far?”

DeMarco felt a flush begin at the base of his neck and work its way toward his forehead, but he only nodded in response to Drummond’s question.

“Let’s see now, where was I? Oh yeah. After Lydia is killed by this little bastard—”

“Isaiah Perry didn’t have a motive for killing anyone, Drummond. He didn’t try to steal a damn thing.”

Ignoring DeMarco, Drummond continued, “You go to see Marcus Perry, a dope-dealing, murdering punk, and he convinces you that his little brother was at Morelli’s house that night because he was delivering the man a gun. Selling him a gun, for Christ’s sake! And according to solid-citizen Marcus, his brother was doing this because nasty ol’ Abe Burrows, who looks like the Pillsbury doughboy, said he’d lose his job if he didn’t.”

“He was an eighteen-year-old kid, Drummond! Burrows intimidated him.”

Drummond continued as if DeMarco hadn’t spoken. “Now when Isaiah Perry gets to the senator’s house, you think that the senator kills him with the gun he was supposedly selling, shoots his wife in the head, then calmly sits there and lets Burrows blow a hole in his arm. Oh, I almost forgot. Burrows deliberately told Perry to bring a
small
-caliber weapon and it was during a visit Morelli made to a hospital to see a buncha sick kids that he learns enough about anatomy and gunshot wounds in five minutes to keep from blowing his arm off. Now did I miss anything?”

“Yeah. Marcus Perry saw Burrows leave the house.”

“Marcus was the fuckin’ getaway driver, you moron! And why would Burrows be there—so the senator could have a witness who could blackmail him for the rest of his life?”

“No, because Morelli wanted someone to help him handle Isaiah, and because he was afraid he might pass out after he was shot and he wanted someone there to call an ambulance so he wouldn’t bleed to death.”

“Tell me something, DeMarco, since it’s your story:
Why
did the senator shoot himself?”

“Because he knew if he was shot during this so-called break-in, no one would suspect him of murdering his wife. You people sure as hell didn’t. And he’d be a real American hero—not only did he blow away a bad guy, he was shot while doing it. When the presidency is at stake, Drummond, people are willing to take big risks.”

“You’re a fuckin’ head case,” Drummond said. There was no inflection in his voice; he was merely stating a fact.

“Marcus Perry described Burrows to me. How did he know what Burrows looked like?”

Drummond paused for a moment, smiled, then said, “He saw him on TV, when Morelli left the hospital.”

The bastard had an answer for everything.

“Then how did Isaiah gain access to the senator’s house?” DeMarco persisted. “I know the house has a security system.”

“The senator said they only set the system when they weren’t home. The kid broke the glass in the back door and came in that way.”

“Maybe Burrows broke the glass before he left the house,” DeMarco said.

“Horseshit.”

“Goddamnit, did you people do
any
kind of investigation? Did you check Isaiah’s hands for gunshot residue to see if he’d really fired a gun? Did you analyze the blood splatter to see if it was consistent with the senator’s story?”

Drummond laughed and said, “Gunshot residue! Blood splatter! You been watchin’
CSI
on TV, DeMarco? You think you’re Gris Gussom, or whatever the fuck his name is?”

The fact was that the only thing DeMarco knew about gunshot residue
was
what he’d seen on television. Ignorance wasn’t an inhibitor, though, and he said, louder than he had intended, “Maybe if you watched TV you’d have some idea of how to investigate a murder.”