House Secrets (35 page)

Bedroom acrobatics or a drunken fall? Whatever the cause, DeMarco knew from previous experience that Mahoney wouldn’t go to a doctor. He had to be bleeding before he’d go to one. What he would do was complain about his condition for the next three or four days to any captive audience, then visit a Korean masseuse he knew. His back would gradually improve after he visited the woman but
DeMarco had always suspected that massage was a minimal ingredient in the healing process.

Mahoney turned back to face him, and the next three words that came from his mouth were three words that DeMarco had never heard him utter before.

“Joe, I’m sorry,” he said, “about some of the things I said the other night, over at the Mayflower. It’s just . . .” Mahoney shook his head instead of completing the thought.

He sat back down in his chair, moving cautiously. “There was this fella I went to high school with,” he said. “He became a teacher. I really liked him, boosted his career when I got the chance, used to invite him over to the house when my girls were little. Then it turns out this guy’s a child molester. I felt . . . hell, a whole buncha things. Sick. Mad. Used. I feel the same way about Morelli right now. It’s driving me crazy.”

“I understand,” DeMarco said.

“So whatever you’re plannin’, I hope it works. But I gotta warn you: you better take him completely off the board. You leave him in play . . . well, you know.”

DeMarco nodded.

Then Mahoney surprised him again.

“And, Joe,” he said, “don’t worry about Morelli runnin’ you out of town. He ain’t the fuckin’ president yet.”

“Five women work on Morelli’s D.C. staff,” Neil said. “Two came with him from New York and I would imagine are mucho loyal to him. Two others have been with him since he came to the Senate, and I would guess that by now these women would sacrifice their children to please him, he being the charmer that he is. Oh, and three of the four women I just mentioned have husbands who make good salaries and would therefore be less likely to be motivated by money.”

“So tell me about the fifth one,” DeMarco said. Why couldn’t Neil ever just cut to the chase?

“The lady’s name is Jackie Arnold. She’s only been with Morelli six months. She used to work for a senator from South Dakota but when he lost his seat, she found a job with Morelli. One thing to bear in mind is that she’s had considerable experience on Capitol Hill; she’s no virgin. After she lost her job with the South Dakota guy, and while she was job hunting, her bills added up. She currently owes Visa twelve thousand dollars and is only paying the interest on her bill. On top of that, she divorced thirteen months ago and her ex-husband is in arrears on child support. Most importantly, though, this lady lives in Gleedsville, Virginia, where her three-year-old daughter attends preschool. This means that Ms. Arnold just runs her ass
ragged
. She works long hours for Morelli, has a God-awful commute, and has all the attendant hassle of a single mother with a kid in day care
who has to be dropped off and picked up and dealt with whenever the day care place is closed. This poor woman, I would assume, is fucking miserable.”

The bar was a political watering hole located on Pennsylvania Avenue, a couple of blocks from the Capitol, and its name was the same as its address: 701. Congressional staffers would gather there in small herds in the evening, talking louder than necessary, hoping everyone within earshot would think that they were the ones pulling the political strings. And sometimes, God help us, they actually were. DeMarco sat at the bar, hunched over a martini—this one made with a Ukrainian vodka—and watched as the recruiter talked to Jackie Arnold.

Sam Murphy had provided the recruiter. He was a fatherly-looking man with a tanned face, curly gray hair, and kind brown eyes. He was so smooth and charming you could imagine him bilking little old ladies out of their savings. He had contacted Jackie that afternoon at her office and offered to buy her a drink while he made his pitch.

He informed Jackie that he represented a think tank and that they had a vacancy on their staff. “Think tank,” as those inside the Beltway know, is a euphemism for a group of intellectual whores, people with doctorates and government experience who prepare position papers for lobbyists and politicians. Smart people, in other words, who can argue both sides of any issue and often do so simultaneously. When the recruiter said the think tank was located in Leesburg, Virginia, five miles from where Jackie Arnold lived, her eyes lit up like she’d seen Jesus.

The job was irresistible. They were offering her 30 percent more than she was currently making to work in an office ten minutes from her home. Furthermore, the recruiter said, the firm paid day care expenses for all their employees and the day care facility was located only three blocks from the office. He didn’t tell her that she would be the only woman at the company who had a child below the age of five.

There was one catch, the recruiter told her. Well, not exactly a catch, he said, but an
opportunity
. They wanted Ms. Arnold to introduce
a young woman to Senator Morelli and recommend that this woman replace her on Morelli’s staff. If the young woman landed the job, Ms. Arnold would be given a five-thousand-dollar signing bonus.

“That lady’s no dummy,” the recruiter later told DeMarco. “She knew that getting your gal onto Morelli’s staff was the reason we were offering her the job. She didn’t say anything, but you could tell.”

“But she agreed?” DeMarco said.

“Oh, yeah. The package I offered was just too good for her to pass up, so she pretended not to understand what was going on. But she did.”

“What do you think she thinks is going on?”

“Oh, just the usual: that the Republicans are trying to place a mole on Morelli’s staff so they’ll be able to get some inside dope when he runs for president.”

The apartments were next.

He needed two units in the same building, and one had to be a corner unit on the ground floor with lots of windows. It took him a day but he found a building on Capitol Hill with one vacant unit and one ideal corner apartment. The fact that the corner apartment was occupied wasn’t a problem—not when a man had access to Sam Murphy’s money.

The tenant currently occupying the corner unit was a sour-faced middle-aged woman who lived alone, and just by looking at her DeMarco could tell that she’d never experienced good luck in her entire life. One of Sam Murphy’s many connections visited the woman. He fluttered his arms theatrically, and said that his film company wanted to use her apartment for one small scene in an upcoming movie. But even though the scene was small, the fake producer said, movies moved slower than Alaskan glaciers and they would need
her place for at least three weeks, during which time they would put her up, all expenses paid, in one of the finest hotels in Hilton Head.

“The only catch,” Sam’s person told the woman, “is—”

“Aw, shit,” the woman said. “Goddamnit, I knew there’d be a catch.”

“The only catch is you have to leave next week. So if you can’t get time off from work, then—”

“Hey! I can get the time. I can get the time. If that bitch doesn’t let me go, I’ll. . .”

So they had an apartment, near the Eastern Market Metro station, a corner unit just like DeMarco wanted, and then DeMarco rented the unit that was vacant.

Now for the cop.

DeMarco called Sam Murphy, who called a guy, who called another guy, who called DeMarco. The guy who called DeMarco was a sergeant, one who worked in personnel. DeMarco told the sergeant what he wanted: a young hot dog, still in uniform.

“But he can’t be bent,” DeMarco told the sergeant. “I don’t want somebody who’s been investigated a dozen times by Internal Affairs. What I’m looking for is a guy who
might
be investigated by Internal Affairs at some time in the future. You understand?”

“I don’t know. What do you want this guy to do?” the sergeant said.

DeMarco told him.

“Hey, that’s not so bad,” the sergeant said. “Hell, I don’t think it’s even illegal. I mean a lawyer might but—”

“Do you know someone or not?” DeMarco said.

“I know the perfect guy,” the sergeant said.

Maybe he wasn’t perfect, but he was good enough. His name was Gary Parker. He was six-four, good-looking, blond, a little on the heavy
side. By the time he was fifty he’d probably be a lot on the heavy side, but right now he looked to DeMarco like the man you’d want standing on the line next to you if you were trying to control a riot. When he met DeMarco, Parker wasn’t in uniform; he was dressed in jeans, a black T-shirt, and a black leather biker’s jacket. It was probably the jacket, but Parker immediately struck DeMarco as cocky and overconfident—just right for what he needed.

DeMarco told Parker what he wanted him to do.

“Is that all?” Parker said.

“Yep.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You don’t need to get it,” DeMarco said. “But what you do need to do is move into an apartment on Capitol Hill.”

“What? There’s no way I can afford a place on the Hill. I’m living in Springfield now.”

DeMarco nodded; he knew that. “What if you had a job moonlighting at the Hooters in Tysons Corner, providing security, and the job paid a thousand a month?”

“Jesus!” Parker said. “And at a Hooters too?”

“Yeah, consider that a fringe benefit. At the end of the year it’s up to you and Hooters’ management if they want to keep you on, but for a year you’ll be living on Capitol Hill, getting paid an extra grand a month, and have a fifteen-minute commute to work.”

“And all I gotta do is . . .”

“Yep, that’s all you gotta do,” DeMarco said.