The 500: A Novel (31 page)

Then I let my hand fall.

That wasn’t me.
This whole thing is impossible,
I thought. Henry could get me by hunting me down, by using my father as bait, by turning Annie against me, by hooking my nuts up to a car battery, by feeding me to Rado.

Or he could sit back and enjoy watching me corrupt myself, torturing geriatrics, becoming exactly the black-hearted little soldier he had always wanted. If I drained this poor old fuck Langford, how long before I’d be back in Henry’s party?

I stepped away from the machine.

Langford considered me for a long while.

“So you’re trying to stop him,” Langford said finally, then made a noise between a wheeze and a laugh. “I’ve always had a soft spot for dimwits. What do you need to know?”

I cocked my head.

“If you were working for Henry,” he said, “I’d be a sticky puddle around your shoes right now.”

This threw me. I wasn’t sure where decency fit in among money, ideology, coercion, and ego. Everything I’d learned about Langford hinted that he was just as crooked as the rest of Washington. But my better self, by not killing the guy, had just gotten me somewhere. I wasn’t about to let it slip away.

“Where’s the evidence?” I asked.

He looked more closely at my face.

“Are you the guy who did in the Supreme Court justice and the girl?”

“So they tell me, but I imagine you can guess who’s really behind that.”

He looked down at my feet. “What happened to your pumps?”

I guess the press had really eaten up that detail of my escape from Davies Group. “They were slowing me down. What have you got on Henry?”

“You know the meat of it. He killed a reporter in 1972.”

“Why?”

“Pearson was onto Henry’s dirty tricks. You know about G. Gordon Liddy? John Mitchell?”

“Of course.”

“Operation Gemstone?”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“Watergate was just the tip of the iceberg. Liddy was mapping out some truly off-the-deep-end stuff: firebombing the Brookings Institution, feeding LSD to Ellsberg, kidnapping activists and shipping them to Mexico.”

“But he never got the green light.”

“
Liddy
didn’t get the green light. The attorney general, Mitchell, told him thanks but no thanks, and by the way, burn those flip charts with all that crazy shit outlined on them. Liddy was a wannabe-big-dick chicken hawk, a moron, which is why you’ve heard of him. He got caught. You haven’t heard of Henry Davies’s part in the same conspiracies, because, as I’m sure you know, Henry Davies is ruthless, supremely competent, and more of a better-to-ask-forgiveness-than-ask-permission type. What Davies pulled off made the wing-nut shit Liddy proposed look as innocent as tearing down campaign signs. I’m sure you can imagine what he’s capable of.

“Davies was a comer. In two years he’d gone from answering phones to being the number one rat-fuck artist on the Committee to Reelect the President. It was unreal. People were starting to hitch themselves to his coattails. They figured he’d find his way into Congress soon enough, and after that, who knew? The guy was a rocket. But then Hal Pearson started sniffing around Davies, started to piece together his role in the dirty tricks. Pearson threatened Davies’s rise. He threatened the whole campaign. Woodward and Bernstein were a couple JV metro reporters who got lucky. They scratched the surface. Pearson would have taken the whole capital down.

“Davies found out that Pearson was investigating him and went to his apartment, up in Mount Pleasant. I guess Pearson was expecting the usual hardball, a browbeating, maybe some threats. He wasn’t expecting Henry Davies. I don’t know what Davies said to Pearson, but the guy was a big drinker with a big temper and I imagine he didn’t take it well. It got physical, and Pearson turned up dead, strangled, his throat a purple mess, the next day.”

“Henry left evidence?” I asked.

“Yes,” Langford said. “The police pulled part of his earlobe out of Pearson’s throat.”

That explained the scar along Henry’s neck.

“Pearson sure as fuck wasn’t nibbling his ear. He nearly killed Davies, crushed his voice box, must have been choking him right back. That’s where he got that creepy whisper.”

“So how did Davies get away with it?”

“He was damaged goods. His bosses wanted to bury him, to get him out of Washington as quickly as possible. They gave him some bullshit defense attaché position in Luxembourg, gave him time to get his ear fixed up. He was out of the States for six months, maybe a year.

“For anyone else, that would’ve been the end of the road, but not for Davies. His higher-ups destroyed his career in government, sure, but Davies had always been the paranoid type. He was a collector, of sorts. Most young guns like him were happy taking orders, rubbing shoulders with the bosses, glad to even get a chance to chat with an attorney general. But Davies was always planning, so that when the time came, he had knives to draw.”

Langford nodded toward the duct tape. “I think I earned my way out of this, huh?”

I pulled it off.

“Thanks,” he said. He took a shaky breath, then continued.

“Henry had kept evidence, documentation of every order he received from his higher-ups, every dirty trick they were complicit in. When his bosses tried to throw him under the bus, he was ready. Bad things started happening to them. He used the secrets he’d collected like a scalpel. One by one he cut them out. It was unbelievable. In exile, he dismantled anyone who tried to cross him. A massacre. He came out unscathed. Well, mostly unscathed; he returned as a pretty dark character after his time in the wilderness. I think that’s when he learned that he could be more powerful out of sight, working the strings.

“He’d been going along to get along, trying to please the bosses. He was dirt-poor, just wanted the big office and the big house. It corrupted him, cost him his career in government. And ever since then it seems like he’s dedicated his life to proving that every honest man, as well as the whole capital, can be corrupted, that they’re no better than he is.

“He made coin while he was at it too. Piece by piece, he built it into an empire. He started by getting into the vetting for campaigns: vice presidential searches, cabinet secretaries, whatever. He would go deeper than was needed for the jobs, and if those candidates ever crossed him, they’d find their skeletons on the front page of the
Post.
At some point he cracked the Federal Investigative Service. They do all the background checks for the government, the guys who ask CIA applicants if they want to fuck their brothers and all that. It was a gold mine. Next he got his fingers in the prayer groups. That started in the eighties. All of a sudden every heavyweight in DC was confessing his deepest secrets once a week before breakfast. Those were supposed to be sacred, strictly off-the-record, but Henry made damn sure he always had someone listening.”

“But what about the evidence?” I asked. “The blood? They found a chunk of his ear in the dead man’s throat, right? It doesn’t get any more open-and-shut than that.”

“You’re right. But the politicos bigfooted the local cops. The evidence file with the police report and the chunk of ear disappeared. The official story went out: Pearson was killed by a burglar. Someone must have thought they could buy that file off the cops and use it to rein Henry in. They thought wrong.

“At first, the file commanded a pretty high price. After all, leverage on Henry was looking to be increasingly precious. The evidence had disappeared while Henry was overseas, and at first he didn’t know it existed, and then he didn’t know who had it. As he grew stronger, and the men who tried to cross him fell, holding on to the one thing Henry would kill to obtain started to seem less and less a good idea. The price dropped. Eventually a friend of mine, James Perry, the party chair in Virginia, got his hands on it. And he was either cowardly enough or sensible enough to hide it. He couldn’t destroy it, just in case Henry came knocking, so he buried it.”

I took a deep breath. James Perry was the man who Henry Davies had claimed was sleeping with my mother, the man my father had supposedly murdered. My mother had been Perry’s secretary. This whole mess was closing in on me, on my family and my past. I steeled myself. Above all, I needed to get that evidence against Henry. Whatever connection my father had to Henry Davies would have to wait.

“Where is it now?” I asked.

Langford let out a bitter laugh. “That’s the best part. Perry had a contracting company on the side, construction and renovations. His cronies steered him a lot of government work. He had keys to half the federal buildings in Washington. So he hid it in plain sight in one of these massive file warehouses the Feds have everywhere, just miles of shelves in an archive gathering dust. If you didn’t know the name he put on the file, you’d never find it in there.”

“Where’s the archive?”

“Nine hundred fifty Pennsylvania Ave.”

“Wait…”

“You got it.”

“The Department of Justice?”

“So good luck with that.”

“He never told you the name?”

“No. He never told anyone anything. What I just told you he let slip in a blackout while we were drunk on a golf junket in Myrtle Beach. Not that my ignorance would help if Davies found me. I’m sure he’d have a real time of it, sipping an RC Cola while Marcus went snipping off postage-stamp patches of my skin until I gave up a name I didn’t have or bled out. Only Perry knew the name on that file. And he’s been dead for sixteen years.”

“Who killed him?” I asked. Henry had just told me my father was the murderer.

“A mugging was the official story. DC can be a very dangerous place for knowledgeable people. I always thought Davies must have been behind it somehow.”

“Did you ever hear Perry mention a woman named Ellen Ford?”

“You think she killed him?” Langford smiled, then considered it. “Maybe from blue balls.

“Not that I could blame him,” he added.

“You knew her?”

“Just from what Perry told me. Said she was a good-looking woman. Some fuckup ex-con for a husband. Perry figured she was working for him trying to butter him up so he’d help get her husband’s prison record cleaned up, help out with his parole. Perry, class act to the end, was just stringing her along while he tried to drag her out to the Palisades. His friend had a house out there Perry used for a fuck pad. Why do you ask about her?”

“She was my mother,” I said.

Langford sucked in air through his teeth and winced. “If it’s any consolation, I never heard about her going along with it. Perry liked girls who took a hard sell, and he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. I’d probably have heard.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Give-and-take,” Langford said. “I imagine you know that game. Now, how did you find me?”

“Malcolm Haskins.”

“And how did he find out I knew about the evidence against Henry?”

“He never told me,” I said. “We didn’t really have a lot of time to chat before Henry killed him. Is Haskins the reason you disappeared?”

Langford nodded. “He started bugging me, asking me questions about all this. I stonewalled him. But when a Supreme Court justice sets his mind to making you testify, dying is one of your more palatable options. And if Haskins knew, then I was sure that eventually Henry would find out and then we’d be back to the RC Cola–and–skinning scenario. So I ran, tried to hide. This thing with Henry, it’s personal for you?”

“Yes. More and more with everything I learn.”

“He offered you some kind of deal?”

I nodded. “It was strange; he wanted me back. He seemed more interested in my obedience, in being able to watch me suffer under him, than anything else.”

“You said no.”

“I kicked Marcus in the face and tried to strangle Henry.”

“Good,” he said, then corrected himself. “Well, survival-wise it was pretty dumb. You should have taken the deal; it was the reasonable thing to do. I said good because I like seeing those guys hurt, and the only thing you have going for you is that Henry has trouble dealing with unreasonable men. Somehow, though, no matter who he’s working on, he always manages to find a compelling enough reason to get the guy to do his will.”

“Is that why you’re talking to me? You think I can get out of this?”

“No. You should have said yes to Henry. You’re going to be a corpse, or worse, before the week is out. I’m talking to you because if you can find me, he can. I’m as good as dead. And it’s nice to go down making a move instead of waiting for Tuesday lasagna.”

He looked around at the furnished room, the same nailed-to-the-wall landscapes that who knows how many people had seen from the same bed as they died slowly. I got the feeling he’d taken a deal, a long time ago, and it had left him here, at the end, nameless and alone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

SENDING THE MESSAGE
through Cartwright, I told my father to find me where he’d lost me once. The Cutlass growled along the dirt road and parked beside the baseball diamond. I was taking a risk, for both of us, by meeting him, but I needed to make sure he was okay and warn him that Henry was coming for him

I rested the Halligan bar against the chain-link fence of the backstop. When I was ten, my father left me at this field, thinking my mother had taken me home after the game. As night fell, I found some local kids and we had a ball playing manhunt then taking turns shooting one another with a little one-pump BB gun. I’d never seen my father scared, but he was white as a ghost that spring night as he came stalking through the fields looking for his son.

He looked just as worried now.

“You okay?” he asked me. His eyes took inventory of my bad week: the friction burns on my face, a mottled black bruise across my throat (which still wasn’t working quite right), and a marked limp from crashing the car into the wall. The gash in my thigh from Haskins’s country place had finally scabbed over. It itched like a motherfucker, which was good, a sign of healing.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Been better?”

I nodded. He hugged me.