Worst Case Scenario (4 page)

He was destined, however, never to find out. After raising his right hand for a first, perfunctory rap, he froze with his knuckles an inch from the door. He realized that there was water leaking onto his tooled snakeskin boots from underneath the door.

Chapter Five

Sharon Bedford lay in the bathtub, naked, in water that had filled the tub and overflowed it long enough for an oozing puddle to seep way all the way to the hallway door. A thick white towel sat bunched against the wall on the back of the tub, where she could have rested her head had she still been alive. In death—or perhaps shortly before—she had slipped along the tub's bottom, submerging her head and shoulders. More than an hour's worth of hot, running water had fogged the bathroom's several mirrors and accounted for the steamy, humid odor pervading the room.

To get into the room, once Gallagher had alerted him, the hotel security officer had used a universal key-card on the hallway door's principal lock. Then he'd had to jimmy the night-bolt with a pry bar and cut through the chain lock with bolt cutters. Neither the night-bolt nor the chain lock could be fastened from outside the room.

As soon as he'd turned off the water and confirmed that Bedford was dead, the security officer had called the police. While he did that, Gallagher had paced in agitated distraction around the small part of the room between the foot of the bed and the opposite wall. His eyes dull with shock, his pale lips moving in unheard mutterings, grief splashed with vivid eloquence across his features, he opened and closed massive fists and periodically snapped his head in a spasmodic shake.

During the intervals when he could concentrate at all, he sought refuge from his pain by meticulously cataloging what he saw in the small room. Pausing occasionally, he examined the adjoining door leading to the hospitality suite. The tongue-and-groove sliding latch on Bedford's side was shut. Gallagher, who knew something about the subject, couldn't see any sign that the latch or any part of the door frame had been forced. He saw instantly that the latch couldn't be closed from outside the room.

The windows were all shut and latched from the inside. Even if they hadn't been, it was clear that none of them could be opened wide enough for a human being to get in.

Bedford's suitcase lay open on the bed and looked about two-thirds packed. White cotton underpants and brassiere lay on the pillows. Two outfits were spread out on the bed, one on each side of the suitcase, as if Bedford had planned to decide after bathing which one to put on and which one to pack. Both were simple: white linen slacks and a round-necked cotton pullover on one side, a denim skirt and a short-sleeved blue blouse on the other. A pair of Adidas court shoes lay on the floor beside the bed.

A large purse of pearl gray vinyl sat on top of the low dresser that extended from the television cabinet. Beside it, trailing a power cord that dropped toward an outlet near the floor, a laptop computer nestled inside an open, black zipper case.

“This is a smoking room,” Gallagher muttered, a suggestion of bafflement coloring the comment. “She didn't smoke.”

The security officer, who'd been eyeing Gallagher warily since completing his phone call, nodded understandingly at the remark. His name was Harvey Barnstable. Out in the hallway, while Gallagher was explaining with considerable agitation why he should break the door down, Barnstable had learned that Gallagher had come to the hotel expecting to pick Bedford up, and that Bedford was very close to him. From a guy like Gallagher in a situation like this you expected shock or rage. Barnstable was relieved that it was going to be shock. He took two quick strides to where Gallagher was standing, trying to show his sympathy by physical closeness without actually touching Gallagher or doing anything else that might make him uncomfortable.

“Wife?” he asked.

“She was gonna be,” Gallagher said. “She didn't know it yet, but she was gonna be.”

“Were you coming up to ask her? God, that's tough.”

“No, she had to get some things out of her system. I'd asked her twice and she'd said yes twice and then got cold feet twice. I figured on making the third one stick.”

“Maybe we better step outside till the police get here?” Barnstable said, inflecting his voice at the end to make the sentence a strongly suggestive question.

“Huh? Oh, sure. Right.”

***

The police hadn't arrived yet when Michaelson lugged his copies of the Sunday
New York Times
and
Washington Post
through the lobby at 12:10, but he knew something was wrong. His job for more than three decades had included picking up subtle cues in edgy body language and nervously elaborate speech that signaled some tense departure from routine. The tension might arise from something as oblique as an interior minister going into the hospital, or as dramatic as a bloody riot being planned. Whichever, when you were four thousand miles from home and the marines at the embassy were out-numbered a thousand to one by street thugs, it was a good idea to stay ahead of the curve.

The hair-trigger nervousness in the lobby seemed palpable to him. A senior assistant manager was staffing one of the slots at the registration desk, scanning the lobby with preoccupied glances as she dealt mechanically with the paperwork that came her way. The concierge offered an automatic smile to anyone venturing within two yards of his Louis Quinze table, but his ear stayed pinned to a telephone receiver, and when he spoke into it he resorted to whispered monosyllables. The bell captain stood his post, but he repeatedly adjusted the silver braid on his maroon cuffs and he looked like someone who very much wanted to find a bathroom.

Seating himself in a well-stuffed armchair that faced the registration desk, Michaelson pulled the Week in Review section from the
Times
. He read it with one eye while he watched the desk and the front door with the other.

From the corner of the reading eye he picked up a splash of royal blue. He looked up from the paper to see Scott Pilkington approach, wearing the casual shirt Michaelson had just glimpsed and a pair of brown slacks. The leisure wear was elegant enough, certainly, but without his worsted pinstripes Pilkington seemed for a moment jarringly out of his element, like MacArthur in mufti or Joe DiMaggio in hunting pinks.

“Checked out and waiting for a cab to the airport, I hope?” Pilkington asked quietly as without invitation he seated himself opposite Michaelson.

“No. I'm staying over another night, as a matter of fact.”

Pilkington didn't try to hide his surprise at this revelation.

“West Virginia must have charms I hadn't fully appreciated.”

“Two that come to mind are distance from Washington and distance from Washingtonians.”

“Just a thought, but you may want to reconsider,” Pilkington said.

“Why?”

“A couple of minutes ago I couldn't help noticing a rent-a-cop breaking into a room next door to last night's hospitality suite. He wasn't being shy about it, and from the urgency he brought to the operation, I surmised that he feared something pretty serious on the other side. I'm betting police, tedious questions, long delays, and other things that might very quickly take the bloom off West Virginia's placid rose. Almost everyone who came for the conference is gone, and any participant who's still around risks being seized on with avidity by cops who want information fast.”

Folding the unfinished newspaper section resignedly on top of the pile on his lap, Michaelson gazed for several seconds at Pilkington.

“There must be more,” he said at last. “What is it?”

“This is strictly a professional courtesy,” Pilkington said briskly. “Favor for an alumnus, old times' sake, no strings attached, no ulterior motive. That sort of thing.”

“Who was registered to the room in question?”

“A young woman named Bedburg or Bedford or something had it Friday and Saturday night. She may well have checked out by now. By great good luck she wasn't actually part of the conference, though I gather that she crashed several of the events.”

Bedford. Michaelson closed his eyes and allowed himself a brief sigh.

“Thank you for the advice,” he said then.

“Which you intend to ignore, I take it?”

“Which I intend to disregard. I don't think a sudden and conspicuous change of plans on my part is likely to reduce the interest of the local authorities in me. Quite the contrary. I have it on good authority that the guilty flee where no man pursueth.”

Michaelson glanced over Pilkington's right shoulder and nodded briefly. Pilkington cranked his head around to look in the same direction. He saw a dark-haired woman who looked to be in her mid-forties and was in fact in her early fifties stroll with patrician serenity through the lobby and stop at the registration desk. A bellhop straining under the burden of two suitcases, an overnight case, and a canvas carryall staggered behind her. His face was a shade darker than the maroon trim on his uniform.

“Oh,” Pilkington said. “I see.”

“That verges on indiscretion,” Michaelson said.

“What in the world does she have in the larger suitcase? An Olympic-class weight set?”

“Marjorie always takes her rock collection along for good luck.”

“Still—all that for an overnight stay in Charleston?”

“You have just officially gone beyond verging. Actually, Marjorie is on her way back to Washington from the better part of a week at a booksellers' convention in Las Vegas. By the way, I want you to feel perfectly free to run along if you're anxious to avoid tedious questions and constabulary entanglements. If you can get through the next fifteen minutes without another subtly suggestive comment, I might even drop by after I get back to D.C. and give you a rundown on any informational tidbits that fall into my lap.”

Two uniformed police officers and two men in civilian clothes hustled through the front door. One of the uniformed officers peeled off toward the registration counter. The rest of the group, directed with frantically discreet little waves by the concierge, hurried toward the stairs.

“Yes,” Pilkington said. “I think I will be pushing off at that.”

Chapter Six

“I'm betting you're intrigued in spite of yourself by that young woman's death,” Marjorie said as she strolled with Michaelson along the Kanawha River toward the Radisson on the back leg of a relaxed evening walk.

“Almost the opposite of intrigued,” Michaelson answered. “Except for your stimulating presence, I'd be feeling the way Gatsby did after Miss Buchanan left.”

“Lackadaisical?”

“You know me too well.”

With powerful
bongs
a carillion somewhere was punctuating the arrival of five in the evening. Marjorie and Michaelson had had several hours to learn in more detail than Pilkington had offered exactly what had brought the police hustling past Marjorie as she registered, for secrets are hard to keep in a hotel. They knew by now that Sharon Bedford had died in her room under circumstances that were at least puzzling and possibly suspicious.

“Would your enervation have something to do with the little chat you and Scott Pilkington were having when I arrived?”

“Yes. He was giving me advice.”

“Which must have been tedious.”

“And the advice was correct.”

“Which must have been aggravating.”

“Right on both counts,” Michaelson said. Without further prompting, he told her what the advice was.

“Why do you think Pilkington's approach is the right one?” Marjorie asked.

“Charleston is a state capital that I'm sure has a perfectly competent police force. If Sharon Bedford's death involved anything more sinister than a pathetic suicide or an imprudent combination of drugs and alcohol, the best chance of finding that out is to let the local authorities investigate it as they would any other suspicious demise. Should reporters start tying her death to the conference or someone associated with it—even someone as little known as I am—then it certainly won't do that unfortunate person any good at all. More important, the murder turns into show business overnight, and any hopes of a serious investigation drastically diminish.”

“You're right,” Marjorie said deliberately, as if she was reluctant to accept the conclusion. “Or, rather, Pilkington's right. If Sharon Bedford's death becomes a national political issue instead of a local law-enforcement question, the detectives will spend more time answering questions from tabloid reporters than they will interviewing witnesses. It'd make the Vince Foster fiasco look like a model of professional police work.”

Rounding a gentle curve, they spotted the gilded dome of West Virginia's capitol. They were less than a block from the hotel.

“I should probably be past worrying about the effect of political fallout on my own prospects but I'm not,” Michaelson said. “Even if I were, there's Wendy to think about.”

They walked in silence for the last hundred feet or so. The afternoon and the evening thus far had precisely met the modest expectations they'd had when they'd planned their meeting here. Lazy hours passed working acrostics and crosswords, eating a room-service meal, strolling through a pleasant slice of an America that was about as real to most people in Washington as Mark Twain's Missouri—this was exactly what they'd been hoping for.

Three years, Marjorie thought. No, more like four. Almost four years had passed since the last time Michaelson had talked to Marjorie about losing his wife. When he'd brought it up before, it had almost always been in settings like this, and she wondered if he was about to allude to it again.

She supposed she was the only one he ever talked to about “losing” Charlotte Michaelson. Most people would have taken him to mean that his wife had died. He didn't mean that, she knew. He meant that he'd lost her the way you lose a train of thought or lose track of what you're doing, through lapse of concentration and inattention. She didn't agree with him and had told him so, but she'd given up arguing about it with him.

An aphorism describes the ideal foreign service officer as “faithful, skillful, and exact, but above all not excessively zealous.” Marjorie figured that Talleyrand had gotten it right when he'd turned that phrase a couple of centuries back. Excessive zeal got in the way of being skillful and exact. The first job of any foreign service officer is to get the facts right and analyze them with perfect dispassion, untinctured by comforting illusions or emotional revulsion or what the big guy down the street wanted to hear. The Pakistanis might be fine chaps whom President Nixon admired and the Indians might be insufferable hypocrites whom he despised, but that didn't mean Pakistan could stand up to India when the tanks rolled. Those are the facts, Mr. President. That's what the numbers on the ground say. Sorry you're disappointed, but making you feel good isn't in my job description.

Back then in the early seventies, the careerists said that Michaelson (along with several colleagues) had made the mistake of being right too early, leaving his career maimed if not destroyed. Cynics—in whose number Marjorie emphatically counted herself at the time—opined that that was why Charlotte Michaelson had left, figuring she'd never be an ambassador's wife.

Marjorie realized now that she'd been wrong. Charlotte had left because she couldn't face the thought of careening into her forties with a man who was faithful, skillful, and exact, but not excessively zealous. Who'd look at her without illusion or self-deception, who'd see her as she saw herself at two in the morning: a matron whose charm had turned brittle with the approach of middle age, whose once-lancing curiosity had atrophied in the dreary days after Washington went from Camelot to California east, who now treated
The New York Times Book Review
as Cliff Notes for cocktail party conversation. She'd left Richard not because of his weakness but because of his greatest strength and her icy fear that she was unequal to it.

And Michaelson had blamed himself, Marjorie knew. He'd felt that he should have sensed the unspoken anguish, should have found a way to restore his wife's disintegrating spirit, to show her that he loved her as a woman and not a credential or an ornament. Nixon he could forgive; himself, for many years, he couldn't.

Marjorie understood what searing pain the divorce had produced, and if she'd been granted some fairy-tale power to spare Michaelson that yawning ache, she would have. At the same time, though, she wondered what he'd be like now if he hadn't gone through it, if he hadn't experienced that single transcendent failure and that long black night of self-doubt. Would he have turned into a slightly less obnoxious version of Pilkington, with intelligence a mile wide and an inch deep, clever but not wise, bright but not thoughtful, recycling prefabricated quips, trading on carefully rehearsed spontaneity, confusing power with strength, knowledge with judgment, verbal facility with vision?

She didn't know. She did know that the end result of Michaelson's trauma was someone whose instincts she trusted. She would have trusted him in a situation room, making decisions while lieutenant colonels moved model ships around a map board. And she trusted him in a hotel lobby, letting her know he was there but not jumping on her the moment she walked in and signaling to every bellhop in the vicinity that she'd come to a tryst.

Michaelson held the door open for Marjorie as they reached the Radisson, and was still a step or two behind her when they began to cross the lobby. He was startled when a man even taller than he and far huskier suddenly loomed in front of him.

“Excuse me, sir,” the man said in something just north of a drawl, with a very slight slurring on the two
s'
. “I would appreciate a word with you, please.”

Michaelson checked his first instinct, which was to say, “Certainly. How about sometime when you're sober?” The abruptness of the man's approach and the almost exaggerated politeness of his diction couldn't hide the keening anguish wrapped around his words, his tone, the expression on his face. He might be drunk or close to it, but he deserved better than dinner party repartee.

“This is Marjorie Randolph,” Michaelson said, gesturing toward his companion, who had turned back and was looking questioningly at the scene. “I'm Richard Michaelson, as you presumably know. I'm afraid I can't carry the introductions any further than that.”

“My apologies, ma'am,” the man said to Marjorie with apparently deep sincerity. “I didn't realize you were with this gentleman, or I wouldn't have intruded this way.”

“That's quite all right,” Marjorie said. Michaelson noticed with some amusement that Marjorie's own tidewater accent slipped a couple of degrees toward Tara. “And I have the pleasure of being introduced to whom, please?”

“Todd Gallagher, ma'am.” The man bowed slightly.

Michaelson considered offering to go for mint juleps.

“If you'll excuse me for interrupting,” he said instead, “the word you'd like to have with me concerns Sharon Bedford, correct?”

“Yessir,” Gallagher confirmed, wheeling back to face Michaelson. “Once the cops got through with me, I greased the hired help enough to find out that you're about the only one here for the conference that hadn't hightailed it out of town.”

“Relative?” Michaelson asked. “Friend? Associate?”

“Friend,” Gallagher said. The syllable was almost a moan, Gallagher's voice throbbing with pain as he spoke it.

“I'm very sorry for your loss,” Michaelson said. “I don't know that I can offer much consolation. I only met Ms. Bedford in passing. But if you think it would help to talk to someone who was here this weekend, I'm happy to do it. If you're staying over, perhaps tomorrow morning would be a good time.”

“Excuse me for interrupting,” Marjorie said, “but it occurs to me that if I weren't here, you two would be having your talk immediately, and I think that that's what ought to happen.”

“No, no,” Gallagher said almost shyly. “I know three's a crowd. I just—”

“Not a bit of it,” Marjorie said, her voice a model of brook-no-nonsense feminine firmness. “I've had Richard's undivided attention for the last four hours, and I can certainly share him for the next ninety minutes or so.” She glanced at her watch. “Just give me a chance to comb my hair. Richard, I'll knock on your door in seven minutes.”

With that she strode toward the elevators, exuding a regal confidence so complete that footmen trailing in her wake would have seemed superfluous.

His head spinning a bit from the delicate finesse that had turned his intended confrontation of Michaelson into a three-party conversation without his ever quite realizing what was happening, Gallagher stood with Michaelson for over a minute, waiting to no purpose he could discern. He couldn't have been expected to know that by “combing my hair” Marjorie had meant closing the connecting doors between the adjoining rooms that she and Michaelson had. The weighty suitcase that had caught Pilkington's attention when Marjorie checked in lay open on the bed in Marjorie's room, its load of thirty-two brand-new hardcover books displayed for random perusal. The clear implication was that Marjorie wouldn't be using that bed herself. She didn't really think that this would scandalize Gallagher, but she saw no reason to take any chances.

***

“Why did she break the first two off?” Marjorie asked Gallagher once they were well into the conference in Michaelson's room that they'd arranged improvisationally in the lobby. Michaelson realized that this was a question he wouldn't have considered asking. He was surprised and intrigued when it pulled a smile from Gallagher.

“She thought I was too good for her,” he said. “Swear to God. Buried one wife, six kids going from a Sunday-school teacher to a fighter pilot to a bouncer in a roadhouse, just a big old salesman who got lucky, and she acted like I was a combination of Joe Willie Namath and Robert E. Lee.”

“Most women I know,” Marjorie said carefully, “would have found a way to deal with that.”

“Most women aren't Sharon.” Gallagher took a long drink from a bottle of Budweiser. “She saw a picture of me from 'Nam in my ranger outfit and she couldn't get over it. Like I was a Green Beret or something. I told her I was nothing special, maybe half a step above an MP, but it was just exactly like talking to that wall over there. There wasn't any way I was gonna make myself into a normal human being in her eyes, so I had to hope she'd get herself up into the same kind of category she was putting me in.”

“Which meant a job back on the inside,” Michaelson said.

“Yessir. She never really got over losing her NSC job. She had decent enough jobs after that, but she couldn't stay interested in something where the most important thing you did was clear your desk by Friday afternoon.”

“Where was she working most recently?” Marjorie asked.

“Self-employed. Summarizing depositions for shorthanded law firms, mostly. Some technical writing, putting stuff written by propeller heads in language ordinary people could understand.”

Gallagher settled back on his perch at the windowsill and drank more beer. Two Buds after confronting Michaelson in the lobby, Gallagher seemed considerably more sober now than he had then. He also appeared calmer, meeting Bedford's death no longer with shock but with a deep, gradual, sorrowing acceptance.

“I'm afraid I haven't been able to provide much consolation,” Michaelson said apologetically.

“That's okay.” Rising, Gallagher dropped the now-empty bottle into a wastebasket and stretched his long arms and legs a bit. “Just talking about Sharon has helped a lot. I really appreciate your putting up with me.”

“That's entirely all right,” Michaelson said. “I do have one bit of information for you, and one piece of advice that you can take for whatever you think it's worth.”

“Shoot.”

“Ms. Bedford looked me up yesterday evening. She wanted my help in going after one of the jobs she was interested in. She had a very definite idea about what I could do for her, and she wanted to see me after I got back to Washington.”