Collateral Damage (8 page)

Chapter Thirteen

What does the smoke changing color turn out to mean?” Michaelson shouted. He was shouting to make himself heard over the noise of water running in the bathroom sink as he shaved.

“It means an accelerant was used to start the fire,” Marjorie yelled back from the small kitchen area in Michaelson's apartment. “Barbecue starter fluid or something like that. A fairly large amount, apparently.”

As in many oversized villages, gossip is Washington's principal cultural activity. The difference is that in real villages the gossipers don't tend to get the facts quite as systematically and consistently wrong as the capital variety do.

Michaelson and Marjorie, for example, had known each other for just over thirty years. The first ten had combined intellectual intimacy with a carnal chastity that Sir Gawain himself could not have reproached, but Georgetown salons had routinely credited them with a decade of adulterous delight. Later, after a divorce each, they had found their way to each other's beds and to an unspoken understanding that they would not find their way to anybody else's. They had never lived together, shared incomes or credit cards, or registered at hotels under the same name. Indeed, the sex that complemented their relationship had never defined it, their frequent trysts representing one very pleasurable aspect of their couplehood but not its essential point. This comfortable fidelity had continued so long by the mid-nineties, however, that the same D.C. gossip that had once approved their sophisticated but imaginary adultery now shrugged disdainfully at what it assumed had become a stodgy, plain vanilla marriage.

Marjorie set sourdough English muffins slathered with margarine next to two cups of black coffee on the table.

“Between that datum about the color change and the Baggie that I cleverly remembered,” she continued, automatically lowering her voice as the water stopped, “you may well have the highlights of the police report you're trying to sweat out of poor Avery.”

“I'm hoping the report might also say something about cause of death,” Michaelson said. He came into the kitchen with his unknotted bow tie hanging around his neck and his collar button unfastened. “Thank you for fixing breakfast.”

“It was the least I could do after your hospitality,” Marjorie said. “I thought of something else, by the way. When we were standing around in the yard, one of the firemen said something about the bedroom smoke detector not having batteries. That might be in the police report too.”

“A bonus,” Michaelson said as he tucked his unfurled napkin into his shirt. “In one sense, of course, the whole thing will be a bonus if Phillips chooses to produce it.”

“‘Of course.' I love that. What are you talking about?”

“We could probably get the substance of the police report without any cooperation from Phillips,” Michaelson said. “If nothing else, we could infer the bulk of it from the interrogation I'll undoubtedly undergo once the police find out I was poking aggressively around Demarest's home and office a short time before he died.”

“Why are you muscling Phillips for it, then?” Marjorie asked.

“Because if he wants the information I promised in exchange badly enough to procure the report and give it to me, that will confirm my suspicion that he and Demarest were working together in some way on whatever the Calvert Manor project was.”

“Confirm it how?”

“By showing that he cares about whether someone murdered Demarest and if so who it was. If Demarest was just an independent source or an unwitting tool, then Phillips would shrug off his death as a secondary issue—collateral damage. If Demarest's death bothers Phillips enough that he wants to look into it, that will tell me that they were collaborating. I've heard a lot of nasty things about Avery Phillips, but he takes care of his own people.”

“Perhaps,” Marjorie said thoughtfully as she added strawberry jam to the second half of her English muffin. “Or maybe it will just mean that explaining Demarest's death will help Phillips get what he's going after.”

“I'm not sure,” Michaelson said after a moment's reflection, “but I think we just said the same thing.”

“Do you have any other ideas, in case nothing happens by two o'clock?”

“None very promising. There's C-Sharp. He probably won't talk to me. And there's Connaught the spook. Or ex-spook. He'll lie through his teeth. This could be challenging.” Michaelson rose, dabbed at his lips with his napkin, and carried his dishes to the sink.

“Do you have any agenda between now and two?” Marjorie asked. “Or are you just tied up with your junior fellow?”

“My junior fellow is putting his paper through the word processor one more time. From the top. That appalling little note I put on it last week may be the four most productive lines I've written since I left the service. My main endeavor between now and two o'clock is going to be trying to see Jim Halliburton.”

“You don't sound like you're looking forward to it,” Marjorie said.

“I'm not.”

***

Not quite a hundred minutes later Marjorie found enough of a respite in the midst of an uncharacteristically bustling morning at Cavalier Books to start thinking again about the plausibility of Michaelson's analysis.

She would have caught the allusion to Judge Jeffreys and the Bloody Assizes and the king-over-the-water toast if Michaelson had sprung them on her. True, she would have caught them because of countless hours in her misspent youth devoted to historical romances. But that was really the point, wasn't it? Anyone drawn without ulterior motive to an outfit like the Stuart Restoration Society would have something like that in her (or his) background. Richard was right: Demarest's interest in that organization had to have been some kind of cover.

But how far did that really get them? That didn't necessarily mean that Demarest was after some sinister document or gothic secret at Calvert Manor. He might have been as shallow as he seemed. Maybe he was just fortune hunting—maybe he was just after Catherine.

Catherine again. Every time she thought this through, Marjorie came back to Catherine. Whatever she might be, Catherine definitely wasn't shallow. If there was a single key to this entire puzzle, Marjorie thought, it wasn't hidden on some microfiche at the CIA; it was inside Catherine's head.

She replayed Michaelson's account of his talk with Demarest. The confrontation at the nightclub. The layout there, Demarest without even an office, just a lockable desk behind a partition. Demarest at the health club, fascinated by neither the boys nor the girls but the mirror. Then Phillips at Michaelson's flat, telling Michaelson he'd missed something.

She briskly straightened some papers on the counter, went to the phone, and dialed Michaelson's number. She got his voice mail, as she'd known she would.

“Give me a call if you can before you talk to Phillips,” she said. “I just had a thought.”

***

Though he was singing Gershwin and Porter, the man accompanying himself on the upright piano seemed to be trying for a ragtime look: sleeve garters, straw boater, that kind of thing. His audience gave no sign of resenting the anomaly. Gathered in a double semicircle of wheelchairs and folding chairs in the Extended Care Facility's day-room, the eighteen elderly residents watched the performance without complaint, smiling, nodding, some of them making game attempts to sing along.

Michaelson spotted Jim Halliburton thirty feet away, at the other end of the room, in front of a flickering but silent television. He wore a blue plaid pajama top tucked into a pair of charcoal gray suit pants with the once-white waistband curling over the belt. His wheelchair occupied a rectangle of sunshine streaming through glass doors that looked out on a snow-covered patio. He was not smiling, nodding, or attempting to sing along.

Michaelson worked his way over to the older man, who glanced up at his approach. Limp white whiskers at least three days long stood out on each cheek against his sallow complexion. A class-reunion-type frown combining recognition and puzzlement creased his face when he got a good look at Michaelson, as if Halliburton dimly recalled him in context but couldn't remember his name.

“Good to see you again, Jim,” Michaelson said as he came up and took a seat near Halliburton, careful not to block his view of the television. “Richard Michaelson.”

“Of course,” Halliburton said. “Michaelson. Near East/South Asia. Good to be back where it's halfway warm again. It was colder than a by-God in Peshāwar, let me tell you.”

Michaelson kept his expression carefully neutral. Peshāwar had once been an American air force base in what had once been West Pakistan on the front lines of what had once been the Cold War.

“Catching up on the news stateside,” Halliburton said, nodding at the TV.

Following the nod, Michaelson saw closed-caption text crawling in white block letters through black rectangles at the bottom of the screen. The channel was MSNBC. The caption said that a U.S. official was having “frank and productive” discussions with his Chinese opposite number. Perhaps inspired by the Great Wall stock footage behind him, the commentator was predicting that most-favored-nation status for China would continue.

“Cozying up to the PRC,” Halliburton said. “Has to be done, of course. But GOI isn't going to like it. Hope someone over there is thinking about that.”

“GOI” is State Department argot for “Government of India.” Although Halliburton's head-snap this time went toward the patio doors, beyond which lay nothing of more institutional importance than the Rockville Pizza Hut, Michaelson surmised that his reference to “over there” meant the White House.

“You're no doubt correct,” Michaelson said. “But then the last time we managed to please GOI was the arms sale back in 'sixty-two.”

“That
was
marvelous, wasn't it?” Halliburton responded with a flush of enthusiasm as his eyes sparkled. “Very rich. Nehru has always been such a self-righteous little prick. Loftily disdaining military aid—
until
Chinese Reds start pouring across the Kashmir border. Then all of a sudden it was ‘Please, please, could we have some tanks thank you.'”

“I remember it well,” Michaelson said, smiling warmly. He barely managed to squeeze these four words in between the cascading waves of Halliburton's continued reminiscence.

“That's just the way it is with them and we might as well get used to it,” Halliburton said. “I remember a meeting with LBJ a while back when we were having a crisis with India every two months. This was during Indira Gandhi's first time around as prime minister. She's Nehru's daughter, you know.”

“Yes,” Michaelson said mildly.

“And we were sitting there in the White House basement getting instant wisdom from all these NSC whiz kids with their White Paper expertise. All of a sudden someone rushes in with a cable for the president. LBJ opens it and reads it, and this huge grin spreads over that enormous face of his. He crumples the cable up and squashes it in his fist, which he raises over his head. And he says, ‘Gentlemen, we have that little lady right by the balls.'”

Halliburton threw himself back in the wheelchair with a delighted, wheezing laugh that continued until drool began to trickle from the corners of his mouth and stream down his chin. The laughter suddenly stopped and a stricken look came over Halliburton's face until Michaelson handed him a handkerchief so that he could mop the spittle up properly.

“Thank you,” he said, as he recovered. “We can't over-react to this kind of aggravation, though. We have to remember that they're a democracy, and their politicians have to play to unlettered galleries, just like ours do.”

This expatiation went on for several dozen more seconds, as Halliburton treated Michaelson like a callow FSO fresh from the Fletcher School and needing to be shaken out of his postwar American triumphalism. Well before it was finished, the China story on MSNBC had given way to an apparent rebroadcast of an appearance by Marcus Humphreys on a talk show the previous day. Michaelson's internal antennae quivered. He didn't flatter himself that his political savvy extended to electoral calculations, but he knew that when an ordinary congressman started showing up on TV and radio this regularly, there were important people who thought he might be more than a congressman before long.

Halliburton's
tour d'horizon
of elementary geopolitics finally wound down just as Humphreys was being asked about affirmative action. Humphreys was launching into what the captions suggested would be a provocative analogy between affirmative action and corporal punishment when Michaelson seized the opportunity to respond to Halliburton's exposition.

“Quit right,” he said.

He examined Halliburton's eyes searchingly, but he wasn't looking for a miraculous flicker of lucidity. He didn't believe in miracles and he certainly wasn't expecting any here. Washington's rather tawdry present wasn't going to intrude into the destiny-shaping Johnson/Nixon/Kissinger world where Halliburton's mind had now comfortably planted him. Michaelson hadn't come to seek information but to convey some.

“You sent me a message just before you went to the hospital,” he said, leaning forward.

“Yes,” Halliburton said. Michaelson could tell from the older man's expression that this was an acknowledgment of Michaelson's statement, not a sign that Halliburton had the faintest idea of what he was talking about.

“I just wanted you to know that the situation has been appropriately taken care of.”

“Excellent.”

“Your concerns were well founded,” Michaelson continued. “But the problem has been dealt with. Everything's under control.”

“Is it now? Well, good, good. Knew I could count on you. Glad to hear it.”

If someone had asked Michaelson what he thought he had accomplished by speaking these words, he would have evaded the question as diplomatically as he could. It was like jazz: If you had to ask, you wouldn't understand. It was what Marjorie would have called a small thing, done well.