House Secrets (16 page)

“I tried to get to you last night,” Garret Darcy said to his boss, “but you didn’t answer your cell phone.”

“I couldn’t,” the man said, sounding annoyed that the hired help would question his availability. “So why did you call?”

“Yesterday, after he met with Ladybird at the canal, he went back to the Capitol, to his office I guess.”

“So?”

“Then he went to the Greek Embassy. That’s why I tried to call you last night.”

“The Greek Embassy?”

“Yeah,” Darcy said. “There was some kinda party goin’ on there. I could see guys in tuxes and gals in gowns goin’ in and out, but De . . . but the guy from the cathedral, he wasn’t dressed like he was there for the party. Anyway, he was at the embassy maybe fifteen minutes then he left.”

“Hmm.”

Hmm?
What the fuck did
hmm
mean?

“Do you think he could be working for the Greeks?” Darcy said, meaning that maybe this DeMarco guy was some sort of mole in Congress. But that would be really weird. Probably the last time the Greeks had spied on anybody had been during the Trojan War.

“I doubt it,” his boss said, and if anyone would know who was spying on whom, he would. “So is that it?”

“No,” Darcy said. “This morning he went to see a woman in McLean.”

“Who’s the woman?”

Garret Darcy told him.

“Are you sure? Absolutely sure?”

“Yeah,” Darcy said. “Do you know who she is?”

“Oh, yes. I do indeed.”

Frustrated by everything connected to Terry Finley and his damn list, DeMarco decided to go to a driving range and hit a bucket of balls. Hitting golf balls was just as therapeutic as hitting his punching bag, but much less sweaty. DeMarco knew the object of going to the range was to improve his game but sometimes he just liked to take a big ol’ driver and smack the balls as hard as he could. Most of his shots sliced or hooked, but DeMarco had good upper body strength and every once in awhile he’d drive the ball straight, about two hundred and fifty yards, like he’d been momentarily possessed by Tiger Woods.

He had just flung his golf bag into the trunk of his car when his cell phone rang. Cell phones were a curse, an infinitely long chain tethering a man perpetually to his job. He looked at the caller ID display. It was Dick Finley calling. Shit. What the hell was he supposed to tell the guy?

“Hello, Mr. Finley,” DeMarco said.

“They found Terry’s laptop,” Dick Finley said. “He’d left it at this bar, the same place where that napkin came from. You know, the napkin that had the names written on it.”

“Sam and Harry’s?” DeMarco said.

“Yeah. It’s there now. The manager just called me. He said Terry forgot his computer there one night and a bartender put it in the back
room where the employees change, but then the bartender goes on vacation without telling anybody about the computer. Anyway, the bartender gets back from vacation today, sees the laptop’s still there, and he calls the
Post
. The
Post
told him to call me.”

So Terry’s laptop hadn’t been stolen by some killer as Dick Finley had thought. The reporter had had too much to drink, forgot his computer, and the next day when he discovered it was missing, he filed a report with the police saying it had been stolen—just like the Louisa County sheriff had told Dick Finley. And maybe the sheriff was right about everything else associated with Terry’s death, including the fact that it had been an accident.

“The reason I called,” Finley said, “is I was wondering if you could pick up the computer and take a look at what’s in it?”

Shit. “Sure, I can do that,” DeMarco said.

“If there isn’t anything there connected to Terry’s death, just . . . I don’t know, just give it to somebody.”

“You sound pretty tired, Mr. Finley. Are you feeling okay?”

“Yeah. I’m just old. So have you learned anything yet?”

“No, sir,” DeMarco said, and to keep Finley from asking more questions—and so he wouldn’t have to tell the man more lies—he added, “But I’ll get over to that bar right now and get the laptop.”

So instead of doing something healthy, like whacking golf balls, DeMarco went to Sam and Harry’s. He liked the place. It was dark and cool and quiet—it looked the way bars were supposed to look—and the bartenders had a tendency to overpour, experience showing that bigger drinks produced happy drunks which in turn produced bigger tips.

DeMarco got a beer—he didn’t feel like experimenting with another brand of cheap vodka—and retrieved Finley’s laptop from the bartender on duty. He found a table near an electrical outlet and plugged in the power cord for the computer. There were hundreds
of files on the laptop, some going back years, including one that looked like a novel that never got beyond the third chapter. Most of the files were rough drafts of stories Terry had written but some contained interview notes and background material on subjects that he’d researched. He found only one file related to Paul Morelli.

In the Morelli file were references to past articles on Reams, Bachaud, and Frey, the three men on Terry Finley’s list, but nothing that pointed to Morelli being guilty of anything specific. There were also large blocks of text that appeared to have come from past stories written about Morelli. It appeared that Terry Finley had found the stories on Internet sites and copied them into his computer. Terry had also talked to a lot of people. Most of the people he had interviewed were people related to the incidents involving Reams, Bachaud, and Frey. For example, he’d talked to the cop who had found Reams in bed with the teenage boy and the motel manager of the place where the incident had occurred. But nothing in Finley’s notes shed any new light on the events that had taken place all those years ago, and nothing pointed to some powerful man helping Paul Morelli commit crimes.

Janet Tyler and Marcia Davenport were both mentioned in the file. Finley had found that Marcia Davenport had done some decorating work on Morelli’s home and that Janet Tyler had worked on a zoning study in New York, but that was it. It appeared that all Finley had managed to do was confirm that both women had a prior association with Morelli but there was nothing to indicate that Finley suspected Morelli of assaulting the women. Lydia Morelli’s name was not mentioned at all.

It occurred to DeMarco that Finley’s laptop wasn’t necessarily up to date. Most reporters wouldn’t use a laptop for taking notes when they interviewed people. Finley probably recorded his raw notes in a notebook or a tape recorder then later transferred whatever he’d learned to his computer. But no notebook or tape recorder had been found on Terry’s body or in his house, according to both Dick Finley and the police reports that DeMarco had seen. Finley’s notebooks
were probably in his office at the
Post
, DeMarco figured, and his bosses had most likely already looked through them.

DeMarco glanced at his watch. It was too late to go to the driving range. He noticed a very attractive brunette sitting at the bar by herself playing with her BlackBerry. He decided to go up to the bar and order another beer.

“Why the hell would he put his clubs in the trunk then go to a bar?” Carl said.

Jimmy didn’t bother to answer. He just sat there, staring at the entrance to Sam and Harry’s, wishing this damn job was over, wishing Carl would just shut the fuck up.

They’d gotten rid of the Buick and were now driving a Ford Explorer. Carl was blowing his cigarette smoke out the window, having just endured another lecture from Jimmy on secondhand smoke. Carl had said that Jimmy was more likely to get cancer from the exhaust fumes of passing cars, but he rolled down the window and it was probably a good thing he did. Jimmy was in such a shitty mood today, the way everything had been going, that he would have put the butt out in Carl’s ear if he hadn’t.

Today they were parked on a corner where they couldn’t get blocked in. If they had to, they could drive right up over the curb. It was good to have a four-wheel-drive SUV with big tires. No fuckin’ way were they gonna lose this jamoke again.

“Will you look at this guy,” Carl said.

“Huh? What guy?” Jimmy said.

“This guy comin’ down the block.”

Jimmy looked over to where Carl was pointing. There was a middle-aged man with a dog walking toward them. The dog was about
the size of a squirrel and had a pink bow on its head. The man wore a pink shirt with epaulets on the shoulders—the color of the shirt matching the dog’s bow—and his pants were so voluminous in the thighs that it almost looked as if he was wearing a skirt. On his feet were espadrilles and on his head was a small cap that looked like a little kid’s baseball cap because it had such a short bill.

“And they wonder why they get beat up,” Carl said.

Before Jimmy could tell Carl that he was an idiot, his cell phone vibrated and he jumped like he’d been goosed. Friggin’ cell phones. He opened the phone and listened for a moment then closed it.

“That was Eddie,” Jimmy said. “He said we can quit followin’ this guy.”

“Thank God,” Carl said.

“But he’s on his way down here. He wants us to pick him up at National.”

“Why’s he comin’ here?” Carl said.

Jimmy shrugged. “Says he’s got something else for us to do, but he didn’t say what.”

“I just hope he’s not pissed at us, the way we fucked this up. I mean, Eddie’s definitely a guy I don’t want mad at me.”

“You got that right,” Jimmy said. “I heard when he was in prison he broke a guy over his knee.”

“He what?”

“This guy, he did something, and Eddie picks him up—grabs him by the balls and the throat with those fuckin’ hands of his—and he snaps the guy over his knee like a
stick.
Broke his back.”

“Jesus,” Carl said.

“But he’s not pissed, at least he didn’t sound like it. He just said he had something else he wanted us to do. Maybe he wants us to clip this DeMarco asshole instead of just followin’ him. Whatever. Anyway, quit worryin’ and let’s go get something to eat.”

“Sure. Where you wanna go?”

“There’s a place over in Arlington, on Wilson Boulevard. A place called Mario’s. They make the best Philly cheesesteak you ever tasted.”

“Yeah, that sounds good,” Carl said. “Can you get a beer there?”

“No, it’s more like a drive-in.”

“Well, shit. Don’t you know a place where you can get a cheesesteak
and
a beer?

Emma was sitting in her living room, staring at the burning logs in her fireplace. She’d just had a fight with Christine over something absurdly trivial, and Christine was at the other end of the house, avoiding her. She knew she should go apologize, and later she would, but not now. Now she just wanted to stare into a fire that was overheating the room.

DeMarco was the reason she’d had the fight with Christine. The fight hadn’t been about DeMarco but he was the one who had put her in such a rotten mood. Emma was convinced that Lydia Morelli was telling the truth and that DeMarco and his devious boss were turning their backs on the poor woman. Maybe
she
should call Lydia and . . .

The doorbell rang. Emma wondered if Christine had called up a friend to go out with. Or maybe it was DeMarco coming back to annoy her further. She got up, reluctantly, and walked to the door.

Emma had never been introduced to the man standing on her porch but she knew who he was. His name was Charlie Eklund. He worked for the CIA. Standing behind Eklund was another man, a blocky, muscular man, who was scanning Emma’s neighborhood with hard, watchful eyes. It appeared that Eklund had a bodyguard, and she immediately wondered why he would need one.

Charlie Eklund was in his seventies. He was small and slender, about five-seven. He was wearing a blue suit with a red sweater-vest, the vest making him look both old-fashioned and avuncular. He had carefully combed white hair and an unremarkable face, no feature being in any way particularly distinctive. The expression on his face was pleasant, and seemed as if it might be perpetually so, as if he was just too much above the fray to allow anything to disturb his good humor.

Emma had no idea what Eklund did for the Central Intelligence Agency. All she knew was that he’d been at Langley forever, and that his job title changed frequently. And the titles he had always contained phrases that made it sound as if he had power but not too much power, titles such as Assistant Deputy Director for something or other. But you could never tell by his title exactly what he did or what he was responsible for or who he reported to or who reported to him. All that was known was that he attended the important meetings—meaning those meetings that had to do with budget and manpower and the CIA’s span of control.

Throughout his long career, Eklund had always stayed in the background and his fingerprints had never been found on anything. He had never been mentioned in the press or called before Congress to explain his part in some botched CIA venture, to explain why something had gone so horribly, awfully, publicly awry. CIA directors came and went; senior staffers were fired and replaced and retired; but Charlie . . . Charlie was always there.