House Secrets (27 page)

“Good evening,” he said as he took a seat across from her at the picnic table. His bodyguard remained standing, far enough away that he couldn’t hear the conversation. “Thank you for choosing a place where I can sit while we talk.” He paused, then said, “May I assume that the reason we’re meeting is that you now plan to threaten me.”

“As you said, Charlie, it’s good to deal with intelligent people. And you’re right. I’m going to threaten you, and you are going to stop following me and Joe DeMarco, and you’re not going to do anything further to aid Paul Morelli.”

“I’ve never done anything to aid Senator Morelli,” Eklund said.

Emma realized that that statement might indeed be true. “Maybe not,” she said, “but you are willing to cover up the fact that he killed his wife.”

Emma didn’t know what Charlie Eklund knew regarding the night Lydia Morelli had died but she was certain that he knew something. He had had people following her, so he could have a witness who had seen Abe Burrows leaving Morelli’s house that night, a witness who could contradict the story that Morelli had given to the police. Taking things a step further, he might even have bugged Morelli’s home and heard everything that had happened.

Before Eklund could make a denial, Emma said, “You’re a reprehensible little shit. You’re willing to let a murderer become president just so you’ll have somebody in the Oval Office that you can control.”

“I think you’re overestimating my influence,” Eklund said, flicking imaginary lint off his trousers.

“Possibly. But what I know for sure is that you are not going to do anything to harm people I care about.”

“And I’m not going to do this because?”

Emma opened her purse. When she reached into her purse, Eklund’s bodyguard reached under his coat. Emma ignored him, but she hoped he didn’t pull his weapon. That could get him killed. She pulled an envelope out of her purse and took three photographs from the envelope. The photos showed Eklund speaking to Reggie Harmon. They were standing in front of a Starbucks coffee shop.

“This week there have been two major leaks by a highly placed source at the CIA and those leaks have been very embarrassing to your director. The reporter who wrote those stories is the man in these photos, speaking to you right in front of the coffee shop where you stop every morning on your way to work.”

“Ah,” Eklund said. “So you think you can convince my director that I was Mr. Harmon’s source.”

“Yes. The reporter won’t reveal his source but he will tell people he met with his source at a Catholic church two blocks from your house—and that he’s met with you.”

“And you think those two facts and these photos are enough? You might not be as bright as I thought,” Eklund said, his small mouth turned up at the corners, his bright little eyes hard as flint.

“Oh, but I am, Charlie. I asked myself a question, one I should have asked earlier. I asked: Why would you take this kind of risk? Why would you go off on your own, unsanctioned by the agency, and have people watch Senator Morelli? At first I thought it was simply because you didn’t want an anti-CIA president in the White House, or if you had one, you’d want to be able to control him in some way. But I think this isn’t about you protecting Langley from the White House. I think this is about you protecting yourself.”

“Myself?” Eklund said.

“Your job is your life, Charlie, and you’re way past retirement age. The friends you once had at Langley have already retired or died and you don’t have the influence you once had. I think you’re on your way out. What you’ve been doing is trying to find something you can use to blackmail Morelli so if they try to make you retire, you can force him to intervene. Or maybe you’re thinking even more ambitiously than that. Maybe you’re thinking that with the right leverage, you can force Morelli to make you the director.”

Eklund didn’t say anything but he was no longer smiling.

“Whatever the case,” Emma said, “I think your current director, who’s just had his ass reamed out royally by the president, would love to have something like this, someone to blame all his troubles on. I think if Colin Murphy sees these photos he’ll send your old ass packing and then he’ll spread it all over the Hill that you’re a media snitch, something that’ll make it hard for you to get confirmed as DCI even if you do have Morelli in your pocket.”

Eklund stared at Emma. There were now two bright red spots on his cheeks.

“Well, we’ll just have to see about all that, won’t we?” Eklund said, and with that he rose from the picnic table and marched away on short, stiff legs.

At eight that evening, DeMarco found the doctor who had given Paul Morelli the tour of the emergency room. He was behind a door that said
STAFF ONLY
, stretched out on a sagging sofa, smoking a cigarette, flipping through an old swimsuit issue of
Sports Illustrated
. On the coffee table near the sofa was a can of Coke and a crumpled candy-bar wrapper. On the floor was another Coke can that the doctor was using for an ashtray.

DeMarco wanted this man for his personal physician.

The doctor was in his mid-forties. His hairline was retreating from a broad forehead and his full black beard was streaked with gray. He wore reading glasses, wrinkled green scrubs, and broken-down running shoes. He looked tired and grumpy.

“Dr. Mason?” DeMarco said.

Looking at DeMarco over the top of his glasses, the doctor said, “I don’t care if you’ve got bubonic plague—get out of here. I’ve been on duty thirty-six straight hours.”

“I’m sorry to bother you but it’s important.”

“I’ll bet. So what are you? A whiplash lawyer or an insurance agent?”

“Neither. I work for the government.”

“Then definitely get the hell out of here.”

“Doctor, do you have any idea what percentage of this institution’s budget comes from federal funds?”

“No,” he said.

That was good, because DeMarco didn’t either. “It’s a very large percentage,” DeMarco said.

“So what?”

“Well, the senator who sent me here tonight has this big budget-whacking knife. If I come home empty-handed, he’ll call the head of this quackery and threaten to use it, and he’ll blame all his threats on you.”

The doctor smirked. He’d been working a day and a half without sleep; nobody in administration could make his life worse. DeMarco decided to try a different tack.

“Doc, they’re easy questions. It’ll only take a minute. Please. I have a wife and two kids at home that I’d like to kiss before midnight. Gimme a break.”

The doctor studied him for a second, then said, “Aw, what the hell.”

DeMarco couldn’t believe it: a man hard enough not to bend in the face of intimidation but soft enough to respond to a pathetic cry for help. Maybe that’s why he was a doctor.

Rising to a sitting position with a grunt, Mason said, “So what do you want?”

“Senator Morelli visited this hospital last week. He talked to you in the ER when he was here. What—”

“Your boss wants to know about Morelli’s visit? That’s why you’re here?”

“Doc, politics is a funny game and nobody tells a grunt like me the rules. So anyway, what did you and Morelli talk about?”

Mason shrugged. “The usual stuff. How many patients we see a day, staff turnover, how long the patients normally have to wait. That kinda thing. Background, so he could take a poke at the health care system like everyone else.”

“Did he ask you about gunshot wounds?”

The doctor was clearly puzzled by the question. “No,” he said, “but while he was here, a resident was patching up a kid who’d just been
shot. The senator put on a mask and watched him work for a while—interested in the procedure I guess.”

“Could you tell me exactly where the patient was shot?”

The doctor lit another cigarette, blew smoke in the direction of the
NO SMOKING
sign, then jabbed an index finger at a spot near his left shoulder. “Here. The bullet entered the pectoralis major, just below the clavicle. The kid was lucky; if the bullet had been a little lower it could have nicked a lung.”

DeMarco didn’t know what the pectoralis major was, but the place the doctor pointed to was exactly where Morelli had been shot. They’d shown a little anatomy picture in the
Post
.

“Did he ask any questions about the damage caused by the bullet?”

“Yeah, he seemed concerned about the patient.”

“Did he ask to look at X-rays?” DeMarco asked. “You know, to get a better understanding of the wound.”

“No. Why the hell would he do that? And he only spent five minutes talking to me; the photographers were all up in pediatrics.”

Washington Harbour is a couple of blocks downhill from M Street in Georgetown. It’s not a harbor—or a harbour—but a cluster of buildings, including a swanky hotel and half a dozen restaurants perched on the D.C. side of the Potomac River. The restaurants are built around a plaza paved with cobblestones, and in the center of the plaza is a fountain. Closest to the river is a bar with outdoor tables and Cinzano umbrellas, and you can sit there and watch crew teams training on the river. On a spring day it was a lovely place to sit and drink. On a cool fall night, the wind blowing, the plaza empty, the umbrellas put away, it was as lonely and as bleak as DeMarco felt.

DeMarco took a seat on a bench near the river and looked out across the Potomac. At eleven at night there wasn’t much to see. The river was just a wide black strip separating the District from the twinkling
lights of the homesteads on the northern Virginia frontier. Planes continuously taking off and landing at Reagan National Airport created a “V” of red lights in the sky. The trust people placed in air-traffic controllers was mind-boggling, DeMarco thought.

He knew what had happened to Lydia Morelli. He couldn’t prove it, but he knew. His only task this evening, as he sat watching the planes land, was to organize his thoughts into a coherent string of words which might convince others.

Paul Morelli had killed his wife. The Speaker had told him she was going to the press and Morelli had confronted Lydia. He would have asked if it was true that she was thinking about telling the media some ridiculous story about him molesting their daughter. And at that point, DeMarco believed, Lydia’s hate spewed forth like water from a broken dam.

She would have raged and screamed and Morelli would have tried to calm her, to charm her into believing that everything she thought was just a figment of her imagination brought on by booze and bereavement. But Lydia had finally been pushed over the edge, refusing at last to be charmed, and her husband would have concluded that he had to do something to stop her.

It would have been easy for a man of Morelli’s influence to have the doctors at Father Martin’s keep her away from phones and prevent her from having visitors; it may have even been standard practice to isolate a person with a severe addiction when first admitted. DeMarco suspected, however, that at the time Morelli placed Lydia in the clinic he had not decided to kill her; he had committed her to keep her away from the media and to give himself time to think. Lydia had told DeMarco that her husband was a man who never allowed himself to be rushed into premature decisions.

And when he did have time to think, Morelli must have realized the only way he could guarantee his wife’s silence was to murder her, and that he had to act quickly. He knew he couldn’t keep her incommunicado at Father Martin’s indefinitely. He also decided at some point that he needed help, and concluded that Abe Burrows was just
the man to help him. To involve anyone else would make him susceptible to blackmail for the rest of his life, but he knew, as Packy Morris did, that he could trust Burrows with his life. And if Lydia had told DeMarco the truth about the team of Morelli and Burrows, Burrows had been the senator’s accomplice before, maybe not in murder, but in other sordid ventures.

So Burrows and Morelli put their bright heads together. They had conspired over more complex problems than the murder of a defenseless alcoholic, and it took them no time at all to conceive the less than original idea of having someone break into the senator’s home and kill his wife, after which the senator would kill the intruder.

DeMarco believed that when Morelli saw the shooting victim in the emergency room at the hospital, practically unharmed by a small-caliber bullet, it all started to come together—and then Morelli came up with the truly brilliant part of his plan. Morelli knew that the likelihood of anyone’s seriously questioning his version of his wife’s murder was small—he was, after all, Senator Paul Morelli. But if he was
shot
during the bogus break-in, then no one would doubt he was a victim and he would be completely above suspicion. There was of course some physical risk—not to mention a hell of a lot of pain—but considering what was at stake—his career and ultimately the presidency—it was a risk he was willing to take.

The concept formed, all they had to do was find a disposable pawn to play the part of the evil intruder. DeMarco didn’t know why they had decided on Isaiah Perry. Maybe Burrows had examined the backgrounds of a number of low-paid personnel in the Russell Building to find someone with a record or connections to a criminal. Maybe they just selected Isaiah because he was young and black. Whatever the case, they found the perfect assailant, a young man with a juvenile sheet and a brother known to the law.