House Secrets (6 page)

Morelli almost said:
I did
. But he didn’t. Instead he said, “I didn’t either, but we have, and we’re going to make it. Thanks to you.”

DeMarco retrieved his mail from the box and the first thing he saw was a letter from Elle Myers. He hadn’t seen her in almost six months, and the last time he’d spoken to her had been three months ago. He opened the envelope, read the short letter, and then just sat there for a long time thinking. It was ten minutes before he trudged slowly up to the second floor of his house.

DeMarco lived on P Street in Georgetown, in a small two-story townhouse made of white-painted brick. When DeMarco’s wife divorced him she had left him his heavily mortgaged home but she took almost everything else he owned, including all the furniture. For nearly two years after her departure his will to refurnish the place had been sapped by her infidelity: she’d had an affair with his cousin. He eventually replaced much of the furniture she’d taken, and the first floor of his home once again looked as if a normal person dwelled there. But the second floor of the house, which consisted of two small bedrooms and a half bath, was still barren except for two objects: a secondhand upright piano and a fifty-pound punching bag that hung from an exposed ceiling rafter.

DeMarco had bought the piano on a whim at an estate sale. He had played when he was young and still remembered how to read music. He knew he’d never be able to play anything requiring real talent, but he figured if the music was slow enough, the grace notes rare enough,
he might be able to entertain an audience of one. He also figured that he needed another hobby—something besides pounding the heavy bag. He and two friends had nearly broken their backs getting the instrument up the narrow stairway to the second floor of his house, and he decided, that day, that if he ever tired of playing it he would turn it into kindling before ever attempting to get it back down the stairs.

He played for an hour, pecking away at “Black Coffee,” a blues song that Ella Fitzgerald used to sing. He mangled the song, his left hand even more ham-fisted than normal. As he played he thought of Ella singing—and of a time he’d danced with Elle.

He’d met her on a vacation to Key West. She was a school teacher who lived in Iowa and he liked everything about her—her looks, her sense of humor, the fact that she cared about teaching kids—but it had been impossible to sustain the relationship, her living a thousand miles away. He could have relocated—or she could have—but neither was willing to make that sort of commitment, to give up good jobs and begin life over in an unfamiliar place. They inevitably drifted apart. The letter he’d received said that she had gotten engaged, to a nice guy, a local fireman—but the whole tone of the letter was
oh, what might have been
.

So he played his piano and thought of Elle and felt sorry for himself. He imagined himself old and alone, feeding pigeons on a park bench on a bleak winter day. He could hear his mother bemoaning the fact that she had no grandchildren and never would. And he realized, being an only child, that the DeMarco line would end with him. Fortunately, before he could consider hunting down a knife to slash his wrists, the phone rang. It was Neil.

“That phone number,” Neil said. “I have something for you, but I don’t know what it means.”

That was a very unusual admission coming from Neil.

Since Neil wouldn’t tell DeMarco what he had found unless DeMarco had a phone equipped with an NSA-approved scrambler, DeMarco had to go to Neil’s home to get the information. Thankfully, Neil lived less than two miles away.

Neil’s wife was home with him, and unlike Neil, she was a sweet, normal person. After exchanging their vows, she’d set about, as women usually do, changing her husband in various and subtle ways—and Neil didn’t even know that he was being changed. At his office, Neil was pompous and condescending and liked to show off, but in his home, his wife in the kitchen and able to hear him, he tended to curb his more annoying habits.

“As I told you,” he said to DeMarco, “I came up with every possible number combination associated with that partial phone number. I eliminated all the unassigned numbers, then identified who the remaining numbers belonged to. What I did was, I cross-referenced . . . Aw, never mind, I won’t bore you with the details, but let me tell you it was a lot of work. Anyway, I found four people who were interesting. One was
extremely
interesting.

“The first is a woman named Tammy Johnson. She works at the Justice Department. I can imagine a number of reasons why a reporter might be talking to somebody at Justice about Paul Morelli, but the problem is that Ms. Johnson works in personnel. She handles things like health insurance and pensions, so I doubt that she was a hot source for Terry Finley, but I’ll leave that for you to confirm.

“The second number,” Neil said, “belongs to a gentleman who lives in southeast D.C. and goes by the curious name of DeLeon White. Mr. White is an independent pharmaceutical retailer.”

Fuckin’ Neil; his wife still had a lot of work to do. “You mean he sells dope,” DeMarco said.

“Crack cocaine, to be precise. So maybe DeLeon sells crack to Morelli.”

“I kinda doubt that,” DeMarco said.

“Yeah, me too,” Neil said. “It’s the last two names that were most intriguing. The third phone number is assigned to a Michelle Thomas, a lady who works for a very high-end escort service.”

“A call girl?”

“Oui. Now Terry Finley was single and I assume he had some sort of sexual outlet, but I doubt if he used Ms. Thomas’s services.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because she’s
way
out of his price range. Michelle Thomas is Neiman Marcus. Terry Finley was Kmart. But Paul Morelli, on the other hand, he could afford her.”

“Yeah, that is interesting,” DeMarco said. “The problem is that Paul Morelli’s so damn-good looking that women would pay him to sleep with them. I doubt he’s using hookers.”

“One never knows,” Neil said. “Now we come to the fourth number.” Neil waited a dramatic beat then said, “The fourth phone number is assigned to Lydia Morelli’s cell phone.”

“What!”

“Could just be a coincidence. Tomorrow I’ll pull the phone records for these four people and see if any of them called Terry Finley. According to Finley’s records, he never called them.”

DeMarco returned to his place and immediately went to the kitchen and removed a bottle of vodka from the freezer compartment of his refrigerator. The vodka was made in Russia and there was a pretty green label on the bottle. It had cost fifteen bucks.

DeMarco had been experimenting with vodkas of late. Emma had introduced him to Grey Goose and he liked it, but it cost about thirty bucks a bottle. And in a bar, you could pay twelve bucks for a Grey Goose martini; they should say “stick ’em up” when they served you. Then one night he’d been channel surfing, and he caught a show in progress that was essentially about the ignorance of vodka drinkers. On the show they gave five people—all pretentious bozos who claimed a preference for high-end brands—six different vodkas to taste in unlabeled shot glasses. The vodkas ranged in price from top-shelf to bargain-basement, and, as could have been predicted, the drinkers couldn’t identify their favorite brand and three of the five concluded that the cheapest booze was the best booze.

So DeMarco was on a holy quest. He was trying to find a vodka that tasted as good as Grey Goose but cost half as much. This brand—
the one he’d just pulled from his freezer—wasn’t it. It tasted like it had been drained from the crankcase of a Russian tractor.

He took his cut-rate vodka into his den. He had an idea. Neil had said that tomorrow he’d work his magic and see if any of the four people that he had named had called Terry Finley, but DeMarco thought there might be a quicker way to get the information. He called Dick Finley.

“Have you found something, Joe?” Finley asked as soon as DeMarco identified himself.

The ex-congressman sounded weak, but it was late and the man was old, so maybe he was just tired. The death of a son can make a man tired.

“Mr. Finley, did Terry have a cell phone?”

“Sure.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“It’s in a box on my dining room table. The police found it in his car and they took it, but they eventually gave it back to me. Why?”

That was good, DeMarco thought. If the phone had been on Terry’s body it would most likely have been destroyed after being submerged in water for several hours. But that made DeMarco wonder why the phone was in Terry’s car instead of on him. Dick Finley provided the answer without having to be asked.

“The battery on the phone must have been low,” Dick Finley said, “because the cops said it was hooked up to one of those cigarette lighter chargers.”

“Could you get Terry’s cell phone, Mr. Finley,” DeMarco said. “I want to see if Terry received a call from a certain number. You see, most cell phones keep a record of recent calls received and—.”

“I know that,” Finley said. “I’m not that outta touch with the modern world.”

“Yes, sir. So could you get Terry’s phone and check the call log.”

“Yeah, hold on a minute.”

It was more like five minutes before Finley came back on the line.

“Okay, I got the phone,” he said.

“Good. Now get into the calls-received menu, see if there’s any number that starts with two-oh-two, five-three-two, three.”

“Is that the number that was on the napkin?” Finley asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“All right, let me see if it’s here. Damn it, these buttons are so small I have a hard time working them.”

DeMarco waited impatiently.

“Here we are,” Finley said. “Yeah. There’s a number here that starts with those numbers. It’s two-oh-two, five-three-two, three-two-three-one. That number’s listed twice.”

The phone number that Dick Finley had just read belonged to Lydia Morelli. When Finley asked him the significance of the number, DeMarco lied and said he didn’t know. The last thing DeMarco wanted was for Finley to know that there was a connection between Paul Morelli and his son’s death.

DeMarco thanked Finley and hung up, more puzzled than ever. He could understand Terry Finley calling Lydia: Finley was brash and ambitious, and from everything he’d learned, he wouldn’t have been at all surprised if Terry had had the balls to call the senator’s wife and question her about her husband’s past. But why on earth would she call him? He was the sort of reporter that politicians and their spouses avoided like the pox.

One thing DeMarco was sure of:
he
wasn’t going to call Lydia and ask her why she had phoned Terry. He wanted to, but he wouldn’t. Paul Morelli was not only a powerful man, he was also the Speaker’s friend. So for DeMarco to just pick up the phone and call Lydia—right after her husband had just said that he had no knowledge of the significance of Finley’s list—would be a very dumb thing to do. But he really wanted to know why she’d called Terry.

DeMarco sipped some more of his drink. It felt like the muscles in his jaw were beginning to lock up, as if he was being partially paralyzed by the cheap Russian hootch. This made him wonder if Russia had an organization like the FDA, some watchdog group that ensured their vodka-makers didn’t put gasoline additives in their liquor. The
smart thing to do would be to pour the rest of the vodka down the drain before he was paralyzed completely.

He thought some more, but couldn’t immediately think of a good way to approach Lydia about her calling Terry. Tomorrow he’d go see Abe Burrows and see what his records said about Janet Tyler—the other woman on Finley’s list—and maybe he’d even take the shuttle up to New York to talk to her. He hadn’t seen his mom in awhile, so the trip to New York wouldn’t be a total waste. But that’s all he’d do for now.

Decision made, he said, “
Za vashe zdorovye
”—the only Russian he knew—and recklessly poured the remainder of the vodka down his throat. He was still coughing when his phone rang.

“Yes,” he croaked into the phone. His voice sounded as if someone had stepped on his larynx with a ski boot.

“Mr. DeMarco, this is Lydia Morelli. I need to talk to you.”

“Can you believe this bastard?” Carl said. “Every fuckin’ light, he hits on the yellow.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “You’re gonna lose him. Get up on his ass. It’s the morning rush. He sees the same car behind him for an hour, he won’t think nothin’ of it.”

“Where’s he goin’ anyway?” Carl said. “I thought he worked at the Capitol.”

Jimmy just shook his head. He loved Carl like a brother—you could put his crank in a meat grinder and he wouldn’t talk—but he was always asking questions. Stupid questions. Questions Jimmy couldn’t answer. Questions to which there were no answers. He was going to pull out the guy’s tongue one of these days if he didn’t quit it.

“And why are we following him?” Carl said.

That was
it
. “Because Eddie said to!” Jimmy screamed. “For Christ’s sake, you heard the same fuckin’ thing I did. Eddie said follow this asshole and if he talks to anybody, find out who and call him. That’s all I know.”