House Secrets Page 5

  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.”

  Chapter 9

  “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.”

  “Yeah, but he shoulda told us why. It’s like we’re mushrooms: they keep us in the dark and—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it before,” Jimmy said. “And open your window. That goddamn smoke is killin’ me.”

  They were approaching another intersection and again the light turned yellow just as this DeMarco guy reached the intersection.

  “Goddamnit!” Carl said, and stomped on the gas pedal. The light turned red before their car was halfway through the intersection.

  “We should have gotten a transmitter to put on his car,” Jimmy said.

  “Aw, we’re okay,” Carl said. Before Jimmy could respond, to tell Carl they weren’t okay, Carl said, “Can you believe these houses, these friggin’ embassies?”

  They were on Massachusetts Avenue, in the section known as Embassy Row.

  “I wonder if these countries pay for these places,” Carl said, “or if we pay for them. I mean it would really piss me off if my taxes were paying for these fuckin’ mansions.”

  Jimmy just shook his head. “Get up on his ass,” he said again. “You’re falling too far back.”

  And sure enough, at the next intersection, the damn guy hit another yellow light.

  “Son of a bitch,” Carl said, again accelerating to make the light, but the light was already red when he started through the intersection. The car that broadsided them was a cab. It hit the front right fender of the rented Taurus they were driving, spinning the Ford almost in a complete circle. Jimmy’s airbag, the passenger-side airbag, exploded. Carl’s didn’t.

  Carl and Jimmy stepped out of their car slowly, shaken, Jimmy gently touching his nose to see if it was broken. The airbag had slammed right into his face. The driver of the cab pried open his door with some difficulty, then came running toward them, his froggy eyes huge and insane behind the thick lenses of his glasses. He was a dark-complexioned man, and Jimmy guessed he was from Afghanistan, Pakistan—one of them Muslim places. The cabbie stopped a foot from Carl, pointed at the stoplight, pointed at the crumpled hood of his cab, and began screaming obscenities in a
foreign tongue.

  Carl hit the cabbie right between the eyes, breaking the guy’s glasses.

  “You terrorist motherfucker,” Carl said.

  Chapter 10

  DeMarco looked in his rearview mirror and winced. The asshole that had been tailgating him for the last six blocks had just run a red light and had been broadsided by a cab. Served the dumb shit right. Five minutes later, DeMarco turned off Massachusetts and onto Pilgrim Road, driving into the shadow created by the National Cathedral’s towering walls.

  When he’d spoken to Lydia Morelli the previous night she’d said, “Let’s meet at the cathedral, Mr. DeMarco. It’s seems an apt place for a confession.” He hadn’t known what she’d meant by that statement, but when he’d asked which cathedral, she said, “Why, the National Cathedral, of course. Do you know another here?” DeMarco did—but it hadn’t seemed like the right time to dazzle her with his knowledge of all the churches he didn’t attend.

  The National Cathedral was the sixth or seventh largest church in the world, and like the great medieval cathedrals of Europe, it had taken almost a hundred years to complete, its construction interrupted not by siege, plague, or famine, but by more mundane reasons like lack of funds and squabbling labor. But after a century of toil it stood magnificent, a home God must have been proud to show his friends.

  Lydia had told him to meet her in the Bishop’s Garden on the south side of the cathedral. DeMarco parked his car and hurried to the garden. He was ten minutes late but Lydia wasn’t there. He cursed himself for his tardiness and wondered if she’d left already, but a more likely explanation was that she’d changed her mind and decided not to meet him at all. He took a seat on a stone bench, checked around one more time for Lydia, then looked upward.

  The National Cathedral has three huge stained glass windows, called rose windows, each sixty feet in diameter and made from thousands of pieces of glass. From outside the church, they appear as large dull circles in the white stone walls—shards of dark glass set into ornate stone frames, no pattern evident, no hint of radiance or beauty given. Inside the cathedral, it was completely different. From the inside, the windows were marvels of form and color, as intricate as oil paintings. DeMarco didn’t know why you couldn’t see the pattern in the windows from outside the church. He suspected it had to do with the physics of light but maybe divinity played a hand in this phenomenon as well: you had to enter God’s house to enjoy its wonders.

  Fifteen minutes later he saw Lydia Morelli walking toward him. She was wearing a simple blue blouse, gray slacks, and low-heeled shoes. From a distance, she looked slim and elegant. Up close she looked weary and malnourished, and DeMarco wondered if she might be ill.

  She took a seat next to him on the bench, breathing as if the short walk from the parking lot to the garden had winded her, and when she exhaled he could smell liquor on her breath. It was only nine-thirty a.m. It seemed that Lydia was indeed ill; her illness was alcoholism. DeMarco could understand a bit better now why her husband had seemed annoyed about her drinking.

  Lydia closed her eyes until her breathing returned to normal then opened them and looked around, apparently checking to make sure no one was nearby. Impatient, DeMarco said, “Why did you want to see me, Mrs. Morelli?”

  Lydia stopped scanning the area and looked directly into his eyes and said, “Because your life’s in danger.”

  Whoa! If you want to get someone’s attention, that’s a good way to start a conversation.

  “What are you talking about?” DeMarco said.

  “I heard what you told Paul and the toady.”

  “The toady?”

  “Sorry. My pet name for Abe. At any rate, I heard what you told them. I eavesdropped. After I left Paul’s office, I stood near the door and listened.” When she said this she smiled somewhat smugly, as if she was proud to have put one over on her famous husband.

  “Terry Finley didn’t die in a boating accident,” Lydia said. “He was killed because he was investigating Paul.”

  “Mrs. Morelli, you need to tell me what you’re talking about.”

  “What do you think of my husband?” she said.

  “What do I think?” DeMarco said, confused by the question. “I guess I think he’s a brilliant politician. Everyone says he’s going to be the next president.”

  Lydia nodded as if agreeing with DeMarco, then said, “He’s a monster. He belongs in a cage, not the White House.”

  DeMarco was almost too stunned to react. “Mrs. Morelli,” he said, “I’m not sure where—”

  “I’m the one who contacted Terry,” Lydia said. “I’m the one who asked him to dig into Paul’s past.”

  Jesus Christ.

  “I heard Paul and the toady talking about him one day,” Lydia said. “They were laughing, saying how he was this stubborn little journalist who never got it quite right.”

  Now that bothered DeMarco. Paul Morelli had said that he didn’t know Terry Finley.

  “But I asked around,” Lydia said, “and I figured that Terry was exactly who I needed. I needed someone willing to do anything to make a name for himself, yet it had to be someone connected with a credible paper like the Post or the Times. I decided it was time for me to finally do something, and Terry was perfect.”

  DeMarco thought she may have selected Terry Finley for another reason: if she’d gone to one of the big-name reporters, they might have had more sense than to listen to her. But he still didn’t know what the hell she was talking about.

  “I’m not following this, Mrs. Morelli,” DeMarco said. “What exactly did you want Terry to do?”

  “I wanted him to destroy my husband.”

  DeMarco rocked backward. “Why would you—”

  “I told Terry that someone had been helping Paul his whole career. A very powerful man.”

  “What man?” DeMarco said. Every time she opened her mouth he became more confused.

  Lydia ignored the question. “What happened to those three men, those men on that list you found, was that they were set up. The man who was caught in bed with the teenage boy was drugged, just like he said. And the man who had the car accident . . . well, it wasn’t an accident. Someone ran him off the road or tampered with his car.”

  “How do you know this?” DeMarco said.

  “Because I just do. I don’t have any evidence, something you could present in court, but I know. I know because I’ve heard Paul and Abe plan the downfall of other men who have gotten in Paul’s way. People have been bribed and blackmailed and murdered to—”

  “Murdered?” DeMarco said. He wondered if this woman might actually be mentally ill, some sort of schizophrenic with conspiracy delusions.

  “Yes. Paul’s never killed anyone himself, of course. Other people do the dirty work but he’s the one who benefits.”

  Lydia started to say something else but DeMarco interrupted her. “Who do you think he had murdered, Mrs. Morelli?”

  “Besides Terry, a man named Benjamin Dahl. Paul—this was when he was mayor—was trying to build a community center in the Bronx and Dahl had a piece of land that he needed for the project but Dahl refused to sell. I heard Paul on the phone one night talking about Dahl. I heard him say: ‘This has gone on long enough. We need to do something.’ Two days later Dahl had an accident in his house. He fell down a flight of stairs and broke his neck.”

  “That’s it?” DeMarco said. “You think your husband had this man murdered because he said ‘we need to do something’?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, maybe he was telling somebody to find a different piece of land, or to make Dahl a better offer or, or, to take legal action against him,” DeMarco said.

  “He wasn’t,” Lydia Morelli said.

  DeMarco started to swear, then stopped himself. Swearing wouldn’t help. “So,” he said, as calmly as he could, “you wanted Terry Finley to find proof that your husband had committed crimes to advance his career.”

  “Yes.”

  “And yo
u were feeding him information to help him.”

  “Not information. I didn’t really have any. All I was really doing was encouraging him, pressing him not to give up, to dig deeper. And he found something. I don’t know what, but the last time I talked to him he was excited. He . . .”

  According to Dick Finley and Reggie Harmon, Terry was always excited.

  “. . . he said he’d found someone in New Jersey who could break things wide open. But he didn’t tell me who the person was or what he knew. Terry was . . . I don’t know, overly dramatic. Unnecessarily secretive. And two days later he was killed.”

  When Lydia made the last statement, she’d leaned in toward DeMarco, putting her face closer to his, and once again he could smell the booze on her breath.

  DeMarco was thinking that he should just leave. He was talking to an alcoholic who obviously hated her husband—a description that probably fit more than a few women whose spouses worked on Capitol Hill—and it was a combination that made him doubtful of everything she was saying.

  “What about the two women on Terry’s list, Marcia Davenport and Janet Tyler?” DeMarco asked.

  “Paul raped them.” Lydia’s voice was completely flat when she said this, just a simple, unemotional statement of fact: Paul raped them.

  Oh, this just keeps getting better and better, DeMarco thought.

  “And how do you know this?” he said, making no attempt to hide his skepticism.

  As Lydia told the story, the thin fingers of her left hand tugged unconsciously at a tendril of hair above her ear. DeMarco found it ironic that while she spoke of her husband sexually assaulting women the sunlight was glittering off the diamonds in her wedding ring.

  Lydia said that the night it happened Marcia Davenport had come to the Morellis’ house in Georgetown. She was there to take photos of the interior and to spend some time looking around to get ideas for decorating the place. Lydia said that after Davenport arrived, she left to meet a friend for drinks. The senator was home at the time, in his den. When Lydia returned home two hours later, she found Davenport sitting on the floor in Paul Morelli’s den, backed into a corner. She was crying, her clothes were disheveled, and Paul Morelli was on the phone with Abe Burrows.