Deceptions

by Michael Weaver

  “So much for that poor misery,” said the old man. “The boss you’re looking for, the one who sent those men, is Don Pietro Ravenelli. He lives in a big house about ten kilometers west of Palermo, off the coast road to Punta Raisi. I wish you and your boy luck. I’m glad I’m seventy-nine and not nine. Who wants to go through it all again?”

  They were back in the car and driving out of Naples.

  “I’m not what I used to be,” said Battaglia flatly. “And I just hope we don’t end up paying for it.”

  Gianni looked at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “If I was smart, I’d have pumped one into his head before we left.”

  “Why? He gave you what you wanted.”

  “Yeah. But there’s still a better-then-even chance he’ll call Ravenelli just to cover his ass.”

  45

  HENRY DURNING WOKE in the soft dawn light, looked at the sleeping face of Mary Yung on the pillow beside him, and smiled. Then it hadn’t been just another improbable, wildly erotic dream.

  She sleeps, he thought, with the total innocence of the young, the pure, and the dead.

  Here in my bed.

  The telephone rang on the table beside him. It set off a forest of jangled nerves. No one ever called with anything good at 6:10 A.M. Then he remembered it was six hours later in Italy and picked up the receiver.

  “Hank!” said Brian Wayne’s voice.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Tune in. Fast. Neal Hinkey is coming on in a minute.”

  Durning felt Mary Yung stirring awake beside him. “Who the hell is Neal Hinkey?” he said.

  “John Hinkey’s son. He evidently works for his father. I don’t like the whole smell of this, Hank. I’ll call you when it’s over.”

  The FBI director hung up.

  Durning hit the remote for his bedroom television. Then he kissed Mary’s cheek.

  “Good morning,” he said. “You even sleep beautiful. And that’s something hardly anyone ever does.”

  The screen came alive in a wall unit, and Durning saw a thin, nervous-looking young man sitting with the CNN commentator.

  “Do you always start your day with the box?” Mary Yung asked.

  “No. I hate the thing. But there’s something coming on I have to see.”

  Then the attorney general turned up the volume as the interview began. Although it quickly became apparent that this was not going to be the standard question-and-answer interview format, but something more like a breaking news item in the form of a prepared statement.

  What the commentator did was introduce his guest as Neal Hinkey, a son and law associate of John Hinkey, the nationally known Washington attorney. He had an announcement to make that could have grave implications.

  Hearing no more than that, Durning knew instantly just how bad it was going to be. And knowing it, he accepted it. For now, at least, what else could he do?

  Hinkey spoke in a young voice stretched thin with emotion. He was here this morning, he told a network audience of millions, because his father and a woman who was a client as well as a close friend had been missing for close to three days and had to be presumed dead.

  The young man’s voice broke on the word dead, and he took a moment to compose himself.

  When he continued, he explained that his father had left instructions as to what he should do if anything happened to him, and that he was simply following those instructions now. He said that by appearing on national television this morning, he was hoping to make the facts in the case known before they were buried by the same tainted power structure that had buried his father and his female client.

  Then Hinkey went into the specifics.

  The mysterious disappearance of five FBI agents, the discovery of the three bodies, the futile efforts of Mrs. Beekman to learn what had happened to her husband, the stonewalling by the Bureau were all laid down block by block until they formed their own wall of indictment. And when each of the missing agents was discovered to have been on special-duty assignment to the FBI director himself, there was no denying the smell of something rotten.

  Durning glanced at Mary Yung and found her watching his face. Their eyes met and held, and there suddenly seemed little that each didn’t know about the other.

  Hinkey was still going on with his injustice recital, but they were no longer paying attention.

  “I guess it’s going to get a little sticky for you now, isn’t it?” she said.

  Durning took her hand and could almost feel some of her serenity flow through to him. Yet how many of those three dead agents sent to question her had she killed herself? No matter. They would have buried her if she hadn’t. But what he liked most was that she showed no visible pleasure in the turn of events against him. If anything, she seemed warmer, more gentle. Lord, this one did carry grace. Even with her loaded gun.

  “Very sticky,” he told her.

  “Will you be able to handle it?”

  “I’ll certainly try.”

  “You have a lot to lose.”

  “No more than anyone else.” He shrugged. “We all leave the same way. Naked and alone.”

  Durning put on a robe and excused himself. He wanted to call Brian Wayne from the safe phone in his downstairs study before his friend got back to him up here.

  Marcy answered on the third ring. She obviously was crying.

  “I don’t understand,” she wept. “He’s your oldest and dearest friend. How could you have done this to him?”

  Her apparent knowledge of it was his second shock of the morning. But he still needed to be sure.

  “How could I have done what to him?” he asked.

  “Whatever he did, he did for you. Now you’ve ruined him with your selfishness. Ruined him.” She dissolved in sobs.

  “No one is ruined. There are ways to contain this. Just get hold of yourself, Marcy. Brian needs support, not hysterics. Now let me speak to him, please.”

  It was several moments before the FBI director came on. “Sorry about Marcy,” he said. “She—”

  Durning cut him off. “When did you tell her about my part in all this?”

  “I don’t know,” Wayne said dully. “But she’ll quiet down. You don’t have to worry.”

  “I’m not worried. We’re stamping out this fire before it starts. I know exactly how to handle this.” Durning paused. “How do you feel?”

  “I had a couple of bad minutes, but I’m OK.”

  “Good. Now listen carefully. We’re going down to your place on the shore. Marcy, too. I want us all incommunicado until we’ve talked and gotten everything straight. Just make one call to your secretary. Tell her you’ll be at Cove Point for the day and to cancel all appointments. And make sure she tells no one else. The last thing we need is the whole Washington press corps streaming down there after us. And for God’s sake, muzzle Marcy and keep her away from the phone! You with me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then I’ll see you down at the point in about two hours. Everything’s going to be fine, Brian. Drive carefully.”

  The attorney general hung up and made two brief calls. One, to his secretary to cancel the day’s appointments. The other, to Tommy, to say he wouldn’t be using the limousine.

  Upstairs, Mary Yung was in the stall shower. Durning took off his robe, quietly opened the door, and joined her.

  Had flesh ever promised so much?

  Yet it wasn’t only that. He was aroused before he entered the shower and touched. The tension, the fear, the excitement of the past half-hour had all added to it in advance.

  Still a crisis junkie.

  The things it took to get him started. And now here she was to finish it, with the warmth of the misty spray, and the soft, slipping, sliding of her lips and hands, and his own hands on the two perfect spheres of her bottom to lift and enter her right there, seeing her eyes with their yellow rims where he could see himself reflected.

  Then he held and moved with her across spaces crowded by the bodi
es of five dead agents, and the murdered widow of one of the agents, and the equally wasted lawyer of the widow, and the sudden living presence of the lawyer’s son, who was even now blowing everything to hell.

  Durning felt sensations pulsing through her. He felt her moved by things far beyond him, of which he was less than a vagrant thought, just someone to be used by her. As he was using her. As they were using each other.

  Wide-eyed, clearly startled, she touched his cheeks. “Why are you crying?”

  “Why are you?”

  “Because people are horrible. And we’re two of the worst.”

  “Maybe we can get better,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t that be lovely.” She stared at him. “Why don’t we start by saving that little boy?”

  Henry Durning took every shortcut he knew. Also, he drove fast, but not so fast as to risk being stopped for speeding. He didn’t want any involvement with the police on this trip.

  And much of the way, when his thoughts should have been focused on what lay immediately ahead, he was thinking of Mary Yung.

  He had given her a house key before he left.

  “This is yours,” he told her. “And so is the house and everything in it.”

  “For how long?”

  “For as long as you want it.”

  “You’re a very generous man.”

  “No. I’m a very selfish man. All I can think of around you are my own needs, everything I want most.”

  “Just like the rest of us.”

  Durning made it to the Waynes’ shore house overlooking Chesapeake Bay in exactly an hour and seventeen minutes. He had been coming here for so many years that the place felt like his own.

  Marcy and Brian were not there yet, and he hadn’t expected them to be. At best, Marcy was notoriously late, and today she had good reason to be even later.

  Durning parked in the gravel driveway and glanced around. The house itself was modest, but it had been in Brian’s family for four generations, and the hundred acres it stood on were now worth millions. So it had the kind of privacy that was impossible to find these days at the shore, with no other houses anywhere in sight, and a view of the bay for which developers would happily sell their souls.

  The attorney general found the key in its usual place under a rock beside the front lamppost. Then he opened the door and went inside.

  The gun cabinet was in the den. Its key hung from a nail in the wall behind it. Durning took out a 12-gauge, double-barreled shotgun. It was well oiled and cleaned. Brian had always taken meticulous care of his guns. In the army, he used to call his carbine his best friend. Durning broke the shotgun open, closed it, then broke it open again.

  The ammunition was kept in a drawer next to the broom closet, and Durning found a box of 12-gauge shells. He slid two of the shells into the shotgun’s chambers and closed the breech. Then he put back the box, brought the gun into a downstairs bedroom off the kitchen, and put it behind some clothes in one of the closets.

  He stood there for a while listening to the hum of the refrigerator, and the engines of a plane passing overhead, and the sound of crows in some nearby trees.

  Well, he thought, and wondered how it had ever come down to this. Not that he really had to wonder. He knew. It was just one thing leading to another, getting you in deeper and deeper until it seemed the more you struggled, the further you sank.

  But that was some John Hinkey. Who would have expected that whole piece of business with his son? Who even knew he had a son?

  But that was enough to do it, all right. And it was easy enough to see the whole progression from there… with the appointment of a special prosecutor, and the media sideshow that would follow, and Brian inevitably splitting apart at the seams, making a full confession, and throwing him to the wolves as he turned state’s evidence.

  So what options do I have other than this?

  Blow my own brains out? Quietly waste away in prison?

  Which in a practical sense meant no options at all. Maybe for others but not for him. Never for him. He had firmly established that part of his nature ten years ago, when he had chosen to cover an accidental killing with his first deliberate one. That was the biggie right there. That was the one that programmed him for everything that followed. After that, it was just a matter of hitting the right buttons.

  As the bodies kept piling up.

  And with this thought, the sickness hit him. Sudden and unexpected. One moment he was standing in quiet contemplation. The next, he was puking his guts into the kitchen sink. He had never known such a sickening. It was as if whatever good had been left in him after all these years was leaving. It was a dissolution, a final revolt of the cells. Only instinct was left to hold him together.

  Then the moment passed and he put his face under the faucet and washed himself clean.

  Durning was sipping scotch and listening to a Chopin etude in the living room when he saw the Buick enter the driveway and pull up in front of the house.

  He watched through the window as they got out of the car. Marcy was talking nonstop while dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. Brian just stared off somewhere.

  Durning rose to greet them as they came in. He kissed Marcy on the cheek, embraced his friend, and handed them each a perfectly chilled martini.

  It was their house but he had taken over as host. Then wasting no more time on amenities, he moved right into it.

  “The worst of it was the initial shock,” Durning said, “and that’s over.”

  He spoke to Wayne. “Did you know Hinkey had a son working for him?”

  The FBI director shook his head. “I met him only that one time in my office, and he never mentioned it.”

  Marcy was crying again. “What would you have done if Brian had known?” she asked Durning. “Had the man’s son murdered, too? And what about other possible law associates and partners? Or would you have just planned on putting a bomb in their offices and getting them all at once?”

  Durning looked at Brian Wayne. “What else did you tell her?”

  Wayne sipped his martini and didn’t answer.

  “I only wish to God he’d told me more,” said his wife. “I’d have screamed so loud none of these disasters would have happened.” She bit her lip to stop its trembling. “Friendship! The next time I hear that word I swear I’ll spit.”

  For the first time Wayne met Durning’s eyes and something passed between them, something they both understood and Wayne’s wife never would.

  “Marcy, please,” said the FBI director. “What’s done is done. We’re not here for recriminations.”

  “Like hell we’re not,” said Marcy. “That’s exactly what I want. Recriminations!”

  She took down half her martini in a single gulp. Then she breathed deeply and stared at her husband.

  “I’m going to tell you something,” she said, suddenly calm and very cold. “I hate your friend Henry Durning. And I despise what he’s done to you all these years. He’s cold and he’s self-serving and he doesn’t care if you or I or anybody else lives or dies as long as he gets what he wants. You amuse him because he once saved your life, and you’ve been paying him homage and kissing his ass ever since. You’re basically the most ethical man I know. Yet when he asked you to betray yourself and your office for a reason he wouldn’t even tell you, you sacrificed the lives of five of your agents without batting an eye.”

  The FBI director closed his eyes as though in pain. “For God’s sake, Marcy—”

  “Don’t you‘for God’s sake’ me!” she rushed on. “Then when he has two more people killed to cover up the first five, and the whole rotten mess explodes in your face, not his, he has the nerve to talk to me about my hysterics.”

  She turned to face Henry Durning. “Well, Mr. United States Attorney General,” she said softly, her eyes dry and hard now, her voice and face like glacial ice, “you haven’t even begun to see my hysterics. Because if you’ve got the idea I’m just going to sit quietly by while my husband is cru
cified and you’re left untouched, you’re not as smart as I think.”

  The room was silent.

  Durning and Wayne stared at each other in a strange, almost embarrassed way. Marcy didn’t look at either of them. She just stood there finishing her martini. Then moving very deliberately, she walked to the far end of the room and began mixing herself another drink.

  Gently, Durning took his friend’s arm. “Forget all that,” he said. “It’s a bad time for everyone. But it might be easier if we talked alone for a few minutes and got a couple of things settled.”

  His hand still on Wayne’s arm, Durning guided him to the bedroom as if he were a blind man, and followed him in.

  Wayne never had a chance to turn around.

  Durning swung the pistol butt only once, a flat solid shot to the back of the head that caught Wayne exactly right and dropped him without a sound. He didn’t seem to fall as much as crumple.

  The attorney general stood looking down at his friend. The calm Durning contained seemed delicate and he didn’t press it. It was enough to just stand there for a moment, letting things settle. Then he returned to the living room.

  Marcy had finished mixing her second martini and was standing at a window, gazing out and drinking as he quietly approached.

  She must have heard him, yet she didn’t turn until he was almost on her. When she did see him, it was the moment he was taking that final step, arm raised, and he faltered before her stare, all stomach for it leaving him. Until the sound of her glass smashing on the wood floor shook him free of her eyes and he put her out.

  I never knew she hated me so much, he thought, and carried her in to join her husband.

  Moving more quickly now, he laid them side by side on the bed.

  Worlds circled as in a dream.

  Both their faces seemed flat and they stared at him out of their own darkness.

  Durning put on a pair of rubber cleaning gloves from the kitchen, took the 12-gauge out of the closet, and wiped it and the shells free of all prints.

  The rest would be all iron discipline.

  Apart from everything else, there were certain details to be considered in a purported murder-suicide. Sometimes the murdered party would be a willing victim… other times, not. In this instance, either way would be feasible. Shotgun shells made a much bigger mess than rifle bullets but also carried a couple of advantages. At close range, the result would never be in doubt. And any possibly embarrassing evidence of earlier blows to the head would be eliminated.