by Mike Lawson
“I was just kidding about that. I don’t know if she’s his mistress.”
“She is,” Emma said.
“And you would know this how?” It always bugged DeMarco that Emma never allowed a lack of data to prevent her from being absolutely certain of her opinion.
“Because John Mahoney’s a scoundrel,” Emma said. “I feel so sorry for his wife.”
Chapter 13
Paul Morelli’s office was located in the Russell Senate Office Building on the northeast side of the Capitol. The interior walls of the building are polished slabs of white and gray marble, and the doors to the senators’ chambers are all brass and mahogany and an impressive eight and a half feet in height. The taxpayers house their senators in style, and Morelli’s suite had a fireplace, rich antique furnishings, and a reception area filled with plaques and awards that the state of New York had bestowed upon its favorite son. A photograph of Morelli and the president was prominently displayed. The president appeared uncomfortable in the photo—he had the look of a man who knew he was posing with his replacement.
Morelli’s receptionist was a woman in her fifties with a horsey face and watery eyes. When DeMarco asked to see Abe Burrows, she pointed wordlessly at an open door while blowing her nose loudly into a tissue.
Judging by his office, Burrows was a typical harried, overworked chief of staff. His small, messy room was overflowing with documents half-read or never-to-be read; his in-box was a Tower of Babel about to collapse; yellow call slips formed a large, untidy pyramid next to his phone.
DeMarco had known dozens of men like Burrows. They didn’t have enough charisma to be elected as dog catchers but they were smart, hardworking, and fanatically dedicated. While their bosses were cutting ribbons and smooching babies, they stayed in the office until midnight, reading the fine print on the bills and making the deals that passed the laws. Politicians were often the hood ornament on the government’s machine—people like Abe Burrows were the engine.
Burrows was on the phone when DeMarco entered his office, and DeMarco heard him say: “You tell your guy that Morelli won’t give a shit about bridges in Mississippi until someone over there starts caring about Northeast interstates. Call me back when you got your head outta your ass.”
He was short and overweight, had frizzy hair, and wore wrinkled clothes that fit him badly—yet DeMarco knew it would be a mistake to assume Burrows’s appearance was an indicator of his character. Senators didn’t select their chiefs of staff for charm and good looks; they picked them because they were harder than diamond-coated drill bits and usually just as sharp.
Slamming down the phone, Burrows looked at it and said, “Dipshit.” Looking up at DeMarco, he raised his eyebrows in curiosity.
“Joe DeMarco, Abe,” DeMarco said.
“Yeah, I know. What do you—”
“The other night, when you and the senator couldn’t remember Janet Tyler, he told me to stop by here. He said you’d check your files.”
“Oh, yeah. But I’m kinda busy right now. I’m . . . Aw, never mind. Hang on.” Burrows hit a button on his desk and said into the speaker box, “Call George Burak. Tell him to pull the personnel file on a gal named Janet Tyler. She worked for the senator when he was mayor. Tell him to do it right away and call me back.” Burrows disconnected the phone call without waiting for a response, then said to DeMarco, “Why are you wasting your time on this?”
DeMarco obviously couldn’t tell Burrows what Lydia Morelli had told him. So he just shrugged and said, “Just being thorough. I told Dick Finley that I’d check out the names on that list, and Tyler’s the last one.”
“Good,” Burrows said, then he ran his hands over his face, like he was trying to scrub away his fatigue. “You know, we’re gonna start our run for the White House sometime next year. And Paul will get the nomination, no doubt about it. But as soon as we declare, the Republicans are going to do everything they can to smear him. They already took a pretty good shot at him when he ran for the Senate, and they didn’t find bupkus, but when he gets the nomination they’ll pull out all the stops. They’ll use anything to discredit him.”
“I’m not trying to hurt the senator,” DeMarco said.
“I didn’t say you were. What I’m saying is that Terry Finley was bush-league. There was no way in hell a guy like him was going to find something wrong about Paul when the entire Republican Party and every conservative journalist in America can’t do it.”
Maybe they could if Paul Morelli’s wife was helping them.
“I’ve been in politics all my life,” Burrows said, “and Paul’s the best I’ve ever seen. And I’m not saying that just because I work for him. He’s the real thing, DeMarco. He’s going to change this country.”
Burrows’s phone rang. He hit the speaker button and said, “Yeah.”
“George is on line three, Abe,” a disembodied voice said.
Burrows punched another button. “George?” he said.
“Yeah,” George said. “What do you want to know about this Janet Tyler?”
“Who is she?” Burrows said. “Apparently she worked for Paul when he was mayor, but I don’t remember her.”
“You don’t remember her because she was only with us two months. We hired her to help with some zoning study, but I guess she quit.”
“You guess?”
“Well, we didn’t fire her. The file only says secretary, Brooklyn zoning study, separated in ’99. That’s it. If we’d fired her ass, the file would have said so.”
“And that’s all you got?”
“Yeah. I even asked a couple of my guys about her, but they don’t remember her either.”
“Thanks, George,” Burrows said and hung up. Looking at DeMarco, he said, “Okay, you happy now? You now know everything I know about Janet Tyler.”
The phone call between Burrows and this Burak character hadn’t sounded the least bit rehearsed. And the conversation that Lydia Morelli claimed to have heard between Burrows and Paul Morelli regarding Janet Tyler had happened eight years ago. It was possible that Burrows didn’t remember the discussion—assuming Lydia was telling the truth, which was a big assumption. So who should DeMarco believe: the alcoholic or the politician? Now that was a tough choice.
“Yeah, I’m happy, Abe,” DeMarco said. “Thanks for your time.”
Emma watched DeMarco exit the Russell Building, and smiled when his head swiveled to stare at the well-formed derriere of a young woman who was just entering the building. She had to find DeMarco a girlfriend, or even better, a wife. DeMarco was the kind of man who needed a wife.
Emma knew that he had fallen head over heels for a spunky FBI agent a couple of years ago, but then the woman had been transferred to L.A. And then he’d hooked up with some school teacher, and although Emma had never met the woman, she’d sounded nice. But the teacher lived in Iowa and she and DeMarco had drifted apart, and now she was marrying somebody else. Emma needed to find him someone local so he couldn’t use distance as an excuse for not making a commitment.
The term “commitment shy” may have been a cliché, but in DeMarco’s case it was valid. And the reason, Emma knew, was his ex-wife. His ex had been an adulterous airhead but for some reason he just couldn’t get over her or get beyond what she had done. But DeMarco’s love life—or rather his lack of one—would have to wait.
DeMarco had descended the steps of the Russell Building and was now standing on the corner of Constitution and Delaware. When a cab came into view, he waved it down and jumped in, and Emma, watching from half a block away, saw a dark blue Buick fall into place behind the cab.
DeMarco hadn’t known it, but Emma had been parked near his house at five-thirty that morning. At seven, she noticed a car with two men in it pull up and park, and when DeMarco caught a taxi to the Russell Building, the car had tailed the cab—and Emma had tailed the car. Emma pulled out her cell phone. It was time to find out who was in the Buick.
The men following DeMarco were a block from the
Russell Building when they were pulled over by the U.S. Capitol police. Emma knew that the female officer driving the patrol car would tell them that they had been seen “lurking” near the Senate Office Buildings and, times being what they were, the Capitol cops wanted to know what they were up to.
The officer made the men exit their car. They were big, beefy white guys in their late forties or early fifties and both had short dark hair, though one guy’s hairline was receding. The one with the retreating hairline also wore glasses with heavy, black frames, the glasses being the main thing that distinguished him from his companion. For some reason, Emma could imagine these two at a hockey game, their faces painted, screaming in delight whenever a player was body-checked into the glass.
The policewoman patted them down one-handed, her other hand on her sidearm while she did, then looked inside the car but didn’t search it. While she was inspecting the interior of their vehicle, the men slouched against the hood of their car, arms crossed over their chests, disgusted looks on their faces. After a brief discussion—and a lot of pissed-off body language—the men handed the officer their driver’s licenses. She ordered them back into their car and returned to her vehicle. Emma saw the man with the glasses slam his hand down on the steering wheel in frustration. Ten minutes later, a long time to do a simple check on outstanding warrants, the officer left her patrol car and returned the men’s driver’s licenses. As the Buick departed, the driver stuck his arm out the window and gave the cop the finger.
The officer remained standing outside her patrol car until Emma drove up next to her. Emma powered down the passenger-side window of her car, exchanged a few words with the other woman, and the officer handed Emma the memory card from a digital camera.
Emma wasn’t a particularly sociable person but she had friends everywhere.
The shuttle from Reagan National to LaGuardia arrived at ten-thirty, and by eleven-thirty DeMarco was standing in the hallway outside Janet Tyler’s apartment. He rang the doorbell, and from inside the apartment, he could hear the commotion caused by a couple of kids responding to the bell and their mother telling them to settle down. He saw the peephole darken and then the door opened.
A woman he assumed was Janet Tyler was holding a little girl in one arm, the girl about two years old. Clutching the woman’s knees was another little girl with big brown eyes and curly dark hair, and she was cuter than Shirley Temple. Tyler herself was slim and short, five-two or five-three, but unlike her dark-haired, brown-eyed daughters, she had blue eyes and blond hair. Her hair was tied back in a careless ponytail and there were food stains on her pink T-shirt. She had the frazzled appearance of a mother with two high-energy children born close to a year apart.
“Ms. Tyler?” DeMarco said.
“Yes.”
DeMarco held up his identification and introduced himself.
“Congress?” Tyler said.
“Yes, ma’am. May I come in? I need to ask you a few questions about Senator Paul Morelli.”
Tyler inhaled sharply, and DeMarco recalled that he’d gotten an almost identical reaction from Marcia Davenport. These women were afraid of Morelli.
“I . . . I don’t have anything to say about the senator,” Tyler said. “I only met him once.”
“You worked for him when he was the mayor. I’d just like to know—”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t talk right now. I have to get my daughter to the doctor’s office.”
The woman was a terrible liar. DeMarco was a good one.
“Ms. Tyler,” he said, “if you don’t talk to me today, you’re going to be subpoenaed to testify before a congressional committee. You’re going to have to fly to Washington and you may be there for several days, at your own expense, until the committee gets around to hearing your testimony. If you want to avoid all that, I’d suggest you talk to me.”
Tyler struck him as a timid person, not all that sure of herself, and he felt like a heel bullying her. But he needed answers.
She closed her eyes briefly then said, “I have to get a neighbor to watch my girls. There’s a café across the street. I’ll meet you there in twenty minutes.”
“These guys are connected somehow to the CIA,” Mary Tollier told Emma.
When the U.S. Capitol police officer had taken the driver’s licenses from the two men in the Buick she had photographed the licenses, then dusted them with fingerprint powder and photographed them again. Emma then took the memory chip from the cop’s camera to a woman named Mary Tollier who worked at the DIA. Tollier had once worked for Emma, and thanks to Emma’s influence, she had ascended the bureaucratic ladder, coming ever closer to that shatter-proof glass ceiling. Mary Tollier owed Emma.
“What!” Emma said. “Who are they and what do they do?”
“The answer to both questions,” Mary said, “is I don’t know. The names on the licenses are phony. I ran their fingerprints, got nothing from any of the databases, but half an hour later I got a call from a very rude man at Langley asking why I was running those particular fingerprints. We traded insults and hung up.”
“Thanks, Mary. Oh, Mary, I just thought of something. You’re a music lover. I have a friend in a quartet, and tomorrow they’re playing some stuff by this marvelous new Swedish composer. I can’t make it, and I was wondering if you’d like to have my ticket.”
Emma would tell Christine that she had to use the ticket to bribe Mary to get information.
Emma knew she deserved to go to hell for what she’d just done.
Janet Tyler entered the café twenty minutes later as promised, and saw DeMarco sitting in a corner booth. She had changed out of the Gerber-stained T-shirt and combed her hair and put on some lipstick. She was a pretty, young mom—and a very nervous one.
She took a seat across from DeMarco. “What’s this all about?” she said.
“Would you like some coffee?” DeMarco said.
“No.”
“Okay. I know you worked for Paul Morelli in 1999. You were involved in some kind of zoning study, but you quit after only two months. I want to know why you quit.”
“I didn’t like the job,” Tyler said.
Terrible liar.
“I don’t believe you,” DeMarco said.
“I’m telling you the truth. I just didn’t—”
“Did Paul Morelli attack you, Janet? Did he rape you?”
Tyler’s eyes widened in shock but DeMarco couldn’t tell if she was shocked because he’d made an outrageous, untrue accusation against Morelli or if it was because he knew what Morelli had done to her.
“No,” she said. “He never did anything to me. I just didn’t like the job and I quit. Why are you asking these questions?”
Lydia Morelli had said something about Tyler’s fiancé, something to the effect that her fiancé had been used to silence her. That had been eight years ago and Tyler had kids, so DeMarco assumed that by now she had married the guy.
“Who’s your husband, Janet?” DeMarco asked.
“I’m not married.”
“Then who’s the father of your children?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Janet, I work for the federal government. How long do you think it’s going to take me to find out what I want to know?”
“You bastards,” she said. “Why can’t you just leave us alone? What are you going to do? Take my children from me? Deport their father?”
“Jesus, no,” DeMarco said. And what was she talking about?
Tyler put her head in her hands and started sobbing, which made DeMarco feel even worse than he already felt.
“Janet,” he said, “I’m not going to do anything to you or your kids. I just want to know—”
“My fiancé’s name is Hussein Halas. He’s a Jordanian national and we’re not married because he hasn’t been able to get a divorce from his wife. Now is there anything else you want to know?”
“I told you. I want to know if Paul Morelli did anything to you. And if he’s blackma
iling you in some way to ensure your silence.”
“No,” she said, but she didn’t look at him when she said the word. “Can I go now?”
DeMarco couldn’t think of anything else to say to make her talk. “Yeah, you can go.”
Tyler immediately rose to leave, wanting only to get away from DeMarco as fast as she could. He felt like a thug leaning on her the way he had and because of this, he said, “And don’t worry, Janet. I promise I’m not going to do anything to harm your family.”
DeMarco had no idea if he could keep the promise he’d just made.
“Did you check the fingerprints I sent you, Marv?”
“Yeah. Why are you asking about these men, Emma?”
“I’m not going to tell you.”
“Well, shit, Emma. I can’t just—”
“You know, Marv, maybe the media won’t care. I mean, how long has it been? Ten years? Twelve? Yeah, maybe after all this time they won’t care that you guys stole a suitcase of heroin from a DEA evidence locker and then traded it for Russian surface-to-air missiles. Now that wouldn’t have been so bad, except maybe the part about stealing the dope, but then you gave the missiles to a terrorist and he used one to shoot down a helicopter carrying a Philippine politician. And the real bummer was, the politician was on our side. Oops.”
“We didn’t know he was a terrorist,” Marv whined.
“I know. You went way beyond stupid on that one, Marv.”
“You’re bluffing, Emma. That op was classified then and it’s still classified, and if you leaked that story, you’d go to jail.”
Emma laughed. “Like you could ever prove I leaked it.”
The phone was silent for a moment. “Okay, fine,” Marvin said. “Their real names are Carl van Horn and James Suttel.”
“Are they agents?”
“God, no. They’re just a couple of mutts we used a few times.”
“Used for what?” Emma said.
“You know, stuff. Stuff we didn’t wanna be tied to. The last time it was a banker down in Haiti. He was funneling money to the wrong people and we tried to get the Haitian government to put a stop to it, but the banker was bribing too many people. So we sent van Horn and Suttel down there. All they were supposed to do was scare the banker a little, but van Horn, he bricked the guy’s kneecaps. He said he needed the brick to get his attention.”