House Secrets

by Mike Lawson

  “Hello, Mr. Finley,” DeMarco said.

  “They found Terry’s laptop,” Dick Finley said. “He’d left it at this bar, the same place where that napkin came from. You know, the napkin that had the names written on it.”

  “Sam and Harry’s?” DeMarco said.

  “Yeah. It’s there now. The manager just called me. He said Terry forgot his computer there one night and a bartender put it in the back room where the employees change, but then the bartender goes on vacation without telling anybody about the computer. Anyway, the bartender gets back from vacation today, sees the laptop’s still there, and he calls the Post. The Post told him to call me.”

  So Terry’s laptop hadn’t been stolen by some killer as Dick Finley had thought. The reporter had had too much to drink, forgot his computer, and the next day when he discovered it was missing, he filed a report with the police saying it had been stolen—just like the Louisa County sheriff had told Dick Finley. And maybe the sheriff was right about everything else associated with Terry’s death, including the fact that it had been an accident.

  “The reason I called,” Finley said, “is I was wondering if you could pick up the computer and take a look at what’s in it?”

  Shit. “Sure, I can do that,” DeMarco said.

  “If there isn’t anything there connected to Terry’s death, just . . . I don’t know, just give it to somebody.”

  “You sound pretty tired, Mr. Finley. Are you feeling okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m just old. So have you learned anything yet?”

  “No, sir,” DeMarco said, and to keep Finley from asking more questions—and so he wouldn’t have to tell the man more lies—he added, “But I’ll get over to that bar right now and get the laptop.”

  So instead of doing something healthy, like whacking golf balls, DeMarco went to Sam and Harry’s. He liked the place. It was dark and cool and quiet—it looked the way bars were supposed to look—and the bartenders had a tendency to overpour, experience showing that bigger drinks produced happy drunks which in turn produced bigger tips.

  DeMarco got a beer—he didn’t feel like experimenting with another brand of cheap vodka—and retrieved Finley’s laptop from the bartender on duty. He found a table near an electrical outlet and plugged in the power cord for the computer. There were hundreds of files on the laptop, some going back years, including one that looked like a novel that never got beyond the third chapter. Most of the files were rough drafts of stories Terry had written but some contained interview notes and background material on subjects that he’d researched. He found only one file related to Paul Morelli.

  In the Morelli file were references to past articles on Reams, Bachaud, and Frey, the three men on Terry Finley’s list, but nothing that pointed to Morelli being guilty of anything specific. There were also large blocks of text that appeared to have come from past stories written about Morelli. It appeared that Terry Finley had found the stories on Internet sites and copied them into his computer. Terry had also talked to a lot of people. Most of the people he had interviewed were people related to the incidents involving Reams, Bachaud, and Frey. For example, he’d talked to the cop who had found Reams in bed with the teenage boy and the motel manager of the place where the incident had occurred. But nothing in Finley’s notes shed any new light on the events that had taken place all those years ago, and nothing pointed to some powerful man helping Paul Morelli commit crimes.

  Janet Tyler and Marcia Davenport were both mentioned in the file. Finley had found that Marcia Davenport had done some decorating work on Morelli’s home and that Janet Tyler had worked on a zoning study in New York, but that was it. It appeared that all Finley had managed to do was confirm that both women had a prior association with Morelli but there was nothing to indicate that Finley suspected Morelli of assaulting the women. Lydia Morelli’s name was not mentioned at all.

  It occurred to DeMarco that Finley’s laptop wasn’t necessarily up to date. Most reporters wouldn’t use a laptop for taking notes when they interviewed people. Finley probably recorded his raw notes in a notebook or a tape recorder then later transferred whatever he’d learned to his computer. But no notebook or tape recorder had been found on Terry’s body or in his house, according to both Dick Finley and the police reports that DeMarco had seen. Finley’s notebooks were probably in his office at the Post, DeMarco figured, and his bosses had most likely already looked through them.

  DeMarco glanced at his watch. It was too late to go to the driving range. He noticed a very attractive brunette sitting at the bar by herself playing with her BlackBerry. He decided to go up to the bar and order another beer.

  Chapter 23

  “Why the hell would he put his clubs in the trunk then go to a bar?” Carl said.

  Jimmy didn’t bother to answer. He just sat there, staring at the entrance to Sam and Harry’s, wishing this damn job was over, wishing Carl would just shut the fuck up.

  They’d gotten rid of the Buick and were now driving a Ford Explorer. Carl was blowing his cigarette smoke out the window, having just endured another lecture from Jimmy on secondhand smoke. Carl had said that Jimmy was more likely to get cancer from the exhaust fumes of passing cars, but he rolled down the window and it was probably a good thing he did. Jimmy was in such a shitty mood today, the way everything had been going, that he would have put the butt out in Carl’s ear if he hadn’t.

  Today they were parked on a corner where they couldn’t get blocked in. If they had to, they could drive right up over the curb. It was good to have a four-wheel-drive SUV with big tires. No fuckin’ way were they gonna lose this jamoke again.

  “Will you look at this guy,” Carl said.

  “Huh? What guy?” Jimmy said.

  “This guy comin’ down the block.”

  Jimmy looked over to where Carl was pointing. There was a middle-aged man with a dog walking toward them. The dog was about the size of a squirrel and had a pink bow on its head. The man wore a pink shirt with epaulets on the shoulders—the color of the shirt matching the dog’s bow—and his pants were so voluminous in the thighs that it almost looked as if he was wearing a skirt. On his feet were espadrilles and on his head was a small cap that looked like a little kid’s baseball cap because it had such a short bill.

  “And they wonder why they get beat up,” Carl said.

  Before Jimmy could tell Carl that he was an idiot, his cell phone vibrated and he jumped like he’d been goosed. Friggin’ cell phones. He opened the phone and listened for a moment then closed it.

  “That was Eddie,” Jimmy said. “He said we can quit followin’ this guy.”

  “Thank God,” Carl said.

  “But he’s on his way down here. He wants us to pick him up at National.”

  “Why’s he comin’ here?” Carl said.

  Jimmy shrugged. “Says he’s got something else for us to do, but he didn’t say what.”

  “I just hope he’s not pissed at us, the way we fucked this up. I mean, Eddie’s definitely a guy I don’t want mad at me.”

  “You got that right,” Jimmy said. “I heard when he was in prison he broke a guy over his knee.”

  “He what?”

  “This guy, he did something, and Eddie picks him up—grabs him by the balls and the throat with those fuckin’ hands of his—and he snaps the guy over his knee like a stick. Broke his back.”

  “Jesus,” Carl said.

  “But he’s not pissed, at least he didn’t sound like it. He just said he had something else he wanted us to do. Maybe he wants us to clip this DeMarco asshole instead of just followin’ him. Whatever. Anyway, quit worryin’ and let’s go get something to eat.”

  “Sure. Where you wanna go?”

  “There’s a place over in Arlington, on Wilson Boulevard. A place called Mario’s. They make the best Philly cheesesteak you ever tasted.”

  “Yeah, that sounds good,” Carl said. “Can you get a beer there?”

  “No, it’s more like a drive-in.”

&
nbsp; “Well, shit. Don’t you know a place where you can get a cheesesteak and a beer?

  Chapter 24

  Emma was sitting in her living room, staring at the burning logs in her fireplace. She’d just had a fight with Christine over something absurdly trivial, and Christine was at the other end of the house, avoiding her. She knew she should go apologize, and later she would, but not now. Now she just wanted to stare into a fire that was overheating the room.

  DeMarco was the reason she’d had the fight with Christine. The fight hadn’t been about DeMarco but he was the one who had put her in such a rotten mood. Emma was convinced that Lydia Morelli was telling the truth and that DeMarco and his devious boss were turning their backs on the poor woman. Maybe she should call Lydia and . . .

  The doorbell rang. Emma wondered if Christine had called up a friend to go out with. Or maybe it was DeMarco coming back to annoy her further. She got up, reluctantly, and walked to the door.

  Emma had never been introduced to the man standing on her porch but she knew who he was. His name was Charlie Eklund. He worked for the CIA. Standing behind Eklund was another man, a blocky, muscular man, who was scanning Emma’s neighborhood with hard, watchful eyes. It appeared that Eklund had a bodyguard, and she immediately wondered why he would need one.

  Charlie Eklund was in his seventies. He was small and slender, about five-seven. He was wearing a blue suit with a red sweater-vest, the vest making him look both old-fashioned and avuncular. He had carefully combed white hair and an unremarkable face, no feature being in any way particularly distinctive. The expression on his face was pleasant, and seemed as if it might be perpetually so, as if he was just too much above the fray to allow anything to disturb his good humor.

  Emma had no idea what Eklund did for the Central Intelligence Agency. All she knew was that he’d been at Langley forever, and that his job title changed frequently. And the titles he had always contained phrases that made it sound as if he had power but not too much power, titles such as Assistant Deputy Director for something or other. But you could never tell by his title exactly what he did or what he was responsible for or who he reported to or who reported to him. All that was known was that he attended the important meetings—meaning those meetings that had to do with budget and manpower and the CIA’s span of control.

  Throughout his long career, Eklund had always stayed in the background and his fingerprints had never been found on anything. He had never been mentioned in the press or called before Congress to explain his part in some botched CIA venture, to explain why something had gone so horribly, awfully, publicly awry. CIA directors came and went; senior staffers were fired and replaced and retired; but Charlie . . . Charlie was always there.

  “I thought we should have a little talk,” he said to Emma.

  Emma didn’t answer.

  “May I come in, please?”

  Emma didn’t answer.

  “Very well,” Eklund said, the pleasant expression still on his face, his eyes now twinkling, maybe with amusement but possibly with malice. Charlie Eklund’s eyes made it hard to tell.

  “What is the DIA’s interest in Senator Morelli?” Eklund said.

  “I don’t work for the DIA,” Emma said. “I’m retired.”

  “You’re retired,” Eklund said, “but sometimes you help them out, like you did in Iran a couple of years ago.”

  Emma wondered how he knew about Iran but didn’t ask. Instead she said, “Why do you have people following Joe DeMarco?”

  “Peterson told you the truth,” Eklund said.

  Peterson was “Marv,” the man Emma had spoken to at the CIA about James Suttel and Carl van Horn.

  “Or I should say that Peterson was dumb enough to tell you the truth,” Eklund said. “Fortunately for him, he was smart enough to tell me that he had talked to you—but I’m still thinking of sending him to one of the Stans for his wagging tongue.”

  Eklund meant somewhere like Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, or Turkistan.

  “So you’re saying that Suttel and van Horn are not working for you,” Emma said.

  “Yes. I just did. It’s as Peterson told you: they worked for us occasionally in the past but. . . . You’ve heard the old expression about not using a sledgehammer when all you’re trying to do is drive a nail? The duo of Suttel and van Horn are a sledgehammer. They have an admirable flair for violence but they lack the finesse required for most operations, so we no longer engage them.”

  Eklund appeared to be telling the truth—but Emma knew that meant nothing.

  “Now do you think we could possibly have this discussion sitting down?” Eklund said. “I have problems with the veins in my legs. Standing for long periods can be rather painful.”

  “So sit on the sidewalk,” Emma said. “I don’t like you coming to my home. I don’t want you in my home. Why are you here?”

  “I told you. I want to know what your interest is in Senator Morelli.”

  Emma said nothing.

  “And why has your associate, Mr. DeMarco, been meeting with the senator’s wife?”

  Now that told Emma something. Suttel and van Horn had not followed Joe to his meetings with Lydia, which meant that someone else had, someone working for Charlie Eklund.

  “I don’t know what you’re up to, Eklund but—”

  “Call me Charlie. Please.”

  “—but if you start interfering with my life, or Joe DeMarco’s, I will go to the media just as I told Peterson and tell them what happened in the Philippines.”

  “I don’t care,” Eklund said, making a dismissive gesture with one small hand. “Go to the media. Run to the media. That incident’s ancient history and the principals involved no longer work at the agency. And the man who was director at the time . . . What was his name? It’ll come to me in a minute. They come and go so often it’s hard to keep track, but whoever he was, he’s dead. I mean the story would embarrass us, of course, but we’d just say it happened before we reformed ourselves. Don’t you know? We’re the new, reformed CIA.”

  “Are you protecting the senator in some way?” Emma said.

  “Protecting him?” Eklund said. “Now that is amusing.” Eklund paused momentarily before adding, “And rather interesting that you’d suggest such a thing.”

  Emma wondered if she had now inadvertently given something away. You had to be very careful when sparring with Charlie Eklund.

  Eklund stared at Emma for a moment. She stared back. “I can see we’re not going to reach an accommodation this evening,” he said. “I guess I should have come better prepared to this meeting.”

  Meaning he should have come with something to force Emma to cooperate.

  “No we’re not and yes you should have,” Emma said. And she closed the door in Charlie Eklund’s face.

  Chapter 25

  Blake Hanover was dying of lung cancer.

  Hanover’s apartment was in a decaying brownstone in a low-rent part of the District. He had retired from the CIA as a GS-15, but Emma suspected that his three divorces had reduced his income to such a degree that he was barely able to afford the shabby one-bedroom unit in which he lived. He sat in a stained Barcalounger wearing a brown bathrobe, yellow pajamas, and brown slippers. A clear tube coming from a small green tank pumped oxygen into his nose. He was hairless from chemotherapy; his complexion was waxy and sallow; and his bald head was speckled with large, ugly liver spots. In his right hand he held a handkerchief and he would periodically cough into it. The handkerchief was spotted brown with dried blood.

  When Emma met Blake Hanover twenty years ago he’d been a burly, blond-haired, chain-smoking spy. A cynical, jaded spy. He’d been the agent in charge of a joint CIA-DIA operation, and the operation, because of Hanover’s ruthless tactics, had needlessly destroyed the life of a young Chinese female spy. Emma despised Hanover and she imagined the feeling was mutual. She would never have come to him for help except that she knew he’d been treated poorly by his old outfit.

  Five years ago, at
a time Hanover had expected to be retired with honors, feted with speeches and gold watches and plaques, the CIA had needed a scapegoat for an operation that had gone badly off-course. Hanover was the chosen goat. Emma doubted that he had been a particularly loyal employee to begin with, but after what had happened to him, she imagined all his feelings toward his old employer would be bitter and bad. Plus he was dying—something she had not known before she came to see him—and thus he might be even more inclined to tell the truth. Encroaching death often has that side effect.

  “So why do you want to know about Charlie boy?” Hanover said.

  “We’ve crossed paths,” Emma said. “Or maybe I should say we’ve crossed swords.”

  “Ooh, too bad for you,” Hanover said, and he laughed, and then the laugh turned into a series of coughs, and with each explosive hack his wasted body rose slightly off the chair.

  “What did you do to piss Charlie off?” Hanover asked when he could breathe again.

  “Does it matter?”

  Hanover thought about that. “No, I suppose not. What do you want to know?”

  “I want to know what he does at Langley.”

  Hanover’s parched lips twitched in amusement. “I guess you could say he’s an accountant. And a rainmaker.”

  “An accountant?”

  “Yeah. Charlie hides the money. He’s been hiding the money for years and he’s very good at it and that’s probably why he’s been there so long.”

  Emma knew what Hanover meant. Congress gave the CIA millions of dollars each year and much of that money was earmarked for specific things. What Eklund apparently did was divert the money to wherever the CIA desired to spend it. For example, say Congress gave the agency several million to hire and train Arabic-language interpreters but the CIA preferred to spend the money tracking down nuclear stockpiles in Russia. The CIA had a tendency to do this, to decide that they knew better than anyone what their priorities should be. It was apparently Charlie’s task to cook the books, to show how the Company had spent the dough trying to recruit Arabic speakers, yet alas, in spite of their diligence, they’d only been able to hire a score of translators with all the money they’d been given.