House Secrets

by Mike Lawson

  Eklund stared at Emma. There were now two bright red spots on his cheeks.

  “Well, we’ll just have to see about all that, won’t we?” Eklund said, and with that he rose from the picnic table and marched away on short, stiff legs.

  Chapter 40

  At eight that evening, DeMarco found the doctor who had given Paul Morelli the tour of the emergency room. He was behind a door that said STAFF ONLY, stretched out on a sagging sofa, smoking a cigarette, flipping through an old swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated. On the coffee table near the sofa was a can of Coke and a crumpled candy-bar wrapper. On the floor was another Coke can that the doctor was using for an ashtray.

  DeMarco wanted this man for his personal physician.

  The doctor was in his mid-forties. His hairline was retreating from a broad forehead and his full black beard was streaked with gray. He wore reading glasses, wrinkled green scrubs, and broken-down running shoes. He looked tired and grumpy.

  “Dr. Mason?” DeMarco said.

  Looking at DeMarco over the top of his glasses, the doctor said, “I don’t care if you’ve got bubonic plague—get out of here. I’ve been on duty thirty-six straight hours.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you but it’s important.”

  “I’ll bet. So what are you? A whiplash lawyer or an insurance agent?”

  “Neither. I work for the government.”

  “Then definitely get the hell out of here.”

  “Doctor, do you have any idea what percentage of this institution’s budget comes from federal funds?”

  “No,” he said.

  That was good, because DeMarco didn’t either. “It’s a very large percentage,” DeMarco said.

  “So what?”

  “Well, the senator who sent me here tonight has this big budget-whacking knife. If I come home empty-handed, he’ll call the head of this quackery and threaten to use it, and he’ll blame all his threats on you.”

  The doctor smirked. He’d been working a day and a half without sleep; nobody in administration could make his life worse. DeMarco decided to try a different tack.

  “Doc, they’re easy questions. It’ll only take a minute. Please. I have a wife and two kids at home that I’d like to kiss before midnight. Gimme a break.”

  The doctor studied him for a second, then said, “Aw, what the hell.”

  DeMarco couldn’t believe it: a man hard enough not to bend in the face of intimidation but soft enough to respond to a pathetic cry for help. Maybe that’s why he was a doctor.

  Rising to a sitting position with a grunt, Mason said, “So what do you want?”

  “Senator Morelli visited this hospital last week. He talked to you in the ER when he was here. What—”

  “Your boss wants to know about Morelli’s visit? That’s why you’re here?”

  “Doc, politics is a funny game and nobody tells a grunt like me the rules. So anyway, what did you and Morelli talk about?”

  Mason shrugged. “The usual stuff. How many patients we see a day, staff turnover, how long the patients normally have to wait. That kinda thing. Background, so he could take a poke at the health care system like everyone else.”

  “Did he ask you about gunshot wounds?”

  The doctor was clearly puzzled by the question. “No,” he said, “but while he was here, a resident was patching up a kid who’d just been shot. The senator put on a mask and watched him work for a while—interested in the procedure I guess.”

  “Could you tell me exactly where the patient was shot?”

  The doctor lit another cigarette, blew smoke in the direction of the NO SMOKING sign, then jabbed an index finger at a spot near his left shoulder. “Here. The bullet entered the pectoralis major, just below the clavicle. The kid was lucky; if the bullet had been a little lower it could have nicked a lung.”

  DeMarco didn’t know what the pectoralis major was, but the place the doctor pointed to was exactly where Morelli had been shot. They’d shown a little anatomy picture in the Post.

  “Did he ask any questions about the damage caused by the bullet?”

  “Yeah, he seemed concerned about the patient.”

  “Did he ask to look at X-rays?” DeMarco asked. “You know, to get a better understanding of the wound.”

  “No. Why the hell would he do that? And he only spent five minutes talking to me; the photographers were all up in pediatrics.”

  Washington Harbour is a couple of blocks downhill from M Street in Georgetown. It’s not a harbor—or a harbour—but a cluster of buildings, including a swanky hotel and half a dozen restaurants perched on the D.C. side of the Potomac River. The restaurants are built around a plaza paved with cobblestones, and in the center of the plaza is a fountain. Closest to the river is a bar with outdoor tables and Cinzano umbrellas, and you can sit there and watch crew teams training on the river. On a spring day it was a lovely place to sit and drink. On a cool fall night, the wind blowing, the plaza empty, the umbrellas put away, it was as lonely and as bleak as DeMarco felt.

  DeMarco took a seat on a bench near the river and looked out across the Potomac. At eleven at night there wasn’t much to see. The river was just a wide black strip separating the District from the twinkling lights of the homesteads on the northern Virginia frontier. Planes continuously taking off and landing at Reagan National Airport created a “V” of red lights in the sky. The trust people placed in air-traffic controllers was mind-boggling, DeMarco thought.

  He knew what had happened to Lydia Morelli. He couldn’t prove it, but he knew. His only task this evening, as he sat watching the planes land, was to organize his thoughts into a coherent string of words which might convince others.

  Paul Morelli had killed his wife. The Speaker had told him she was going to the press and Morelli had confronted Lydia. He would have asked if it was true that she was thinking about telling the media some ridiculous story about him molesting their daughter. And at that point, DeMarco believed, Lydia’s hate spewed forth like water from a broken dam.

  She would have raged and screamed and Morelli would have tried to calm her, to charm her into believing that everything she thought was just a figment of her imagination brought on by booze and bereavement. But Lydia had finally been pushed over the edge, refusing at last to be charmed, and her husband would have concluded that he had to do something to stop her.

  It would have been easy for a man of Morelli’s influence to have the doctors at Father Martin’s keep her away from phones and prevent her from having visitors; it may have even been standard practice to isolate a person with a severe addiction when first admitted. DeMarco suspected, however, that at the time Morelli placed Lydia in the clinic he had not decided to kill her; he had committed her to keep her away from the media and to give himself time to think. Lydia had told DeMarco that her husband was a man who never allowed himself to be rushed into premature decisions.

  And when he did have time to think, Morelli must have realized the only way he could guarantee his wife’s silence was to murder her, and that he had to act quickly. He knew he couldn’t keep her incommunicado at Father Martin’s indefinitely. He also decided at some point that he needed help, and concluded that Abe Burrows was just the man to help him. To involve anyone else would make him susceptible to blackmail for the rest of his life, but he knew, as Packy Morris did, that he could trust Burrows with his life. And if Lydia had told DeMarco the truth about the team of Morelli and Burrows, Burrows had been the senator’s accomplice before, maybe not in murder, but in other sordid ventures.

  So Burrows and Morelli put their bright heads together. They had conspired over more complex problems than the murder of a defenseless alcoholic, and it took them no time at all to conceive the less than original idea of having someone break into the senator’s home and kill his wife, after which the senator would kill the intruder.

  DeMarco believed that when Morelli saw the shooting victim in the emergency room at the hospital, practically unharmed by a small-caliber bul
let, it all started to come together—and then Morelli came up with the truly brilliant part of his plan. Morelli knew that the likelihood of anyone’s seriously questioning his version of his wife’s murder was small—he was, after all, Senator Paul Morelli. But if he was shot during the bogus break-in, then no one would doubt he was a victim and he would be completely above suspicion. There was of course some physical risk—not to mention a hell of a lot of pain—but considering what was at stake—his career and ultimately the presidency—it was a risk he was willing to take.

  The concept formed, all they had to do was find a disposable pawn to play the part of the evil intruder. DeMarco didn’t know why they had decided on Isaiah Perry. Maybe Burrows had examined the backgrounds of a number of low-paid personnel in the Russell Building to find someone with a record or connections to a criminal. Maybe they just selected Isaiah because he was young and black. Whatever the case, they found the perfect assailant, a young man with a juvenile sheet and a brother known to the law.

  To lure Isaiah to the senator’s home, they concocted the idea of Burrows buying a gun from him, and Burrows set about immediately to blackmail him into complying. They also came up with Isaiah’s motive—the story of Morelli catching him stealing from his office. In retrospect, Isaiah’s motive had been the weakest part of their plan, but it had still been good enough for the police.

  As DeMarco sat there in the darkness, he could see exactly how it had happened: The afternoon of the murder, Morelli travels to Havre de Grace and convinces the clinic staff that his wife needs to leave for the night to attend the Ellen Jascovitch dinner—which of course she never did. Morelli leaves Lydia with Burrows while he attends the Jascovitch function, telling Burrows to let Lydia drink all she wants. Burrows may have even spiked her drink with a sedative to keep her docile or put her to sleep. If evidence of a sedative was found in her bloodstream during an autopsy, the ME would think nothing of it, Lydia being the certified addict that she was.

  After the Jascovitch affair, Morelli returns home and at midnight that night, Isaiah Perry approaches the senator’s door and tentatively knocks. Burrows, not the senator, opens the door; it would have been Burrows because all Isaiah’s dealings had been with Burrows, and they wouldn’t want to alarm the boy prematurely. Inside the house, Isaiah sees the senator for the first time, and Morelli, with his incomparable charm, immediately puts him at ease. He tells Isaiah the gun is really for him and asks to look at it. He compliments the young man, thanks him for performing such an unusual service, then under some pretext, gets Isaiah to follow him to the master bedroom. Once inside the bedroom, the senator—DeMarco was sure it was the senator and not Burrows: even Burrows might have balked at murder—walks up to Isaiah Perry, presses the gun against his chest, and shoots him through the heart.

  Lydia Morelli stirs in her sleep but doesn’t awaken because of the amount of booze she drank earlier in the evening. Morelli walks over to his wife’s sleeping form, and without hesitation, shoots her in the temple. He wouldn’t have hesitated because he had no conscience.

  After the killings, he and Burrows survey the room and arrange a few things to make it look as if the senator and Isaiah had struggled for the gun. This explains the time lag between the first two shots and the last shot that Marcus Perry had heard.

  Then came the hard part. The senator positions himself in the location where he supposedly was when Isaiah shot him. He hands the gun to Burrows, then assists Burrows by placing the barrel in the exact spot on his shoulder where the gunshot victim in the emergency room was wounded. DeMarco could imagine Burrows hesitating, unwilling to pull the trigger, until Morelli screams at him to get on with it. He could imagine the bullet burning through Morelli’s shoulder, and Morelli overriding the pain with his incredible will.

  After Morelli is shot, Burrows waits to make sure his boss doesn’t pass out, dials 911 for him, then watches as Morelli tells the police to hurry, to come to his house, that his wife has been killed. After the call is made, Burrows rushes from the house, probably going somewhere nearby so he can call 911 again if the medics don’t show up quickly.

  Yes, Paul Morelli had killed his wife. DeMarco could see it all, exactly as it had happened—and he knew without a doubt that no one else would see it his way.

  There was only one thing that DeMarco could not explain: If Morelli had a powerful ally who had committed crimes for him in the past, why didn’t he use that same person to kill Lydia?

  Chapter 41

  Mahoney owned a thirty-two-foot sailboat that he moored at a marina near Annapolis. His wife, Mary Pat, was an excellent sailor and so was one of his daughters. When DeMarco was still married, Mary Pat had taken him and his wife out sailing once, on a day when the wind was gusting twenty knots, and Mary Pat had put the boat so far over on one side that the handrails had touched the water. She’d scared the crap out of DeMarco, but his ex, dimwit that she was, had thought it was a hoot.

  Mahoney never went out on the boat with his wife. He claimed he got seasick as soon as it left the dock but DeMarco suspected that he too was terrified of Mary Pat’s reckless seamanship. Mahoney only used the boat when he wanted to brood. He didn’t take it out of the harbor; he would just sit on the deck with the boat tied to the pier and smoke cigars and drink and think. He and DeMarco now sat beside each other on canvas deck chairs, sipping Jamaican rum. There was a full moon over their heads and small whitecaps danced on the water.

  “He murdered her,” DeMarco said.

  The Speaker closed his eyes and his lips moved in a silent curse. “What happened?” he said.

  DeMarco told him. When he finished, Mahoney said, “Are you sure?”

  Was he sure? He was sure O. J. had killed Nicole; he was sure Lee Harvey Oswald hadn’t acted alone—and he was just as sure that Paul Morelli had murdered his wife. He couldn’t prove it, but he was sure.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “But you have no proof?”

  “No.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “At this point I don’t think there’s anything I can do. But you can do something.”

  “Like what?” Mahoney said, his eyes narrowing with suspicion. “Talk to the cops. I’ll meet with them after you’ve talked to them, tell them everything I know, but I if go to them on my own they’ll blow me off.”

  But they sure as hell wouldn’t blow off John Fitzpatrick Mahoney. No, sir. They’d reopen the investigation and find some physical evidence tying Morelli to the crime. They’d make Marcus Perry admit to seeing Burrows leave the house. They’d whack Abe Burrows with a rubber hose and make him talk. But it would take a big push from Mahoney.

  The Speaker responded immediately. The brain inside his large, handsome head could calculate self-serving strategies faster than any computer. It didn’t take him a nanosecond to reject DeMarco’s suggestion.

  “No way,” he said. “If I go to the cops and tell ’em I think Morelli’s a murderer, and if they can’t prove it, my ass is fried. Can you imagine the fuckin’ headline? Speaker of the House Accuses Presidential Contender of Murder. No goddamn way is that gonna happen, not with what you’ve got. No, you go to the cops on your own.”

  “It won’t work!” DeMarco protested.

  “You make it work, goddamnit!”

  DeMarco just shook his head.

  “You know if I go to the police,” DeMarco said, “there’s a good chance it’ll get back to Morelli. Are you going to support me if he comes after me?”

  “Of course,” Mahoney said.

  Of course, my ass, DeMarco thought.

  “And there’s something else you need to know,” DeMarco said.

  “What!” Mahoney snapped.

  DeMarco could tell that his boss wanted this meeting over, that he wanted DeMarco to leave, but DeMarco didn’t care. He launched into a discussion about Charlie Eklund conducting surveillance operations on Morelli, and van Horn and Suttel’s deaths, and the unknown man who’d been helping Paul Morel
li throughout his political career. As DeMarco talked, he could see Mahoney’s frustration building. DeMarco’s tale was complex—and John Mahoney didn’t have the patience for complex tales. But what he did have was the ability to get to the core of an issue.

  Mahoney stopped DeMarco mid-sentence by yelling, “Enough! Enough with all this bullshit about the CIA and some guy who’s been helping Morelli. Forget all that crap and focus on one thing: focus on Morelli.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Joe,” Mahoney said, looking directly into DeMarco’s eyes, giving him that look—the look he used to convince other politicians to follow his lead, the look he used to get young women to crawl into his bed. “Focus on Morelli. If we nail him, son, he’s of no use to this CIA guy. And if we nail him, whatever he’s done in the past and whoever’s been helping him in the past becomes irrelevant. We gotta get him. We can’t let him get away with what he’s done.”

  DeMarco didn’t bother to ask Mahoney why he kept saying “we” when he wanted DeMarco to do all the work and take all the risks.

  DeMarco wanted to take Mahoney out on his damn boat and feed him to the fishes.

  Chapter 42

  Lieutenant David Drummond put down the newspaper he’d been reading and looked up at DeMarco in irritation. Before Drummond could speak, DeMarco said, “What I’ve got to say is going to shock you.”

  Drummond’s expression of annoyance was instantly replaced by one of amusement.

  “You couldn’t shock me, pal,” he said, “if you dropped your pants and showed me a rose where your dick’s supposed to be.”

  “Okay,” DeMarco said. “I believe Senator Paul Morelli, abetted by his chief of staff, Abe Burrows, killed Lydia Morelli and Isaiah Perry in cold blood.” Judging by the way Drummond’s jaw dropped, DeMarco figured that he had given the detective a jolt even without undoing his belt.