by Mike Lawson
“So it’s possible Murphy’s right?”
“He could be,” Emma said, “but it seems unlikely Morelli would take this kind of risk. Especially this soon.”
That was exactly what DeMarco had thought.
“But you better watch your back, Joe,” Emma added. “Do you want me to provide you with some protection?”
DeMarco hesitated. Maybe someone to cover him wouldn’t be a bad idea. Maybe he should even ask Emma for a gun. “No,” he finally said. “I’ll be okay.”
After he finished talking to Emma, he tried to get back to the congressman’s financial records but after five minutes he said to hell with it. He wanted to know where Paul Morelli was.
Packy Morris gave a languid wave as DeMarco entered his office. DeMarco didn’t see how it was possible—the human skeleton has structural limits—but Packy looked even bigger than he had the last time DeMarco had seen him. He had the phone to his ear, almost invisible in one large hand, and was nodding every few seconds, saying, “Right. Right.”
Packy looked at DeMarco and rolled his eyes in exasperation. Finally he hung up, sat back in his chair, and said, “Morons, Joe, this city is filled with morons. Washington should be floating, the empty heads of its befuddled citizens, like hot-air balloons, tugging it aloft.” Shaking his head in mock dismay, he added, “I despair for the republic.”
DeMarco waited a beat then said, “Are you through, Packy?”
Packy’s small, malevolent eyes twinkled. “So what do you want, little citizen?” he said.
“What’s Paul Morelli been up to lately?”
Packy studied DeMarco’s face, and as he did, he tapped his front teeth with the eraser end of a pencil.
“The last time you were here you asked about Morelli,” he said. “Are you the head of his I-coulda-been-a-contender fan club?”
“I’m just curious about him.”
“Just curious, my ass. You’re asking for a reason. Would you care to share?”
Packy sat there like an arrogant Buddha, his small eyes laughing. Toying with DeMarco was more fun than plucking the wings off flies.
“Packy,” DeMarco said, “would you like me to talk to your born-again boss about a member of his staff who has a thing for hookers made up like kittens?”
Packy started tapping his teeth again with the pencil, trying to gauge DeMarco’s sincerity.
“You’d be such a prick?” he asked.
“Without hesitation. Now quit pretending you’re Bill Buckley’s fat brother and tell me what Morelli’s been up to.”
“Well, since you asked nice, all right. Senator Morelli has disappeared.”
“What do you mean, disappeared?”
“Just that. He’s disappeared. His own staff doesn’t know where he’s at.”
“How do you know?”
He gave DeMarco a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding look.
“Yes, and it’s been tres embarrassing for his staff.”
“Packy, if you wanted to find him, how would you go about it?”
“You’re asking me? I thought you were some kind of investigator. What the hell do you do, Joe?”
DeMarco ignored the question, and said, “I’m not talking about a missing persons search. I’m asking who you’d talk to that would most likely know where he is.”
“I’ve already talked to him. He doesn’t know.”
“Who?”
“The chief of staff in his New York office. Next to the late Abe Burrows, he was closer to Saint Paul than his confessor. If he doesn’t know, nobody does.”
“But would he tell you?”
“I’ve got more on him than you have on me. I mean, if you want to hear about something kinky . . .”
“Uncle Harry, it’s Joe.”
Harry Foster hesitated before he answered. “Yes,” he finally said, “what can I do for you?”
DeMarco was taken aback. Harry was never so formal, not when dealing with him.
“It’s about Paul Morelli, Harry.”
DeMarco thought he heard a small groan come from Harry.
“Joe,” Harry said, his voice serious, “there’s a lotta speculation that someone set Paul up. No one believes that this out-of-work actress just decided to become a secretary or that this photographer just happened to be hanging around the Russell Building. Please tell me you didn’t have anything to do with that, son. Please.”
“Of course not, Harry,” DeMarco said. He hated to lie to his godfather, but what else could he say?
There was another lengthy pause while Harry contemplated DeMarco’s response. Finally he said, “So what is it you want to know about Paul?”
“I want to know where he’s hiding.”
“You and every journalist on the planet. But why do you want to know?”
Shit, DeMarco thought. He should have anticipated that question. He began to think of a plausible lie, but before he could utter it, Harry said, “It doesn’t matter. I don’t know where he is. When I heard about his troubles, I called him, figuring he could use a good PR man, but he didn’t return my calls. I’ve tried to track him down, but he’s vanished.”
“How the hell could he vanish, Harry? He’s a U.S. senator with one of the most recognizable faces in the world.”
“It’s easy to vanish if you’ve got money. You grow a beard, you buy a hat, and you have a chartered jet take you someplace with palm trees.”
Harry was right.
“Harry, if anybody would know where he is, who would it be?”
“Two people, and I’ve talked to both of them. One’s the chief of staff for his New York office, George Burak, and the other’s a . . . oh, a relative.”
“What relative?”
“Joe, I gotta run now. I have a client waiting.” And Harry hung up.
DeMarco spent lunch at the Monocle, drinking martinis, eating free peanuts, and arguing with himself. On the blank page of his mind, he drew a line down the middle. On one side he listed all the reasons why Paul Morelli could be having people killed and maimed, and on the other side, all the reasons why that didn’t make sense.
He thought about Morelli, sitting off in some isolated spot, driven over the edge by what had happened to him, using his sick, brilliant mind to plot revenge, but he ultimately rejected the idea. Revenge was an emotional crime, it was about getting even, and Morelli, unless he was drunk, was calculating and totally rational. Killing everyone who had been there the night he was arrested was too risky and not rational at all.
DeMarco finally concluded that the similarity between Parker’s death and Arnie’s accident—the timing of the events, the fact that both occurrences had involved people with less than sterling characters—was just coincidence. It had to be.
Sticking the swizzle stick from the last martini in his mouth, DeMarco waved a jaunty goodbye to the bartender. It was time to quit worrying about Paul Morelli.
Chapter 61
Eight a.m., two days later, DeMarco stood in the doorway of his house, shaking the rain off his umbrella. He was wearing a raincoat over a wife-beater undershirt and boxer shorts. His slippers were soaked through. In his left hand was the newspaper, the edition that was supposed to be delivered by six a.m., and the paper was a waterlogged mass that he had found under a rhododendron ten feet from the door. DeMarco’s Christmas tip to his paperboy would be a note advising him to buy an alarm clock and improve his aim.
He went into the kitchen, still muttering curses at the paperboy, laid the wet paper on the counter, and poured a cup of coffee. Since the first part of the paper was nothing but soggy pulp, he put the national news aside and turned to the local section. On the bottom of the second page, beneath an article on cost overruns incurred renovating the Jefferson Memorial, was a picture of one-time congressman Clayton Adams. The picture of Adams, a headshot taken from his days in the House, showed him smiling; apparently they couldn’t find a photo of him when he wasn’t smiling. The article accompanying the happy picture said that Clayton Adams was dead.
Adams’s obituary did not contain the modifier “distinguished legislator”; no one was willing to state, even posthumously, that America’s destiny had been altered in any appreciable way by Adams’s five terms of service. The paper did note, for some mean-spirited reason, that Adams had once been investigated by the House Ethics Committee for sponsoring a bill that benefited a construction company owned by a cousin. Regarding the cause of death, the only thing that DeMarco cared about, the Post said that the good congressman had died of a heart attack, noting that he had had a quadruple bypass two years earlier.
DeMarco looked out his kitchen window at the rain falling on his untended backyard lawn. He had once read a story—probably in Reader’s Digest while waiting to have his hair cut—about a man in Arkansas who had been struck five times by lightning. It seemed the poor fellow’s head was some sort of knobby lightning rod. The same article mentioned other queer folk, all sounding like the type that aliens preferred to kidnap, who had also been zapped more than once. The point of the story was, contrary to the old cliché, that lightning could indeed strike twice.
And maybe it did, and maybe coincidence against incredible odds was more commonplace than he had ever suspected, but DeMarco did not believe that what had happened to Gary Parker, Arnie Berg, and Clayton Adams was a trifecta of random acts of divine whimsy.
Brenda!
He rushed to the phone in his den and dialed her number. The phone rang five times before she answered.
“Brenda, thank God you’re home,” he said.
“Sweetie! It’s so good to hear from you,” she said. “I’ve missed you terribly.”
That was a bald-faced lie, but a nice one. Since gaining instant celebrity status for her part in Morelli’s demise, Brenda’s career had skyrocketed. DeMarco had read that she was currently acting in a Matt Damon movie, not the lead, but a good supporting role. He’d also read she’d been seen recently in the company of another famous actor, but was definitely not responsible for him breaking up with his wife.
“Brenda,” DeMarco said, “there’s something going on that—”
“Joe, I’m just tickled pink you called, but I can’t talk now. The limo’s waiting for me. My plane leaves in an hour.”
“Brenda, listen to me, you’re in—”
“Honey, I’ll be in Seattle tonight. At the Sheraton. Call me there.”
“Brenda, goddamnit, wait a—”
He was speaking to a dial tone.
Chapter 62
At four-thirty that evening, DeMarco was in the lobby of the Seattle Sheraton. Brenda wasn’t in her room and he didn’t have the slightest idea where she might be. He walked over to the concierge’s desk, where he was ignored and forced to listen to the concierge and a bellboy talk about the Seattle Seahawks collapsing in the fourth quarter of their last game. Go Skins. He took a twenty from his wallet and held it up so the concierge could see it in his peripheral vision. The man’s head swiveled so fast that there was the pleasing possibility of whiplash.
“Yes, sir!” he said. “May I help you?”
DeMarco said he was trying to find a Ms. Hathaway, an actress from California making a movie in Seattle. The concierge had a wandering eye and was able to focus simultaneously on the twenty and DeMarco’s face. He plucked the bill from DeMarco’s hand.
“They’re filming just a few blocks from here, down at the Pike Place Market. They’ll be there until midnight.”
Seattle’s Pike Place Market is an open-air bazaar, a must-see tourist trap filled with produce vendors, tone-deaf street musicians, and weekend artists. It’s a place where fishmongers mong. At six o’clock at night, the vendors’ stalls were closed and the smell of rotting sea-life lingered in the air.
DeMarco found the film crew easily. They were on the second floor of a restaurant called Lowell’s, surrounded by a small crowd of star-gazers. Matt Damon and a busty, dark-haired actress that DeMarco recognized, but whose name he couldn’t remember—Kathy, Katy, something like that—were seated at a table, holding hands, eyes locked: Hollywood’s portrait of a couple in love. The windows behind them, which stretched the entire length of the wall, offered a magnificent twilight view of Elliott Bay.
DeMarco looked around for Brenda but didn’t see her. Walking in his direction was a harried-looking woman with reading glasses half-buried in the nest of her frizzy perm. She was holding a clipboard and two cell phones hung from her belt. She looked like someone whose name would sweep by unnoticed in the credits at the end of the film—second gaffer to the gaffer’s boy, third assistant to the cinematographer’s toady. DeMarco reached out and grabbed her arm as she passed.
“Do you mind!” she said, glaring at him as she pulled her arm free.
“I need to talk to Brenda Hathaway.”
“Tough shit,” the lady said. “If you don’t wanna get tossed outta here, get back over there with the rest of the looky-loos.”
DeMarco pulled out his congressional ID and flashed it in her face.
“I’m a federal investigator, not a fan. Tell me where she is or I’ll shut down this whole operation.”
“Oh, bullshit,” she said. “We’ve got a permit.”
DeMarco pulled from his memory a line from some movie he’d once seen. “Lady,” he said, “I’ve got a badge, a gun, and a bad temper. Now where is she?”
The clipboard lady wasn’t intimidated but she said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake. She’s in the restaurant next door, taking a break with some of the crew.” As he turned to leave, he heard her mumble, “Fucking storm trooper.”
The place next door was called the Athenian Inn and Brenda was seated at a table with two other women drinking coffee. Before DeMarco could reach her table, a young man built like a bouncer and wearing a blue windbreaker with the word SECURITY on it put a hand in the center of DeMarco’s chest. Fortunately Brenda noticed him at that moment.
“Joe!” she shrieked, and rushed over and kissed him on the mouth. It was a nice kiss. “What on earth are you doing here?” she said.
“Brenda, we need to talk. The people who helped me bring down Paul Morelli are getting killed.”
“What are you talking about?” Brenda said, unconsciously backing away from him.
“Just what I said. Gary Parker, Clayton Adams, they’ve been—”
“Gary’s dead?”
“Yeah. Brenda, you have to—”
“Brenda, they’re ready for you.” DeMarco turned and saw the lady with the clipboard. She gave DeMarco a little go-fuck-yourself smile.
“Brenda,” DeMarco said, “listen to me. You have to—”
“Stop!” Brenda said and waved her hands in front of DeMarco’s face. “I can’t handle this right now. I’ve got a scene to shoot and I don’t want this stuff inside my head. Whatever you’re talking about, I’ll deal with it later.”
Brenda turned and walked away before he could stop her. He thought about dragging her out of there, and then realized he was being foolish. She’d be safe with so many people around and the cameras rolling—plus the guy in the security jacket would probably break his neck.
Over her shoulder Brenda said, “Come on, Joe, you can watch my scene.”
The crowd of gawkers who’d been watching the filming was no longer paying attention to Matt Damon and his female lead. They weren’t paying attention because Brenda had just taken off her blouse, offering fans and camera crew an eye-popping view of her marvelous chest in a push-up bra. She stood there, not the least self-conscious, tapping her foot impatiently until a skinny, bald guy wearing a faded nuke-the-whales T-shirt pushed his way through the ring of spectators and gave
Brenda something that looked like a lightweight life jacket. After she had the vest on, the whale-hater reached out and appeared to fondle Brenda’s boobs.
Brenda had gotten DeMarco a place to stand near one of the cameramen and DeMarco said to him, “Uh, what’s that guy doing?”
The cameraman, a man as big and hairy as a Kodiak bear, grinned an
d said, “He’s the prop guy. Luckiest dude on the set. The vest he’s playing with has these teeny radio-controlled charges that explode when Brenda gets shot. They throw fake blood about ten feet so you can get slow-mo gore. Real Peckinpahish. You’ll see.”
Brenda rebuttoned her blouse and the prop guy handed her a silver-plated automatic pistol. She took the gun from him then turned and quickly exited the restaurant. A moment later someone yelled, “Quiet on the set. Action,” and Brenda came back into the restaurant and walked toward the table where Damon and the dark-haired starlet were seated.
Brenda staggered slightly as she walked, feigning either intoxication or some state of advanced psychosis. Her lips were moving, but DeMarco couldn’t hear most of what she was saying; he assumed the dialogue would be dubbed in later. Damon and the other actress pantomimed shock when Brenda pointed her gun at them, then stood up and made don’t-shoot-me gestures with their hands. When Brenda narrowed her eyes and pointed the gun at Damon’s heart, Damon’s leading lady jumped forward and grabbed Brenda’s arm.
The two actresses fell to the floor and rolled about, wrestling for the gun, the skirts of both women rising nicely to expose sleek, creamy thighs. DeMarco assumed that what would happen next would be the old movie ploy where a shot would be fired as the women struggled, followed by a long, suspenseful moment to allow the audience time to bite their nails and wonder if it was the heroine who’d been plugged—which instantly made DeMarco wonder about the gun. What if it contained real bullets and not blanks?
It turned out DeMarco was wrong: the gun didn’t go off while the women were wrestling. Katy, Kathy, whoever the hell she was, put some sort of kung-fu wrist lock on Brenda and managed to win the weapon. Katy then jumped to her feet and backed cautiously away from crazy Brenda, aiming the gun at her—and at that point a man wearing a Yankees baseball cap yelled “Cut.”