by Mike Lawson
“You can’t possibly believe . . .”
“And very soon, the next phase of my resurrection will begin. While I’m ripping apart the oil conspiracy that’s enslaved this country for a century, a report will surface showing that the tea that Brenda gave me that night contained a small amount of PCP mixed with Rohypnol.
Yes, Joe, angel dust and a roofie. It’s no wonder I acted so bizarrely, so out of character. The technician who analyzed the tea will confess that he hid the report because he was forced to do so by the diabolical Gary Parker.”
“But the tea was never analyzed,” DeMarco said. “The papers said so.”
Morelli smiled. “A brazen lie, Joe, fabricated by Gary Parker.” Before DeMarco could say anything else, Morelli said, “Very soon, a few well-paid, credible people will begin to destroy the reputations of Parker and Arnie Berg and Brenda. In Berg’s case, it obviously won’t be hard to smear his image. The man was despicable. Parker, it will turn out, was a cop on the take, had been one all of his short career, and people will come forward to substantiate this. Your little actress will require some effort. I haven’t worked out all the details yet, but don’t worry, I’ll come up with something.
“Now do you understand, Joe? Now do you see the picture? It’s five or six years in the future. The video is gone and all the people who conspired against me are dead, and all have tarnished reputations. There’s irrefutable evidence that I was drugged and entrapped by a group of treacherous people to keep me from reaching the White House. And by that time, I’ll be the darling of the Western world, Time’s Man of the Year, the one who broke the shackles of Big Oil and who really did something to stop global warming.” He winked at DeMarco. “I believe, sir, that my plan has . . . potential.”
“Don’t you think,” DeMarco said, “that someone’s going to notice that everyone who was involved is dead?”
“Of course they’ll notice, but so what? Parker died in a simple traffic accident. Berg got drunk and fell off a roof with a friend as a witness. And poor Brenda, she was just the victim of an unsafe stunt. And did you know, Joe, that the man who built the staging for Brenda’s last scene, a man with terminal cancer and four kids still living at home, has already admitted that it was his fault the staging fell apart?”
“Jesus Christ,” DeMarco said, “You killed your wife and an innocent kid. You raped your stepdaughter. You belong in an asylum, not the White House.”
DeMarco expected that Morelli would get angry but he didn’t. Instead he nodded his head as if agreeing with DeMarco. “You’re right,” he said. “I have weaknesses. All men do, even great men.”
“You consider killing your wife a ‘weakness’?”
“No, that was a necessity. She was about to destroy everything that I’d worked for. I was talking about Kate. I really do regret what happened to her; I feel terrible about it.” Morelli paused before he added, “But she did overreact a bit.”
“She overreacted?” DeMarco said.
“Well, yes. She didn’t have to kill herself. At any rate, and I certainly hope this makes you feel better, I’ve sworn never to drink again.”
DeMarco had never known anyone so brilliant yet so totally devoid of humanity. He was sure there was some clinical term for Morelli’s condition, but “monster,” as his wife had called him, was easier to understand.
“I’ve got some bad news for you, Senator,” DeMarco said, “Dominic Calvetti knows that you killed Lydia and molested his granddaughter.”
DeMarco could tell that he’d finally managed to surprise Morelli, but not for the reason he thought.
“You figured out that Lydia was Dominic’s daughter? I guess you’re brighter than I thought you were. But Dominic doesn’t know I killed her and he never will. The police haven’t figured it out, so how would he?”
“Because I told him,” DeMarco said.
Morelli laughed. “Ah, Joe, you run a terrible bluff. If you had ever talked to Dominic, you wouldn’t be sitting here. But Dominic was the reason I killed Lydia. I was worried, of course, that the public might believe her about Kate, but my real fear was that Dominic would. And Lydia had also threatened to tell the press about my relationship with him. That could have had a greater impact on my political career than an alcoholic’s unsubstantiated charges of rape.
“You know the real irony, Joe? I could have been another Dominic Calvetti. I was raised with kids who ended up as wise guys working for him, but I chose the higher road. I’ve given my life to public service, not to lining my own pockets. And still you don’t respect me.” Morelli made a little tsk-tsk sound with his tongue, and said, “You’re a hard man to please, my friend, and I guess you’ll go to your grave that way.”
While Morelli was still smiling at his own joke, the door to the cabin swung open. Morelli’s gun hand jerked in the direction of the door, but when he saw who it was, he said, “Lord, Eddie! What on earth are you doing here? You practically gave me a heart attack.”
“Mr. Calvetti’s outside, Senator. You need to give me the gun so he can come in. You know how it is.”
“Dominic’s here?” Morelli said.
“Yes, sir,” Eddie said. “So give me the gun.”
Morelli hesitated, momentarily confused, and maybe frightened, but then he regained his composure. He rose from his chair and walked over to Eddie and handed him the gun. “Thank God, you’re here. You must have followed this lunatic up here,” he said, gesturing toward DeMarco. “He was planning to kill me.”
Eddie said nothing; his face had the mobility of the figures on Mount Rushmore. He put Morelli’s gun in the pocket of his peacoat—and then he hit Morelli in the left side with one of his huge, disfigured hands.
DeMarco heard Morelli’s ribs break.
The breath exploded from Morelli and he collapsed to the floor and curled into a fetal position, clutching his side.
“All clear, boss,” Eddie said.
Calvetti walked into the room alone; Loomis must have remained in the Lincoln.
Calvetti looked down at Morelli. His face was unreadable. His lips were compressed into a thin, unyielding line.
Calvetti had heard every word that Morelli had spoken. DeMarco’s holster had contained a wafer-thin transmitter; the receiver had been in Loomis’s aluminum suitcase. Loomis was a surveillance expert who worked for the FBI—and for Dominic Calvetti. Calvetti had given DeMarco the gun to compel Morelli to admit that he had molested his stepdaughter although Calvetti had believed, that even under the threat of death, that Morelli would never confess to such an unspeakable sin.
“Dominic, what are you doing?” Morelli said. He was in such agony from the pain in his side that he could barely speak.
Calvetti didn’t answer him. He just looked over at Eddie and Eddie kicked Morelli in the side, in the same place where he’d hit him before, and Morelli passed out from the pain.
Calvetti studied Morelli’s prone form for a moment then said to Eddie, “Call your brother. Tell him to come up here.” Turning to DeMarco, he said, “Go back to the car. Loomis will take you back to the city.”
DeMarco just nodded his head. He couldn’t speak because he was holding his breath.
“You know what will happen if you talk about any of this,” Calvetti said.
DeMarco nodded again.
Calvetti looked at DeMarco for what seemed an eternity, apparently wanting to be sure that DeMarco understood what he meant, that if DeMarco ever talked he would die. Then Calvetti’s gaze shifted back to Morelli, and with his unblinking stare and his lined, ancient face and his long, bony nose, he looked like a vulture about to dine on something dead.
DeMarco hadn’t thought it possible to feel any sympathy for Paul Morelli, but at that moment, he did. And then he turned and left the cabin and walked down the snow-lined road back to the Lincoln.
He didn’t look back, not once.
Chapter 68
It was the afternoon of Christmas Eve.
Congress was in recess and the
Capitol was quiet, seeming more like an empty cathedral than a government structure. DeMarco loved the building when it was this way, when it was empty of tourists and lobbyists and politicians. His footsteps echoed throughout the rotunda as he made his way across the floor toward the steps leading up to the Speaker’s suite.
He opened the door to Mahoney’s office and was greeted by the sound of a party in progress and Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas.” He had forgotten, with everything else on his mind, about the Speaker’s Christmas bash. Two desks had been turned into buffet tables, and thirty or forty people milled about, sipping doctored punch from plastic glasses. In one corner stood a small Christmas tree decorated with red-and-white-striped bulbs. Mistletoe dangled from light fixtures in a dozen places. Mahoney loved mistletoe.
And there was Mahoney, at the center of the crowd, the center of attention. Covering his white hair was a red Santa’s hat with white fur trim and a small bell on the top. In one meaty paw he held a glass of spiked eggnog; his other paw rested paternally on the shoulder of a young blond intern.
Mahoney was in the middle of an old and raunchy joke, something involving a priest and three goats. He delivered the punch line in an authentic Irish brogue and his staff all laughed because the boss was laughing. The face of the intern turned pink enough to match her well-filled sweater. The only one not laughing was Mahoney’s chief of staff, who had looked over in alarm when DeMarco came through the door, terrified that he might have been a reporter.
Mahoney saw DeMarco—and the expression on his face. He motioned DeMarco toward his office and proceeded in that direction himself. He stopped once to top off his eggnog with a shot of Jamaican rum, then stopped again to buss a woman standing within the target radius of a mistletoe sprig. The woman was in her forties; Mahoney was an equal-opportunity lecher.
On the drive back to New York with Loomis, DeMarco wondered why Calvetti had decided not to kill him. It could have been because of his relationship to Harry Foster, but he also suspected that somewhere in the lump of anthracite Calvetti had for a heart, he felt remorse for the things he had done on Morelli’s behalf. Whatever the case, he was alive. He was certain that Paul Morelli was not.
He did, however, ignore Calvetti’s warning not to talk to anybody about what had happened at the cabin in Catskill Park. He told Emma. He told her because she had a right to know, and he knew that he could trust her with any secret. Emma’s whole life was a secret. And now he told Mahoney.
“Jesus,” Mahoney said, when DeMarco finished speaking. “What do you think happened after you left?”
“I think Calvetti killed him. Morelli destroyed Calvetti’s plan of placing his own man in the White House, and he killed Calvetti’s daughter and was responsible for the death of his granddaughter. There’s no way Paul Morelli’s still alive.” DeMarco paused, then said, “But I’ll bet we never find the body. Someday, somebody’s going to walk into that cabin where Morelli was staying and see the things he had written on that whiteboard, the vision he had to resurrect his career, and then they’ll think that he realized that it was futile, that he had no chance for a comeback. They’ll think he walked into woods and made himself disappear.”
Mahoney nodded, apparently agreeing with DeMarco’s reasoning. “I think I’m gonna eventually tell Dick Finley what happened,” he said. “He should know why his son died.”
“I guess,” DeMarco said, not sure that that was a good idea. Mahoney shook his head sadly, making the bell on the Santa hat jingle. “Ah, Joe,” he said, “the things Morelli could have done, the things we could have done.”
Mahoney and DeMarco both sat in silence for a while, reflecting morosely on all that had happened. DeMarco’s morose thoughts were mostly about himself. He felt as if God had decided to make a sequel to the story of Job, and that he’d been cast to play the lead. In the last year he’d lost another lover, almost been killed by a madman, and been manipulated, as always, by his boss. He was responsible for the deaths of three people: Gary Parker, Brenda Hathaway, and, very soon, Arnie Berg. If he had never set about to ruin Paul Morelli, they would all still be alive.
Maybe he was even responsible for the deaths of Lydia Morelli and Isaiah Perry. If he’d never met with Lydia, maybe they wouldn’t have died. And Marcus Perry—if he hadn’t talked to him, maybe he would not have tried to avenge his brother’s death.
Maybe. His conscience was sodden with maybes.
Mahoney tipped back his head and polished off his eggnog. “Well, that’s that,” he said, his tone indicating that he was through ruminating about Paul Morelli. “I think I’ll call this kid in New York I know. He’s the attorney general up there now. I think I’ll see if he’s interested in bein’ a senator.”
DeMarco knew that the “kid” in New York was at least fifty.
“He’s kind of an idealist,” Mahoney said, “always tiltin’ at one fuckin’ windmill or another, but I think he’s coachable.”
One thing DeMarco had always admired about John Mahoney was his optimism. Politics was a tough game, and even with Mahoney’s clout, he probably lost half the battles he fought. But each day he got up, put on his armor, picked up his lance, and climbed onto his trusty, sway-backed steed. Mahoney also jousted with windmills.
Yes, the Speaker was through mourning Paul Morelli—it was time to find his replacement, time to fight another battle. DeMarco wished he had Mahoney’s ability to shrug off life’s blows so easily.
And Mahoney must have been thinking the same thing because he said, “Get your chin off your chest, son. You did what you had to do.”
“I know but I was just thinking . . .”
“There’s a gal here this afternoon, my secretary’s niece. I’ll introduce you. I swear she looks like Gina Lollobrigida, Joe. You’re too young to remember Gina, but this gal . . . well, she’s the spittin’ image of her.”
The bell on the Santa’s hat jingled as Mahoney rose unsteadily to his feet. “Come on, Joe. We’re missin’ the party.”
“I love Christmas,” Mahoney said.
Chapter 69
Paul Morelli was barely conscious when Eddie and his brother took him out of the trunk of the car.
Eddie had busted him all up inside. His ribs on both sides were broken, and his kidneys were horribly bruised. He wouldn’t be surprised if his spleen had ruptured. Every time the old man had asked him a question, and every time he had hesitated, Eddie had hit him. He hit him with a fist that felt like a wrecking ball slamming into his body. And in the end, he admitted to every lie. He confessed to everything.
They put him down on his back on a damp, concrete floor. His hands were tied behind him and there was duct tape over his mouth. His eyes took in the building, some sort of circular, concrete structure. He thought it might be a grain silo, and he had this vivid image of tons of wheat pouring down on him, crushing him, smothering him.
He heard something behind him then, metal scraping on metal, like rusty hinges being forced open. Eddie and his brother, two men build like a matched pair of oxen, were grunting with the effort. If they were grunting, it had to be very heavy. As frightened as he already was, it frightened him even more not being able to see what they were doing.
Eddie suddenly came into his field of vision. He bent down, grabbed him by an ankle, and with one hand, dragged him across the concrete floor. He flipped him over onto his belly and cut the rope binding his hands behind his back. Thank God! If he could get the tape off his mouth maybe he could reason with Eddie. But before he could remove the tape, Eddie placed a foot against his shoulder and shoved and he felt himself falling.
He didn’t fall far, maybe six feet. He landed on his back, the breath knocked out of him, waves of pain coursing through his body. He lay there for a minute with his eyes closed, willing himself not to pass out. He couldn’t pass out. He wondered if his back was broken or if one of his fractured ribs had punctured a lung. He finally opened his eyes and looked up.
Calvetti was standing there on th
e edge of the opening that he had been thrown through. A short, frail, white-haired old man—a man who at that moment seemed as old and as terrifying as death itself. He just stood there, looking down at Morelli, studying him, his face expressionless. There was nothing there: not anger, not regret, and certainly not pity.
Morelli reached up to scrape the tape off his mouth so he could talk to Calvetti. He ripped at the tape so frantically that his fingernails scratched grooves into one of his cheeks. “Dominic!” he screamed when the tape was finally off. Then, struggling to control his fear, he lowered his voice and said as calmly as he could, “Don’t do this. Please. I can still be president. I can still achieve our dream.”
Calvetti just shook his head—one time, slowly, from side to side—and then he looked over and nodded to Eddie.
Morelli watched in horror as Eddie and his brother began to lower a heavy concrete door. The door was on massive hinges and was three inches thick. Morelli struggled to get to his feet but with his injuries he was too slow. By the time he got up, Eddie and his brother had closed the door, sealing the space he was in. The last thing Paul Morelli saw before the door closed was Dominic Calvetti’s black eyes silently condemning him to hell.
Morelli raised his hands. He was tall enough that he could touch the door. He pushed against it but knew that even if he hadn’t been injured, he wouldn’t have been able to move it. Then he heard something click, as if some sort of mechanism had been engaged to lock the door.
He sank to the floor in pain, his injuries aggravated by straining against the door. He bit down on the knuckles of his right hand to stop himself from screaming, to force himself to think.