Collateral Damage

by Michael Bowen

  “Then what—” C-Sharp started to ask.

  “As my mother used to say,” Phillips interjected, “if you keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut, you might learn something.”

  “To continue,” Michaelson said. “Andrew Shepherd’s wife divorced him at a time when he was going through a psychological crisis, wondering about the worth of his life and career. In this condition, he found himself susceptible to advances by men who claimed to find him attractive or fascinating. That strikes me as very human, although I recognize that there are different views on the matter. I suppose any who are without sin should feel free to cast the first stone.”

  “I don’t see any takers,” Marjorie said.

  Project, however, glanced up sharply from his freshly filled plate with a look suggesting that he was striving valiantly to assimilate puzzling data.

  “Steady, tiger,” Phillips said calmly. “In the words of that remarkable woman, Saint Teresa of Avila, ‘Humility is truth.’”

  “Through an unforeseeable combination of vexatious circumstances, unfortunately,” Michaelson continued, “Mr. Shepherd’s predilections led to an experience that was quite traumatic for both him and Catherine. The details needn’t concern us. Its significance for present purposes is that it resulted in psychological counseling, generating treatment records that should have been kept highly confidential but weren’t.”

  “Well, that narrows things down a bit, doesn’t it?” Cindy muttered.

  “Fast-forward to a little over four years ago,” Michaelson said. “Andrew Shepherd learned that he had inoperable stomach cancer. He decided to take his own life. He arranged his affairs and made sure that his family was properly provided for. Then he did one more thing. He felt that Cindy was far less fragile emotionally than Catherine. So he took some pains to ensure that Cindy rather than Catherine would find his body. He thought that Cindy would be able to get the situation under control and spare Catherine the worst of the ordeal. Unfortunately, again, his plans miscarried.”

  “That’s enough,” Cindy snapped. “Cathy doesn’t have to sit here and take this in her own house.”

  “Steady, tiger,” Catherine said evenly. “In the immortal words of that remarkable woman Lesley Gore, ‘It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to.’”

  “My surmise,” Michaelson said, “and that’s all it is, is that Andrew Shepherd killed himself less than an hour before he expected Cindy to come home, and several hours before Catherine was due. The Washington area, however, was hit by a snowstorm. The combined incompetence of Washington drivers and its snow-removal crew created the usual, grossly disproportionate gridlock. A trip that should have taken Cindy fifteen minutes consumed over four hours. Catherine, traveling from a different place by a route that didn’t take her through Washington, got home before Cindy and found the body.”

  “I haven’t heard anything about P.D. yet,” C-Sharp said.

  “You are beginning to annoy me,” Phillips told C-Sharp.

  “Preston Demarest had already come into the picture,” Michaelson said. He then explained the CIA’s use of Aldrich Ames to funnel disinformation to the Soviet Union.

  “Are you saying Preston had also been used as a conduit to Ames?” Catherine asked.

  “No. With the Ames scandal about to go public, the CIA had to find out whether any of the people it had used with Ames had retained compromising documents or other inconvenient evidence. Demarest was recruited as a free-lancer for this task, I suspect on the recommendation of Mr. Phillips. He was recruited because he was capable of exploiting Andrew Shepherd’s particular sexual vulnerability. He seduced Andrew Shepherd and used the entrée this provided him to search surreptitiously for documents and records that might interest a reporter looking for a fresh angle on the Ames case. He found some.”

  “Lovely,” Catherine said. Her voice was steady and she gazed, dry-eyed, directly at Michaelson.

  “It may be aesthetically repulsive, but it was a classic operational necessity,” Michaelson said. “I’m not a CIA cheerleader, but that’s the reality. Information like that, promiscuously revealed, can get people killed.”

  “What did he find?” C-Sharp asked.

  “It’s not important. He found enough to realize, after Ames’ arrest hit the papers, how the CIA had been using Ames. Mr. Demarest wrongly thought the CIA would view what he had as explosive information. He took it to at least two people to try to exploit the possibilities this suggested.”

  “Who was the other one?” Phillips asked. Catherine and Cindy both looked sharply at him.

  “A man named Connaught, formerly with the CIA but now working for one of the political parties.”

  “The nasty little bitch was two-timing me, after all,” Phillips confirmed with a show of indignant petulance.

  “Connaught and Mr. Phillips here were both smarter than Demarest,” Michaelson said. “They realized that the CIA exposé Demarest thought he had was worthless, but that without knowing it Demarest was in fact onto something of genuine potential value.”

  “Namely?” Catherine asked.

  “Documentary proof that an eighteenth-century ancestor of Marcus Humphreys was a black slaveowner. Demarest had found an arguably compromising hotel receipt hidden in one of the estate books. To take a picture of it, he had laid the receipt over the page where it was stashed. That page happened to be an indenture showing the sale of a slave to Thaddeus Praisegod Humphreys.”

  “Two hundred years ago?” C-Sharp squealed in amazement.

  “Yes,” Michaelson said. “Before the Beatles.”

  “How could anyone think that was politically important?”

  “Oh, don’t be such a complete twit,” Phillips said impatiently. “This is a country that spent two bloody months on the verge of a shooting war and only news junkies knew about it because the lead story was a White House intern who licked something besides postage stamps in the Oval Office.”

  “At any rate,” Michaelson said, “Connaught and our friend Phillips here each, independently, sent Demarest back into Calvert Manor to get a complete copy of the indenture that he had inadvertently photographed in partially concealed form.”

  “He got in the first time by seducing my father,” Catherine said with a sad little head shake. “And the second time by seducing me.”

  “Yes,” Michaelson said. “With a little help from each of his sponsors. Phillips, rather charmingly if you like that kind of thing, briefed him on a collection of harmless eccentrics called the Stuart Restoration Society.”

  “Don’t ask,” Cindy said as C-Sharp opened his mouth.

  “I fell for it like a twelve-year-old with her first romance novel,” Catherine said.

  “Connaught chose a more sinister course. Some recent CIA appointees are much more susceptible than they should be to partisan political leverage. That explains some of the more colorful characters who’ve found their way into the president’s company over the last few years. Connaught exploited that susceptibility to have someone there obtain the records of Catherine’s psychological counseling and provide them to him. He used them to draw Demarest a road map.”

  “Excuse me,” Willie said, rising. “If it’s all right, I’m going to go set up the electronics.”

  “Demarest in this fashion found his way back into Calvert Manor. In the small hours of one morning he snuck into the library and got to work. After he’d found the page but before he could start clicking his Minox, Cindy interrupted him. The ensuing verbal fracas woke up Catherine. Demarest couldn’t explain himself. He staged a melodramatic exit followed by a fake suicide attempt that played skillfully and mercilessly on Catherine’s past trauma. The result was a reconciliation that enabled him to come back and, eventually, try again for the critical document.”

  “But he couldn’t come up with it,” Marjorie said, “because Cindy took it out of the estate bo
ok and hid it.”

  “He was never able to find the document again,” Michaelson said as he glanced at his watch. “But he died trying. Which is what we’re here to explore.”

  The phone rang. Catherine excused herself to answer it, returning in less than a minute.

  “It’s an AT&T operator for you,” she told Michaelson. “She says your conference call is ready.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Where’s Willie?” C-Sharp asked as he looked around the living room.

  “In the upstairs study, where the trustee was the day Preston bought it,” Willie said, his voice resonating over a speakerphone resting next to a television monitor set up on the living-room writing table. The second-floor floor plan filled the monitor’s screen.

  “And who’s the stiff calling in from outside?” C-Sharp said with a nod toward the speakerphone.

  “Corbin James Connaught, joining us from his office in downtown Washington,” Michaelson said. “Welcome to the party, Mr. Connaught.”

  “Joining you from my office on a Sunday morning, soon to be a Sunday afternoon,” Connaught said. “Could we please get on with it?”

  “I should mention that Mr. Connaught is participating reluctantly in our little exercise,” Michaelson said. “I have something he wants and I’m not going to talk to him about it unless he shares this experience with us first.”

  “Perhaps you should explain what the exercise is,” Catherine’s voice said over the speakerphone.

  “Fair enough,” Michaelson said. “Mr. Connaught, through some intermediaries, gets credit for the theory that Preston Demarest’s death was either accidental or an elaborately disguised suicide. Though quite implausible, the theory has the virtue of not being flatly impossible—which appears to be more than we can say for the alternative possibility of intentional homicide.”

  “Since our talk the other night, in other words,” C-Sharp said, “we have gotten exactly, let’s see, humpty-humpty, left at the light—nowhere. Zero progress. Right?”

  “That’s what we’re here to find out,” Michaelson said. “The idea is to replicate the setup at Calvert Manor the day Preston Demarest died. Catherine and Cindy Shepherd are on the phones in their bedrooms, where they were that day. Marjorie Randolph is on the extension in the downstairs den. Avery Phillips and Project are on the phone in the kitchen. Mr. Connaught is joining us from a remote location, just as Mrs. Shepherd was on the day of the killing. And Willie is taking the place of the trustee. The rest of us are in the living room.”

  “To what end?” Connaught asked with a sigh that the speakerphone seemed to amplify.

  “To see if it is physically possible for someone taking part in this phone call on the second floor of this house to get from where they are to the room where Demarest died, stay there long enough to have killed him the way he was killed, exit while leaving behind only doors locked from the other side, and get back to the starting point, without leaving more than five minutes between their documented contributions to the call.”

  “Good luck,” Connaught said without enthusiasm.

  “Thank you,” Michaelson said, scribbling on a legal pad. “It is now eleven forty-three a.m. Are you there, Willie?”

  “Sure am.”

  “All right. Go.”

  “What’s he doing?” Connaught asked.

  “If he’s following the script,” Michaelson said, “he’s climbing out the window onto the porch roof. You do have your copy of the floor plan, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Arrived by messenger yesterday morning.”

  “You’re saying the trustee killed P.D.?” C-Sharp demanded incredulously.

  “No. I’m saying someone on the second floor killed him. We can’t say who, so we’ll start with the position farthest away from him.”

  “Heee-re’s Willie,” a musical contralto sang then over the phone.

  “Eleven forty-six,” Michaelson said, making a note. “Where are you, Willie?”

  “Still on the roof, outside the sewing room that’s right next to the guest room where Preston went to his final reward.”

  “And how is it you’re still able to chat with us?”

  “I reached through the window of that room, picked up the receiver of an extension phone from a table near the window in there, and pulled it out here to the porch. Now I’m going a few feet down the porch to the window of the room where Preston died.”

  “But you can’t get in through there,” C-Sharp said. “At least you couldn’t on the day of the killing.”

  “He doesn’t have to get in through that window,” Michaelson said. “Tell us this, Willie: Is the opening wide enough for you to stick the receiver into the room?”

  “Sure is,” Willie said. “And I’m just about to do it.”

  “Eleven forty-seven,” Michaelson said. “So. Thus far our trustee stand-in has made it through about ten percent of the task without an excessive interval. Of course, this is the easy part. What Willie’s doing now, with the receiver safely stashed in the death room, is scooting further along the roof to the window of the bathroom on the other side. He’ll enter the bathroom through that window, go through the adjoining door into the room where Demarest was, pick up the phone, and report in.”

  Silence intervened long enough to become noticeable. Michaelson saw everyone in the living room glance at their watches. Phillips finally broke in.

  “I’m surprised you don’t have elevator music playing while we’re on hold,” he said.

  “I’ll remember that for our next homicide investigation,” Michaelson promised.

  “An interesting experiment, I suppose,” Connaught said then after another quiet period. “But if this had happened on the day in question, don’t you think Demarest would have noticed little details like the open window on a cold day, the receiver dangling through that window, and so forth?”

  “I’m quite certain he would have. And did.”

  “And it didn’t strike him as a bit odd?”

  “Not in the least,” Michaelson said. “He thought he knew exactly why all this rigmarole was being gone through. He was collaborating actively with the killer to get her into his room.”

  “For the most obvious of reasons, you’re implying,” Connaught said.

  “The obvious will do for now,” Michaelson said. “We’ll hold the subtleties in reserve, in case we need them later on.”

  “Okay, here I am,” Willie panted over the phone at this point. “But getting through that window was a literal pain in the butt. Literal. You heard it here first.”

  “Eleven-fifty,” Michaelson announced. “We could even stretch a point and call it eleven forty-nine and a half.”

  “Speaking of points,” Phillips said, “I think you’ve made yours about the phones. The conference call isn’t an alibi for anyone on the second floor. Using the extension phone in the room on one side and the window of the bathroom on the other, and assuming Demarest’s cooperation, the killer could have gotten from her assigned position into the room where Demarest was without being off the conference call for more than three minutes.”

  “Exactly,” Michaelson said. “And we can all agree, I hope, that once the killer was in the room with the extension receiver, she could interject occasional comments into the conference call during brief breaks from doing whatever her purpose required. She’d have to keep the receiver under a pillow or something in between comments, lest it pick up any stray vocables. But that wouldn’t be any big trick.”

  “I’ll also stipulate that whoever it is you have up there could reverse his course, making comments within the same time limits,” Connaught said. “So why don’t you call this little bit of community theater a success and wrap it up?”

  “Because we’ve handled the phones but not the exit,” Michaelson said. “For that part, unfortunately, we can’t simulate conditions on the
day of the murder perfectly. The temperature then was twenty-two and today it’s around fifty. If you’ll all bear with me, though, I believe I’ve thought of a way around that. Willie will let you know when I step on stage again.”

  Michaelson left the living room for the kitchen, where Phillips glanced at him with quizzical bemusement. He pulled his Thermos from the freezer, opened it, and extracted several Baggies. Phillips couldn’t tell what was inside, beyond noting that it was roughly as transparent as the Baggies themselves. Hustling a bit in deference to the understandable impatience of everyone else involved, Michaelson went upstairs and headed for the room where Demarest had died.

  Cindy accosted him in the hall, cutting in front of him and slapping his chest roughly with the heels of both hands.

  “Is this your idea of keeping your word?” she whispered fiercely. “Who do you think you’re fooling with that any-one-of-the-three-could-have-done-it crap? You might as well accuse Cathy by name.”

  “I’ve kept my word and my conscience is clear,” Michaelson said. “Now please get out of my way before someone overhears you accusing your sister.”

  As he brushed past her, she grabbed at his left arm. He swung it briskly free and with a back chop landed an elbow on her bicep, just hard enough to make her think twice about grabbing him again. He made it into the room without further interference.

  “Intermission is over,” Willie announced over the phone. “Enter Michaelson stage left, with Baggies.”

  “You’re doing fine,” Michaelson said. “Just keep describing exactly what I’m doing.”

  “Okay. He’s fiddling with the lock on the bathroom door now. He just pushed the button to make the bolt spring out.…Now he’s pushing the bolt back in.…He’s taking a small ice cube out of the Baggie and trying to force it into the hole where the bolt is.…Doesn’t look like it’s working…He’s getting a little frustrated…trying it again with a new bitty ice cube.…Hmm. Seems happier with this one.…Now he’s going into the bathroom and closing the door behind him.”