Corruption of Power

by Brenda English

  “To meet you. I take it that means he doesn’t know I’m coming along.”

  “No.”

  “He’s not gonna like you springing me on him.”

  “Listen, by the time we’re done, you’ll be the least of his worries. This whole thing, including you being there, is off the record and very unkosher. But if I play this thing right, in the long run, none of that will matter.”

  Well, Lansing certainly knows how to pique a girl’s interest, I thought.

  And that’s putting it mildly, my voice added.

  Leave me alone, I groaned.

  “What?” Lansing asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, embarrassed, “just talking to myself.”

  * * * *

  In another five minutes we were turning up the drive to the Taylor house. Lansing was finishing his instructions on how to comport myself—in short, just stay quiet and listen—when he pulled up at the front door.

  The maid, Maria, was there and let us in without argument when Lansing gave her his name. She did look a little surprised to see me there again, but she kept whatever thoughts she had about it to herself and took us back to the family-room area with all the windows. Hub Taylor was sitting in an overstuffed armchair when we walked in. He, however, didn’t take Maria’s silent approach about my presence.

  “What is she doing here?” he asked angrily, standing up from the chair. “I didn’t say you could bring any press!”

  “Forget about it,” Lansing told him. “She’s just here to listen and in case one of us needs a witness to this conversation later. Nothing she hears will leave this room unless I say so. She’ll do what I tell her.”

  I turned to look at Lansing in astonishment, only to see him give me a surreptitious wink that told me to swallow hard and stay quiet.

  Lansing sat down on the end of the sofa nearest Taylor’s chair, and I helped myself to another chair across from him.

  “So what do you want this time?” Taylor asked impatiently, returning to his chair. “I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  But Lansing wasn’t to be rushed. He sat back on the sofa and looked around the room.

  “Did Mrs. Taylor do much of the decorating herself?” he asked. “This room looks a lot like what I expect she’d have liked, given everything I’ve heard about her.” He didn’t even know Janet Taylor, but I had to give him credit when I realized what he was doing—invoking her presence, bringing her to life again in the house and in Hub Taylor’s mind.

  “Yes,” Taylor said uncomfortably. “She did.”

  “A very special lady, everyone says,” Lansing went on, his expression the very picture of innocence.

  Taylor said nothing, and I had the feeling the memory of his dead wife was gnawing at him again.

  “Okay, Mr. Taylor.” Lansing spoke again. “Let’s get down to why I’m here.”

  Taylor just looked at him. Lansing went on.

  “I want to offer you one last chance to change the story you told us about the afternoon your wife died, about where you were.”

  “There’s nothing to change,” Taylor spoke up gruffly. “I told you where I was. I was out driving around.”

  “Okay, Mr. Taylor,” Lansing said, looking sad now, “let me tell you a different story. I think you may start to remember some things you’ve apparently forgotten.”

  I knew then what Lansing was about to do. He was going to lay the whole thing out for Taylor.

  “What we have, Mr. Taylor,” he said, “is a United States senator, a very powerful man, who can’t leave good-looking women alone. But somewhere along the line, he goes a little over the edge. Somewhere he gets the idea that no woman he’s interested in should be able to tell him no. So one night, when a woman he has the hots for continues to turn him down, he drugs her so he can fuck her.”

  Lansing’s blunt language drew a flinch from Taylor. He had used the word very deliberately, I knew, to emphasize the ugliness of what Lloyd had done. Lansing went on.

  “The plan is that once she’s unconscious, he can do whatever he wants with her. And even if she knows later what happened, what can she do about it? Considering who he is, no one will stick their neck out for her, and he can make life miserable for her.

  “The only problem is, he uses too much of the stuff and it makes her sick. So instead of screwing her, he has to call a doctor friend to meet him at the doctor’s office. The doctor pulls the senator’s chestnuts out of the fire, and the woman is too afraid to talk.

  As Lansing spun his tale I watched Taylor’s face. I suspected that even Taylor hadn’t known this part of the story, that he hadn’t known Lloyd had already put at least one woman’s life in danger before Ann Kane. Nor had he known there was a witness: Peter Morris. Taylor already was watching Lansing’s face as if hypnotized by a cobra.

  “So a few weeks go by,” Lansing was saying, “and the senator’s got his eye on another sweet young thing who wants nothing to do with him. Why not try the mickey on this one? he thinks. Only this time he somehow convinces his friend, a county supervisor, to come along for the fun.”

  Taylor started, then dug his fingers into the chair arms, his knuckles whitening as if he were holding on for dear life.

  “No doubt,” the detective went on, “the senator tells his friend it’s all perfectly safe. Or maybe he doesn’t tell his friend anything until the woman starts passing out. Whichever, they go to the woman’s apartment, talk their way in on some pretext, and have some drinks. The senator puts the mickey in whatever the woman’s drinking. He doesn’t know she isn’t drinking alcohol because of another drug she’s taking. And so she passes out, and the boys have their fun.”

  Taylor’s face, by this time, was suffused with color. Hard to tell if it was fear, embarrassment, or both.

  Lansing sat forward with his forearms on his thighs, his hands clasped between them. He looked at Taylor intently, and Taylor couldn’t seem to pull his eyes away.

  “But then the poor woman starts to have convulsions, and then she dies,” Lansing said. “So the senator and his friend the supervisor take the woman’s body, wrap it in a sheet, and dump it out at Mason Neck, where it’s found the next day. The senator tells his friend not to sweat it. No one saw them with her. There’s no way to connect them. Forget it.”

  “This is all bullshit.” It was Taylor speaking, finally.

  His voice was hoarse and breathy. “I don’t know anything about any of this.”

  “Let’s not get into denials, yet,” Lansing said. “There’s more to the story.” He paused for a second and then continued.

  “In the meantime there’s a tragedy. Someone kills the supervisor’s wife. The supervisor says it wasn’t him. He was out driving around. Neighbors and coworkers say he and his wife were having problems, that he went home that day because his wife was upset about something. But he still says he didn’t do it.

  “At about the same time the doctor who helped Lloyd out begins to get suspicious about the senator. He calls a reporter at one of the newspapers and has a long talk with her about what he knows. He points the finger at the senator in the death of the second woman, and even has some evidence to back it up—like the senator’s blood type and a prescription for a certain drug that he had written for the senator.

  “So the reporter goes to the senator and asks what he knows about it. The senator denies it all, but very shortly, the doctor—a Dr. Peter Morris, who I think you know, by the way—turns up dead, supposedly a suicide, but the police don’t think so. And that same night, the reporter is attacked and she’s told it’s a warning to drop the story. Still, there’s no real proof in either of these cases. It looks, Mr. Taylor, like your wife’s killer and the men who let Ann Kane die are all going to get away.”

  At that, I saw a glimmer of hope come into Taylor’s eyes. But Lansing quickly doused it.

  “Then the police get lucky,” he said. “What the senator doesn’t know yet, Mr. Taylor, is that the woman he drugged first has come forward with he
r story. And we have telephone-company records to back it all up. So listen carefully, Mr. Taylor, and I’ll tell you what I’m going to do.” Lansing moved forward in the chair, even closer to Taylor.

  “I’m going to hang the senator out to dry. I’m going to get a warrant for blood and hair samples, and I’m going to run every test there is, and I’m going to match his hair and his blood and his DNA to the evidence we found on Ann Kane’s body. And do you know what I’m going to do then?”

  For a moment there was no response to Lansing’s question. Finally, as if the words had taken a while to penetrate, Taylor shook his head no.

  “Then I’m going to offer the senator a deal in return for the identity of the second man with him that night. And I can tell you what the senator is going to do. He’s going to take my offer, and he’s going to point the finger at you, and he’s going to say it was all your idea.”

  “No!” Taylor spoke up, as if jerking himself awake. “He’s my friend. He wouldn’t do that!”

  “Oh, I think he would,” Lansing said, smiling as if the thought pleased him. “The other thing you don’t know, sir, is that I now have an eyewitness who can put you at this house at the time your wife died. If you’re already in jail on murder charges, the senator has nothing to lose and everything to gain by laying it all at your feet. He’s going to sell you out!”

  Taylor leaped up from the chair, his eyes wild and panicked.

  “No!” he shouted. “No!” He looked wildly around the room, as if searching for a way out.

  Lansing jumped up as well and shouted back at him.

  “Sit down!” he ordered. “And listen to me!”

  Taylor focused on Lansing’s face and then did as he was told. I was riveted to my chair, fascinated by the whole performance, by a side to Lansing I hadn’t seen, and I was eagerly waiting for him to drop the other shoe.

  Taylor was sitting in the chair once more, gasping for breath as if he had been doing wind sprints.

  “Here’s what I think, Mr. Taylor,” Lansing said, calmly again, as he sat back down, too. “I think your wife’s death was accidental. I think you tried to make it look like murder to hide your own involvement. I think that we’re going to offer you a deal in exchange for the truth. I think what you’re going to do is tell me exactly what happened the day your wife died. And then you’re going to help me nail your friend the senator!”

  Taylor’s chin dropped to his chest, and as tears ran down his face and onto his shirt, great broken sobs issued up out of him, shaking him and grating on my nerve endings like sandpaper.

  Lansing waited calmly, his eyes leaving Taylor’s face only once, to look at me with an expression that told me there was satisfaction in what he had done, but little joy.

  When Taylor finally managed to stop crying, he spoke to Lansing.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt Janet,” he said. “It was an accident, like you said.”

  “I know,” Lansing told him. “But don’t say any more right now. I want you to come down to the station and tell your story there. We can tape your statement for the record. And you should call an attorney to meet us there. I don’t want any questions later about violating your rights. But let me give you a piece of advice, Mr. Taylor.”

  “What?”

  “Get a new attorney. John Aldritch can’t represent you and Lloyd both, and you and I both know where he’s going to throw in his chips.”

  Mutely, Taylor shook his head. I was busy admiring the workings of Lansing’s mind. With his warning to Taylor about Aldritch, he had neatly managed to neutralize the one person who might have tipped his hand to Lloyd before Lansing was ready to go after him. Now Aldritch would have no more warning than Lloyd would.

  Good-looking and smart, too, my voice said. For once, I couldn’t disagree with it.

  Twenty-nine

  After some thought, Taylor called a lawyer he knew socially and asked him to come to the Great Falls station. Lansing and I took Taylor in to the station, none of us talking throughout the twenty-minute trip.

  At the station, Lansing took us in through the back, in an effort to keep Taylor’s presence out of public view—and, he hoped, out of public knowledge. He took Taylor to an interrogation room to wait for the lawyer. Then he took me next door to what I realized was a darkened observation room that looked in to the first room through a one-way mirror.

  “You can watch and listen in here,” he told me. “Just don’t discuss anything that goes on with anyone else who comes in. We’ll talk again when I’m done in there. Okay?”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “I’ll behave.”

  Lansing smiled at me then, a real smile, not the calculated ones I had seen at Taylor’s house. He turned and left the room, and I sank down in a chair in the back corner, wondering how I could think about my love life in the middle of what was going on.

  I cleared the hormones from my brain and settled in to watch Hub Taylor wait. He was like a man dissolving, bit by bit. Every so often a new wave of tears would start in his eyes and run down his face, which now looked pale and doughy. A couple of times he sat forward and put his head in his hands. Cynic that I am, I had to wonder how many of his tears were for his wife and how many for himself.

  Probably ten minutes had gone by when the door to the observation room opened, and several people, some in uniform and some not, came in and sat down. The last one was Bill Russell. He did a double take when he saw me there. Then he walked over and sat down next to me.

  “Lansing know you’re here?” he asked in a whisper.

  “He invited me.”

  At that, Bill’s eyebrows rose in even greater surprise.

  “It’s a long story,” I told him, feeling smug myself for once. “Let’s just say he and I are getting along a little better today.”

  “All right,” Bill agreed as we saw Lansing lead a group into the interrogation room, where Lansing sat down at the head of the table. “But I expect to hear the real story eventually.”

  I gave him an affirmative shake of the head, and as we turned our attention to the other room, a man I didn’t know walked over to Taylor and put a hand on his shoulder, then sat down next to him. One of the two other plainclothes detectives in the group stood by the door as the second one sat down opposite Taylor.

  “Hub,” the lawyer—Sam Ross, according to the whispers of the two cops in front of me—said to his client, “I think you and I should talk privately before you talk to the police.”

  “No!” Taylor said. “I want to get this over with.”

  “But, Hub, I can’t—”

  “I said no! I want to talk about this, and I want to do it now!”

  “All right, Mr. Taylor.” Lansing stepped in smoothly. “If you’re ready to talk to us, the recording system is working and we’re listening.”

  So Taylor told his story… all of it. He told them about how Ed Lloyd gradually had sucked him into his latest little game. Lloyd had started by sympathizing with Taylor that his wife was only “half a woman.” He loved his wife, Taylor said, but as Lloyd had talked about it more and more, he had begun to feel his wife’s paraplegia was cheating him of real sex. So he had started going out with Lloyd to parties, and then to little private parties at Lloyd’s house, where there were just four of them—Lloyd, Taylor, and a couple of attractive young women, although never the same young women.

  “I knew it was wrong,” Taylor said, “and Janet knew something was going on, but once I started, I couldn’t seem to stop. And Ed was always there, telling me I deserved to feel like a real man again.”

  Then came the night, he said, when Lloyd took him to Ann Kane’s apartment. It was clear when she answered the door that she wasn’t expecting them and was less than happy to see Lloyd there. But Lloyd talked his way in—“Just for a nightcap and then we’ll go,” he had said—and Ann Kane finally relented, probably hoping it would get rid of them sooner than continuing to argue. She fixed the two men drinks at Lloyd’s request, but declined to have one hersel
f, which irritated Lloyd. He badgered her about it until she agreed to have a soda. Once the drinks were on the living-room coffee table, Lloyd asked if she had any sort of snack, some crackers maybe. Obligingly, Ann went into the kitchen, and while she was gone Lloyd put some type of powder in her soda.

  “I asked him what the hell he was doing,” said Taylor, “but he told me to shut up, and then she came back with the crackers.”

  It couldn’t have been, he continued, more than fifteen or twenty minutes after she drank the soda that she passed out.

  “It scared the shit out of me,” he said, “but Ed told me to relax, that he had done this before and she would be fine.”

  Lloyd had carried Ann Kane into her bedroom, where he put her on the bed and undressed her, then raped her.

  “And you watched?” Lansing asked him. “You saw him have sex with Ms. Kane?”

  “Yes,” Taylor answered, almost in a whisper.

  “Holy Christ!” Bill muttered beside me.

  “I wonder how much of this was really Lloyd getting his jollies and how much was a test for Taylor,” I mused.

  “And then what happened?” Lansing was asking.

  “Then I had sex with her, too,” Taylor admitted.

  “Why?”

  “It was Ed. He was telling me how great it was, being able to do anything I wanted to her. He kept at me, and finally I did it. He was my friend, the one who got me started in politics. He told me if I did whatever he said, he’d see to it that I ended up in Congress, maybe even the Senate. He said he had to know if I really had the balls for the job.”

  “So you had intercourse with her,” Lansing said. “And then what?”

  “And then she… she started having convulsions.”

  Taylor described Ann Kane’s death, by which time Sam Ross was looking rather green around the gills. When the convulsions started, Taylor said, neither he nor Lloyd had any idea what to do. Within a minute or two Ann stopped convulsing, but she also stopped breathing. Taylor tried pounding on her chest, but nothing happened, and they gave up.