Stranglehold

by Ed Gorman

  “I found out that Monica was blackmailing three of our clients. One of them was Natalie Cooper.” He was pleased with himself. He’d gotten my attention. But my silence made him uneasy. He hurried on. “That’s why somebody killed her.”

  “And you, of course, didn’t know anything about the blackmail?”

  “I’m ruthless. I’m not stupid. Monica was both. She went through our money as soon as we got it. She even tried to convince me we needed a private jet. But she was a good front for our firm. She was good on TV and the cable boys didn’t hate her the way they hate me. So she was useful. But she was greedy and so she got into blackmail.”

  “If she didn’t cut you in, how did you find out about it?”

  “I had her computer hacked. She was smart enough to never say anything outright, but after I read a few hundred e-mails it became clear what she was doing.”

  “Why are you telling me? Shouldn’t you be telling the police?”

  “You’re losing your savvy, Dev. The police know there was a lot of friction between Monica and me. A couple of people in the hotel told them about our shouting matches. They wouldn’t mind pinning her death on me. The press would love it. It’d be like seeing Karl Rove in a perp walk. You people would be having multiple orgasms if you saw something like that. So I’m sure as hell not going to let them know that I had a good reason to want to kill her.”

  Our food came. I had no appetite. I stuck to coffee. He started sawing on his rare steak immediately. After his cheeks were puffed out with meat and his lips glistened with blood, he said, “And there’s another reason. If any of this ever hits the press, I need you to verify that I told you all this. If I’d had anything to do with the blackmail, I sure as hell wouldn’t have told you about it.”

  “Because if the story gets out about blackmail, you’re out of business whether you had anything to do with it or not.”

  “You don’t have to sound so goddamn happy.”

  I pushed my plate away and then pushed my chair back.

  “Where the hell are you going?”

  “I have work to do.”

  “I tell you all this and you just get up and leave without saying anything?”

  “Looks that way, doesn’t it?”

  I threw down a ten for the tip and left the Governor’s Room. The old fart in all the framed photographs and paintings looked crabbier than ever.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Cooper estate stretched across a sprawling piece of land that was partly forest and partly field inhabited by the massive stone Tudor-style great house and the lesser servants’ quarters and the stables where the horses were kept. Senator Cooper had bred and raised trotters. The white fences were stark in the bright afternoon. I pulled up on the circular drive and parked in front of the place. I stood for a moment watching a man walking a horse in from the field to the stables. There was something timeless about it, like a French pastoral painting. The door had a leaded-window insert and was made of half-timber paneling. I had the feeling a tonsured monk might open it.

  A friendly woman in a russet-colored dress greeted me. The white hair framed a handsome face that had likely persevered seventy-some years in this vale of tears. “Yes, may I help you, sir?”

  “My name is Dev Conrad. I need to see Mrs. Cooper.”

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Conrad. Please come in. My name is Winnie Masters. I’m Mrs. Cooper’s secretary.”

  My feet echoed on a gleaming dark floor as she led me through an entry hall that was probably as big as the tiny house where my ex-wife and I spent our first two years. This house felt like a museum, and I didn’t like it at all. As we moved down a hall I began to notice an endless number of framed photographs on the walls. The late senator and Natalie in meet-and-greets with everybody from Bill Clinton to Nelson Mandela to Bono.

  As we continued our trek I noticed a formal dining room to the left. There was enough room for a good share of the United Nations to eat there. Winnie Masters finally stopped when we reached another Tudor door. This one hadn’t required three trees to build, but it still had the sturdy and somewhat forbidding air of all such doors. Winnie opened it, then stood aside while I walked into a timbered den filled with icons of many different eras. The enormous floor-to-ceiling bookcases contrasted with the largest plasma screen I’d ever seen. The snapping flames in the brick fireplace seemed out of place in a room where a dozen theater seats were set in front of a movie screen partially covered with a curtain. There was a dry bar in a far corner. Before she directed me to a deep leather chair, Winnie Masters produced a quaint little coffee cup and said, “Do you take anything in your coffee, Mr. Conrad?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Cup and saucer in my hand, my weight sinking into the luxury of the leather chair, I sat back and gawked around.

  “This was the senator’s favorite room.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “The rolltop desk over there came from one of Jack Kennedy’s homes. The senator worked in the White House when President Kennedy was in office. I don’t think he ever got over what happened that day in Dallas. Mrs. Cooper has told me that he still had nightmares about it right up to the time of his own death. He was very proud that he was able to get that desk.”

  “I’m sure he was.”

  “I never knew Senator Cooper, of course; I only came here after he died to help sort through his papers. Then Mrs. Cooper asked me to stay on, and it’s been quite interesting. After my own husband died, I thought my life was over. But working here—well, as I say, it’s quite interesting.”

  I wondered how much she knew about any of it. If you want to know the skinny on a hospital, ask a nurse; if you want to know the secrets of a corporation, ask the executive secretary; if you want to know anything about a sociopathic former starlet, do you talk to her factotum?

  “Have you seen Susan today?”

  I liked the way she handled it: “Now please, Mr. Conrad, you don’t expect to get me in the middle of all this, do you?”

  “I thought I’d give it a try.” I liked her smile and I liked her.

  “You know what a spear carrier is in theater?”

  “Sure.”

  “That’s what I am in this household. I deliver messages. I don’t interpret them and I don’t enhance them in any way. I like it here because it’s interesting and because I have a very nice room on the third floor. I don’t want to leave.”

  “So you can’t be bribed?”

  “Not unless you’re willing to pay for all seven of my grandchildren’s college educations.” The blue eyes held intelligent amusement. “Now, why don’t I go and see if Natalie’s busy?”

  I always look over the books in libraries, private or public. There was one section that was essentially Americana. The novels ran to Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald—novelists he might have read when he was in college back in the fifties. There was also a good deal of nonfiction, notably books by Saul Alinsky, the Chicago man who taught poor people how to organize and challenge those who held them down. He was a true champion of the downtrodden. His life was threatened many times by those who claimed he was a communist, but he continued on anyway. His books inspired millions of young people. I took down a copy of Reveille for Radicals and turned back the cover.

  For my favorite wild-eyed radical

  From his loving wife Patricia

  They’d been married twenty years before her heart finally gave out. From all I’d read about the couple Patricia was as progressive as her husband. She’d been a sociology student at Alinsky’s alma mater, the University of Chicago, and had met her husband when they’d both been marching to protest a particularly usurious loan company that exploited poor blacks. She’d come from money and prominence but had betrayed her class, as it was often put in those days. She’d worked hard to get her husband elected, first to the House and then to the Senate. The Washington gentry hadn’t liked her. Too liberal. But then, so was her husband.

&n
bsp; Then she died, and after two years of loneliness he met Natalie, and while she hadn’t changed him radically at first, he soon enough became unrecognizable to his old friends. He became interested in becoming wealthy, and if you can’t become wealthy holding a Senate seat, then you are incompetent beyond repair. I believe the term is “license to steal” and that applies to both sides. Natalie was his unindicted co-conspirator. She was the darling of the lobbyists; she understood how secret deals were made to fill the coffers. I tried to imagine Natalie reading Saul Alinsky. I couldn’t help myself. I laughed out loud.

  “Do you talk to yourself, too?” Natalie had come in.

  As I put the book back on the shelf, I said, “Yes, I do, and I find myself pretty damned interesting.”

  “I checked with Ben. That one radio interview still hasn’t been rescheduled. You’re supposed to do what I tell you to.”

  I turned to her and said, “Supposedly you hired us because we know more about campaigning than you do.”

  “We’ll see how you feel when I stop payment on the very large check Winnie mailed to your firm today.”

  By now she was inside the room. At first she’d been addressing me from the doorway as if getting closer might cause her to be ill. She wore silver lamé lounging pajamas—trashy chic. She carried a martini in her left hand and a good deal of malice in her eyes. “I want you to leave.”

  Why waste time? “How much did Monica Davies want from you to keep quiet about Susan?”

  You could never quite forget that she was an actress, not a great one but one who understood some of the basic skills of the craft. And this she did well—rolled her eyes and smiled. “Oh, God, you’re really going to try and bail yourself out with this kind of bullshit?”

  “Larson told me it was a lot of money.”

  I had the pleasure of watching the word “Larson” have the effect of a bullet between the eyes. “What the hell are you talking about?” The acting wasn’t so good this time.

  “He doesn’t want his firm to be associated with blackmail. And I don’t blame him. So before the story breaks he wants to know what’s going on. And so do I.”

  She walked past me, headed for the fireplace. At any other time I would assume that she wanted me to admire her body in the silver lamé pajamas. This time she was just stalling. We were well past the point where she’d ever care about me finding her seductive.

  When she reached the chairs in front of the fireplace, she said, not turning around, “You may as well sit down.”

  “I’ll stand.”

  She finished her martini and walked halfway back to me. Her years showed now, and they were cruel years. Winnie was so much more appealing than she’d ever be. Natalie wouldn’t be able to fathom how that would be possible.

  “I did it for Susan’s sake.”

  “That’s a lie. You did it so there’d be a Cooper in the House and eventually in the Senate. You did it for yourself, not for Susan.”

  “I’ve done a whole lot of things for Susan, and the bitch will never be grateful for them. I tried very hard to be her friend. I knew I’d always be her stepmother and nothing more. But some stepmothers and their daughters get on very well. Not her. She wouldn’t have any of it. She hated me from the day I came into this house. You should have seen her at our wedding. She would barely speak to me. Everybody saw it. It was humiliating. She idealized her mother, that was the problem. Her mother was this grand lady who gave herself to helping the poor. And I was this slut—she actually called me that more than once. This slut. She said I was corrupting her father.”

  She set her martini glass on a small table. She was performing, but at least the writing was getting better. “When I met John and saw all the opportunities he’d passed up, I wanted to help him. I’d been in Washington a few years by then and I knew a lot of people. He had this big house and this reputation as a reformer, but he didn’t have all that much money. And times were changing. He’d come into office when the liberals dominated. But then things turned around, got very conservative. Susan always says that I made him change his votes. Well, if I hadn’t, he never would have been elected for his last term—maybe not for his last two terms. And so he started traveling in conservative circles. We both did. We met a lot of different people. I’ll grant you they were people he wouldn’t have liked before, but he’d mellowed. And he became friendly with them.”

  All this was reverie; I wondered if she’d forgotten I was here.

  “I need to know about the blackmail.”

  “Well, you can blame that bitch for that.”

  She was back at the dry bar then, fixing herself another martini. She talked as she worked. “We sent her to Smith. She stayed two years and then ran off to Paris. And then she traipsed all over the world. The worst part was when she came back to the States. The people she took up with—she was always getting into some kind of scrape. John was beside himself. That was when he developed sleeping problems. I’d find him in the middle of the night sitting up and staring at the wall. I always knew who he was thinking about. Worrying about.”

  “The blackmail. Tell me about the blackmail.”

  She sipped what she’d created. She turned it into stage business, pursing her lips as if she were a wine taster considering the latest offering, then came around from the bar, toting her glass, and said, “I didn’t know about any of this until recently, when Monica Davies contacted me.”

  “Know about any of what?”

  “I’m coming to that.”

  She seated herself with great style, setting her drink on the arm of the leather chair. “You really should sit down, Dev. This may take a while.”

  “Not if you get to the point.”

  “The point, dear, is that my sweet little stepdaughter Susan slept around a lot.”

  “So?”

  “And she didn’t always sleep with the best sort of men. I always wondered if the thugs she dragged home were for my sake—to upset me, to rub my face in it. Her father was more understanding. He always sided with her and said that I was being a snob.”

  “And the point is what?”

  “The point is that over the years there were two of them who later on tried to blackmail her. Threatened to go to the tabloids when Susan announced that she was running for Congress. I insisted she let me handle them, and I did. I hired a private detective and he found out that they were both on parole—if that tells you anything about the kind of man she was seeing—and he told them he would turn his files about them over to their respective parole officers immediately if they didn’t cease and desist.”

  “And did they?”

  “Of course. What choice did they have? But then Monica Davies came along.”

  “When did this start?”

  “We were in Chicago at a regional convention and Davies was there. She took me aside at a cocktail party and whispered a name to me. The name didn’t mean anything to me at the time. But she said to ask Susan about the man. That she’d tell me all about him. So naturally I did. And I had the great pleasure of seeing my stepdaughter start to come apart. All her haughtiness and arrogance—gone, just like that. In fact, she looked sick to her stomach when I started questioning her. At the time I didn’t know anything about the man, but when Davies came back to me and started demanding money, she filled me in about him. A terrible, terrible person.”

  “Am I supposed to guess his name?”

  “His name is Craig Donovan.”

  I walked over to the leather chair facing hers and sat on the arm. “Obviously Donovan went to Monica with his story. Monica would do the blackmailing because she was a lot more dangerous than he was—you knew that. You knew how ruthless she was. And she could destroy Susan overnight. So she cut Donovan in for a piece of it. Then she let you and Susan know what she wanted.”

  She lifted the martini to her mouth but not before offering me a coy smile. “Very good. You should have been a private detective yourself, Dev.”

  “I’m smart enough to know that
Susan has a son named Bobby Flaherty and that Bobby’s in town with his young wife.”

  “Goddammit,” she said. She made fists of her tiny hands and squeezed her eyes shut as if trying to will me out of existence. “This is all coming apart.”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re paying them for.”

  The eyes were open now and they blazed at me. “You’re not very smart after all. A child she gave up for adoption. A sleazebag like Craig Donovan the father. How would that look when the press got hold of it?”

  “It wouldn’t look good. But it could be explained. Bobby was born twenty years ago. Susan can make the case that she was in no condition to be a mother. She and Bobby are getting close now. I could see them at a joint press conference talking about all this.”

  “Oh, right. Can you imagine what Duffy would do with this?”

  “It’s better than living at the mercy of a blackmailer. And it’ll come out eventually anyway. You’ve got several people involved, and that’s a sure way of some reporter picking it up.”

  “What if Donovan goes on TV? Just putting him in front of a TV camera would damage her. I only met him once, but everything about him was sinister. Susan really did like slumming. And again I always thought it was another one of her childish ways of getting back at me.”

  “How was the money delivered?”

  “Wyatt handled it. He’s a very dutiful husband. He arranged for the money in the first place. Even for us, putting a quarter of a million dollars in cash is difficult. He put it in a large black briefcase with a lock on it. A combination lock. And took it to Monica Davies’s hotel room. She took it. She offered him a drink, but he said he’d never drink with anybody like her.”

  “Did he think anybody else was in her room?”

  “I asked him that myself. He said that he told her he needed to use her bathroom so he could look around. But he didn’t see anybody.”

  “Was it a suite?”

  “I asked him that, too. He said no. That’s why he was pretty sure there wasn’t anybody else there. There weren’t many places to hide.” She put her hands over her face and then took them down. “What’re we going to do, Dev?”