“I’ll walk you to school,” was all I said.
Taking a muffin from the sideboard, I checked my e-mail while I waited for EG to brush her teeth and pack her backpack. I had no more promising leads on transportation companies. I knew I wouldn’t find Pao that way. I suspected Graham had set me on another wild goose chase so I’d fail. I never knew when to trust the spook. Connecting the ownership of textbook publishers didn’t prove Edu-Pub laundered cash for terrorists or politicians, or that Tex had been framed or Max and Mindy murdered for investigating them. I was convinced Pao was the key.
The only thing I knew for certain was that I wasn’t letting Graham have my house if I could prevent it, and if I had to move out, I would only be nastier about acquiring it again.
I debated going up to the attic and confronting my nemesis in person, but I didn’t see the point. I’d named the game, and even though I felt I was close, I’d lost. I had only one option left—the forged invitations for the reception.
Hearing EG plodding down the stairs, I went out in the foyer to meet her. The waxed hardwood floors gleamed in the sunlight from the leaded-glass transom. The antique side table sported a fresh arrangement of yellow sweetheart roses that Nick had probably brought home. The gloomy oil painting of some long dead ancestor even seemed welcoming. I didn’t want to give any of this up. I knew in my heart that grandfather had meant for us to have it. If Max and my Oracle were one and the same, he’d been taking care of me for years. I wanted to cry.
“Blackwell Johnson on line one,” the intercom announced. Mallard’s voice, not Graham’s.
I didn’t have time for lying lawyers. EG arrived to stand beside me. “Tell him I’ll get back to him later.” I opened the door and we walked out silently. At least EG wasn’t a whiner. I gave her credit for that.
“We’re not done yet,” I told her. “I won’t make promises I can’t keep. If our bags are on the step when we get home, I’ll find another place for us. I meant it about finding you an alternative school.”
“I told Magda I was staying,” she said gloomily.
“Yeah, and Graham yelled at me for it.” How much did I tell her about our mother? Magda wasn’t a beautiful airhead but a dangerous unknown in our equation. “You’d better tell me where your passport is so we aren’t thrown out without it.”
“It’s not in the house. I can get it.”
I saw a certain resemblance to Nick in the grim set of her mouth. For all I knew, mine had the same tight lines. We’d started on this adventure as something of a lark, but it had become a lot more in this last week and a half.
I tugged her hair affectionately as we squeezed into the crowded Metro. “If you planted it in Mallard’s herb pots, I hope you wrapped it in plastic.”
She offered a half-hearted grin. We understood each other. We might want to murder each other upon occasion, but we were sisters. Murderous urges came with the territory.
We said nothing on the subway ride. By the time we reached our destination, I had worked up a lot of fears and was having doubts about letting EG out of my sight. But the security guards at the gates reassured me as we walked up to the school.
“You still think my dad is innocent?” she asked quietly before we reached the entrance.
“Most probably,” I agreed. “A man like Tex is capable of questionable acts to get what he wants. I think he may have been trying to escape a bad situation and someone framed him. I can’t imagine him as a murderer, not any more than we could do something like that.”
She nodded, knowing the gray areas our family often trod. “That’s what I thought. I won’t mind living in a small apartment.”
She walked down the hall, leaving me shell-shocked. EG wasn’t much inclined to express herself, but I think she’d just said she wanted to stay with me even if we lost the house.
I was the best virtual assistant in the world, and I couldn’t find one lousy scumsucker so my sister had some hope of acquiring a home and a father. Damn, that made me feel like camel spit.
~
I wasn’t in the mood for apartment hunting. Since textbooks were on my mind, I decided to find out more about the educational committee Mindy and my grandfather and possibly Tex had been investigating. And I didn’t want to be near Graham while I did it.
I grabbed the Metro to L’Enfant Plaza instead of returning to the house. It’s almost impossible to find a public telephone now that everyone possesses a cell, but there was a hotel in the station, and I looked like a tourist. I sauntered in to make use of the public phones.
I didn’t know the number for Tex’s office, but I knew Nick’s cell number. Fortunately for me, he actually answered it. “Where is Tex today?” I demanded without preamble.
“What are you up to?” he asked in a very un-Nickly way.
I wasn’t certain I liked what D.C. and power status was doing to my normally easygoing brother. Or maybe my paranoia was contagious. “I thought I’d have a word with the dear, sweet man before we leave.”
“Balderdash.” Only Nick could get away with a word like that. “Besides, he’s in meetings all day. He’s with his lawyers now.”
“Then perhaps I should stop over at his house and have a conversation with his wife. She belongs to that family values group, doesn’t she?” I asked as sweetly as I knew how, although two men and a teenager lingering near the phones hurried away when they caught my expression.
“For pity’s sake, Ana, leave her alone. Go look for an apartment. You can’t push everyone into doing what you want. We’ll have money before long. Everything will be fine.”
“Nick, you’re sweet, but a moron. All right, give me whatever you can find about that educational committee Mindy Carstairs was working on.”
“If you’re actually planning on helping the senator, then I can fax you the info, but you’ll have to twist the fax number from our resident spider.”
“I’m not going anywhere near that man or I’m likely to get arrested. Send it to my e-mail address, and I’ll pick it up at an internet café.”
We reached an agreement, and I headed for the desk to ask for the nearest computer. The hotel had computer services, but funny thing, they didn’t lend them to non-guests. With directions in hand, I stopped in the restroom of the hotel’s convention center to powder my nose. Say what you will about big American hotels, but they’re a class service for the homeless.
I got some cash out of my account from the hotel ATM, sauntered over to the internet café, fed my money to the clerk, and accessed my website. One Christmas a client had sent me an impressive leather Daytimer. I pulled it out now, using it to jot down the info Nick sent on Mindy’s contacts and duties. Then I looked up the directions to the office housing the educational committee. It was in the same complex as the GSA, just down the road.
Hotel gift shops are dreadful places to buy clothes unless one threw money around like chicken feed, but I refused to return to the mansion, and I needed something besides shorts and a halter to visit the stifling corridors of authority.
Vowing to charge Tex for expenses, I bought a long rayon skirt in a swirl of bright colors and topped it with a hideously expensive silk sleeveless pullover in black. I might have been forced to crawl out of my cave, but I can still do eccentric. Besides, they didn’t have denim.
I tucked my black bag under my arm—out of reach of purse snatchers—and walked over to the education building. Knowing I was walking into the annex where Mindy Carstairs was last seen, I used a modicum of caution for a change.
I politely informed everyone who asked that I was Ana Maximillian from Senator Hammond’s office. I convinced the appointment clerk that someone must have screwed up because I’d had this appointment for weeks. I held up my passport ID with my finger casually blocking Devlin and had her check for appointments in the name of Mindy Carstairs. I made a show of annoyance that the appointment hadn’t been changed to my name and the right date after Mindy’s death. The clerk bought it.
I referred th
em to Nick’s new business cell phone if anyone inquired. I love having connections in the right places. I don’t love government offices, but their one advantage is that the right hand seldom knows what the left hand is doing. Despite all the new security restrictions, we still had a government of the people, for the people, and people were seldom predictable or reliable. With my ID and a big smile, I worked my way right up to the authority overseeing the education committee. Mindy had been the liaison between Tex’s office and the committee, and according to the police reports, security had seen her here just before lunch. She’d made a call from the lobby, then hadn’t showed up for her appointment later.
“Miss Maximillian, how may I help you?” the boss man over the committee asked with a pompous, busy air intended to tell me I wasn’t welcome.
This would be a lot easier if I were a cop or a PI and could ask for what I wanted. But I was raised a diplomatic corps brat and knew the jargon and the procedures well enough. I don’t recommend trying this at home.
I pulled out my Mont Blanc fountain pen—purchased on E-bay—and my freebie Daytimer, flipped a few pages, and read the notes I’d taken from Nick and added a few of my own. “Mindy Carstairs was working on the textbook recommendations for the committee. The senator’s office doesn’t have that report in our files. Could you please provide us with a copy?”
He made a note on a legal pad. “Anything else?”
No chitchat about how’s the senator doing and we’re so sorry about Miss Carstairs and anything we can do to help. Bastard. But I knew the system. One sided with the survivors to avoid going down with the ship.
He obviously hadn’t read this morning’s papers or he’d be a little more suspicious of my request. That he wasn’t in the least interested crossed him off my suspect list. Or else it crossed out the report as a motive. Admittedly, I was chasing up a pretty thin tree.
I had read the police files on the case. I had a good memory. As long as I had Mr. Boss Man listening, I pretended to read the details from my notebook. “Ms. Carstairs had an appointment with Mr. Hagan that she didn’t keep.” Because she’d been murdered, but that went without saying. “I would like to speak with him, if I might. There are several matters that need clarification.”
Like the full name and address of the man Hagan claimed to have been meeting at the time of Mindy’s death. The police had verified the alibi, but I, being of suspicious nature, didn’t take any one person’s word for it. I wanted his parking ticket or subway pass or other proof that both men didn’t lie. I was ripe for a conspiracy theory.
If I had investigated the annoying man who’d told me to go home when I’d been looking for Nassar, I would have had a dossier on him by now. But I hadn’t got his full name, and there’d been a few dozen with the name Hagan in the huge files of the GSA, and I’d had other things on my mind. Now, the circles were tightening.
Boss Man talked to his secretary, then glanced impatiently at his watch.
Now see, if I were a violent kickass kinda person, I’d have whacked him. A woman had died, an important man was about to go down for it, and all this pig cared about was his golf date. As taught, I swallowed my bile by smiling. “Thank you for your time. If your secretary could prepare those papers before I leave, I won’t have to waste any more of the taxpayers’ money by returning.” I swished out as if I were the boss and he was the toadie.
His secretary wasn’t particularly happy with me either, but I could understand that. I was adding to her overworked and underpaid burden. I called up my Magda charm and complimented her shoes. They looked shiny, so I figured they were new.
“Oh, I just bought them this weekend.” She held out a pink pointed toe that matched her Pepto-Bismol suit. “They hurt like the devil but they were on sale.”
I swallowed the caustic remark leaping to my tongue. It burned going down and I nearly choked, but this was for EG. I would behave until I exploded. “You’re fortunate you can wear those. I have bunions and can barely tolerate shoes. Mindy used to have the most fantastic heels.” I knew this from the police file. One of the detectives on the case had been female and couldn’t resist commenting on the Manolo Blaniks, which started the blackmailing mistress rumors. In the normal run of things, aides couldn’t afford five-hundred dollar shoes, especially if they refused help from their parents.
“Oh, Mindy found the most gorgeous shoes at the consignment shop down the street. She always scheduled her meetings here around mid-day so she could shop at lunch.” She handed me the papers I’d requested hot off the copy machine. “Her death was quite a shock to us.”
“As it was to us all,” I murmured politely. “I simply don’t understand her fascination with textbook publishers. She was obsessed.” That came straight from her mother.
The secretary raised her eyebrows conspiratorially, glanced over her shoulder to her boss’s closed door, then leaned across the desk to whisper to me. “She told me the committee was recommending textbooks that all came from the same publishing houses, and congressmen own those publishers. She thought it was scandalous and believed kickbacks might be involved. Of course, she was a liberal. I don’t know why she was working for Senator Hammond.”
“Because she was good at her job,” I said curtly. And she must have been to have learned what it took me several hours to dig out, and only then after Graham had told me to. It had taken the cops weeks to discover it, and they were laying the blame on the wrong person. “I would think the police would be harassing all the congressmen instead of just Senator Hammond.”
“About textbooks?” the secretary inquired incredulously. “No one cares about textbooks. The committee makes recommendations on the basis of content and cost. Owning stock in those companies is smart business. Why would the police care?”
The little bit I’d read about monopolies in the Britannica before I fell asleep popped into mind, but I said nothing. Buying up the competition was only American business savvy, after all.
The Britannica, unlike the textbooks extolling the virtues of Vanderbilts, had mentioned poor wages and bad job conditions as a result of monopolies like the textbook cartel. But if I were to believe the textbooks, the men who became rich off the profits of monopolies generously distributed their wealth to charity—the charities of their choice, of course. That way, they got to reward the people who supported them while ripping off the people who didn’t. I was beginning to see the light, but it was dim. Where did Pao fit in?
“Thank you so much.” I rifled through the papers and looked enlightened, although the documents appeared to be a perfectly innocuous list of recommended books for different grade levels and not a scathing diatribe naming names as I’d hoped. I didn’t think Mindy had been murdered for this. “If you could direct me to Mr. Hagan’s office?”
Following the secretary’s directions and entering the next office, my antipathy for the head of the education committee skyrocketed. I recognized him, but he didn’t seem to recognize me without my teenage disguise. Unlike his boss, Hagan rose from his desk, greeted me with a smile, and limped forward to hold out his hand for me to shake. I studied him now as I hadn’t earlier. I figured him at fifty, with the vaguely athletic figure of someone who had once taken pride in his physique but no longer had the time to care. His graying hair didn’t have the silver style job of Blackwell Johnson, and his shapeless suit screamed off-the-rack. His disguise was as invisible as mine. He could be anything from government hack to CIA.
“What can I do to help Senator Hammond’s office?” As an underling, he didn’t have a private office but offered me a chair in his cubicle.
“We merely needed to ascertain where Ms. Carstairs left off with her committee work and what we need to do to pick up the reins again.” I pulled out my Daytimer and posed my pen.
“Actually, Ms. Carstairs had made an appointment so she might tender her resignation,” he said smoothly. “It was just a formality. Her work here was done. I believe she meant to hand over her final report.”
“How odd.” I frowned and wiggled my pen. “No one at the office was aware of that. Her files were in order, and aside from the notes the police took, I haven’t seen a final report.”
He relaxed infinitesimally. Martial arts had given me a few years training in studying an opponent’s reflexes. He’d been tense, ready to take me on. Now he wasn’t. The report was the key. Or my paranoia had gone into overtime.
“Perhaps she had it with her when she died,” he said sympathetically. “The police don’t always tell us everything. I’m sorry I can’t help you.”
On my own, I might have accepted his blatant dismissal, but my family’s safety came first. Stomach clenching, I sat tight and forced more questions to my reluctant tongue. “The police said you were in a meeting at the time Ms. Carstairs was to deliver the report. Was the meeting supposed to have included her?”
His cheerful charm disappeared into a frown, but his mouth straightened as he found a way around whatever obstacle I’d inadvertently formed.
“When Ms. Carstairs failed to appear, I met with a textbook salesman who arrived unexpectedly. The meeting had no relation of any concern to Senator Hammond’s office.”
Textbook salesman.
I rose, desperate to get away before I really exploded.
Hagan thought he’d neatly evaded a government lackey, I could tell by the satisfied expression in his eye. He knew the police didn’t have Mindy’s report, the report that would have made his committee look very ugly—the report I suspected Mindy had been working on. Had her report included the connections between the textbook salesman and Hagan and whatever hanky panky was happening over at Edu-Pub?
Evil Genius Page 25