Damage Control: A Novel
Page 41
Some things never change.
A righteous spark of anger went through me, all the more annoying because I knew she was right.
“Let’s kick together, Mom. My pills, your ciggies. Deal?”
Mom pursed her lips. Then she gave a terse nod.
“Your Mr. Blair has been marvelous,” she said. “His assistant keeps calling to see how you’re doing. He’s going to pay for us to stay at a fancy clinic near Palm Springs once they release you.”
“Clinic? I’m fine.”
“It’s more like a luxury spa, apparently. He said we need to hide away from the media. He’s a fine man. When he learned about my cancer scare and the long wait for a biopsy, he paid out of his own pocket for the procedure.”
I thought I was hallucinating. “What, in the last forty-eight hours?”
Mom’s eyes grew shiny.
“And we got the results immediately.” She squeezed my hand. “It’s benign. A cyst. The cancer hasn’t come back.”
“Oh, Mom,” I said, thinking I must still be dreaming. “That’s fantastic.”
* * *
For the next few days, Thomas Blair was in constant touch, running a smooth, textbook-perfect PR campaign while keeping Mom and me sequestered in Palm Springs. Tyler drove out to visit me, saying the police had come by the office. They were eager to interview me and we wouldn’t be able to put it off much longer.
Tyler said the police had found a disk in Faraday’s office containing a recording of my conversation with Thomas Blair in his rooftop garden, where the company founder had brought up my suspicions about Faraday.
They’d also found a file cabinet at Faraday’s home stuffed with documents indicating he’d run a rogue operation from inside Blair, taking on black PR for freelance clients.
One of those clients was the disgraced JTM Financial Services, Inc., for whom Faraday had done a series of unsavory jobs including blackmail, break-ins, and intimidation. The files would be a treasure trove for federal investigators for years to come.
But some of Faraday’s private clients were giving law enforcement trouble, including a company called Tune, Inc., that seemed not to exist.
At this, I let out a strangled cry.
“That was our pet name for Luke,” I said excitedly. “Anabelle and I used to call him ‘Tune’ because of the way he swaggered around like Neptune, the god of the sea.”
The police believed that someone at Tune, Inc., had hired Faraday to kill Randall Downs, and they’d resumed questioning drug lords who might have vowed revenge on the police captain.
“You’re not going to enlighten them?” I asked Tyler.
“Me?” said my colleague, looking steadily at me. “I already told them everything I know.”
I rolled my eyes.
Tyler walked to the window. “How about a walk, now that it’s cooled off,” he said.
He turned, giving me a significant look, and I knew we’d discuss it more outside.
The desert air smelled of baked dust and nocturnal flowering shrubs.
As shadows fell and warm winds blew, we strolled through the tranquil grounds of the resort spa and I finally began to understand Tyler’s lies and evasions.
While courting me in vain, Oliver Goldman and his feds had also approached Tyler for help with their investigation. And my colleague, who’d grown increasingly uncomfortable with Faraday’s black operations, agreed to wear a wire.
Tyler had also befriended Faraday’s dirty tricks operative, Stu Nicholls, and gotten him on tape after a night of drinking, boasting that he’d killed an LAPD cop in Palos Verdes. Faraday’s man was now sitting in jail awaiting trial for murder. The police suspected that he was also behind my attempted murder. They figured that when Nicholls botched that, Faraday decided to do the job himself.
To this day, I still don’t know whether Faraday was really a rogue agent or whether he acted with the full knowledge and support of our founder. When I recalled my boss’s daily meetings with Blair, the nervous way he’d finger his tie and mutter to himself, how shrunken and chastened he seemed after each visit upstairs, I had my doubts he’d acted on his own.
But I was also thankful to Thomas Blair for everything he’d done for Mom.
Faraday never intended to get her a slot on a medical trial if her cancer returned. He’d said that only to buy my compliance.
As Tyler and I strolled through the landscaped grounds and the San Jacinto Mountains cast purple-blue shadows, Tyler hit me with one last surprise.
Blair wanted to send us on a weeklong fact-finding missing to Ireland to collect affidavits from friends and former employers of Marie Connor, the onetime Holloway au pair. One family outside Limerick had accused her of stealing jewelry two years earlier.
“Since when does Blair send two associates overseas on expensive junkets?” I said.
“Maybe he figures he owes us some R & R, after all we’ve been through,” Tyler said.
“Is he going to pay for separate rooms too?”
Tyler’s face assumed the cherubic look of a choir boy. “If that’s what you want.”
* * *
There was a message waiting from Thomas Blair when we got back to the spa lobby. It was for both of us.
When we called him back, Blair explained that he’d decided to divide Jack Faraday’s senior vice president position into separate jobs. He was looking for two good people. Were Tyler and I interested?
We told him we’d think about it.
Was this a bribe, a way to ensure that we stayed with the company and didn’t question things too deeply? Tyler and I batted it around all evening over our five-star spa cuisine dinner but failed to come to any conclusion.
When it was time to leave, I walked him to his car.
“Could we start again, Maggie, from the beginning, and you give me a real chance this time?” Tyler asked.
I told him yes, and he kissed me under the hot desert moon.
45
The day before I met with police, I visited Villa Marbella to see how Anabelle was doing.
A black town car was parked in the driveway when I pulled up. A uniformed driver stood by the back, loading designer suitcases into the trunk.
Senator Paxton emerged from the house, carrying a briefcase, a trench coat slung over one arm.
Congress was going back into session and he’d soon be a busy man—making backroom deals, holding hearings, finding consensus, pushing bills through.
He looked as dapper as ever in his hand-tailored suit, monogrammed white shirt, Italian loafers, and silk tie. But his eyes were sunk more deeply in his sockets, his jowls hung loosely, and his skin was the color of mushrooms.
When he saw me, his facial muscles pulled together, trying but failing to muster a smile.
“Hullo, Maggie.”
We shook hands and he told me how much Anabelle cherished my friendship and how he and Miranda appreciated my efforts on the family’s behalf.
We were about to say good-bye when I blurted it out.
“Henry, when did Luke and Emily start seeing each other?”
Horrified, I clapped my hand to my mouth, but it was too late, the words could not be retrieved.
He regarded me gravely. Then a look of paternal concern beamed from U.S. Senator Henry Paxton’s large brown eyes.
“What are you talking about, Maggie? My son didn’t know Emily.”
Then Senator Paxton patted my arm.
“These last weeks have been a nightmare for us all. I think you should get some rest. Good-bye, Maggie.”
He climbed into the town car. Immediately the tinted window rolled up, sealing him back inside his private world.
The luxury car glided down the long driveway until it disappeared.
And I thought: All the long hours and sacrifice. The lies and half-truths. The sleepless nights. I’d put my personal life on hold and my career and even my safety on the line because I’d believed in him and his family. Somehow I had suckered myself into thinking
that the end justified the means, so long as it was for a good cause.
And because of that, I found it inconceivable that Senator Henry Paxton could look me in the eye and lie with such earnest conviction.
But now he’d finally shown his true hand: Henry Paxton didn’t care about anyone but himself. He was narcissistic, cold, and predatory, unmoved by the suffering and death his family left in their wake with their indulgent, reckless, and destructive behavior.
In his exalted world, family and position were all that mattered, and the rest of us existed only to do his bidding. The most basic human decency eluded him. His charisma was chameleonlike. It changed depending on what he needed from you. He had no sincerity or depth. He was hollow inside.
It had taken me almost twenty years to see this basic truth, and it had almost gotten me killed.
I felt mortified by my naïveté and humiliated by how they’d all played me for a fool and manipulated my old loyalties. And not only the Paxtons. Faraday had read me from the beginning, correctly gauging my infatuation with this family, my desire to get close to them again in the hopes that their glamour might rub off on me.
When I entered Villa Marbella, Simon was standing at the picture window in the living room, staring out at the driveway.
He dipped his head to acknowledge me, and as he turned away, his lips curved into a tight smile.
I vowed to tell the police everything.
* * *
Anabelle was out back with Lincoln, filling a basket with aromatic white peaches that clustered so thickly the tree branches drooped almost to the ground.
Bangs was romping with them, and Lincoln screamed with delight as the dog found a bruised peach and ate it, a puzzled look in her doggie eyes.
“Did you catch Dad on his way out?” Anabelle asked, brushing specks of dust and bark off her face with her shirtsleeve.
I told her that I had.
“I’m so glad,” she said, hugging me.
Lincoln held up a half-eaten peach.
“Try this one, Mommy. It’s juicy-sweet.”
“I’ve got an idea,” Anabelle said, clapping her hands. “Lincoln, why don’t you get Bangs and bring her over to Aunt Maggie and I’ll take a picture of the three of you.”
Then it was time to take one with Anabelle too.
We squatted alongside the child and his dog and I held the cell phone at arm’s length and took the photo.
“It came out great,” Anabelle said, peering over my shoulder.
There we were, smiling bravely into the camera on a golden September afternoon, when the evening breeze brings the barest butterfly chill to remind us that winter draws near, even here in L.A.
I looked closer. The cell phone image had captured a change in Anabelle that I had missed.
She was as beautiful as ever, but the tragedy of recent weeks had burned away everything superfluous. What remained was a more elemental, haunting beauty, like a drift of wood the sea has tumbled to smooth white sculpture.
In the photo, Anabelle stood behind Lincoln, pulling him close, her hands clasped in a garland over his chest. Her eyes were sad, and her lower lip, caught between her teeth as she forced a smile, concealed a tremor.
But she was alive. And she was determined to survive.
And at that moment, I knew that despite everything her father and brother had done, I wasn’t capable of betraying her. I’d take her secret—all their secrets—to my grave.
Let the voters choose whether to keep Henry Paxton in office.
Let them decide whether the black cloud of tragedy and suspicion that swirled over the Paxton name made him unfit to govern. It’s the eternal dilemma with politicians, isn’t it?
And so I pledged my loyalty not for or against Henry but to his daughter, Anabelle.
I wanted to be a friend to her, the friend I hadn’t been able to be at sixteen when she suffered a terrible injury that had been meant for me.
I owed her a karmic debt I could never repay.
I know I can’t keep her safe. Life doesn’t work that way.
But maybe I can control the damage.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Anne Borchardt, Anna deVries, and Susan Moldow.
Maggie Crawford helped me work through the plot and Cynthia Merman, Marcell Rosenblatt, and Kathleen Rizzo caught my mistakes. Any that remain are mine alone. Thank you to Chika Azuma for doing the cover design.
Alan Mayer regaled me with stories and lunch.
The fine folks on MUA offered fragrant companionship.
David, Adrian, and Alex provided love, encouragement, and support. Thanks, guys.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Denise Hamilton
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Designed by Jill Putorti
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010044518
ISBN 978-0-7432-9674-8
ISBN 978-1-4516-2789-3 (ebook)
Contents
PROLOGUE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS