Act of Darkness (3 page)

For just a second, Victoria wondered what would happen if she told Melissa the whole story as far as she knew it, and then sent the girl out to discover who had done what when and whose idea it had been to go ahead with it. Stephen Fox. Dan Chester. Kevin Debrett. It had to be one of those three. The one thing Victoria was sure of was that Janet hadn’t known a thing, and wouldn’t have known even afterward if the three of them had been careful enough. Which they never were.

She lit up with one of the hotel’s matches and closed her eyes. “Melissa,” she said, “could you do me a favor? Find out what Miss Rawls will be wearing to this cocktail party.”

“Miss Rawls will be at the cocktail party?” Melissa sounded shocked. Melissa was very good at sounding shocked.

“Since Miss Rawls is in town,” Victoria flicked an ash at the small pile of newspapers on the floor, “Miss Rawls will insist she be at this cocktail party. Just to make sure everything looks normal. Find out what she’s going to wear. And when we get there, stick to Stephen. Hang on his arm and don’t let him out of your sight. Is that clear?”

“Of course, Miss Harte.”

“I’d have you hang onto Dan Chester,” Victoria said, “but I think that kind of cruelty is probably in violation of labor law.”

T
HE NEWS OF STEPHEN
Fox’s introduction of the Act in Aid of Exceptional Children had been in that morning’s Washington
Post,
and although Dr. Kevin Debrett had expected it to be there, the actual sight of it, tucked into the bottom right-hand corner of the front page with a headline in twelve-point type, came as something of a shock. Just what was shocking about it, Kevin didn’t know. There was certainly nothing in the particulars to surprise him. The act Stephen had finally introduced had been the same one hammered out over months of late-night meetings in this very building. Its provisions for private clinics, direct billings to the federal government, and extended therapy had been written by Kevin himself. It was just that, seeing it there, he began to think of the entire project as an unacceptable gamble, a slap in the face of fate. Kevin had been a very lucky man. His luck had held, he thought, because he’d always known enough not to strain the limits of it. The Act in Aid of Exceptional Children was going to strain those limits to the point of disintegration. It was as if, having won the lottery, he’d decided to take his money and bet it all on a horse.

He tapped his fingers against the thick glass top of his desk and sighed. He was a relatively young man, only in his forties, and he was already more of a success than he had ever expected to be. Dan Chester had promised him that, back when they were all at the University of Connecticut, and Dan Chester had delivered. It was funny to think, now, that Kevin had so resisted the idea of becoming a doctor. He hadn’t been all that good at science, and he had hated the sight of blood—he still hated it. God only knew he’d had no interest in Serving His Fellow Man. But Dan had insisted, and when Dan insisted he got what he wanted, maybe because when he insisted he always turned out to be right. Kevin had suffered his way through three years of premed, four years of medical school, and an interminable residency in obstetrics. Dan had vetoed Kevin’s plan to specialize in psychiatry, as being too chancy and not quite scientifically respectable. Kevin had had to get down in the muck and mire, and he had done it. He’d borrowed a lot of money from his mother to outfit his office and set up shop just outside Hartford, in one of those suburbs where insurance company money kept the prices of most things high and the price of obstetrical services astronomical. He’d practiced until he was locally well known and then, on Dan’s suggestion, after Stephanie Fox had been born damaged and then died, had abruptly switched fields, into the study and care of children with Down syndrome. Kevin Debrett had always been an excellent researcher, no matter what the subject, and he liked spending his time among the dry pages of aging books and even more quickly aging journals. The human body was too fluid and inconsistent for him, too
wet.
Every time he delivered a baby, he found himself appalled that there was so much blood.

Of course, Dan had had an ulterior motive. Even then, he’d been setting Stephen up to run for the presidency, finding Stephen a cause, giving Stephen an identity. All three of them had known, all the way back there in college, that Stephen was their best shot at producing a media celebrity. Dan looked too foreign, even though he wasn’t, and too much like the popular conception of Machiavelli. Kevin himself was just too damn conventional.

Still, Kevin thought now, Dan was not only a genius but a loyal genius. He believed in sticking by his friends. First he’d gotten Stephen elected to the U.S. Senate—and right out of the Hartford statehouse, too—and then he’d gotten Kevin down to Washington and shown him how to play the game. In no time at all, Kevin had gone from being a reasonably successful physician to the country’s most popular expert on mental retardation in children, His clinic had grown from five small rooms on Avenue C to this great white marble palace in the hills of McLean, Virginia. He had a staff of 250, a client list well over a thousand names long, and a reputation a saint would have envied. From the things he read about himself in the papers, he might have been Mother Teresa turned Protestant and dressed up in drag.

It was the sainthood business that bothered him. It was a position he would never have chosen for himself—even though, in a way, he did consider himself a saint, on his own terms. His terms were not the ones the papers were using, or the delegations of parents’ groups who gave banquets in his honor, or the universities who awarded him honorary degrees. His own terms were understood by only three people in the world: Dan Chester, Stephen Fox, and himself.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and he had been sitting at his desk for an hour, doing what he thought of as “not thinking.” Mostly, what he was not thinking about was the death of Maren Kent, down on the second floor, who had been brought in as an emergency patient three days ago and never had much chance to grow up human anyway. He wouldn’t have been not thinking about it, except that someone had done it again—left a vial of succinylcholine lying on the floor. Of course, succinylcholine was what you used in an emergency like that. A vial of it wouldn’t be misinterpreted. Still, it wouldn’t be good to get a reputation for carelessness, and he’d already lost a vial of succinylcholine last month. It had been taken right out of the medical bag he had parked in the cloakroom of the Old Washington Hotel during Victoria Harte’s birthday party.

He reached across his desk, picked up his phone—a piece of plastic the thickness of a golf visor—and buzzed for his secretary. Her voice, a beautiful North Carolina drawl, slid back at him with a soft seductiveness that made him think of warm molasses.

“Could you get Dan Chester for me, please? He’ll be at Stephen Fox’s office in the SOB. The new office.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

Kevin sat back, expecting to have to wait a long time. Dan might be in the SOB, or he might be somewhere else. Dan was often somewhere else, nobody knew where.

The buzzer on his phone went off, and Kevin was surprised to hear the North Carolina drawl saying, “Mr. Chester on three, Doctor. He says he was just thinking of calling you.”

Kevin punched the button for three and said, “Dan?”

“Kevin. I’m losing my mind over here. These offices are very pretty, but they’re not what I call efficient.”

“Stephen should be happy to get one.”

“He is. He’d be happier to get one in the Capitol itself. I mean, he has one in the Capitol itself—”

“But it’s totally inadequate. I know, Dan. You’ve told me.”

“The way things are going, maybe we won’t have to put up with it for very long. I’ve been treating myself to daydreams all morning. What about you? Are you all right?”

Kevin looked down at the top of his desk. Except for the phone, it was empty. It was always empty. He knew he did a lot of work, but he sometimes wondered when and where he did it. On Dan’s orders, his office was perpetually devoid of official paperwork, except in the direst emergency. Even the drawers of his desk held nothing more vulgarly laborlike than a collection of Mark Cross twenty-four-carat gold monogram pens.

“Kevin?” Dan said.

“I’m here,” Kevin told him. “I’m sorry. I’m a little tired today. I saw the piece in the
Post.
”

“Yeah. Good piece, too. With any luck, Stephen wasn’t lying to me this morning, and Janet was told beforehand. As long as she was, we’re off and running.”

“Janet,” Kevin said. “Right.”

“I wouldn’t worry about Janet, Kevin. Janet is a trooper. It’s just that Stephen doesn’t know how to treat his troopers.”

“Stephen doesn’t know how to treat much of anybody.”

“Stephen knows how to treat reporters, and that’s all I care about. If I were you, Kevin, I’d worry about the Markey woman. She’d been on the phone to me six times already since eight o’clock this morning.”

“
Eight
o’clock?”

“Lobbyists get paid for bugging senator’s chiefs of staff at eight o’clock in the morning. Or three, which they think is even better.”

“Is she beginning to make an impression?”

“She has to make an impression, Kevin. She bought into the cocktail party, and just now she bought into the seminar Fourth-of-July weekend. We’re going to get a quarter of a million dollars in soft money out of that organization before the year is out.”

“And they’re going to get a bill without competency exams.”

“No,” Dan said. “They’re not.”

This, Kevin thought, must have been the way the Poles had felt at the end of World War II, when they’d found out they’d been sold lock, stock, and barrel to the Soviet Union. It was not, of course, he himself who was being sold—it was Clare Markey—but he could sympathize. If there were competency requirements in that final bill, she was going to get killed.

“How the hell,” he asked Dan, “are you going to manage that?”

“I’m going to manage it,” Dan said, “because I have to. Without the competency requirement, that bill’s going to look like just another government handout, and to the social workers, too. You know how the heartland feels about handouts. You know how they feel about social workers.”

“I know how they feel about doctors,” Kevin said drily. “That was something we hadn’t counted on back in college, was it?”

“You’ll be all right,” Dan said. “You’re a publicly acknowledged exception. And we went over this before. Without government money, your standard of living is going to go through the floor, yours and every other doctor’s. People can’t afford to pay what you want to charge and the insurance companies are going to start refusing to at any moment.”

“Right. Being a medical man turns out not to be the ultimate stickup operation after all.”

“Kevin—”

“Never mind,” Kevin said. “I’m sorry. I’m not even too sure why I called. I saw that article in the paper and I got—nervous.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because Janet is a trooper, but her mother isn’t.”

There was a pause on Dan Chester’s end of the line. Kevin wondered what Dan thought about at times like this and then stopped wondering. Trying to second-guess Dan always gave him a headache.

“Victoria Harte,” Dan said, “is not somebody I’m going to worry about. Try to remember, Kevin. It doesn’t matter what she knows. It only matters what she can prove.”

F
OR PATCHEN RAWLS, THE
world was an enormously simple place. There were two kinds of problems, the practical and the moral. With practical problems, all that mattered was getting what you were owed: script approval, an extra million, the right wardrobe mistress, the new trailer. Her name had been a practical problem once, when she was first starting out as an actress, in New York. She had been born Mary Rawls in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and she had seen, as soon as she got to Manhattan, that “Mary” wasn’t going to do a thing for her. It was such an ordinary name, people forgot it, or mistook it for someone else’s. She was always running into visiting firemen who thought they had seen her in a production of
Camelot
or a road show of
Carousel,
when it was really Mary Rawley or Mary Reels they had seen. Because name recognition was everything, she had known she was going to have to change hers, and she had. She had picked “Patchen” off the spine of a book in the Endicott Booksellers on Columbus Avenue, and had been perfectly happy ever since. It was the name of some poet whose work she couldn’t read, but that didn’t matter. She had learned from at least a dozen people that the poet was a well-respected one and on the right side of most things, or at least not on the wrong one. He was considered both sensitive and intellectual, and with his name some of that reputation for sensitivity and intelligence began to rub off on her. It was a situation her high-school English teacher back in Pittsburgh was probably choking on. Her best friend from college was probably ready to slit her throat. That was just fine. Patchen Rawls had never considered herself as stupid as other people said she was.

Moral problems were much more complicated than practical ones, because they had to be broken down into two groups. First, there were the easy questions, the things everybody with any sense knew to be true. Pollution, for instance, ought to be outlawed and brought to a halt at once, no matter what it did to the economy or the country’s standard of living. People had too many things, anyway. Women who wore furs ought to be put in jail, or at least harassed on the street. Animals were innocent, and people were wicked. Plants were beautiful and peaceful and never made war. Every lumberjack in the country deserved to be taken out and shot—although they couldn’t be, because everyone knew capital punishment was wrong. Patchen had a whole list of convictions like this, covering everything from smoking to day care, from the double-nickel speed limit to gay rights. She had the world neatly divided into two sets of people, the Nazis and the resistance. There were gay activists and homophobes, self-affirming career women and brainwashed housewives, happy little day-care geniuses and sniveling little home-raised brats, people who wanted more public housing and people who wanted to see the poor living in the streets. Most of all, there were the people who believed in God and the people who knew He didn’t exist. The people who believed in God were always Nazis.