Collateral Damage (17 page)

“Reliable sources like who?”

“Like me,” Michaelson said. “If there's any real-world possibility that a non-Shepherd killed Preston Demarest, then you are tied to a very mediagenic homicide. You won't be contributing usefully to any political party's electoral prospects. Instead, you can expect to be dividing your time for the next three years between congressional committees and grand juries.”

“Are you threatening me?” Connaught demanded.

“Yes, Mr. Connaught, I am threatening you,” Michaelson said with jovial firmness. “In diplomacy we call it an ultimatum. You will disengage forthwith from Calvert Manor and everything and everyone connected with it. You will stop pursuing the document you've been after. You will not send any more minions into the lives of these people in search of that document or in search of anything else. You will never again use Andrew Shepherd's name or his modest but selfless services to his country to advance any partisan or personal goal. You will, in short, leave the Shepherd family alone. Because if you don't I guarantee you I will get this story media play that will make Vince Foster's suicide and Monica Lewinsky's love life seem like page eight filler.”

Five seconds that seemed like thirty passed. Then Connaught's voice came over the speakerphone again.

“And if I comply with these conditions, you'll keep quiet?”

“Yes. For a price.”

“Namely?”

“Call me tomorrow at ten and we'll discuss it.”

Michaelson pushed a button and the conference call ended.

The living room began to fill a bit as those who had been in other parts of the house drifted in. When Michaelson noticed that Willie and Catherine had both joined the group, he made his way over to them.

“That was fascinating,” Catherine said in an oddly detached voice, as if Michaelson had just staged
Death of a Salesman
in drag. “Marjorie explained almost everything else when she called me a couple of days ago, but the ice cubes came as a surprise.”

“Thank you,” Michaelson said. “Speaking of ice cubes, if you'll excuse me for a moment, I'm going to run up and get what's left of them before they make a mess.”

When he reached the bathroom where he'd thrown the Baggies in the sink, he found Cindy waiting for him, eyes flashing and arms folded across her chest. This did not surprise him.

“At least now we know how much your word is worth,” she said bitterly. “The trustee. Of all the unmitigated bullshit.”

“Ageism pure and simple,” Michaelson said, shaking his head sadly. “You mean you can't see our somewhat overweight, solidly middle-aged trustee squirming through windows and scrambling nimbly around on rooftops?”

“That cow?” Cindy demanded derisively. “As if. Plus, how could she plan on getting past either my window or Cathy's without being spotted? Never mind why Demarest would have let her fat ass into the room with him.”

“Those are potential difficulties with the trustee theory,” Michaelson admitted. “You'll notice I was careful not to commit myself to it.”

“‘Commit'? You told everyone on that call that Cathy killed Demarest, as clearly as if you'd said it in so many words.”

“I did nothing of the kind,” Michaelson said. “I haven't told anyone that Catherine Shepherd killed Preston Demarest, and I never intend to. For the excellent reason that she didn't kill him. You did.”

Chapter Twenty-four

I'm sure you could have seduced Demarest without the cigars, but they were a nice aesthetic touch,” Michaelson said. “The kind of subtle allusion to Janos that would appeal to him.”

“‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,'” Cindy said. “Freud.”

“It must have been particularly satisfying for you to imagine him tumbling at the last moment to the way you'd conned him, realizing as he lay there with you straddling him that he'd been had and there was nothing he could do about it—just before you slammed his head onto the stone and turned important parts of his brain into jelly.”

“Are you seriously accusing me of murder based on psychobabble about cigars?” Cindy asked. Her voice betrayed no anger. Just mild amusement seasoned with a grain or two of genuine interest.

“Of course not,” Michaelson answered. “Proving how he was killed effectively proves who killed him as well. Scooting through windows and over roofs was the work of a former gymnast, not a former debater. You, not Catherine. And you were the one who maneuvered him into the guest room, which is the only room where this elaborate murder would have worked.”

“You're forgetting that Preston had a vote,” Cindy said. “I was all by myself on keeping him off that call. I couldn't have forced the issue if he hadn't gone along with it himself.”

“You prearranged that with him. He played along with the skit so that you and he could end up together in that room without anyone else knowing about it, and he could get what he wanted from you.”

Cindy looked contemplatively over Michaelson's left shoulder for four seconds, as if trying to analyze his argument objectively.

“Doesn't work,” she said then, shaking her head. “This isn't the fifties. Grown-ups don't have to go to that kind of trouble to get laid. Besides, Preston's poofter quotient was about eighty percent. Janos was his idea of steak. Anyone with two X chromosomes was parsley at best. And when Preston did feel like some Venus action, he still didn't need me. He could get it from Cathy with half the hassle and none of the attitude.”

“You didn't finesse him into that room hustle by offering him sex. You seduced him well before the killing to try to protect Catherine by enticing him to abandon her so he could go after you. He collaborated with you to get you alone in the guest room with him because you promised him that bloody indenture.”

“I could have gotten the indenture to him anytime I wanted to without any cloak-and-dagger routine.”

“If you'd just turned it over to him, you couldn't have enforced the promise you extracted from him in exchange for it—namely, that he'd break off the engagement to Catherine and get out of her life. You knew he'd break his word without compunction. So you told him he could get the document only by putting himself in what my sainted parents would have called a compromising situation with you: alone together in a bedroom with his pants down and your skirt up.”

“I know what ‘compromising situation' means,” Cindy said with an eye-rolling sigh.

“Demarest thought he had you outfoxed. He went along with your demand, figuring that if you did contrive to have the two of you discovered, he could get back into Catherine's good graces by doing the same suicidal-lover-on-the-brink routine he'd worked before. But he underestimated you as badly as he overestimated himself. Once you got his pants around his ankles in that room, you had no intention of giving him anything except a dent in the back of his head and two lungs full of smoke.”

“You really going to try to sell that crock to the police?” Cindy asked amiably.

“No. The police haven't helped me figure out the euro, so I feel no compulsion to help them figure out what happened to Preston Demarest. The police are the least of your worries.”

“Then I guess we don't need to be having this conversation.”

“Wrong,” Michaelson said. “Avery Phillips is a different matter altogether. He's one of those inconvenient people who believes in certain things, and one of them is honor. He despised Preston Demarest in many ways. But when he died, Demarest was in this house in collaboration with Phillips, carrying out a plan that Phillips put together. Avery Phillips isn't going to shrug off Demarest's death because of some fairy tale about autoerotic misadventure and national security.”

“Then please tell him I didn't do it,” Cindy said, her voice a trifle bored. “Or Cathy. Meanwhile, I'll watch my back.”

“I'll tell him no such thing. Even if I could lie well enough to fool Phillips on something as clear as this, I'd save that talent for people who could make me secretary of state. That leaves you a bit short in the minimum-bid department.”

“So you're going to finger me for him?”

“You've fingered yourself far more effectively than I ever could. If he asks me to confirm his suspicion that you killed Demarest, I will. Not because I want him to hurt you, but in the hope that then he'll listen when I explain why you killed him. That's about the only useful contribution I can still make.”

“I was wondering when you'd get to motive,” Cindy said. “Since as far as I know I didn't have one.”

“Your motive was to safeguard Catherine,” Michaelson said. “You've been fanatically protective of her since your parents' divorce and especially since she surprised your father in flagrante. You've convinced yourself that she lives her life on the edge of neurasthenia, and that you're the only thing standing between her and institutionalization. An adolescent who offered her a marijuana cigarette got an elbow in the kidneys. Preston Demarest got a fireplace stone in the back of the head.”

“Right. To fiercely protect her, I killed the man she loved. Nice try.”

“The man she loved but who didn't love her. You killed Preston Demarest because he was a manipulative sadist who'd exploit Catherine's neuroses and psychic trauma to get whatever he wanted. When you couldn't seduce him away from her, you killed him.”

“You make it sound so noble I almost wish I'd done it just so I could try on the halo,” Cindy said.

“What you did wasn't noble. You converted Demarest from a criminal into a martyr and risked destroying Catherine's emotional balance past any hope of recovery. Good intentions aren't enough. Killing Demarest was a tragically reckless and misguided exercise in moral egotism.”

“Whoa,” Cindy said. “We're getting a little judgmental here, aren't we?”

“A generational habit to which I'm partial,” Michaelson said icily. “Ignoble though it was, however, your killing of Demarest wasn't evil in the way that his psychological abuse of Catherine was. Legally, what you did was cold-blooded, premeditated murder. Morally, in your own judgment, it was justifiable homicide. That judgment was wrong, but your mistake was selfless rather than malicious, and your victim was someone who won't be missed. That's the idea that I hope to sell to Avery Phillips.”

“You have sold it,” Phillips said.

Michaelson and Cindy both looked up, startled. Phillips, who had apparently been standing in the hall, walked to the doorway and leaned against the jamb. He shifted his gaze from Michaelson to Cindy, and Michaelson watched the two of them eye each other for a moment in cool and intrigued appraisal.

“A weekend with me and I'll bet you wouldn't be gay anymore,” Cindy said. Phillips shook his head.

“Tried that in high school,” he said. “The third time a girl I was going with went on a crying jag because it was a cloudy day I thought, I don't need this. I'm going to date happy people who dress well. Been gay ever since. Besides, I couldn't stand the thought of Preston laughing at me in hell when I met him there after you managed to kill me the same way you did him.”

“I didn't kill anyone,” Cindy said.

“Stick with that denial,” Phillips said. “Not that you'll need it much more. I'm walking away from this, and I'll square things with Janos. Which leaves you and Catherine, and frankly, I wouldn't touch that with Krafft-Ebbing on a stick. Maybe you two can stand in the corner together or something.”

“Catherine spent this morning proving that she's stronger than anyone except Marjorie thought she was,” Michaelson said. “Perhaps what she needs is someone for her to protect, instead of someone protecting her. If so, she has it now.”

“Oh, dear,” Phillips said, “caring nurturers at twelve o'clock. I feel a glucose OD coming on. By the way, you're about thirty seconds away from your next phone call, so I'd toddle on downstairs if I were you.”

“Gracious,” Michaelson said, glancing at his watch as he hurried out of the bathroom, “you're right. I hadn't really built this little dialogue into the schedule.”

Trailed by Phillips, Michaelson hustled to the stairs and got back to the living room just in time to hear a female voice call his name over the speakerphone.

“This is Richard Michaelson,” he said.

“Please hold for Congressman Humphreys.”

Several seconds passed before a male voice came over the speaker.

“We ready to go on TV?” the voice asked.

The mumble in the background was apparently affirmative, for after a couple of flickers the monitor at Calvert Manor came to life to show Humphreys' torso, with his head pinning a telephone receiver to his shoulder.

“Thank you for calling, Congressman,” Michaelson said.

“You're welcome. You've done me a considerable service, and all you asked in return was a phone call, so I thought I should oblige. I'm on a speaker, right? Who all we have there?”

Michaelson inventoried the crowd.

“Okay,” Humphreys said. “Well, I got the copy of that document you had couriered to my office. Where's the original, if you don't mind my asking?”

“With an archival document preservation expert at George Washington University.”

“Sounds like a real good place for it.”

“We rigged a television hookup for this call so that you could look at the book the document came out of, in case you have any doubts about its authenticity.”

“I don't,” Humphreys said. “We're going straight up the middle with this. Press release hits the wire in fifteen minutes. Speech and press conference in less than three hours. Finding out that thing's a forgery would spoil a real good strategy.”

“Preemptive disclosure,” Michaelson said, nodding.

“Now, that's what
I
called it,” Humphreys said, grinning. “What my staff tells me is that we're being ‘proactive.' It's like Chick Johnson in that old vaudeville routine: We're not confessing, we're bragging.”

“I'll leave the semantics in your more than capable hands,” Michaelson said.

“Seriously,” Humphreys said then, “if this thing had blindsided us three weeks before an election, we'd have been running for cover. This way we get to lead with it, turn it into a positive. The only way I could get more coverage on a Sunday afternoon is to be assassinated.”

“That strikes me as too high a price to pay for a Monday-morning headline,” Michaelson said. “Good luck with it.”

Humphreys leaned back in his chair and seemed to relax a bit. His expression became more reflective, as if the journeyman pol thrilling helpful amateurs with inside banter about tactics had suddenly yielded the floor to a serious thinker.

“Funny thing,” he said. “I've known at least since college that there were black slaveowners, although it never occurred to me that my own ancestors might have been among them. I don't know of any serious historians who even question it. But all the same, that piece of paper would've been a world-class bombshell at the climax of a campaign. Even some kids on my own staff were stunned by it. They
didn't
know. They'd never even thought about it.”

“I suspect most people haven't,” Michaelson said.

“Most people haven't thought, period,” Humphreys said. “There are tens of millions of voters out there whose
total
idea of American slavery comes from seeing
Roots
or
Gone With the Wind
. They have no idea that there were any blacks before the Civil War who weren't slaves, or that there were whites opposing slavery while Abe Lincoln was still learning his ABC's. They buy what I say about health insurance regulation or transportation policy because they want to square things with Kunta Kinte. That indenture is going to mess with their heads. And if you're going to mess with people's heads, it's better to be on offense than on defense.”

“So now they'll get a little real history on television,” Michaelson said.

“Very little, but very real,” Humphreys said. “Okay, now you know the game plan. Was that all you had for me?”

“That's it.”

“Then thanks again for handling it the way you did, and check CNN at three o'clock Eastern.”

The screen went blank and the line went dead. Michaelson stared for a moment at the monitor.

“He was right,” Marjorie commented. “One hundred percent of what many Americans know about slavery comes from television.”

“Yes,” Michaelson said. “Just like one hundred percent of what I know, even now, about Marcus Humphreys. Even when we had a direct conversation, the dominant image I have of him is from a television screen.”

“Kind of messy, isn't it?” Phillips said quietly to them, nodding toward Cindy and Catherine across the room. “Just leaving them this way. The killer and the neurotic. Lizzie Borden and Martha Stewart, playing house.”

“I suppose so,” Michaelson said. “They're collateral damage. Like those kids whose legs are blown off by land mines years after the fighting is over. We were at war and we won, but the price of victory included innocent lives.”

“Catherine didn't have a chance before,” Marjorie said. “Maybe she has a chance now. That's something.”