Collateral Damage (4 page)

“Very ambitious.”

“And, of course,” Demarest concluded, “we hold a high tea on Restoration Day—the anniversary of Charles the Second resuming the throne. That specifically is how I met Catherine.”

“While she was discussing the Bloody Assizes with Judge Jeffreys over Earl Grey and scones?”

“Not exactly,” Demarest said after a long moment's silence. Shifting his eyes abruptly from Michaelson, he stared into the middle distance, as if he were lining up a six-iron shot. “I approached her about permission to use Calvert Manor for the Restoration Day tea. The place dates from the time of James the Second, you know. She had never heard of us, but the idea charmed her right out of her navy blue flats. Her concentration at Bucknell was the literature and history of seventeenth-century England. She's an SRS natural. The rest is basically
Love Story
without the leukemia and foul language.”

“How long ago was this first charmed encounter?”

“Roughly thirty seconds before Cindy started hating my guts.”

“I was thinking more in terms of months or years.”

“Tell me something,” Demarest said, suddenly resuming eye contact with Michaelson. “What in the world does that have to do with whatever it is about these Halliburton and Phillips guys that has you bothered?”

“If your offer is still good,” Michaelson said instead of answering the question, “I'll take you up on some of that wine.”

“Sure,” Demarest said.

He quickly produced another Styrofoam cup and decanted chardonnay into it. Michaelson lifted his cup six inches off the desk, caught Demarest's eye, and then said with almost liturgical solemnity, “To the queen.” He passed his wine cup deliberately above the top of the water cup and waited expectantly. Demarest again looked blank for a second or two.

“To the queen,” he stammered then.

“The answer to your question,” Michaelson said, “is that I don't know what the timing of your first meeting with Catherine Shepherd has to do with what I'm looking into. If anything. I do know, however, that the Stuart Restoration Society is an elaborate cover story, suggesting that you're a bit sensitive about how your two paths actually crossed.”

“The Stuart Restoration Society is perfectly genuine,” Demarest said. “You can check it out.”

“I'm certain it is. I'm equally certain that no one deeply involved in such a group would be baffled by an allusion to Judge Jeffreys and the Bloody Assizes, when the streets ran red with gore from unfortunates who had rebelled prematurely against the Stuart monarchy. A true Stuart partisan would condemn the very term ‘Bloody Assizes' as Whig propaganda.”

“I was trying to be diplomatic,” Demarest said.

“And what were you trying to be when I offered the classic toast of Stuart loyalists?” Michaelson asked. “After the Stuarts went into exile, their supporters in England always had both wine and water at dinner. When someone toasted King William or his successors, they'd join in, to avoid appearing disloyal. But they'd pass their wineglass above their water glass so that their toast would actually be ‘To the king over the water'—in other words, to the exiled pretender. I have a quite emphatic impression that you didn't know a thing about that until this moment.”

“It's a bit esoteric,” Demarest said.

“Translation: It wasn't in your briefing book.”

“This conversation is beginning to bore me,” Demarest said.

One of the most underappreciated weapons in a diplomat's arsenal is the simple truth, brutally stated. As Demarest pulled a black-and-orange vinyl carrying bag onto the desktop and began checking impatiently through it, Michaelson decided to use that weapon.

“You're in over your head,” he said, not unkindly.

“Thank you for sharing.”

“You're not in Avery Phillips' league. Few people are. You're not going to scam him and you're not going to outwit him.”

“I hadn't even heard his name until you mentioned it a few minutes ago,” Demarest said as he zipped the gym bag shut.

“You don't have to admit anything. Just absorb what I'm saying and think about it. If you think you're using him, the chances are that he's using you. If you double-cross him, you're in trouble, and if you play along with him, you're out in the cold as soon as he's gotten what he wants from you.”

Demarest made sure all the desk drawers were locked, then offered Michaelson a tight little smile.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“Of course,” Michaelson said. “Tell me what's actually going on. I'm not looking for money or a piece of the action. I just want to know the story behind a piece of paper that I got from someone I worked with long ago. What's in it for you is that with the help I can give you you might stand a chance against Phillips.”

“Have a good life,” Demarest said, turning the smile off. He strode quickly away, toward the stairs.

After Demarest's head disappeared beneath the top of the stairwell, Michaelson took a handbill from the desk. It advertised a return engagement the following week for “C-Sharp and the Nasty Boys.”

Michaelson waited ten minutes before he walked to the squat, chrome-and-glass office building whose fourth floor sheltered Bodies by Design. He went there to see if the gym bag Demarest had been flashing around was a red herring or if he actually had just gone to the place.

He had. In the midst of a sales pitch from a husky young man who looked like he had a pulse rate of about sixty, Michaelson spotted Demarest cruising around the oval running track, swiveling his head for a long, appreciative gaze each time he passed the aerobics area. And when the aerobics class ended and the swivel gazes continued, Michaelson surmised that Demarest had been ogling neither the men nor the women in their formfitting spandex, but the mirror.

***

“Patrice Helmsing is confirmed for three o'clock tomorrow afternoon,” Marjorie told Catherine Shepherd an hour or so later.

“Well, that's good news. I'll let Wilcox know. Cindy and I will both be here. And of course you're welcome to come if you can take the time from your store. This is really your party.”

“I probably will stop by,” Marjorie said. “With the snow we've only had three customers today, and unless there's a sudden thaw, I don't expect tomorrow to be any better. Have you had any luck getting a plowing service out there for the driveway?”

“No,” Catherine said, “they're all swamped. And I guess it could be a problem, couldn't it?”

“Your driveway does dip a bit in the middle. If it's acting like a bobsled run tomorrow afternoon, you may end up with an alienated prospect and a brace of unexpected weekend houseguests.”

“Well, Cindy and I will just have to take care of it ourselves, that's all.”

“That sounds a bit ambitious,” Marjorie said. Delicately. At least in Cindy's case, any commitment to manual labor struck Marjorie as insanely implausible.

“Thank you for expressing your skepticism so tactfully,” Catherine said, a suggestion of joshing laughter coloring her voice. “Cindy already brought the idea up, actually. She said she's so anxious to unload this place that she'd do anything except change diapers. Not a job for princesses, I grant you, but Cindy and I between us should be able to handle it. We've agreed we'll be out here in our grubs by noon tomorrow if we haven't arranged for commercial plowing by then.”

“Good luck, then,” Marjorie said. Catherine sounded confident, but Marjorie would believe it when she saw it.

***

“Sorry it took so long to get back to you,” Cecilia Hamisch said over the phone to Michaelson at exactly four o'clock. “The European Union's not at the top of anyone's list right now. But I finally got some calls returned and I have an answer for you.”

“Which is what?” Michaelson asked.

“Someone's kidding you. The EU has options on about eighty thousand square feet in downtown Washington. They got a couple of hints from us early on about available space. They were thinking very low profile—handful of secretaries, a few number crunchers, and a face-man to pat fannies over at Commerce. They're definitely not in the market for anything like Calvert Manor.”

“So they say, at any rate,” Michaelson offered.

“They're putting their money where their mouth is. Those options didn't come cheap.”

This was easier than the
New York Times
Monday crossword, Michaelson reflected, with some misgivings. Why would Avery Phillips bother with a phony story that he had to know Michaelson could explode with a phone call or two?

“Thank you very much,” Michaelson said.

“There's one more thing,” Hamisch said. “My E-mail inquiry stimulated wider interest than I expected. Someone named Connaught called me from one of the national committee offices. Alumnus. I don't remember him, but he seemed to know you and a lot of other people who've worked here. He didn't know anything about the European Union, but he wanted to learn everything I could tell him about Calvert Manor. Which wasn't much.”

“That's interesting,” Michaelson said. “Thank you.”

After hanging up Michaelson pulled an old copy of the studbook off a bookshelf behind him. This was the Foreign Service Personnel Directory, with a capsule biography of all serving FSOs. Connaught, Corbin (James), AB (History) Brown 1965, was credited with service as an attaché for cultural affairs in Belgrade from 1969 to 1974, a science and technology attaché in Prague from 1979 to 1981, and a chargé d'affaires for special assignments in Budapest from 1987 to 1990. No indication of how he'd passed his time during the rather noticeable gaps between these tours of duty.

In other words, Corbin James Connaught was a spook. Or had been. A CIA officer who sometimes used State Department cover. Now ostensibly no longer in government service but claiming to earn his shekels working for one of the political parties. Cecilia Hamisch, model civil servant that she was, had been careful not to say which one.

Michaelson felt a bit silly now about lecturing Demarest on his naïveté. Phillips' fairy tale about the European Union made no sense as a story to fool Michaelson for long. It made very good sense, however, as a device to send a signal with Richard Michaelson's credibility behind it to Washington's foreign policy, national security, and political establishments. A signal that somebody had an interest in Calvert Manor that they were trying to disguise. Which was exactly what Michaelson had just done.

Chapter Six

This is above and beyond, Marjorie,” Patrice Helmsing said as the airport retreated in Marjorie's rearview mirror late Friday morning. “You're running a bookstore, not a taxi service.”

“I told Carrie to close the store at noon, actually,” Marjorie said. “If this morning's sales cover the light bill, I'll be pleasantly surprised. Snow they shrug off overnight in Detroit or Chicago paralyzes D.C. for a week.”

“That does ring a bell,” Helmsing said, smiling slightly.

Patrice Murchison Armour Helmsing was almost six feet tall. Her white skirt-and-jacket suit and the gold rims of her glasses stood out strikingly against her obsidian skin. Gentle waves of hair blacker than her body framed prominent cheekbones that kept her fifties-plus face from seeming fleshly. Eyes with charcoal-flecked, chocolate brown pupils took in the world with a steady, measured gaze.

Helmsing had lived away from Washington for twenty of the last twenty-five years, but she still referred to her family as “the Washington Murchisons.” Black Murchisons were free residents of Washington, D.C., ten years before South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter. A generation later they were financially comfortable, and by the 1920s they were rich—part of a class as self-conscious as any collection of blue bloods in Boston or New York. They ran charities, sat on civic committees, funded scholarships, decorated corporate boards, and spent money and sweat battling for civil rights.

A mantle of clouds turned the sky eggshell white from one horizon to the other as Marjorie and Helmsing crawled through half-plowed streets toward Calvert Manor. It was nearly three p.m. when they parked just outside the eight-foot evergreen hedge shielding the property. As soon as they reached the top of the driveway, they spotted a solitary, parka-bundled figure thirty feet away, vigorously attacking the asphalt with an ice chopper.

“Which Shepherd is that?” Helmsing asked.

“Catherine, I'm guessing,” Marjorie said.

“Goddammit! Break, you miserable sonofabitch!”
the figure barked at the ice.

“Correction,” Marjorie said to Helmsing. “Cindy.”

Five steps father down the driveway Marjorie raised her voice so that Cindy could hear it over the ice chopper's tinny ring.

“Where's Catherine?”

“Her serene highness stood me up,” Cindy panted. “About half an hour ago she breezed back here from someplace where people's shoes match their purses.”

“Where is she now?”

“Inside. She was properly mortified and pathetically keen to pitch in, but I told her that perspiration wouldn't coordinate well with the Laura Ashley Junior League Collection getup she had on. I sent her into the house to make herself useful there.”

Sweat pasted Cindy's hair to her forehead. A deep red suffused her face. Marjorie repented her mental disparagement of Cindy's aptitude for hard work and was searching for some gracious way to say so when an inch-thick slab of ice the size of Marjorie's back broke free. Spidery fissures snaked through the remaining layer. Cindy attacked these with atavistic avidity, quickly exposing another twelve square feet of asphalt.

A Lexus pulled into the driveway.

“Wilcox and Jenkins,” Cindy said. “Trustee and realtor.”

When the two women who got out of the Lexus had made their way down the driveway, Cindy managed perfunctory introductions and offered distracted contributions to a bit of small talk, all punctuated by clanging blows of the chopper blade.

“This is a magnificent piece of work you've done on the driveway,” Jenkins said to Cindy, who had by now produced clear pavement to just past the front walk.

“Right,” Cindy muttered as she shouldered the snow shovel and ice chopper and started down the driveway toward the garage behind the house. “Now you do a magnificent job of moving this pile of prerevolutionary brick. Then we'll both be happy.”

Using Wilcox's key, the four remaining women proceeded into the house without waiting for Cindy to return. They found the large living-room hearth glowing with a bright-flamed fire of crackling cherry wood. They saw fresh apples, oranges, and peaches heaped in a bowl on the dining-room table. Curtains parted on the south side of the house emphasized the cheering effect of the day's scant sunshine. Marjorie surmised that Catherine had been efficiently busy since Cindy had sent her inside.

Which was fine, Marjorie thought, but where was Catherine now? Moping with remorse or not, letting four people walk into her home without even a greeting didn't seem like her style. So far, all they had was Cindy's word about Catherine's whereabouts today. A tiny bite of anxiety began to gnaw at Marjorie's gut.

She told herself she was being silly. Even so, she thought, it couldn't hurt to keep her eyes open.

“The inside looks fabulous too,” Jenkins said. “They may start wondering why they need me.”

“Just persuade Ms. Helmsing to offer us a price that a court will approve if one of the little darlings decides two years from now to charge me with misfeasance,” Wilcox said. “As long as I can turn in a final accounting that's pluperfect bullet proof, you won't have to worry about what the Misses Shepherd think.”

Taking the unsubtle hint, Jenkins clicked into sales mode. She adopted a prudently understated approach, letting the home speak for itself. It had plenty to say: colonial heritage, large bedrooms with individual fireplaces, library with oak shelving graced by calf-bound estate books dating to the eighteenth century, ample closet space, and modern plumbing and appliances.

The undeniable downsides of a house more than three centuries old seemed pale in comparison to these features. Some of the renovations the home had seen over the years had been jury-rigged improvisations, resulting in anomalies like doors that opened out of converted bathrooms instead of into them. The door connecting one of the guest bedrooms to its bathroom had a sixty-year-old dead bolt snap lock that would have been more appropriate on an outside back door. When they got to that room, Helmsing seemed instinctively to suspect the weakness in the bolt's spring and the play in its housing, which she promptly verified.

But Marjorie figured things that a few thousand dollars and a little love could fix weren't going to keep Helmsing from owning this house. During the tour of the first and second floors, Helmsing looked like a very serious potential buyer. While Marjorie made discreet forays into empty rooms in a vain search for Catherine, Helmsing turned on taps, flushed toilets, and felt for drafts at the cracks of window frames. When in the midst of viewing what had been the master bedroom she started taking measurements with a cased, metal tape, Marjorie thought the earnest-money check was as good as written.

“If you'll be here for a while yet, I'm going to excuse myself for a few minutes,” Marjorie said.

Jenkins nodded while Helmsing scratched numbers in a small memo book. After exiting, Marjorie opened and closed the nearest bathroom door but didn't go inside. She scurried instead toward the stairs. She'd had at least a peek at every room on two floors without spotting Catherine. The glimpse of lonely desperation she'd seen in Catherine's eyes across her kitchen table slipped into Marjorie's memory and wouldn't go away.

After a rapid and fruitless repeat run through the first floor, Marjorie took the kitchen stairs to the basement.

“Catherine?” she called at the bottom of the stairs. Only the faintly mocking echo of her own voice answered her.

Flipping on lights, she moved quickly through the musty cellar. The laundry room was spotless and uninhabited. The furnace room was piled high with empty boxes but showed no sign of recent human intrusion.

She stepped from the furnace room into a spacious recreation room, paneled and carpeted and dominated by a massive pool table. Arrayed haphazardly on shelves around the room's perimeter were the remnants of affluent childhood: board games in battered boxes, Ping-Pong paddles and discolored balls, odd lots of checkers, and the kind of educational books that are received at Christmas without being asked for and shelved by spring without being read.

One last door presented itself to Marjorie. What might have been a small office or an oversized closet intruded into the far corner of the rec room. Cindy leaned against the wall next to the door, paging idly through a copy of
Entertainment Weekly
.

“Where's Catherine?” Marjorie asked.

“Where she wants to be.”

“I was looking for more specific information.”

“It's not your day to watch her,” Cindy said. She snapped the magazine shut. “Don't worry about it. She's a big girl.”

“Do you mind if I take a look behind that door?”

“Yes, I mind.”

“I just want to be sure Catherine's all right,” Marjorie said.

“If there was anything wrong with her, do you think I'd be standing here like an airhead? She's my sister.”

“And coheir.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means I'd like to take a look behind that door.”

“Listen. Carefully. Catherine and I are both grown-ups. As in of age. Adults. The answer's no. No one's bought anything yet. This is still our house. You go find your little friends and start collaborating on an article for
Gracious Living.”

“The group upstairs includes a realtor with keys and a trustee with authority,” Marjorie said. “Whatever's on the other side of that door, would you rather all four of us saw it or just me?”

“Jesus, you
are
a bitch, aren't you?”

“If you like.”

Marjorie stepped toward the door. With a disgusted shrug Cindy stamped away. Marjorie turned the knob and pushed the reluctant door open.

She walked into a tiny study, the kind of place a thoughtful parent might have rigged up for his daughters to use to do their homework. Felt-covered plywood laid across filing cabinets formed a makeshift desk against the back wall. Textbooks, spiral notebooks, and three-ring binders decorated with adolescent graffiti crammed a shelf above the desk. Posters of toothy young men with lots of hair whom Marjorie supposed she might have recognized if she'd ever watched the Fox network decorated the walls. In this room, the apparent epicenter of a charmed and golden early adolescence, Marjorie found Catherine.

Catherine was standing in the corner. She had her head bowed and her hands clasped behind her back at her waist, like a parody of Norman Rockwell that might have been titled
Schoolgirl in Disgrace
. A white kitchen timer ticked on the desk. The contrast between Catherine's penitent, juvenile posture and her matronly dress, sheer stockings, and elegant black flats seemed vaguely pornographic. Marjorie tried to banish an unwelcome mental image of lonely males in dreary hotel rooms flicking one-handed through magazines featuring pictures of scenes like this.

Catherine's shoulders stiffened and her ears pinkened when Marjorie entered the room, but Marjorie didn't see any other reaction to her presence. Catherine stood rigidly in place, stoically enduring her apparent penance.

“Catherine?” Marjorie said quietly. “Are you all right?”

No answer. No visible reaction.

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

No response.

“Satisfied?” Cindy asked icily from behind Marjorie. “Could you maybe just fuck off now and take a Metamucil break with your chums upstairs or something?”

“Is that your best idea under the circumstances?” Marjorie asked, turning to face Cindy.

“Look,” Cindy said wearily. “Maybe you mean well and maybe I'm being a shit. But I've been through this before. This is Cathy's trip. This goes on until she's ready for it to stop. The best thing you can do is leave. Tell your crew about our nice, dry basement and keep everyone else out of this room.”

An abrupt rasp from the timer jerked their eyes back to the inside of the room. Turning from the corner, Catherine shut the timer off and without making eye contact with either Marjorie or Cindy walked wordlessly from the room. Cindy sighed and relaxed. Marjorie looked from Catherine's retreating figure back to Cindy.

“I don't have any right to ask this,” Marjorie said, “but has this kind of thing been going on since your father died?”

“You're right. You don't have any right to ask that.”

Her pace unconsciously quickening as she reached the stairs, Marjorie almost raced out of a clean, dry, semifinished basement that suddenly seemed creepily gothic.

She found Helmsing, Jenkins, and Wilcox huddled around the writing desk in the living room, poring over what looked like a building inspector's report.

“Oh, there you are,” Helmsing said as she looked up. She immediately turned back to Jenkins. “I'll have a signed offer on your desk by Monday at noon. You'll find it very attractive.”

“I'll look forward to it,” Jenkins said.

“‘Attractive' is a relative term,” Wilcox added casually. “I should warn you that you're not the only party who's recently expressed interest. I expect another offer to come in Monday morning. At or near the asking price, and without contingencies.”

“Will I have a chance to beat it?” Helmsing asked.

“I'll do my best,” Wilcox said, “but I can't guarantee it. The best thing would be for your first offer to be better than the other one I'm expecting.”

“I'll keep that in mind,” Helmsing said.