Dead Heat (24 page)

“To the minute.”

“How are they doing?”

“They're staring at their wristwatches. Mr. Heineman arrived first, showing a great deal more politeness than one is used to from a member of the press. I sat him in the west parlor as you instructed. Mr. Eichenhorn followed ten minutes later. More of a nervous type, wanted me to know he had no time to waste. I ushered him into the west parlor also.”

“Reactions?”

“Definite recognition on both sides. Cordial hellos of great wariness exchanged. I should say Mr. Eichenhorn seems more apprehensive about Mr. Heineman's presence than vice versa, but that may merely be a sign of the times. Who could possibly make the news media uneasy?”

“Another reporter.”

“Very true.”

“Show Eichenhorn in. Then make polite noises at Heineman and reassure him that Mary will be with him soon.”

“Done.”

Pierce closed the heavy doors on the way out. Spraggue moved away from the desk, crossed the Oriental rug, the parquet border, and mounted the wrought-iron stairs to the open balcony that ran around the second story of the massive room. He would be able to see Eichenhorn. Eichenhorn wouldn't see him. Not at first.

“Mrs. Hillman will be with you in a moment,” Pierce rumbled, holding the door, ushering Eichenhorn inside. “Please take a seat by the desk.”

“I'm really running late—” Donagher's campaign manager began. Pierce must have frowned at him. Pierce's frown left people unable to finish sentences.

“I'm sure you won't have long to wait,” the butler intoned. The doors banged shut.

Eichenhorn took his time meandering over to the desk. His suit looked rumpled and hung across his narrow hunched shoulders no better than it would have hung on a bent wire hanger. He whistled under his breath as his eyes scanned the shelves of leather-bound volumes. He admired the Cézanne over the mantle, strolled across the room to the bay window, whistled softly again before sinking into the smaller of two leather armchairs in front of the desk. Spraggue took the steps noiselessly, cleared his throat when he was some six feet behind Eichenhorn.

The campaign manager jumped, half turned in his chair, stared. His lips compressed into a tight line and he shook his head.

“I told the senator I shouldn't come. Not today, not so early in the campaign.”

“And he said?” Spraggue settled himself in the chair behind the desk.

“He said we couldn't afford to ignore Mary Spraggue Hillman, that with a flick of her checkbook, she could win us the race.”

“Donagher's a smart man.”

“What do you want? Do I get to see your aunt or was that just a come on?”

“It was a kindness. I thought the questions I have to ask you might be less embarrassing here, in private, than they would be in Donagher's company. Or at the police station.”

“What questions? Why the hell should I answer any more of your questions?” Eichenhorn stood up. “I'm going to tell the senator about this. He'll be—”

“You recognize the man you were sitting next to out there?”

Eichenhorn had turned away and taken two steps towards the double doors. He pivoted on one heel, his face a wary mask. “Some TV news guy. Channel 4. I think the name is Heineman.”

“Very good. If you walk out the door, I'm going to invite him to take your place here. And I'm going to tell him what I would have liked to ask you, if you hadn't been in such a hurry.”

Eichenhorn retraced his footsteps. “Such as?”

“Sit down. Would you like some coffee?”

“No. You're pressuring me and I don't like it.”

“You're going to like it even less. Sit down.”

Reluctantly, indignation puffing up inside him like air in an inflating balloon, the man sat.

“I want to know where you got the bottle of Parnate,” Spraggue said.

Eichenhorn stared. “The bottle of what?”

“Parnate, Mr. Emery.”

Eichenhorn's fingers clutched the arms of the chair, then balled themselves into fists. He said, “I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Let me tell you then. It won't take long and you may find it entertaining—and conclusive, the way I did. Act One: at a funeral an old cop calls a guy I know as Murray, Marty. The old cop could have been drunk or mistaken.”

“Yeah.”

“Act Two: a bottle of pills appears in a dead man's bathroom,
after
the police have already searched it. I notice some marks on the front door lock of this dead man's apartment, the marks of a not very talented housebreaker. Are you following this?”

Eichenhorn nodded.

“Act Three: the fingerprints of the man called Murray turn out to be the same as those of a boy named Marty, a boy who used to pick locks so badly the cops could always nail him—”

“Those records are sealed. You can't use them in court.”

“I didn't say anything about court. I said something about TV news. Something about a slip of the tongue while I'm talking to a reporter. I'll be very sorry. I'll say I was misquoted. Senator Donagher's going to be very pleased to learn he has an ex-burglar as a campaign manager. So are the voters.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to know whose medicine you planted in Collatos' bathroom. And why.”

“Jesus—”

“And it better sound good.”

Eichenhorn shoved his wire-rimmed glasses back on his narrow nose, wiped his hand across his forehead. “Are you taping this?”

“Not now. This is your chance to come clean, off the record. When Heineman joins us, if he joins us, then we'll do some recording.”

Eichenhorn closed his eyes and bowed his head; his Adam's apple bobbed up and down in his scrawny neck. He glanced behind him before he spoke, started off whispering, as if that would defeat any undetected listening device, frustrate any unseen eavesdropper. “The way I figured it,” he began shakily, “it would get the heat off the senator. The sooner Collatos' death is cleared up, the sooner the whole fracas dies down, the sooner the papers go back to printing political stories instead of crime stories. See? So I wanted it out of the way. It was the wrong kind of publicity. Donagher doesn't need stuff like that.”

“And you just happened to have a bottle of pills handy that would make the whole story, the whole accidental death garbage, come out right. Whose were they?”

Eichenhorn shrugged.

“This isn't hard to figure,” Spraggue said. “You live at Donagher's place. You didn't want those pills over there, so they have to belong to you or Donagher or Donagher's wife or one of the kids. If I had the time, I'd just check the medical records of every member of the Donagher machine—”

“They're confidential. Medical records are confidential.”

“There is very little information that can't be bought in this world. Understand that. But I don't have a lot of time to play around with. So I am asking you to make a choice. Either tell me where you got the bottle of Parnate or meet the press as a reformed burglar. Maybe Donagher will weather the storm. Maybe he'll even keep you on, bluff it out, say he knew about your record all along and he's all for rehabilitation. But my bet is that it would be a big mistake to admit openly that your right-hand man, a man who is, I'm sure, lusting for appointed office in the government, is a crook. People might assume that all politicians are crooks, but they hate to see it spelled out in the papers in black and white.”

“They're my pills.”

“Who's your doctor?”

Silence.

“Who suggested that you plant them in Collatos' medicine chest?”

“I was working on my own,” Eichenhorn said faintly. “I thought it would be easy. I mean, why the hell shouldn't Collatos have been depressed? I thought the cops would find the bottle and close the case, say he'd been taking those antidepressant pills and then the hit of speed on top of it killed him. And that would be the end of the story. We could get on with the campaign. I planted them too late, I guess.”

“It was a stupid thing to do.”

“I can see that now. I've done a lot of stupid things in my life and the one thing I've learned from my mistakes is not to compound them by screwing people who've been good to you. I'm not going to talk to you about anyone else on Donagher's staff. I'll resign. Then your goddam TV reporter won't be able to hurt him.”

Spraggue stared into the opaque blue eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses, and found unexpected steel. Murray's long fingers gripped the armrests. His knuckles were white as chalk. He sat as straight as Spraggue had ever seen him sit, with his shoulders flung back, as squared as nature would ever let them be. Eichenhorn had drawn the line; he'd rat on himself, not on others.

Spraggue found himself admiring the defiant man in the chair more than he'd thought possible five minutes earlier. He said, “There are a couple of other items I would like.”

“What makes you think I'd give you anything?”

“They're too trivial to fight over. I can call Donagher and get them on the phone. Or get him to order you to give them to me.”

“What?”

“Number one: a list of people on Donagher's staff.”

“And number two?”

“A list of all the places Donagher and Collatos went the day before the marathon.”

“That's all?”

“That's all.”

Eichenhorn sighed. “I don't suppose I could bargain with little items like that,” he said.

“Try.”

“If I give them to you, now—I have Donagher's appointment book with me—would you wait until after the election to tell the press about me, about Martin Emery?”

“You're a rotten burglar,” Spraggue said.

“I know. But I'm a good campaign manager.” Eichenhorn tried a sickly smile. “I'm not even a bad person. I haven't done anything illegal since—”

“But you insist those pills are yours?”

Eichenhorn swallowed. “Yes.”

Spraggue rang the buzzer on the desk. “Pierce will show you out as soon as you've written down the timetable for Sunday and the names of Donagher's staff workers.”

“What's it worth to you?”

“I won't say anything to the press for now. Not today. The election is still a long way off.”

It took ten minutes for Eichenhorn to write out the lists, five more to relay instructions to Aunt Mary, shake hands with a puzzled Heineman, kiss Sharon on the cheek in a manner far more brotherly than he felt. At ten fifteen, Spraggue left the house.

THIRTY-ONE

The Porsche was where he'd left it, but Mary's chauffeur had polished it until it gleamed. Might as well have smacked a steal-me-first sign across the front bumper. The windshield sparkled so brightly he was afraid he wouldn't be able to see out of it. The gas tank, close to empty when he'd careened up the driveway in cold anger, had been filled. He wondered if the parking tickets in the dash compartment had been laundered.

Half a mile from the house, where the twisty driveway looped in front of the stone gatehouse, he pulled the car over and stopped.

He couldn't have stayed ten minutes longer at the mansion. Already childhood memories were closing in: the sensation of unseen wheels turning, of unheard oiled machinery grinding relentlessly away. His shoes had been polished, his rumpled, sooty clothes removed while he slept. Life under great-grandfather Davison Spraggue's slate roof was lived in the old man's shadow. It had a rhythm foreign to this generation's renegade Spraggue, a seductive and hateful rhythm.

The windows of the gatehouse were dark and bare. Mary had probably done her worst and fired the gardener. Spraggue slid across the seat and out the passenger door, walked up the flagged pathway, peeked in the half-glassed door. Empty. He could move his things temporarily to the gatehouse, whatever things he had left. Aunt Mary wouldn't like it. Well, she didn't have to face the ghosts in the tower room.

He walked back to the car, got in.

What would he have left to put in the gatehouse? His fingers tightened on the steering wheel. Furniture he didn't give a damn about; he hadn't had any furniture to speak of on Fayerweather Street. He'd had a drawerful of yellowing theatrical programs, some photographs, a few trifling oddball gifts … Kate's letters. Visible, tangible backups for wayward memory, physical evidence of the fine-drawn threads that webbed him to others. The two paintings his mother had loved …

Why fire? He flexed his shoulders, loosened his hands on the wheel and let them drop forward into his lap, forced himself to consider the fire dispassionately, from a distance. To warn him off? Off of what? To destroy? Destroy what? The files he'd brought in from Pete's house that very day, possibly under the nose of secret watcher? He hadn't noticed, had hardly shot so much as a glance out the cab's rear window. The reckless between-lanes driving of the cabbie, the memory of Sharon Collatos' shower-damp face, had occupied his thoughts much too completely. Was the object to be destroyed the envelope Sharon had brought, the one that he'd pocketed at the time of the fire, the one that he'd transferred to this new stiff jacket?

Had the arsonist meant to kill? Had he waited, shivering in the bushes, for homecoming footfalls on the concrete path, for lights to blossom in the upstairs windows?

Mary, he knew, would understand his need to escape, realize that he wouldn't feel up to any social banter with the rage still in him, compounded by the distaste he felt at his role of inquisitor. Hadn't taken much to get poor Eichenhorn quivering. Maybe he should audition for nastier parts: Reverend Parris in
The Crucible
, Iago, Richard III.

Mary would begin to unravel one end of the ball of yarn. Mary understood what had to be done.

God, that it were as simple as picking at a ball of yarn until the one lost end came free. It was more like probing a tangled skein of writhing serpents knotted on the floor, trying, barehanded, to isolate three, possibly four, poisonous heads, before one rose to strike.