House Secrets (2 page)

“They said he’d been out in his kayak and had fallen overboard and drowned. But the story doesn’t make sense.”

“You don’t think he drowned?” DeMarco said.

“He drowned,” Dick Finley said. “The autopsy was definitive on that. And the water they found in his lungs came from the lake.”

“Then I don’t understand,” DeMarco said.

“It’s a long commute from D.C. to Lake Anna, and Terry was a workaholic. The day he died, I know he left the
Post
about eight, so he wouldn’t have gotten to the lake until at least nine-thirty. So why would a guy go kayaking at nine-thirty, ten o’clock at night? I asked the police that, and they said there was a full moon that night, but I still don’t buy it. And the other thing is, Terry got that kayak five, six years ago. He was always getting interested in some new thing—biking, kayaking, rock climbing—and then after a couple of months he’d lose interest. The only thing he cared about was work. What I’m saying is, I don’t think Terry’d been in that boat in two or three years, maybe longer.”

“But his body was found in the lake, near the kayak,” DeMarco said.

“Yeah, but there’s other stuff. Like Terry’s laptop is missing. That laptop was
always
with him. If he wasn’t carrying the thing, it was
close by—in his car, on his desk, wherever he was. I asked the sheriff where his computer was, and at first he said he didn’t know. Two days later he calls back and says that Terry had filed a report with the D.C. cops before his death saying it had been stolen.”

“And you don’t think it was?”

“No. I talked to Terry the day he died, that morning. If his laptop had been stolen, he would have told me. He’d have been going
nuts
to find it. And the sheriff said that Terry reported the theft over the phone, not in person. So who knows who really filed the report?”

“I see,” DeMarco said.

“And that’s not all,” Finley said. “Terry was working on something, something he said was going to win him a Pulitzer. He wouldn’t tell me what, but he said when he filed his story the dome was gonna come off the Capitol. Now to tell you the truth, I didn’t think too much of that. Terry was always working on some story he said was gonna be big, but usually wasn’t. But then he goes and dies, and now I don’t know. You want another beer?”

While Finley was getting his beer, DeMarco looked down at the beach and noticed a pudgy, middle-aged man walking a small dog. He watched as the guy tossed a stick of driftwood into the water. The stick looked heavy and was as long as the dog, but the dog—poor, dumb creature that it was—charged into the water after it. A wave crashed into the animal and it disappeared for a moment, then it reappeared with the stick in its mouth. The dog fought its way back to the beach and brought the stick to the man, who immediately tossed it again, farther out this time. DeMarco felt like going down to the beach and throwing the stick into the water and making the pudgy guy go fetch it.

After Finley handed him his beer, DeMarco said, “Do you think there might be something in your son’s house that would give me an idea of what he was working on?”

“Maybe you can find something, but I looked a couple days ago,” Finley said. “I went all through his desk, even looked in his safe to see if he’d put something there, but all that was in the safe was some
cash and some old coins he’d collected.” Finley smiled then, but it was a sad smile. “The coins were like the kayak,” he said. “Terry bought ’em ten years ago and probably hadn’t looked at ’em since then. But if you want to look in his house, I’ll give you the keys.”

“That’d be good,” DeMarco said. “I’ll take a look later if I think I need to.”

“I did find one thing that I can’t explain,” Finley said, and he reached into his shirt pocket and carefully removed a wrinkled piece of paper and handed it to DeMarco. The paper was water-damaged and torn. It was a cocktail napkin from a place called Sam and Harry’s, a bar in D.C. that DeMarco went to quite often.

“That was in Terry’s wallet,” Finley said. “His wallet was in his pants when he died and it got wet, of course. All the cash and credit card slips were all stuck together and I tore that when I tried to separate it from the other stuff. That’s all of it I could salvage.”

DeMarco studied what was written on the napkin for a moment but could make no sense of it. “You think what’s written here might be related to whatever he was working on?” he said.

“I don’t know,” Finley said. “It looks like he was just doodling on that napkin—Terry was a real doodler—but I don’t think he would have put it in his wallet if it wasn’t important. Look, the only thing I know for sure is that he didn’t fall out of a damn kayak at ten o’clock at night.”

“Old man Finley’s a good guy,” the sheriff said. “I liked him when he was in Congress and I still like him. But he’s wrong about Terry. There wasn’t anything suspicious about his death.”

The Louisa County sheriff was in his forties, well-muscled and tanned, and on the credenza behind his desk was a picture of him and a boys’ baseball team. Two of the kids in the picture were clutching a good-sized trophy. DeMarco hoped the sheriff was as good a cop as he was a coach.

“We didn’t find any signs of a struggle,” the sheriff said. “His house wasn’t ransacked and he definitely drowned in the lake. The lake’s got some kind of algae in it which is pretty distinctive, and the medical examiner found it in his lungs.”

“You don’t think it’s strange that he was kayaking in the dark?” DeMarco said.

“It wasn’t that dark. There was a full moon that night and the lights from other houses on the lake would have provided more light. But there’s something else, something we didn’t tell Mr. Finley.”

“What’s that?”

“Terry’s blood alcohol level was .18 at the time of his death. We think he had a few drinks after work, came home with a pretty good buzz on, and decided to go for a little moonlight paddle. Drunks have bad judgment. And their coordination and sense of balance aren’t too good either. Have you ever been in a kayak, Mr. DeMarco?”

“No. Been in a canoe, but not a kayak.”

“Well, sometime you oughta try to get
in
one. What I’m saying is, the toughest part of kayaking is getting in and out of the damn boat without tipping it over, and if you don’t believe me, try it. Then try it again after four drinks.”

DeMarco called the
Washington Post
and spent five frustrating minutes navigating his way through a particularly annoying voice mail system before he was finally connected to Reggie Harmon’s phone.

“Reggie, my man,” DeMarco said, “I’m in the mood to buy you a big salad for lunch.”

“A
salad
?” Reggie said, as if he couldn’t imagine consuming something so horrible.

“That’s right, Reginald. A two-olive salad with martini dressing. Onions if you prefer.”

“Ah, that kinda salad. Well, veggies are one of your four basic food groups, aren’t they?”

“Yes, they are, my friend. Plus vodka’s usually made from potatoes. Carbohydrates, you know. And if you have a twist in your second martini, you’ll ward off scurvy.”

“Where and when, son? A man my age can’t afford to ignore his health.”

“The Monocle. As soon as you can get there.”

DeMarco hung up the phone. He should have been ashamed of himself, appealing to the late-morning cravings of an alcoholic to get information—but he wasn’t.

DeMarco had called Reggie from his office, a small windowless room in the subbasement of the Capitol that seemed to have been designed to induce claustrophobia. He spent as little time there as possible, and the décor—or the lack of it—reflected this. The only furniture in the room was his desk, two wooden chairs, and a battered, four-drawer file cabinet. The file cabinet was a totally unnecessary item because DeMarco didn’t believe in keeping written
records; they could subpoena
him
, but not his files. At one point he’d had a couple of pictures on one wall that had been given to him by his ex-wife, but since they had reminded him of her unfaithful nature every time he looked at them, he’d finally taken them down. The pathetic part was that the bare space on the wall where the pictures had been still reminded him of her.

The Monocle Bar and Grill was located near Union Station, less than a fifteen-minute walk from the Capitol. DeMarco locked his office door and walked up the steps to the main floor of the building, to the rotunda, the space directly beneath the dome. He saw a page he knew leading a tour group: a smart-assed, jug-eared little bastard named Mullen. Pages had the professional longevity of butterflies, here one summer and gone the next, so DeMarco rarely knew their names—but he knew Mullen’s. He had walked out of his office one day and saw Mullen smooching a girl page out in the hall, next to his door. Instead of acting embarrassed as he should have, Mullen had the balls to offer DeMarco fifty bucks for the use of his office. The kid would probably be president one day.

To reach the Monocle, DeMarco walked down First Street, past the Supreme Court. He looked up, as he always did, at the words
EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW
carved into the stone above the building’s sixteen massive marble columns. The high court was one of the few institutions in Washington that DeMarco still had any faith in, and he had this faith for a simple reason: the nine people who worked there had nothing more to gain. They were at the pinnacle of their profession, they had the job for life, and they didn’t have to please anybody to keep the job. Those, he believed, were circumstances that tended to produce honest if not always wise decisions. But he was probably wrong about that too.

As DeMarco stepped inside the Monocle, the maître d’ glanced over at him to see if his attire was appropriate, nodded curtly, then returned to his reservation list. The Monocle was a bit pretentious but then this was understandable: its clientele tended to be the legislative
branch of government as opposed to the electorate, and the walls of the bar were covered with photographs of drinking politicians. It seemed like Mahoney was in half the pictures.

DeMarco saw Reggie Harmon sitting at the end of the bar, the only customer at eleven in the morning, his first martini half-gone. Reggie was sixty and he looked like a vampire that had been caught in a sunbeam. He had a pale sunken-cheeked face and dyed black hair plastered to a long, narrow skull. His shirt was two sizes too large around the collar and his thin fingers poked beyond the cuffs like claws.

As DeMarco sat down on the stool next to him, Reggie slowly swiveled his head in DeMarco’s direction. His eyes were so red that DeMarco wondered if any of the reporter’s blood reached his brain. Exposing too many nicotine-stained teeth in the grimace he called a smile, Reggie said, “What do you call a hundred lawyers buried in a landfill?”

“A good start. Reggie, that’s the third time you’ve told me that stupid joke. You need to get some new material.”

“Well, you could still laugh, just to be polite,” Reggie said.

DeMarco just shook his head then pointed at Reggie’s drink and held up two fingers for the bartender’s benefit.

“What do you know about Terry Finley?” DeMarco asked.

Reggie drained his first martini. “The kid that drowned?” he said.

“Yeah, the kid that drowned.” Finley had been forty-two when he died.

Reggie shrugged, then reached for the full glass the bartender had just placed at his elbow. He swallowed a third of the drink before saying, “What do I know about him? Well, he worked the political beat, of course.”

“Why ‘of course’?”

“The only reason he got the job was because his dad was a congressman. The schemers in charge figured a kid whose dad worked on the Hill would give the paper an edge.”

“Did it?”

“No. Terry was an annoying, ambitious little shit, one of those guys who always thought he was gonna be the next Bobby Woodward, but he never tried to use his old man to get there.”

“Was he any good?”

Reggie swallowed the remainder of his second martini; as an afterthought he reached for the olives from his first martini. At the rate Reggie drank, DeMarco was thinking that they should just hook up an IV bag to his arm.

“Only in his dreams,” Reggie said. “A couple years ago he got everyone all excited when he said he’d discovered that this colonel over at the Pentagon was an al-Qaeda mole. The basis for his conclusion was that the guy—the Pentagon guy—was always meeting this dishy, Arabic-looking gal in these seedy hotel bars. Turned out the guy was just boffing the lady, who happened to be Egyptian, but was no more into Islam than the Pope. That was Terry: seeing a spy ring instead of two people fuckin’.”

“Huh,” DeMarco said. “Was he working on anything important before he died?”

“Maybe. I heard him and his editor going at it one day. Frank was trying to get Terry’s ass up to the Hill to write about some political squabble, and Terry kept telling him that he didn’t have time. He said he was working on the biggest thing since Clinton got a blow job.”

“But you don’t know what the story was about?”

“No. All I heard was Terry say that if Frank knew who his source was, he wouldn’t be giving him chickenshit assignments.”