House Secrets (34 page)

“I’ve never heard of it,” DeMarco said.

Since Audrey wouldn’t let her talk, Emma just rolled her eyes. Her message was clear enough though: the things that DeMarco had not heard of far exceeded those that he had.

“They even made a movie based on pathological intoxication several years ago,” Audrey said. “It was called
Final Analysis
and starred Richard Gere and Kim Basinger. In the movie, Kim has a couple of sips of alcohol—cough syrup, actually—and then beats her husband to death with a dumbbell. Pathological intoxication has also been used, unsuccessfully I might add, as a defense in a number of criminal cases. The defense argues that the defendant had no more control over his actions than an insane person who commits murder or assault or whatever. I’ve testified twice for the defense in such cases, and the defense lost both times. Juries don’t buy it, regardless of the scientific data. They can’t believe that a couple sips of booze will affect a person so drastically since it’s never affected them that way.”

“Well, I’ll be,” DeMarco said, but he was distracted by the piano man. He was playing a medley from
Camelot
the way DeMarco had always wanted to play it. When he sang, in that whiskey-coated voice, the haunting lyrics of “If Ever I Would Leave You,” DeMarco was reminded that his wife had left him in September. Elle’s letter had arrived in September.

DeMarco shrugged off the music and gloomy thoughts of love lost. “So,” he said, “the type of personality I’m describing—a normally-in-control, calculating individual who loses his self-control with just a small quantity of alcohol—is a possibility.”

“Definitely,” Audrey said. “The other possibility, of course, is that his sexual urges may have nothing to do with alcohol. I mean, alcohol may trigger them, but alcohol isn’t at the root of his problem.”

“What are you talking about?” DeMarco said.

“I’m saying some people have sexual urges that they can’t control. Why would anyone molest children, for example? Morality aside, pedophiles know that if they’re caught they’ll become social outcasts and go to prison, yet they do it anyway. No rational person would be a child molester, yet they’re often intelligent men. They do what they do because they can’t stop themselves. And it’s not just pedophiles that have these self-destructive urges. Why would a president of the United States, a brilliant man, a Rhodes scholar, have an affair with an intern
in
the White House? He knew what was at stake, not just the presidency and everything he was working for, but his legacy, his place in history. So why did he do it?”

“I don’t kno—”

“Because he couldn’t help himself. Even knowing the consequences, he couldn’t stop. And that may be the case with this man you’re talking about. In a certain situation, with a certain kind of woman, and with a little booze to loosen his inhibitions, he just can’t stop himself.”

The piano player segued into the theme song from
Camelot
. Images of JFK and Jackie as young Arthur and maid Guinevere didn’t come to mind. Instead, DeMarco thought of sordid stories of Marilyn Monroe’s death and Sam Giancana. Emma cleared her throat to gain his attention.

“Well,” DeMarco said. “I guess I should get going. I appreciate you taking the time to see me, Audrey. I don’t know what to do about this guy but I guess now I understand him a little better.”

“Oh come on, Joe, use your head,” Emma said. “Audrey just gave you the answer.”

“You have an idea?” he said to Emma.

“Yes, but we’ll talk about it later. Tomorrow. Right now you’re going to leave so Audrey and I can catch up on old times.”

“Emma,” Audrey said, “you can be so rude sometimes. Joe hasn’t even finished his drink.”

“She can be rude all the time,” DeMarco said. Then he raised his hands in a don’t-hit-me gesture and said, “I’m outta here. And Audrey, thank you again for helping me even if I won’t know how you’ve helped me until Emma tells me.”

“You’ve got to be kidding!” DeMarco said.

“Not at all,” Emma said. “It seems pretty straightforward to me.”

“Emma, I’m not the damn CIA. I don’t have a bunch of trained agents hiding in my closet.”

“There is no closet in this office.” Looking around DeMarco’s small, drab workplace, she added, “How can you stand working here?”

“You know what I mean,” DeMarco said. “Your plan, it’s just . . . It has too many moving parts. It’s too complicated.”

“Not if you plan properly.”

“Isn’t there some military saying about how after the battle starts all the plans fall apart?”

“I’ve never heard that one,” Emma said.

Yes she had.

“And it’ll be expensive. Where in the hell am I going to get the money for this?”

The corners of Emma’s mouth turned up slightly, and then she answered his question.

DeMarco sat there stunned for a moment. “You know,” he finally said, “he just might be crazy enough to do it.”

“You’ll never know until you ask,” Emma said.

Emma rose, put on her coat, and opened the door to DeMarco’s office. Standing half-in and half-out of the doorway, she said, “And
by the way, it was the Prussian, von Moltke. He said, ‘No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength.’ But Mike Tyson said it better.”

“Tyson? The boxer?”

“Yeah. He said, ‘Everybody’s got a plan—until you hit ’em.’”

Sam Houston Murphy was dressed in a white shirt, a string tie, blue Levi’s, and alligator-skin cowboy boots. He was six foot four, maybe six-six with the boots, and the shirt was stretched tight across a stomach the size of a kettle drum.

Murphy was in his sixties. He had a homely rubbery face, large ears, and a Bob Hope ski-jump nose. His dark hair, probably dyed, was a thick unruly shag with a Dennis-the-Menace cowlick at the rear. Your first impression was Texas shitkicker—until you looked into his eyes. His eyes were as hard as ball bearings.

DeMarco was sitting with Murphy near the pool of his San Antonio home. Fall was beginning to turn cruel in Washington, but here in Texas it was a sunny seventy-five degrees. Murphy’s latest wife—a six-foot blond with the body of a Vegas showgirl—was swimming laps in the Olympic-size pool. Murphy’s eyes followed his wife’s form with obvious enjoyment as he drank coffee from a mug that said,
LOVE ME, LOVE MY DOG
. His dog, a bony-backed white mongrel with cataracts, lay sleeping on the tiles next to Murphy’s chair.

DeMarco didn’t like Murphy or his dog.

Murphy had been a senator for the last eighteen years but had decided not to accept another term because he was ready to make his run at the White House. He wasn’t as popular as Paul Morelli but he
was the best man the Republican Party had to offer at the moment. Some said he was the only one dumb enough to run against Morelli.

Sam Murphy was about as dumb as Lyndon Johnson or George Bush, Sr. He was born in a hardscrabble town in West Texas without a pot to piss in. He snagged a football scholarship from Texas A&M that garnered him permanent knee problems and a degree in petroleum engineering. He hit his first gusher six months after he graduated, the oil rights to the land bought with a federal grant he had been given to use for shale-formation research. He spent two decades turning barrels of oil into barrels of money, then veered into politics like a man genetically engineered to make deals in smoky back rooms. Three wives and twenty-some years later, he was one of the shrewdest politicians to ever hang a Stetson in the Senate cloakroom. If his opponent had been anyone other than Paul Morelli, Sam Murphy would have had a genuine shot at the Big House on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Murphy was this year’s what-you-see-is-what-you-get candidate. His campaign theme was “Return America to the Americans.” He would impose heavy trade sanctions to protect American industries and allow only German scientists and white Russian figure skaters to immigrate. He promised to abolish welfare in every form and declared that the best place for the homeless was a jail cell. He was a staunch supporter of capital punishment and believed that if every household had a gun, the judicial system would not be so overloaded. To a large segment of the working class, Sam Murphy was one of them: he drank Bud, drove a pickup truck, and liked blonds with big tits.

The private Sam Murphy was completely different from the public figure. He was pragmatic, insightful, and carefully picked his image and his issues. DeMarco knew he hated country-western music, preferred French wines to beer, and was usually chauffeured to appointments in a limo. He did like blonds with big tits, though.

While still looking at his wife, Murphy said, “Kinda surprised you wanted to see me, Joe Bob. Thought you was pissed at me.”

DeMarco had made the mistake of making a crack in Murphy’s presence once about every Texan having two first names, and from that point on he was Joe Bob. DeMarco’s middle name was not Bob.

“I still am, Senator,” DeMarco said.

“Shit, you can call me Sam, son. Ain’t a senator no more and don’t want no truck with them that is. Now next time you see me you might be callin’ me Mr. President, but until then, Sam’ll be juss fine.”

Three years ago the Speaker had assigned DeMarco to lend Sam Murphy a hand with a small problem. Why Mahoney was willing to aid a Republican, DeMarco didn’t know, but Murphy had said that there was an administrator at NASA leaking bid information to contractors and turning a profit doing so. He told DeMarco he wanted to expose this scoundrel in the interest of God, country, and fair play. DeMarco was gullible enough to believe him, got the goods on the NASA guy, and he was duly sacked. That should have been the happy ending to a minor drama, except DeMarco read in the paper two months later that the administrator’s replacement had awarded two large contracts to Texas companies. DeMarco didn’t know how Murphy had pulled it off, but it was apparent that he had found some way to manipulate the system to his constituents’ advantage. When DeMarco accused him of this, Murphy just winked and said DeMarco had better have a “whole shit pot full of evidence” before he went around making “slanderous” accusations against a United States senator—knowing that DeMarco had no evidence.

Yes, DeMarco was indeed pissed at Sam Houston Murphy. Murphy believed in nepotism, cronyism, paybacks, and payoffs. He was the kind of politician who had made DeMarco cynical of all politicians—but he had never killed one of his wives.

Murphy inhaled sharply as his current wife pulled herself from the pool and stood for a moment in profile, as if posing for her husband and his guest. DeMarco had pocket hankies that contained more material than the bikini she was wearing.

DeMarco heard Murphy mutter to himself, or maybe to his dog, “Damn, ain’t that somethin’.” To DeMarco he said, “Well, since I
know you ain’t one of my fans, you gonna tell me what it is that made you fly all the way to God’s country to see me?”

To make Emma’s plan work, DeMarco needed somebody with money and clout. Sam Murphy had both in abundance. Plus, as DeMarco knew from previous experience, Murphy was a risk taker, the type that always bets the table-limit even when the odds were against him. He also knew where he stood in the polls, and DeMarco was hoping that he’d be willing to take a considerable risk to increase his chances of beating Morelli.

Mrs. Murphy glanced over at her husband and his guest, her eyes lingering briefly on DeMarco. She blew Sam a kiss then walked slowly away from the pool toward the house. Her sleek limbs glistened with water and the movement of her haunches made DeMarco think of a prowling feline.

“Sam,” DeMarco said, “I know Paul Morelli has committed a serious crime but I can’t prove it.”

Murphy turned his eyes away from his wife’s ass and looked at DeMarco.

“I know you, Joe Bob. If you’re comin’ to
me
for help, Morelli musta done somethin’ God-awful horrible. You gonna tell me what it is?”

DeMarco did. While he talked, Murphy scratched the old hound’s neck. Surprisingly, he didn’t show any emotion when DeMarco discussed Morelli killing his wife and possibly molesting his stepdaughter. When DeMarco finished, Murphy said, “This thing about him and the booze—how it affects him—now that I think about it, there may be something to that. I remember being at functions with him and that aide of his, the tubby one who got killed, he’d count Morelli’s drinks like he was Carrie Nation’s brother.”

“So you believe me,” DeMarco said.

“You know, it don’t matter if I do or not. I’d be a damn hypocrite if I said I wouldn’t like to see Paul out of the race. And if he landed in jail, that’d just be icin’ on the cake. But what is it you think you can do, son? I agree with the police. You ain’t got shit
for evidence—just a lotta coincidences strung together like beads on a cheap necklace.”

“I can’t get Morelli for murder, Sam. All I want to do is ruin his political career.”

“Now that’s a
noble
objective, boy, but like I said: How the hell you gonna do it?”

When DeMarco told him his plan, Murphy smiled broadly and said, “You gotta devious mind, Joe Bob.”

Actually, Emma was the one with the devious mind.

“Yeah, I’m beginnin’ to think right kindly toward you, son,” Murphy said. “I’m not sure it’ll work, but the most it’ll cost me is three, four hundred grand. Hell, I’m gonna spend a
whole
lot more than that on TV ads.”

“Where were you yesterday?” Mahoney asked.

“Texas.”

“Texas! What in the hell were you doin’ there?”

“You don’t want to know.”

Mahoney sat a moment, studying DeMarco.

“Morelli?”

“Yeah.”

Mahoney rose slowly from his chair, and while rubbing his lower back, walked over to a window in his office. The window looked out onto the National Mall. The Lincoln Memorial shimmered in the distance. Mahoney said he never tired of the view—Washington’s obelisk, Lincoln’s cube, Jefferson’s temple—though it often made him feel sad and small, knowing he would never be included in the pantheon of democracy’s giants.

“M’damn back’s driving me nuts,” Mahoney said as he gazed out the window.