House Secrets (8 page)

“That’s it?” DeMarco said. “That’s why you think she was assaulted?”

“No, there was something else Paul or Abe said, but I can’t remember the exact words. It was a long time ago.”

No shit. According to the dates on the napkin, it had been nine years ago. “But Tyler never reported being raped either, did she?” DeMarco said.

“No, but I know that’s what happened,” Lydia said. “I mean, I didn’t at the time but after what happened to Marcia Davenport later and . . . well, then I put it together.”

Before DeMarco could say anything else, she said, “Go talk to those women. That’s what Terry did. And find out what Terry was doing in New Jersey. You need to get evidence against Paul. You need to get him!” She almost shrieked the words “get him” and as she did, she reached out and dug her fingernails into DeMarco’s forearm.

Christ, she was
nuts
, DeMarco was thinking, and at that moment he heard a noise behind him and he turned. Thank God. It was a priest, not a reporter. The priest was walking down the garden path, reading from a prayer-book as he walked, moving his lips as he read. He glanced at Lydia and could see the anguish on her face, then he turned his gaze toward DeMarco, his expression not accusing, just asking if they needed his help. DeMarco shook his head no. Lydia didn’t need a priest; she needed a psychiatrist.

“Mrs. Morelli . . .,” DeMarco said, and then he stopped. He didn’t know what to say.

“I know,” Lydia said. “You can’t believe it. You can’t believe that the great Paul Morelli could have done the things I’ve said. Well, I’m going to tell you something about my husband, something that only Abe and I know.”

“And what’s that?” DeMarco said, having no idea what this woman might say next.

“Most of the time Paul is the most unemotional, calculating bastard you’ll ever meet. Like why do you think he married me, a woman five years his senior and with a child to boot?”

“I don’t kn—”

“He married me because of my father, because he thought my father could advance his career.”

All DeMarco could remember reading about Lydia’s father was that he’d been a judge, but he didn’t know anything else about the man.

“Paul analyzes everything,” Lydia was saying. “He never loses his temper. He never allows his opponents to rush him into doing anything prematurely, before he’s had a chance to think things through. And he is, as you said, brilliant. Except when he drinks. Paul can’t handle liquor. At all. Even small amounts. And he knows it and he hardly ever drinks, and whenever he does, at a party or a fund raiser, that little bastard, Abe, watches him like a hawk. But sometimes, for whatever reason, Paul gets drunk. Maybe it’s the stress of the job. Or maybe the demons inside his head are
screaming
at him. I don’t know.
I don’t know what triggers it. But when he drinks, and he’s almost always alone when he does . . . well, then the genie comes out of the bottle and all Paul’s sick urges coming spewing out.”

This conversation was surreal. Here was this morning drinker talking about her husband’s drinking problem. Meeting with her had been a huge mistake.

“The night he attacked Marcia Davenport,” Lydia said, “Paul was in his den drinking and Davenport made the mistake of going in there.”

“He drinks then he assaults women,” DeMarco said. He was being sarcastic but Lydia Morelli didn’t notice.

“Yes,” she said. “And it’s always the same kind of woman.”

“What do you mean?”

“Go see Janet Tyler,” Lydia said. “Talk to her. Follow up on Terry Finley’s investigation.”

DeMarco was completely frustrated. “Mrs. Morelli, why are you telling me all this?” he said. “I’m not a cop or a reporter. I’m just a lawyer. So even if what you’re saying is true”—he almost added
and that’s one big goddamn if—
“you’re talking to the wrong guy.”

“I told you why I’m telling you. I’m telling you because your life’s in danger and I’m trying to keep you from getting killed like Terry. But I’m also telling you because you’re an investigator. I heard Paul say that when I met you.”

“I am, but . . .” DeMarco shook his head. “Look, you have to understand something: I don’t have the clout or the authority to investigate your husband.”

And he didn’t. To investigate someone like Paul Morelli, special prosecutors were assigned: smart, ruthless, independent bastards with dozens of people on their staffs. But Lydia Morelli didn’t care.

“You have an
obligation
,” she said. “You have a job to do and you need to do it.”

She rose from the bench and said, “I have to go. I have . . . I have an appointment.”

With a bottle
was DeMarco’s immediate thought.

“And you have to do your job,” she said again, and then she turned to go.

“Wait a minute,” DeMarco said. “I have to know something.”

“What?” she said, now impatient to leave.

“According to the dates on that napkin, Davenport was, uh, attacked in 2002, Tyler in ’99. Why are you doing this now?”

Lydia waved the question away, as if she were shooing flies. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “All you need to know is that I’m telling the truth. Now I have to go. Oh, and one other thing—if you tell anyone we had this discussion, I’ll deny it.”

With that pronouncement she walked away. She moved slowly, like an old woman, her back bent, her steps unsteady and weary, as if the knowledge she carried inside her head was weighing her down.

What the hell had he gotten himself into?

Garret Darcy watched the man and woman in the cathedral garden through binoculars. The guy was dressed in a suit and tie but he didn’t look like someone who worked in an office. He was a hard-looking bastard. A cop maybe? Or maybe a hood. Yeah, he looked more like a hood than a cop. Now that would be interesting.

It would be good if something interesting happened. It was great to be working again but following Ladybird was dull work. For one thing, she was so easy to follow. Not only was she a civilian but from what he’d seen, she drank quite a bit, not an activity that improved one’s observation skills. But even if she’d been teetotaler and trained to spot a tail, she never would have seen him. Darcy could tail a ghost; he’d spent an entire career following people.

He sorta wished, though, that he’d been assigned to Big Bird. He couldn’t help but wonder if Phil and Toby had been given the primary target because of Kosovo. He had screwed up one time, one damn time, and that had been years ago—but he bet that was the reason that he’d been given the wife instead of the man himself.

But what the hell. He was getting paid and it was easy work. Phil and Toby, they had to hustle to keep up with Big Bird because he was always on the move. Those guys, poor bastards, weren’t sleeping more than five hours a day and when they did sleep, half the time it was sitting in a car. By comparison, Ladybird was a piece of cake. She
stayed in the house in Georgetown most of the time and, as near as he could tell, spent most of her day watching TV and sipping drinks. When she did go out, she’d meet a girlfriend and have lunch and more drinks, and at night, unless she was accompanying her husband to some function, she was usually in bed by ten, at which point Darcy would head on home.

Today, however, was different, meeting this guy who looked like a hood in an out-of-the-way spot. He had to find out who the guy was. Maybe Phil and Toby knew already, but the boss, that tricky little shit, he liked to keep things compartmentalized. He’d ask Phil later if they knew the man, but for now, as soon as the hardcase and Ladybird quit blabbing, he’d follow the guy to his car and get a license plate number.

If he’d had a parabolic mike he could have heard what they were talking about but he didn’t have one. That was the odd thing about this op. The boss didn’t seem to have access to the kind of equipment they’d used in the past. No mikes, no tracking devices, no night-vision goggles. They even had to bring their own cameras, which in his case was a little low-budget, piece-of-shit Kodak digital. And when Phil had asked if they should try to get a bug into Big Bird’s house, the boss had said no, not yet. Well, maybe that wasn’t so surprising considering who Big Bird was. But this op—it was just a little bit off. The boss was up to something.

Now that was a laugh: that cagey bastard, he was
always
up to something.

Hey, what the hell, it was an easy gig. When he’d enlisted in the marines, before he’d started working for the boss—a million years ago it seemed like now—he and some guys had been bitching about sitting around doing nothing, waiting all the time. An old gunnie heard them griping and said: “Boys, you get paid the same for marching as you do for fighting.”

And he was getting paid. He thought when he retired that he and Sharon wouldn’t have any problem at all living off his government
pension, but money ran through Sharon’s hands like water. They’d whittled their savings account down to nothing. So quit bitching, he told himself. You get paid the same for marching as you do for fighting, and a dull job was better than no job, and it was definitely better than being in the middle of a shit storm like Kosovo.

DeMarco turned in to Emma’s driveway and parked his car.

Emma lived in McLean, Virginia, in a beautiful redbrick home, one that seemed much more expensive than she should have been able to afford on a retired civil servant’s salary. But would Emma ever reveal the source of her wealth? Of course not. The Sphinx was more likely to sing to a camel.

He heard music coming from the house. Emma’s lover, Christine, played a cello in the National Symphony and she often practiced at home, but DeMarco could hear sounds—or in this case
noises
—being made by more than one musician. DeMarco was not a classical music fan to begin with—give him that ol’ time rock and roll—but this music . . . Well, it wasn’t your typical, monotonous Beethoven / Mozart elevator music. It sounded like cats screaming in agony.

He rang the doorbell. The awful composition continued. He rang again and Emma answered the door, looking wild-eyed, like maybe she was the one torturing the cats.

“Thank God you’re here!” she said. Not usually the reaction she had when she saw him. Turning her head, she yelled over her shoulder, “Christine, I have to go. Joe’s here and he has a . . . an emergency.” She didn’t wait for Christine’s answer and immediately closed the door.

“Take me someplace that has liquor and is soundproof,” Emma said.

“What’s going on?” DeMarco asked.

“Christine’s quartet.”

DeMarco had forgotten that Christine moonlighted with a small quartet. He’d heard them play once, an experience he’d repeat only if heavily medicated.

“They’re working on a piece by some avant-garde Swedish composer. Or maybe he’s Danish. Who cares? They’ve been playing this one passage for over an hour and I was thinking of shooting them all before you arrived.”

They didn’t find a soundproof bar but they found one that was quiet enough, not even a CD playing on the sound system. Emma ordered a blue martini, curaçao liqueur mixed with lime and gin, the color of the drink almost matching her eyes. DeMarco spent a long time selecting a brand of vodka, discussing his options with the bartender, before finally settling on one made in Ireland called Boru. Who would have guessed that the Irish made vodka? And it was good, certainly better than the antifreeze he had in his refrigerator at home, but not cheap. Emma pointed out that cheap and good rarely went together, an axiom DeMarco was determined to disprove.

“So what do you think?” DeMarco said after he finished telling Emma about his conversation with Lydia Morelli at the cathedral.

“The first thing I think is that you had better take the part where she said you’re in danger seriously. There are some strange things about Terry Finley’s death, and the fact that Senator Morelli claimed not to know Finley bothers me.”

“It bothers me too, but you have to remember that the person who told me that Paul Morelli knew Terry had booze on her breath at nine-thirty in the morning.”

“Still, take it seriously. Has anybody been following you?”

“How would I know?” DeMarco said. Then he remembered the yahoos who had been broadsided by the cab. “Well, maybe,” he said
and he told Emma about the wreck. “But if those guys were tailing me, they were pretty inept.”

“Oh that’s right,” Emma said, “all thugs belong to Mensa.” Ignoring the sarcasm, DeMarco said, “What’s really bugging me is that I can’t tell if Lydia is telling the truth, and if she is, why now? Why didn’t she tell somebody all this stuff years ago?”

“You know,” Emma said, “political wives are different from other women. Take Jackie Kennedy or Hillary Clinton, or hell, even Eleanor Roosevelt. They were all publicly humiliated by their womanizing husbands, but they stuck by them anyway. One reason could be love. There’s nothing unusual about a good woman loving a bad man, and these men were charming, charismatic people. So maybe a politician’s wife stands by her cheating husband simply because she loves him. But then there are other factors. Maybe these women, after all the sacrifices they’ve made, don’t want to give up their positions. They want to be the first lady. Or it could even be that their motives are actually noble. They know that it would be bad for the country if they were to initiate a messy, public divorce.”