Washington Deceased (5 page)

Cox paused for one beat. He smiled. Then he said, “Watch your mouth, peasant.”

Cheryl walked away quickly. She was stifling either a laugh or a scream and Wendy couldn't tell which.

“What did you mean when you made that remark about Richard Michaelson?” Wendy asked after Cheryl had disappeared. “When you said o-
kay
like that, like ohhhh-
kay
and got this look on your face like I'd just ordered Vichyssoise at McDonalds. What'd all that mean?”

“Wendy, all I can tell you is that that guy's got his own agenda.”

“Meaning what?”

“He has a definite idea about where he wants to be when the next President comes in, and it's not in the private sector. He'd lie, cheat or steal to get on the right guy's short list for one of the jobs he has in mind.”

Wendy shrugged. What Cox was saying so far tallied pretty well with what Michaelson had told her himself.

“So what?” she said.

“So keep your eyes open. He'd walk over the Senator to get where he wants to go. He'd sure as hell walk over you. Watch your back. And if there's anytime you feel like giving me a call and asking about what he's doing, don't think twice about it, okay? Just do it. Okay?” He wrote two phone numbers on the top page of the papers he was about to give her.

“Okay. I guess.”

“Look. Can I call you? I mean if I shake myself free from here long enough for dinner or something?”

Wendy thought about that for a second.

“Maybe,” she said then, smiling. Her smile was enchanting when she wanted it to be. It was enchanting now. But she didn't give him her phone number at Hartnett Hall. “I'll give you a call later on and we'll talk about it.”

***

Michaelson walked into Cavalier Books around 5:30. He picked up a copy of
L'Exprès
from the periodicals rack in the front and wandered back among the bookshelves. He found his own book, three copies displayed spine out.

He took one down and glanced at the cover and the back flap. He nodded as if impressed with the subtle wisdom that the jacket copy promised. He paged through the slim volume and nodded again, as if the bits he read clearly fulfilled this promise. His expression as he reached up to replace the book was absent, suggesting that he was still preoccupied with the thought-provoking profundities he had serendipitously discovered. By the time he was through replacing the book it was displayed face out, with the full front of the cover showing.

He made his way toward the other side of the store where you could walk up three wooden steps to a small platform, buy a cup of coffee or tea, and sit at one of two tiny tables.

This addition to the booksellers' trade had been popular in Washington for several years, and it was Michaelson's observation that it worked. That is, it drew to the bookstore in the evening people who came not to buy books but to meet other people, generally of gender opposite to their own, and who more than occasionally ended up buying books as a by-product of this activity. So much nicer, Michaelson imagined, to tell your mother that you'd met the boy at a bookstore than to say you'd run into each other at a bar.

He had just about finished an article on the future of proportional representation in the French National Assembly when he spotted Marjorie Randolph mounting the steps to join him. He stood up and held out the other chair at the table where he was sitting.

“Good evening, Marjorie. May I buy you a cup of your coffee?”

“You may buy me a cup of my tea, thank you,” she said, Virginia tidewater washing gently through her voice. Marjorie sat down and fetchingly shook the chestnut hair that, naturally or chemically, still offered no hint of gray after forty-seven years.

Michaelson signaled to the counter and sat back down.

“I've restored your book to its original display, by the way,” she said.

“Ah. You noticed.”

“Yes, I noticed. Richard, I
do
wish you wouldn't do that.”

“You're quite right. I'm very sorry.”

“It is my store, after all.”

“Marjorie, you are absolutely correct. It was a mischievous impulse that I should have tried harder to resist. It was quite wrong of me. I apologize.”

“You know, Richard,” Marjorie sighed, “you can be quite charming when you choose to be.”

“You're not too surprised, are you? For thirty-five years I was essentially paid to be charming when I chose to be.”

“We actually sold a copy of your book today, if you can believe it. And to a real person. Not a campaign staffer.”

“Yes, as it happens I did know that.” Michaelson examined a long, nearly invisible strand of blond hair that he'd picked up while rearranging the display of his book. “Off hand, I'd say you sold it late this morning to a blond-haired young woman of medium height and weight, fair complexion, blue eyes and a disarmingly direct type of approach.”

“Richard,” Marjorie said, “that was positively Sherlockian. How in the world did you figure all that out from a single hair?”

“I didn't, to tell the truth. I met her earlier today. A bit before noon she came into a meeting I was involved in. She had a copy of the book which in the course of the meeting she took out of a sack from this store. That much was observation. The rest was simple logic.”

“I dare say.”

“Her name is Wendy Gardner, by the way. Senator Gardner's daughter.”

“That's it,” Marjorie said, snapping her fingers silently. “I thought the name rang a bell.”

“I know Senator Gardner very well. He and I go back quite a way. But I don't think I ever got to know anyone in his family.”

“It's a fairly standard Washington story, I'm afraid,” Marjorie commented. “Things were more or less all right until Wendy got to be about thirteen. There were the occasional infidelities in the back seats of limos at embassy parties and that kind of sordid nonsense, but nothing really fundamentally wrong, if you understand me.”

“I do.”

“Then Wendy's mother decided that Wendy was turning into your basic D.C. brat, running with friends who were too rich, too fast and too sophisticated, getting away from where she came from and so forth, becoming more D.C. than midwest.”

“Did Wendy's mother react in the customary way?”

“Naturally. She jerked the little jewel back to live with her in cow country, in the house they maintained in the home state for official residency purposes. The rest was the way it usually is.”

“Divorce?” Michaelson asked.

“Within two years. Eight months later, he remarried.”

“Someone on the staff?”

“Of course.”

“Yes, you did say the way it usually is.”

“It was less than three years after the remarriage that they videotaped him with his paw in the cookie jar.”

“That part I knew.”

“The proverbial prison door had slammed behind him about fifteen minutes before the second honey served her own set of divorce papers.”

“A Washington tragedy.”

“The only one it's tragic for is Wendy,” Marjorie said. “The rest of them got what was coming to them.”

Marjorie looked with undisguised malice at a plastic sign hanging over the tea-and-coffee bar. It showed a lighted cigarette with a red circle around it and a red slash through the circle.

“It says something about the bureaucratic mind, don't you think, that I should be required to put a non-verbal sign up to communicate a message as simple as No Smoking in a bookstore? You'd think that anyone coming into a bookstore would have enough English to handle that much. Wouldn't you?”

“I haven't a doubt.”

“I have suggested to my lawyer that it is unconstitutional for the District of Columbia City Council to forbid me to smoke in my own establishment. It's bad enough that they won't let me serve wine here. I've instructed her not to call me back until she has a satisfactory answer.”

“Good luck.”

“Until now,” Marjorie said wistfully, “the only institution I've ever been associated with where I was forbidden the consolations of both alcohol and tobacco was the Amelia Fairfax Academy for Young Ladies—and that's the only place where I ever partook immoderately of either.”

“Well,” Michaelson said sympathetically, “smoking is permitted in my apartment, and wine has been known to be available.”

“What else is on the menu?”

“Oh, I don't know. Baloney sandwiches. Carry-out pizza. Whatever.”

“You have yourself a date, Richard. I'll give Carrie the keys so she can lock up.”

Chapter Six

secure perimeter ahead

reduce speed to 15 mph

“Do you suppose they mean a fence?” Michaelson asked, glancing at the white-on-green metal sign.

“They mean it about slowing down,” Wendy said. “There're speed bumps just after this curve coming up.”

“Then we shall certainly obey.”

Michaelson braked the eight-year-old Dodge Omni Hatchback he was driving and downshifted.

They saw the chain-link fence topped with razor wire fifteen yards beyond the last speed bump. A free-standing sign said in raised silver-gray letters on a pebbled blue background that they were about to enter the Federal Minimum Security Correctional Facility (Fritchieburg).

The principal gate was open, the breach guarded only by a black-and-yellow striped barricade arm. They stopped before the plywood arm long enough to be scrutinized by a man inside a tinted-glass sentry box and to read a sign commanding them peremptorily to park at the first available space past the gate and proceed immediately to the Guard House.

The barrier swung upward. Michaelson drove the Omni forward and parked it between two orange lines in a grease-stained, paved enclosure perhaps fifty yards square. They got out and walked to a featureless, one-story building opposite the gate. Inside this structure they showed their drivers' licenses to a steely-eyed young woman in a light-brown-with-loden-green-trim uniform, said why they had come, and signed a register. In exchange for their signatures they received plastic-encased badges marked VISITOR (B-4).

Wendy laid her purse on a long, scarred table. They both stepped through a metal detector. A second guard dumped the contents of Wendy's purse unceremoniously on the table and briefly sorted through its contents.

“You'll have to leave the cigarettes and the lighter here,” he told her. He handed her a white matchbook stamped in smeared, blue ink with the seal of the Department of Justice undergirded by the words Federal Bureau of Prisons. “There's a cigarette machine and a dollar bill changer in the waiting room.”

Wendy and Michaelson proceeded to the latter area, which took up the rear third of the Guard House. They were the only ones there. A large sign informed them that visitors were to wait for shuttles to take them to the buildings indicated on their badges, and were not to leave those buildings except in the company of security personnel.

“And this is
minimum
security,” Wendy said.

“It's considerably more secure than any embassy I ever served in,” Michaelson agreed.

“The natives were probably friendlier.”

“Don't be too sure.”

Ten minutes later a small schoolbus painted olive drab pulled up outside the Guard House lobby. Wendy and Michaelson got on and showed the driver their visitors' badges. The bus chugged away from the Guard House, passed a long, boxy, four-floor building with a sign reading administration in front and drove them through a succession of curves and Y forks to a waist-high cyclone fence demarcating sector B. Landscaped hillocks and the twists of the prison roadway isolated it from the Guard House and Administration Building a few hundred yards away.

“You'll have one minute to get through the gate once I punch in the code,” the driver told them. “B-4 is the last building to your right.”

Michaelson and Wendy climbed off the bus and heard a metallic thunk just after the driver punched four buttons on a key pad mounted near the gate. They pushed the gate open and went through.

Cottages B-1, B-2 and B-3 were grouped together, near the gate, no more than ten yards separating one from the other. Honor Cottage B-4 was a good one hundred-fifty yards away from them, separated not only by a wide swatch of beaten earth but by a six-hoop, concrete outdoor basketball court and an asphalt tennis court. Between the two courts and the cottage itself, they could see part of the twelve-foot wide lawn that went around the building—a humanizing embellishment the other buildings in sector B lacked.

They walked up to B-4 and went in the front door. A videocamera hummed and turned its glassy eye toward them. The only doorway opened to their right, channeling them through a modest lobby furnished with shell-shaped chairs made out of dove-gray molded fiberglass and tubular steel. On the other side of this room was another doorway, this one guarded by a metal detector. Correctional Officer Grade-2 Smith had already bounded out of the Building Security Office and was waiting for them on the opposite side of the metal detector.

Wendy passed through the device without incident. Michaelson stepped confidently through and was startled when a harsh beep sounded, accompanied by a rasping buzz from the Building Security Office.

“Must have some metal on you,” Smith said as he flipped a switch to cut off the alarms.

“I don't think so,” Michaelson muttered, genuinely puzzled. “The detector at the Guard House didn't go off.”

“I crank the ones I'm in charge of up a couple of clicks,” Smith said.

Michaelson's belt buckle was leather and his car keys and loose change rested in a plastic tray beside the protesting device. He patted the pockets of his sport coat, felt something underneath the lining of the breast pocket, and sheepishly fished it out. It was a nail clipper, smaller than Wendy's little finger. He dropped this into the plastic tray and passed again through the metal detector while Smith nodded knowingly.

“We're here to visit Desmond Gardner,” Wendy told the guard.

“Room 104,” Smith said. “Straight down the ground floor corridor, on your left. Inmate Gardner is permitted to receive visitors in his room, in common areas, such as the lounge on the ground floor, and on the grassy area immediately surrounding this building. Don't go anywhere else. Carry on.”

Smith went back into his office.

Their footsteps echoed hollowly as they walked down the corridor. Alternating red and white squares of vinyl tile covered a bare concrete floor that showed through in spots. There was no carpeting. Another video camera gazed down the length of the hall, and Wendy imagined expressionless people in light-brown-and-loden-green uniforms watching her on a TV screen somewhere as she tramped down the brightly lit passageway.

“To tell you the truth,” Michaelson said, “it reminds me of the graduate center dormitories at Harvard—except that we had to walk a lot farther to play tennis.”

They paused in front of a wooden door marked 104. Wendy hesitated for a moment, glanced at Michaelson, then raised her hand and knocked tentatively. The sound of two or three steps came from inside and then the door swung open.

“Wendy!” Desmond Gardner exclaimed, surprise and delight lighting up his voice. He and his daughter hugged each other tightly.

“I brought someone to see you,” Wendy panted when they had broken the clinch and she had gotten a chance to catch her breath.

“So you did,” Gardner said, glancing up in slight embarrassment at Michaelson. “I'm very glad to see you, Dick.” He reached out and shook Michaelson's hand. “Sorry about ignoring you for a moment there. I asked Wendy when we talked Sunday to get in touch with you, but I had no idea she'd manage to get you out here so soon, and I certainly wasn't anticipating that she'd be able to come along with you.”

“I didn't expect to get out here so fast myself,” Wendy said. “I didn't get a chance to phone yesterday until it was too late to get a call through.”

“Good to see you again, Senator,” Michaelson said.

Gardner stepped back from the doorway so that Wendy and Michaelson could move into his nine by nine foot room.

“I wish it could have been under different circumstances,” Gardner said. “But that's the way it is. We are where we are.”

Michaelson glanced around. The room combined the depressing and the pathetic. The walls were peach-painted cinderblock. One bed, one wardrobe, one table and one chair, all made of cheap wood. A small television and a clock radio sat on the table near a current Almanac of American Politics and a U.S. Statistical Abstract. The front section of yesterday's
Washington Post
lay beside the chair. A deck of cards rested on top of the radio. On the walls Gardner had taped a handful of framed mementoes from the career that his greed had blasted: a black-and-white picture of Gardner looking over President Reagan's shoulder while the President signed a bill; a certificate from the National Rifle Association congratulating him on qualifying as a Marksman (Handgun); a yellowed scrap of newsprint with the headline, Gardner Upsets Prescott. There were no other books, no chessboard, not even a pad and pen.

“Well,” Michaelson said, clasping his hands behind his back and turning toward Gardner. “Why don't you tell me what it is you think I might be able to help you with?”

Gardner sat down on the bed and put both hands behind him to brace himself.

“Did Wendy give you the broad outlines?” he asked.

“Yes. She said that the U.S. Attorney from your state is threatening to try to block your parole unless you give him information that you don't have. He won't tell you what the information is, except for a broad hint that it relates in some way to sugar and alleged corruption.”

“That's it in a nutshell.”

“Do you have any idea what he was talking about?”

“None. And I don't think he does either.”

“What do you think he was doing?” Michaelson asked.

“Fishing.”

“He must've had some hint that there was something to catch.”

“You're right,” Gardner agreed. “He must have. But I don't have the first notion of what it could be.”

“You were on the Western Hemisphere Trade Subcommittee, which if I remember correctly does deal with sugar import quotas every year.”

“You're damn right I was. I had a soft drink bottling plant and a major candy company in my state. If I'd let those crackers from Louisiana have their way every year, there wouldn't be any sugar imports, the price of sugar would go through the roof, and seventeen thousand registered voters would be very upset with me. I had to pay attention to what went on on that subcommittee.”

“Just so. Was it really that bad—setting the import quotas, I mean?”

“It was as bad as you could possibly imagine,” Gardner assured him. “An annual bloodletting. A regular Washington orgy of hustling and lobbying and logrolling.”

“Did you see any evidence of outright corruption—bribery, that kind of thing—in the process?”

Gardner stood up abruptly and folded his arms across his chest. He looked away from Michaelson, expelling his breath in a long sigh. He walked over to the table and leaned against it.

“Let me tell you a story,” he said.

“All right.”

“The year before my last election, the lobbyist for the National Association of Nursing Professionals made an appointment and came to see me. She asked me if I was familiar with Carepac. That was her association's political action committee. I said that I was.”

“Yes?” Michaelson prompted.

“Then she asked me what my position was on a bill that would reduce federal aid to hospitals that filled administrative positions with nurses who came from diploma schools instead of limiting them to nurses who'd gotten bachelor's degrees from four-year schools.”

“I take it that this question was pregnant with implication.”

“That's putting it mildly. I didn't give a tinker's dam whether that bill passed or failed or never came to a vote. On my list of twenty things to worry about, it was around fifty-third. The lobbyist knew that. But I knew that Carepac was giving campaign contributions to senators who were willing to support the bill. I knew that no one was giving campaign contributions to senators who opposed the bill. The lobbyist knew that I knew these things.”

“You're suggesting that the outcome of your deliberations on the merits of this measure was foreordained.”

“Exactly. I told her I was a fervent believer in professionalizing the nurses' calling and that I would therefore support the bill. The next week, my campaign committee received a check.”

“Thus illustrating—what, precisely?”

“You see, Dick,
that
wasn't a bribe. That's not the kind of thing I got sent to prison for.
That
was democracy in action.
That
was business as usual.”

“I do see, yes.”

“That kind of thing was absolutely par for the course when the annual sugar import quotas were set. No one made any bones about it. That's what I know about. I could give them chapter and verse on that until they were tired of listening to me.”

“But, if I catch your meaning, that couldn't be what they're interested in, because it's open, notorious and apparently legal.

“It's even subtler than that,” Gardner insisted. “How could they be looking for anything? How could there be anything for them to look for? How can you possibly
have
corruption when you have political action committees? What's the point? Why bribe someone under the table when you can bid for his vote on the open market?”

“That's a persuasive if depressingly cynical observation.”

“I don't mean it to sound cynical. I'm just saying if there was some importer that felt he had to buy some votes, and some senators who were capable of being bought, no one had to pass around hundred dollar bills in white envelopes. You just get the right PAC man to drop the right hint. Everyone knows that the sugar quotas get set in a sixteen-hour marathon committee session where everybody gives something and everybody takes something and there's no way in the world to say any particular quota should've been a couple of hundred tons more or a couple of hundred less. Bribery would be superfluous.”

“So your conclusion is that the U.S. Attorney's office back home was just taking a shot in the dark. They assumed that there must be something, and they hoped that you could be pressured or bluffed into providing a lead they could work with, even though they really had no specific notion of what they were looking for.”