by Linda Barnes
“We’re here,” he said. God, but he was tense. He had to practically pry his left hand from the steering wheel. All the way over, he’d glared at the speedometer, holding back, denying the need to drive fast, flat out, reckless, to let some of that rage escape, burn off. He shook her arm. “Do you want me to carry you?”
She lifted her head, peered at the whirl of lights, and blinked.
He came around to her side, opened the door and helped her out, gave her a hug to steady her, and started for the front steps. Mary had the door open before he reached it.
“Dear Lord, Michael,” she said, in a welcoming rush, “what have you gotten yourself into now?” She kissed him on the cheek, perched on the toes of tiny red fluff house slippers, enfolded Sharon in a warming embrace, urged them into the library, rang for coffee, all the while keeping up a steady flow of comforting, meaningless chat.
“You woke Pierce up at this hour?” Spraggue said as he guided Sharon to the green velvet sofa. “I don’t think you pay the man enough.”
“Don’t worry about him,” Mary said. “He owes me too many gambling debts to even consider quitting.” She took her cue from Spraggue; if he didn’t want to talk about the fire, she would ramble on about other things. “My dear,” she said to Sharon, “forgive me for saying it, but you ought to be put straight to bed. You look even more exhausted than my nephew, who is, I trust, sorry for dragging you into this mess.”
Sharon tried to smile. “I think I dragged him in.”
“No one ever has to drag him a quarter of an inch. He volunteers. He plunges off the deep end with scarcely a glance at the rocks below. Even as a child—I won’t go into the horrid details now with you ready to drop. I’ve had the south guest room prepared, Michael, for Miss Collatos—”
“I’ll take her upstairs, Aunt Mary.” He smiled reassuringly at Sharon. “You need a guide in this place. Souvenir maps at the door.”
“Don’t badmouth the old relic,” Mary said with a maddening smile. “I’ve had the tower room prepared for you. You may have to come home for a while.”
Spraggue sighed.
“Follow me, please, ma’am,” he said to Sharon, taking her unresisting arm. He led her up the curving formal staircase that rose from the marble-tiled foyer. She was starting to take notice of her surroundings.
“Michael,” she said with a puzzled frown. “What is this place?”
“My aunt lives here.”
“Your Aunt Rockefeller?”
“My Aunt Hillman. Mary Spraggue Hillman.”
“Spraggue with two gs Spraggue.”
“Right.”
“Unbelievable,” she said as they traveled down a wide corridor papered in ivory and gold. “I could get lost in here.” Their footsteps were muffled in thick golden carpeting. Tiny crystal sconces lit their way.
“I did, when I was a kid.”
“Did my brother know about … about this?”
“About what?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
They turned into a narrower hallway, trod along a deep rose Oriental runner that warmed the cream-colored walls. The carved mahogany molding at ceiling and floor glistened.
“Your room is the fourth doorway in the Oriental corridor. Here it is. There’s a bath attached, and if I know my aunt, there is a new toothbrush in the medicine cabinet and a selection of nightgowns in the closet. Press that button in the morning and you’ll get breakfast. Oh, and your dress cleaned. I don’t think Dora’s up to see to it tonight, but she may waltz in. This place runs on odd hours.”
“Who else lives here? Besides your aunt?”
“Pierce. He’s the butler and chief card player. Dora cooks. There’s a chauffeur who’s so old my aunt has to drive him around, and a gardener, but I think he has a room in the gatehouse.”
“What your aunt said—about coming home. Is this yours?”
“I think of it as belonging to my children.”
“Are you … Do you—?”
“No. I don’t have any kids.”
She took her cue from his tone and didn’t ask any more questions for a while. Her eyes made a search of the room from left to right, lingered on the silk-embroidered Chinese tapestries, the huge canopied bed. She giggled, but the noise came out strained. “Are the sheets satin?”
“They might be.” Spraggue put his hand on her chin, tilted her face up, and brushed her lips with his mouth. “I wish we could check them out. But you’re giggling and I’ve never heard you do that before, and you’re totally exhausted, and possibly in what people call a state of shock. And my aunt would probably interrupt us by sending Pierce in with a glass of warm milk at a crucial moment.”
He had to lean far over to kiss her; she was so small.
“Good night,” he said.
“Where will you be? What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
She turned away. He could hear her deliberate deep breathing, see her back straighten. When she faced him again, her mouth had stiffened into a line of resolve. “Look,” she said, and her voice had iron in it, “it may have been your house, but it was my brother and I’m not planning to go nicely off to bed, thank you, while you plot revenge alone.”
“Go to sleep. Nothing major is going to happen tonight, believe me. I’m too damn tired.”
He left her there, gazing into the gilt-framed mirror, retraced his steps downstairs.
Back in the library, Aunt Mary stared at him and he could read a hundred questions in her eyes, some dealing with the length of his stay upstairs. Pierce poured him a cup of steaming coffee. He shook his head, and the butler, with an upward flick of an eyebrow, brought the cup to Mary instead.
“The radio is calling it arson,” Mary said. “I’ve been monitoring the police band since you called.”
He sank onto the green velvet sofa, noticing that Dora or Pierce or someone had smoothed out the indentation of Sharon’s head on the pillow.
“Are you all right, Michael?”
He leaned forward, elbows pushing into his thighs, chin and mouth pressed into his triangled hands. “Great.”
She nodded at Pierce, who took his silent leave, closing the oak doors behind him. Spraggue shut his eyes and listened to the clock tick, to the swishing of Mary’s slippers across the parquet floor, the splashing of liquid in a glass. She put the brandy glass in his hand, startling him by her silent approach. She waited until he’d downed half the glass.
“Michael—” she began.
“Please. No questions tonight, Mary Paper?”
“The Globe?”
“Writing paper, please.”
“In the desk.”
She followed him to the huge mahogany block that sat in the exact center of the vast Oriental rug, opened the top right-hand drawer and set a sheet of blank stationery on the maroon leather blotter.
He didn’t bother sitting in his great-grandfather’s leather armchair. He leaned over, lifted a pen out of a marble block and wrote, handed the piece of paper to Mary. Two lines of scraggly print danced across it.
“Tomorrow at nine o’clock,” he said. “I want these two men here. Can you get them for me?”
She studied the list. “Will they want to come?”
“Hand them a line. Either of them should be willing to dance to any tune you want to whistle.”
“Nine o’clock.”
“Get me up by eight. I’ll wake Sharon. She’s got to be in on it. And I’d like you and Pierce to be available too.”
“No explanation?”
He tried to stretch his mouth into a taut smile.
“Tomorrow,” he said.
THIRTY
Spraggue shifted his weight forward in the huge leather chair. The change of clothes he always kept in the tower room felt stiff, unworn and overstarched. They didn’t stink of smoke, though, and he was grateful for that. He’d spent almost an hour last night—this morning—standing under a pounding, steaming shower, trying to get the bu
rning stench out of his hair, his nostrils, out of his mind. He nodded up at Pierce who stood ten paces inside the library’s double doors. “On schedule?” he asked.
“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?”
