Michaelson took the machine and saw Pilkington’s number blinking on the screen.
“You did see this coming, didn’t you?” he commented as he picked up the phone.
“As soon as he pulled that piece of paper out.”
Marjorie waited patiently while Michaelson completed the call and left his message.
“Now,” she said when he’d finished. “Would you please tell me the real reason you’re doing what you carefully explained to me earlier this evening was exactly the wrong thing to do?”
“I’m at an age for sunsets and poetry,” Michaelson said. “I’m not going to save the world or renew the country’s spirit or even demilitarize the oil routes. But maybe I can keep one man from going bitter and obsessed into the last half of his middle age.”
“Fair enough,” Marjorie said. “A bit romantic for a hardheaded, unsentimental realist in his sixties, but fair enough.”
“I still remember the action stateside twenty-five years ago when the Bengali uprising broke out in what was then East Pakistan,” Michaelson said. “When things finally got too dicey, we sent the standard evacuation order to our mission in Dacca: ‘women, children, and nonessential men.’” He glanced over at Marjorie, meeting her eyes. “I may be in my sixties, but I’m not quite ready for the nonessential men category yet.”
Chapter Seven
Pilkington didn’t call until Wednesday. When he did, he wanted to know if, by any wild chance, the Gallagher chap mentioned in Michaelson’s voice-mail message had followed up. Michaelson said that as a matter of fact he had.
“And?” Pilkington prompted.
“Barring a police breakthrough in the Bedford investigation, we’re meeting on Sunday.”
“Then you and I had better meet on Saturday.”
“Where and when?” Michaelson asked.
“Fourish at Dunsinane.”
“Don’t you think Dunsinane is overdoing it a bit?”
“No doubt. See you there.”
***
Michaelson hadn’t been idle while he waited for Pilkington’s call. He’d talked at length to Wendy Gardner, for example. What she told him would have meant little if Pilkington hadn’t called. When Pilkington did call, though, Wendy’s information told Michaelson that he should try to talk to Jerry Marciniak before his meeting with Pilkington.
Michaelson arranged to do this early Friday morning. Very early.
“Ninety percent of science is waiting,” Marciniak said without looking up from the microscope when Michaelson appeared in the lab’s doorway.
“So is ninety percent of getting to see you,” Michaelson said. “That and getting out of bed before dawn.”
“This baby’s not ready to tell us anything yet,” Marciniak said as he slipped a glass slide from the viewing tray and tucked it between two holders in a ceramic case a few feet away on the long, slate table. Slipping off the stool where he’d been perched, he strode briskly across the large room’s echoing tile floor.
“Between seven-fifteen and eight-thirty is the only time I can actually do hands-on science here in the lab,” he said. “From then on it’s paperwork, committee meetings, and making nice with politicians. Let’s go to my office.”
Michaelson followed Marciniak through a swinging double door and down a long, institutional gray hallway. Marciniak’s cardigan sweater this morning was red, his dress shirt blue and neatly pressed but open at the neck.
“What’s your reaction to Sharon Bedford’s death?” Michaelson asked.
“It’s a shame she’s dead, and the way she died stinks out loud. I’ve asked for a copy of the autopsy report.”
They stepped into a sunlit office, rather spacious by GSA standards but seeming cramped because of the piles of paper, books, reports, and pale green-jacketed files that filled the desk, shelves, floor, windowsills, and two of the chairs.
“My office doesn’t usually look this bad,” Marciniak said offhandedly as he circled behind his desk. “It usually looks worse. Sorry, old joke. See if you can find a place to sit.”
Michaelson obeyed the instruction, transferring a top-heavy paper tower from a chair to the floor.
“What bothers you about the way Ms. Bedford died?” he asked.
“You’ve got a reasonably healthy young woman without any obvious bad habits who’s eating breakfast and walking around like nothing’s wrong one minute and the next thing anyone knows her heart stops beating. You don’t have to be Quincy to figure we’re not talking about natural causes here.”
“Just a doctor’s professional curiosity, then?” Michaelson prompted.
“A scientist’s professional curiosity,” Marciniak corrected him. “My M.D. proved I have a memory. It was my Ph.D. that proved I have a mind.”
Michaelson nodded deferentially.
“You didn’t know Sharon Bedford before the conference, though?” he asked.
“Matter of fact, I did know her,” Marciniak said. “She’d talked to me about getting a serious policy-area job somewhere. She got to be a gluteal pain about it, in fact. I mean, she was hungry and I can understand that, but it gets old after a while. She thought we’d be doing her a favor to let her work fifty hours a week for thirty-two thousand a year, but I can’t just snap my fingers and make something like that happen.”
“Do you have any idea why she picked you as a possible job contact?”
“I had a pulse, for one thing,” Marciniak said. “She’d network with anyone who was breathing regularly, and I qualified. Plus, I’d done in spades what she was trying to do in clubs. I elbowed my way from glorified desk clerk to a senior policy-making job. I guess she figured I’d empathize.”
“Did you?”
“I suppose so. I see classmates in the private sector at outfits like Triangle Research, making twice my top government salary, flying first class, staying at hotels that you couldn’t even see a Holiday Inn from, driving a Lexus provided by their companies—and you know what? I wouldn’t trade places with them. I couldn’t stand to be out of it, away from the action. So sure, I understood her feeling the same way.”
“Do you know how she happened to get so knowledgeable about your career?” Michaelson asked. “The through-the-hawse-hole stuff, I mean.”
“Now, I’m gonna sound like an egomaniac, but what the hell. They knew my name over there at NSC when she was there. There’s a computer entry over there saying I’m a whiz about institutional dynamics in mature bureaucracies. Swear to God, and don’t ask me why. They had me in for a chat when they were noodling over some big-picture metatheory called the Mandarin Hypothesis.”
“I’m afraid I’m drawing a blank on that one,” Michaelson said.
Leaning back so far in his chair that the front legs lifted off the carpet, Marciniak flicked his right hand carelessly.
“The premise is that every society starts out just barely getting by. Subsistence. Then, boom, something no one understands happens and suddenly some societies explode with energy, going farther in two generations than they had in six centuries. Whatever it is that happens has something to do with people who are really good at doing something useful: fighting, growing food, making tools, putting ten million bits of information on a ceramic chip the size of your fingernail—that kind of thing.”
“I’m with you,” Michaelson said, nodding.
“The hypothesis is that just when things are going really well, something strange happens. Power starts slipping away from people who can do things and passes to people who can say things. Priests in Egypt and ancient Israel. Mandarins in China. Fonctionnaires and bureaucrats in prerevolutionary France. Apparatchiks in postrevolutionary Russia.”
“Lawyers in the United States?” Michaelson asked a trifle mischievously.
“You said it, I didn’t. Anyway, that’s the Mandarin Hypothesis. There really is a paper on it over there at NSC
and I suppose my name really does show up in a footnote somewhere. I think Sharon Bedford probably heard of me when they were batting the thing around on a slow day in the White House basement a few years back.”
“It’s quite stimulating,” Michaelson said, “but I don’t see any obvious way to use it to explain why she died and who killed her.”
“No,” Marciniak agreed, emphatically shaking his head. “The Mandarin Hypothesis is a telescope. To get to the bottom of whatever happened to her, you’ll need a microscope. Facts. Data.”
“No doubt you’re right,” Michaelson said. “What did you go to see her about the morning she died? That would qualify as a datum, wouldn’t it?”
“Fair enough.” Marciniak shook his head with a half-smile. “I had a lead on a job for her. Down the road, in an agency that doesn’t exist yet.”
“An agency run by you?”
“It’d be nice if it worked out that way, but you learn not to count on things like that in this town.”
“Sounds a tiny bit thin.”
“Damn near invisible. I knew how bad she wanted it, though, so I thought I’d float it by her.”
“How did she react?” Michaelson asked.
“She was more intrigued than I thought she’d be. She asked me for details, said she wanted to follow up.”
“Not exactly the depths of despair, then.”
“I never saw her despondent,” Marciniak said. “Certainly not that weekend.”
“Did she mention any inducement she could offer?” Michaelson asked. “Information that might come in handy for a busy senior official, that kind of thing?”
“Not to me she didn’t. That’d be a pretty low-rent play. And anyway, I don’t see how she could have had anything I wanted.”
Michaelson saw the message-waiting light on Marciniak’s phone begin to glow bright red. The bureaucratic day was about to start. He rose from his chair.
“If she had had something you wanted,” he asked as he leaned across the desk to shake Marciniak’s hand, “do you think you might have found a job that already existed for her?”
“Hey,” Marciniak answered, grinning, “I said it was a low-rent play. I didn’t say I was too classy to try it if it looked like it might work.”
***
Not on Wimbledon’s center court, not surrounding the sixteenth hole at Augusta, nowhere had Michaelson ever seen a lawn with the utterly level, glasslike smoothness and emerald perfection of the bowling green at Dunsinane Driving and Hunt Club in Chevy Chase. Four men in dazzling white flannels stood or bent or crouched at one end of the square of turf, contemplating with solemn gravity four solid black balls that looked to be about sixteen inches around, and one smaller white ball.
With something less than solemn gravity, Michaelson watched them from the south patio immediately behind the larger wing of the clubhouse. He took a deliberate and substantial sip from a heavy tumbler that had started off with two fingers of undiluted Johnny Walker Black Label scotch.
“I take it that at some point one of them is actually going to do something,” he said to Pilkington, who sat with his own glass of scotch on the other side of a white metal table.
“Don’t be so provincial,” Pilkington said. “If this were baseball, there’d be just as much standing around and you’d be lecturing me about how it’s all part of the mental game.”
“If this were baseball, the sphere would be moving a hundred and thirty-five feet per second. Doing something with it would be intrinsically more impressive.”
“It’s a good thing you disregarded my advice about Sharon Bedford,” Pilkington said abruptly.
“I took your advice, actually. I volunteered nothing, and if my profile had been any lower, I’d have been horizontal. But Gallagher still tracked me down and insisted on conversation. I enlisted only to avoid the draft.”
“However your involvement came about, it’s a stroke of very good luck. I’ve spent a good part of the past week in contact with the Charleston Police Department. It’s gratifying how ready they are to help the State Department. We apparently aren’t quite as pushy as the FBI. At any rate, this thing is shaping up as a four-alarm shambles for several people, including some whose good opinion I covet.”
“Rather inconvenient for Ms. Bedford, too.”
“She’s past caring about it,” Pilkington said. “The people I referred to are not.”
“I’m all ears,” Michaelson said.
“Poison. Bufotenine. Ingested orally.”
“In English, please. You mean she swallowed a pill or took the poison in food or something?”
“Candy, in all probability. It looks like the last thing she ate was a chocolate mint that the maid left on her pillow after she cleaned the room up, and the betting is that that’s what carried the poison. She was diabetic and nibbled frequently on sweets, as many diabetics do. She presumably ate the mint in one bite, climbed into the filling tub, and died.”
“It doesn’t sound much like accidental death,” Michaelson said.
“I can’t argue with that. Unfortunately, the answer that makes the most sense to me is a bit complicated.”
“Suicide?”
“Yes.”
Michaelson gazed at the lawn-bowlers for a long moment over a contemplative sip of scotch as he considered the possibility.
“It strikes me as a lot of trouble to take just to push off, and a pretty unpleasant way to do it,” he said. “Besides that, I talked to the woman Saturday evening. She simply wasn’t in that frame of mind.”
“If you want to make her death murder, you have two choices,” Pilkington said patiently. “One is to figure out a motive for the maid who cleaned the room while Ms. Bedford was at breakfast Sunday morning. She left a pillow mint in every room she cleaned, and there’s no doubt the one Bedford swallowed was like the mints the hotel buys for that purpose. There was no mint when the police searched the room, and there was one and only one empty mint wrapper in the wastebasket.”
“What’s two?”
“Two is to come up with a way someone could have gotten into Bedford’s room, between the time the maid left and the time Bedford came back from breakfast, without being noticed by anyone else and without Ms. Bedford realizing he’d been there.”
“Pass-card?” Michaelson suggested.
“The maids and the front desk personnel had them, of course. But except for the one who cleaned, they all deny going into her room that morning, or providing a pass-card to anyone else on any pretext. When Gallagher and the hotel security officer found Bedford’s body, the hallway door and the door communicating with the adjoining room were both locked from the inside. The windows were all closed, and anyway the maximum opening on any of them was only four inches. Far too small for a human being to get in or out.”
“Marjorie mentioned that Philo Vance confronted a problem like this in The Canary Murder Case,” Michaelson said. “According to her exposition, the murderer in that story used a slipknot in a length of thread to throw an inside bolt from outside the door.”
“I’ve never heard of anyone having that kind of luck with a slipknot in real life,” Pilkington said, “but let that go. The hallway door here was secured by three locks before Bedford indulged her sweet tooth for the last time: a standard lock, a night-bolt tripped by a lever just below the inside doorknob, and a chain lock about eye level on the door. The standard lock would be engaged simply by closing the door, but the other two could be locked only from the inside, and I don’t see how you could do the thread trick on either of them.”
“Neither do I,” Michaelson said. “Marjorie and I spent a good hour Monday morning playing with the identical locks on my hotel room door. There’s not the slightest doubt in my mind that Ms. Bedford secured those inside locks herself.”
“So,” Pilkington said. “That leaves someone getting in, somehow or o
ther, during Bedford’s breakfast.”
“Only the standard lock would be engaged while she was in the café, presumably,” Michaelson said. “Gallagher was sure he could have picked it. Perhaps that’s what the murderer did.”
“The police found no sign of that. More important, the corridor outside Bedford’s room was like a Beltway rush hour Sunday morning. People who’d come to the conference were bustling around, trying to get to the airport for one of the morning flights back to Washington. Goings and comings around Bedford’s room were noted. Extensively. Picking even a simple lock is a fairly conspicuous activity. It’s hard to believe that that wouldn’t have been spotted along with everything else, if it had happened.”
“Is that the case for suicide, then?” Michaelson asked. “That she must’ve killed herself because we can’t figure out how anyone else would have killed her?”
“I think it was a suicide with a purpose,” Pilkington said. “I think she killed herself because she realized in the cold gray light of dawn that her thoughts of getting a significant government job back were pipe dreams. And I think she decided that as long as she was going to go, she might as well make trouble for the kind of people she blamed for her own bitter disappointments.”
“You, for example?” Michaelson asked.
“No, as a matter of fact. I think her target was Jeffrey Quentin.”
“What makes you say that?”
Pilkington drew a quarter-folded page from his shirt pocket and handed it to Michaelson. Unfolding the paper, Michaelson saw the cover and inside page of a birthday card photocopied on a single sheet. The card’s cover showed a charming female tot, gamboling amidst flowers and balloons. Spaced over the inside page, in the kind of perfect script that used to be seen above the blackboards in elementary school rooms, was a single sentence.
“‘Your Little Girl Is One Year Old Today and She’s Praying for You in Heaven,’” Michaelson read aloud. “Disputandum de gustibus non and all that, but it seems a bit grotesque.”
“It was sent to women in the Wilmot, Ohio, area several years ago, approximately a year after they’d had abortions.”
Worst Case Scenario Page 6
