Worst Case Scenario

by Michael Bowen

  “As if they were trying to set things up to ease him out of office early under the Twenty-fifth Amendment—claim that he was mentally disabled and replace him?”

  “That’s what I thought at the time. Then the effort suddenly disappeared without a trace, and I assumed that it was just one of those nice tries that didn’t quite get off the ground.”

  “Whereas it may simply have become unnecessary,” Marjorie said.

  “Yes. After this order circulated, any removal effort that was actually authorized by the Constitution would have been exquisitely superfluous.”

  “What now?” Marjorie asked.

  “They say that it pays to advertise,” Michaelson said. “I think our next move is to do something fairly conspicuous.”

  “Wait a minute. Are you going to tell Gallagher about this?”

  “Yes.”

  “I expect he’s going to be rather conspicuous around Washington himself about two hours after you do,” Marjorie said.

  “I expect the same thing.”

  “Wont’t we be putting him in danger by inviting attention to ourselves, then?”

  “You’re right.” Pausing, Michaelson finished his wine and gazed reflectively at the goblet. “I suppose we’d better think up some non-Washington task to keep him busy for a day or two.”

  “Good luck,” Marjorie said.

  She rose to refill her glass, thought better of it, and sat back down. In what anyone but Michaelson might have taken as some agitation, she looked around the familiar room as if she’d never seen it before. Finally, resting her forearms on her crossed legs, she leaned forward.

  “Was the vice president one of the eight people who had to be in the middle of it?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Do you think he knew?”

  “Define ‘know,’” Michaelson replied.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The dull-finish metal box nestled inside the wooden cabinet above the gas stove in Michaelson’s kitchenette as if it had been die-cut and laser-trimmed to the cabinet’s dimensions. Someone poking his nose into the cabinet would see what looked like the outside of a ventilating shaft.

  “This is the key,” Gallagher said, holding up a notched cylinder an eighth of an inch in diameter and two inches long.

  He stuck the cylinder into what looked like a rivet head in the lower right-hand corner of the box’s face. A gentle click sounded when he turned the cylinder. The front of the box popped open from the bottom, revealing that it wasn’t waferthin tinplate but half an inch of carbonized steel.

  Michaelson and Marjorie watched the performance with polite interest. It was just after three in the afternoon, not quite twenty-four hours after Marjorie’s discovery of the November 2, 1987, order hidden by Sharon Bedford. Michaelson had called Gallagher the evening before, suggesting an off-hand hope that he might be able to come up to Washington over the weekend. Gallagher had been on a flight first thing the following morning and, once he understood the problem, had gotten a Deluxe Secure Hideaway LokBox delivered first thing that afternoon.

  “We have almost a thousand of these installed around the country, with an absolute guarantee against forcible entry or removal. We’ve only gotten one claim, and that turned out to be an insurance fraud setup.”

  “Very impressive,” Michaelson said. He took a sealed white envelope from his inside coat pocket, slipped it into the lock-box, and snapped the cover shut. He returned a collection of cellophane-wrapped napkins and paper-towel rolls to the cabinet and swung its door shut. Then he led Gallagher and Marjorie out of the tiny kitchen area and into a somewhat larger living room.

  “Let’s review what we have so far,” he said. “Three people with an established or presumptive interest in the November order are known to have visited Sharon Bedford in her hotel room the morning she died: Jerry Marciniak, Jeffrey Quentin, and Scott Pilkington.”

  “What’s Marciniak’s presumptive interest?” Marjorie asked as the three seated themselves.

  “Marciniak rose from a humdrum civil service slot in the health-care bureaucracy to a major policy-making position,” Michaelson said. “He did so with unbecoming speed. A suggestively short time before that ascent began, according to Artemus, Artemus used Marciniak to get his daughter priority for critical medical treatment. Artemus did that by using the order—the ‘lever,’ as he put it. The order would give him leverage with Marciniak only if Marciniak thought he could use his knowledge of the order to his own advantage later on. The sharp hostility to Marciniak that Artemus expressed suggests that Marciniak did exactly that, and did it almost immediately, thereby exposing what Artemus had done.”

  “Used it to boost his own meteoric rise, you mean,” Marjorie said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m convinced,” Marjorie said. “Sorry about sidetracking your summary. You had placed three suspects in Sharon Bedford’s room the morning she was killed.”

  “Except that we’re going to have to come up with some creative thinking to turn either Quentin or Marciniak into a legitimate suspect,” Michaelson said.

  “I’m glad I’m not the only one worried about that,” Gallagher said. “The killer poisoned Sharon by injecting bufotenine into a mint she ate. The maid didn’t leave the mint in her room until just before Sharon left the café where she was eating breakfast, and by that time both Marciniak and Quentin had long since come and gone.”

  “What a depressing display of left-brained, logic-bound, linear Western thinking,” Marjorie said.

  “But hard to argue with,” Michaelson commented.

  “That’s what’s so depressing about it,” Marjorie said.

  “Well, all that means is that we have one more question to answer before we have the solution,” Michaelson said. “There’s an objection nearly as substantial to Pilkington as the killer. If he tampered with the mint, he had to do so while Ms. Bedford was in the room. He might have been able to accomplish that by distracting her and going through some sleight of hand. But he couldn’t have counted on that when he was planning the murder.”

  “The solution doesn’t leap out at me,” Marjorie said. “But at least we can be reasonably sure Pilkington and Quentin knew Bedford had a duplicate original of the order. They knew about the order, and they had to realize that that was what she was hinting about in her job hustle.”

  “Marciniak knew about the order, too, and she was also hustling him for a job,” Michaelson pointed out.

  “Right,” Marjorie said. “But we have no reason to believe she was using the order to do it. Marciniak denied that she was shopping anything to him. We don’t have any hard evidence that he was lying. He might have heard she was claiming at the conference to have something juicy up her sleeve, but the murder had to have been planned before the conference. No one just happened to waltz down there with bufotenine in his pocket. I think that if we’re going to pin her murder on Marciniak, we’re going to have to show that he had some way of knowing exactly what Sharon had, and some reason to want to keep her from using it.”

  “And as if all of those problems weren’t daunting enough,” Michaelson said, “Marciniak, Quentin, and Pilkington are only the people that someone spotted going into Ms. Bedford’s room. We can’t be certain that they’re the only possible suspects.”

  “Can you think of any others?” Gallagher asked.

  Before answering, Michaelson rose lightly from his chair and crossed to a drink caddy near the window.

  “I have the standard selections,” he said as he opened a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label scotch and poured two fingers into a crystal tumbler that he took from the caddy’s bottom shelf. “Can I get anything for anyone else?”

  “G&T, naturally.” Gallagher shrugged.

  “Scotch,” Marjorie said.

  Michaelson deliberately prepared and distributed the requested drinks, sank ba
ck into his chair, took one sip from his own glass, then smiled benignly at the other two for a moment before speaking.

  “There is at least one other suspect,” he said. “And I think the next thing we have to decide is whether to focus on him or cross him off the list.”

  “Who’s that?” Marjorie asked.

  “Alex Moodie. He was there, he was intensely interested in retrieving his wife’s career, and when I talked to the two of them, Deborah told me a couple of deliberate lies. Or to be fair, made a couple of key statements that were incompletely truthful. She did so for what I’d regard as fairly noble reasons, but she still didn’t come across with all the facts.”

  “You going to expand on that for us?” Gallagher asked after putting a substantial dent in his gin and tonic.

  “When her initial push on the Artemus matter went nowhere,” Michaelson said, “Deborah did what any savvy and experienced bureaucrat would do. She stopped pushing. Then, years later, she resumed the crusade. She told me that that happened out of sheer frustration. That wasn’t the whole truth.”

  “What is?” Marjorie asked.

  “I don’t know. But I think finding out should become a priority at the Washington end of our little adventure.”

  “‘Washington end’?” Gallagher asked. “What other end is there?”

  “There’s a loose thread in Wilmot, Ohio, that we’ve been ignoring,” Michaelson said.

  “The phony, obscene birthday card that was found in Sharon’s room, you mean,” Gallagher said.

  “Exactly. It connects to Quentin, obviously, but what exactly is the connection? The card as a blackmail instrument doesn’t work very well. Is there something more substantial? Specifically, is there some link between Ms. Bedford and one of the victims of the campaign ploy involving that card that Quentin orchestrated?”

  “Any ideas about how to answer that question?” Gallagher asked.

  “One,” Michaelson said. “It involves you.”

  He explained what he had in mind.

  “That seems a little bit, ah, off-center,” Gallagher said.

  “Agreed,” Michaelson said. “If a straight-ahead attack could expose the murderer, the Charleston police would presumably have him in custody by now.”

  “I’m game,” Gallagher sighed.

  “Happy hunting,” Michaelson said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  When he pulled up across the street from the tidy, working-class duplex in Wilmot, Ohio, Gallagher got a gut-wrench worse than the one that preceded the first sales call he’d ever made. It wasn’t quite paralyzing, but it was bad enough to make him forget for a moment the brain-numbing fatigue that pulsed through his body after the six hours of cabs, planes, shuttle buses, and rental cars that separated him right now from Washington.

  He’d been doubtful from the beginning about even finding the woman. He was a salesman, not an analyst. He hadn’t seen the inside of a library since college. He couldn’t believe that he could just walk up to the ready reference desk of the Wilmot Public Library, give the librarian a two-week range of dates and a topic, and have her turn over a handful of yellow clippings from the Wilmot Press Gazette that would tell him what he needed to know.

  But that’s what had happened. Inside fifteen minutes he’d had five names, and it hadn’t taken much review of the follow-up articles to decide that Marian Littlecross was the one he wanted to see.

  He didn’t expect an answer when he rang the bell beside the dull silver-framed screen door, and he didn’t get one. Taking out one of his cards, he printed two sentences neatly on the back in blue felt-tip pen and wedged the card in between the door’s frame and the grillwork decorating its front. The sentences read: “Ms. Littlecross: I have $55 for you if you have 15 minutes for me. I’ll phone at 6:00.”

  On his way to the Red Roof Inn, where he had a reservation, he supplied himself with two bacon cheeseburgers, a large order of crispy curls, and a six-pack of beer. He figured that once he was in his room resting on pillows propped against the headboard of his bed, the food, the beer, and ESPN would just about get him through to six o’clock.

  Gallagher had spent the better part of two hours the day before talking with Michaelson and Marjorie about the most effective way to approach the woman whose name he’d managed to find. The consensus was total deceit.

  Gallagher didn’t like that, particularly. On his office desk a Lucite paperweight encased a bromide in which he happened to believe with passionate intensity: “A Lie Doesn’t Sell Anything But Your Competitor’s Product.” Unfortunately, though, he couldn’t come up with anything within spitting distance of the truth that looked like it might work, so he was going along with the approach they’d suggested.

  Promptly at six he muted the tube and called Littlecross’ telephone number. He reached an answering machine. The voice on the recording sounded simultaneously defensive and world-weary. Gamely reminding himself of another piece of paperweight wisdom—”Selling Starts When the Customer Says No”—he took a deep breath and plunged in.

  “Ms. Littlecross,” he said after the beep, “this is Todd Gallagher with SafeHome Security, and I’ve got some good news for you. Your name was selected for participation in a marketing survey that I’ll be conducting for SafeHome in this area. The survey takes fifteen minutes flat, and your answers will of course be kept strictly confidential. If you’re willing to take part, you’ll be paid fifty-five dollars, and that’s cash on the nail, before you answer question one. You can reach me—”

  He stopped as he heard the phone pick up.

  “Okay, I’ve heard enough,” a husky contralto said.

  “Ms. Littlecross?”

  “That’s me. I just wanted to hear what was behind the hint before I decided whether to talk to you. You checked out. The number on your card is the same one information has for your office in Raleigh, there’s someone there who’s heard of you, and the Better Business Bureau says you’re reputable.”

  “I’m relieved to hear that,” Gallagher said, reflecting automatically that this didn’t sound like a woman who needed home security advice from him or anyone else.

  “You gonna try to sell me anything? ’Cause I’ll tell you right off the bat I’m not in the market. I have forty-five-caliber security, and that’s all I’ve ever needed.”

  “No, ma’am, I’m not going to try to sell you a thing. I am a salesman and people tell me I’m good at it, but today I’m trying to get information that’ll help me sell things to other people.”

  “I guess you might as well come on over, then. Just be sure you have the money, and plan on being out of here before Seinfeld comes on.”

  “See you in half an hour,” Gallagher said.

  ***

  The woman who opened her door to Gallagher twenty-seven minutes later looked as though she was in her early fifties. Light brown hair streaked with gray framed a square face with a no-nonsense, this-is-as-good-as-it’s-gonna-get expression. The top of her head came almost to Gallagher’s chin, which made her five-eight or five-nine, and that height deemphasized a solid build that would have appeared stocky on a shorter woman.

  He gave her another of his cards and she invited him in. He stepped directly into a living room where a younger, thinner, shorter version of Marian Littlecross sat with her eyes fixed on a flickering television screen. She didn’t glance up at Gallagher’s entrance, and Gallagher looked at her only long enough to see her brush Dorito crumbs absently from an oversized, hot-pink T-shirt. Judging from her features, he would have said she was in her early twenties, although her posture, expression, and waist-length hair made him wonder if she were actually still an adolescent.

  This would be the girl who, according to the clippings, had been rushed to the hospital with crudely bandaged wrists and a near-catatonic nervous breakdown after finding one of the praying-for-you-in-heaven cards in her mail. He hadn’t tho
ught that much about it, but seeing her there now, he shivered involuntarily at the thought of it. However obliquely, he could feel what it must have been like to read that card, without warning, a year after an abortion had ended the first and, as it turned out, the only pregnancy you’d ever have.

  Apparently without considering an introduction, Marian Littlecross led Gallagher directly across the living room, through a small dining room, and into a brightly lit kitchen.

  “I’m having coffee,” she said as she gestured toward a turquoise table and chairs against the far wall. “How about you?”

  “Coffee would be fine, thanks. Black.”

  As Littlecross fussed with cups and a Mr. Coffee, Gallagher opened his Leatherette folder, pulled a standard survey form and a SafeHome logo envelope out of its cover pocket, and wondered exactly how he was going to bring this off. During the planning stage it had seemed as though getting in the door would be the hard part and the rest would be a snap: Just find a way to work Sharon Bedford’s name into their chat, watch Littlecross’ reaction, and make a judgment. Now that part didn’t look like such a piece of cake after all.

  Littlecross put a midnight blue mug at Gallagher’s place and set a pearl gray mug at her own. Stark white lettering on each said borealis health center. Then she sat down and nodded at Gallagher with what he took to be permission to begin.

  “First off,” he said, handing her the envelope, “let’s not forget your payment. You’re kind enough to take time to talk to us, and we do appreciate it.”

  Littlecross slit the envelope open and examined its contents skeptically. She found a slick, full-color SafeHome brochure, a fifty, and a five. She folded the fresh-from-the-cash-machine currency into a pocket of her pale blue skirt and set the brochure and the envelope aside—both, obviously, destined for the trash the moment the door closed behind Gallagher.

  Figuring that he’d purchased all the goodwill he was going to, Gallagher began going through the survey, asking questions that were carefully designed to make anyone answering them wonder whether they could stand to live another thirty minutes without a fully installed SafeHome security system: How many hours a day is the house empty? What percentage of the people in this neighborhood work away from home during the day? What did she think was the level of illegal drug use in Wilmot? Officials elsewhere estimated that over ninety percent of residential burglaries were committed by amateurs looking for things they could trade for drugs—did she think that was probably the situation in Wilmot as well?