Collateral Damage

by Michael Bowen

  “You sent me a message just before you went to the hospital,” he said, leaning forward.

  “Yes,” Halliburton said. Michaelson could tell from the older man’s expression that this was an acknowledgment of Michaelson’s statement, not a sign that Halliburton had the faintest idea of what he was talking about.

  “I just wanted you to know that the situation has been appropriately taken care of.”

  “Excellent.”

  “Your concerns were well founded,” Michaelson continued. “But the problem has been dealt with. Everything’s under control.”

  “Is it now? Well, good, good. Knew I could count on you. Glad to hear it.”

  If someone had asked Michaelson what he thought he had accomplished by speaking these words, he would have evaded the question as diplomatically as he could. It was like jazz: If you had to ask, you wouldn’t understand. It was what Marjorie would have called a small thing, done well.

  “Is there anything else we can usefully discuss today?” Michaelson asked then.

  “No, I can’t say there is.” Halliburton was now decisive, an all-business section chief wrapping up a staff meeting so busy people could get back to work. “This place is actually very convenient to the fudge factory, though, and you can drop by again if something comes up before I’m back at my desk.”

  “Until next time, then,” Michaelson said.

  His spirits hadn’t risen much by the time he got to the pay phone in the lobby. The Extended Care Facility was about as convenient to Foggy Bottom as it was to the Pentagon. And he hadn’t heard “fudge factory” as slang for the State Department since 1979.

  A call to his office number and a familiar code-punch produced a recorded voice informing him that he had three new voice mail messages. The first was Marjorie’s, which intrigued him. The second, from Phillips, reported that he might be running a bit late but promised he’d be at Michaelson’s office without fail by three p.m. That one satisfied him. The third was considerably more detailed.

  “Rich-ard Michaelson,” it began with insurance salesman heartiness. “Corbin Connaught here. You probably don’t know me. I don’t know that we ever served together, but I certainly heard your name. Anyway, I’m an FSO alumnus now, just like you. Doing a little consulting, this and that, here and there. Calvert Manor turns out to be a topic of mutual interest. I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a call at your early convenience.”

  The voice continued with Connaught’s number, but Michaelson didn’t hear it. He had already punched the code that deleted the entire message.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Cause of death was blunt trauma to the back of the head,” Phillips said as he languidly tossed a thick manila envelope onto Michaelson’s desk. “They have a blood, tissue, and indentation match from a protruding fireplace stone in front of the grate, so they figure that’s the source of the blunt trauma.”

  “Hard to disagree,” Michaelson said.

  Phillips was now standing with his hands loosely joined behind his back, just short of parade rest, offering Michaelson about one-eighth of his profile. Michaelson slit the envelope open and took out two substantial documents. He began speed-reading the first, which was headed fire marshal—preliminary investigative report.

  “I ended up getting that from a cop source instead of the fire marshal,” Phillips said.

  “Even though it’s still officially a fire marshal investigation?” Michaelson asked.

  “So far. The police apparently aren’t ready to start throwing jurisdictional elbows yet. But they’re keeping up to speed. They don’t want to commit to homicide and then not be able to prove it, but if it starts to move that way, they’ll grab it.”

  “Their reluctance is understandable,” Michaelson said as he began flipping through diagrams and tables. “Hallway door locked from the inside. Connecting bathroom door ditto. Plus the trustee didn’t see anyone go into or out of either room, and she says she was looking.”

  “And the only window was supposedly limited to a maximum opening of a little over three inches.”

  “No ‘supposedly’ about it,” Michaelson said. “I can tell you from personal experience that that part is right.”

  “There are identifiable footprints on the roof over the porch, but they apparently belong to Demarest.”

  “Yes,” Michaelson said. “He was shoveling off the roof. Someone else’s footprints were in the snow in the yard, according to this, but they led away from the house. And anyway there are no marks from a ladder or anything you could boost yourself with anywhere in the snow around the house.”

  “No one heard a helicopter,” Phillips continued, “and they make a lot of noise.”

  “Chimney?”

  “An anorexic midget couldn’t have hidden in it, much less gotten down it into the room.”

  “Secret passages or hidden panels?” Michaelson asked.

  “No.”

  “In sum, then: no way for anyone who was in the room with Demarest when he died to get out after Demarest got conked.”

  “No apparent way,” Phillips demurred. “You’ve identified the question, not the answer.”

  “Point taken,” Michaelson said.

  “That’s where the other item I gave you comes in,” Phillips said. “It’s a transcript of the conference call, annotated in increments of twenty seconds. You’ll see that the longest period of time between tape-recorded comments by any given participant is a little under five minutes. You getting the picture?”

  “Vaguely,” Michaelson said.

  “Everyone we know of in the house was in the living room when Wilcox assigned rooms for the conference call. Everyone who then went upstairs, except Demarest himself, was in on the call. No one saw anyone go upstairs between the call starting and the alarm ringing—and believe me, Willie and Project were keeping their eyes open. There wasn’t any phone in Demarest’s room.”

  “Bingo,” Michaelson said, glancing at Wilcox’s second-story floor plan, which was attached to the report.

  “Right,” Phillips said. “It’s not enough to figure out some clever way for someone to get into and out of the locked bedroom. We also have to explain how someone got upstairs without being noticed by any of the witnesses near both stairways. Or how somebody already upstairs got to the room, murdered Demarest, and got back to their phone in less than five minutes.”

  “What about the footprints and this unidentified person apparently running from the back of the house after the alarm sounded?”

  “Could be one of the spongers who was there with C-Sharp. Heard sirens and decided to make himself scarce in case the county mounties suggested a whiz quiz.”

  “A what?” Michaelson demanded.

  “Urine test for drugs.”

  “The report doesn’t say that any of the spongers are unaccounted for.”

  “The others may be covering for him. The footprints lead into the backyard and then to the driveway. From there he could have recovered his nerve and rejoined the group in the front yard, or snuck out to the street in the general confusion and gotten away.”

  “The footprints are tantalizing,” Michaelson said. “Remember the old wheeze where the murderer walks backward to the crime scene, leaving a trail apparently going away from it?”

  “Hollywood twaddle,” Phillips snapped. “Whoever made those tracks was running away from the house. Cops examining footprints can tell whether someone is running forward or feeling his way backward. Besides, even if you have the murderer approach the house this way, you still can’t get him onto the porch roof, much less into Demarest’s room.”

  “Very disconcerting,” Michaelson said. “No one could have killed Demarest and yet he’s dead. We have a junior fellow here at Brookings who’s unfazed by logical contradiction. I’d ask his opinion but he’s busy revising a paper on the euro. If the police aren’t re
ady to call it homicide yet, what is your cop source’s working theory on how the blunt trauma came about?”

  “Accident. I believe the term of art is autoerotic misadventure.”

  “To each his own, I suppose,” Michaelson said. “It’s a bit hard for me to visualize, though.”

  “The hypothesis goes like this. Bent out of shape about his exclusion from Catherine’s presence and from the conference call, Demarest decided to pass his time in genteel self-gratification. After he ensured his privacy, he made a fire but ineptly failed to open the damper. Not realizing his mistake at first, he then ingested a recreational pharmaceutical—Ecstasy, in case you’re keeping track—and began pursuing the solitary vice while, for some reason, sitting with his back to the edge of the bed. This so absorbed his attention that he either didn’t notice the room filling with smoke or chose to finish what he had started before doing anything about it. Climax, ecstatic physical spasm, backward reflex, tumbles off the bed, hits his noggin, lights out.”

  “I see,” Michaelson said.

  “I don’t believe it either,” Phillips said.

  “Any pass by the constabulary at explaining the use of an accelerant on the fire?”

  “That part of the theory is a bit lame. They say Cindy thinks maybe the firewood they used was pretreated with some kind of starter fluid. She apparently was rather vague about it.”

  “A conundrum,” Michaelson said, drumming his fingers on the desk and gazing pensively out his window. “If this were a movie, of course, we could just pin it on the CIA.”

  “Here in the real world, unfortunately, no one is silly enough to think that a new corpse is less embarrassing than an old memo.”

  “Especially if the corpse has provocative associations.”

  “You’re fishing without a license, Richard,” Phillips said sharply, turning away from the wall and flinging himself a bit petulantly into the guest chair.

  “Excuse me?” Michaelson asked mildly.

  “The deal was, I get the police report, you give me something that would help me get to the bottom of Demarest’s death. I’ve come across with the report plus a transcript of the conference call. So stop pumping me for information you think I have about Demarest’s past, and deliver. C’mon, chop-chop, let’s have it.”

  “Absolutely right,” Michaelson said. He tossed Phillips a photocopy of the sentences he’d copied from Catherine Shepherd’s notebooks.

  “What’s this?” Phillips asked.

  Michaelson told him. Phillips spent a few seconds perusing the pages.

  “Well, as kinks go this is pretty white-bread suburban. In New York terms, it’s a lot closer to dinner at La Nouvelle Justine than party time at a Chelsea leather bar.”

  “I defer to your undoubted expertise,” Michaelson said.

  “I won’t deny that it’s intriguing,” Phillips said as he folded the photocopy into his inside coat pocket. “But you’re holding out on me.”

  “You’re mistaken,” Michaelson said. “Indeed, you’re projecting. You said I missed something at Demarest’s apartment. You thought there was something interesting there besides the Lancer memo. You didn’t find it when you searched the place, so you assume I found it and am keeping quiet about it. I didn’t and I’m not.”

  “Hard for me to believe,” Phillips said.

  “And even harder for me to prove, since you probably know what this fascinating item is and I don’t have the faintest idea.”

  Phillips made a face.

  “Fortunately,” Michaelson said, his own face brightening, “I do have an idea about where this thing is. Or, to be more precise, Marjorie has an idea on that subject.”

  “It’s a good thing I’m not missing a performance of Sunday in the Park with George for this conversation,” Phillips said with an exasperated sigh. “All right, I’ll bite. Let’s hear it.”

  Michaelson explained Marjorie’s idea. Phillips’ face remained impassive for two seconds after Michaelson had finished.

  “Let’s go,” he said then.

  ***

  It was about ten minutes after Phillips and Michaelson left Michaelson’s office that Marjorie got a phone call from Carrie, the young woman who, when she wasn’t busy earning her master’s degree in library science, worked with generally unfailing reliability for Marjorie. Carrie explained that she was having a Problem and wouldn’t be able to get in until half an hour past her scheduled starting time at four p.m.

  Marjorie viewed this as providential. The commercial distractions generated by $327.98 in sales hadn’t been nearly enough to divert her restless mind from the Calvert Manor puzzle. By midafternoon she had convinced herself that she had to talk to Catherine again. Doing that productively would require some information and resources that Carrie could gather more efficiently than she could.

  “Actually,” she said to her contrite employee, “we’re not all that busy. Why don’t you come in at five-fifteen, but do some things for me on the way?”

  “Sure. What do you need?”

  “Well, first, I’ll need a large serving of cream of celery soup from Ellie’s Deli, and a Thermos for it.”

  “Can do,” Carrie said.

  “Second, I need to know the date Andrew Shepherd died. It was a couple of years back, but it should have made the papers.”

  “Okaayyy,” Carrie said, a bit dubiously.

  “And what I’m particularly interested in,” Marjorie concluded, realizing that she was about to complete Carrie’s bafflement, “is what the weather was like that day.”

  ***

  Phillips didn’t share Michaelson’s taste for vigorous walks, so they took a cab to Club Chat Fouetté. The place was closed but Phillips (as Michaelson noted with interest) had a key, which he used on the front door. As they came in, he nodded at a solid-looking gent behind the bar, who nodded back without apparent interest or surprise.

  “Demarest was a dummy owner for this and a couple of my other commercial properties,” he explained to Michaelson during their brisk march toward the stage and the stairway. Then he raised his voice slightly, calling, “Where are you, Janos?”

  “Right here,” a voice shouted from their left.

  The slightly built Eastern European who had let Michaelson in on his first visit surged at them from the hallway leading to the alley door. He came at Phillips with both fists flying.

  Phillips pivoted, his arms cocked instantly in front of him. He absorbed a glancing left-fist punch on his upper right arm, then snapped his left arm up and out to block Janos’ right jab. His own right fist darted out to smack Janos’ temple. The blow sent Janos sprawling.

  “Do your whimpering upstairs,” Phillips said brusquely as he yanked the man to his feet. “That flooring cost nine thousand dollars, and salt water is bad for it.”

  He pushed Janos to the stairway, then nudged him up with a knee in the buttocks. Alternately massaging his wrist and the side of his face, Janos moved under his own power to what had been Demarest’s desk and perched on top of it.

  “You have to get over this Slavic sentimentality or Balkan or Magyar or whatever the hell it is,” Phillips said to him. “If you’d tried that kind of nonsense with Project, he would’ve put you in the hospital.”

  Janos responded with the Anglo-Saxon obscenity customary under these circumstances, putting it in the imperative mood.

  “That would be between me and Project, and a gentleman never tells,” Phillips said. “Now. Please keep your mouth shut before I ask Mr. Michaelson here to avert his gaze long enough for me to shut it for you. You are to listen until told to speak. Got it?”

  Janos salvaged what dignity he could with a second’s deliberate delay, then nodded.

  “Good. Three points. One. I didn’t kill Preston. You think I did, but that’s because you’re a silly ass with less brains than the average desk jockey at Langl
ey, and that’s saying something. Two. I want to find out who did kill Preston as much as you do. My reason is different than yours, but it’s still a reason. Three. You are going to help me do it. Are we clear? Say yes.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Janos said. Michaelson felt a slight thrill of admiration at the courage it took for Janos to speak those four words.

  “You don’t have to believe me, you moron,” Phillips snapped with unfeigned irritation. “You just have to be frightened enough to do exactly what I tell you.”

  Without waiting even an instant for reaction, Phillips then looked helplessly to heaven, stamped his foot, and walked around once in a very tight circle.

  “Oh, very well, then,” he said. “I’ll explain it in terms simple enough for even you to wrap your tiny mind around.”

  Phillips stopped talking, closed his eyes, and took three deep breaths. In through the nose, out through the mouth. After the third breath, he opened his eyes. He waited another two or three seconds. Then he resumed speaking, all trace of aggravation gone.

  “Preston wasn’t trying to scam me,” he said. “He may have let you believe he was because that’s the kind of thing that would impress you, but he wasn’t. Preston was trying to make a deal with me. He’d gotten something fair and square, and he wanted me to bid for it. There was no reason for me to be upset about that. Business as usual. Is this penetrating?”

  His face impassive, Janos reached behind him and without looking found a four-pack of A&C Grenadiers at the back of the desk. Masking his continuing nervousness well but not perfectly, he took one of the cigars out, bit the tip off, and lit the cigar with a chartreuse Bic from his trouser pocket. Then, through a cloud of blue-gray smoke, handling the cigar with almost effete delicacy, he nodded.

  “All right,” Phillips continued. “Preston thought he had something very valuable. He did, but it wasn’t what he thought he had. What he thought he had was basically worthless, and no one would give him the time of day for it.”