Collateral Damage

by Michael Bowen

  Michaelson exited the bathroom through its other door and trotted downstairs with an almost unbecoming spring in his step. He caught himself humming and barely managed to stop before he reached the living room.

  “Thank you for your patience, everyone,” he said as he got within range of the speakerphone.

  “At the risk of seeming peevish,” Phillips said, “so what?”

  “A fair question,” Michaelson answered. “By way of answer, let me ask Willie to go over and open the bathroom door without touching the lock.”

  “Yo, massa,” Willie said, with more than the hint of a world-weary sigh in his voice. “Cord won’t reach. Back in a sec.”

  Only a moment or two of electronic silence had passed before they heard Connaught, talking more to himself than to the rest of them.

  “Pan Am 103,” he murmured. “Son of a bitch.”

  Before anyone could follow up on this cryptic comment, Willie came back on.

  “Can’t do it, sports fans,” he said in an uncharacteristically earnest tone. “That door be locked.”

  “Hold it, Willie,” Phillips said. “You mean to say that Michaelson went through the doorway into the bathroom, closed the door behind him, and now it’s locked from your side?”

  “Thass right, boss,” Willie said in something much closer to his customary mocking trill. “There’s enough daylight between the door and the jamb to slip a quarter through, and I saw the bolt.”

  “How’d you do it?” C-Sharp asked.

  “The ice cube, you moron,” Connaught said. “The spring on the bolt must be very weak, with plenty of play in the housing.”

  “Well, it would be, wouldn’t it?” Catherine interjected a trifle defensively, as if she were still trying to sell the house. “It’s about sixty years old.”

  “Michaelson tripped the bolt, then manually pushed it back into the housing and held it there by jamming a small ice cube into the housing in front of it,” Connaught said. “He closed the door. In the time it took him to come downstairs the ice cube melted and the bolt shot through. It’s the same basic trick the terrorists who blew up Pan Am 103 over Scotland used as the timing device on the laptop computer they booby-trapped.”

  “So the murderer could have done the same thing,” Phillips said.

  “Killer, not murderer,” Michaelson said. “‘Kill’ is an empirical observation. ‘Murder’ is a legal conclusion.”

  “Except for one thing,” Willie said. “At the risk of being a spoilsport. On the day Demarest died there’s no way the killer waltzed into the kitchen and scored any Baggie full of ice chips out of the fridge. Project and I were in the kitchen, and it didn’t happen.”

  “The killer hardly needed a freezer for her small ice cubes when she had a roof exposed to twenty-two-degree temperatures right outside her window,” Michaelson said.

  “All right,” Connaught said. “You’ve provided a theoretical alternative to suicide or accident as the explanation for Demarest’s death. You’ve shown the hypothetical possibility of any one of three people killing him. Good show and all that, but which one of them are you saying did it?”

  “That’s precisely the point,” Michaelson said. “Our experiment provides no basis for picking any one of the three.”

  “Then would you be good enough to explain exactly why you have wasted going on forty-five minutes of my time?” Connaught snapped.

  “In order to blackmail you,” Michaelson said cheerfully.

  “What?”

  “You see, neither Cindy Shepherd nor Catherine Shepherd had any motive for murdering Demarest. Catherine was in love with him, and Cindy viewed him as an ally in her campaign to unload Calvert Manor. That leaves the trustee.”

  “Who likewise didn’t have any motive, at least that I know of,” Connaught said.

  “She may or may not,” Michaelson said. “It may even be that you weren’t using her to try to get your hands on the document you were convinced was secreted at Calvert Manor, just as you used Demarest and tried to use me. None of that makes the slightest difference.”

  “It seems to make all the difference in the world to me,” Connaught said.

  “I’ll spell it out for you,” Michaelson said. “If Demarest’s death wasn’t a Shepherd family affair, then it was related to something else. The only something else in the picture right now is the pursuit of that document. You are deeply implicated in that pursuit. You sent Demarest in here after it, doing a great deal of psychological harm in the process. Then you put political muscle on a federal agency to force a cockeyed accident/suicide theory down the throat of the local police. So when the conspiracy theorists light up the Internet, your ears will be burning. And when enough discreet leaks from reliable sources finally generate attention from the respectable media, you’ll be in the crosshairs.”

  “Reliable sources like who?”

  “Like me,” Michaelson said. “If there’s any real-world possibility that a non-Shepherd killed Preston Demarest, then you are tied to a very mediagenic homicide. You won’t be contributing usefully to any political party’s electoral prospects. Instead, you can expect to be dividing your time for the next three years between congressional committees and grand juries.”

  “Are you threatening me?” Connaught demanded.

  “Yes, Mr. Connaught, I am threatening you,” Michaelson said with jovial firmness. “In diplomacy we call it an ultimatum. You will disengage forthwith from Calvert Manor and everything and everyone connected with it. You will stop pursuing the document you’ve been after. You will not send any more minions into the lives of these people in search of that document or in search of anything else. You will never again use Andrew Shepherd’s name or his modest but selfless services to his country to advance any partisan or personal goal. You will, in short, leave the Shepherd family alone. Because if you don’t I guarantee you I will get this story media play that will make Vince Foster’s suicide and Monica Lewinsky’s love life seem like page eight filler.”

  Five seconds that seemed like thirty passed. Then Connaught’s voice came over the speakerphone again.

  “And if I comply with these conditions, you’ll keep quiet?”

  “Yes. For a price.”

  “Namely?”

  “Call me tomorrow at ten and we’ll discuss it.”

  Michaelson pushed a button and the conference call ended.

  The living room began to fill a bit as those who had been in other parts of the house drifted in. When Michaelson noticed that Willie and Catherine had both joined the group, he made his way over to them.

  “That was fascinating,” Catherine said in an oddly detached voice, as if Michaelson had just staged Death of a Salesman in drag. “Marjorie explained almost everything else when she called me a couple of days ago, but the ice cubes came as a surprise.”

  “Thank you,” Michaelson said. “Speaking of ice cubes, if you’ll excuse me for a moment, I’m going to run up and get what’s left of them before they make a mess.”

  When he reached the bathroom where he’d thrown the Baggies in the sink, he found Cindy waiting for him, eyes flashing and arms folded across her chest. This did not surprise him.

  “At least now we know how much your word is worth,” she said bitterly. “The trustee. Of all the unmitigated bullshit.”

  “Ageism pure and simple,” Michaelson said, shaking his head sadly. “You mean you can’t see our somewhat overweight, solidly middle-aged trustee squirming through windows and scrambling nimbly around on rooftops?”

  “That cow?” Cindy demanded derisively. “As if. Plus, how could she plan on getting past either my window or Cathy’s without being spotted? Never mind why Demarest would have let her fat ass into the room with him.”

  “Those are potential difficulties with the trustee theory,” Michaelson admitted. “You’ll notice I was careful not to commit my
self to it.”

  “‘Commit’? You told everyone on that call that Cathy killed Demarest, as clearly as if you’d said it in so many words.”

  “I did nothing of the kind,” Michaelson said. “I haven’t told anyone that Catherine Shepherd killed Preston Demarest, and I never intend to. For the excellent reason that she didn’t kill him. You did.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  I’m sure you could have seduced Demarest without the cigars, but they were a nice aesthetic touch,” Michaelson said. “The kind of subtle allusion to Janos that would appeal to him.”

  “‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,’” Cindy said. “Freud.”

  “It must have been particularly satisfying for you to imagine him tumbling at the last moment to the way you’d conned him, realizing as he lay there with you straddling him that he’d been had and there was nothing he could do about it—just before you slammed his head onto the stone and turned important parts of his brain into jelly.”

  “Are you seriously accusing me of murder based on psychobabble about cigars?” Cindy asked. Her voice betrayed no anger. Just mild amusement seasoned with a grain or two of genuine interest.

  “Of course not,” Michaelson answered. “Proving how he was killed effectively proves who killed him as well. Scooting through windows and over roofs was the work of a former gymnast, not a former debater. You, not Catherine. And you were the one who maneuvered him into the guest room, which is the only room where this elaborate murder would have worked.”

  “You’re forgetting that Preston had a vote,” Cindy said. “I was all by myself on keeping him off that call. I couldn’t have forced the issue if he hadn’t gone along with it himself.”

  “You prearranged that with him. He played along with the skit so that you and he could end up together in that room without anyone else knowing about it, and he could get what he wanted from you.”

  Cindy looked contemplatively over Michaelson’s left shoulder for four seconds, as if trying to analyze his argument objectively.

  “Doesn’t work,” she said then, shaking her head. “This isn’t the fifties. Grown-ups don’t have to go to that kind of trouble to get laid. Besides, Preston’s poofter quotient was about eighty percent. Janos was his idea of steak. Anyone with two X chromosomes was parsley at best. And when Preston did feel like some Venus action, he still didn’t need me. He could get it from Cathy with half the hassle and none of the attitude.”

  “You didn’t finesse him into that room hustle by offering him sex. You seduced him well before the killing to try to protect Catherine by enticing him to abandon her so he could go after you. He collaborated with you to get you alone in the guest room with him because you promised him that bloody indenture.”

  “I could have gotten the indenture to him anytime I wanted to without any cloak-and-dagger routine.”

  “If you’d just turned it over to him, you couldn’t have enforced the promise you extracted from him in exchange for it—namely, that he’d break off the engagement to Catherine and get out of her life. You knew he’d break his word without compunction. So you told him he could get the document only by putting himself in what my sainted parents would have called a compromising situation with you: alone together in a bedroom with his pants down and your skirt up.”

  “I know what ‘compromising situation’ means,” Cindy said with an eye-rolling sigh.

  “Demarest thought he had you outfoxed. He went along with your demand, figuring that if you did contrive to have the two of you discovered, he could get back into Catherine’s good graces by doing the same suicidal-lover-on-the-brink routine he’d worked before. But he underestimated you as badly as he overestimated himself. Once you got his pants around his ankles in that room, you had no intention of giving him anything except a dent in the back of his head and two lungs full of smoke.”

  “You really going to try to sell that crock to the police?” Cindy asked amiably.

  “No. The police haven’t helped me figure out the euro, so I feel no compulsion to help them figure out what happened to Preston Demarest. The police are the least of your worries.”

  “Then I guess we don’t need to be having this conversation.”

  “Wrong,” Michaelson said. “Avery Phillips is a different matter altogether. He’s one of those inconvenient people who believes in certain things, and one of them is honor. He despised Preston Demarest in many ways. But when he died, Demarest was in this house in collaboration with Phillips, carrying out a plan that Phillips put together. Avery Phillips isn’t going to shrug off Demarest’s death because of some fairy tale about autoerotic misadventure and national security.”

  “Then please tell him I didn’t do it,” Cindy said, her voice a trifle bored. “Or Cathy. Meanwhile, I’ll watch my back.”

  “I’ll tell him no such thing. Even if I could lie well enough to fool Phillips on something as clear as this, I’d save that talent for people who could make me secretary of state. That leaves you a bit short in the minimum-bid department.”

  “So you’re going to finger me for him?”

  “You’ve fingered yourself far more effectively than I ever could. If he asks me to confirm his suspicion that you killed Demarest, I will. Not because I want him to hurt you, but in the hope that then he’ll listen when I explain why you killed him. That’s about the only useful contribution I can still make.”

  “I was wondering when you’d get to motive,” Cindy said. “Since as far as I know I didn’t have one.”

  “Your motive was to safeguard Catherine,” Michaelson said. “You’ve been fanatically protective of her since your parents’ divorce and especially since she surprised your father in flagrante. You’ve convinced yourself that she lives her life on the edge of neurasthenia, and that you’re the only thing standing between her and institutionalization. An adolescent who offered her a marijuana cigarette got an elbow in the kidneys. Preston Demarest got a fireplace stone in the back of the head.”

  “Right. To fiercely protect her, I killed the man she loved. Nice try.”

  “The man she loved but who didn’t love her. You killed Preston Demarest because he was a manipulative sadist who’d exploit Catherine’s neuroses and psychic trauma to get whatever he wanted. When you couldn’t seduce him away from her, you killed him.”

  “You make it sound so noble I almost wish I’d done it just so I could try on the halo,” Cindy said.

  “What you did wasn’t noble. You converted Demarest from a criminal into a martyr and risked destroying Catherine’s emotional balance past any hope of recovery. Good intentions aren’t enough. Killing Demarest was a tragically reckless and misguided exercise in moral egotism.”

  “Whoa,” Cindy said. “We’re getting a little judgmental here, aren’t we?”

  “A generational habit to which I’m partial,” Michaelson said icily. “Ignoble though it was, however, your killing of Demarest wasn’t evil in the way that his psychological abuse of Catherine was. Legally, what you did was cold-blooded, premeditated murder. Morally, in your own judgment, it was justifiable homicide. That judgment was wrong, but your mistake was selfless rather than malicious, and your victim was someone who won’t be missed. That’s the idea that I hope to sell to Avery Phillips.”

  “You have sold it,” Phillips said.

  Michaelson and Cindy both looked up, startled. Phillips, who had apparently been standing in the hall, walked to the doorway and leaned against the jamb. He shifted his gaze from Michaelson to Cindy, and Michaelson watched the two of them eye each other for a moment in cool and intrigued appraisal.

  “A weekend with me and I’ll bet you wouldn’t be gay anymore,” Cindy said. Phillips shook his head.

  “Tried that in high school,” he said. “The third time a girl I was going with went on a crying jag because it was a cloudy day I thought, I don’t need this. I’m going to date happy people wh
o dress well. Been gay ever since. Besides, I couldn’t stand the thought of Preston laughing at me in hell when I met him there after you managed to kill me the same way you did him.”

  “I didn’t kill anyone,” Cindy said.

  “Stick with that denial,” Phillips said. “Not that you’ll need it much more. I’m walking away from this, and I’ll square things with Janos. Which leaves you and Catherine, and frankly, I wouldn’t touch that with Krafft-Ebbing on a stick. Maybe you two can stand in the corner together or something.”

  “Catherine spent this morning proving that she’s stronger than anyone except Marjorie thought she was,” Michaelson said. “Perhaps what she needs is someone for her to protect, instead of someone protecting her. If so, she has it now.”

  “Oh, dear,” Phillips said, “caring nurturers at twelve o’clock. I feel a glucose OD coming on. By the way, you’re about thirty seconds away from your next phone call, so I’d toddle on downstairs if I were you.”

  “Gracious,” Michaelson said, glancing at his watch as he hurried out of the bathroom, “you’re right. I hadn’t really built this little dialogue into the schedule.”

  Trailed by Phillips, Michaelson hustled to the stairs and got back to the living room just in time to hear a female voice call his name over the speakerphone.

  “This is Richard Michaelson,” he said.

  “Please hold for Congressman Humphreys.”

  Several seconds passed before a male voice came over the speaker.

  “We ready to go on TV?” the voice asked.

  The mumble in the background was apparently affirmative, for after a couple of flickers the monitor at Calvert Manor came to life to show Humphreys’ torso, with his head pinning a telephone receiver to his shoulder.

  “Thank you for calling, Congressman,” Michaelson said.

  “You’re welcome. You’ve done me a considerable service, and all you asked in return was a phone call, so I thought I should oblige. I’m on a speaker, right? Who all we have there?”