(2012) Political Suicide

by Michael Palmer

  “Does Oliver think every monitoring client should go through extensive psychotherapy?”

  “It doesn’t always have to be extensive,” Filstrup said.

  Don’t drink, go to meetings, and ask a higher power for help.

  Lou knew that the terse, three-pronged instruction manual was all that the majority of addicts and alcoholics involved with AA ever needed. Psychotherapy had its place with some of them, but protracted, expensive treatment was often over the top.

  He could sense their exchange was getting out of hand, and kept quiet by reminding himself, as he did from time to time for nearly every one of his docs, that whether the stone hit the vase, or the vase hit the stone, it was going to be bad for the vase.

  Filstrup removed his glasses and cleaned the lenses with a cloth from his desk drawer. Lou thought the gray tie would have done just as well.

  “Just because you were once a drug addict,” Filstrup went on, “doesn’t give your opinions greater authority here.”

  “I can’t believe we’re going at it like this because I came in here to ask for more work.”

  The phone rang before Filstrup could retort. He flashed an annoyed look and pushed the intercom button. “I thought I told you to hold all my calls, Mrs. Peterbee,” Filstrup said.

  I thought you were expecting one, Lou mused.

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Filstrup,” the receptionist said. “Actually, this is for Dr. Welcome. I have the caller on hold.”

  Lou gave Filstrup a bewildered look. “Who is it, Mrs. P?” Lou asked.

  “Our client, Dr. Gary McHugh,” Peterbee said. “He said it’s urgent.”

  Filstrup reflexively straightened up. “McHugh, the society doc?” he said. “Put him through.” Filstrup allowed the call to click over, then said in an cheery voice, “Gary, it’s Walter Filstrup. How are you doing?”

  The director’s conciliatory tone churned Lou’s stomach, but it was not an unexpected reaction, given who was on the other line. Gary McHugh tended to the D.C. carriage trade and probably numbered among his patients a significant portion of all three branches of the government. He was renowned for his acumen, loyalty, and discretion, as well as for making house calls. What he was not known for, at least within the confines of the D.C. Physician Wellness Office, was for being one of Lou Welcome’s closest friends since their undergraduate days together at Georgetown.

  Several years before, McHugh had lost his driver’s license for operating under the influence and refusing to take a field sobriety test. The board of medicine’s knee-jerk policy was to refer such physician offenders to the PWO, and in the absence of another associate director, Lou was placed in charge of his case.

  Although McHugh adhered to the letter of his monitoring contract, he regarded the whole business as something of a joke. Lou could not help but enjoy the man’s spirit, intelligence, and panache, even though he never had much trust in the strength of McHugh’s recovery—too much ego and way too few AA meetings. Still, McHugh, a sportsman and pilot with his own pressurized Cessna, had always been irrepressible, and Lou looked forward to their required monthly progress meetings, as well as to any other chance they had to get together.

  “Am I on speakerphone?” McHugh barked.

  “I was just finishing a meeting with Lou Welcome,” Filstrup said, as if the appointment had been on his calendar for weeks.

  “Dr. Filstrup, I need to speak with him.”

  “I’m here,” Lou said.

  “Dr. Welcome, get me off speaker, please.”

  Lou stifled a grin at Filstrup’s discomfort, and with a what can you do? expression, took the receiver. “Hey, Gary,” he said, pressing the phone to his ear to seal off as much sound as possible, “what gives?”

  “Welcome, thank God you’re there. I’m in trouble—really, really big trouble. I need to see you right away.”

  “Talk to me.”

  “I can’t. Not from where I am.”

  “Where, then?”

  “My house. You have the address?”

  “Of course,” Lou said.

  “When can you get there?”

  Filstrup kept quiet and still. Lou forced any urgency from his voice, and pressed the receiver even tighter against his ear. He checked his Mickey Mouse watch, a Father’s Day gift from Emily. Nearly four—eight hours before he was due at the ER for the graveyard shift. McHugh lived in a tony neighborhood, midway between the Capitol and Annapolis.

  “I can be there in about forty-five minutes,” Lou said.

  “Get here in thirty,” McHugh urged. “Before too much longer, the police are going to show up here to arrest me.”

  “For what?”

  “For murder.” He hung up without saying good-bye.

  CHAPTER 2

  Murder.

  The word reverberated through Lou’s mind as he left the city and headed east.

  Gary McHugh, suave, adventurous, almost painfully popular, believed he was about to be arrested for killing someone—not killing, but murdering.

  Who? How? For the moment, the questions far outstripped their answers. One thing that did make sense was that McHugh’s first move would be to call Lou. Their history together was a colorful and at times wildly adventurous one that included parachuting with two magnums of champagne onto a remote field, where two bewildered women were waiting with their picnic baskets for their double blind dates to arrive. If Lou were in mortal trouble, there were few people he would turn to before calling McHugh.

  The December afternoon was already dark, and the wipers on Lou’s ten-year-old Camry were working to keep up with a fine, windblown snow. He pulled off of Route 50 and onto a secondary road lined with McMansions, many of which were already decorated for Christmas. White bulb country, Lou had once heard someone describe upscale neighborhoods such as this one—understated holiday decor featuring small white lights on the front shrubs and electric candles in every window. Nice enough, but he was still partial to the tangled strings of blinking colored bulbs outlining Dimitri’s Pizza shop, just below his apartment in D.C.

  It was one of Walter Filstrup’s few sensible rules that clients be identified only by their assigned numbers, and that no doctor’s name could be removed from the office. In a totally out-of-character concession to the man, Lou kept his client numbers next to their initials on a card in his wallet, and their contact information locked in his smartphone, which, at that moment, was resting on the worn passenger seat of the Toyota. McHugh’s cell phone number was in it, but if he had wanted Lou to call, he would have said so.

  Murder.

  What in the hell is the man talking about?

  The two of them had met once or twice a month since McHugh’s monitoring contract became active, sometimes at the PWO, sometimes at McHugh’s home or D.C. office, and less frequently at a restaurant. Filstrup insisted that Lou include a credit card validation that he paid for his own meal. Lou never reacted maturely to being told what to do, and he resented the implication that he or the other associate director could be bought—certainly not for the price of a dinner. So, even though Filstrup’s policy made some sense, Lou had taken trips in McHugh’s plane, and gone to a couple of Redskins games thanks to his friend’s season tickets.

  As things evolved between them, McHugh did test Lou once by claiming he never had the time to see a doctor, and had ordered some Percocets from an Internet pharmacy in Canada to deal with a chronically balky back. His reasoning was that alcohol was the substance that had gotten him a PWO contract, not painkillers. Lou made little attempt to point out the foolishness of that belief, or the quickness with which a positive random urine test for Percocet or any such drug would get his license pulled. McHugh’s denial was as thick as a glacier, but he still knew what was at stake, so Lou extracted a promise that, when the Percocet bottles arrived in the promised plain brown wrapper, they would be opened in his presence and the pills dumped in the toilet.

  After the pills had been disposed of, Lou sat beside the phone as McHugh m
ade an appointment with his orthopedist. The final steps would be the assurance that the orthopedist had been informed of McHugh’s status with the PWO, and would provide the program a copy of any prescription he wrote.

  “No thanks necessary,” Lou had said as the last of the Percocets swirled down the toilet.

  “None given,” McHugh had replied testily.

  Not long after that exchange, when Lou mentioned in passing that Emily was assigned to do a school report on a new piece of environmental legislation, McHugh arranged for the congressman sponsoring the actual bill to speak at Emily’s school. Case closed. Friendship preserved.

  Lou cruised through the gated entrance of McHugh’s elegant Tudor-style home. The electric candles in each window looked as if they had been included in the design when the house was built, but there were no bulbs on the shrubs. Lou observed only one car parked in the circular driveway—a Lexus, which he assumed belonged to Missy, McHugh’s wife. McHugh prided himself on his high-end black Jaguar. Lou wondered if the car had somehow been involved in the man’s current plight—a fatal accident of some sort, perhaps. Then he reminded himself that McHugh had very specifically said murder.

  He braked the Toyota to a stop in front of the roofed entranceway. McHugh—graying red hair, broad-shouldered, dense five o’clock shadow—stood waiting. He wore a green collared sweater, but no jacket. His face was distorted by a huge bruise involving the area between his left cheek and hairline. His left eye was swollen shut.

  “Hey, thanks for getting here so quickly,” McHugh said grimly, “I forgot it was rush hour.”

  “No problem. Gary, let’s get inside. It’s freezing out here.”

  Limping slightly, McHugh set Lou’s peacoat on a hook in the foyer, and shook his hand. His wrestler’s grip had not been diminished by whatever had battered his face. His one open eye was bloodshot, and Lou almost immediately smelled alcohol—more, it seemed from the man’s pores than from his breath. Whatever had happened today, booze was almost certainly part of it. Lou’s recurrent warning that he did not feel McHugh could ever drink in safety had gone unheeded and was now apparently extracting a heavy toll.

  “What’s going on, Gary?”

  “Let’s go my study,” McHugh said. “I just lit a fire to take the chill out.”

  The temperature in the cherry-paneled room had already responded to the neatly laid blaze. The space was perhaps a third the size of Lou’s entire apartment. A forty-inch plasma TV mounted above the stone fireplace was tuned to CNN. The walls were decorated with pictures and souvenirs that defined the man—his travels to exotic locales, his plane, skydiving certification, skiing with a skill and grace that showed even in a photograph, black-tie parties featuring A-list notables, testimonials and letters of thanks, at least two from recent presidents.

  McHugh motioned Lou to one of two red leather armchairs, while he remained standing, glancing from time to time at the TV.

  “Talk to me, Gary,” Lou said.

  McHugh, now watching CNN steadily, had his back turned. Despite the odor of alcohol, there was no evidence in his speech or manner that he was intoxicated. “Anytime now,” he said, “CNN is going to report breaking news regarding the shooting death in his garage of Congressman Elias Colston.”

  Lou stiffened and dug his fingers into the thick arms of his chair. Colston, the chairman of the House Committee on Armed Services, was one of the more popular congressmen in the House. Maryland District 1, Lou guessed, or maybe it was District 3.

  “How do you know?” he asked.

  “I was there,” McHugh said flatly, wincing as he sat down in the other chair. “I saw the body. At least two shots—one to the chest and one dead center in the forehead.”

  “Are you absolutely sure? Did you check for a pulse?”

  “Believe me, Lou, I checked, but I know dead.”

  “And the body temp?”

  “Warm.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “I got there at noon.”

  “And you had been drinking?”

  There was an embarrassed silence, and then, “Yes. Fairly heavily.”

  Lou groaned. Gary McHugh seldom did anything in half measures. He could only imagine what fairly heavily meant.

  “Why hasn’t the story broken by now?”

  McHugh shrugged. “I guess because I’m the only one who saw him—besides the person who killed him, that is.”

  “And why didn’t you call the police?” Even as he was asking the question, Lou knew the answer.

  “I … intended to find a phone booth and call them anonymously, rather than risk giving them my cell phone number. I knew if they caught up with me and I were found to be drinking, I could kiss my medical license good-bye.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Gary. But before you could call anyone, you smashed up your car and did this to your face, yes?”

  “You got it. I must have skidded off the road and hit a tree.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “The first thing I remember after seeing Elias’s body, I was being transferred from an ambulance stretcher to a bed in the ER. Apparently, someone found me unconscious in my car. Somebody said something about having to use the Jaws of Life.”

  Blackout from alcohol or concussion, Lou thought. Most likely both. He probably should have been kept overnight.

  “Which hospital?” he asked, checking the screen expectantly.

  “Anne Arundel.”

  “Are you okay now? I have my medical bag in the car. Maybe I should check you over.”

  “They did everything—blood work, CAT scan. I had to beat the frigging residents and med students off with a stick.”

  “Did they want to keep you?”

  “They wanted to, but I wouldn’t consider it. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of the place as quickly as possible. Missy came and they let me go.”

  “Your alcohol level?”

  “It was probably high. One of the nurses who knows me said a good lawyer could get me off any charges by saying I was head injured and couldn’t authorize having my blood drawn. That may be the reason the police decided not to charge me on the spot.”

  “I’m not sure that’s true if the ER people had good reason to draw your blood in the first place. Besides, you can always be charged later. But more important, the charges you’re talking about may be significantly bigger than a DUI. Why do you think they would charge you with Colston’s murder?”

  McHugh rose and began to pace in front of the fire. “Colston is a patient of mine. I’ve been to his house many times before. There are security cameras.”

  “Then maybe one of them recorded the murder.”

  “Maybe, but it took place way in the back of the garage, by the stairs that go up to Colston’s office. I don’t remember any cameras being there—just outside on the driveway. I’ll bet the only thing those cameras recorded is me, driving up and later driving away—maybe even with Elias’s blood on me from when I checked him over.… What in the hell is going on? Why hasn’t anyone found him and called the cops?”

  “Gary, why would you be drinking in the morning and then go off to make a house call on one of your patients?”

  “Because I wasn’t making a house call, Lou.… Dammit, what is going on with this station? Why haven’t they reported anything about this?”

  McHugh grabbed a poker and stoked the fire as if he were spearing a wild boar.

  Lou tightened his grip on the chair once more.

  Again an inflated silence.

  “Easy does it, Gary.”

  “Shit, I suppose everyone’s going to find out anyway. I didn’t go there to see Colston. I went there to see his wife, Jeannine.”

  “Not to treat her.”

  McHugh sighed. “No. We’ve been having an affair for more than two years.”

  “Oh, Gary,” Lou groaned.

  McHugh assaulted the fire again. “That’s not all,” he said.

  CHAPTER 3

  Lou stared across at
McHugh and drew a nervous breath.

  That’s not all.…

  What did he mean by that?

  How much more could there be?

  Before McHugh could explain, the news of Congressman Elias Colston’s murder hit CNN like a wrecking ball. The report varied little from McHugh’s account. Colston’s body was discovered by his wife, Jeannine, after she returned from a meeting of a congressional spouses’ group in Washington.

  Jeannine Colston was not available for comment, but a spokeswoman for her said only that their son and daughter had been notified at college and were on their way home, and that Jeannine had no other comment at that time. The feed of the crime scene around the Colstons’ tasteful country home was bedlam.

  Lou waited for a commercial interruption to the first wave of reports, then turned to his host. “Okay, Gary,” he said, “short and sweet. What else is there you haven’t told me?”

  McHugh threw an unnecessary log on the fire and began pacing again. “From what I can piece together, I skidded off the road and hit a tree just after I had crossed the bridge.”

  “Bridge?”

  “I really don’t remember a hell of a lot, Lou, but there’s a stone bridge across a river about a mile down the road from the Colstons’.”

  Lou saw no significance to this latest revelation. “Explain,” he said.

  “Well, unless they find it at the scene, the police are going to suspect that I stopped and tossed the murder weapon off the bridge and into the river, then kept going and went off the road. There aren’t many homes between Colstons’ place and the bridge, so a logical conclusion would be that I was headed away from there.”

  Lou winced. “That’s exactly what they’re going think,” he said.

  Then he remembered something else—something that McHugh had been required to discuss the first day his PWO monitoring contract began—his love affair with guns. McHugh owned several pistols and some hunting rifles. Years before, after a client’s gunshot suicide, the monitoring contract was modified to demand that all guns be removed from a doctor’s house, cataloged, and locked in a storage facility using a padlock provided by the PWO.