Corruption of Power

by Brenda English

  “Oh, yes, we all knew Ann, although I only knew her to speak to. What a terrible, terrible thing.” Her expression now was suitably somber. “She didn’t really socialize with the Senate crowd, you understand. We often deal with Senator Wills’s staff on legislative issues, but outside working hours, Ann didn’t spend a lot of time with the people around here.”

  “So I was told. So you really didn’t know much about her personal life, then? What about Senator Black? Do you think there might be anything he could tell me?”

  “I’d be surprised,” Susan said. “He doesn’t hang around a lot after hours either. His wife and kids stay up here most of the year, and he’s a real family man. But you know, the person you really ought to talk to is Maggie. She used to work for Rita Wills back when Rita was the Florida attorney general. I don’t know that she and Ann were close friends, but she knew Ann longer than any of us.”

  “Maggie?”

  “Yes, Maggie Padgett. She’s Paul’s secretary.”

  “Is she here?”

  “Not today. She’s been out sick all week, but she said she planned to come in tomorrow, even though it’s Saturday, to catch up. You could call her or come back then. She usually gets in about eight.”

  “Okay, maybe I’ll do that. Well, listen, Susan, thanks for your help.”

  “Certainly,” she said, and walked me to the outer door. I left the office wondering if this Maggie Padgett would be of any more help than Susan Barrett had been. I decided I would have to make the trip back regardless, just on the off chance that she might know more about the people in Ann Kane’s life than I had learned so far.

  Although it was doubtful. From the sound of it, Ann Kane wasn’t much of a social butterfly. She spent most of her free time among the less affluent, apparently. Still, the Capitol Hill connection—and Ed Lloyd—were worth pursuing. While the crowd one meets in soup kitchens might be less than savory, few of them would have had either the means or the opportunity to slip Kane a lethal drink or to transport her body twenty-five miles away to dump it.

  It was always possible, I supposed, that she had been done in by some nutcase priest or soup kitchen volunteer who spent his spare time doing good works for the homeless and killing young women on the side. But I didn’t think it was very probable. No, her death stank of some other kind of ego at work, someone who thought the rules didn’t apply to him, someone who would drug her for sex, either because she wouldn’t go to bed with him willingly or because he got off on having her helpless. Someone who also had an accomplice he trusted enough to share his murderous little escapade with.

  None of which left me with anything for a story for Saturday’s paper. Back in my car, I picked up the phone and called Rob to tell him to cross me off the story lineup.

  “Too bad,” he said, when I told him there was nothing new on Janet Taylor from the investigation end. “Woulda been nice to have a story on the police arresting someone for it, to go along with Ken’s piece on the funeral.”

  “That’ll take a little longer,” I replied. “But I’m working on it.”

  “Do you think he did it?” By he, I knew Rob meant Hub Taylor.

  “Just between us girls, he could have,” I told Rob. “But what I can’t figure out is why.”

  “Don’t you hate it when that happens?”

  I laughed. “ ’Bye, Rob,” I said, and hung up.

  He was right. I did hate it when I couldn’t figure out why. Why Hub Taylor? Why Ed Lloyd? Why Noah Lansing? Today had been one big question mark. I decided to pack it in, take some well-deserved comp time, and go home.

  Fifteen

  I struggled up out of the forest through which I was running after a receding light, to discover that I had been dreaming and that the loud noise I was hearing was the telephone on my kitchen wall. I realized I had fallen asleep on the sofa just as the sun was going down, and now it was full dark outside.

  The phone kept ringing insistently. Apparently, I had left the answering machine turned off. I pulled myself up, groggy from the depth of sleep I had reached, and stumbled over to the kitchen. I snatched the phone off the hook in mid-ring and forced out a “Hello” in a voice that sounded like mud.

  “Sutton McPhee?”

  “Yes?” I swallowed deeply, trying to clear my throat to the point of intelligibility. My brain would take a little longer.

  “Sutton, it’s Peter Morris.”

  “Oh, Dr. Morris. Sorry I’m a little groggy here. I was asleep.” The effort of putting words together helped clear the mental decks. I was rapidly coming back to the present. The digital clock on my oven said it was 8:15 P.M. I wondered why Morris was calling.

  “Oh, I do apologize for waking you up,” he said quickly.

  “That’s okay,” I told him. “I was having a very frustrating dream anyway.”

  “Listen, Sutton, I need to talk to you right away.”

  “Did you remember something else?”

  “No. Nothing. But something very disturbing just happened.”

  “What?”

  “I… I really don’t want to discuss it on the phone. Do you have plans for the evening? Is there any way we could talk in person?”

  I looked around at the wild party that wasn’t going on in my living room. No one there seemed to object to my leaving.

  “Sure,” I agreed. “Where are you?”

  “I’m at home in McLean. Would you just come here? I would rather no one saw us talking, especially now.”

  “Fine. What’s your address?”

  “Twenty-seven-nineteen Cedarbrook. It’s just off Georgetown Pike and Great Oaks Terrace.”

  “Okay, give me a few minutes to wash my face and throw on some clothes. I’ll be there by”—I estimated the distance in my head—“oh, let’s say nine-thirty. Is that too late?”

  “No, no. That’s fine. Just come as soon as you can.”

  Then, my brain fog clearing a little more, I thought to ask the question that had occurred to me earlier.

  “By the way, Dr. Morris,” I said, “I saw you at Janet Taylor’s funeral today.”

  “Were you there?”

  “I was, but I was trying to be unobtrusive.” Well, as far as most of the people there were concerned. “Was she a patient of yours?”

  “Yes,” he answered, sadly. “Ed Lloyd sent the Taylors to me after her accident. I’ve been their internist ever since.”

  “Interesting,” I told him. “All right, I’ll be over soon.”

  We hung up.

  What, other than a jog in his memory, could have prompted his call? I wondered as I went back to my bedroom. I splashed my face with cold water, brushed my hair out and rebraided it, slipped on a lightweight, tweedy blue sweater and jeans, and stuck my feet into a pair of cordovan loafers.

  In the foyer, I took my wallet and keys out of my purse, turned off all but the kitchen light, and went out into the night to talk to Peter Morris.

  * * * *

  Needless to say, Dr. Peter Morris, internist to movers and shakers, lived in a very upscale neighborhood in McLean. Large, expensive lots that maintained privacy. Looming, center-hall Colonials covered in heavy red brick, a favorite way in the nation’s capital to say “I have arrived.” Extensive landscaping and outdoor accent lighting. Twenty-seven-nineteen Cedarbrook fit the mold.

  Lights were on in the house when I pulled into the driveway behind a black Lexus. The double garage door was in the up position, showing a white Porsche 911 and a red 1960s-vintage Jaguar XKE taking up the two bays. Admiring the doctor’s taste in cars, I went up the bricked walk to the front door and rang the doorbell.

  No one came to the door in response, so I rang it a second and, eventually, a third time. Still no Peter Morris. I was puzzled. Even if he had been in the bathroom when I rang the doorbell the first time, I had waited long enough between rings for him to hear it. I pulled out the brass door knocker and rapped loudly. Still no response. I tried the door, but it was locked. I backed out onto the walk to look
through the lighted dining-room windows to my left. No sign of movement. To the right, behind what I assumed were the living-room windows, there was only darkness.

  Where could he be? I wondered. His car was in the driveway. He had asked me to come over, so he was expecting me. It was 9:32, so I was right on time. Maybe he was out on a deck or in the backyard and hadn’t heard me.

  I had seen when I drove up that a wooden fence jutted out from the sides of the house, enclosing the backyard. I walked around to the outside of the garage and up to the fence, but there was no gate on that side.

  “Dr. Morris?” I called, thinking he might hear me if he were in the backyard. “Are you there? It’s Sutton.” No answer. Now I was becoming concerned.

  I went back around the front corner of the garage and walked between the Porsche and the XKE to look for another way into the house. A connecting door was in the back right corner. The window in that door was dark, but I went over to it anyway and grasped the knob, which turned easily in my hand, opening the door. I stopped.

  “Dr. Morris?” No answer. What there was, however, was a palpable feeling in the air that something was wrong inside this house. The hair stood up on the back of my neck.

  Through a window on the wall to my left, the reflected glow of a security light in the backyard showed me that I was in a largish laundry room. A white washer-dryer pair sat beneath the window. Next to them was a laundry sink, where a faucet dripped with clocklike precision. Beyond the sink were shelves on which sat bottles and boxes of laundry supplies and some unidentifiable stacks of folded laundry. I brushed a hand against the wall next to the door and found a double light switch, which I flipped up. Simultaneously, lights came on overhead in the garage and in the laundry room.

  Ahead of me was a closed, solid wood door, which I guessed led into the kitchen. Again, the door opened easily, into another darkened room. Again, the flick of a switch in a bank of switches on the left-hand wall turned on a couple of small, recessed lights in the ceiling, this time to show me a spotless, modern kitchen with oak cabinets and white Corian countertops running down either wall, a cooking island in the middle, and white appliances breaking up the oak here and there. Terra-cotta tiles on the floor felt hard under my loafers.

  I called out Morris’s name, again without any response. Something was badly wrong here. I could feel it. I wanted nothing more than to turn around, run to my car, and go home. But that desire lost out to an even stronger need to know what was wrong—as it always did. Jack used to get really angry with me when, having heard an odd noise in the middle of the night, I would get up and go to see what it was instead of waking him. But I always had been that way, figuring that if a killer or monster waited for me in the dark, it would be over quickly and was preferable to the long minutes or hours of heart-pounding fear I would endure if I just lay in bed listening. This was just the same. What I didn’t know was always more frightening than what I did.

  On the right-hand wall of the kitchen, a swinging door showed a strip of light at the bottom. I pushed it open slowly to see the dining room, with its elegant set of Chippendale chairs around an oval mahogany table large enough to seat ten easily. The wall to my right was completely taken up with a built-in china display cabinet that went from floor to ceiling and was filled with what I knew was an expensive china in blue and gold. On the floor was a luxurious cream-colored carpeting overlaid with an expensive-looking Oriental rug on which the dining table sat. Overhead, a crystal chandelier, that probably cost two months of my salary or more, glittered brightly. The decor, I suspected, was the legacy of the ex-wife who had moved back to Boston.

  Still there was no sign of Dr. Morris. By this time fear had silenced my calls to him.

  On the dining-room wall to the left, a doorless archway led into a darkened hall. I crossed the room slowly, almost holding my breath from the tension that enveloped me. In the hallway, carpeted stairs to my left led up to the second floor. On the right was the front door. Opposite where I stood, another archway led into a lightless room I thought most likely was the living room.

  I crossed the hall, trying not to notice the darkened top of the stairs. One terror at a time, I thought. At the entryway into the living room, I stopped and felt the wall beside me again for a light switch. This time it turned on several lamps on small tables around the room. My subconscious mind and my peripheral vision noted glassed-in bookcases against walls, a large elaborate mantel above a fireplace to the left, and several tall green plants in corners. But my conscious attention and my eyes immediately went to the grouping of an overstuffed navy-blue sofa facing the fireplace from the center of the room, flanked by two navy, burgundy, and cream-striped upholstered chairs. In the chair opposite me, sat Dr. Peter Morris. His eyes were open, but the small round hole on the left side of his forehead and the blood all over his shirt and the chair behind him told me he wasn’t seeing me or anything else.

  For several seconds I thought my heart would stop. Then, when it not only didn’t stop, but in fact beat louder and faster, I thought I might faint. I’ve seen plenty of dead bodies in my time. It’s hard to avoid them when you’re a police reporter. But I was usually prepared to see those. Even viewing my sister’s body in the morgue, as horrible as that experience had been, was something I first had a chance to steel myself to see. This was the first time I had had the experience of being the person to actually find the body. Nor was this some anonymous victim. This was someone I knew. I dropped my keys on the floor and bent over at the waist to let my own blood go back to my brain. Finally, I straightened up slowly. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that Morris was dead, but I knew I would have to make certain.

  I went over to the right side of the chair so that I didn’t have to keep looking at the vacancy of his eyes. There was no chest movement that I could see. Carefully, I reached down to his left wrist, not wanting to touch his blood-drenched neck or to disturb the revolver with the grained wood handle in his hand. There was no detectable pulse either. His skin was still quite warm to the touch, so he hadn’t been dead long. But dead he unquestionably was.

  I walked over to a Parsons table behind the sofa, to the cream-colored telephone that sat there. I knew I had to call the police. I could have left the house altogether and called it in anonymously, I supposed, but who knew how many neighbors had seen my car in the driveway by now. The first time any of the cops who knew me heard “white VW Beetle convertible,” I probably would come to mind immediately. Then I would have a real problem. And, come to think of it, once the police arrived, I was going to have to have a story ready for them, one that was the truth, but not enough of the truth to tie my hands in finding out where Ed Lloyd stood in all this. I was afraid I knew the whole truth—that Peter Morris hadn’t committed suicide. On the phone, he hadn’t sounded depressed or self-destructive. What I had heard in his voice was fear. No, I thought, someone else killed him. And it suddenly occurred to me that for all I knew, that someone was still in the house.

  Quickly, I went back to the doorway, picked up my keys, and let myself out the front door. Once inside my car, I locked the doors and used my cellular phone to call nine-one-one. At least if someone came out of the house after me, I could always drive away.

  The 911 dispatcher answered. There was no way around it; I was in for a bad night here. I identified myself to the dispatcher, told her briefly what I had found, gave her the address, and asked her to have someone call Bill Russell and send him out as well. More than likely I was going to need to call in whatever remaining chips I had left with him. I figured the hassle factor from the cops at the scene would be minimized with Bill there to vouch for me. He would be called eventually anyway, but I wanted him there from the beginning to run interference for me.

  In the driveway, I waited for the police, working out my story about how I came to be here. I thought back to what Peter Morris had said on the phone and wondered what it was he had wanted so urgently to tell me.

  Sixteen

  I s
till had seen no signs of anyone else in the house by the time the police began to arrive eight or ten minutes later. Nothing had moved, no lights had gone on or off, no one had entered or left, at least not through the doors I could see from my car. Whoever had murdered Peter Morris probably was long gone.

  Behind me, the first squad car, colored lights flashing but siren silent, pulled up behind me in the driveway. The driver, who looked like he hadn’t seen thirty yet, turned his spotlight onto my car and, over his loudspeaker, ordered me to get out and stand away from the car, hands in the air. Which I promptly did. I knew they would have it figured out in a moment. In the meantime I wasn’t fooling around with nervous policemen with loaded guns.

  Once I was out on the driveway, the cops slowly got out, their guns pointed at me, and began walking toward me.

  “I’m a newspaper reporter,” I told them. “I made the call to nine-one-one.” Some other time the idea of being frisked by a twenty-eight-year-old cop might have its appeal. Tonight, I wasn’t in the mood.

  “You have some ID?” the officer who had been driving asked.

  “Yes, it’s in my wallet on the passenger’s seat of my car. You’ll have to get it from this side. The other door is locked.”

  The driver nodded to his partner, who holstered his own gun and came up to the driver’s door of the VW to reach in and bring out my wallet. He took his heavy cop’s flashlight out of his belt and flicked it on to examine my driver’s license and my press ID, the two things I kept easily visible in the little plastic windows just for anxious moments like this.

  “Sutton McPhee,” he said, looking up at his partner. “It says she works for the News. I’ve seen her name on stories.” He closed the wallet and turned off the flashlight. His partner reholstered his gun as well.

  “You can put your hands down,” the driver said just as a second and third squad car and an ambulance rounded the curve a couple of houses away and drove up to park against the curb on either side of the driveway. Gratefully, I complied.