Corruption of Power

by Brenda English

  At home, I gathered up the week’s laundry and took it downstairs to the basement laundry room, where I filled up three washers, stuffed them with a small fortune in quarters, and turned them on. I figured they would take half an hour, just enough time for me to clean my bathroom, which was about as much as I could handle thinking about right now.

  Twenty-five minutes later I was putting out fresh towels in the now-sparkling bathroom when the phone on my bedroom nightstand rang. For a moment I hesitated to answer it, thinking of all the people it could be to whom I would rather not talk at the moment. On the other hand, it could be a friend or someone with information I wanted. I relented and went to pick it up. It turned out to be a salesperson, whom I quickly dispatched back to telemarketing limbo, but the flashing message light reminded me I probably should listen to the messages that had come in last night and that I had chosen to ignore this morning. In fact, according to the counter, I had received two more since then. I sat down on my bed and pressed the play button.

  “Sutton, it’s Bill,” Bill Russell said. “I don’t know what you’ve gotten into the middle of, but I don’t like the sound of it. Would you be careful? And would you please use your common sense and bring us in on whatever it is? I know we’re only the police, but we might actually be able to help.” The machine said he had called at 1:00 A.M.

  Bill’s message was followed, just as I had suspected, by calls from reporters at the Post and two of the local TV stations, all of which had come in during the night. I let them play and erase themselves, having no intention of returning the calls.

  The next message was a 10:00 A.M. call from Rob Perry.

  “It’s Rob. I thought I’d better let you know that I just got off the phone with Mack Thompson, who just got chewed out by Jim Todd.” Jim Todd was the paper’s publisher, who had come up through the business side of newspapers and who the reporters were convinced was more concerned with keeping advertisers happy than with reporting the news. He hobnobbed with Washington’s upper crust and hated, in the worst way, to offend any of them.

  “It seems,” Rob’s voice went on dryly, “that Todd had gotten an earful from John Aldritch, that attorney for Hub Taylor. Aldritch says you went out to Taylor’s house bright and early this morning, completely uninvited, finagled your way in, and started accusing Taylor of murdering his wife. Aldritch apparently made lots of noises to Todd about harassment and slander and restraining orders. What Todd knows about reporting wouldn’t give a gnat pause, of course, and we all know how he sucks up to anybody with any public clout. So, he apparently kissed Aldritch’s ass all over the place and then called Thompson and said he had better not get any more calls over this. Thompson called me, trying to figure out whether to be pissed off at Aldritch, Todd, or you. I told him all three. I also said that it made perfect sense for you to go out there, since you’re one of the reporters covering Janet Taylor’s death. And I reminded him that Taylor is a public figure, that he isn’t off the hook over his wife’s death, and that when you get our tails in a crack, it’s usually for a good reason. It was for a good reason, wasn’t it, McPhee?” He hung up without specifically ordering me to call him, so I decided it wasn’t necessary. I wondered which of my questions to Hub Taylor had touched such a nerve. The one about his wife or the one about Ann Kane?

  The final message was Ken Hale.

  “Sutton, where are you? We need to talk about this Taylor stuff. We are supposed to be working on it together, don’t forget. And I’d love to know what the story in this morning’s paper was about. Did this Morris guy know something about Janet Taylor? Let’s go have a drink. Call me.” Ken had called at 10:30 this morning.

  Him, I rang back immediately.

  “Hello,” he said, picking the phone up on the third ring.

  “Ken, it’s Sutton.”

  “Who?” he asked archly.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be the Lone Ranger. I just haven’t had anything to tell you. I’ve got something else going, too, and it sort of got the best of my time.”

  “Is this something else the reason you’re finding dead doctors out in McLean?”

  “That’s part of it. But there are also some things we need to discuss about Hub Taylor. I managed to get in to see him this morning. So how about dinner? I’ll buy.”

  “You don’t have a very high opinion of me if you think my affections can be bought for the price of a dinner, do you?” he joked.

  “Let’s just say I’ve heard from certain sources at work that the only thing required to get your affections is to be female.” As a single, nice, good-looking guy who liked women, Ken never lacked for “companionship” anytime he wanted it. In spite of that, he had never been married, not for lack of wanting to, he had told me once, but because he was still waiting for the woman who would absorb his attention outside the bedroom as much as inside it. I kept telling him he was picking the wrong kind of women as an avoidance mechanism.

  “All right, where and when?” Ken asked, laughing.

  “Seven o’clock. Port of Italy.” I had had no lunch, and I knew that by the time I finished the three o’clock yoga class I planned to get to, I would be ready for something filling. Port of Italy’s long menu of pastas and other Italian dishes sounded like what was called for. And it would be halfway between my apartment and Ken’s house off Old Keene Mill Road.

  “Great. See you then,” Ken agreed.

  I remembered my clothes. I went to the kitchen for another roll of quarters, which I got at the bank by the handfuls just for laundry, and headed downstairs to put my clothes in the dryers. At 2:30, clothes cleaned and dried, I changed into a leotard and tights and headed over to my yoga class.

  Teresa, my teacher, was a forty-two-year-old nurse who had gotten interested in yoga after a car wreck had given her a chronically painful back injury. The yoga had worked so well for her that she had gone on to become a certified instructor and eventually turned the entire top floor of her 1930s house in the Rosemont section of Alexandria into a yoga studio, where she held frequent classes. Teresa was one of the most grounded people I had ever met. She gave off such feelings of quiet confidence, such composure and peace with who she was, that I was convinced most of her students came back as much in hopes of awakening those feelings in themselves as for fitness. I always left her classes rested, my thoughts quieted, more aware of my body and how it worked. On a day like today, there was no price I wouldn’t pay to let Teresa work her magic on me.

  * * * *

  Port of Italy, which sits across Franconia Road from the department-of-motor-vehicles building, was crowded when I got there. I was glad I had had the presence of mind to call a couple of hours before and make reservations. It was one of my favorite restaurants: good food, made from scratch, an imaginative menu with tasty dishes from both northern and southern Italy, a dining room divided into several sections to provide a little more intimate atmosphere, and an attentive staff who were always in motion and smiling.

  Anna, a college student with a long, straight, blond pony-tail and mischievous blue eyes, was playing hostess and greeted me by name.

  “Ms. McPhee, how are you?” she asked, picking up a black grease pencil to make a mark on her seating chart.

  “Good, Anna, I’m good,” I told her. “Just very busy.”

  “Is that why we haven’t seen you for a while?”

  “I know. I know. I’ve got to do a better job of having a personal life somewhere in all this work.”

  Grinning, Anna picked up a stack of menus and lifted a couple off the top.

  “Two tonight?” she asked.

  “Yes, Ken Hale should be coming along any minute. But go ahead and seat me, and I’ll wait for him inside. Could we have a booth tonight, please, Anna?” She knew Ken as well. We had had drinks here more than once, and since he didn’t live far away, who knew how many times Ken had been here on his own.

  “Certainly,” Anna answered agreeably, “whatever you’d like. This way, ple
ase.”

  I followed her back past a wall of wine bottles residing inside a see-through cooler that runs from floor to ceiling. On our right was the stairwell down to the restaurant’s popular sports bar, from which I could hear a low rumble of conversation and occasional cheers over some sort of televised competition. Anna led me to a corner booth, where I sat down, ordered a gin and tonic from the waitress who appeared immediately, and sat back to wait for Ken. Five minutes later my drink arrived, and so did my coworker. He asked the waitress for a beer and sat down opposite me.

  “So, how goes it, Sutton?” Ken asked, smiling. He never called me McPhee, and he was always in a good mood. I thought to myself what a nice guy he really was, amazed that no one had managed to tie him down yet. Tie him down—maybe that was what no one had tried on him. I entertained myself with lascivious thoughts for a second and smiled back at him.

  “I have no idea,” I finally answered truthfully, getting a grip on my imagination. “I feel like I’m poking around in the dark. Things move, but I still don’t know what’s in there.”

  “I might be able to help shed a little light,” he said as the waitress came back with his beer. He grabbed it, drank a large swallow, put it down on the table and relaxed against the upholstered seat back. “But before I tell you anything, you have to tell Father Ken what naughty things you’ve been doing. I understand you’ve been a very bad girl.”

  “Fine, your holier-than-thouness, but can we order dinner first? I’m starving.”

  “I suppose so,” he agreed, opening his menu, “although I should confine you to bread and water as punishment for not keeping me filled in.”

  We studied the offerings for a couple of minutes, by which time our waitress was back. We each rattled off our preferences—stuffed mushrooms and chicken Marsala for me, minestrone and veal piccata for Ken—and gave the menus back.

  “Well?” Ken asked when the waitress left.

  So I told him about my visit to Hub Taylor’s house, about asking Taylor point-blank if he killed his wife, and about Taylor throwing a fit and then throwing me out.

  “And John Aldritch showed up just as Taylor was going ballistic, so he got in on the act and called up Jim Todd. And you know what a wimp Todd is. I’m sure he kissed the telephone receiver all over because that was as close as he could get at that moment to Aldritch’s ass. He called Mack Thompson who called Rob Perry who called my answering machine.”

  “What did Rob say?” Ken asked, knowing that it was what Rob said to us that really mattered in these situations.

  “Basically, that I should just make sure I know what I’m doing, cover my ass, and come back with a good story.”

  “I love that guy,” Ken said.

  “Don’t we all?”

  “That’s all well and good and quite fascinating, Sutton,” Ken went on, “but you haven’t told me where Dr. Morris fits in to all this.”

  I looked at him for at least sixty seconds, my brain calculating the pros and cons of letting him in on the full extent of what I knew and suspected. On the surface, the Ann Kane story was a separate affair that had nothing to do with the Taylor murder I was working on with Ken. And yet, I never had been much of a believer in long strings of coincidence. Some part of my brain was itching with the idea that somehow, somewhere, it was all connected—Ed Lloyd, Ann Kane, Maggie Padgett, Peter Morris, Hub Taylor, Janet Taylor—and no matter how I tried, I just couldn’t make the itch stop. I didn’t know how they were connected, but every suspicious bone in my body kept feeling that they were.

  So what do I do about Ken? I asked myself. Do I keep the Ed Lloyd information from him and keep that story all to myself, or do I bring him in on it, hoping that somewhere down the road he can help me find the thread that ties it all together?

  “Sutton?” Ken finally said, beginning to look worried that I suddenly had zoned out on him.

  “I’m just trying to decide how far to trust you,” I answered.

  “You’ve known me for four years, Sutton. You already know how far you can trust me.”

  He was right. If and when this whole thing blew up, if my brain itch was right, it would take both of us to cover it. And, once in a while, there were times when common sense dictated that you let someone else know what you were onto, just in case.

  “Okay,” I agreed finally, “here’s what I know, and what I guess.”

  I took him through all of it: Peter Morris’s call; his story about the woman Ed Lloyd brought to him and what he thought had happened to her and to Ann Kane; Lloyd’s blood type; my question to Lloyd at the cemetery; Morris’s subsequent call that something had happened and he needed to see me; finding his body and my conviction that it wasn’t a suicide; my growing suspicion that if Lloyd was responsible for Ann Kane’s death, his partner might have been Hub Taylor; the question I had asked Taylor this morning about Ann Kane that actually had gotten me thrown out; my meeting with Maggie Padgett. Ken sat quietly through my story, listening intently, working it through in his own mind.

  By the time I finished, we were halfway through our dinners and our second round of drinks. Ken put his fork down.

  “That’s quite a story, Sutton. If I heard this much supposition from just about any other reporter, I’d say they were crazy. But you’re too good for me to pass it off. No,” he said, shaking his head and taking his fork to the veal again, “coming from you, I have to think there’s something here. Maybe a really big something here.”

  “So you don’t think it’s my imagination trying to make a story where none exists?” It actually was almost a relief to be able to bounce my ideas off someone who knew what I knew. It’s hard sometimes, when you’re working on a big story alone, to know if and when you’ve lost your perspective on things, to know whether your instincts are good or whether you’ve just become paranoid.

  “Far from it,” Ken reassured me. “I think the Peter Morris stuff on Ed Lloyd is sound, especially now that you’ve met Maggie Padgett, and especially if the police find any evidence that supports your suspicion that Morris was murdered. The idea that Hub Taylor was in on the Ann Kane thing with Lloyd is a lot more tenuous—completely tenuous at this point. But the fact that Janet Taylor is dead and that Hub can’t prove he didn’t do it isn’t tenuous. What we don’t know is whether one is connected to the other—yet. But it’s an interesting idea, and it’s even more interesting in light of what I wanted to tell you.”

  “Oh?”

  “I found a talkative neighbor of the Taylors’ this morning. One Elizabeth Van Metre. Seems she was very close to Janet Taylor and disliked Hub Taylor intensely.”

  “Really.”

  “Yeah, she called him, if my memory serves, a ‘vulgar salesman’ and said she didn’t know what Janet could possibly have seen in him.”

  “So did she have gossip?”

  “Oh, more than gossip. She had it from the horse’s mouth. Janet Taylor had confided in her recently that the marriage was in trouble, that Hub was spending more and more time with Ed Lloyd, who, it turns out, Janet detested. Seems Janet was very worried about Lloyd’s influence over her husband.”

  My brain was itching in a big way. “Did she say what kind of influence, exactly?” I asked.

  “Not exactly,” Ken said. “She said she thought Janet probably was more concerned than she was saying, but Mrs. Van Metre was left with the distinct impression that whatever Ed Lloyd was into was ‘unsavory,’ to quote her again.”

  “I would think drugging women for sex would qualify as unsavory,” I said.

  “At least. If not sick and perverted.”

  “Certainly not the kind of thing Hub Taylor would want his wife to know about,” I went on.

  “But what if she did find out?” Ken said, thinking out loud. “Is that really enough to kill her over? Divorce would be a little less extreme.”

  “Maybe, if we’re talking about a situation where people are thinking rationally. The problem is, though, that Ann Kane went and died. If Taylor was ther
e, it all suddenly became a lot more sinister, with a lot more at stake. Janet Taylor was responsible in a big way for his political success. Having her divorce him wouldn’t look very good. And if his wife somehow found out, or even suspected what actually happened, if she confronted him, threatened to expose him in any way, divorce could have been the least of his worries. Maybe she didn’t realize until too late that he wasn’t rational anymore.”

  Ken thought this over, finished the last of his beer, and looked at me.

  “This is fucking incredible,” he said, visible excitement growing in his eyes. “I think you’re right. Goddamn it, Sutton, I think you’re right.” He looked up as our waitress materialized again.

  “Coffee and dessert?” she asked as she reached down to clear away the remains of dinner. We both passed on dessert but ordered black coffee. As soon as the waitress walked away, Ken leaned forward conspiratorially, barely able to contain himself.

  “So where do we go from here?” he asked eagerly. “There has to be a way to nail all this down, to find out whether it’s all connected. Maggie Padgett seems to be the only real lead to Ed Lloyd right now. What about her?”

  “It’s clear I’m going to have to try to talk to her again. I know she was the woman Dr. Morris treated. I thought I’d give her the weekend to think about the fact that we’re talking about people dying here. Maybe she’ll come around. Maybe I’ll go back to see her on Monday, try to convince her she has to tell someone what she knows.”

  “You do realize that if Ed Lloyd figures out you’ve tracked her down, you and she both could be in danger, too?”

  I had realized it hours ago, but I knew Ken was still thinking this thing through, thinking out loud.

  “Yes, but I have no reason to think he knows,” I told Ken. “After all, Peter Morris never knew who the woman was. Lloyd saw to that. So how could he tell me her identity? As far as Lloyd knows, Maggie is still a mystery woman.”