The 500: A Novel

by Matthew Quirk

  All of this cogitation had me feeling pretty smug, but it didn’t do me any good. No close relatives had survived Langford, and part of the reason you pay the Catenas of the world five hundred bucks an hour is that they keep their mouths shut. It’s impossible to pry secrets out of their attorney-client-privileged hands.

  It’s almost impossible legally, that is, which Haskins had realized too late in his quest to find the evidence against Henry Davies that Langford was holding on to. I didn’t have to bother with such niceties and had just picked up from Cartwright tools with which I could pry open pretty much anything. Those were my backup plan, though. I didn’t have time to break into and sift through Catena’s office. I was hoping this would be more of a finesse job.

  I tailed Catena leaving his office and followed him to a house down in Georgetown near Dumbarton Oaks. There were valets out front, and clear signs of a high-toned party going on within. I waited for him to go inside, then drove past and parked in a dark spot around the corner where I had a decent view into the kitchen and living room of the house.

  I called Catena’s cell and watched him through the window.

  “Larry Catena,” he said.

  “Mr. Catena. Hello,” I said. “Sorry to bother you so late. This is Terrence Dalton at the office of the chief medical examiner. We have a body here, and according to the identification we found it’s a…” I pretended to read. “Karl Langford. Date of birth is March fifteenth, 1943. We were looking for next of kin and saw that you were his lawyer.”

  “I’m afraid you’re mistaken. Karl Langford is dead.”

  “Yeah,” I said, sounding annoyed. “I know. This is the morgue. That’s why we’re calling.”

  “You found Karl Langford’s license on a body in the District?” he asked. Concern crept into his voice.

  “Yes, and some credit cards, a few other things. Can you come down tomorrow and identify the body?”

  “I’ll be there,” he said.

  I gave him a time and a phony number and let him go. I don’t know if Catena really bought my story, but that hardly mattered. It was an old con man’s trick to get information out of people. You’d call someone and inform him that, according to some ID you’d found on the corpse, you had his wife or daughter on ice at the morgue. After you had the person in hysterics, you’d cool him off by describing a body that didn’t match the loved one—a play normally known as the dead black female. The one-two punch of horror and relief would usually knock a person loose enough for him to give you whatever information you needed—typically a Social Security number or name and address—and that you claimed was necessary to straighten the matter out. I knew that Catena wouldn’t just hand over Langford’s current address, but that didn’t matter. I only needed him to contact Langford, and I figured killing someone’s dead client is a sure way to find out if he or she is still kicking.

  I watched Catena step outside and make another call. Perfect.

  By now, I’d changed into a clean suit. I’d spent enough time hanging around Washington high-society types that I could waltz into any party and fake it just fine. If only I’d known how easy it was when I was younger. Instead of prying open doors and falling off roofs, I could have just walked right into any given house party, said, “Oh, I’m a friend of John’s from work,” helped myself to the bourbon, talked about NYPD Blue or some stale political gossip, then sneaked into the bedroom to pocket the jewelry at my leisure.

  That’s more or less how I entered the house. It was a beautiful Colonial Revival with a columned porch. They were using the caterer who did the Davies Group Christmas parties, a good sign. I had a couple lamb chops and scanned the crowd for Catena. Polite folks all, the partygoers carefully avoided staring at the guy with the bandage on his nose.

  I spotted Catena, looking ill at ease, by the base of the stairs, and set a pick. When he rounded the corner, I backed into him, then apologized profusely.

  “It’s fine,” he said. I set my drink down and got the hell out of there. I’d worried that my pickpocketing skills would be a little rusty, and they were. I’d practically felt him up trying to get his phone, but he didn’t seem to notice. Perhaps he was preoccupied by the recent news about Langford’s corpse showing up at the DC morgue.

  A little Googling will tell you the backdoor key sequence to get around a password on an iPhone. All I needed was a glance through his recent calls to find what I wanted. Right after I’d done my morgue bit, Catena had called someone listed only as MT, with an eastern Maryland area code. I didn’t even have to bother with a reverse directory. The address was in the phone’s contact list: an assisted-living facility on the Eastern Shore called Clover Hills. I looked it up on his phone’s Web browser: it seemed like a nice place, and even had a golf course.

  That’s how I found myself standing, that same night, in a deep bunker guarding the green of the seventeenth hole at Clover Hills. I peered through binoculars in a drizzling rain. The old burgling duds, a hooded sweatshirt and canvas jeans, felt good as I cased the house. Looking through the bedroom window, I could make out Langford, the man Justice Haskins had told me held the key to the evidence against Henry. Langford looked awful, with tubes running from his chest, but still pretty good for a dead guy.

  With the Halligan, I did a neat job pulling the lock on the sliding doors next to his patio, and barely disturbed him when I broke in. By the time he woke up, his arms were bound neatly to the rails of his bed with duct tape. Having my old tools in my hands made me feel calm, however precarious my position: I was dressed like a thug and standing over a terrified old man hooked up to what I guessed was a dialysis machine.

  The apparatus pumped slowly. A small wheel squeezed blood through a tube that ran through a host of different plastic bottles before it snaked back to Langford’s bed, across his torso, then tucked neatly through the wall of his chest. It looked like it went right into his heart.

  “Henry Davies sent you,” he said.

  I wasn’t sure if Langford’s fear of Henry or his hatred of Henry—cooperation or spite—would be a better pry, so I left him guessing on that point.

  “I need to know about Hal Pearson,” I said.

  Langford licked his dry lips and looked at the ceiling. “Henry murdered him. You kill me and the evidence goes public. Now would you please take this goddamned tape off my wrists and let me get some sleep. It’s hard enough being hooked up to this fucking vampire without people wasting my time with stupid questions.”

  “What evidence do you have?”

  “Enough.”

  “What exactly?”

  “Fuck your mother.”

  Maybe that was his default tell-off, but he’d sure picked the wrong man and the wrong time to use it. The topic of my mother was still a little raw with me after my run-in with Henry.

  I watched the pump turn, the red fluid go around. Small clamps, nothing more, held together the tubing his blood ran through. I checked to see if the monitor was hooked up to anything—a phone line, an Ethernet cable—that might let a nurse know that Langford was having trouble. It wasn’t. I’d already moved his phone to a chair far out of reach.

  I stepped a little closer to the machine. A few twists and a pinch and I would hold Langford’s life between my two fingers. I could bleed him slowly, splashing him out over the brown wall-to-wall carpet.

  No violence. It was the only law my father respected, the only one I’d never second-guessed. Until today. Now I wasn’t sure what I believed. Apparently my dad was a killer too.

  These bloody impulses suited my recent mood. Ever since I’d seen Henry twist my life into a lie, setting me up for the murders, I’d been enjoying my time back on the dark side—a theft here, roughing up a cop there. What did I have to lose? I could show Henry he’d misjudged me. I had what it takes to apply the last lesson, to use it against him. I had the will to take coercion to its absolute, to the worst kinds of violence.

  I watched the wet grow in Langford’s eyes, watched him stare as I
touched my knuckle to the center of the pump, felt the throb of the machine, the cool plastic slide against my skin.

  Then I let my hand fall.

  That wasn’t me. This whole thing is impossible, I thought. Henry could get me by hunting me down, by using my father as bait, by turning Annie against me, by hooking my nuts up to a car battery, by feeding me to Rado.

  Or he could sit back and enjoy watching me corrupt myself, torturing geriatrics, becoming exactly the black-hearted little soldier he had always wanted. If I drained this poor old fuck Langford, how long before I’d be back in Henry’s party?

  I stepped away from the machine.

  Langford considered me for a long while.

  “So you’re trying to stop him,” Langford said finally, then made a noise between a wheeze and a laugh. “I’ve always had a soft spot for dimwits. What do you need to know?”

  I cocked my head.

  “If you were working for Henry,” he said, “I’d be a sticky puddle around your shoes right now.”

  This threw me. I wasn’t sure where decency fit in among money, ideology, coercion, and ego. Everything I’d learned about Langford hinted that he was just as crooked as the rest of Washington. But my better self, by not killing the guy, had just gotten me somewhere. I wasn’t about to let it slip away.

  “Where’s the evidence?” I asked.

  He looked more closely at my face.

  “Are you the guy who did in the Supreme Court justice and the girl?”

  “So they tell me, but I imagine you can guess who’s really behind that.”

  He looked down at my feet. “What happened to your pumps?”

  I guess the press had really eaten up that detail of my escape from Davies Group. “They were slowing me down. What have you got on Henry?”

  “You know the meat of it. He killed a reporter in 1972.”

  “Why?”

  “Pearson was onto Henry’s dirty tricks. You know about G. Gordon Liddy? John Mitchell?”

  “Of course.”

  “Operation Gemstone?”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “Watergate was just the tip of the iceberg. Liddy was mapping out some truly off-the-deep-end stuff: firebombing the Brookings Institution, feeding LSD to Ellsberg, kidnapping activists and shipping them to Mexico.”

  “But he never got the green light.”

  “Liddy didn’t get the green light. The attorney general, Mitchell, told him thanks but no thanks, and by the way, burn those flip charts with all that crazy shit outlined on them. Liddy was a wannabe-big-dick chicken hawk, a moron, which is why you’ve heard of him. He got caught. You haven’t heard of Henry Davies’s part in the same conspiracies, because, as I’m sure you know, Henry Davies is ruthless, supremely competent, and more of a better-to-ask-forgiveness-than-ask-permission type. What Davies pulled off made the wing-nut shit Liddy proposed look as innocent as tearing down campaign signs. I’m sure you can imagine what he’s capable of.

  “Davies was a comer. In two years he’d gone from answering phones to being the number one rat-fuck artist on the Committee to Reelect the President. It was unreal. People were starting to hitch themselves to his coattails. They figured he’d find his way into Congress soon enough, and after that, who knew? The guy was a rocket. But then Hal Pearson started sniffing around Davies, started to piece together his role in the dirty tricks. Pearson threatened Davies’s rise. He threatened the whole campaign. Woodward and Bernstein were a couple JV metro reporters who got lucky. They scratched the surface. Pearson would have taken the whole capital down.

  “Davies found out that Pearson was investigating him and went to his apartment, up in Mount Pleasant. I guess Pearson was expecting the usual hardball, a browbeating, maybe some threats. He wasn’t expecting Henry Davies. I don’t know what Davies said to Pearson, but the guy was a big drinker with a big temper and I imagine he didn’t take it well. It got physical, and Pearson turned up dead, strangled, his throat a purple mess, the next day.”

  “Henry left evidence?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Langford said. “The police pulled part of his earlobe out of Pearson’s throat.”

  That explained the scar along Henry’s neck.

  “Pearson sure as fuck wasn’t nibbling his ear. He nearly killed Davies, crushed his voice box, must have been choking him right back. That’s where he got that creepy whisper.”

  “So how did Davies get away with it?”

  “He was damaged goods. His bosses wanted to bury him, to get him out of Washington as quickly as possible. They gave him some bullshit defense attaché position in Luxembourg, gave him time to get his ear fixed up. He was out of the States for six months, maybe a year.

  “For anyone else, that would’ve been the end of the road, but not for Davies. His higher-ups destroyed his career in government, sure, but Davies had always been the paranoid type. He was a collector, of sorts. Most young guns like him were happy taking orders, rubbing shoulders with the bosses, glad to even get a chance to chat with an attorney general. But Davies was always planning, so that when the time came, he had knives to draw.”

  Langford nodded toward the duct tape. “I think I earned my way out of this, huh?”

  I pulled it off.

  “Thanks,” he said. He took a shaky breath, then continued.

  “Henry had kept evidence, documentation of every order he received from his higher-ups, every dirty trick they were complicit in. When his bosses tried to throw him under the bus, he was ready. Bad things started happening to them. He used the secrets he’d collected like a scalpel. One by one he cut them out. It was unbelievable. In exile, he dismantled anyone who tried to cross him. A massacre. He came out unscathed. Well, mostly unscathed; he returned as a pretty dark character after his time in the wilderness. I think that’s when he learned that he could be more powerful out of sight, working the strings.

  “He’d been going along to get along, trying to please the bosses. He was dirt-poor, just wanted the big office and the big house. It corrupted him, cost him his career in government. And ever since then it seems like he’s dedicated his life to proving that every honest man, as well as the whole capital, can be corrupted, that they’re no better than he is.

  “He made coin while he was at it too. Piece by piece, he built it into an empire. He started by getting into the vetting for campaigns: vice presidential searches, cabinet secretaries, whatever. He would go deeper than was needed for the jobs, and if those candidates ever crossed him, they’d find their skeletons on the front page of the Post. At some point he cracked the Federal Investigative Service. They do all the background checks for the government, the guys who ask CIA applicants if they want to fuck their brothers and all that. It was a gold mine. Next he got his fingers in the prayer groups. That started in the eighties. All of a sudden every heavyweight in DC was confessing his deepest secrets once a week before breakfast. Those were supposed to be sacred, strictly off-the-record, but Henry made damn sure he always had someone listening.”

  “But what about the evidence?” I asked. “The blood? They found a chunk of his ear in the dead man’s throat, right? It doesn’t get any more open-and-shut than that.”

  “You’re right. But the politicos bigfooted the local cops. The evidence file with the police report and the chunk of ear disappeared. The official story went out: Pearson was killed by a burglar. Someone must have thought they could buy that file off the cops and use it to rein Henry in. They thought wrong.

  “At first, the file commanded a pretty high price. After all, leverage on Henry was looking to be increasingly precious. The evidence had disappeared while Henry was overseas, and at first he didn’t know it existed, and then he didn’t know who had it. As he grew stronger, and the men who tried to cross him fell, holding on to the one thing Henry would kill to obtain started to seem less and less a good idea. The price dropped. Eventually a friend of mine, James Perry, the party chair in Virginia, got his hands on it. And he was either cowardly enough
or sensible enough to hide it. He couldn’t destroy it, just in case Henry came knocking, so he buried it.”

  I took a deep breath. James Perry was the man who Henry Davies had claimed was sleeping with my mother, the man my father had supposedly murdered. My mother had been Perry’s secretary. This whole mess was closing in on me, on my family and my past. I steeled myself. Above all, I needed to get that evidence against Henry. Whatever connection my father had to Henry Davies would have to wait.

  “Where is it now?” I asked.

  Langford let out a bitter laugh. “That’s the best part. Perry had a contracting company on the side, construction and renovations. His cronies steered him a lot of government work. He had keys to half the federal buildings in Washington. So he hid it in plain sight in one of these massive file warehouses the Feds have everywhere, just miles of shelves in an archive gathering dust. If you didn’t know the name he put on the file, you’d never find it in there.”

  “Where’s the archive?”

  “Nine hundred fifty Pennsylvania Ave.”

  “Wait…”

  “You got it.”

  “The Department of Justice?”

  “So good luck with that.”

  “He never told you the name?”

  “No. He never told anyone anything. What I just told you he let slip in a blackout while we were drunk on a golf junket in Myrtle Beach. Not that my ignorance would help if Davies found me. I’m sure he’d have a real time of it, sipping an RC Cola while Marcus went snipping off postage-stamp patches of my skin until I gave up a name I didn’t have or bled out. Only Perry knew the name on that file. And he’s been dead for sixteen years.”

  “Who killed him?” I asked. Henry had just told me my father was the murderer.

  “A mugging was the official story. DC can be a very dangerous place for knowledgeable people. I always thought Davies must have been behind it somehow.”

  “Did you ever hear Perry mention a woman named Ellen Ford?”