But he seemed very calm. “Lydia, this has all been a very bad dream. The truth is, hard as it may be for you to accept it, no one would believe either of your concocted stories against the word of one of the most distinguished women in America, Veronica Caldwell, a champion of the arts, grieving wife, mother, a member of the United States Senate. My poor brother will be judged mentally unfit and spend the rest of his years in an institution, and a damn sight better one than that crazy one he’s been in.”
“Your brother… yes… you no doubt handled that.”
“Well, it wasn’t too difficult to convince him… he isn’t lying you know. He believes he did what he says… probably wanted to do it for years. I would never let my brother die. Even if none of this had happened, he’s still better off being institutionalized, and I’ll see to it that he receives the finest of care.”
My God, Lydia thought. He actually sees himself as a savior instead of the instigator of murder. He’s crazier than Mark Adam, but he’s also crazy like a fox. What a lethal combination…
“You know nothing, Lydia, only what your fertile imagination has conjured up for you. And this young lady,” nodding at Christa, “has already demonstrated her overactive imagination. After all, she said it was her lover, Mr. Hughes. This night never happened, ladies. Let’s all go home and get on with our lives. All that’s happened is that the tape that has caused so much anguish will now be put to a positive, however painful, use.”
Lydia had first thought he would immediately destroy the tape. As though sensing what she was thinking, he added, “The tape will now be turned over to the attorneys I’ve retained for my brother’s defense. It had always been my intention to destroy the tape once I found it, but the situation has changed. But there’s always been the possibility that another copy exists and will surface to haunt us again, and now that Mark Adam has confessed, shown himself sick enough to kill his own father, the tape becomes strong evidence to support an insanity plea in his behalf. I’m sure you would agree to that. And by the way, the tape also provides a sympathetic motive for Mark having killed Jimmye… he was brainwashed by the cult to do their dirty work, just as he did it at that ceremony of theirs. Rather fitting, matter of fact, in view of Jimmye’s longtime interest in the subject.”
All very logical, Lydia had to admit, and felt herself shiver slightly in spite of herself. She shifted through the sequence to clear her thoughts, get herself under control… Until the tape came to their attention, the Caldwells were embarrassed by Mark Adam’s involvement with the cult, but there it stayed. Until Jimmye got hold of the incriminating tape, which now made a huge scandal a real possibility, especially with her threats to reveal it. When she became untenable, they had her killed by Jason, not expecting that the tape would turn up in the hands of Quentin Hughes. But at least Hughes didn’t use it, only threatened to—which was bad enough but almost tolerable. Then when the senator, in an apparent fit of conscience brought on by the knowledge of his terminal illness, threatened to destroy the family reputation by telling all, Veronica and Cale felt they had to help him along the way to eternity, for the sake of the family, of course. Hughes was still a problem, but she, Lydia realized now, was a bigger one. With her refusing to play the passive role as counsel to the committee that Veronica had presumed she would, she herself more than anything else forced their hand. Now they needed a scapegoat above all else, and pitiful Mark Adam was the ideal candidate, and the tape of his terrible act at the cult now became the document to make the guilty confession stick—as a creature of the cult he did its bidding in killing Jimmye, and to avenge himself on a father who had impregnated Jimmye, he took a terrible revenge… or at least so Cale’s story would go in court. And, as Cale had said so confidently, Mark would be found mentally incompetent, not able to distinguish right from wrong at the time he committed the killings, and put in an institution. Well, at least once the tape was made public the Center for Inner Faith would be severely damaged. Even Senator MacLoon’s wheeling-dealing would have a hard time bailing them out of this.
Would Cale really get away with it? Was the Caldwell name, especially Veronica Caldwell’s, that all-powerful, that damnably respectable? Maybe. Better than maybe, if Lydia were honest with herself. Sure she’d try, go to Horace Jenkins with Christa to corroborate her story, but would they be believed? More likely she would be the one perceived to have snapped under the press of frustrated ambitions. And Christa… an emotionally disturbed woman, who’d just been jilted by her lover…
Well, damn it, at least don’t say anything more. Cale was dangerous, dangerous like a lizard—which he now looked like to her. Smooth and easy in manner but a man who had been part of such a sick conspiracy. Oh yes, they called Mark Adam sick and no doubt he was, but how much sicker, in their dissembling ways, were Cale and the redoubtable Veronica, hiding behind a facade of respectability and their own rationalizations.
Once again, as if reading her mind, or at least part of it, Cale said, “And, Lydia, if you actually insist on telling any outlandish tale about us, I’m afraid we’ll be obliged to sue you for reckless disregard for the truth—slander. That won’t sit well for your future career as an attorney around these parts. Might even end it… Well, it’s been instructive, ladies, all around I trust. I’ll be going now, and thank you for this…” By which he meant the videotape, which he’d come for in the first place.
Casually, almost insolently it seemed, he moved to his right, taking a circuitous route to the door that led from the studio. Both women looked at each other, and seeing the dazed look on Christa’s face, Lydia knew she’d get little comfort or meaningful response from the woman.
She willed herself into action, ran across the studio and out its door, rushed up a hallway to the door they’d entered through, opened it and stumbled outside, leaning against the building, breath coming in gasps—
A sound from the direction of the parking lot froze her against the building. It might have been an automobile backfire, a firecracker even. It wasn’t. The crack cut through the chilled night air. A car door slammed shut. The sound of a man calling out, “Drop it,” melodramatic, except not in this awful context of reality. Headlights suddenly lit up the parking lot to frame a car coming around the corner of the building. Looking across a grassy strip that separated the parking lot from the building, it seemed to Lydia that it looked like Ginger’s car. She ran toward it, the only familiar… safe… thing in this surreal storm of deceit and violence.
It was Clarence, though, who called out her name as he jumped from the car and ran to close the distance between them. As she ran, Lydia’s attention was drawn to her left, where a heavyset man had Francis Jewel pressed up against the side of a car. He was holding a gun to Jewel’s head and yelling at him… something like, “What the hell did you do that for…?”
Clarence was holding Lydia now, but she could see over his shoulder that Ginger had gotten out of her car and was coming to them. Suddenly Ginger stopped, looked down at something hidden from Lydia’s view by a parked car. And then Ginger, laid-back Ginger, let out a scream that Lydia could feel down to her toes. She and Clarence ran to Ginger’s side, looked down to see the body of Cale Caldwell, Jr., sprawled out on the asphalt, the videotape cartridge still in his hands. Blood seeped from a wound in his chest. He looked dead, and he was.
It was unreal, like all the rest that had happened in the last hours, and horribly real. Moments before this man had acted—and convincingly so—invulnerable. Now… Tentatively Lydia and Clarence and Ginger went to where the unknown man held Jewel against the car. Lydia asked him who he was.
“Never mind,” Conegli said. “Call the police. Hurry up.”
Obviously Jewel knew who Conegli was, and in fact was both pleading with him and threatening him, which was strange, considering that it was Conegli who held the gun in his face. “Damn it, you work for me… I only did what you should have done, did your job… I couldn’t help doing it… he wouldn’t give me the tape, started to p
unch me, run off. That tape is worth my life…” He meant because of what the cult would do to him for not retrieving it, ironically not even thinking of the murder charge that soon would be lodged against him. The cult’s power was still, Lydia thought, in its fashion surpassingly powerful…
Conegli’s only answer to Jewel was to tell him to shut up, that he might do strange things for a living but getting mixed up in a murder for sure wasn’t one of them. That he had his principles.
“Let’s go inside and call the police,” Lydia said to Clarence and Ginger. They were moving toward the entrance to the WCAP building when the rear door opened and Christa and Hughes came through it. They all met in the middle of the grassy strip.
When Lydia asked Hughes if Christa had filled him in on what had happened, he said she hadn’t needed to. The security guard had called him and asked whether Caldwell had arrived. Hughes hadn’t known what he was talking about, and when the guard told him that Caldwell didn’t want anyone else to know about their so-called private meeting, he really wondered what the hell was going on. He decided to look around, and wandered into the control room right after Caldwell showed up to interrupt Lydia and Christa after they’d viewed the tape.
“Then you’ll back me up when I tell what happened,” Lydia said, for the first time feeling that some sense was coming into all this.
For one of the rare times in his life, Hughes smiled and meant it. “You don’t need anybody to back you up, counselor, not with this…” And he held up a reel of quarter-inch audio tape. “Damned if I know why, but one of the Ampexes was taping through a studio mike. You do a passing fair interview, Lydia. You’ve got the secret down pat. Let the victim do the talking and hang himself. Anytime you want a job, let me know.”
At first Lydia was confused, and then she remembered idly pressing some buttons. Obviously, without even knowing what she was doing, only hoping against hope, she’d activated the equipment Hughes mentioned. She leaned against Clarence, then straightened and headed for the phone to call the MPD.
34
The flashing lights and sirens of police cars, the gawking crowds and reporters, television cameras and lights that had almost miraculously materialized at the fine old Virginia homestead of the distinguished Caldwell family, resembled a Hollywood premiere more than the grim business going on—the arrest for murder and conspiracy to commit murder of one of America’s foremost patrons of the arts, the Honorable United States Senator from the sovereign state of Virginia, Veronica Caldwell, descended from the best and most aristocratic traditions of the nation, and of charming Jason DeFlaunce, lesser patron of the arts and fancy handyman to the mighty.
They came out and were rushed into separate police cars. Veronica, head high, still trying to look the perfect Caldwell, was almost a touching figure, until one reminded oneself of what she had done. Jason, the hired hand, somehow came off better, looking the way he felt, dazed, disbelieving, pale as chalk. The police cars taking them, one presumed, to MPD headquarters took off with a screech of tires and sirens. Even now, Jason was separate from the family. Whether he would be, finally, equal, if only in crime, was yet to be seen.
35
Lydia and Clarence sat at Peng’s, one of their favorite Chinese restaurants in New York, treating themselves to sweet-and-sour shrimp, beef with snow pea pods and chicken prepared in three different styles. They’d arrived in New York that morning and checked into the Carlyle Hotel. That night they had tickets to the concert by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Zubin Mehta.
“Come on, honey,” Clarence was saying. “Relax, or at least try to. It’s over—”
“I’m trying, Clarence, but you know it really isn’t over. Not until Veronica’s and Jason’s cases are dealt with. And for me… well, I’m not sure I’ll ever get over it…”
“Hey,” he said, “what about me? I had a damned mike planted in my apartment. My bedroom, yet.” He smiled when he said it. “I just hope we weren’t too noisy.”
And now she was able to smile, even laugh. “I’d say we better try to get our own tape or whatever it is of that one. What was the guy’s name… Conegli? Tape, tape, who’s got the tape… the case of the missing tape. Sounds like an Erle Stanley Gardner mystery. Well, I doubt I’ll be reading any mysteries for a long time. I’ve had enough of the real thing…”
“What do you think will happen to Veronica?”
“Well, at first, after I found out everything that was said by Cale at the studio had somehow been recorded, I thought it would be pretty open-and-shut. But that was really the elation or high of the moment. A little while later I knew it wouldn’t be that simple, once I reminded myself about who Veronica is, who the Caldwells are, and the sympathy of her case, the sympathetic motives behind what she’d done. When I saw Chief Jenkins I knew it wouldn’t be simple. He was grateful for the help, you remember, but warned me that there were a few miles between arraignment, indictment and conviction. He’s right. Veronica was smart enough to try to defend Jason, which makes her look good, even though I doubt it will do him any good. He’s cooked, poor guy. He wanted so badly to be a member of the Caldwell family. Well, he finally made it, but not the way he wanted.”
“Okay, counselor, enough. Get into that terrific food and—”
But once started Lydia wasn’t about to be diverted. Not yet. “You know, I once mentioned the Harris case. I think I compared that woman to Christa at the time. But it also reminds me a little of Veronica. I mean, people felt sympathetic about Mrs. Harris’s reasons for what she did, she was a woman badly used, that sort of thing. Well, Veronica was badly used, God knows, too. A husband that carried on with their adopted daughter, who threatened to ruin the family reputation she so desperately cared about. And a girl she raised like a daughter turning on her, the family, and blackmailing them. God, Clarence, it’s really not too surprising that she cracked, took leave of her senses… I’m not excusing her, please understand. That’s what she did for herself. But I am trying to understand. I’ll testify for the people, and accept the jury’s verdict. Don’t expect me, though, to take any satisfaction in it coming out guilty. That’s a human reaction, and I apologize for it, but—”
“Lydia, of all the people in this thing, you have the least to apologize for. And as for you being human, frankly, my dear, I wouldn’t have you any other way. In fact… and don’t die of shock… I just had a very human idea. Why don’t we skip the concert, finish up here and get us to the Carlyle for the evening. You get my point, lady?”
“I do, sir. And I approve. This case is closed.”
Other Books by Margaret Truman
Murder at the FBI
Murder in the Smithsonian
Murder on Embassy Row
Murder in the White House
Murder on Capitol Hill Page 25
