The second perimeter

by Mike Lawson

  Gary was a skinny, nervous kid with a mild facial tick. He looked about twenty years old and was sitting behind a desk that overflowed with paper. The capacity of his in basket had been exceeded days ago. This might have explained the tick; the kid seemed so overwhelmed by his workload that DeMarco could imagine him having a nervous breakdown when the next piece of paper landed on his desk.

  “Bill Berry was in charge of that contract,” Gary said to DeMarco. “He handled all that sorta stuff at the shipyards.”

  “So can I talk to Berry?” DeMarco asked.

  Gary’s phone rang before he could answer DeMarco’s question. “Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I’ll be right there,” Gary said into the phone and hung up. “Jesus,” he said. “That was the admiral. He wants to see me.”

  The way Gary said “the admiral” it sounded like the man was seated at the right hand of God— or maybe he outranked God.

  “All I want to know is where this guy Berry is,” DeMarco said.

  Gary wasn’t listening. He had pulled open a drawer in his desk and was rifling through it. “Hold on a minute,” he said to DeMarco. He searched, flipping tabs on manila file folders as fast as his index finger could move. “Damn it!” he wailed. “Where is it?” A moment later he said, “There you are!” as if speaking to a pet that had been hiding under the bed, and he pulled a graph from a tattered folder. DeMarco noticed the graph had a yellow Post-it sticker on it, and on the Post-it someone had scrawled the word “Bullshit” with a red felt-tip pen.

  “Bill Berry?” DeMarco said. “Can you please tell me where he is?”

  Gary tore the Post-it off the graph, shoved the graph into a new file folder, and patted down a cowlick on the back of his head.

  “Bill Berry’s dead,” he said to DeMarco as he walked away.

  * * *

  BILL BERRY HAD died in an automobile accident the day after Dave Whitfield was killed. He missed a curve and his car had plunged down a steep, wooded embankment on Spout Run in Arlington, Virginia. His blood alcohol content at the time of his death had been a whopping .25.

  “But are you sure it was an accident, Sheriff?” DeMarco said.

  It had taken some effort to get the Arlington County sheriff to agree to talk to him about Bill Berry’s death. When he’d first arrived at the sheriff’s office, he was told that unless he had some official status— such as being Bill Berry’s lawyer or a lawyer who worked for Berry’s insurance company— they weren’t going to tell him anything. DeMarco had been forced to call the Speaker and tell Mahoney that the sheriff was being mean to him.

  “Shit,” Mahoney had said. “What’s this fuckin’ guy’s name?”

  Half an hour later the sheriff escorted DeMarco back to his office.

  “What do you mean, am I sure it was an accident?” the sheriff said. “The damn guy was drunk and he ran his car off the road. What the hell else could it have been?”

  “Sheriff,” DeMarco said, “I can’t tell you the specifics, but Mr. Berry could have been involved in something bad. He could have been murdered.”

  “Jesus Christ,” the sheriff said. “So what do you think happened, bud? You think somebody messed with the brakes on the guy’s car? Or maybe rammed him and pushed him off the road?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out, Sheriff.”

  “Berry’s car bounced down a hill. He hit one tree head-on, broadsided another one, then the car rolled over a couple of times before it ended up on its top in someone’s backyard. The car was a mess, the body was a mess, and there’s no way I can tell if anybody did something to it.”

  “Can’t you—”

  “Television,” the sheriff said, shaking his big, bald head. “I’ll just bet you’ve been watching TV, one of them dumb-ass CSI shows. You’ve probably seen ’em strip some car down to the frame, and then the hero goes: ‘Hey, we’ve got a scratch here that came from a hacksaw made in Tijuana.’ Well let me tell you something, pal. In real life, a county sheriff’s department doesn’t have the budget or the expertise to do shit like that. We looked over the car as best we could and didn’t see anything inconsistent with a drunk runnin’ his car off the road. Now since you’re apparently some kinda big shot, maybe what you oughta do is call up the FBI and have them check out Berry’s car.”

  * * *

  BILL BERRY’S WIDOW was a small plump woman in her early fifties. She had unremarkable features, a soft chin, and lifeless brown hair. She was as drab as a sparrow except for her glasses: the frames were fire-engine red and too big for her face. DeMarco bet that one of her friends had talked her into the frames, telling her they made her look young and with-it. They didn’t.

  “He handled everything,” she told DeMarco. “The bills, the insurance policies, the bank accounts. I don’t know where anything is, and when I do find something, I don’t know what it means.”

  “It must be pretty hard,” DeMarco said. “And I’m sorry to intrude, but I need to know a few things about your husband.”

  “Why?” she said. She wasn’t being belligerent; she was just bewildered. A week after her husband’s death she found everything bewildering.

  “He had a government insurance policy, Mrs. Berry. We just need to make sure of a few things before we sign off on it.”

  “He did?” Mrs. Berry said.

  Berry had had a standard government life insurance policy that paid his widow one year of his salary. DeMarco had determined this when he had looked at Berry’s personnel record. So DeMarco knew that Berry had had an insurance policy and was glad his wife now did, too. He also knew that her husband had thirty-seven thousand dollars in a credit union in Crystal City— and it was not a joint account. The account had been opened about the same time as Carmody was given the training contract at the shipyard. The initial deposit into the account had been fifty thousand dollars.

  “What was your husband doing the night he died, Mrs. Berry?” DeMarco asked.

  “Having dinner with some people from out of town,” she said. “He was always doing that. Guys would fly in from one of the shipyards for meetings and later they’d go out for dinner and drinks.”

  “Do you know who he was having dinner with that night?”

  “No. He may have told me their names, but I don’t remember.”

  “Did your husband ever mention a man named Phil Carmody? He lives in Bremerton, Washington.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, shaking her head several times. Every time DeMarco asked another question to which she didn’t know the answer, the world became a stranger, more frightening place.

  “Mrs. Berry, did you know that your husband deposited fifty thousand dollars in a bank in Crystal City a few months ago?”

  DeMarco knew what she was going to say before she said it.

  “What?” she said. “Where did the money come from?”

  * * *

  MAHONEY WAS AT the Old Ebbitt Grill having dinner with four union leaders. Autoworkers union, DeMarco thought, but it could have been steelworkers or Teamsters. It didn’t really matter.

  DeMarco looked at the five men sitting at the table, stuffing rare steak into their mouths, sipping bourbon between bites. Mahoney fit right in with the union guys: they were all big, beefy men with red faces; they were all loud and crude; and they all had eyes that hinted at intellects out of proportion to their years of schooling and the grades they had acquired while in school. DeMarco suspected that if Mahoney hadn’t been a member of Congress he would have been a labor leader.

  The Speaker saw DeMarco standing at the entrance to the dining room. He stood, picked up his tumbler of bourbon, swallowed whatever remained in the glass, then said something that made his companions roar with laughter. He slapped one man on the back and made his way toward DeMarco. Despite the amount of alcohol he had consumed, Mahoney moved between the tables gracefully, never bumping into a chair, never jostling the elbow of another diner. Mahoney, the dancing bear, a wide-bodied Fred Astaire.

  Mahoney led DeMarco outside th
e restaurant so he could light up the half-smoked cigar he pulled from the right-hand pocket of his suit coat. He lit the cigar, blew smoke at the moon, and looked across the street at the massive structure that housed the U.S. Treasury Department. Floodlights lit up the white walls of the building, making it look like a monument— or a very large tomb.

  It was almost nine but DeMarco could see lights burning in two windows on the third floor of the building. He could imagine a small group of people in the lighted room, staring bleary-eyed at each other as they tried to balance the nation’s checkbook.

  “Those guys are scared, Joe,” Mahoney said. He was talking about the union leaders, not the people in the Treasury Department. “There was a time when a kid with a high-school diploma, a kid whose hands worked better than his mouth, could have a good future in this country. He could get a job at GM or Ford or Boeing, become a machinist or a welder or a toolmaker, and in thirty years he’d have a house and two cars and maybe a boat and be able to put his kids through college. Those days are gone, and those guys are scared. And I’m scared, too, because I can’t figure out what the hell to do about it.”

  Mahoney had many faults; DeMarco knew this all too well. He drank too much, he cheated on his wife, and he bent the rules with abandon. He was selfish and self-centered and vain and inconsiderate. But he cared about the people of this country, and the ones he cared about the most wore steel-toed boots and hard hats.

  “Shit,” Mahoney said, still thinking about the union leaders. He took in a breath and trained his drinker’s eyes on DeMarco. “So whaddya got?”

  DeMarco told him.

  “Goddamnit, Joe,” he said, sounding tired, “why can’t it be just the way it seems? Why can’t this bum have killed Hathaway’s nephew? Why can’t this slug Berry have had a few drinks and drove himself into a tree? Why does it have to be spies, for Christ’s fuckin’ sake?”

  “Maybe it’s not,” DeMarco said, “but right now too many things don’t add up. The money in Berry’s bank account. Whitfield’s last phone call saying these two clucks were up to something. The timing of Whitfield’s death. And this guy Carmody— he just doesn’t fit the mold of a training consultant.”

  “So why would they— whoever the hell they is— kill Berry? Whitfield I can understand, maybe. He saw something he shouldn’t have so they killed him. But why Berry?”

  “I called Emma and asked her the same question. She thinks that whoever’s running this thing may be wrapping up loose ends, trying to protect Carmody and his men.”

  “Emma,” Mahoney said, shaking his big head. “Because she’s an ex-spook she sees spooks under every rock.” Mahoney shook his head again, and a white lock fell down onto his forehead, almost into his eyes. He looked like a big angry sheepdog. “So what do you want me to do?” he asked DeMarco.

  “Nothing. I just thought I’d better let you know what was happening. And I have to go back out to Bremerton.”

  “Great. I don’t have enough problems, I got you giving me mysteries to worry about, and then you’re not going to be here in case I need you.”

  “We have to get to the bottom of this thing, boss. If Emma’s right—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” Mahoney said. “Go back to Bremerton.”

  Mahoney tossed his cigar stub toward the gutter and a passing woman gave him a dirty look for littering— or maybe just for being a large, sloppy drunk. Mahoney smiled at the woman, a smile that said: Go screw yourself, honey.

  “I gotta get back inside,” Mahoney said. “If I can’t help those guys, I can at least buy ’em enough booze to make ’em forget their problems for one night.”

  DeMarco would have bet his pension that the union guys were picking up the tab— but he could have been wrong. With Mahoney you just never knew.

  18

  We’re at a dead end here,” DeMarco said.

  He and Emma were sitting in a car, parked half a block away from Carmody’s office in Bremerton. They’d been parked in the spot for more than an hour. Emma sat behind the steering wheel, sunglasses masking her eyes and her thoughts.

  “I know,” Emma said.

  But that didn’t keep DeMarco from telling her what she knew. “We have nothing to show that these guys are doing anything illegal. We can’t pin Whitfield’s murder on them. We didn’t find anything in their houses. You didn’t find anything in Carmody’s office. And this Berry, back in D.C., he’s dead so even if he was involved in something, he’s not going to tell us.”

  “I was thinking some more about Berry,” Emma said. “I’m inclined to think his death really was an accident.”

  “Oh? Why’s that?”

  “It occurred to me that if they—”

  “Who’s they?”

  “— that if they wanted to keep Carmody and his guys in place out here for any length of time, they would need Berry to maintain their contract. With him dead they might have a hard time continuing to work here.”

  “Who’s they?” DeMarco asked again.

  “I don’t know, but somebody is running this operation. We know Mulherin, Norton, and Carmody didn’t kill Whitfield. We know Whitfield saw or heard something because he called you, and after he called you somebody killed him. This means that Carmody contacted somebody, somebody close by, and told that person that they’d been busted by Whitfield. And the person Carmody contacted acted very quickly to eliminate Whitfield. Which means there’s somebody on the ground out here running things.”

  “Okay, fine,” DeMarco said. “Let’s assume that Carmody and the pirates really are—”

  “The pirates?”

  “Mulherin and Norton.”

  Emma laughed. “That fits,” she said.

  “Anyway, let’s say you’re right and these guys are spies or terrorists or whatever. Do you think they’re going to do something stupid now, so soon after Whitfield’s death?”

  “No. They might not do anything for weeks, maybe months. I wouldn’t, if I was running this.”

  “That’s what I was afraid you were gonna say.” DeMarco wasn’t a patient man; nothing drove him nuttier than just sitting and waiting. “So let’s give ’em a shove,” he said.

  Emma sat there a minute, tapping a manicured nail on the steering wheel. “Of the three of them,” she said, “who do you think is the weakest link?”

  “Weakest link how?” DeMarco said.

  “The one likely to crack first. The one most likely to panic if we squeeze him.”

  “Mulherin,” DeMarco said without hesitation.

  “Why?”

  “Carmody just seems like a tough bastard, ex-SEAL and all that. Norton, he’s got— I don’t know—discipline. Like the way his apartment’s so neat. And he might be smart. You know, all the computer stuff.”

  “Yes,” Emma said, “and the first time we met them, I noticed Mulherin got all bug-eyed on us when we stepped into Carmody’s office and looked over at Norton for support. So I agree, Mulherin’s the one.”

  “So how do you wanna squeeze his skinny ass?” DeMarco said.

  19

  Ned Mulherin was sitting in the back of his boat drinking a beer, listening to a Mariners game on the radio. The boat was a twenty-one-foot Trophy and was moored at the marina in Brownsville, a town a few miles from Bremerton. For the last two hours he’d been installing new electric downriggers on his boat— no more hand cranking up a ten-pound ball of lead when he went salmon fishing, no sirree. Except for the fact that the Mariners were behind three runs in the second inning, he was feeling pretty good. Then he saw the guy walking down the pier, the hard case who’d come to Carmody’s office, and he stopped feeling so good.

  “You remember me, Mulherin?” DeMarco said.

  “Yeah. You’re that guy from Congress, the one that Whitfield sicced on us.”

  “That’s right,” DeMarco said, “and we need to have a little talk.”

  Emma had decided to let DeMarco brace Mulherin. She had something else to do, but even if she hadn’t been otherwise e
ngaged, she thought DeMarco would be more effective with Mulherin. The reason for this was something she called the “Godfather factor.”

  DeMarco’s late father had been an enforcer for a New York mob boss— and DeMarco looked just like his father. He had thick shoulders and heavy arms and big hands. He had a big, square, dimpled chin. And when his mouth took a certain set, and if he let his eyes go cold and flat…Well, the end result was a hard-looking guy but one who was polite and well educated, a guy who spoke in a soft, rational tone of voice, and all the time he’s talking you’re thinking that if you don’t do exactly what he says, you’re gonna wake up with a horse’s head in your bed. The Godfather factor would start moving Mulherin in the direction Emma desired.