by Jane Haddam
Act of Darkness
A Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mystery
Jane Haddam
A MysteriousPress.com
Open Road Integrated Media
Ebook
Contents
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Part One
One
1
2
Two
1
2
3
Three
1
2
3
Four
1
2
3
Five
1
2
Six
1
2
Seven
1
2
3
Part Two
One
1
2
3
Two
1
2
3
Three
1
2
3
Four
1
2
Five
1
Six
1
2
Seven
1
2
Part Three
One
1
2
Two
1
2
3
Three
1
2
Four
1
2
Five
1
2
3
Epilogue
1
2
Preview: Quoth the Raven
PROLOGUE
Washington, D.C. June 1
[1]
STEPHEN WHISTLER FOX COULD not remember when he had first realized he was going to run for president. By the end of May, with the last of the good weather already slipping away and the wet heat of the summer beginning to rise out of the swamp that was the core of the District of Columbia, he felt as if he’d known it forever. It was the start of what was going to be a long and uncomfortable summer, and a political dead time at that. The Senate was nominally in session, but half the senators were tucked away in summerhouses in Wyoming and Maine, and the other half always seemed to be asleep. Stuck in Washington against his will, Stephen felt like a pregnant woman too close to the moment of her conception to show. Dan Chester had warned him. Under no circumstances was he to say anything about his decision to run. It would be a year before he could decently announce, and in that year they had things to do, a war chest to collect, a battle plan to solidify. It was bad enough that Stephen had told not only his wife but his wife’s mother. Janet was a good little political wife, a veritable model of liberal womanhood who ranked right up there with Tipper Gore, but Mama was a walking disaster. In fact, Victoria Harte was a walking disaster even without prior knowledge of Stephen’s political plans. She was, for one thing, Victoria Harte, The Last of the Movie Stars, as the magazines were always putting it. She had a reputation from Beverly Hills to Timbuktu, and that reputation was not good, not if you needed votes in the Bible Belt. Stephen needed votes in the Bible Belt. Stephen needed votes everywhere. In spite of all the brave talk about a nationwide backlash against the Reagan era, Dan Chester’s polls did not look good.
“The problem,” Dan said, “is that they just don’t trust us. Not us personally, you understand. The party. It’s all this business with the PACs and the soft money and the savings and loans.”
They were sitting in Stephen’s new office, one of the priority offices overlooking the Esplanade in the Senate Office Building, Stephen’s reward for having been elected to a third term. Dan had the leather couch. Stephen had the tilting, unstable executive chair. Stephen thought they might as well have been back at the University of Connecticut, sitting on cracked plastic in the fraternity house lounge. It was eerie, but neither of them ever seemed to change. Stephen was still the tall, athletic, good-looking one, dark haired but blue eyed, the inevitable student body president and captain of the tennis team. Dan was still the short, gnarled gnome with the shrewd eyes, the one who made people wonder what his name had been before. And, of course, Dan was still the one with the brains.
Dan was staring across the office with that hooded look that said Stephen was being stupid again. Stephen looked away.
“I thought PACs were their problem,” he said.
“Not according to Sixty Minutes,” Dan said. “According to Sixty Minutes, they get 80 percent of their donations from individuals, we get 80 percent of our donations from PACs. You can thank the unlamented, lately departed Tony Coelho for that.”
“Does anybody really believe what they say on Sixty Minutes?”
“Everybody believes it. That’s why you’re going to be interviewed on it. That’s the point.”
“About the Down syndrome thing,” Stephen said.
“And only about the Down syndrome thing,” Dan agreed.
Stephen was still looking out the window—or at the window, at any rate. It was the first of June and the sun was high and hot in the sky. It sent light into the glass that seemed to get caught there and burn. Stephen made himself turn away and look at Dan again, questioning.
“The Sixty Minutes interview doesn’t air till fall?”
“Not until after Labor Day, Stephen, that’s right.”
“And they won’t find out about the—seminars?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea if they’ll find out about them. They won’t make a fuss about them. That’s all that matters.”
“Lloyd Bentsen—”
“Lloyd Bentsen was tied to a loser,” Dan said. “You’re the Great White Hope. Never forget that. It’s not the seminars I’m worried about, Stephen. It’s Janet. And what’s-her-name, you know, with the tits.”
Stephen flushed. “I’ll take care of Janet,” he said. “I’ll take care of Patchen Rawls, too.”
“Have you told Janet about the Down syndrome thing?”
“Of course I have. How could I avoid it? It was going to be in the Washington Post.”
“She doesn’t mind.”
It was a statement, not a question, and there were words left out. What Dan was really saying was You’d better be damn sure she doesn’t mind. Stephen hated being with Dan when Dan was being this way.
“Janet,” he said, “has great concern for retarded children. She’s personally committed to making sure that this country does something to alleviate—”
“Let’s just hope she’s personally committed to becoming First Lady. Did you check the schedule I sent you? You’ve got a lot to do today.”
The shift in emotional climate was abrupt, but like a sudden shower after long dead weeks of oppressive heat, it was welcome. It was especially welcome because Stephen had checked the schedule for today. He was on top of things for once. He wheeled his chair to the desk and went through the papers on the blotter until he found it. It had been produced on an IBM PC-190, fed through the most sophisticated software package in existence, and emerged, complete with graphics, looking printed. There was even an American bald eagle made of red-white-and-blue stars and bars in the upper left-hand corner. It could have been a stockholder’s report.
“Boy Scouts,” Stephen said, “League of Women Voters, the oil guy from Oklahoma, briefing conference, cocktail party—”
“That’s the one,” Dan said. “Do anything else you want today, but don’t miss the cocktail party.”
“Is it a fund-raiser?”
“Everything is a fund-raiser. I sold the invitations
at twenty-five hundred a pop. Don’t miss your coaching session, either. I don’t like the way you’ve been looking on television lately. Your rough edges are coming back.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“What’s-her-name with the tits is going to be at the cocktail party. She absolutely insisted and I didn’t want to create a situation.”
The emotional climate had shifted back. It had a tang to it that it hadn’t had before, a knife-blade edge of malice. Stephen felt himself freezing up.
“And?” he said.
Dan Chester smiled. “Look at it this way,” he told Stephen. “Never, never, never forget what happened to Gary Hart.”
[2]
FOR CLARE MARKEY, BEING a lobbyist was a job like any other job, almost. It had a few things going for it. It paid well enough for her to dress in Ralph Lauren and off-the-rack Christian Dior. It got her invited to a lot of parties. It gave her an excuse to have an office the size of a high-school basketball court decorated in mauves and grays. It had a few things going against it, too. One of the reasons her office was so large was that there were so many phones in it: twenty-six lines in all, and nine separate instruments. There were days when all the lines lit up at once and Clare found herself wanting to hide in a closet with a Nancy Drew book, the way she had when she was eight. Then there were the posters, gigantic black-and-white blowups of meretricious photographs, ragged starving children with flyaway hair sitting on sagging porches or next to garbage cans in urban-jungle alleys. Printed at the bottom of each of these posters were the words THE EMPOWERMENT PROJECT: A National Coalition of Citizens Concerned about Children. Clare Markey was an honest woman, and an honest liberal, too. She believed there ought to be a national coalition of citizens concerned about children, especially “exceptional” children, who always seemed to get stuck with the leftovers of life. If the money to help them didn’t come from the government, where would it come from? The kids didn’t have it and never would. Their parents didn’t have it, either. On her own, with a couple of glasses of Scotch under her belt, she saw visions: a vast network of special schools, a vaster network of home-visitor workers, job training, skills training, halfway houses, adult self-sufficiency, perfection. Unfortunately, she was too clearheaded to make herself believe that the Empowerment Project was going to do anything to make these visions real. They called themselves a “coalition of citizens concerned,” but after four years of working for them, Clare knew what they really were: an undeclared union of child-care workers and staff people at state facilities for the mentally retarded. Clare also knew what they were really concerned about: their paychecks, their benefits, and their pensions. At the moment, all three were relatively small. If Stephen Fox’s Act in Aid of Exceptional Children managed to get through Congress and past the president’s desk—and if Clare did her job right—all three would be much larger. Whether any exceptional children would be helped in the process was moot.
Clare caught herself jamming a pencil into the chignon folds of her dark hair—it had been blond originally, but blond women weren’t taken seriously; she had dyed it within a month of moving to Washington after college—and made herself stop. For the last half hour, she had had her left ear glued to the handset of her red phone, and her ear was beginning to go to sleep. Her mind had gone to sleep ages ago. It always did when Harvey Gort got on his favorite soapbox. Harvey Gort was the chairman of the Empowerment Project and her employer.
“The man’s a goddamned extortionist,” Harvey was saying. “There’s no other word for it. He’s holding us up.”
“Of course he’s holding us up,” Clare said. “That’s what these people do. For God’s sake, Harvey. You ought to know how the game is played by now.”
“A hundred thousand dollars for one weekend on Long Island is too damn much money, seminar or no seminar. And I don’t believe there is any seminar. You tell Dan Chester all that for me.”
Dan Chester. Clare stared at the tip of her pencil and frowned. It was odd. Theoretically, Dan Chester spoke only on Stephen Fox’s authority. Theoretically, it was Stephen Fox who was really holding them up. Chester, after all, was just a political manager. It was Fox who was the duly elected senator from the state of Connecticut. Still, nobody ever blamed Stephen Fox for the things Dan Chester did in his name, or even gave Fox credit for thinking them up. It was as if nobody in Washington believed that Fox was really real. He was just one more of Dan Chester’s special effects, the public face of a private political act.
“Dan Chester,” Harvey Gort said, “thinks he can get away with anything.”
Clare Markey sighed. “In this case, Harvey, he can get away with anything. At least as far as we’re concerned. Did you look at the material I sent you?”
“I looked at the prices. Did you really spend twenty-five hundred dollars of our money for an invitation to a cocktail party?”
“Of course I did. The cocktail party’s tonight, by the way. What did you expect me to do?”
“You could show a little common sense,” Gort said. “Why don’t you just tell the son of a bitch he can stuff it?”
“Kevin Debrett,” Clare Markey said carefully, “is going to be at that cocktail party tonight. He bought invitations for himself and four of his staff. And Kevin Debrett is going to be on Long Island for Fourth-of-July weekend.”
There was silence on the other end of the line that wasn’t really silence. Harvey was swearing under his breath, using the full range of obscenities he had learned on the barricades of Berkeley in 1968. Clare was always surprised at how crude Harvey’s language was, and how unimaginative. Her steel-worker father had been a foulmouthed man, but at least he’d shown some originality.
Harvey Gort coughed in a strangled way and said, “We can’t ace Debrett out anyway. He’s known Fox since God knows when.”
“We can’t ace him out, but he can ace us out,” Clare said. “Let’s face it, Harvey. That bill can be written any one of three ways. It can cut us in and cut Debrett out—which it won’t, because you’re right, Debrett and Fox have known each other forever. Debrett was Janet Fox’s obstetrician when they had that child that died—”
“Stephanie Fox who had Down syndrome,” Harvey said cynically. “Stephen Fox’s great personal tragedy.”
“Never mind Stephen Fox’s tragedy, Harvey. Fox owes Debrett. That’s all that counts. Fox does not owe us. He has no reason not to cut us out completely.”
“We’d make a public stink,” Harvey said.
“So what? Dan Chester would make the whole Empowerment Project look like a bad cover for a worse grab at legal graft. And no matter what kind of stink you made, you couldn’t oppose the competency exam thing without looking like—”
“Competency exams,” Harvey Gort exploded. “Of all the white supremacist, racist, bigoted—”
“Spare me the rhetoric, Harvey. Spare everybody. The general public doesn’t see a single thing wrong with competency exams. After all, they’ve got to get licenses just to drive their cars. If Chester puts a competency exam clause into that bill and you try to do anything public to get rid of it, you’ll be crucified. What we need is a bill that spreads the money around without calling for competency exams. Right?”
“Absolutely.”
“Fine.” Clare rubbed the palm of her free hand against her forehead. She was sweating. “If we’re going to get what we want, we’re going to have to contribute to the war chest. You know that and I know that. Campaign contributions buy access. That’s the way this town runs. So I’ve bought us into the cocktail party, and as soon as I get off the phone with you I’m going to buy us into one of those ‘seminars.’ If I’m lucky, there’ll still be a place open on the Fourth of July.”
“Why the Fourth of July? Because Debrett will be there?”
“No. Because it’s a long weekend, three and a half days with Fox instead of two and a half.”
“Oh.”
“I’m very good at what I do, Harvey, I know how these things run. We’ll get
up there on Friday, listen to a two-hour speech on Saturday, and spend the rest of the time drinking mineral water and pretending to be impressed by Fox’s Hollywood relatives. Then they’ll send up a bunch of Fireworks and everybody will pretend to be having a good time. Not a single solitary thing will get done except this: we’ll be on board.”
“And we have to be on board,” Harvey said.
“You bet we do.”
Harvey Gort sighed. “Do you think the rumors are true? That Chester is setting Fox up to run for president?”
“I don’t think it makes much difference if he is or he isn’t. If he is, we’re contributing to a presidential campaign. If he isn’t, we’re contributing to his next run for the Senate. Who cares?”
“Not me,” Harvey said.
“I’m glad you feel that way. Now get off the phone and let me get back to work.”
There was a slight hesitation on the other end of the line and a cough, as if Harvey were considering getting back into the fray. Then there was a click and then a void and then a dial tone, and Clare found herself holding a telephone receiver that connected her to nothing.
Damned idiot, she thought. Damned slimy little bastard.
She replaced the receiver in the cradle and walked over to her wall of smoky gray windows, to look out on the cars and the people and the mossed-over brown granite buildings. It was one o’clock on the afternoon of a hot June day and everything she could see looked wilted. Funny, she thought. I’m only twenty-nine years old, I won’t have my thirtieth birthday for another six months, and I feel tired enough to die.
Being tired didn’t really worry her, though. She was tired all the time. It was part of the job. What made her uneasy was that she had actually found a point of agreement with Harvey Gort.
Dan Chester was a slimy little blob of corruption who ought to be squashed into the pavement somewhere and left to rot.
[3]
WHEN VICTORIA HARTE HAD first found herself transformed into a movie star, her politics had consisted of a manic ambition to get into the bed of one Kennedy or another. It was one of the few ambitions she had never been able to realize. Now, more than thirty years from the day she had first heard Senator Jack Kennedy speak at a Hollywood Democratic Club luncheon, she thought that was probably a good thing. Jack would have been a coup, Bobby would have been a pleasure, but that other one—bleh. There was something about that other one that made Victoria think of her childhood in Los Angeles and all those men who used to spend every nonworking waking minute at the Knights of Columbus” Hall. Actually, as far as Victoria was concerned, most of the things that had happened to her, and most of the things that had not, had been for the best. There had been a time in the late sixties when she had felt cheated because she had not been ten years younger than she was. The world had seemed to belong to the very young, and she had wanted desperately to be one of them. Now she realized that being part of that generation, or the one that followed, would have been a bore. These new “movie stars” were not allowed to behave like movie stars at all. When they tried, they got beat up by the gutter press. She, on the other hand, was expected to travel with an entourage of twelve and enough clothes to outfit a small Caribbean island. It was part of the Old Hollywood mystique she was supposed to represent. That mystique gave her a lot of latitude, for which she was grateful. The presently fashionable cause back in Beverly Hills was Fake Fur and Kindness to Animals. All the young women out there were throwing their minks on the bonfires of the animal rights movement. Nobody expected her to do the same, which was a very good thing. At the moment, she had six minks, four chinchillas, three sables, and a moth-eaten Persian lamb. She also had a leopard, but she’d put it into storage. In the present political climate, mucking around with endangered species would probably be pushing things just a little too far.
