Dead Man’s List. Mike Lawson

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СКАЧАТЬ gut, was an unbuttoned aloha shirt patterned with red hibiscuses. His hair was white and full, his legs were white, thick, and hairless, and his large bare feet were pale.

      DeMarco thought he looked like a beluga whale that had crashed a luau.

      “It’s about time you got here,” Mahoney said.

      This complaint was typical of Mahoney. There he was—lying under an umbrella, drinking, doing nothing—while DeMarco had been forced to drive seventy miles in heavy traffic because his boss hadn’t wanted to talk over the phone. Or maybe Mahoney just didn’t want to hold the phone as this could have interrupted his drinking and smoking.

      Nor did Mahoney offer DeMarco a seat or a drink. This breach of etiquette could have occurred because Mahoney was oblivious to the creature comforts of his subordinates—or it could have been because DeMarco looked impervious to such ailments as dehydration and heat stroke. DeMarco’s forefathers were Italian and his features reflected his heritage. He was five foot eleven, with heavy shoulders and strong arms. He combed his dark hair straight back, and the first strands of gray were just beginning to appear at the temples. He had a handsome face, but a hard one, and if Francis Ford Coppola had been casting extras for Godfather IV, he would have hired DeMarco on the spot.

      So DeMarco stood there in front of Mahoney’s lounge chair, squinting into the midday sun. It was the first of September and the temperature was in the low eighties. As he waited for Mahoney to tell him why he’d been summoned, he glanced up at the large house in the background. DeMarco didn’t know who had loaned his boss the use of the mansion with its pool and its magnificent view of Chesapeake Bay, but he suspected it was someone trying to curry his favor. DeMarco wondered if that same person had loaned Mahoney the woman he could see in the window.

      The woman—lithe and tanned—was in her thirties and she was walking back and forth in front of a large picture window, talking on a cell phone. The only thing she was wearing was a black bikini bottom the size of a stripper’s g-string. Her bare breasts, from a distance of fifty yards, were flawless.

      Mahoney swiveled his thick neck to see what DeMarco was looking at.

      “Yeah, she’s a character,” he said. “And in case you’re havin’ impure thoughts, she’s not with me. She’s the girlfriend of the guy who owns the house.”

      Impure thoughts—a Catholic sinner’s expression—and DeMarco bet that Mahoney had been confessing to that particular transgression from the time he was a pudgy altar boy. But was he lying about the woman? DeMarco didn’t know. He doubted if God knew. And the fact that Mahoney could lie so nimbly was not surprising: he was a politician. John Fitzpatrick Mahoney was the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, third in line for the Oval Office if both the president and vice president were unable to serve. A truly terrifying thought in DeMarco’s opinion.

      “Hey! Stop looking at her tits and pay attention,” Mahoney said.

      DeMarco reluctantly shifted his gaze back to Mahoney’s blue eyes—the red-veined eyes of a dedicated drinker.

      “There’s a guy,” Mahoney said, “an old buddy of mine, an ex-congressman from Virginia. His name’s Dick Finley and he retired about ten years ago. Anyway, a week ago his son died in some kinda weird accident and Dick wants somebody to look into it.”

      “Does he need a lawyer?” DeMarco asked. “I mean is he planning to sue somebody?”

      DeMarco had asked the question not because he cared about the answer but because he had just looked up at the mansion again—and he wanted to keep looking. The young woman was still on the phone, but this time she saw DeMarco staring at her. She turned to face him so he was treated to a full-frontal view, and then she smiled and wiggled her fingers at him. She was so firm nothing else wiggled. He bet Mahoney was lying.

      Mahoney snorted in response to DeMarco’s question. “If he needed a lawyer, Joe, I wouldn’t have given him your name.”

      DeMarco was offended though he knew he had no right to be. He had a law degree—had even passed the Virginia bar—but he had never practiced law. He was too busy doing other unsavory things on Mahoney’s behalf.

      “It sounds like what he needs,” Mahoney said, “is somebody to turn over a few rocks and see what crawls out.”

      There you go, DeMarco thought. That was his job description: rock flipper and bug crusher. Not very flattering but accurate enough.

       Chapter 2

      Retired congressman Richard Finley lived in Colonial Beach, Virginia, not far from the Chesapeake Bay mansion where DeMarco had met Mahoney.

      Finley answered the doorbell wearing a sun-faded red golf shirt, khaki pants, and scuffed Top-Siders. He was short, in his eighties, bald and tanned, and had the kind of neat round head and small-featured face that looked good without hair on top. He smiled at DeMarco when DeMarco introduced himself but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. Finley’s eyes looked hollow and haunted, as if he’d been punched in the gut by fate one too many times.

      He led DeMarco onto a deck that looked out over the beach, said how much he appreciated DeMarco coming, and asked if he wanted a beer. As Finley was popping the tops on two Coronas, DeMarco commented on the view.

      Finley glanced over his shoulder at the water as if he’d forgotten it was there. “Yeah,” he said, “I bought this place for my wife and kids to come in the summer. And for my grandkids if I ever had any, which I never did. Now my family’s all dead so I guess I’ll just donate the place to some charity when I’m gone.”

      DeMarco almost screamed: No! Give it to me! But instead he nodded his head solemnly.

      “My wife, breast cancer killed her, and my other boy, he died in Vietnam—God curse John Kennedy for that. And now my youngest son is dead. We had Terry when I was forty-one. I never thought for a minute that I’d outlive him.”

      “I’m sorry,” DeMarco said.

      “But with my wife and my oldest boy, at least I knew why they died. With Terry, I don’t know what happened. And that’s why I called John, to see if he knew somebody who could…I don’t know, poke into things.”

      Dick Finley explained that his son, Terry, had been a reporter for the Washington Post and two days ago his body had been found in Lake Anna where Terry had a home.

      “They said he’d been out in his kayak and had fallen overboard and drowned. But the story doesn’t make sense.”

      “You don’t think he drowned?” DeMarco said.

      “He drowned,” Dick Finley said. “The autopsy was definitive on that. And the water they found in his lungs came from the lake.”

      “Then I don’t understand,” DeMarco said.

      “It’s a long commute from D.C. to Lake Anna, and Terry was a workaholic. The day he died, I know he left the Post about eight, so he wouldn’t have gotten to the lake until at least nine-thirty. So why would a guy go kayaking at nine-thirty, ten o’clock at night? I asked the police that, and they said there was a full moon that night, but I still don’t buy it. And the other thing is, Terry got that kayak five, six years ago. СКАЧАТЬ