THE NEWS ABOUT THE woman they called Mrs. Patricia Willis had been everywhere for so long, the news about the arrival of Karla Parrish had been wiped out of public consciousness. Julianne Corbett knew, because she had been watching. She had been watching the story about Mrs. Willis intently. It isn’t every day that one of your constituents kills her husband and blows up her car in a municipal parking garage. The story was beginning to take on that eerie timeless quality of an urban legend. There was also the practical factor. Nobody got into the United States Congress on talent, experience, or good intentions. It took money, and that meant campaign contributions. Tiffany Shattuck had found Mrs. Willis’s name on the contributors’ list the night the explosion happened—and called Julianne about it, at four o’clock in the morning, as if it had been late-breaking word of a presidential assassination.
“She gave us a lot of money,” Tiffany had informed Julianne as solemnly as she could when she had had no sleep and far too much beer. “Over and over again. She was a very solid supporter of your campaign.”
Julianne might have been angry, but she had been restless and agitated and unable to sleep, and when the phone rang she had been sitting up in bed going through all one hundred and twenty-four stations on her cable-ready TV, looking for something to watch that made some sense. American Movie Classics was showing Take Care of My Little Girl, a just-after-World-War-II social-conscience film where Jeanne Crain learns the evils of the sorority system from an ex-G.I. who has come to her campus on the G.I. bill. At least four stations were showing infomercials about exercise equipment. (Who bought exercise equipment at four o’clock in the morning?) The rest of the offerings all seemed to be religious. Julianne didn’t really mind Mother Angelica, but at four A.M. all the offerings on the Eternal Word Television Network were in Italian. She had been about to hunt through her night table for her crossword puzzle books when Tiffany had started heavy breathing in her ear.
“What if somebody finds out?” Tiffany demanded. “I mean, this is the biggest scandal since I don’t know what. The biggest scandal ever in the state of Pennsylvania, I bet.”
Maybe that was true. Julianne didn’t know much about scandals in the state of Pennsylvania. They hadn’t been on the menu when she was going to elementary school. What had been on the menu, as far as she could remember it, was what would now be called sexual harassment. It was as clear to her now as it had been at the time—the day Bobby Brenderbader had copped a feel at the drinking fountain; the day John Valland had snapped her bra strap in class while Mrs. Magdussen was explaining the virtue of the Union side in the Civil War. Julianne shook it all out of her head and brought herself back to the present. A middle-aged balding man whose belt was just a little too tight was going on and on about how Christ led him to understand the importance of complex carbohydrates.
“She couldn’t have been a really huge contributor,” Julianne said reasonably. “I would have heard about it.”
“You did hear about it,” Tiffany persisted. “She was on the November list. You must remember.”
“I don’t remember. Tiffany, for God’s sake, there were two hundred people on that list.”
“I know, I know.”
“Was she at the reception?” Julianne’s campaign staff had given a reception for her two hundred largest noncorporate contributors, just to stay in touch.
Tiffany cleared her throat. “No, she wasn’t. We sent her an invitation and she didn’t answer it. She didn’t even RSVP. We followed up on it.”
“And?”
“And I suppose she said she couldn’t come,” Tiffany said irritably. “I don’t know. I didn’t handle her invitation. We had a whole committee to handle invitations.”
“Yes, Tiffany. I remember.”
“I still say we ought to take it seriously. In this day and age, I mean. It could come back to haunt us in the next election.”
“I don’t think so, Tiffany. Didn’t Rosalynn Carter have her picture taken with John Wayne Gacey?”
“President Carter didn’t get elected again either. Julianne, really. You ought to do something about this.”
“What?”
“What do you mean, what? Something.”
“Well,” Julianne said reasonably. “I can’t very well give the money back, can I? The woman is dead. Her husband is dead. I’m probably broke. What am I supposed to do?”
“The woman isn’t dead,” Tiffany said. “Did you hear that on the news? Did I miss something?”
Julianne reached into her night table for the Tylenol. “No, no,” she said reassuringly. “It was just a slip of the tongue. I suppose I’ve been thinking she must be dead. Since nobody can find her.”
“She’s probably in Bolivia.” Tiffany snorted. “If it was me doing something like that, I’d take a lot more than fifteen thousand dollars. You can’t get anywhere on that kind of money these days. Maybe you should issue a press release.”
“Saying what?”
“Saying that even though she was a large contributor, you’d never even met her.”
Julianne swallowed a Tylenol dry, and then another. “I think that would only call attention to something it’s unlikely would be noticed any other way. Don’t be silly, Tiffany. It’s late. Go back to sleep.”
“I can’t sleep.”
“Work on the Karla Parrish reception, then. It’s—what? Soon.”
“I can’t work on the Parrish reception. I can’t think of anything but this. It’s the creepiest thing I ever heard of.”
Four years before, a young woman living near Pittsburgh had killed both her small children because her new boyfriend had promised to marry her if she did. This was not the creepiest thing Julianne had ever heard of. She shifted a little in bed and stretched.
“Go to bed,” she told Tiffany. “Seriously. Or work on something current. Stop worrying about Mrs. Willis.”
“Nobody calls her Mrs. Willis on television,” Tiffany said. “They always call her Patricia. As if they didn’t want you to know she was his wife. Do you think all men are worried that their wives are going to kill them in their sleep?”
“No,” Julianne said. “Go to sleep. Get off the phone. Let me go to sleep. It’s been a long day.”
“I’m going to have another cup of coffee and read the Inquirer report again,” Tiffany told her. “It’s the most complete. Maybe they’ll bring in Gregor Demarkian. Then we’d make the national news with this thing, and I could say I was part of it.”
“Go to sleep,” Julianne had said again—and that had been when? Last night? The night before? Sitting at her desk this morning, with the sun coming up outside the windows, Julianne couldn’t remember what she had done when over the last month, or why. What she did know was that she was in the office before seven, with her full war paint on, drinking coffee out of a mug big enough to hold a small lobster. The computer contributor sheets were spread out across her green felt desk blotter. The invitations list to the Karla Parrish reception was propped up against her Rolodex. Her new cat calendar was lying flat against the hardwood next to her phone. Why was it that people still had green felt desk blotters? she wondered. They didn’t blot ink pens anymore. Half the time they didn’t even have pens of any kind anymore. The offices were full of word processors.
Julianne ran her finger down the contributors’ lists again and frowned. She hadn’t realized that these lists were so detailed. There was the name: Patricia (Mrs. Stephen) Willis. There were the amounts and the dates they had been received: $11,000 on the first of June; $14,500 on the twelfth of September; $22,000 this past March. Julianne knew that you had to tell some federal commission or other who your campaign contributors were and what they had contributed, but she hadn’t realized that that information would be this—specific. She started to rub the side of her face and then stopped herself. She didn’t want to smear her makeup. She wished it were time for Tiffany to come into the office. There were things she needed to talk out. Unfortunately, the rules were clear. When an employee can call an employer at four o’clock in the morning, the employer is a saint. When the employer can get an employee out of bed at six A.M. just to talk office talk, the employer is a tyrant. Julianne shoved the contributors’ lists away from her and stood up.
She wasn’t going to issue a press release. Of course she wasn’t. That would be silly. On the other hand, what might not be silly was a little damage control. Because Tiffany was right. You could never tell what would damage you these days.
Julianne looked out the less dirty of her windows and down to the street. She went back to her desk and picked up the invitations list for the Karla Parrish reception. She had been reading about Karla, even in the middle of all this fuss about the death of Patricia Willis. If it hadn’t been for that death, the reception would have been really big news. That, Julianne remembered, was the kind of luck Karla always had. Just when she was about to make a big splash, someone else came along and made a bigger one, and Karla’s splash was lost in the tidal wave. When they were all in college together, Julianne remembered, the bigger splash had always come from Patsy MacLaren.
Julianne ran her finger down the column of names and found the one she was looking for. She took a pencil out of the caddy on her blotter and underlined both the name and the phone number. Then she pulled the phone closer across the desk and started punching numbers into the phone pad.
The phone was picked up almost immediately. It was answered less immediately, by a husky voice that seemed to belong to someone who did not intend to be in a good mood. Julianne looked at her little digital clock and winced. It was 6:12 A.M.
Julianne sat down and took a deep breath. “Bennis?” she said.
On the other end of the line, Bennis Hannaford made a noise that could have been a death rattle.
Julianne shook out her overteased hair. “Bennis, listen to me, this is important. I want you to get in touch with that friend of yours for me, Gregor Demarkian—”