A Cohiba Panatela doesn’t taste bad at all when you smoke it, Cindy reflected as she spat her second brushful of toothpaste into the sink around ten o’clock the following Sunday morning. The problem is that then you keep on tasting it for about a week. She’d had her first a few months ago, last November. C-Sharp had fetched her fifth during the Marjorie/Michaelson chat Wednesday night. She now figured she’d have her next one, maybe—never.
After a throatful of Scope, she returned to her bedroom, where C-Sharp contentedly snored, presumably lost in blissful dreams of cheering crowds. She slipped into slacks of khaki denim and grabbed the first T-shirt in her dresser drawer. It was pale blue, featuring a male and a female head in white caricature with a bit of once-topical dialogue overlaid in black: “That’s hard to swallow, Mr. President.”/”You just said a mouthful, Monica.”
Cindy’s first misgiving came when she reached the top of the stairs and caught the smell of bacon frying. This didn’t compute. Eyes narrowing in puzzled alarm, she hustled downstairs to find Catherine in a sunshine-yellow dress covered by a hunter-green apron. At least she skipped the pearls and high heels, Cindy thought. Catherine was tending a griddle full of bacon, while more than a dozen cooked strips drained on a paper towel-covered plate.
“ ’Morning, Cindy,” Catherine said brightly with a glance over her shoulder. “Be a lamb and put that bacon on a clean plate, then take it out to the buffet in the dining room with the other food, would you?”
Wary eyes fixed on her sister, Cindy dumped the bacon onto a white china plate and sidled into the dining room with it—where she very nearly dropped it, along with her jaw. Describing the spread that covered the buffet with an offhand reference to “other food” struck Cindy as roughly equivalent to calling World War II a “scrap.” Three flavors of bagels, white, light wheat, and whole-wheat toast, all spread deftly with margarine; mounds of fresh fruit; four carafes of fruit juice; pots of coffee and tea; and scrambled eggs bubbling invitingly in a warming pan. In a house that at the moment sheltered a total of three people, Catherine had covered the buffet with enough food for a marine platoon.
Cindy debated with herself for a moment about how best to react. Pretend that she didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary? Approach it with calm determination, the way the experts say you should when your seven-year-old starts swearing? Or, she thought with a mental shrug, why not just be myself: direct and tactless?
“What’s the Stepford Wife number all about?” she called from the dining room. “I had this vague idea you were going to church or something. I mean, wouldn’t this be like a five-day supply of bacon even if C-Sharp and I ate bacon, which I don’t and C-Sharp shouldn’t?”
“We’re having guests for brunch,” Catherine yelled back. “Your call, but you might want to put on something a tiny bit dressier.”
Cindy strode back into the kitchen but stopped abruptly in the doorway. Her eyes widened and her tongue undertook an urgent search for saliva to swallow. Catherine was holding a long, black-handled, thick-bladed carving knife. And smiling just a bit oddly.
Offering Cindy a genial nod, Catherine used the tip of the knife to separate three more strips of raw bacon from the second package of the stuff she had opened. Cindy expelled a long breath.
“What guests?” Cindy managed to ask.
The doorbell rang.
“That’s some of them now, unless I miss my bet,” Catherine said. “Would you—”
“I’ll get it,” Cindy said quickly. “Just please don’t ask me to be a lamb again.”
As she strode to the front door, Cindy felt the knot of anxiety in her gut swelling into something uncomfortably close to panic. For a wild moment she considered offering a head fake to whoever turned out to be at the door and then running off through the snow to someplace reasonably sane. She fought the impulse back. She opened the door. And she gasped.
“Good morning, Miss Shepherd,” Avery Phillips said. “I think the other Miss Shepherd is expecting us. May we come in?”
Cindy stepped back to admit Phillips, quickly followed by Willie and a two-wheel handcart pushed by Project. On the handcart was a trunk that Cindy thought must have been left over from the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera.
“Michaelson has talked to you, right?” she asked.
“Yes, and did his best not to seem to be gloating. Outsmarted me, which I don’t mind, and then outfoxed me, which I do. So to get what I want I’ll have to deal with him instead of the Shepherd squirearchy.”
“What’s in the trunk?”
“If there’s an outlet somewhere in the house that’ll accept a three-prong plug, it’s an advanced audiovisual telecommunications center. Otherwise, it’s a very expensive doorstop.”
“What’s it for?” Cindy asked.
The doorbell rang.
“That’d be Michaelson,” Phillips said. “Why don’t you ask him about the trunk? I’m just following orders.”
Cindy opened the front door, where Michaelson and Marjorie waited patiently. Cindy would ordinarily have gaped at the Stanley stainless steel Thermos Michaelson was holding, but her reactive capacities were running on empty at the moment. Catherine glided into the entrance hall, apron doffed.
“Welcome, everybody,” she called gaily. “You’re just in time for brunch. The buffet is in the dining room. I’m afraid we’re a bit informal. I hope you don’t mind serving yourselves.”
“Yeah,” Cindy said dryly. “We haven’t been able to get good help since the War. The Boer War.”
“May I put this in the freezer?” Michaelson asked, tendering the Thermos with two hands as if it were a prize vintage pinot noir.
“Let me take it for you,” Catherine said.
“Do you mind if Willie sets our video toys up in the living room?” Phillips asked.
“After we eat,” Catherine said firmly over her shoulder.
“Can someone just explain what’s going on?” Cindy asked.
“While we eat,” Catherine said.
Cindy still held back, her expression dubious. C-Sharp picked that moment to appear in the dining-room doorway, a strip of bacon in one hand and the remains of another disappearing into his mouth.
“Bacon’s awesome,” he opined.
This assessment resolved the issue. In less than five minutes the eight people were seated at the dining-room table before plates filled—and in Project’s case, heaped—with food. A bit forced at first, the conviviality became steadily more real under the stimulus of caffeine, vitamin C, and cholesterol, helped along by Phillips’ diverting explanations of the various ways impressive amounts of money could be legally earned without incurring any obligation to pay federal income tax.
It was C-Sharp who introduced the topic that, like a well-crafted simile, explained the meeting without calling attention to itself. Glancing around appraisingly after Phillips finished hymning the delights of accelerated depreciation, he swallowed the last of a toast-and-scrambled-egg sandwich and grinned slyly.
“This is really about P.D., right?” he asked. “I mean, heat’s lost interest because they think it’s accidental, but some of us aren’t buying that, so we’re going to rehash it, am I right?”
“The police know perfectly well that Preston Demarest was murdered,” Michaelson said. “They’ve lost interest because it has been hinted to them by people whose good opinion their superiors covet that continuing the investigation can do no good and much harm. And because they’ve been given some information about Mr. Demarest’s background that puts his victimization rather low on the list of constabulary priorities. That’s surmise, by the way, but it’s clearly the most plausible explanation for what began as a very aggressive and competent investigation suddenly aborting.”
“And you’re telling us this because—” C-Sharp prompted.
“Because the police aren’t the only ones involved, and others with a stake in this matter aren’t so easily turned aside. We are here to satisfy those people about how Demarest’s murder occurred, and convince them to let things lie where they fell.”
Cindy shot Michaelson a look of angry surprise. He ignored it. He let his eyes deliberately survey the faces around the table. Catherine’s expression suggested polite interest, as if another guest had asked Michaelson to explain the International Monetary Fund and it was her duty to listen with at least a semblance of attention. Marjorie’s eyes were sharp and alert, shifting their gaze rapidly from Phillips to C-Sharp to Cindy. Phillips had his Zen-master mask on, hooded eyes turned steadily in Michaelson’s direction. Willie was looking thoughtfully at Catherine. C-Sharp had picked a windowpane in the background between Michaelson and Catherine and focused a look of bemused tolerance on it. Project, busily shoveling fruit from his plate to his mouth, looked covetously at the eggs and bacon still in the warming trays.
“I believe you have the floor,” Phillips said to Michaelson.
“We start with Andrew Shepherd,” Michaelson said. “He was, among other things, a businessman whose work took him behind what used to be the Iron Curtain. Like many people in that position, he allowed himself to be debriefed by the CIA when he returned from those trips.”
“You mean we’re gonna pin this on the spooks?” C-Sharp demanded, shaking his head with a disbelieving smile.
“No,” Michaelson said. “The Central Intelligence Agency had no reason to kill Preston Demarest, and if it had killed him, he wouldn’t have died the way he did. The quality of leadership at that outfit has declined somewhat in recent years, but it isn’t yet being run by people who think you can ward off unpleasant publicity by killing an American citizen in the epicenter of American political media. The only people I know of who do think so have jobs as script consultants in Hollywood.”
“Then what—” C-Sharp started to ask.
“As my mother used to say,” Phillips interjected, “if you keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut, you might learn something.”
“To continue,” Michaelson said. “Andrew Shepherd’s wife divorced him at a time when he was going through a psychological crisis, wondering about the worth of his life and career. In this condition, he found himself susceptible to advances by men who claimed to find him attractive or fascinating. That strikes me as very human, although I recognize that there are different views on the matter. I suppose any who are without sin should feel free to cast the first stone.”
“I don’t see any takers,” Marjorie said.
Project, however, glanced up sharply from his freshly filled plate with a look suggesting that he was striving valiantly to assimilate puzzling data.
“Steady, tiger,” Phillips said calmly. “In the words of that remarkable woman, Saint Teresa of Avila, ‘Humility is truth.’”
“Through an unforeseeable combination of vexatious circumstances, unfortunately,” Michaelson continued, “Mr. Shepherd’s predilections led to an experience that was quite traumatic for both him and Catherine. The details needn’t concern us. Its significance for present purposes is that it resulted in psychological counseling, generating treatment records that should have been kept highly confidential but weren’t.”
“Well, that narrows things down a bit, doesn’t it?” Cindy muttered.
“Fast-forward to a little over four years ago,” Michaelson said. “Andrew Shepherd learned that he had inoperable stomach cancer. He decided to take his own life. He arranged his affairs and made sure that his family was properly provided for. Then he did one more thing. He felt that Cindy was far less fragile emotionally than Catherine. So he took some pains to ensure that Cindy rather than Catherine would find his body. He thought that Cindy would be able to get the situation under control and spare Catherine the worst of the ordeal. Unfortunately, again, his plans miscarried.”
“That’s enough,” Cindy snapped. “Cathy doesn’t have to sit here and take this in her own house.”
“Steady, tiger,” Catherine said evenly. “In the immortal words of that remarkable woman Lesley Gore, ‘It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to.’”
“My surmise,” Michaelson said, “and that’s all it is, is that Andrew Shepherd killed himself less than an hour before he expected Cindy to come home, and several hours before Catherine was due. The Washington area, however, was hit by a snowstorm. The combined incompetence of Washington drivers and its snow-removal crew created the usual, grossly disproportionate gridlock. A trip that should have taken Cindy fifteen minutes consumed over four hours. Catherine, traveling from a different place by a route that didn’t take her through Washington, got home before Cindy and found the body.”
“I haven’t heard anything about P.D. yet,” C-Sharp said.
“You are beginning to annoy me,” Phillips told C-Sharp.
“Preston Demarest had already come into the picture,” Michaelson said. He then explained the CIA’s use of Aldrich Ames to funnel disinformation to the Soviet Union.
“Are you saying Preston had also been used as a conduit to Ames?” Catherine asked.
“No. With the Ames scandal about to go public, the CIA had to find out whether any of the people it had used with Ames had retained compromising documents or other inconvenient evidence. Demarest was recruited as a free-lancer for this task, I suspect on the recommendation of Mr. Phillips. He was recruited because he was capable of exploiting Andrew Shepherd’s particular sexual vulnerability. He seduced Andrew Shepherd and used the entrée this provided him to search surreptitiously for documents and records that might interest a reporter looking for a fresh angle on the Ames case. He found some.”
“Lovely,” Catherine said. Her voice was steady and she gazed, dry-eyed, directly at Michaelson.
“It may be aesthetically repulsive, but it was a classic operational necessity,” Michaelson said. “I’m not a CIA cheerleader, but that’s the reality. Information like that, promiscuously revealed, can get people killed.”
“What did he find?” C-Sharp asked.
“It’s not important. He found enough to realize, after Ames’ arrest hit the papers, how the CIA had been using Ames. Mr. Demarest wrongly thought the CIA would view what he had as explosive information. He took it to at least two people to try to exploit the possibilities this suggested.”
“Who was the other one?” Phillips asked. Catherine and Cindy both looked sharply at him.
“A man named Connaught, formerly with the CIA but now working for one of the political parties.”
“The nasty little bitch was two-timing me, after all,” Phillips confirmed with a show of indignant petulance.
“Connaught and Mr. Phillips here were both smarter than Demarest,” Michaelson said. “They realized that the CIA exposé Demarest thought he had was worthless, but that without knowing it Demarest was in fact onto something of genuine potential value.”
“Namely?” Catherine asked.
“Documentary proof that an eighteenth-century ancestor of Marcus Humphreys was a black slaveowner. Demarest had found an arguably compromising hotel receipt hidden in one of the estate books. To take a picture of it, he had laid the receipt over the page where it was stashed. That page happened to be an indenture showing the sale of a slave to Thaddeus Praisegod Humphreys.”
“Two hundred years ago?” C-Sharp squealed in amazement.
“Yes,” Michaelson said. “Before the Beatles.”
“How could anyone think that was politically important?”
“Oh, don’t be such a complete twit,” Phillips said impatiently. “This is a country that spent two bloody months on the verge of a shooting war and only news junkies knew about it because the lead story was a White House intern who licked something besides postage stamps in the Oval Office.”
“At any rate,” Michaelson said, “Connaught and our friend Phillips here each, independently, sent Demarest back into Calvert Manor to get a complete copy of the indenture that he had inadvertently photographed in partially concealed form.”
“He got in the first time by seducing my father,” Catherine said with a sad little head shake. “And the second time by seducing me.”
“Yes,” Michaelson said. “With a little help from each of his sponsors. Phillips, rather charmingly if you like that kind of thing, briefed him on a collection of harmless eccentrics called the Stuart Restoration Society.”
“Don’t ask,” Cindy said as C-Sharp opened his mouth.
“I fell for it like a twelve-year-old with her first romance novel,” Catherine said.
“Connaught chose a more sinister course. Some recent CIA appointees are much more susceptible than they should be to partisan political leverage. That explains some of the more colorful characters who’ve found their way into the president’s company over the last few years. Connaught exploited that susceptibility to have someone there obtain the records of Catherine’s psychological counseling and provide them to him. He used them to draw Demarest a road map.”
“Excuse me,” Willie said, rising. “If it’s all right, I’m going to go set up the electronics.”
“Demarest in this fashion found his way back into Calvert Manor. In the small hours of one morning he snuck into the library and got to work. After he’d found the page but before he could start clicking his Minox, Cindy interrupted him. The ensuing verbal fracas woke up Catherine. Demarest couldn’t explain himself. He staged a melodramatic exit followed by a fake suicide attempt that played skillfully and mercilessly on Catherine’s past trauma. The result was a reconciliation that enabled him to come back and, eventually, try again for the critical document.”
“But he couldn’t come up with it,” Marjorie said, “because Cindy took it out of the estate book and hid it.”
“He was never able to find the document again,” Michaelson said as he glanced at his watch. “But he died trying. Which is what we’re here to explore.”
The phone rang. Catherine excused herself to answer it, returning in less than a minute.
“It’s an AT&T operator for you,” she told Michaelson. “She says your conference call is ready.”