Somewhere in a Hotel
The Senator’s suite was still crowded, even though it was well after midnight, every available surface littered with empty cups, plates, soda cans and fast food containers. The Senator sat on the couch, conferring with Frank and Woody. He was tired and kept rubbing his forehead. Frank was snappish and impatient, Woody trying to keep the peace. Maggie was in another corner of the room, conferring with her own press secretary. Kenny Bass was in the bedroom, hunched over the phone, his creased and solemn face growing more solemn as he listened.
“Mmm-hmm. So the paint scratches on the bumper make you think it was no accident?” He listened again. “Billy always was a jerk but I don’t think anyone deserves that.” Nodded, though he was alone in the room. “What about Lila?”
As he listened, he looked increasingly sad. ‘Two men in suits, that’s all you’ve got? Oh, city fellahs, huh? Mr. Nondescript and someone big and mean-looking? Yes, well, at this point, she’s not the only one sorry she didn’t take a shotgun to them, is she? Look, Dick, is someone on watch at the hospital? All the time?”
He listened, made some notes, listened again, and suddenly sat up straight, his sallow face reddening. “What? You think we’re doing this? There are people up there who actually think so? That’s total bullshit. Jim’s not like that. What’s the basis?”
He cocked his head and listened again. “Guys in suits at the hospital, shoving ID in people’s faces, talkin’ national security and asking for access to the phone circuits? Oh, they didn’t ask? Yeah. Yeah. Demanded. Right. And nobody at the hospital can describe any of them? Was it Nondescript and the big guy again?” He listened and sighed. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I hear you. They wore suits and they carried badges and so the whole world opened to ’em. Anybody look at the badges, Dick? I mean, it could have been something from a cop goods store, or won at a carnival.”
This time the man he called Dick spoke longer, and Kenny Bass’s face got grimmer. “FBI? No shit. I got one or two of those in my drawer, Dick. Any idea what they were doing with the phone circuits? No one asked? Not even your people? No!” His “no” thundered in the empty room. Ken Bass was a calm guy who rarely lost his temper, but this conversation was getting to him.
“Look, Dick, this is giving me a major headache Even if God himself shows up to do a wiretap, you ask for the court order, right?”
He listened to the gravel voice of Dick “Tricky Dicky” McPartland, head of the homicide unit, sitting in his office up the in Maine Department of Public Safety, take a few minutes to curse out people’s lack of curiosity, with a few jabs at Washington thrown in. Then McPartland said, “So we threw our own tap on the phone. Legal, mind you, just to see what these guys might be looking for. Got one at Friedman’s house, too, just in case. Only phones they tapped were the Special Care nurse’s station and the pay phone in the waiting room.”
“Yeah, real odd,” Bass said. “They tapped the phones the daughter might call in on to see how her mother’s doing.”
McPartland missed the irony. “Yeah. Funny how the daughter just vanished into thin air like that, isn’t it? You don’t suppose she had something to do with this, do you””
Kenny Bass snorted. “Dick, someone kills your uncle and tries to kill your mother, you might get a little spooked, too.”
“The dad didn’t run, while the kid borrowed a car and crashed it, ran away from the hospital, and hasn’t been seen since. Looks suspicious to me.”
Ken Bass had known McPartland a long time. The guy had risen more from seniority than brains. In Bass’s opinion, there was as much gravel in the man’s brain as in his voice. “Sounds like you aren’t talking to your own people, if you think the girl’s involved in this.”
“What the hell’s that mean?”
“You find a trooper named Roland Profit and ask him about the night Lila Friedman was attacked.”
“Profit’s on traffic. What’s he got to do with this?”
But Ken Bass was annoyed. He didn’t like slipshod police work. He didn’t like suspicion falling on the kid, with all she’d been through. In particular, because it came painfully close to his own fears, he didn’t like suspicion falling on the Buxton campaign. “Ask Profit. And while you’re at it, ask the cop who was in the emergency room at Kennebec Valley what Lila Friedman said to her daughter. Or you could ask one of the nurses. It’s right there in your police report, if you care to read it. She said, ‘Run, Jenny, run.’ She said something else, too, but that’s all the listeners could catch. So maybe, just maybe…”
His voice dropped into a lower register, a rumble to rival McPartland’s. “Maybe the poor kid is running because her mother told her to. It might be amazing in this day and age for a kid to do something because a parent told her to, but I hear Jenny Cates is a real good kid who adores her mother.”
He waited for McPartland’s response.
“I’ll follow up,” McPartland growled, “but you’d better hope I don’t find your candidate tied into this. I’m not covering up nothing for nobody, not even some hot-shot US Senator. Understood?”
Ken Bass had worked hard to maintain his contacts with the state police, and McPartland’s attitude troubled him. Mostly people were cooperative, happy to help out Senator Buxton and his staff. But he knew McPartland would love to finish his career on the high of busting a US Senator. “Understood, Dick,” he said. “Keep me informed, will you?”
Silence, then grudging acquiescence. “One more thing,” Bass said. “I don’t think you ever answered. Has anyone tried anything at the hospital?”
Another silence, then McPartland said, “Hell, yes. Twice. First time the husband spotted it; second time it was a nurse. We’re worried as hell about third time lucky, and that’s with a cop on the door at all times. Woman’s got such a following, you’d think she was a saint instead of a lawyer.”
So even though it was his case, McPartland had no idea who Lila Friedman was. How could he solve an attempted murder if he didn’t even know his victim?
“Dick?” Kenny Bass said. “You know what? She is a saint.” He hung up but made no move to leave the bedroom. The Senator would want to know about the call, and the man was already exhausted from the long campaign day. He didn’t need more bad news right now.