LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 8

      DeMarco retrieved his mail from the box and the first thing he saw was a letter from Elle Myers. He hadn’t seen her in almost six months, and the last time he’d spoken to her had been three months ago. He opened the envelope, read the short letter, and then just sat there for a long time thinking. It was ten minutes before he trudged slowly up to the second floor of his house.

      DeMarco lived on P Street in Georgetown, in a small two-story townhouse made of white-painted brick. When DeMarco’s wife divorced him she had left him his heavily mortgaged home but she took almost everything else he owned, including all the furniture. For nearly two years after her departure his will to refurnish the place had been sapped by her infidelity: she’d had an affair with his cousin. He eventually replaced much of the furniture she’d taken, and the first floor of his home once again looked as if a normal person dwelled there. But the second floor of the house, which consisted of two small bedrooms and a half bath, was still barren except for two objects: a secondhand upright piano and a fifty-pound punching bag that hung from an exposed ceiling rafter.

      DeMarco had bought the piano on a whim at an estate sale. He had played when he was young and still remembered how to read music. He knew he’d never be able to play anything requiring real talent, but he figured if the music was slow enough, the grace notes rare enough, he might be able to entertain an audience of one. He also figured that he needed another hobby—something besides pounding the heavy bag. He and two friends had nearly broken their backs getting the instrument up the narrow stairway to the second floor of his house, and he decided, that day, that if he ever tired of playing it he would turn it into kindling before ever attempting to get it back down the stairs.

      He played for an hour, pecking away at “Black Coffee,” a blues song that Ella Fitzgerald used to sing. He mangled the song, his left hand even more ham-fisted than normal. As he played he thought of Ella singing—and of a time he’d danced with Elle.

      He’d met her on a vacation to Key West. She was a school teacher who lived in Iowa and he liked everything about her—her looks, her sense of humor, the fact that she cared about teaching kids—but it had been impossible to sustain the relationship, her living a thousand miles away. He could have relocated—or she could have—but neither was willing to make that sort of commitment, to give up good jobs and begin life over in an unfamiliar place. They inevitably drifted apart. The letter he’d received said that she had gotten engaged, to a nice guy, a local fireman—but the whole tone of the letter was oh, what might have been.

      So he played his piano and thought of Elle and felt sorry for himself. He imagined himself old and alone, feeding pigeons on a park bench on a bleak winter day. He could hear his mother bemoaning the fact that she had no grandchildren and never would. And he realized, being an only child, that the DeMarco line would end with him. Fortunately, before he could consider hunting down a knife to slash his wrists, the phone rang. It was Neil.

      “That phone number,” Neil said. “I have something for you, but I don’t know what it means.”

      That was a very unusual admission coming from Neil.

      Since Neil wouldn’t tell DeMarco what he had found unless DeMarco had a phone equipped with an NSA-approved scrambler, DeMarco had to go to Neil’s home to get the information. Thankfully, Neil lived less than two miles away.

      Neil’s wife was home with him, and unlike Neil, she was a sweet, normal person. After exchanging their vows, she’d set about, as women usually do, changing her husband in various and subtle ways—and Neil didn’t even know that he was being changed. At his office, Neil was pompous and condescending and liked to show off, but in his home, his wife in the kitchen and able to hear him, he tended to curb his more annoying habits.

      “As I told you,” he said to DeMarco, “I came up with every possible number combination associated with that partial phone number. I eliminated all the unassigned numbers, then identified who the remaining numbers belonged to. What I did was, I cross-referenced…Aw, never mind, I won’t bore you with the details, but let me tell you it was a lot of work. Anyway, I found four people who were interesting. One was extremely interesting.

      “The first is a woman named Tammy Johnson. She works at the Justice Department. I can imagine a number of reasons why a reporter might be talking to somebody at Justice about Paul Morelli, but the problem is that Ms. Johnson works in personnel. She handles things like health insurance and pensions, so I doubt that she was a hot source for Terry Finley, but I’ll leave that for you to confirm.

      “The second number,” Neil said, “belongs to a gentleman who lives in southeast D.C. and goes by the curious name of DeLeon White. Mr. White is an independent pharmaceutical retailer.”

      Fuckin’ Neil; his wife still had a lot of work to do. “You mean he sells dope,” DeMarco said.

      “Crack cocaine, to be precise. So maybe DeLeon sells crack to Morelli.”

      “I kinda doubt that,” DeMarco said.

      “Yeah, me too,” Neil said. “It’s the last two names that were most intriguing. The third phone number is assigned to a Michelle Thomas, a lady who works for a very high-end escort service.”

      “A call girl?”

      “Oui. Now Terry Finley was single and I assume he had some sort of sexual outlet, but I doubt if he used Ms. Thomas’s services.”

      “Why’s that?”

      “Because

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