LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 3

      “Old man Finley’s a good guy,” the sheriff said. “I liked him when he was in Congress and I still like him. But he’s wrong about Terry. There wasn’t anything suspicious about his death.”

      The Louisa County sheriff was in his forties, well-muscled and tanned, and on the credenza behind his desk was a picture of him and a boys’ baseball team. Two of the kids in the picture were clutching a good-sized trophy. DeMarco hoped the sheriff was as good a cop as he was a coach.

      “We didn’t find any signs of a struggle,” the sheriff said. “His house wasn’t ransacked and he definitely drowned in the lake. The lake’s got some kind of algae in it which is pretty distinctive, and the medical examiner found it in his lungs.”

      “You don’t think it’s strange that he was kayaking in the dark?” DeMarco said.

      “It wasn’t that dark. There was a full moon that night and the lights from other houses on the lake would have provided more light. But there’s something else, something we didn’t tell Mr. Finley.”

      “What’s that?”

      “Terry’s blood alcohol level was .18 at the time of his death. We think he had a few drinks after work, came home with a pretty good buzz on, and decided to go for a little moonlight paddle. Drunks have bad judgment. And their coordination and sense of balance aren’t too good either. Have you ever been in a kayak, Mr. DeMarco?”

      “No. Been in a canoe, but not a kayak.”

      “Well, sometime you oughta try to get in one. What I’m saying is, the toughest part of kayaking is getting in and out of the damn boat without tipping it over, and if you don’t believe me, try it. Then try it again after four drinks.”

      DeMarco called the Washington Post and spent five frustrating minutes navigating his way through a particularly annoying voice mail system before he was finally connected to Reggie Harmon’s phone.

      “Reggie, my man,” DeMarco said, “I’m in the mood to buy you a big salad for lunch.”

      “A salad?” Reggie said, as if he couldn’t imagine consuming something so horrible.

      “That’s right, Reginald. A two-olive salad with martini dressing. Onions if you prefer.”

      “Ah, that kinda salad. Well, veggies are one of your four basic food groups, aren’t they?”

      “Yes, they are, my friend. Plus vodka’s usually made from potatoes. Carbohydrates, you know. And if you have a twist in your second martini, you’ll ward off scurvy.”

      “Where and when, son? A man my age can’t afford to ignore his health.”

      “The Monocle. As soon as you can get there.”

      DeMarco hung up the phone. He should have been ashamed of himself, appealing to the late-morning cravings of an alcoholic to get information—but he wasn’t.

      DeMarco had called Reggie from his office, a small windowless room in the subbasement of the Capitol that seemed to have been designed to induce claustrophobia. He spent as little time there as possible, and the décor—or the lack of it—reflected this. The only furniture in the room was his desk, two wooden chairs, and a battered, four-drawer file cabinet. The file cabinet was a totally unnecessary item because DeMarco didn’t believe in keeping written records; they could subpoena him, but not his files. At one point he’d had a couple of pictures on one wall that had been given to him by his ex-wife, but since they had reminded him of her unfaithful nature every time he looked at them, he’d finally taken them down. The pathetic part was that the bare space on the wall where the pictures had been still reminded him of her.

      The Monocle Bar and Grill was located near Union Station, less than a fifteen-minute walk from the Capitol. DeMarco locked his office door and walked up the steps to the main floor of the building, to the rotunda, the space directly beneath the dome. He saw a page he knew leading a tour group: a smart-assed, jug-eared little bastard named Mullen. Pages had the professional longevity of butterflies, here one summer and gone the next, so DeMarco rarely knew their names—but he knew Mullen’s. He had walked out of his office one day and saw Mullen smooching a girl page out in the hall, next to his door. Instead of acting embarrassed as he should have, Mullen had the balls to offer DeMarco fifty bucks for the use of his office. The kid would probably be president one day.

      To reach the Monocle, DeMarco walked down First Street, past the Supreme Court. He looked up, as he always did, at the words EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW carved into the stone above the building’s sixteen massive marble columns. The high court was one of the few institutions in Washington that DeMarco still had any faith in, and he had this faith for a simple reason: the nine people who worked there had nothing more to gain. They were at the pinnacle of their profession, they had the job for life, and they didn’t have to please anybody to keep the job. Those, he believed, were circumstances that tended to produce honest if not always wise decisions. But he was probably wrong about that too.

      As DeMarco stepped inside the Monocle, the maître d’ glanced over at him to see if his attire was appropriate, nodded curtly, then returned to his reservation list. The Monocle was a bit pretentious but then this was understandable: its clientele tended to be the legislative branch of government as opposed to the electorate, and the walls of the bar were covered with photographs of drinking politicians. It seemed like Mahoney was in half the pictures.

      DeMarco saw Reggie Harmon sitting at the end of the bar, the only customer at eleven in the morning, his first martini half-gone. Reggie was sixty and he looked like a vampire that had been caught in a sunbeam. He had a pale sunken-cheeked face and dyed black hair plastered to a long, narrow skull. His shirt was two sizes too large around the collar and his thin fingers poked beyond the cuffs like claws.

      As DeMarco sat down on the stool next to him, Reggie slowly swiveled his head in DeMarco’s direction. His eyes were so red that DeMarco wondered if any of the reporter’s blood reached his brain. Exposing too many nicotine-stained teeth in the grimace he called a smile, Reggie said, “What do you call a hundred lawyers buried in a landfill?”

      “A good start. Reggie, that’s the third time you’ve told me that stupid joke. You need to get some new material.”

      “Well, you could still laugh, just to be polite,” Reggie said.

      DeMarco just shook his head then pointed at Reggie’s drink and held up two fingers for the bartender’s benefit.

      “What do you know about Terry Finley?” DeMarco asked.

      Reggie drained his first martini. “The kid that drowned?” he said.

      “Yeah, the kid that drowned.” Finley had been forty-two when he died.

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