Mike Lawson: Dead Man’s List

Mahoney swiveled his thick neck to see what DeMarco was looking at.

“Yeah, she’s a character,” he said. “And in case you’re havin’ impure thoughts, she’s not with me. She’s the girlfriend of the guy who owns the house.”

Impure thoughts—a Catholic sinner’s expression—and DeMarco bet that Mahoney had been confessing to that particular transgression from the time he was a pudgy altar boy. But was he lying about the woman? DeMarco didn’t know. He doubted if God knew. And the fact that Mahoney could lie so nimbly was not surprising: he was a politician. John Fitzpatrick Mahoney was the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, third in line for the Oval Office if both the president and vice president were unable to serve. A truly terrifying thought in DeMarco’s opinion.

“Hey! Stop looking at her tits and pay attention,” Mahoney said.

DeMarco reluctantly shifted his gaze back to Mahoney’s blue eyes—the red-veined eyes of a dedicated drinker.

“There’s a guy,” Mahoney said, “an old buddy of mine, an ex-congressman from Virginia. His name’s Dick Finley and he retired about ten years ago. Anyway, a week ago his son died in some kinda weird accident and Dick wants somebody to look into it.”

“Does he need a lawyer?” DeMarco asked. “I mean is he planning to sue somebody?”

DeMarco had asked the question not because he cared about the answer but because he had just looked up at the mansion again—and he wanted to keep looking. The young woman was still on the phone, but this time she saw DeMarco staring at her. She turned to face him so he was treated to a full-frontal view, and then she smiled and wiggled her fingers at him. She was so firm nothing else wiggled. He bet Mahoney was lying.

Mahoney snorted in response to DeMarco’s question. “If he needed a lawyer, Joe, I wouldn’t have given him your name.”

DeMarco was offended though he knew he had no right to be. He had a law degree—had even passed the Virginia bar—but he had never practiced law. He was too busy doing other unsavory things on Mahoney’s behalf.

“It sounds like what he needs,” Mahoney said, “is somebody to turn over a few rocks and see what crawls out.”

There you go, DeMarco thought. That was his job description: rock flipper and bug crusher. Not very flattering but accurate enough.

Retired congressman Richard Finley lived in Colonial Beach, Virginia, not far from the Chesapeake Bay mansion where DeMarco had met Mahoney.

Finley answered the doorbell wearing a sun-faded red golf shirt, khaki pants, and scuffed Top-Siders. He was short, in his eighties, bald and tanned, and had the kind of neat round head and small-featured face that looked good without hair on top. He smiled at DeMarco when DeMarco introduced himself but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. Finley’s eyes looked hollow and haunted, as if he’d been punched in the gut by fate one too many times.

He led DeMarco onto a deck that looked out over the beach, said how much he appreciated DeMarco coming, and asked if he wanted a beer. As Finley was popping the tops on two Coronas, DeMarco commented on the view.

Finley glanced over his shoulder at the water as if he’d forgotten it was there. “Yeah,” he said, “I bought this place for my wife and kids to come in the summer. And for my grandkids if I ever had any, which I never did. Now my family’s all dead so I guess I’ll just donate the place to some charity when I’m gone.”

DeMarco almost screamed: No! Give it to me! But instead he nodded his head solemnly.

“My wife, breast cancer killed her, and my other boy, he died in Vietnam—God curse John Kennedy for that. And now my youngest son is dead. We had Terry when I was forty-one. I never thought for a minute that I’d outlive him.”

“I’m sorry,” DeMarco said.

“But with my wife and my oldest boy, at least I knew why they died. With Terry, I don’t know what happened. And that’s why I called John, to see if he knew somebody who could…I don’t know, poke into things.”

Dick Finley explained that his son, Terry, had been a reporter for the Washington Post and two days ago his body had been found in Lake Anna where Terry had a home.

“They said he’d been out in his kayak and had fallen overboard and drowned. But the story doesn’t make sense.”

“You don’t think he drowned?” DeMarco said.

“He drowned,” Dick Finley said. “The autopsy was definitive on that. And the water they found in his lungs came from the lake.”

“Then I don’t understand,” DeMarco said.

“It’s a long commute from D.C. to Lake Anna, and Terry was a workaholic. The day he died, I know he left the Post about eight, so he wouldn’t have gotten to the lake until at least nine-thirty. So why would a guy go kayaking at nine-thirty, ten o’clock at night? I asked the police that, and they said there was a full moon that night, but I still don’t buy it. And the other thing is, Terry got that kayak five, six years ago. He was always getting interested in some new thing—biking, kayaking, rock climbing—and then after a couple of months he’d lose interest. The only thing he cared about was work. What I’m saying is, I don’t think Terry’d been in that boat in two or three years, maybe longer.”

“But his body was found in the lake, near the kayak,” DeMarco said.

“Yeah, but there’s other stuff. Like Terry’s laptop is missing. That laptop was always with him. If he wasn’t carrying the thing, it was close by—in his car, on his desk, wherever he was. I asked the sheriff where his computer was, and at first he said he didn’t know. Two days later he calls back and says that Terry had filed a report with the D.C. cops before his death saying it had been stolen.”

“And you don’t think it was?”

“No. I talked to Terry the day he died, that morning. If his laptop had been stolen, he would have told me. He’d have been going nuts to find it. And the sheriff said that Terry reported the theft over the phone, not in person. So who knows who really filed the report?”

“I see,” DeMarco said.

“And that’s not all,” Finley said. “Terry was working on something, something he said was going to win him a Pulitzer. He wouldn’t tell me what, but he said when he filed his story the dome was gonna come off the Capitol. Now to tell you the truth, I didn’t think too much of that. Terry was always working on some story he said was gonna be big, but usually wasn’t. But then he goes and dies, and now I don’t know. You want another beer?”

While Finley was getting his beer, DeMarco looked down at the beach and noticed a pudgy, middle-aged man walking a small dog. He watched as the guy tossed a stick of driftwood into the water. The stick looked heavy and was as long as the dog, but the dog—poor, dumb creature that it was—charged into the water after it. A wave crashed into the animal and it disappeared for a moment, then it reappeared with the stick in its mouth. The dog fought its way back to the beach and brought the stick to the man, who immediately tossed it again, farther out this time. DeMarco felt like going down to the beach and throwing the stick into the water and making the pudgy guy go fetch it.

After Finley handed him his beer, DeMarco said, “Do you think there might be something in your son’s house that would give me an idea of what he was working on?”

“Maybe you can find something, but I looked a couple days ago,” Finley said. “I went all through his desk, even looked in his safe to see if he’d put something there, but all that was in the safe was some cash and some old coins he’d collected.” Finley smiled then, but it was a sad smile. “The coins were like the kayak,” he said. “Terry bought ‘em ten years ago and probably hadn’t looked at ‘em since then. But if you want to look in his house, I’ll give you the keys.”