Simple (26 page)

“So, if we establish this, it doesn't prove homicide. We can't hang the guy for an affair.”

“Yes, Boss. We … get that. Proof is going to be the sticker. I get three possibilities: Cal did it. Connolly did it and we have to break his alibi. He hired someone to do it. In which case it would make sense of Simon lying about one thing and another.”

“Somebody called her from a pay phone on the evening before the murder. Probably not Connolly if he was on his way to Harrisburg.”

Guy in a silver Saab.

*   *   *

MIKE CONNOLLY SITS
in his home office on Saturday—as usual, on the phone. He played a game of golf this morning. He and Monica are having people to dinner tonight. He has to nap and shower and shave. Elinor is handing over her kitchen to the caterers from All in Good Taste. She looks worn out with worry. An hour ago, she came in and cradled his head as she used to do when he was a boy.

“Always on the phone,” she said.

“And I don't even like phones.”

He had been instructed to turn everything to advantage, and that is what he had done all week long. He was talked out. He had talked and talked.

When the news of the state budget impasse kept hitting the headlines, he told various people that the problem with the budget was solvable and he hoped that both parties would soon see wisdom. It was hard for him to get specific about where cuts could be made because he was on the board of the symphony and of Pitt and at the moment they were getting hit hard with proposed cuts and taxes and they were fighting back. But KDKA camped outside his office one day, so he got to make a brief speech about how, although he wasn't officially in Harrisburg this term, he kept in touch with some who were and saw bipartisanship as a key to solutions. Also, he said, if he could bring in just half as much business and industry as he had good reason to believe the state stood in a good position for, there would be no budget problem, no impasse. Pennsylvania would be flush. And that was a goal he intended to pursue.

“When are you going to announce your candidacy?” the reporter from KDKA asked.

“I'm talking to my family this weekend. If they give me the go-ahead, if we think we can preserve our family life and that I can still work on the causes I'm already committed to, I will agree to run.”

“So something midweek next week?”

“About that, yes.”

“You left the political arena because your son was ill with a heart condition. Is he all right now?”

“He's perfect now. Thank you. We had a lucky and happy outcome.”

He escaped, as he always did, before he said too much.

Haigh and the other bosses liked his sound bite.

His father liked it, too. The old man called him immediately upon seeing the news. “I knew it. I knew you'd be good at this.”

The compliment gratified him.

Most of the week he'd spent being a candidate. He had lunches and dinners on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday with people that … mattered. He began to understand in a way he never had before that he was important to a lot of people. He was a connector. He was the link that gave people links to others. He introduced a banker high up in PNC to a builder of hotels. He introduced the head of the August Wilson Center board to the head of the symphony board. He went to dinner with the head of Reed Smith. He talked to the county commissioner four times, listening to what the current problems were. He drove to Philly for a dinner and drove partway home that night, stopping on the way back in Harrisburg, where he stayed with Haigh again.

The stop, the reminder of his old patterns, was only one of a hundred times Cassie Price leapt in and out of his thoughts like a dolphin breaking the crest of the water. He'd think, “I'm focused, I'm working, I'm okay,” and there she'd be, looking at him. He could hear her voice. He could understand … what she was thinking. He could look into the blue eyes of the PNC man and see her eyes. It was awful. He kept working. He filled himself with work.

Last night, Friday evening, before he left the office for yet another dinner, this one at the Frick mansion, a thing some people had put together for him and in which he would be the center of a long chain of connections, his father came in unannounced to see him. The old man closed the door carefully and took a chair. Connolly was sitting at his desk at the time, on the phone, as always. He ended the call and faced his father across the desk.

“About this girl who died,” his father began slowly, “I know about you seeing her.”

“Evan.”

His father nodded once. “Who else knows?”

“You, Evan, me, and Simon.”

“Simon knows?”

“Yes.”

“Did he—”

“He quizzed me until I gave it up.”

“You know what I'm asking.”

“I don't know the answer. I asked him. He denied it.” Then he felt his whole body shake as if his heart literally did a somersault. He wanted to be a boy, to crawl to his father and rest a head against the old man's leg and be comforted by his father's hand on his head. “Should we press it? It means giving everything up.”

His father looked at him steadily. “Are you strong?”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“You were meant to be in high office. You look it, you sound it, you smell of it.”

“I'm not so sure anymore.”

“I've given this a lot of thought. There's being good. We are, you and me, pretty good men. Then there's the greater good. You have that dinner tonight?”

“Yes.”

“And you are innocent, I take it.”

“Yes.”

“Is it worth giving up? I think not.”

He had been shocked by his father. He would have sworn his father would choose the other way—come clean, personal honesty. But when he went to the dinner at the Frick, the way people kept referring to his father, the long years in the business of the law, the reputation for things done with class and dignity, he realized his father didn't want to spend his last days with his name smeared and the firm in disrepute.

Your father,
they said,
your brother
—always liked working with them. The casinos, the budget, the fund-raising hurdles, the other potential candidates, the invitations to golf, vacations, everything he talked about had the subtext of who knew whom and how A could get into a conversation with B. He chatted with men and women in beautiful shoes and he watched an imaginary Cassie dressed up and trying to fit in, trying to make her way into this crowd. At times, he thought his eyes teared up, but he couldn't tell if others could see that.

*   *   *

THE WAITRESSES AT
Bob Evans couldn't remember having seen Cassie Price. One of them sat down at the table with Colleen and Potocki, delicately moving aside their plates, which held unfinished bits of sausage and pancake under crumpled napkins. She stared hard at the picture. “What did she do? Prostitution? Fraud?”

“Neither. We simply have to trace her movements for a case.”

The woman shivered. “Oh. I get it, right. She got killed.”

“Yes.”

“I have a daughter, came out beautiful. Who knows why these things happen—you see good-looking parents with kids that got the worst of them and bad-looking parents with beauties…” The woman wasn't terrible looking at all, but she had a tired coarseness about her. She rubbed at her face in a manner a cosmetologist might have fainted at. Erasing the feeling of worry, Colleen thought. “They get something wrong with their brains when they come out too pretty. Mine thinks about things like whether models are parting their hair on the side or in the middle this year. She wants two hundred and fifty-nine dollars for jeans and seventy-five for a belt. She didn't get that way from me. It's because she can achieve a certain look.”

Because she can. Clinton said the reason for Monica Lewinsky was simply because he could.

“And she doesn't notice the hungry way men look at her. She really doesn't. She's too busy looking at herself.”

“Keep her locked in the house,” Potocki said. “‘Lock up your daughters.' If I had a daughter, it's how I'd feel, I know.”

“She's twenty-four.”

Ah. Dependent and probably not that gorgeous, Colleen thought.

The woman tapped the photo. “Some guy killed her because he couldn't have her, plain and simple.”

She and Potocki left the woeful waitress, who was no doubt codependent in the beauty game, to go to the motels of Breezewood. They hit it on the second try. A man wearing a turban did not recognize the photo and did not think he had registered Cassie Price himself, but he readily pulled up his ledger on-screen and began checking the dates Colleen gave him. “No, no,” he said to June and July dates. When he got to August, he brightened. “Yes, yes,” he said, “I have it here. Cassandra Price. She, yes, secured the room with a credit card. Let me see. She charged no incidentals and paid with cash. Does that help?”

“Yes, it helps enormously. Would you see if there is any room being charged at the same time to either of two names, Connolly or Simon.”

The hotel manager handed over a blank sheet of paper for her to write down the names she wanted him to check. He liked the work of it, looking these things up.

Colleen told Potocki, “Just in case they were covering their tracks that way. Probably not. You never know.”

“Nothing,” the man said. “Not the day before or the day after.”

She nodded. “Do you have a surveillance camera here?”

“I'm sorry. No. We cannot afford one yet. My friends tell me they break down and create one problem after another.”

Too bad, too bad.

They progressed to the other motels, working out what the pattern was. “They motel-hopped,” Colleen said. “Didn't want to be remembered.”

“He was careful,” Potocki said. “He could have booked a room in his name and stayed overnight, but he went home, late at night, probably. He was being careful. He had her make the reservation.”

“I hope he didn't make her pay for the room.”

“No doubt he gave her cash.”

“She had to pay for her own breakfast that day.”

“Yeah. That was early on. She probably didn't know how careful she had to be about her credit card. But you know, when you think of all the fancy places he could have afforded to stay—he could buy an apartment or a vacation home, but to see her, he was slumming. Motel bed, motel bathrooms. It's odd.”

“What do you make of it?”

“Something in his fantasy life.”

“Like what?”

“Like a god dipping down to kiss a mortal. He can't take her to the heavens where he'd be recognized. He plays at her hut.”

Potocki was thinking of Zeus's exploits. Zeus's wife, Hera, was unhappy and vengeful.

“Do you think what's-her-name, Monica Connolly, got wind of it and hired someone to— It looks like a passionate murder, it looks like a burglary, but it sciences out like a premeditated murder.”

“Totally agree.”

As they worked through the afternoon, they found two more stays registered to Cassandra Price, both paid in cash, no incidentals. Three places admitted to having surveillance cameras. Only one of them was a place she had stayed. At that place, the tapes for July had been erased and rerecorded, so it was no good, but they had enough evidence to get the pattern.

“Enough for today,” Potocki said. “Let's go home. We can establish the rest of the pattern with the phone calls.” It was going to take lots more paperwork to pinpoint the locations of the callers when the calls were made, but that could be done, and Christie was no doubt already on phase two.

“Do you realize we have not one iota of evidence that it was actually Connolly?”

“Boss will find out who paid for the phone.”

“She probably paid for it. She paid for it, she called herself, she went to a motel. It's sounding like masturbation.”

Potocki laughed. “Don't knock it. It got me through a lot of bad times.”

“I say nothing.”

Potocki laughed again. They got into his car and started for Pittsburgh.

After they'd been back on the road for thirty miles or so, Potocki said, “I keep asking myself what this is like. Is this Clinton-Lewinsky, just a little fun with a cigar but the girl talks too much; is this Gary Hart—who can remember him?”

“Barely.”

“Is this John Edwards, all Mr. Clean, but dumb as dirt when it comes to choosing a reliable mistress; is this Mark Sanford, hopelessly in love and in need of the loved one; is this Vitter or Spitzer, paying for it and happily because the transaction is needed for the kick; is this Ensign, who is just playing chess with people: ‘I'll take this piece, you can have that'?”

“Most of them were already in office, so they had a throne to defend. Connolly is seeking office. Closer to Edwards.”

Potocki appeared to think about this, nodded, squinting into the sun.

“You know who you forgot?”

“Tons of politicians.”

“Yes, but what about Gary Condit? The girl died. She was killed violently. And he was blamed because she loved him and wanted him. All that time, I figured it this way: He tells somebody, a brother, an associate, somebody, ‘Man, I'm in too deep. She's putting a lot of pressure on me.' And the associate quietly goes off to take care of it. I thought that's what happened. Now it turns out it's some Salvadoran immigrant—the Cal Hathaway solution, somebody out of the blue. The Salvadoran had been attacking women in that same park.”

“The police look real bad in that one. They concentrated on Condit and missed the other,” he said.

“We had guys who concentrated on Cal and missed the office affair.”

“So we're somewhere … between Gary Condit and John Edwards and Mark Sanford—for explanations.”

“Which feels like nowhere.”