The President's Henchman (23 page)

McGill had a government limo to take him to O’Hare. As a treat, he brought his kids back to their mother’s house in it. Carolyn was out front talking with a neighbor when the stretch Cadillac pulled up. The kids piled out, giggling, as Caitie pretended to be a movie star arriving at her premiere. They gave McGill hugs and kisses and ran into the house. He waved to his ex.

“Things getting any better?” he asked.

“I showed Lars what I could do,” Carolyn answered. “How good I am.”

At her marksmanship, McGill presumed.

“Was he impressed?”

She nodded, smiling.

“You’ll have to show me, too,” McGill said.

“Next time you’re in town.”

The neighbor gave both of them strange looks, and McGill departed.

He had Deke sitting up front with Leo. The privacy screen was raised. He picked up the phone and called Sweetie at the P Street office of McGill Investigations, Inc.

“We’re back on the Chana Lochlan case,” he told her.

That took Sweetie by surprise. “She changed her mind?”

“Patti asked me to keep on it. She wants to know more about Ms. Lochlan. She thinks our former client might exercise too much for her own good.”

“Is that possible?” Sweetie asked.

“It is if you’re doing it for vanity.”

“Well, sure, that’d make it sinful.”

“Not like you or me, doing it for fitness or to mortify the flesh.”

“The sin is in the thought not the deed,” Sweetie instructed.

“So how full of shit are we?”

“Saint Peter’s sure to let us know,” Sweetie said with a laugh.

“Anyway, it’s time for us to talk with as many of Chana’s old boyfriends as possible. I’m going to start with number one, her old college sweetheart out in California. Why don’t you speak with the ones who are still around D.C.? We’ll compare notes when I get back.”

“Okay,” Sweetie said. “You think maybe it’d be worth a stop in Ohio on the way back, see if you can catch up with her father?”

McGill considered the idea.

“Patti wants us to keep all this quiet. Talking to her dad, that’d likely get back to her.”

“Yeah, but he’d probably know things nobody else would.”

“Let me see how I feel after I talk to the boyfriend. I’ll take it from there.”

Sweetie was pleased when McGill told her he’d had a good weekend with his kids.

“I think I’ve got a big kid of my own on my hands,” she said, telling him about Putnam Shady and his crack about spankings. “Just what I need living upstairs, a kinky lawyer.”

“Move if the guy’s creeping you out.”

Not that Sweetie creeped out easily. She said, “I can handle him. If he wants some dominatrix action, I’ll make him reenact the Stations of the Cross.”

McGill laughed. He asked Sweetie to fax the list of Chana’s lovers to the Air Force jet he’d be using. “After my limo drops me off. And my bodyguard makes sure all is well.”

Sweetie said, “You’re doing okay for an old Chicago copper, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” McGill said. “Now if we only had a paying client or two.”

McGill’s jet took off without having to wait in line for other departing traffic. The steward, who McGill had just learned was named Lieutenant Bartholomew Burley, brought McGill his requested White House ice tea as the Gulfstream leveled out at cruising altitude, heading for San Jose.

“Thank you,” McGill told him.

“You’re welcome, sir.”

“You and the guys in the cockpit don’t mind chauffeuring a civilian around?”

“We’re all combat veterans, sir. A little light duty is fine with us.”

The lieutenant wore the grin of someone with a secret as he went forward. McGill waved Deke over, recounted the exchange, and asked what Burley was keeping from him.

“He was joking about light duty,” Deke said in a quiet voice.

“So what’s the joke?”

“The crew has been trained in light arms, hand-to-hand, and first aid.”

“Just in case we run into any trouble you and Leo and I can’t handle.”

“Always good to have strength in numbers,” Deke responded. “Also, they all know how to make parachute jumps — with you harnessed to any one of them.”

“Huh,” McGill said.

The surprises just kept on coming.

McGill thought Graham Keough looked like a poet. All he needed was a big floppy hat with a feather. He had long dark hair and sensitive gray eyes. He worked in a green-glass tower in Silicon Valley, the Manager of All Things Creative for a computer gaming company called MindGames.

McGill had called him during the flight to California. When Graham heard what McGill wanted, he’d told him he’d clear his schedule to talk with him. McGill’s impression, though, was that Graham wanted to
hear
from him. About Chana. The old flame still burned. Graham was waiting for him and Deke in the company’s reception area. Pacing. He wasn’t going to waste time having his guests escorted back to his office.

Only the Manager of All Things Creative didn’t have an office. Nobody at MindGames did. The entire work force, thirty or so people mostly under thirty years old, all too cool to be impressed by McGill, worked in an open floor plan. There were no cubicles either, at least in a formal sense. Desks were separated from one another by groups of plantings, abstract sculptures, life-size cutouts of comic-book characters. Some of the spaces were bigger, some smaller, some tiny.

Graham saw McGill and Deke looking around. “We allot space for working areas according to the point standings in a new game we’re beta testing. We move things around every Friday afternoon.”

“Anybody ever lose all his space?” McGill wanted to know.

“One guy.”

“He get fired?” Deke asked.

“No, he’s the CEO. He has to telecommute until he can displace someone else.”

Graham opened a door to a large room.

“Conference room,” he said. “Only place besides the johns that has a door.”

Deke stepped inside, checked it out.

After the room had been given the Secret Service stamp of approval, Deke went to wait outside, closing the door behind him. Graham gestured McGill to the seat at the head of the conference table. He took the one to the right of it instead. Graham sat opposite him.

“How can I be of help?” he asked.

McGill told him the whole thing. Chana coming to him, the phone call, the thong, and getting fired. Graham Keough’s frown got progressively deeper.

“If you’ve been fired,” he asked, “what are you doing here, talking to me?”

“Ms. Lochlan finds herself in regular proximity to the president.”

All the color drained from Graham’s face.

“No, no, no,” he said. “Chana would never —”

“The president is also my wife,” McGill reminded him. “Would you take a chance?”

McGill’s question started Graham Keough thinking.

“I’ve read about you, Mr. McGill. You’re a
private
investigator. Which I think is pretty cool for the president’s husband. But that means you’re doing this, what, off the books?”

“Discreetly. Which is all to Ms. Lochlan’s advantage. So I hope you’ll treat this as a confidential meeting. Have you had any contact with Chana lately?”

Graham shook his head. “Only when I watch TV. Only in my dreams.”

“She was hard to get over?”

“Try impossible.” Graham was quiet for a moment, trying to decide how much to reveal. McGill, the ex-cop, had seen such calculations many times before. “After I left Chana —”

“You left her?” McGill interrupted.

“I had to. I’ll get to that. After I left her, I became a real grind. Focused on nothing but schoolwork. Graduated second in my undergraduate class, first in grad school. When I finally came up for air, I dated every girl I could, tried to drown myself in female attention. That left me feeling like a shit, so I started being very selective about whom I’d date. That made me feel like an elitist jerk, and it was futile because I knew what I was doing. I was measuring the women I dated against Chana, and since none of them was her, none of them could ever measure up.”

Graham Keough sighed deeply, lapsed into silence.

After a moment, McGill asked, “And what’s the plan now?”

The tech wizard shrugged. “Now, I leave it to fate. If there’s a woman who’ll make me forget Chana, we’ll meet. She’ll find me. I hope.”

“So you’ve never tried to get back in touch with Chana?”

“No. I’ve thought about it, of course. But it just seemed too creepy. A desperate-guy thing. I’ve managed to hold myself above that.”

McGill nodded. He believed the younger man.

“So why did you break up with Chana?”

“Do you know anything about her mother?” Graham asked.

McGill shook his head.

“Marianne Westerly was the mother from hell,” Graham Keough said. “I’m a peaceful guy, but there were times I wanted to fly across the country and do terrible things to her.” He laughed. “There are
still
times I feel like that.”

“What was so bad about her?” McGill asked.

“Well, let’s see. She was a professor, you know that?”

McGill nodded. “That much I’ve heard. Women’s studies.”

“Right.
Crazy
women’s studies. I’m all for individual liberation. But some of Professor Westerly’s ideas went way beyond that.”

McGill nodded empathetically and kept listening closely.

“While Chana was in her freshman year at Westwood, finding out who she was and making me happier than I’d ever been, good old Mom came up with a fascinating topic for her class to sink their teeth into: Should Professor Westerly divorce her husband of twenty-some years?”

McGill frowned. “Hypothetically, you mean.”

Graham shook his head. “Dead serious. The class studied the history of marriage, looked at how women traditionally got the subservient role, discussed whether any legal union between a man and woman could be equitable, and applied their findings specifically to Chana’s parents. In the end, it was unanimously decided that Ms. Westerly had no choice but to divorce her husband.”

McGill was at a loss for words.

“Yeah. It boggles the mind,” Graham continued. “But the real kicker is that Chana didn’t know anything about it until she got home after her freshman year. Mom had made her divorce a class project but hadn’t said a word about it to her own daughter.”

“And how did Chana take the news?” McGill asked.

“Not well. You want something to drink? This could take a while.”

McGill sipped a chilled green-tea-and-honey concoction that was good enough for him to decide to add to the White House menu.

“She adored her dad,” Graham told McGill. “Still does, I imagine. Funny thing was, Professor Lochlan was cool about his wife divorcing him. They still intended to live together; they just wouldn’t be married anymore. Pretty ’60s idea, if you ask me. But when Chana came home and didn’t get with the program, Mom started in on her. Called Chana a
traditionalist.
A
baseball player.
Said that might have been acceptable if Chana was butch but, no, she had to be straight, too. Probably hoped to make some empty-headed surfer a good little Valley Girl wife.”

“Her parents didn’t know about you?” McGill asked.

“No.”

An omission that still hurt, McGill could see. “So what happened?”

“Didn’t take long for Professor Lochlan to see he’d have to make a choice. Going along with his wife’s lunacy was one thing, but losing his only daughter was another. And since he and Mom were already divorced anyway, he told her to hit the bricks.”

For the first time since he started telling the story, Graham cracked a smile.

“What’s funny?” McGill asked.

“Well, being a liberated woman, Mom had refused to take any alimony in the divorce. I think that point got decided in class, too. So when Professor Lochlan kicked her out — the house was in his name — she was left with her clothes and about a buck ninety-eight in the bank, I heard. She could have gone back to court, of course, but then what would she tell her students?”

McGill enjoyed the irony but wanted to pick up on another point.

“Do you know about Nanette?” he asked.

“Chana’s sister. She died before Chana was born.”

McGill nodded. “So Professor Lochlan had already lost a daughter; it was understandable he didn’t want to lose another. But why didn’t Professor Westerly feel the same way?”

“Maybe Mom felt Chana didn’t measure up to Nan. Or what she fantasized Nan would have become since the poor kid died so young.”

Graham excused himself for a moment. Nature calling.

McGill thought it was the younger man’s heart that was demanding a respite.