Washington Deceased (10 page)

“The Public Information Officer? If I want a State Department press release I'll look in Tom Wicker's column.”

“Just a formality. New policy. I'll be happy to talk to you, I just don't want anyone to think I'm cutting corners.”

“Heaven forbid. Very well. You'll have your letter Monday morning if I have to type it myself.”

“Thank you,” Charles Blair said. “Have a good lunch.”

Michaelson hung up the phone and looked out his window at Massachusetts Avenue.

“I'll be damned,” he said softly to himself.

Chapter Fifteen

“I refuse to believe that you are seriously asking me to do this,” Marjorie Randolph said to Michaelson.

“I know that it's unreasonable, but….”

“No, it's not
unreasonable
. Asking me to get the President to drop by for coffee and doughnuts in the morning would be unreasonable. Asking me to persuade a specific person in Washington, D.C., to accept a dinner invitation on slightly over twenty-four hours notice is preposterous.”

“I'm only asking you to try.”

“That's asking quite a lot.”

“Washington is full of people who can do the difficult,” Michaelson said. “Only you can accomplish the impossible.”

“Your charm is going to get you into serious trouble one day.”

“It already has. More than once. Please tell me that you'll do it.”

“I'll try. I'll put in a good effort and I'll fail and then I'll remind you of what I said.”

“Thank you.”

“Only for you.”

“By the way: has Wendy Gardner come by yet?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. She's been here for at least fifteen minutes. You'll find her over in Foreign Affairs.”

“Thank you again.”

Foreign Affairs at Cavalier Books consisted of two six-shelf sections of paperbacks with titles like
Love's Barbaric Passion
, featuring on their covers drawings of young women with recently torn dresses and of men who, though supposedly hailing from no later than the eighteenth century and frequently from much earlier, looked like they'd just come from a delt-toning session on the Nautilus.

Michaelson found Wendy Gardner perusing the covers of these books, as if she might actually be thinking not only of buying one but of selecting it on something other than a random basis.

“Good afternoon,” Michaelson said to Wendy as he approached. “I think that I've had a productive morning.”

“Hello,” she responded with that rockbottom, minimum level of sullen civility that women use with men when they want to let them know that they're furious with them. “I wish I could say the same thing.”

“I detect a note of displeasure.”

“Well, after all, you're an experienced diplomat.”

“Did the phone-number-and-address project turn out to be more of a problem than I'd caused you to expect?”

“No.” Wendy handed Michaelson the chart she had made summarizing the results of her efforts. “Unless you call wasting all morning on busywork a problem.”

Michaelson glanced over the chart. Most of the numbers were for residences. A handful were for businesses. Most of those Wendy had talked to had said that no one named Tony could be reached at the number she'd dialed. Two had connected her to Tonies who were alive and well and who professed mystification at the reference to Martinelli. Three had hung up without comment and two she had never reached.

“I see,” he said. “You've concluded that I sent you on a fool's errand.”

“Well tell me something,” Wendy rejoined. “Do you see anything terribly enlightening on that list?”

“It doesn't leap out at me.”

“You mean you're not going to pretend that you have some colleagues at the CIA who can run that information through a computer and come up with some kind of brilliant new lead for us?”

“My former colleagues are all at the State Department. The CIA is a different group of chaps altogether. Always sitting on their briefcases when they're having lunch and that sort of thing.”

“We don't know a single thing now that we didn't know yesterday afternoon. Not from this chart anyway. We don't even know that 3096 is part of a phone number, and even if it is we don't have any way to be sure that it's a Washington-area number instead of Miami or Chicago or Detroit or anyplace else.”

“Excuse me,” Marjorie called to them from an aisle-and-a-half away. “Why don't you two see if you can argue a little more loudly? There are a couple of people in Chevy Chase who can't hear you.”

“She's right,” Michaelson said to Wendy. “We are abusing Marjorie's ample hospitality. Why don't we go for a walk?”

“Where?” Wendy demanded.

“Well, how about down to the mall between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial and back?”

This was more walking than Wendy had done at one time since she'd gotten her driver's license, but she couldn't bring herself to tell someone three times her age that it sounded like too much for her. She followed him out of Cavalier Books and began strolling down Connecticut Avenue with him.

“I'm not sure the information you've gathered is as useless as you believe,” Michaelson said after they had crossed Massachusetts. “It would have been nice if someone at one of those numbers had said something suggestive of a connection with Tony Martinelli, but the fact that no one did may only mean that someone is being very careful—something you'd expect of a professional criminal.”

“I'll be more than a little surprised if any hardened criminals turn up at Silver Spring Laundry and Dry Cleaning.”

“I'll grant you that the addresses seem anodyne. But that's not conclusive either. A small business or a private residence can still be the scene of drug sales or numbers running or a variety of other criminal enterprises that could well have some bearing on Martinelli's death.”

“How do you propose we find out about these particular addresses?”

“I can't say that I've given the matter a lot of thought. Perhaps we should put that question on hold while we review what I've been able to find out. Maybe an answer will suggest itself.”

“Okay,” Wendy said dubiously.

Michaelson described his conversation at the Justice Department. Wendy listened with manifest and growing impatience, and then offered him a you-mean-that's-it? expression when he was finished.

“In other words, they told you nothing.”

“Next to nothing, that's correct.”

“I thought you told me your morning was productive. You didn't learn a thing.”

“On the contrary, I learned a great deal. You can learn things without having people tell them to you, you know.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, for example: There's an investigation under way into something that your father might plausibly know something about, and that's why the U.S. Attorney back home made the approach that he did.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because the high mucky muck that I was talking to at Justice went out of his way to convince me that, although word of a criminal investigation could theoretically be leaked by his division, it probably hadn't happened in this case.”

“How do you get from there to the conclusion you just handed me?”

“If there were no investigation, then there would have been nothing to leak and he could confidently have guaranteed me that no leak of any such matter had come from any of his people. Since he hedged his bet, there must have been some risk that such a leak had in fact occurred. Therefore, there must have been something that could have been leaked. Hence, there must be an investigation going on.”

“Why would he care so much about your opinion that he'd go to that kind of trouble to cover his ass—er, fanny?”

“I doubt it was any trouble at all. I imagine it's second nature to him. But as to why he should care, the only answer I can think of is the inspector general hypothesis.”

“Do you really think that theory makes any sense?” Wendy asked.

“I'd certainly have my doubts if it weren't for one thing.”

“What's that?”

“I can't think of any other reason why he would have led me by the hand to the court record in Martinelli's case.”

“Tell me why you think he did that, and why that means that you're the inspector general.”

“All right. He did it because he wants to be sure he has it both ways. If I really have some secret but powerful mandate, then he comes across as being savvy and reasonably cooperative. If I don't and somebody who does looks into this whole thing later on, then the paper record will show that he revealed absolutely nothing to me beyond what I had a statutory right to see.”

“Then why didn't he let you copy the file?”

“Because if I really were the inspector general, I'd be able to retrieve the entire contents of the file myself, very quickly, once I knew there was something in it worth looking for. If I turned out not to be the inspector general, then he wouldn't have appeared to have been unduly accommodating to me. Fortunately from our standpoint, unfortunately from his, I have a rather good memory.”

“All right,” Wendy said. She pronounced the words with a long exhalation, as if she were exhausted by the effort of listening to Michaelson.

They had reached the front of Lafayette Park, directly across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. Beside the west wing, the old Executive Office Building with its improbable but majestic tiers of pillars and casements loomed in government-issue grayish-brown. Beside the east wing, a long line of tourists patiently waited for admission to their chief executive's residence, while Masterpiece Theatre voices on tape recordings told them over loudspeakers what they'd see on the inside.

Michaelson and Wendy crossed Pennsylvania and walked past the east side of America's most famous address. The Washington Monument loomed only a few hundred yards and one very busy street beyond them. They walked toward it.

“All right,” Wendy said again after they had crossed Constitution and begun walking down the mall, “tell me what else you learned.”

Michaelson told her about his five phone conversations with the people at State.

“So you think you might learn something when you talk to them next week?” she asked when he was finished.

“It's an outside possibility, I suppose. Actually, I think that I've already learned the thing I'd hoped to learn by making the calls.”

“Namely—what?”

“That Charles Blair leaked some rather sensitive information to the Department of Justice.”

“What makes you think it was Blair?”

“A very fair question. Call it oblique inference. He was the only one of the five people I talked to who tried to steer me to one of his colleagues. And he was the only one to insist that I generate a letter documenting our talk and our appointment.”

Wendy stared at him.

“You don't seem convinced,” he said. “I can't really say I blame you. It's the best I can do.”

“It's all oblique inference,” Wendy said, sighing. “It reminds me of Psych 10.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Last term I took the introductory course in Psychology. The morning of the first class, one guy came in about five minutes late. The grad ass (this is what undergraduates call graduate assistants) who was teaching the class says, ‘Five minutes late—obviously suffering from avoidance neurosis.' So the guy says that next class he'll come five minutes early. ‘That would be anxiety neurosis,' the grad ass says. So then this other kid says, ‘What about me? I was here exactly on time.' And the grad ass says, ‘Obsessive-compulsive. You see, you all have a neurosis. It's just a question of which one.' ”

“I'm not sure I altogether grasp the application of this anecdote to the problem before us.”

“The point is, the grad ass had the rules set up so that there was no way for him to be wrong. No matter what you did, he could pin a neurosis on you.”

“I see. And you're saying.….”

“I'm saying it's the same thing here. If somebody spills his guts to you, then that proves that he's telling you what he knows because he thinks you're the inspector general. On the other hand, if some guy practically totally stonewalls you and just gives you little hints to be polite, that proves that there's a lot of great information somewhere between the lines of what he said, and he dropped the hints because he's afraid you might be the inspector general. Finally, if a bunch of people tell me absolutely nothing, that proves that one of them might have something to hide. So according to you, no matter what results your suggested investigations produce, we must be on the right track.”

“You're right.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“I believe it was Karl Popper who contended that no discipline could qualify as a science unless its hypotheses were subject to refutation by the results of empirical observation. If whatever theory you have is set up in such a way that no matter what happens it's consistent with that theory, then it's not a scientific theory.”

“I guess that's kind of what I was saying.”

“Unfortunately, no one's come up with a scientific theory that satisfactorily deals with the winks and nudges and raised eyebrows that pass for communication in Washington. All I can tell you is, I've been at this for a long time. I've been right a lot more often than I've been wrong. My best judgment is that the conclusions I've drawn so far are correct.”

“Have you considered the possibility that you've been at it too long?” Wendy demanded.

“Yes, that thought has crossed my mind once or twice.”

“I mean, it seems to me that there's a possibility that, you know, we haven't even considered yet.”

“And what possibility is that?”

“The possibility that dad does know something—something that could be very damaging to powerful people in the government.”

“Or outside it,” Michaelson nodded.

“And that Martinelli was assigned to Honor Cottage B-4 because his job was to shut my father up.”

“By killing him, you mean.”

“That's right.”

“I have considered that theory, but I rejected it as too improbable to warrant diversion of any of the scarce investigative resources we have at our command. It's an interesting premise for the kind of people who write novels and aren't encumbered by any knowledge of the way government actually works, but it's not very high on the scale of real world possibilities.”