Murder on Capitol Hill (28 page)

They waited for the ritual of his eminence Jason DeFlaunce stepping onto the stage to announce the evening’s program was about to begin. Instead, it was Veronica Caldwell who stepped through the curtains. Most in the audience immediately recognized her, and spontaneous applause rippled throughout the auditorium. Veronica waited for it to die down, then said, “I’m so delighted to be here this evening to introduce
the program. I’m honored to be a member of the United States Senate but this center and the arts in America, particularly in Washington, have always been close to my heart. Like religion, they’ve sustained me in our family’s tragedy. I was determined to be here tonight to renew my old involvement in what this center stands for. I assure you that nothing short of a declaration of war would have kept me from it.”

Veronica stepped back through the curtains. The houselights went down. The curtain opened and the two musicians stepped center stage. Lydia nervously squeezed the oversized handbag on her lap, feeling the contours of the videotape through the leather. Clarence had handed over to her both the tape and Christa’s letter when he’d picked her up, in spite of his conviction that they would be safer at his apartment. Lydia, though, had insisted he give them to her, then shoved them into her bag.

Somehow she felt that more than one show was about to begin…

***

Well, at least her cats were okay, Christa thought when she got back to her apartment. People who said that cats were aloof and didn’t miss human contact were crazy. Both animals came to her, rubbed against her legs and nuzzled their heads against her hands. She couldn’t stay long. Quentin would be returning to Washington, probably that evening, and would surely come looking for her.

She looked up the number and dialed the Caldwell Performing Arts Center. After finding out that the performance was going on, she finally persuaded the woman who answered that there was an emergency
and she must find Lydia James and bring her to the phone. Thanks to Lydia’s recent publicity, the woman could recognize her and bring her to the phone.

“Hello, this is Lydia James. Who is this? What’s the—?”

“Christa Jones—”

“Oh, well… I’m glad to hear from
you
. Are you all right? Are you here in Washington?”

“Yes, I am… Miss James, I must see you.”

“All right. When?”

“Right now. Please.”

“I’ll leave immediately and meet you anywhere you say.”

Christa considered asking Lydia to come to her apartment but was afraid to stay there any longer. “Meet me at Luigi’s.”

“On Nineteenth Street, Northwest?”

“Yes.”

“I’m on my way.”

Lydia hurried back into the darkened theater and told Clarence she was leaving to meet Christa at famous Luigi’s.

Clarence pulled her up from her seat and led her to the lobby.

“Can’t you meet her
after
the concert? I’ll come with you—”

Lydia shook her head. “I promised her I’d be there right away. I’ve got to go
now
, Clarence.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No, please. If I don’t show up alone she might panic, even run. Stay for the rest of the concert, then go home. I promise I’ll call you the moment I can. Please, Clarence, thanks for understanding—”

“Look, damn it, I’m not worried about Christa Jones, I’m worried about
you
.”

She kissed his cheek. “I’ll call you soon.”

As Clarence reluctantly went back into the auditorium and Lydia headed for the exit door, Veronica Caldwell, who’d been observing them from an alcove at the far end of the lobby, quickly went to a phone located in the coatroom.

Joanne Marshall, Cale’s secretary, answered her call. “This is Senator Veronica Caldwell. I’d like to speak to my son.”

“He’s sleeping—”

“Wake him.”

Joanne went to Cale’s bedroom and shook his bare shoulder. “Wake up, Cale. Your mother’s on the phone.”

“Tell her I’ll call back,” he said sleepily.

“Cale, she sounds angry. Please talk to her.”

He sat up in bed, shook the sleep from his head and reached for the phone on the night table. “Mother?”

“Yes.”

He told Joanne to hang up the living room extension. After Veronica heard her do so, she said, “Come to the center, Cale, right away.”

“Mother, I’m in bed, I—”

“Cale, get here. Twenty minutes.”

***

John Conegli watched Lydia exit the Caldwell Center. He expected her to go directly to her car, but instead she went to the first in a line of waiting cabs, which quickly pulled away from the curb. Conegli maneuvered his car out of the parking lot and followed
her cab at a safe distance until it pulled up in front of Luigi’s restaurant. He watched Lydia pay the driver and go quickly into the restaurant.

Pretty strange, he thought. She comes to a theater with her boyfriend, runs out on him, grabs a cab and goes to an Italian joint.

Since Lydia had no idea who he was, he could safely enter the restaurant and get a look at who she was meeting. Besides, he was also hungry.

Both the upstairs and downstairs rooms at Luigi’s were near capacity. Conegli spotted Lydia seated at a table at the extreme rear of the downstairs room. She was facing the door. Across from her was another woman… wait, he recognized her… sometimes you could get lucky… he checked their table for the package, saw nothing. Both women he noted, had purses large enough to hold a package.

Conegli was about to take a table too far from Lydia’s to overhear the conversation when a couple at a table next to hers paid their check and got up. Luck comes in twos, once in a blue moon, he thought.

He quickly moved to it, then ordered a black olive and anchovy pizza and a glass of red wine.

Lydia and Christa took passing note of Conegli as he sat down next to them, then returned to resume what appeared a heavy conversation. Conegli leaned to his left, but even this close the general noise in the restaurant made it impossible for him to hear more than snatches of conversation. Well, it was better than nothing. And it sure beat sitting in a car waiting for them to come out. The zesty smell of Italian food tickled his nostrils. He sipped his wine, and made a
mental note to make sure the waitress gave him a blank receipt so that he could put in a hefty dinner tab for Mr. Francis Jewel.

***

“I still don’t understand,” Lydia said to Christa. They’d ordered a carafe of white wine.

“It all fits together, Miss James—”

“Please call me Lydia.”

“All right… Well, you asked about the tape you saw of Quentin and Senator Caldwell. I remember the day you came to the station to screen it. You said that there were things that bothered you about it.”

“That’s right. One was that Senator Caldwell fiddled with a missing button on his shirt. It seemed so unlike him to make a public appearance without being perfectly groomed. I asked his wife about it and she assured me that he’d worn a brand-new shirt that day.”

“I was aware of it too, but
I
knew why the button was missing. Just before the taping Senator Caldwell and Quentin had an awful row… Quentin actually grabbed the senator by his shirt collar and that’s when the button popped off.”

“What could have caused such an argument?”

Christa glanced at Conegli, who casually looked away and focused on his wine. She leaned across the table. “Jimmye McNab.”

“What about her?” Lydia asked.

“Quentin was insanely jealous over Senator Caldwell’s affair with Jimmye.”

“Then it was true,” Lydia said. “I’d heard rumors that the senator had been intimate with her but I never believed them. After all, he raised her as a daughter—”

“Except she wasn’t really his daughter… anyway, the important thing is that Quentin was crazy in love with Jimmye, always had been. When he found out she was pregnant with Senator Caldwell’s child, he became wild… I’d never seen him so—”

“
Senator Caldwell’s child?
Are you sure it wasn’t his son’s, Mark Adam’s?”

Christa shook her head, and thought back to that night when Hughes had told her that Jimmye was pregnant with Senator Caldwell’s child. She’d replayed it over and over to herself, remembering what they’d said to each other, the tears, the shouts of rage, the lovemaking, especially the lovemaking, that was remarkably tender compared to what it usually was…

“He’s the lowest,” Hughes had said about Caldwell. “He was her father, at least he raised her as a daughter, and he took advantage of her.” The irony of Hughes taking a moral tone escaped him, and was not something that Christa could mention.

Christa
had
wanted to point out Jimmye’s less than sterling qualities, but thought better of that, too. She and Hughes had sat on the couch in his apartment, actually a moonstruck, outraged, unrequited lover. Christa welcomed his unaccustomed vulnerability… for her it meant she might finally be
needed
.

“I told her to get an abortion,” Hughes had said, “but she laughed. She actually laughed, right in my face. She told me that the baby was worth more than the tape had ever been.”

It was the first time Christa had heard of the videotape, and she asked him about it. Later that night they drove to WCAP and he screened the tape for her.
When it was over, he told her to forget about it and said he was going to put it away for safekeeping.

They returned to his apartment and went to bed, where for the first time in her experience rough-tough Quentin Hughes actually broke down and cried and allowed her to comfort him as she made love to him.

In the morning while she was making breakfast, Hughes also happened to mention that Senator Caldwell had cancer. Jimmye had told him. When Christa made some appropriate response Hughes shook his head, said he didn’t deserve a respectable natural death…

Christa looked now at Lydia through eyes that were misted over. “I felt then that Quentin would kill Senator Caldwell.”

Lydia said: “But it was Jimmye who was murdered right after she became pregnant, not Caldwell.”

“I know… Quentin called Jimmye and made a date to see her. They weren’t lovers anymore, of course, but he’d never gotten over her. I knew they were meeting because I overheard his telephone call to her. And that was the night she was murdered. He’d worked in the office until early evening, then left to meet her. He came back and did the show, and it was in the middle of it that a bulletin came over the UPI wire that she’d been found murdered—”

“You
knew
he’d met her the night of her murder, and never told anyone about it?”

Christa looked down, closed her eyes and bit her upper lip. “No, I told no one. I couldn’t be sure he’d killed her. After all, the fact that he met her didn’t absolutely mean that he’d murdered her—”

“Did you ask him about it?”

“No… if I had he would have been furious. I learned a long time ago that making Quentin angry only gave him an excuse to get rid of you. I know, I know, I should have left then, but I guess my obsession with him was almost a match for his with Jimmye.”

Lydia wanted to shake Christa, but at the same time felt for her. She’d obviously lived in constant fear that Hughes would dismiss her, as he’d done with so many other women in his life, and couldn’t stand it when one did it to him. Lydia resisted the urge to reach across the table and touch her in a gesture of sympathy.

“But, Christa, you stayed with Hughes even though you suspected, more than suspected, that he might have murdered someone.”

“I know it doesn’t say very much for me, Lydia, but like I said, I’ve been addicted to him. I guess it started the day I met him in Des Moines. To me… and remember where I was coming from… he was
the
most exciting man, the man for me. Just being with him made me feel special, if you can understand that. He seemed to
know
so much, appeared so at ease in every situation, which God knows was the opposite of me. But there was more than the professional success that rubbed off on me, made me feel better about myself… Believe it or not, at that time there was a side of him that was gentle, a side he kept hidden from almost everybody… Well, I saw it. He could even make me laugh, Lydia. I think I know him… knew him… better than any other person on earth, certainly better than any other woman. I’ve spent most of my life trying to make him see that I
was the
only
woman for him. I decided years ago that I’d do anything, take anything to stay close to him. I kept hoping the time would come when he’d feel the same way I did and—”

“Why now, then? What made you walk away from him now?”

A weary smile crossed her lips. “I didn’t walk away, Lydia. He did.”

“I’m sorry, Christa…” But what, she thought, about Christa’s hinting on the phone before their meeting at the bus station that she had something important to say about the senator’s murder. “Christa, what did Jimmye’s death have to do with the later Caldwell killing?”

“I think Quentin finally killed Senator Caldwell just like he killed Jimmye McNab.”

“Why?”

“My God, I told you… he’d been Jimmye’s lover, made her pregnant…”

Lydia’s attention was diverted by John Conegli, who’d been served his pizza, but who’d allowed it to cool. Now he was leaning noticeably far to the left. Lydia’s annoyed look made him quickly pick up a slice of the pie and look away.

“I think we should go someplace else,” Lydia told Christa.

“I think you’re right… you have the envelope I gave you?”

Lydia flushed. She drew a deep breath and said, “I opened it, Christa, right after you left, and I opened the locker and took the videotape.”

“Oh… then you’ve seen it?”

“No. I wanted to wait for you to come back to do
that.” It was only a partial truth but Lydia felt it was justified. She wasn’t, though, sure how to read the expression on Christa’s face. “Are you angry at me?”

Christa shook her head. “I needed time to think. No more, not after New York… let’s go to the station, I can play it for you there.”

“Is that a good idea? You’ve told me that Quentin attacked you in New York, that you were afraid for your life. Going to WCAP will be walking into his hands, won’t it?”