Where Nobody Dies (28 page)

I showed him the contents of Art Lucenti's file from Linda's papers. He looked it over, then whistled. “Guy must be shitting in his pants,” Button remarked, “since we got Lessek and Bellfield. He's just waiting for the other shoe to drop. And now,” he added cheerfully, “that you've seen fit to tell me about this here phone call, I'd best go drop a shoe on the honorable congressman.”

“Wait a minute.” I held up a restraining hand. “Let me go with you.” I tried to make it sound like a request instead of a plea.

Button raised his eyebrows to the ceiling. “Why?” he asked.

The answer I gave him was true if not complete. “Because I feel guilty,” I said. “Dawn Ritchie didn't tell me about that phone call so I could come running to you with it. She meant it to be a secret. I feel responsible. If Lucenti isn't thoroughly checked out—”

Button's face was impassive, his voice cold. “Are you going to accuse me of giving him a break because of who he is?”

“No,” I said, and meant it. “But you've got an indicted suspect in the can already. It wouldn't be hard to let Lucenti skate out of this with a little fancy footwork.”

“You're kind of messing up your metaphors there, Counselor,” Button grinned. “But the answer's no. This is official police business—no kibitzers.”

“I might remind you,” I pointed out, my voice dropping to a chilly tone, “that I didn't have to tell you anything. I could have confronted Lucenti on my own and not—”

“So why didn't you?” Button challenged. “And don't try to convince me you suddenly saw your civic duty, because I won't believe—”

“Oh, come off it, Detective,” I interrupted. “How the hell could I go waltzing into Lucenti's headquarters demanding that people tell me their innermost secrets in strictest confidence when I've just been plastered all over the media as the woman who got Todd Lessek on tape? Who'd talk to me? I'm a walking Abscam, thanks to you.”

Button eyed me speculatively, his brow creased with thought. “You know,” he said at last, “that's not a bad idea. Not bad at all.”

“What's not bad?” Then a horrible thought struck me. “Oh, no,” I protested, “you're not going to wire me for sound again, are you? That tape itches like hell.”

Button smiled sweetly. “Only when you sweat,” he pointed out.

“A lady never sweats,” I countered absently.

“I know. I had a grandmother too.” He leaned his backside against his desk and smiled at me in a fatherly fashion I found thoroughly repellent. “No, what I'm thinking is this. Congressman Lucenti's up to his ass in lawyers. The minute I get to his door, he's gonna be on the phone talkin' 'bout warrants and calling the mayor and demanding to know who told us about this here phone call he's supposed to have made.”

“I see what you mean.”

“But if you're there with me,” he went on, his eyes gleaming with anticipation, “it's a subtle way of saying, ‘You play ball with us or you're gonna be looking at yourself on the six o'clock news and you won't like what you see.'” The smile that accompanied his words was positively sharklike.

“All that,” I commented sarcastically, “just because I'm there?”

Button gave me a look of feigned innocence. “Hey,” he protested, “
I
can't be threatening the man. That might violate his constitutional rights, or something, wouldn't it, Counselor?”

“Or something,” I muttered. But it didn't really matter; the important thing was I'd be inside Lucenti's headquarters and in a position to get my own questions answered.

As we drove on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in Button's unmarked car, he hit me with the one question I'd been hoping he'd forget to ask. I should have known forgetting wasn't in his repertoire.

“Is there anything else in those files,” he asked with deceptive casualness, “that I ought to know about?”

“No,” I answered firmly, having decided long ago that Aida Valentin Lucenti's pathetic criminal past was something no one, least of all the police, ought to know about.

In the immortal words of Dick Cavett, politics bores my ass off. There's something about a room plastered with posters of the smiling candidate that seems to me irrevocably phony. Yet I had to admit, looking around Art Lucenti's campaign headquarters—soon to be transformed into his neighborhood office—that Art had a perfect political-poster face. An open smile, dark wavy hair, laugh lines around the eyes offset by a strong masculine jaw that spoke of unbending integrity. He was shown laughing with a senior citizen in a yarmulke, buying bread from a beaming Italian matron, holding a jump rope while two black girls did Double Dutch routines, sitting in solemn conference with a group of Puerto Rican teenagers wearing anti-drug T-shirts. Each picture showed a side of Art I had to respect. Too bad, I thought, that other photos hadn't been displayed as well: Art selling out his tenant clients by secretly working for Todd Lessek, Art cutting himself in on the waterfront deal, Art paying blackmail money to Linda Ritchie.

I watched while Detective Button flashed his ID at the girl behind the desk. He seemed amused at her flustered speed as she dashed into the congressman's office to inform him of the official visitor.

The congressman wasn't nearly as impressed as his underling. He strolled out of his office, stretched out a hand in instinctive political fashion, and invited us into his sanctum.

“This is Ms. Jameson.” Button indicated me with a wave of his hand. “She's here at my request.”

Art's smile never faltered, but there was a hint of irony when he said, “We've met. At Linda Ritchie's funeral, wasn't it?”

I nodded. I wasn't sure I had a speaking part in Button's little play.

“I have a few more questions about Mrs. Ritchie's murder,” Button began. I was irresistibly reminded of Columbo, who kept coming back and coming back with his “few more questions” until he'd thoroughly trapped his quarry. The image of Button as a black Peter Falk almost put a grin on my face. I clamped my jaws shut and listened.

“A sad business,” Art sighed. His heart was no longer in it; hypocrisy had tired him. Or perhaps the arrest of his pal Lessek had replaced the tragedy of Linda's death in his thoughts.

“New evidence has just come to my attention,” Button went on smoothly, “and I thought I'd better check it out. I wouldn't want anyone to say”—he glanced at me pointedly—“that the police were treating a congressman any differently from any other citizen.”

Art got the message. The quick look he gave me from under his long eyelashes was shrewd and penetrating. He licked his lips and said, “Of course, I'm always willing to cooperate with the authorities.”

“Good. A witness has come forward who says Mrs. Ritchie called you here at your office the night of her death and asked you to come to her apartment. Is that true, Congressman?”

“Who”—Art bleated, pale and stunned—“who is this witness?” He looked at me, and this time his eyes gleamed with malice. The smooth political façade had cracked. “And what is she doing here? I think I'd better call my lawyer,” he concluded, his voice gradually moving from bluster to decisiveness.

“By all means,” Button said, gesturing toward the phone on the cluttered desk. “Go ahead and call. As for Ms. Jameson, she represents the family of the witness I mentioned.”

I gave Button full points for guile. As Marcy Sheldon's lawyer, I supposed I could be fairly represented as the attorney for Dawn Ritchie's “family,” but the way Button put it was misleading in the extreme. A fact that bothered me not at all as I looked into Art Lucenti's scheming face.

“Congressman,” Button continued with inexorable logic, “we can and will get the phone company's records for the numbers in this office. If a phone call was made on the night of the murder on one of these phones to or from Mrs. Ritchie's number, we'll find out about it. If I have to do it without your assistance, I will, but rest assured your lack of cooperation will be duly noted.”

If Art Lucenti had been a lesser mortal, the line would have been “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” I began to sense that part of my function here was to stand as a symbol of the perils of the hard way. The arrest of Todd Lessek had to be much on the congressional mind this morning.

Art Lucenti's thought processes weren't moving very swiftly, I thought unkindly, attributing the delay to the absence of political advisors to weigh the pros and cons with him in some smokey back room of the mind. But finally his eyes met Button's, and he said, “Okay.” Then he flashed me a contemptuous glance and said, “But I'll talk to you alone. Not to her.”

I opened my mouth to protest, then sat back complacently. That was the advantage, I thought, in coming with the cops. You couldn't be thrown out.

“Please wait outside, Ms. Jameson,” Button said blandly, ignoring my fury. There was a hint of steel in his voice that had me moving, however reluctantly, out of my chair. The fact that I was contemplating murder apparently bothered Button not at all.

By the time I hit the outer office, with its clacking typewriters and smiling posters, I was mad as hell. I should have known better, I thought sourly, pacing around the cluttered office in my rage, than to trust a cop!

No wonder, I told myself with angry hindsight, that Button had been so agreeable to my coming along. He'd known instinctively that the minute things got interesting, Lucenti would have me evicted. I looked wistfully at the closed door. What was going on in there? I wondered. Was Art stonewalling, was he baring his soul, was he turning on his formidable charm? But that particular commodity, I thought wryly, had been singularly lacking when I'd left the room.

My reflexive pacing was interrupted by the woman who'd inspected Button's ID when we'd first come in. “Would you like some coffee while you're waiting?” she asked.

The woman looked to be around thirty, though her unfocused face and fluffy hairstyle made her seem younger. A fuzzy pink sweater and heart-shaped locket added to the effect, which was less dewy youth than gauche adolescence.

I responded to the question as I always did, with an enthusiastic acceptance and a silent hope that the coffee would be drinkable. It wasn't.

“Good coffee,” I lied, swallowing it with a grimace I turned into a smile. Maybe politics is catching.

The woman smiled back, and I was struck by the oddness of her mouth. She had a full, sensuous lower lip, but her upper lip was a taut line that suggested a dessicated New England spinster. Her lips looked as though they belonged to two different people—people who wouldn't like each other very much.

“I'm Donna Healy,” she said, sitting down next to me on a straight-backed chair. “I've been with the congressman since his first campaign. It's hard not to worry when …” Her eyes strayed to the closed door, behind which her boss was facing Detective Button's no-doubt thorough cross-examination.

Donna Healy. I was sure I'd heard the name from Linda. Then I recalled bitchy remarks about one of Art's aides who'd been in love with him since the year one, but whom he treated with casual disdain. Linda, I remembered with distaste, considered the whole idea irresistibly funny.

“Detective Button's hoping the congressman can help him find whoever murdered Linda Ritchie,” I explained.

“But didn't her husband—”

“That's what the police thought at first,” I answered coolly, “but that was before they found out she was blackmailing everyone she knew—including the congressman.”

Whatever I'd expected from Donna Healy—outraged denials, tearful sympathy—it wasn't what I got. “I knew it!” she cried excitedly. There was a flush of triumph on her unformed face, a light of vindication in her pale blue eyes. “That explains everything,” she went on happily.

I caught up with her. Linda had played her little game with Donna as she had with Brad, convincing the lovesick girl that Art was giving her the special attention Donna had hungered for for years. It was, I realized with a suddenness that stopped my breath, a stunning motive for murder. And Donna had just as much access to the phones as her boss did. But would Linda have arranged to meet her co-worker at her own apartment?

“That's why he was taking her to Washington, wasn't it?” Donna asked shyly. “Linda tried to hint it was because he couldn't stand not to be with her, but I didn't believe it.” Yet something in her tiny voice told me she had believed it, and it had hurt her very much.

“I always dreamed of working in Washington with Art someday,” she went on. “I always knew he'd get there, even when he was only a district leader. But then we won and instead of me he picked Pete Lo Presto as his legislative aide. He said I'd be more effective in the neighborhood office, but …” Her voice trailed off.

“And his taking Linda was the last straw,” I prodded sympathetically.

She nodded and swallowed hard. “But I should have known not to believe Linda about the other stuff,” she said. “Art would never be unfaithful to his wife.” The assertion was tempered by a good measure of regret. “He never looks at other women.”

“That's not what Linda wanted people to believe.” I fueled the flame of Donna's anger. “You weren't the only person she gave the wrong impression to.”

This time the strange lips twisted in unmistakable bitterness. “From the day Linda first came in here, she was trouble. Little sly insinuations about how much she knew, or how she and Art did this, or Art told her that. She made such a big deal about it every time she spoke to him.”

I took a shot in the dark. “Did they ever go into corners together and talk? Or meet secretly?”

Donna rolled her eyes. “She used to break in on him when he was in the middle of something and go into her helpless act. He'd ask her to wait till he was finished, but somehow she always got him to leave what he was doing and go with her.”