Worst Case Scenario (5 page)

“Doesn't sound despondent to me,” Gallagher said.

“I agree. When a physically healthy young woman dies alone in a locked room, you can't help thinking of suicide, but I'd require a great deal of convincing to accept that hypothesis in this case.”

“Thank you,” Gallagher said. “That helps. It truly does.”

“You may find my advice less appealing,” Michaelson said. “I suggest that you wait—that you give the police a few days to investigate Ms. Bedford's death before you jump in.”

“Jump in how?”

“Hiring a private investigator. Tracking down a witness or two and bracing them. Peddling a conspiracy theory to the press.”

Gallagher chuckled and eased his hips comfortably back against the wall. Raising his left hand, he idly stroked a fringe of overlong whisker-stubble at the back of his jaw.

“What in the world makes you think I have anything like that in mind?” he asked in the kind of voice people use to ask how fast they were going, Officer.

“Wild guess,” Michaelson said, smiling.

“You'll have to do better than that if you expect me to pay attention.”

“You've spent most of fifty years going hard after whatever really mattered to you. I think Sharon Bedford was the most important thing in your life for the last year or so, and to have her ripped away from you so brutally has to be devastating. You need to believe there's something you can
do
about that. You can do something about a murderer, but you can't do anything about an embolism that popped up in the wrong place or some other random absurdity. Right now there's only one explanation for her death that you're psychologically capable of accepting—and that's a bad frame of mind to be in when you're making tactical decisions.”

“I want to show you something,” Gallagher said, pulling out his wallet. “Sharon mailed it to my home address Thursday—the day she left for the conference here.”

He handed Michaelson a roughly hand-sized piece of paper that he extracted from the wallet. Marjorie leaned over as Michaelson held the paper in the light so that they could both read the blue ink notations on it:

101248

152237

KISSINGER

4939

HIGHWAYS TO INDIANS

2612

“Do you have any idea what this is?” Michaelson asked.

“It's a paper she generally kept posted on her refrigerator door with a little ladybug magnet,” Gallagher said, his voice catching for a fraction of a second at the end. “I recognize most of the things on there. The top number happens to be the combination to her bicycle lock. Four-nine-three-nine was her PIN number for automatic teller machines. The bottom number is the code that turns off the security system I installed at her apartment.”

“What about ‘Kissinger'?” Marjorie asked.

“Security system again,” Gallagher said. “It's a disregard code. If the alarm goes off, the office calls your place pronto. If you say, ‘Everything's okay,' the office assumes there's a guy standing there with a knife at your throat and calls the cops. If everything really is okay and you'd just set the alarm off by mistake, you give your disregard code and the office forgets the whole thing. Sharon picked ‘Kissinger' for hers.”

“The second number looks like a padlock combination, too,” Marjorie said.

“Could be,” Gallagher agreed. “Might be a gym locker or her bin in the storage area of her building, or something else.”

“Which leaves ‘Highways to Indians,'” Michaelson said.

“Don't have a clue about that one,” Gallagher said, shrugging.

“Provocative,” Michaelson said.

“If that means it smells funny, I agree with you,” Gallagher said. “Why would she have gone to the trouble to mail this thing off to me just before she came out to this conference?”

“An obvious possibility is that she didn't want it to be found if someone searched her apartment,” Michaelson said.

“Searched it either while she was away or after something happened to her here,” Gallagher added. “It looks to me like she thought that whatever she was peddling out here was risky. And it looks to me like maybe she was right.”

“All the more reason to take my advice,” Michaelson said.

“Why? What's going to change in a week?”

“In a week the police might be in hot pursuit of a murderer, if there was a murder. You can probably sell security systems better than they can, and they can probably investigate murders better than you.”

“Uh-huh,” Gallagher said. “And what if in a week they've just shrugged it off? Unexplained death of a nobody from out of town. Heart stopped beating. One a those things. Sharon Bedford becomes three pages stuck in a manila folder in some file cabinet.”

“In that case,” Michaelson said after a delicate pause, “if you still want to go after it, I'll help you.” Crossing the room, he handed Gallagher his business card. “Give me a call. I know my way around Washington. I have a long memory, a fat Rolodex, and a lot of chits to call in.”

Gallagher accepted the card and pressed one corner thoughtfully against the dimple in his chin.

“Why are you offering to do something like that?” he asked.

“I'm not really sure,” Michaelson said with a brief shrug. “Maybe I had a few more beers than usual because of a woman once.”

“The offer's good only if I take your advice, is that it?”

“Quid pro quo, as we used to say in the foreign service.”

“All right,” Gallagher said decisively, holding out his hand, “you got yourself a deal. Three hours ago I'd'a bet next month's paycheck there wasn't a better salesman than me in Charleston tonight, and son of a gun if I wouldn't have lost.”

They shook hands. Gallagher touched Michaelson's card just above his right eyebrow by way of taking his leave of Marjorie, and left the room. Marjorie waited for five seconds after the door had closed behind him before she spoke.

“You've abused subordinates, the English language, yours truly, and a lot of other things over a woman,” she piped then reproachfully, “but alcohol isn't one of them. That had to be the most transparent lie you've ever told.”

“Actually,” Michaelson said, “I believe I told a slightly more transparent lie to the Saudi oil minister in 1978. He didn't believe me, though, so perhaps it doesn't count.”

“What are you looking for?” she asked as he began rummaging through an attaché case that sat open on the bed.

“Scott Pilkington's number at work. I want to leave a message on his voice mail so that he'll get it first thing tomorrow. Mention that a cowboy's about to ride through his little patch with a very large amount of money and a very small amount of discretion.”

“Do you anticipate adding something to the effect that where this particular cowboy's concerned you have the last ticket to the ball, so if Pilkington wants to come he'll have to dance with you?”

“That might come up,” Michaelson said. “
If
I can find that blessed number.”

“Here,” Marjorie said, offering him a palm-sized computer.

Michaelson took the machine and saw Pilkington's number blinking on the screen.

“You did see this coming, didn't you?” he commented as he picked up the phone.

“As soon as he pulled that piece of paper out.”

Marjorie waited patiently while Michaelson completed the call and left his message.

“Now,” she said when he'd finished. “Would you please tell me the real reason you're doing what you carefully explained to me earlier this evening was exactly the wrong thing to do?”

“I'm at an age for sunsets and poetry,” Michaelson said. “I'm not going to save the world or renew the country's spirit or even demilitarize the oil routes. But maybe I can keep one man from going bitter and obsessed into the last half of his middle age.”

“Fair enough,” Marjorie said. “A bit romantic for a hardheaded, unsentimental realist in his sixties, but fair enough.”

“I still remember the action stateside twenty-five years ago when the Bengali uprising broke out in what was then East Pakistan,” Michaelson said. “When things finally got too dicey, we sent the standard evacuation order to our mission in Dacca: ‘women, children, and nonessential men.'” He glanced over at Marjorie, meeting her eyes. “I may be in my sixties, but I'm not quite ready for the nonessential men category yet.”

Chapter Seven

Pilkington didn't call until Wednesday. When he did, he wanted to know if, by any wild chance, the Gallagher chap mentioned in Michaelson's voice-mail message had followed up. Michaelson said that as a matter of fact he had.

“And?” Pilkington prompted.

“Barring a police breakthrough in the Bedford investigation, we're meeting on Sunday.”

“Then you and I had better meet on Saturday.”

“Where and when?” Michaelson asked.

“Fourish at Dunsinane.”

“Don't you think Dunsinane is overdoing it a bit?”

“No doubt. See you there.”

***

Michaelson hadn't been idle while he waited for Pilkington's call. He'd talked at length to Wendy Gardner, for example. What she told him would have meant little if Pilkington hadn't called. When Pilkington did call, though, Wendy's information told Michaelson that he should try to talk to Jerry Marciniak before his meeting with Pilkington.

Michaelson arranged to do this early Friday morning. Very early.

“Ninety percent of science is waiting,” Marciniak said without looking up from the microscope when Michaelson appeared in the lab's doorway.

“So is ninety percent of getting to see you,” Michaelson said. “That and getting out of bed before dawn.”

“This baby's not ready to tell us anything yet,” Marciniak said as he slipped a glass slide from the viewing tray and tucked it between two holders in a ceramic case a few feet away on the long, slate table. Slipping off the stool where he'd been perched, he strode briskly across the large room's echoing tile floor.

“Between seven-fifteen and eight-thirty is the only time I can actually do hands-on science here in the lab,” he said. “From then on it's paperwork, committee meetings, and making nice with politicians. Let's go to my office.”

Michaelson followed Marciniak through a swinging double door and down a long, institutional gray hallway. Marciniak's cardigan sweater this morning was red, his dress shirt blue and neatly pressed but open at the neck.

“What's your reaction to Sharon Bedford's death?” Michaelson asked.

“It's a shame she's dead, and the way she died stinks out loud. I've asked for a copy of the autopsy report.”

They stepped into a sunlit office, rather spacious by GSA standards but seeming cramped because of the piles of paper, books, reports, and pale green-jacketed files that filled the desk, shelves, floor, windowsills, and two of the chairs.

“My office doesn't usually look this bad,” Marciniak said offhandedly as he circled behind his desk. “It usually looks worse. Sorry, old joke. See if you can find a place to sit.”

Michaelson obeyed the instruction, transferring a top-heavy paper tower from a chair to the floor.

“What bothers you about the way Ms. Bedford died?” he asked.

“You've got a reasonably healthy young woman without any obvious bad habits who's eating breakfast and walking around like nothing's wrong one minute and the next thing anyone knows her heart stops beating. You don't have to be Quincy to figure we're not talking about natural causes here.”

“Just a doctor's professional curiosity, then?” Michaelson prompted.

“A
scientist's
professional curiosity,” Marciniak corrected him. “My M.D. proved I have a memory. It was my Ph.D. that proved I have a mind.”

Michaelson nodded deferentially.

“You didn't know Sharon Bedford before the conference, though?” he asked.

“Matter of fact, I did know her,” Marciniak said. “She'd talked to me about getting a serious policy-area job somewhere. She got to be a gluteal pain about it, in fact. I mean, she was hungry and I can understand that, but it gets old after a while. She thought we'd be doing her a favor to let her work fifty hours a week for thirty-two thousand a year, but I can't just snap my fingers and make something like that happen.”

“Do you have any idea why she picked you as a possible job contact?”

“I had a pulse, for one thing,” Marciniak said. “She'd network with anyone who was breathing regularly, and I qualified. Plus, I'd done in spades what she was trying to do in clubs. I elbowed my way from glorified desk clerk to a senior policy-making job. I guess she figured I'd empathize.”

“Did you?”

“I suppose so. I see classmates in the private sector at outfits like Triangle Research, making twice my top government salary, flying first class, staying at hotels that you couldn't even see a Holiday Inn from, driving a Lexus provided by their companies—and you know what? I wouldn't trade places with them. I couldn't stand to be out of it, away from the action. So sure, I understood her feeling the same way.”

“Do you know how she happened to get so knowledgeable about your career?” Michaelson asked. “The through-the-hawse-hole stuff, I mean.”

“Now, I'm gonna sound like an egomaniac, but what the hell. They knew my name over there at NSC when she was there. There's a computer entry over there saying I'm a whiz about institutional dynamics in mature bureaucracies. Swear to God, and don't ask me why. They had me in for a chat when they were noodling over some big-picture metatheory called the Mandarin Hypothesis.”

“I'm afraid I'm drawing a blank on that one,” Michaelson said.

Leaning back so far in his chair that the front legs lifted off the carpet, Marciniak flicked his right hand carelessly.

“The premise is that every society starts out just barely getting by. Subsistence. Then, boom, something no one understands happens and suddenly some societies explode with energy, going farther in two generations than they had in six centuries. Whatever it is that happens has something to do with people who are really good at doing something useful: fighting, growing food, making tools, putting ten million bits of information on a ceramic chip the size of your fingernail—that kind of thing.”

“I'm with you,” Michaelson said, nodding.

“The hypothesis is that just when things are going really well, something strange happens. Power starts slipping away from people who can
do
things and passes to people who can
say
things. Priests in Egypt and ancient Israel. Mandarins in China.
Fonctionnaires
and bureaucrats in prerevolutionary France.
Apparatchiks
in postrevolutionary Russia.”

“Lawyers in the United States?” Michaelson asked a trifle mischievously.

“You said it, I didn't. Anyway, that's the Mandarin Hypothesis. There really is a paper on it over there at NSC and I suppose my name really does show up in a footnote somewhere. I think Sharon Bedford probably heard of me when they were batting the thing around on a slow day in the White House basement a few years back.”

“It's quite stimulating,” Michaelson said, “but I don't see any obvious way to use it to explain why she died and who killed her.”

“No,” Marciniak agreed, emphatically shaking his head. “The Mandarin Hypothesis is a telescope. To get to the bottom of whatever happened to her, you'll need a microscope. Facts. Data.”

“No doubt you're right,” Michaelson said. “What did you go to see her about the morning she died? That would qualify as a datum, wouldn't it?”

“Fair enough.” Marciniak shook his head with a half-smile. “I had a lead on a job for her. Down the road, in an agency that doesn't exist yet.”

“An agency run by you?”

“It'd be nice if it worked out that way, but you learn not to count on things like that in this town.”

“Sounds a tiny bit thin.”

“Damn near invisible. I knew how bad she wanted it, though, so I thought I'd float it by her.”

“How did she react?” Michaelson asked.

“She was more intrigued than I thought she'd be. She asked me for details, said she wanted to follow up.”

“Not exactly the depths of despair, then.”

“I never saw her despondent,” Marciniak said. “Certainly not that weekend.”

“Did she mention any inducement she could offer?” Michaelson asked. “Information that might come in handy for a busy senior official, that kind of thing?”

“Not to me she didn't. That'd be a pretty low-rent play. And anyway, I don't see how she could have had anything I wanted.”

Michaelson saw the message-waiting light on Marciniak's phone begin to glow bright red. The bureaucratic day was about to start. He rose from his chair.

“If she had had something you wanted,” he asked as he leaned across the desk to shake Marciniak's hand, “do you think you might have found a job that already existed for her?”

“Hey,” Marciniak answered, grinning, “I said it was a low-rent play. I didn't say I was too classy to try it if it looked like it might work.”

***

Not on Wimbledon's center court, not surrounding the sixteenth hole at Augusta, nowhere had Michaelson ever seen a lawn with the utterly level, glasslike smoothness and emerald perfection of the bowling green at Dunsinane Driving and Hunt Club in Chevy Chase. Four men in dazzling white flannels stood or bent or crouched at one end of the square of turf, contemplating with solemn gravity four solid black balls that looked to be about sixteen inches around, and one smaller white ball.

With something less than solemn gravity, Michaelson watched them from the south patio immediately behind the larger wing of the clubhouse. He took a deliberate and substantial sip from a heavy tumbler that had started off with two fingers of undiluted Johnny Walker Black Label scotch.

“I take it that at some point one of them is actually going to do something,” he said to Pilkington, who sat with his own glass of scotch on the other side of a white metal table.

“Don't be so provincial,” Pilkington said. “If this were baseball, there'd be just as much standing around and you'd be lecturing me about how it's all part of the mental game.”

“If this were baseball, the sphere would be moving a hundred and thirty-five feet per second. Doing something with it would be intrinsically more impressive.”

“It's a good thing you disregarded my advice about Sharon Bedford,” Pilkington said abruptly.

“I took your advice, actually. I volunteered nothing, and if my profile had been any lower, I'd have been horizontal. But Gallagher still tracked me down and insisted on conversation. I enlisted only to avoid the draft.”

“However your involvement came about, it's a stroke of very good luck. I've spent a good part of the past week in contact with the Charleston Police Department. It's gratifying how ready they are to help the State Department. We apparently aren't quite as pushy as the FBI. At any rate, this thing is shaping up as a four-alarm shambles for several people, including some whose good opinion I covet.”

“Rather inconvenient for Ms. Bedford, too.”

“She's past caring about it,” Pilkington said. “The people I referred to are not.”

“I'm all ears,” Michaelson said.

“Poison. Bufotenine. Ingested orally.”

“In English, please. You mean she swallowed a pill or took the poison in food or something?”

“Candy, in all probability. It looks like the last thing she ate was a chocolate mint that the maid left on her pillow after she cleaned the room up, and the betting is that that's what carried the poison. She was diabetic and nibbled frequently on sweets, as many diabetics do. She presumably ate the mint in one bite, climbed into the filling tub, and died.”

“It doesn't sound much like accidental death,” Michaelson said.

“I can't argue with that. Unfortunately, the answer that makes the most sense to me is a bit complicated.”

“Suicide?”

“Yes.”

Michaelson gazed at the lawn-bowlers for a long moment over a contemplative sip of scotch as he considered the possibility.

“It strikes me as a lot of trouble to take just to push off, and a pretty unpleasant way to do it,” he said. “Besides that, I talked to the woman Saturday evening. She simply wasn't in that frame of mind.”

“If you want to make her death murder, you have two choices,” Pilkington said patiently. “One is to figure out a motive for the maid who cleaned the room while Ms. Bedford was at breakfast Sunday morning. She left a pillow mint in every room she cleaned, and there's no doubt the one Bedford swallowed was like the mints the hotel buys for that purpose. There was no mint when the police searched the room, and there was one and only one empty mint wrapper in the wastebasket.”

“What's two?”

“Two is to come up with a way someone could have gotten into Bedford's room, between the time the maid left and the time Bedford came back from breakfast, without being noticed by anyone else and without Ms. Bedford realizing he'd been there.”

“Pass-card?” Michaelson suggested.

“The maids and the front desk personnel had them, of course. But except for the one who cleaned, they all deny going into her room that morning, or providing a pass-card to anyone else on any pretext. When Gallagher and the hotel security officer found Bedford's body, the hallway door and the door communicating with the adjoining room were both locked from the inside. The windows were all closed, and anyway the maximum opening on any of them was only four inches. Far too small for a human being to get in or out.”

“Marjorie mentioned that Philo Vance confronted a problem like this in
The Canary Murder Case
,” Michaelson said. “According to her exposition, the murderer in that story used a slipknot in a length of thread to throw an inside bolt from outside the door.”

“I've never heard of anyone having that kind of luck with a slipknot in real life,” Pilkington said, “but let that go. The hallway door here was secured by three locks before Bedford indulged her sweet tooth for the last time: a standard lock, a night-bolt tripped by a lever just below the inside doorknob, and a chain lock about eye level on the door. The standard lock would be engaged simply by closing the door, but the other two could be locked only from the inside, and I don't see how you could do the thread trick on either of them.”