“One never knows,” Neil said. “Now we come to the fourth number.” Neil waited a dramatic beat then said, “The fourth phone number is assigned to Lydia Morelli’s cell phone.”
“What!”
“Could just be a coincidence. Tomorrow I’ll pull the phone records for these four people and see if any of them called Terry Finley. According to Finley’s records, he never called them.”
DeMarco returned to his place and immediately went to the kitchen and removed a bottle of vodka from the freezer compartment of his refrigerator. The vodka was made in Russia and there was a pretty green label on the bottle. It had cost fifteen bucks.
DeMarco had been experimenting with vodkas of late. Emma had introduced him to Grey Goose and he liked it, but it cost about thirty bucks a bottle. And in a bar, you could pay twelve bucks for a Grey Goose martini; they should say “stick ‘em up” when they served you. Then one night he’d been channel surfing, and he caught a show in progress that was essentially about the ignorance of vodka drinkers. On the show they gave five people—all pretentious bozos who claimed a preference for high-end brands—six different vodkas to taste in unlabeled shot glasses. The vodkas ranged in price from top-shelf to bargain-basement, and, as could have been predicted, the drinkers couldn’t identify their favorite brand and three of the five concluded that the cheapest booze was the best booze.
So DeMarco was on a holy quest. He was trying to find a vodka that tasted as good as Grey Goose but cost half as much. This brand—the one he’d just pulled from his freezer—wasn’t it. It tasted like it had been drained from the crankcase of a Russian tractor.
He took his cut-rate vodka into his den. He had an idea. Neil had said that tomorrow he’d work his magic and see if any of the four people that he had named had called Terry Finley, but DeMarco thought there might be a quicker way to get the information. He called Dick Finley.
“Have you found something, Joe?” Finley asked as soon as DeMarco identified himself.
The ex-congressman sounded weak, but it was late and the man was old, so maybe he was just tired. The death of a son can make a man tired.
“Mr. Finley, did Terry have a cell phone?”
“Sure.”
“Do you know where it is?”
“It’s in a box on my dining room table. The police found it in his car and they took it, but they eventually gave it back to me. Why?”
That was good, DeMarco thought. If the phone had been on Terry’s body it would most likely have been destroyed after being submerged in water for several hours. But that made DeMarco wonder why the phone was in Terry’s car instead of on him. Dick Finley provided the answer without having to be asked.
“The battery on the phone must have been low,” Dick Finley said, “because the cops said it was hooked up to one of those cigarette lighter chargers.”
“Could you get Terry’s cell phone, Mr. Finley,” DeMarco said. “I want to see if Terry received a call from a certain number. You see, most cell phones keep a record of recent calls received and—.”
“I know that,” Finley said. “I’m not that outta touch with the modern world.”
“Yes, sir. So could you get Terry’s phone and check the call log.”
“Yeah, hold on a minute.”
It was more like five minutes before Finley came back on the line.
“Okay, I got the phone,” he said.
“Good. Now get into the calls-received menu, see if there’s any number that starts with two-oh-two, five-three-two, three.”
“Is that the number that was on the napkin?” Finley asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“All right, let me see if it’s here. Damn it, these buttons are so small I have a hard time working them.”
DeMarco waited impatiently.
“Here we are,” Finley said. “Yeah. There’s a number here that starts with those numbers. It’s two-oh-two, five-three-two, three-two-three-one. That number’s listed twice.”
The phone number that Dick Finley had just read belonged to Lydia Morelli. When Finley asked him the significance of the number, DeMarco lied and said he didn’t know. The last thing DeMarco wanted was for Finley to know that there was a connection between Paul Morelli and his son’s death.
DeMarco thanked Finley and hung up, more puzzled than ever. He could understand Terry Finley calling Lydia: Finley was brash and ambitious, and from everything he’d learned, he wouldn’t have been at all surprised if Terry had had the balls to call the senator’s wife and question her about her husband’s past. But why on earth would she call him? He was the sort of reporter that politicians and their spouses avoided like the pox.
One thing DeMarco was sure of: he wasn’t going to call Lydia and ask her why she had phoned Terry. He wanted to, but he wouldn’t. Paul Morelli was not only a powerful man, he was also the Speaker’s friend. So for DeMarco to just pick up the phone and call Lydia—right after her husband had just said that he had no knowledge of the significance of Finley’s list—would be a very dumb thing to do. But he really wanted to know why she’d called Terry.
DeMarco sipped some more of his drink. It felt like the muscles in his jaw were beginning to lock up, as if he was being partially paralyzed by the cheap Russian hootch. This made him wonder if Russia had an organization like the FDA, some watchdog group that ensured their vodka-makers didn’t put gasoline additives in their liquor. The smart thing to do would be to pour the rest of the vodka down the drain before he was paralyzed completely.
He thought some more, but couldn’t immediately think of a good way to approach Lydia about her calling Terry. Tomorrow he’d go see Abe Burrows and see what his records said about Janet Tyler—the other woman on Finley’s list—and maybe he’d even take the shuttle up to New York to talk to her. He hadn’t seen his mom in awhile, so the trip to New York wouldn’t be a total waste. But that’s all he’d do for now.
Decision made, he said, “Za vashe zdorovye”—the only Russian he knew—and recklessly poured the remainder of the vodka down his throat. He was still coughing when his phone rang.
“Yes,” he croaked into the phone. His voice sounded as if someone had stepped on his larynx with a ski boot.
“Mr. DeMarco, this is Lydia Morelli. I need to talk to you.”
“Can you believe this bastard?” Carl said. “Every fuckin’ light, he hits on the yellow.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “You’re gonna lose him. Get up on his ass. It’s the morning rush. He sees the same car behind him for an hour, he won’t think nothin’ of it.”
“Where’s he goin’ anyway?” Carl said. “I thought he worked at the Capitol.”
Jimmy just shook his head. He loved Carl like a brother—you could put his crank in a meat grinder and he wouldn’t talk—but he was always asking questions. Stupid questions. Questions Jimmy couldn’t answer. Questions to which there were no answers. He was going to pull out the guy’s tongue one of these days if he didn’t quit it.
“And why are we following him?” Carl said.
That was it. “Because Eddie said to!” Jimmy screamed. “For Christ’s sake, you heard the same fuckin’ thing I did. Eddie said follow this asshole and if he talks to anybody, find out who