Dead Man’s List

“Sorry. My pet name for Abe. At any rate, I heard what you told them. I eavesdropped. After I left Paul’s office, I stood near the door and listened.” When she said this she smiled somewhat smugly, as if she was proud to have put one over on her famous husband.

“Terry Finley didn’t die in a boating accident,” Lydia said. “He was killed because he was investigating Paul.”

“Mrs. Morelli, you need to tell me what you’re talking about.”

“What do you think of my husband?” she said.

“What do I think?” DeMarco said, confused by the question. “I guess I think he’s a brilliant politician. Everyone says he’s going to be the next president.”

Lydia nodded as if agreeing with DeMarco, then said, “He’s a monster. He belongs in a cage, not the White House.”

DeMarco was almost too stunned to react. “Mrs. Morelli,” he said, “I’m not sure where—”

“I’m the one who contacted Terry,” Lydia said. “I’m the one who asked him to dig into Paul’s past.”

Jesus Christ.

“I heard Paul and the toady talking about him one day,” Lydia said. “They were laughing, saying how he was this stubborn little journalist who never got it quite right.”

Now that bothered DeMarco. Paul Morelli had said that he didn’t know Terry Finley.

“But I asked around,” Lydia said, “and I figured that Terry was exactly who I needed. I needed someone willing to do anything to make a name for himself, yet it had to be someone connected with a credible paper like the Post or the Times. I decided it was time for me to finally do something, and Terry was perfect.”

DeMarco thought she may have selected Terry Finley for another reason: if she’d gone to one of the big-name reporters, they might have had more sense than to listen to her. But he still didn’t know what the hell she was talking about.

“I’m not following this, Mrs. Morelli,” DeMarco said. “What exactly did you want Terry to do?”

“I wanted him to destroy my husband.”

DeMarco rocked backward. “Why would you—”

“I told Terry that someone had been helping Paul his whole career. A very powerful man.”

“What man?” DeMarco said. Every time she opened her mouth he became more confused.

Lydia ignored the question. “What happened to those three men, those men on that list you found, was that they were set up. The man who was caught in bed with the teenage boy was drugged, just like he said. And the man who had the car accident…well, it wasn’t an accident. Someone ran him off the road or tampered with his car.”

“How do you know this?” DeMarco said.

“Because I just do. I don’t have any evidence, something you could present in court, but I know. I know because I’ve heard Paul and Abe plan the downfall of other men who have gotten in Paul’s way. People have been bribed and blackmailed and murdered to—”

“Murdered?” DeMarco said. He wondered if this woman might actually be mentally ill, some sort of schizophrenic with conspiracy delusions.

“Yes. Paul’s never killed anyone himself, of course. Other people do the dirty work but he’s the one who benefits.”

Lydia started to say something else but DeMarco interrupted her. “Who do you think he had murdered, Mrs. Morelli?”

“Besides Terry, a man named Benjamin Dahl. Paul—this was when he was mayor—was trying to build a community center in the Bronx and Dahl had a piece of land that he needed for the project but Dahl refused to sell. I heard Paul on the phone one night talking about Dahl. I heard him say: ‘This has gone on long enough. We need to do something.’ Two days later Dahl had an accident in his house. He fell down a flight of stairs and broke his neck.”

“That’s it?” DeMarco said. “You think your husband had this man murdered because he said ‘we need to do something’?”

“Yes.”

“Well, maybe he was telling somebody to find a different piece of land, or to make Dahl a better offer or, or, to take legal action against him,” DeMarco said.

“He wasn’t,” Lydia Morelli said.

DeMarco started to swear, then stopped himself. Swearing wouldn’t help. “So,” he said, as calmly as he could, “you wanted Terry Finley to find proof that your husband had committed crimes to advance his career.”

“Yes.”

“And you were feeding him information to help him.”

“Not information. I didn’t really have any. All I was really doing was encouraging him, pressing him not to give up, to dig deeper. And he found something. I don’t know what, but the last time I talked to him he was excited. He…”

According to Dick Finley and Reggie Harmon, Terry was always excited.

“…he said he’d found someone in New Jersey who could break things wide open. But he didn’t tell me who the person was or what he knew. Terry was…I don’t know, overly dramatic. Unnecessarily secretive. And two days later he was killed.”

When Lydia made the last statement, she’d leaned in toward DeMarco, putting her face closer to his, and once again he could smell the booze on her breath.

DeMarco was thinking that he should just leave. He was talking to an alcoholic who obviously hated her husband—a description that probably fit more than a few women whose spouses worked on Capitol Hill—and it was a combination that made him doubtful of everything she was saying.

“What about the two women on Terry’s list, Marcia Davenport and Janet Tyler?” DeMarco asked.

“Paul raped them.” Lydia’s voice was completely flat when she said this, just a simple, unemotional statement of fact: Paul raped them.

Oh, this just keeps getting better and better, DeMarco thought. “And how do you know this?” he said, making no attempt to hide his skepticism.

As Lydia told the story, the thin fingers of her left hand tugged unconsciously at a tendril of hair above her ear. DeMarco found it ironic that while she spoke of her husband sexually assaulting women the sunlight was glittering off the diamonds in her wedding ring.

Lydia said that the night it happened Marcia Davenport had come to the Morellis’ house in Georgetown. She was there to take photos of the interior and to spend some time looking around to get ideas for decorating the place. Lydia said that after Davenport arrived, she left to meet a friend for drinks. The senator was home at the time, in his den. When Lydia returned home two hours later, she found Davenport sitting on the floor in Paul Morelli’s den, backed into a corner. She was crying, her clothes were disheveled, and Paul Morelli was on the phone with Abe Burrows.

“But how do you know he raped her?” DeMarco said.

“She told me he did,” Lydia said.

“She said your husband raped her? She used the word ‘rape’?”

“No. She said, ‘Help. He attacked me.’ What else could she have meant?”

“Attacked” didn’t necessarily mean rape, but DeMarco didn’t say that. Instead he said, “Then what happened?”

“When Paul saw me he screamed at me to go up to my room and stay there. When I didn’t move right away, he picked up a thing on his desk, a paperweight or something, and threw it at me. It hit the wall near my head. I don’t know if he was trying to hit me or just scare me, but he was acting insane. And he was drunk.”

DeMarco found it impossible to imagine Paul Morelli drunk and throwing things at his wife. It also occurred to him that Lydia Morelli had probably been drunk herself since she’d just returned from having drinks with a friend.

“Then what happened?” DeMarco asked.