“He would have been forty-four in December,” Dan Chester said.
“Fine. I take it that my impression is correct, that he had no history of heart disease or very high blood pressure, that there had been no rumors of cancer or—”
“Maybe he had AIDS,” Patchen Rawls said. “Everybody’s going to have AIDS eventually. That’s because the capitalist medical system in this country has no respect for—”
“Patchen, make sense.” Victoria Harte threw up her hands. “People don’t die like this when they have AIDS. They don’t die like this when they have cancer, either. What he told me,” she looked at Gregor, “was that ‘there was no apparent cause of death.’ Quote unquote.”
Patchen Rawls sniffed. “I don’t even know what that means. Except maybe that there wasn’t blood all over the room. There wouldn’t be. Death isn’t an enemy. Death is a friend.”
“You ought to know,” Janet Harte snapped. “You’re the one who murdered your mother.”
“I did nothing of the—”
“Stop.” Gregor sighed. This was impossible. This was worse than impossible. He didn’t envy the police officer who got stuck with this case. “I understand,” he told them, “that this is a very tense situation. I even understand that this was a very tense situation long before Dr. Debrett died. What we have to do right now, however, is to work out a few things before the police get here. Just enough so that we can be of some help.”
“Are the police going to want us to help?” Victoria said.
“I haven’t the faintest idea, Ms. Harte. I don’t think it matters. Help is always welcome in the long run. What I want to do now is to figure out when was the last time we can be sure Dr. Debrett was alive.”
“We all saw him between two and three o’clock,” Bennis said. “You saw him, too. He was having a very bad time with—” Her head swiveled and came to rest on the figure of Clare Markey, perched on the edge of a couch in unnatural stillness. Clare Markey blushed.
“With me,” she said. “I suppose I was being a little hard on him.”
Gregor nodded. “Would you tell me why? You must have known him a very long time. Were you always hard on him?”
Clare rubbed a finger on the side of her nose. “I suppose I usually had more sense. Dr. Debrett had connections, after all. But today, I—well, Dr. Debrett seemed to feel—”
“Yes?”
“Well, as if he were the only one who knew what to do about retarded children. As if he had all the answers, I suppose you would say. What it really came down to was that he thought he ought to get all the money.”
“Government money,” Gregor said.
“That’s right.” Clare smiled. “Of course, we all behave like that, everybody trying to get a piece of the federal budget. We all have to, if we want to get anything at all. Mostly it’s a pose. But with Kevin—you know, there are rules to this game, whether people on the outside realize it or not.”
“Rules to lobbying?” Bennis sounded incredulous.
“Of course,” Clare Markey said. “We use influence. We use whatever media attention we can manipulate to our advantage. Some people have even falsely accused other people of—things, and then started investigations. That’s something you can’t ignore the possibility of—”
“That’s within the rules?” Now Bennis sounded shocked. Gregor didn’t blame her.
Neither, apparently, did Clare Markey. “It’s the principle of direct versus indirect action. There isn’t another lobbyist on Capitol Hill who’d be—let’s call it judgmental—if I called the FBI and said I had evidence that Dr. Debrett was selling drugs on the side. They wouldn’t be shocked if after I’d done that, I called the papers and said there was an FBI drug investigation going on with Kevin at the center of it. It would be something else again if I actually went to the Debrett Clinic and planted half a pound of cocaine in Kevin’s desk.”
“Well, well,” Victoria Harte said. “It’s so nice you people have moral scruples about something.”
Gregor wasn’t interested in hearing about moral scruples at the moment. He certainly wasn’t interested in hearing about moral scruples from Victoria Harte.
“Did Kevin Debrett plant a pound of cocaine in somebody’s office?” he asked Clare Markey.
Clare was shaking her head. “It wasn’t that clear-cut. And it wasn’t proved. It happened about five years ago.”
“What did?”