Act of Darkness(67)

“Right,” Bennis said.

Then she bolted, toward the beach room, toward nowhere in particular.

She had never been so humiliated in all her life. He hadn’t even remembered her name.





SEVEN


[1]


IT WAS TIME GREGOR Demarkian had decided, to ask some questions—and better yet, to ask some questions that made sense. Speculating on the possible uses of curare—or synthetic curare, as Tibor had pointed out to him toward the end of their conversation on the phone—wasn’t getting him anywhere. He’d learned long ago that it didn’t matter what a detective had figured out. It only mattered what he’d been able to prove.

The problem was, it was never easy to find anyone in this house when you wanted to find them. Only when you wanted to be left alone did you have them cluttering up the landscape like dust bunnies. Like murder suspects everywhere, this bunch was distinctly uncooperative.

Because he had already scoured the first floor for signs of life and been disappointed, he wandered toward the beach room, the Mondrian study, and the great wall of windows at the back. Out there, the rain was still coming down and the red-white-and-blue decorations looked limp. If they had been made of crepe paper like everybody else’s, they would have been ruined.

He was just beginning to wonder if he should get hold of a bullhorn and get Bennis’s attention that way, when Clare Markey came out of one of the other doors on the short hall. She was dressed in a white silk shirt and a pair of the kind of “casual” pants that never look right unless they have just been dry-cleaned. Her hair, on the other hand, was loose to her shoulders and more than a little uncombed.

She swung into the hall and then between the pair of couches that marked out the western boundary of the space that led to the deck, turning automatically south, not watching where she was going, or even seeming to care. A second later she slammed into Gregor’s chest, nose to sternum. Gregor thought with surprise that it had been a long time since he had been made so aware of how tall he was. Clare Markey was a tall woman, at least five foot ten. Right up against him like this, she looked minuscule.

She bounced away from him and blushed and said, “Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t see you.” Then she looked at him, realized how absurd that must have sounded, and blushed again. “Excuse me. I sound like an absolute idiot today.”

“Not at all,” Gregor told her. “You were thinking about something else. I do it all the time.”

“I’m not supposed to do it at all. That’s part of being a lobbyist. You’re supposed to know what’s going on at all times.”

“And do you? Usually?”

“I used to.”

“Do most lobbyists?”

Clare Markey shrugged. “Believe it or not, I never thought about ‘most lobbyists,’ not before this weekend, anyway. I never thought about me as a lobbyist, either, if that makes any sense.”

“It does if you’re becoming dissatisfied with your work.”

Clare shot him a swift, startled look, then burst out laughing. “Oh, dear. Dissatisfied with my work. Do you know how old I am, Mr. Demarkian?”

“Twenty-eight or twenty-nine?”

“Twenty-nine. Do you know how much money I made last year?”

“I have no idea. I know lobbyists are supposed to be well paid.”

“Well paid isn’t the word for it. Last year, I made over half a million dollars—you look shocked. I don’t blame you. I’m a little shocked myself. What do I do, after all? I talk a lot of horse manure to a lot of corrupt politicians, and we all pretend what I’m saying isn’t horse manure and what the politicians are isn’t corrupt.”

“It’s not exactly that,” Gregor said mildly. “Its that I’m surprised the organization you work for can pay you that.”

“You mean the Empowerment Project? They can’t. They’re not the only people I work for. Although I’ve got to admit, they can pay a lot more than you would think. You’d be amazed at what a PAC can collect from a lot of people who are living barely above the poverty line, if the organization puts its mind to it.”

“The members don’t complain?”

“Why should they? They get what they want, almost always. I’m very good. Of course, whether what they want is good for the country, that’s another story. And the Empowerment Project is small potatoes next to any of the really big operations, like the teachers’ union  s.”

“Teachers’ union  s?”

“That’s what I was thinking about, before all this started. That I was getting a good enough reputation to pick up one of the teachers’ union  s. Get one of those on your client list and you can make a million dollars a year. Half of it called expenses and untouched by the men from the income tax.” She looked back in the direction of the Mondrian study and sighed. “I was just talking to Dan Chester. It’s amazing how talking to Dan Chester can change my mind about practically everything.”