House Secrets Read Free Page A

any faith in, and he had this faith for a simple reason: the nine people who worked there had nothing more to gain. They were at the pinnacle of their profession, they had the job for life, and they didn’t have to please anybody to keep the job. Those, he believed, were circumstances that tended to produce honest if not always wise decisions. But he was probably wrong about that too.
    As DeMarco stepped inside the Monocle, the maître d’ glanced over at him to see if his attire was appropriate, nodded curtly, then returned to his reservation list. The Monocle was a bit pretentious but then this was understandable: its clientele tended to be the legislativebranch of government as opposed to the electorate, and the walls of the bar were covered with photographs of drinking politicians. It seemed like Mahoney was in half the pictures.
    DeMarco saw Reggie Harmon sitting at the end of the bar, the only customer at eleven in the morning, his first martini half-gone. Reggie was sixty and he looked like a vampire that had been caught in a sunbeam. He had a pale sunken-cheeked face and dyed black hair plastered to a long, narrow skull. His shirt was two sizes too large around the collar and his thin fingers poked beyond the cuffs like claws.
    As DeMarco sat down on the stool next to him, Reggie slowly swiveled his head in DeMarco’s direction. His eyes were so red that DeMarco wondered if any of the reporter’s blood reached his brain. Exposing too many nicotine-stained teeth in the grimace he called a smile, Reggie said, “What do you call a hundred lawyers buried in a landfill?”
    “A good start. Reggie, that’s the third time you’ve told me that stupid joke. You need to get some new material.”
    “Well, you could still laugh, just to be polite,” Reggie said.
    DeMarco just shook his head then pointed at Reggie’s drink and held up two fingers for the bartender’s benefit.
    “What do you know about Terry Finley?” DeMarco asked.
    Reggie drained his first martini. “The kid that drowned?” he said.
    “Yeah, the kid that drowned.” Finley had been forty-two when he died.
    Reggie shrugged, then reached for the full glass the bartender had just placed at his elbow. He swallowed a third of the drink before saying, “What do I know about him? Well, he worked the political beat, of course.”
    “Why ‘of course’?”
    “The only reason he got the job was because his dad was a congressman. The schemers in charge figured a kid whose dad worked on the Hill would give the paper an edge.”
    “Did it?”
    “No. Terry was an annoying, ambitious little shit, one of those guys who always thought he was gonna be the next Bobby Woodward, but he never tried to use his old man to get there.”
    “Was he any good?”
    Reggie swallowed the remainder of his second martini; as an afterthought he reached for the olives from his first martini. At the rate Reggie drank, DeMarco was thinking that they should just hook up an IV bag to his arm.
    “Only in his dreams,” Reggie said. “A couple years ago he got everyone all excited when he said he’d discovered that this colonel over at the Pentagon was an al-Qaeda mole. The basis for his conclusion was that the guy—the Pentagon guy—was always meeting this dishy, Arabic-looking gal in these seedy hotel bars. Turned out the guy was just boffing the lady, who happened to be Egyptian, but was no more into Islam than the Pope. That was Terry: seeing a spy ring instead of two people fuckin’.”
    “Huh,” DeMarco said. “Was he working on anything important before he died?”
    “Maybe. I heard him and his editor going at it one day. Frank was trying to get Terry’s ass up to the Hill to write about some political squabble, and Terry kept telling him that he didn’t have time. He said he was working on the biggest thing since Clinton got a blow job.”
    “But you don’t know what the story was about?”
    “No. All I heard was Terry say that if Frank knew who his source