“You haven’t won a Pulitzer in ten years,” she reminded him. “Maybe you’ve forgotten how good it is.”
He put his mouth over the nipple of her right breast and caressed it with his tongue. He thrilled when he felt the little mound of flesh dimple and harden in response. “The Pulitzer never did that for me,” he said.
At Evelyn Bracken’s insistence, Harold Marshall called his doctor at home after dinner to report the dizzy spells. The doctor came over and examined Marshall but found nothing wrong. He ordered him to the hospital for tests first thing the next morning.
Ultimately, the tests told the doctors nothing. There was nothing apparent in the pictures from the CAT scan to explain the spells Marshall described. In the absence of proof of a problem, the doctors were left to their diagnostic instincts. Since they read newspapers and knew who they were treating, they believed their best clue lay in Marshall’s high blood-pressure readings. The problem had to be related to stress and should be treated as such. They prescribed medication and weekly checkups. They knew of nothing else to do.
Their error in diagnosis would be obvious soon enough, although in the aftermath of the next episode, they would examine the CAT scan again and agree the problem was too small to detect at the time. Doctors protecting other doctors? Perhaps. But the aneurysm that had formed in the wall of a blood vessel at the base of Harold Marshall’s brain—in the balance center—was tiny, indeed. The bouts of dizziness he experienced were caused by the aneurysm’s pressure against a major posterior communicating artery in a network of arteries known as the Circle of Willis.
Had the CAT scan been done two days later, the aneurysm would have been apparent to anyone trained to read the pictures. But it wasn’t apparent on this day.
And later, it would be too late.
46
Monday morning it was still raining.
It was the fourth straight day of the deluge, and the radio news people talked about flooding in the low-lying areas, especially along the George Washington Parkway. The traffic jams were enormous, and everyone shared the gray mood that rivaled the color of the sky. But Steve Pace showed up for work looking renewed.
He and Kathy spent the weekend doing anything that struck them of a moment. They took long walks in the warm rain. They rented a bunch of classic old movies and watched them on the VCR. They cooked exotic meals and drank great wines. They watched a thunderstorm from the roof of the apartment building, risking being struck by lightning to see the light-and-water show.
“Do you think if we drove out to the country, you could put on an airy dress and run through a field of wildflowers in slow motion?” Pace asked her as they stood on the roof.
“In slow motion?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Pretty girls do it all the time in perfume commercials on television.”
“Those are tampon commercials,” she corrected.
“Then forget it,” he said. “Please, don’t let tampons interfere with this weekend.”
Kathy laughed in the breezy way Pace loved. “Don’t worry,” she assured him.
They even talked of marriage, and neither shrank from the thought. It was a breakthrough for Pace, as he thought it must be for Kathy. Hell, having an honest and open relationship was a breakthrough for him.
It was the greatest feeling in the world.
And he would have some time to enjoy it before his euphoria was shattered.
Avery Schaeffer came ambling by Pace’s desk. “You weren’t in the paper all weekend, you know,” he reminded the reporter. “I figure you didn’t work the requisite eighty hours last week.”
The words were harsh. But the light in Schaeffer’s eye gave him away.
“Yeah, I think I quit at sixty-seven or sixty-eight,” Pace replied.
Schaeffer slid into Jack Tarshis’s ever-vacant chair. “What do you have in mind for the week now that your extended vacation is over?”
“Extended vacation?”
“You took the whole weekend off?”
“I made some phone calls on Saturday and Sunday.”
“Produce anything?”
“No. Nobody called me back.”
“Then they don’t count for much.”
“And I was going to put in for overtime.”
“Forget it. You’ll be lucky if you get paid at all.”
“Then I guess I’d better get to work.” Pace got serious. “The major question is, where is Elliott Parkhall? I checked in with that crazy desk man at his building. The police are still standing guard over his apartment, and Parkhall hasn’t showed. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s left the country, or more likely, he’s dead.”
“There’s still the critical question of what caused the ConPac crash,” Schaeffer said.
“Absolutely,” Pace agreed. “Ken Sachs is first on my call list this morning.”
“They going to resume daily briefings?”
“No. I talked to Mitch Gabriel on Friday. He said since there’s a criminal matter involved, the agency more than likely won’t say anything more about its investigation. Whatever they find will go straight to the Justice Department.”
“What about the other members of the original team on the engine? Would they have anything to say?”
“Comchech and Teller? I tried them a couple of times. Their offices refer me to the Justice Department. Both changed their home numbers. The new numbers are unlisted.”
“How about the Sexton guy, the one who saw the engine right after the crash?”
“Dave Terrell, right,” Pace said. “Same thing. I begged Whitney Warner to get me an interview with him, but he’s been put under wraps by DOJ, too. I’ve got his home phone, but when I call, the only people who ever answer are his wife or a teenage kid, and when they find out who wants to talk to him, they inform me very politely he has nothing to say.”
“They’ve closed off most of your avenues, haven’t they?” Schaeffer said glumly.
“I guess that’s what grand-jury investigations do,” said Pace. “But I’m going to keep—” He was interrupted by his phone. If he let it ring, it would kick back to a clerk who would take a message. Pace didn’t know whether Schaeffer wanted him to ignore it or not.
“Take it,” the editor said. “It could be a lot more important than this conversation.”
“National desk. Steve Pace.”
“I have some information.”
The look of surprise on Pace’s face alerted Schaeffer.
“Who is this?” the reporter asked.
“You don’t care. All you need to know is what I know.”
Pace started taking notes, trying to get both sides of the conversation. He knew the voice, but he asked anyway. “If I don’t know who you are, how can I evaluate what you?”
“Just listen. You can check it out.”
“Go ahead,” Pace urged.
“You know Chapman Davis?”
“Sure.”
“He drives a silver-gray Thunderbird. Brand new.”
Pace went cold. “So do a lot of people.”
“True. But it’s an interesting coincidence, isn’t it?”
“Is he the one who picked up Elliott Parkhall last Monday night?”
“No idea. That’s what investigative reporters are for, to find out those things?”
“I suppose so. Thanks.”
“I could surprise you and call again. There’s something even bigger in the works.”
“Anything you can tell me?”
“Not now.”
“You have my home phone?”
“Yeah. Don’t worry. I’ll find you if I need you.”
The line went dead. Pace expelled a long, low whistle as he finished his notes, and Schaeffer waited impatiently to learn what the conversation had been about. Pace didn’t waste words getting to the point.
“The head of the minority staff of the Senate Transportation Committee, a Marshall appointee, drives a brand-new silver-gray Thunderbird.”
“Holy shit!”
The two men stared at each other for a long moment.
“Who was that?” Schaeffer asked, nodding toward the phone.
“He wouldn’t say, but I recognized the voice. George Ridley.”
For a second the name didn’t mean anything to Schaeffer; then he pointed his finger at Pace in realization. “He’s the one who told you Marshall was pressing the NTSB.”
“Right,” said Pace. “He’s the majority chief of staff on the same committee.”
“Do I gather they don’t like each other?” Schaeffer asked.
“Not necessarily,” said Pace. “Oh, they’re totally different types. Ridley’s white, solidly middle-class, blustering, profane, and out of shape. The only exercise he gets is flapping his lips, bending his elbow, and chewing. Chappy’s almost the exact opposite: black, from a blue-collar family, an ex-college basketball player who still runs every day. I like him, a lot more than I like George Ridley, as a matter of fact.”
“A black Republican?”
Pace shrugged. “It happens.”
“Did whoever that was know if it was Davis who picked up Elliott Parkhall?”
“He said he didn’t, which kind of leaves me up a creek, with an interesting clue but no smoking gun.”
Schaeffer laughed. “That’s a maimed metaphor if I ever heard one.”
Pace laughed, too. “Nobody’s perfect.”