“Well, she would keep his calendar, check his e-mail, take his calls, sit in on all his meetings. In short, there wouldn’t be anything she wouldn’t know about the guy.”
“It’s my understanding,” said Paul, “that Admiral Hart is still here, in charge of Weapons Acquisition and Management for the Navy.”
“That’s right. His office is just around the corner from us, in the tenth corridor.”
“Hart’s wife is convinced the two were having an affair,” I cut in, “but I’m not so sure about that. When Goodall was at the Academy, she tried to hang an affair around Paul’s neck, too.” I caught Paul looking at me and smiled. “But she lied about that. At least she admitted that to me before she died.”
Jack leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees. “I remember reading about her accusations in Navy Times,” he said, “but no one who really knew Professor Ives ever believed a word of it.”
“That’s gratifying,” Paul said with a thin, grim smile.
“I did ask around as casually as I could about Goodall’s sex life,” Jack continued, “but there doesn’t seem to be any scuttlebutt about that. If Goodall and Hart were an item, they played their cards very close to their chests.”
“What about the possibility that Goodall was blackmailing Hart?” Murray asked, breaking what was, for him, an uncharacteristically long silence. “If not about sex, how about something else? Something job-related, for example.”
“But wait a minute.” I held up a hand. “If Hart were doing something dishonest, immoral, or illegal, wouldn’t he try to hide it from his staff, just in case any of them were the whistle-blowing type?”
Jack raised a hand, the stone in his Naval Academy ring a flash of blue in the bright light streaming through the window. “Consider this scenario. As Hart’s assistant, Goodall would normally sit in on all meetings. What if, all of a sudden, people started showing up who weren’t on his calendar? What if she were excluded from certain meetings? She might get suspicious, put two and two together, start nosing around.”
“My experience is mostly with the corporate world,” Murray said, “so can you educate me a little? What sort of mischief could an admiral like Hart get into?”
Jack took a deep breath. “This is pure speculation, you understand, and completely off the record…” He paused. When Murray nodded in agreement, Jack leaned forward in his chair and continued. “Hart may be looking ahead to retirement, angling for a job at one of the biggies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, or Northrup/Grumman. It’s possible he’s steering business their way, in some sort of you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours kind of scheme.” Jack gazed at the ceiling, his green eyes completely innocent. “But you didn’t hear that from me.”
“Kickbacks?” I asked.
“Could be, but not necessarily. With that kind of arrangement, no money actually needs to exchange hands.”
“That’s drawing a pretty fine line,” Murray snorted.
“But wouldn’t there be safeguards in place to keep that from happening?” Paul wondered.
“Usually, yes, through a tightly controlled government contracting process,” Jack continued. “But there’s a war on in Iraq, and things need to get rushed through in the name of expedience, sometimes without the usual oversight. We call it fast-tracking.”
I couldn’t wait to put in my two cents worth. “Easier to explain why you let a government contract go to a crony than to explain to a grieving mother that her son died because he didn’t have a bulletproof vest, right?”
“Right. And troops have to be fed and supplied from day one,” Jack continued. “You simply can’t afford to wait around for the usual contract procedures to run their course.”
I’d dealt with government contracts before while working at Whitworth and Sullivan-writing a statement of work, advertising it in Commerce Business Daily, sending it out to perspective bidders, evaluating bids, awarding the contract, dealing with challenges from losing bidders who think they’ve been unfairly excluded. It could take years before the actual product showed up on your loading dock.
“But aren’t the fast-track vendors prequalified in some way,” I wondered, “like the blanket purchase order agreements I remember from back in the old days?”
“Many are, particularly for goods and services that we anticipated a need for, but now we’re dealing with companies capable of providing expertise to quickly gear up and handle critical large-scale public works projects like water, sewer, electricity, housing, transportation. It’s a whole new ball game.”
“But still, even with fast-tracking,” I said, “surely there are safeguards to keep DOD employees from playing fast and loose with the contract regulations?”
“Of course there are, but it’s ridiculously easy for things to slip through the cracks. Governmentwide, we’re still dealing with largely a paper system. It’s stunning how much time we waste faxing paperwork back and forth and making phone calls.”
As if it knew we were talking about it, the telephone on Jack’s desk warbled once. Jack ignored it. “Besides, a lot of the fast-track contracts are set up for projects that fall under a certain amount, say fifty thousand dollars. Nobody really looks too hard at them.”
“Are there a lot of contracts in that category?” Murray asked.
“Thousands upon thousands.”
“It could add up,” Paul commented dryly.
“It could.”
One of the secretaries to whom we had been introduced earlier rapped once on the door frame and stuck her head into the room. “You asked to be reminded when it was time for lunch.”
“Thanks, Sue. We’ll just be a minute.” Jack smiled and turned to me. “Now, about that other name you asked me about, Chris Donovan?”
“Yes?”
“I checked for you. She’s a civilian, working in Personnel.”
“She?” Paul and I said it at the same time.
Jack shrugged. “Short for Christine, I suppose, but she always goes by Chris. I thought you knew.”
“Well, that’s very different,” I quipped, quoting Miss Emily Latella of Saturday Night Live fame. What an ignoramus I’d been! Chris was a woman. That could change everything.
“In her present capacity, Donovan probably wouldn’t have worked with Goodall,” Jack continued. “But before she got out of the Navy, Donovan also worked in Weapons Acquisitions and Management. I’m sure you’ll want to ask her about it.”
I was absolutely certain of that, too.
“Donovan’s not here on Saturday,” he added. “I checked. Her office says she’ll be in on Monday. You can call back then.” Jack handed me a slip of paper on which he’d written Chris Donovan’s telephone number. I tucked it into my purse for safekeeping, but I had no intention of waiting until Monday to check back with Chris Donovan at her office. Now that I knew Chris was a business associate of the dead woman and not an ex-boyfriend with murder on his mind, I’d call her on my cell phone using the number I’d filched from Jennifer’s locker.
With the memory of Marisa Young’s recent tongue-lashing still fresh in my mind, I decided that whatever it took-fibs, fairy tales, flim-flam, or farrago-I’d figure out a way to get Chris Donovan to open up and talk to me.
“Lunch?” Jack asked, rising from his chair.
Like hungry little ducklings, we followed.
Lunch was served in the oh-so-elegant Pentagon Executive Dining Room, where crystal, china, and heavy silverware graced tables covered by thick white linen cloths. In the days since my shattering box lunch experience in Baltimore, every meal had been a treat. Tuna noodle casserole, Triscuit and gouda, even the cheeseburger at the drive-through McDonald’s on I-68 outside of Frostburg on our way back from Deep Creek Lake had been, for me at least, a gourmet delight. So when I sat down and checked the dining room menu, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.