“Hard.” Stratton began to make a comeback. He was on familiar ground. “And thankless. We are involved in very many crucial national and international issues. Mal works ten, fifteen hours a day.”
“Not much time for another job,” I said.
Stratton realized he’d been led down the path. He tried to backtrack.
“Certainly he works hard, but what he does in his off-hours…” Stratton shrugged and spread his hands.
“He’s listed as the President of The American Democratic Imperative,” I said. “A charitable organization based in Washington.”
Stratton shook his head in silence.
“Before her death, Olivia Nelson regularly made large contributions to The Better Government Coalition, in Cambridge. The Better Government Coalition is listed as a subsidiary of The American Democratic Imperative, which is headed by your chief of staff.” Stratton stared straight ahead.
“And you have told me directly that you were intimate with Olivia Nelson,” I said.
The words hung in the room, drifting like the dust of ruination.
Then Loudon Tripp said, “Enough. I’ll hear no more, Spenser. I’m responsible for all of this. I hired you. I brought you and your dirty mind and your gutter morals into all of this. And now you contrive to dirty my dead wife and my friend with one lie.”
“He’s not your friend, Mr. Tripp,” I said. “He slept with your wife. He stole your money.”
“No,” Tripp said. “I’ll hear no more.”
He stood up. Chip stepped in beside him.
“You can’t stop me,” he said to Farrell. “Come on, kids.”
“Last chance,” I said to Tripp. “For all of you. You’ve got to look at this. You’ve got to stop pretending.”
“Get out of my way,” Tripp said again. His voice sounded strangled. “Not my wife, not with my friend.”
He moved past Farrell toward the door. Chip went with him, knotted with excitement, frantic to explode. Meredith stared at him with her mouth half open, motionless.
“Come along, Meredith,” Tripp said. Except that his voice was strangled, he spoke to her as if she were dawdling by a toy store.
“He’s… not… your… friend,” Meredith said.
“Meredith,” Tripp said. The squeezed-out voice was parental-exasperated, long-suffering-but not unloving.
“For crissake, Mere,” Chip said.
“He… was… fucking her,” Meredith said.
Tripp flinched. Chip’s face reddened.
“He was fucking me,” she said in a rush. “Since I was fourteen and he came in my room at one of those big parties.”
The silence in the room was stifling. No one moved. Meredith was rigid, her hands at her sides, a look of shock on her face.
“Jesus,” Chip said. “Mere, why didn’t you…?”
“Dr. Faye says I was getting even with Mommy, and I wanted Daddy to…” She put both her hands suddenly over her mouth and pressed them, palm open, hard against her face, and slowly slid her back down the wall until she was sitting on the floor, her legs splayed in front of her. Chip looked at his father, who seemed frozen in time, then he went suddenly to his knees beside his sister and put his arms around her and pressed her head against his chest. She let him hold her there.
Loudon Tripp stared for a moment at both of them, and then, without looking at anyone else, he walked across my office and out the door and down the corridor past the two guys in their London Fogs. They looked in the office uncertainly. Farrell shook his head at them and they stepped away from the door.
Stratton continued to sit in his chair with his head down, staring at the floor, contemplating his ruin.
Human voices wake us, and we drown.
chapter forty-six
ON A BRIGHT Sunday morning, Susan and I took Pearl over to Harvard Stadium to let her run. We sat in the first row of the stands while Pearl coursed the football field alert for game birds, or Twinkie wrappers. Her nose was down, her tail was up, and her whole self seemed attenuated, as she raced back and forth over the field where generations of young Harvard men had so fiercely fought.
“Your name was in the paper this morning,” Susan said.
She was wearing a black and lavender warm-up suit, and her dark hair shone in the sunshine.
“Did you cut it out and put it up on the refrigerator with a little magnet?”
“Most of the story was the Senator Stratton indictment. Detective Farrell is quoted extensively.”
Pearl spotted a covey of pigeons near the thirty-yard line and went into her low stalk. The closer she got, the slower she went, until finally the pigeons flew up and Pearl dashed to where they had been and wagged her tail.
“He did the work,” I said. “And he did it even though he wasn’t feeling too swell.”
“How are you feeling?” Susan said. “You did some work too.”
