The Hellfire Club(43)



“Wait, Phil—” Charlie began, but it was too late; Strongfellow was already a full city block away, driving as if he were in the Grand Prix.

The light turned green and Charlie and Street crossed the street, resuming their walk toward the Capitol. The white and pink flowers of the cherry blossom trees were beginning to bud. Groundskeepers unfurled rolls of sod to cover the acres of barren, frozen dirt surrounding the Capitol grounds; turf harvesting was a postwar agricultural development that significantly enhanced the appearance of the capital’s tourist spots.

“What did you want to ask him?”

“It’s dumb. This note I found in my desk maybe belonged to Van Waganan,” Charlie said. “Scribbles about broadleaf crops and the University of Chicago. My intern called and wasn’t able to get any information about it because of wartime secrecy laws. Phil said he’d look into it for me.”

“Sounds pretty random.”

“It is. I don’t know much about Van Waganan. It’s probably nothing.”

“All I know about him is that his body was found in a cheap hotel room next to a dead hooker. That might be as much as I need to know, to be honest.”

Charlie stopped walking and looked at Street, stunned. “Really? A hooker? Everything I’ve heard made it sound like it was suicide.”

“Nope,” said Street. “They kept it out of the papers, a friend of mine with connections told me. To spare his family, they put the hooker’s dead body in a different room.”

“And what do they think happened?”

“They have no idea,” said Street. “It remains an open case.”

“Amazing. A dead congressman is an open case.”

“In company towns, like this one or Hollywood or Detroit or Nashville, police are often encouraged to let some crimes go unsolved. People in power don’t want them solved.”

“What?”

“Someday, for kicks, go to the homicide division here in DC and see how many dead young women are in the cold-case files. Attractive ones. You’ll be stunned.”

“Right, but Van Waganan and a dead prostitute—that has to be some form of murder-suicide, no?”

“All I know is what my guy told me. They think he didn’t kill her and she didn’t kill him. No cause of death. No evidence of sexual contact. There was no evidence of any relationship at all, actually—no phone records, no witnesses. Nothing tying the two together.”

“Other than their corpses being found in the same room,” Charlie said.

“Right.” Street laughed. “Except that.”

“It’s hard to believe the local police wouldn’t care about such a case,” Charlie said.

“They care,” said Street. “But when there’s a VIP involved, the FBI bursts in and claims jurisdiction and that’s it. We don’t hear about it after that. Hoover’s own private police force.”

They continued into the Capitol Building and walked up the stairs to the House Chamber. By now Charlie knew better than to ask Street if he was offended at not having been invited to the party that evening. With the exception of the veterans’ poker night, Street shunned most social functions, presumably to avoid the blatant racism so prevalent in Washington. Which wasn’t to say he was a shrinking violet; Street ate daily at the purportedly whites-only House Dining Room, and he didn’t give an inch when bigotry reared its head in his presence, routinely challenging the offhand remarks and “funny stories” that exposed his colleagues’ often unwitting, careless prejudices. Did Street care that he wasn’t invited to the bacchanal tonight? He’d already made it clear to Charlie that he far preferred to spend his evenings with his wife and twin baby boys than with most members of Congress. “Honestly, Charlie, most of them are just imbeciles,” he said once.

They reached the second floor of the Capitol Building, and Charlie paused to look at the immense oil painting of the Founding Fathers that hung on the wall of the landing. As imagined by artist Howard Chandler Christy, George Washington stood on a dais in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall in 1787, lit and posed as if God had just handed down to him the U.S. Constitution. James Madison sat in the front row, a worried expression on his face, while front and center sat Alexander Hamilton, whispering into the ear of a lounging Benjamin Franklin. It was a complicated portrayal, half class photo of almost forty Founding Fathers, half patriotic rah-rah. Since it had been painted, fourteen years earlier, Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States had become one of the most famous works of art in the country.

So much had changed since the last time he’d stopped to look at the portrait, a few weeks before. He’d been with MacLachlan and Street, all of them on their way from the House Chamber to their offices after a vote, Bernstein in tow with a sheaf of phone messages for Charlie’s attention.

“Hold up,” MacLachlan had called out from the second floor as the others headed downstairs. They turned and rejoined him. MacLachlan was staring up at the painting as he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a leaflet. “I’ve been meaning to get a better look at this. Christy spent years chasing down portraits of all these men, it says here.” He waved the leaflet toward the painting, then turned with a grin to the others. “Can you name them all?”

“This a pop quiz, Mac?” Street asked.

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