Act of Darkness Read online

  It was two o’clock on the afternoon of June first, and she was sitting in the living room of her suite on the top floor of the Old Washington Hotel, the biggest, flashiest, most ostentatious, and most expensive accommodation in the District of Columbia. It was the kind of place that suited Victoria, and she knew it. It was also the kind of place she liked. She had started her life as a child actress, and an unsuccessful one. What she remembered of the world before her eighteenth birthday consisted of a series of two-room apartments with peeling paint and leaking pipes, inadequate heat and nonexistent air-conditioning, disintegrating stucco and the brown pinpoint tracks of rampaging bugs, presided over by a mother with only two emotional modes: euphoria and condemnation. The euphoria surfaced every time Victoria got an audition. The condemnation was more of a constant, Mother’s preferred response to auditions failed, weight gained, weight lost, potato chips eaten, and pimples and blackheads of any kind. During the acne years, Victoria had wanted to take a razor blade to her face and settle the issue once and for all. Nobody with a face full of scars would ever be a movie star, and nobody with a face full of scars would ever have pimples again either. In the dark quiet hours after one of her mother’s real fits of craziness—Mother pulling her own hair out in clumps, tearing at her face with her nails, keening in the high whistling screech that sounded like a cross between a banshee and a witch being burned at the stake—permanent disfigurement had seemed like the least of all possible evils.

  Now, of course, she was the universally acknowledged Most Beautiful Woman in the World, even at sixty considered to be more attractive than most of the children who had risen to success in the Industry behind her. Her mother was long dead, buried out in Forest Lawn next to Victoria’s first pet Pekingese dog. Some of the two-room apartments were part of Victoria’s portfolio, spruced up (barely) and reclassified as condominiums. It would have been a success story for the ages, if it hadn’t been for one thing: the pain of Victoria’s childhood had been real, and she still felt it. When nobody was looking, she spent endless hours in front of the mirror, trying to see what everybody else saw and failing. Looking at her face was like looking at one of those pictures that changed from a tree to a duck depending on how you tilted it. She could never get the tilt just right or make the picture change.

  Fortunately, she was not so blind when it came to her daughter, the grandchild Victoria’s mother had once called “that damned little cancer of defeat.” Victoria’s mother had wanted her to abort, but Victoria had been smarter than that. In the first place, she hadn’t believed in it. In the second, she hadn’t wanted to. In the third, it was 1948 and the procedure was illegal as hell, carried out in back rooms and likely to lead to sterility or death. It made more sense to disappear for a year, to pretend to have been married and divorced. Women in Hollywood did that all the time and nobody ever asked any questions. They knew better.

  So Victoria had Janet, and Janet was beautiful, as beautiful as her father had been. If it hadn’t been for that odd streak of repressive conventionality, Janet would have been the unalloyed joy of Victoria’s life. Even with it, she was the one thing Victoria took really seriously, the one cause for which she would let herself be ruined rather than betray, the cornerstone and single element in what she couldn’t help thinking of as her honor. It surprised her, sometimes, that emotion: not love so much as a commitment so total and so passionate as to leave no room in her for anything else. Like a butcher with his thumb on the scale, Victoria weighed everything with Janet already part of the equation. Stuck in the hospital with gallbladder surgery less than six months ago, she had worried about how Janet was taking it. Even her choice of clothes was dictated by what she thought Janet would feel if she saw her mother photographed in them and on the cover of the National Enquirer. It was a piece of good luck that Janet was more amused than annoyed by Victoria’s flamboyance. It was not a piece of good luck that Janet had married Stephen Whistler Fox, and it was aggressively bad luck that Stephen never went anywhere without that first-class thug, Dan Chester. Victoria leaned forward on the couch and picked up Janet’s wedding picture, secure behind glass in its sterling silver Tiffany frame. It was her fault Janet had met Stephen—that had happened at a Democratic party fund-raiser Victoria had organized herself—but it certainly wasn’t her fault that the two of them had married. Victoria had done everything short of having Janet drugged and kidnapped to put a stop to that. And she had been right. Considering everything that had happened since, she had been more than right.

  She put the photograph back, down among the complimentary hors d’oeuvres the management had sent up when she arrived, the caviar in the tiny ice sculpture swan, the tea in the Wedgwood teapot, the. cold shrimp in the silver bowl. There were two Limoges vases filled with a dozen red roses each on the coffee table, too, and her own sterling-silver brush and comb and mirror set. She smoothed her famous pile of honey blond hair and pushed the buzzer for Melissa. Then she sat back and waited for Melissa to arrive.

  Victoria Harte traveled with a personal masseuse, a personal trainer, a personal nutritionist, a personal shopper, a wardrobe woman, a hairdresser, a makeup woman, a secretary, a bodyguard, a chauffeur, and a maid. She also traveled with Melissa, who had no title and was young. When pressed, Victoria sometimes called Melissa her “companion,” but that was not quite right. What Melissa actually was, was one of the world’s most talented gossips, and Victoria’s personal spy.

  She was also the kind of woman who seems destined to spend her life in flat-heeled shoes. She arrived at the door of the living room in brown oxfords, four plastic fake tortoiseshell haircombs, and the twin set she’d bought in Harrod’s in 1982. It was the only time Victoria had ever known Melissa to buy clothes.

  “Yes?” she said. And that was it. The reason Melissa was one of the world’s most talented gossips was that she rarely said anything. She listened.

  Victoria fussed at her hair again—Melissa always made her nervous—and then said, “Did you get hold of Janet yet? Is she coming over?”

  “I haven’t been able to find her, Ms. Harte. I think she’s working at the school today.”

  “Working at the school.” Victoria bit her lip. “I wish I could talk her out of working at that school.”

  “I think she likes it, Miss Harte.”

  “I don’t. I think she—never mind. Do you know if she’s seen the papers this morning?”

  “No, Ms. Harte. I know she knows all about the Act in Aid of Exceptional Children. Is that what you were worried about?”

  “Yes,” Victoria said.

  “She was interviewed on the radio this morning,” Melissa said, diffident, as if she didn’t want to take credit for something anyone could have done. “I made a tape for you, if you’d like to hear it.”

  “Of course I want to hear it.”

  “I took a call from Mr. Chester, too, Ms. Harte. Making sure we’d be at the cocktail party tonight.”

  “Is Janet going to be at the cocktail party?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we’ll be there. Sometimes I wish we’d spend more time in Washington. I’d like to know more than I do about Mr. Daniel Chester.”

  “Miss Rawls called, Ms. Harte. She said it was extremely important you get in touch with her.”

  Miss Rawls. Victoria made one of the faces that had been her trademark in the series of screwball comedies that had first made her famous and began to root around in her pocketbook for the cigarettes she almost never allowed herself to smoke. In a way, Miss Rawls was her fault too, because she had introduced the little slut to Stephen. Miss Rawls had introduced herself to Dan Chester, however, and it was Dan Chester who did Stephen’s pimping.

  For just a second, Victoria wondered what would happen if she told Melissa the whole story as far as she knew it, and then sent the girl out to discover who had done what when and whose idea it had been to go ahead with it. Stephen Fox. Dan Chester. Kevin Debrett. It had to be one of those three. The one thing Victoria was su
re of was that Janet hadn’t known a thing, and wouldn’t have known even afterward if the three of them had been careful enough. Which they never were.

  She lit up with one of the hotel’s matches and closed her eyes. “Melissa,” she said, “could you do me a favor? Find out what Miss Rawls will be wearing to this cocktail party.”

  “Miss Rawls will be at the cocktail party?” Melissa sounded shocked. Melissa was very good at sounding shocked.

  “Since Miss Rawls is in town,” Victoria flicked an ash at the small pile of newspapers on the floor, “Miss Rawls will insist she be at this cocktail party. Just to make sure everything looks normal. Find out what she’s going to wear. And when we get there, stick to Stephen. Hang on his arm and don’t let him out of your sight. Is that clear?”

  “Of course, Miss Harte.”

  “I’d have you hang onto Dan Chester,” Victoria said, “but I think that kind of cruelty is probably in violation of labor law.”

  [4]

  THE NEWS OF STEPHEN Fox’s introduction of the Act in Aid of Exceptional Children had been in that morning’s Washington Post, and although Dr. Kevin Debrett had expected it to be there, the actual sight of it, tucked into the bottom right-hand corner of the front page with a headline in twelve-point type, came as something of a shock. Just what was shocking about it, Kevin didn’t know. There was certainly nothing in the particulars to surprise him. The act Stephen had finally introduced had been the same one hammered out over months of late-night meetings in this very building. Its provisions for private clinics, direct billings to the federal government, and extended therapy had been written by Kevin himself. It was just that, seeing it there, he began to think of the entire project as an unacceptable gamble, a slap in the face of fate. Kevin had been a very lucky man. His luck had held, he thought, because he’d always known enough not to strain the limits of it. The Act in Aid of Exceptional Children was going to strain those limits to the point of disintegration. It was as if, having won the lottery, he’d decided to take his money and bet it all on a horse.

  He tapped his fingers against the thick glass top of his desk and sighed. He was a relatively young man, only in his forties, and he was already more of a success than he had ever expected to be. Dan Chester had promised him that, back when they were all at the University of Connecticut, and Dan Chester had delivered. It was funny to think, now, that Kevin had so resisted the idea of becoming a doctor. He hadn’t been all that good at science, and he had hated the sight of blood—he still hated it. God only knew he’d had no interest in Serving His Fellow Man. But Dan had insisted, and when Dan insisted he got what he wanted, maybe because when he insisted he always turned out to be right. Kevin had suffered his way through three years of premed, four years of medical school, and an interminable residency in obstetrics. Dan had vetoed Kevin’s plan to specialize in psychiatry, as being too chancy and not quite scientifically respectable. Kevin had had to get down in the muck and mire, and he had done it. He’d borrowed a lot of money from his mother to outfit his office and set up shop just outside Hartford, in one of those suburbs where insurance company money kept the prices of most things high and the price of obstetrical services astronomical. He’d practiced until he was locally well known and then, on Dan’s suggestion, after Stephanie Fox had been born damaged and then died, had abruptly switched fields, into the study and care of children with Down syndrome. Kevin Debrett had always been an excellent researcher, no matter what the subject, and he liked spending his time among the dry pages of aging books and even more quickly aging journals. The human body was too fluid and inconsistent for him, too wet. Every time he delivered a baby, he found himself appalled that there was so much blood.

  Of course, Dan had had an ulterior motive. Even then, he’d been setting Stephen up to run for the presidency, finding Stephen a cause, giving Stephen an identity. All three of them had known, all the way back there in college, that Stephen was their best shot at producing a media celebrity. Dan looked too foreign, even though he wasn’t, and too much like the popular conception of Machiavelli. Kevin himself was just too damn conventional.

  Still, Kevin thought now, Dan was not only a genius but a loyal genius. He believed in sticking by his friends. First he’d gotten Stephen elected to the U.S. Senate—and right out of the Hartford statehouse, too—and then he’d gotten Kevin down to Washington and shown him how to play the game. In no time at all, Kevin had gone from being a reasonably successful physician to the country’s most popular expert on mental retardation in children, His clinic had grown from five small rooms on Avenue C to this great white marble palace in the hills of McLean, Virginia. He had a staff of 250, a client list well over a thousand names long, and a reputation a saint would have envied. From the things he read about himself in the papers, he might have been Mother Teresa turned Protestant and dressed up in drag.

  It was the sainthood business that bothered him. It was a position he would never have chosen for himself—even though, in a way, he did consider himself a saint, on his own terms. His terms were not the ones the papers were using, or the delegations of parents’ groups who gave banquets in his honor, or the universities who awarded him honorary degrees. His own terms were understood by only three people in the world: Dan Chester, Stephen Fox, and himself.

  It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and he had been sitting at his desk for an hour, doing what he thought of as “not thinking.” Mostly, what he was not thinking about was the death of Maren Kent, down on the second floor, who had been brought in as an emergency patient three days ago and never had much chance to grow up human anyway. He wouldn’t have been not thinking about it, except that someone had done it again—left a vial of succinylcholine lying on the floor. Of course, succinylcholine was what you used in an emergency like that. A vial of it wouldn’t be misinterpreted. Still, it wouldn’t be good to get a reputation for carelessness, and he’d already lost a vial of succinylcholine last month. It had been taken right out of the medical bag he had parked in the cloakroom of the Old Washington Hotel during Victoria Harte’s birthday party.

  He reached across his desk, picked up his phone—a piece of plastic the thickness of a golf visor—and buzzed for his secretary. Her voice, a beautiful North Carolina drawl, slid back at him with a soft seductiveness that made him think of warm molasses.

  “Could you get Dan Chester for me, please? He’ll be at Stephen Fox’s office in the SOB. The new office.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  Kevin sat back, expecting to have to wait a long time. Dan might be in the SOB, or he might be somewhere else. Dan was often somewhere else, nobody knew where.

  The buzzer on his phone went off, and Kevin was surprised to hear the North Carolina drawl saying, “Mr. Chester on three, Doctor. He says he was just thinking of calling you.”

  Kevin punched the button for three and said, “Dan?”

  “Kevin. I’m losing my mind over here. These offices are very pretty, but they’re not what I call efficient.”

  “Stephen should be happy to get one.”

  “He is. He’d be happier to get one in the Capitol itself. I mean, he has one in the Capitol itself—”

  “But it’s totally inadequate. I know, Dan. You’ve told me.”

  “The way things are going, maybe we won’t have to put up with it for very long. I’ve been treating myself to daydreams all morning. What about you? Are you all right?”

  Kevin looked down at the top of his desk. Except for the phone, it was empty. It was always empty. He knew he did a lot of work, but he sometimes wondered when and where he did it. On Dan’s orders, his office was perpetually devoid of official paperwork, except in the direst emergency. Even the drawers of his desk held nothing more vulgarly laborlike than a collection of Mark Cross twenty-four-carat gold monogram pens.

  “Kevin?” Dan said.

  “I’m here,” Kevin told him. “I’m sorry. I’m a little tired today. I saw the piece in the Post.”

  “Yeah. Good piece
, too. With any luck, Stephen wasn’t lying to me this morning, and Janet was told beforehand. As long as she was, we’re off and running.”

  “Janet,” Kevin said. “Right.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about Janet, Kevin. Janet is a trooper. It’s just that Stephen doesn’t know how to treat his troopers.”