Deadlock Page 5

  Her name was called out again, this time louder, and then the word surrender.

  Surrender…

  Yes, a surrender that would end this. And yet she knew if she did surrender now, she would be forever lost.

  Her will told her to resist, but she had lost all ability to resist. She could not move. She could not control her limbs. She could not scream. She felt a drawing downward, downward.

  And then in some far place in her mind – if she still had a mind – in a voice that sounded distantly like her own, she willed herself to say, Oh, God, help me.

  3

  “I messed up,” Sam Levering said. “Oh, boy, did I.”

  “Just tell me,” Anne Deveraux said.

  Levering popped another aspirin into his mouth. Anne was everything to him – legal counsel, advisor, and spokesperson. She was also the sharpest politico on Capitol Hill. He depended on her for his every move, from schedules to meals to troubleshooting statements drafted on the fly.

  This time she’d have to come up with a strategy, and it would have to be a masterpiece. He would need to break it to her a step at a time.

  “I had a date last night,” Levering said.

  “Not exactly news,” Anne said. She was the only one he would allow to talk to him that way. Part of it was pure sexual power. With her flowing raven hair, her form-fitting red suit, and her impeccable makeup, Anne Deveraux could, as the saying went, make a bishop kick out a stained-glass window. The one and only time Levering had made a move on her, however, she had frozen him out with an icy glare. Anne made it clear to him that she was all business.

  “This wasn’t an ordinary date,” Levering said, clearing his throat. “It was with Millicent Mannings Hollander.”

  Anne threw her head back, the way she did when signaling overdrive in disaster-handling mode. “Tell me that’s not true.”

  “Unfortunately, it is.”

  Anne began to pace in front of the oil painting near Levering’s office door, the one of Gordon McRae as Curly in Oklahoma! It had been the gift of a wealthy donor.

  “So you are telling me you were with Justice Hollander last night, and that she is about to die this morning? Have you seen the Post Web site yet?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s all over the place. And the big question is what was she doing alone, in an evening gown, in the middle of a Washington, D.C., park? And you’re saying there are only two people with the answer?”

  “Three.”

  Anne thought a moment. “You had the limo?”

  “Sylvan won’t talk.”

  “What about her friends? Did she tell anybody she was going out with you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, we better find out. Anybody see you pick her up?”

  Levering shrugged.

  Anne stopped for a moment and fished a cigarette from her pocket. She put it in her mouth and “smoked” it, though it remained unlit. Levering had seen her do this many times before. It was the ritual of a supreme spin doctor.

  “All right,” Anne said. “Detail me.”

  “I was going to take her to dinner,” Levering said, longing for a drink but deciding he better not until this meeting was over. “Then I thought we’d ride around a little. Have a couple of drinks.”

  “Does she drink?”

  “Not much.”

  “Did she have anything to drink?”

  “Some champagne. Why?”

  “That may come in handy. Keep going.”

  Levering rubbed his temples. With his eyes closed he continued. “So I’d already had a snort before picking her up. Believe it or not, I was a little nervous.”

  “Why shouldn’t I believe it?” Anne said. There was a challenging tone in her voice that Levering ignored.

  “So I drank a little more with her, we talked. She was uptight. And, I don’t know, I got forward with her, I guess.”

  Anne dragged deeply on the unlit cigarette, then put her hand on her hip. “Keep going.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “You want me to help you?”

  “Fine. I kissed her on the neck.”

  Anne Deveraux threw her head back again, looked at the ceiling, and did a complete turn in the middle of the office. When she finished, she said, “You’re telling me you tried to score with a justice of the United States Supreme Court? On the first date? Before you even got out of the car?”

  Smiling sheepishly, Levering said, “That’s about it.”

  “What were you thinking?” Anne said.

  “You know me.”

  “I can understand it with the others. Interns, yes. Socialite widows, fine. But Millicent Mannings Hollander?”

  “I don’t know why I wanted her.” He paused, pondering his reasons. He had not grown up with very much attention from girls. He had always felt shy and self-conscious – all the way through college. Even when he got married he considered it a lucky blunder. But when he won his first public office in the state legislature, he found that power held a certain attracting force. Women began to gravitate toward him. He was always careful about it. He’d never had a scandal during his married years. Even after the divorce he kept things as discrete as possible. He’d had his pick of women. So why Millie?

  “Let me answer for you,” Anne said. “She’s Jaws.”

  Levering tilted his head at her.

  “You know,” Anne said. “Jaws. The shark. The big one. She was the big one. You wanted to land her.”

  Levering, with reluctance, nodded. “Maybe.”

  “Millicent Mannings Hollander is the most famous virgin in the country. Everybody knows she never got married and doesn’t date. But you thought you’d be Mr. Excitement for the great score, didn’t you?”

  “Fine. Guilty.”

  “Good. Confession’s good for the soul.”

  “I don’t believe in souls.”

  “Then it’s good for your digestion, okay? Now let me do what I do.”

  Levering sighed, glad to be back on familiar ground. Admissions always made him nervous. “What’s the first step?”

  “I’ll go down and figure out what her status is. I’ve got to see if I can get to her before she talks to anybody.”

  “Can you swing that?”

  Anne took a drag on her unlit cigarette and smiled. “Who’s your Huckleberry?”

  4

  Millie opened her mouth and finally a sound came out.

  “Help. Oh, please help.” She heard her voice as if it came from outside of herself, a frightened whisper.

  Light invaded darkness. She opened her eyes. A foglike veil shrouded the room.

  She felt as if she were being pulled through that veil, pulled like dead weight toward consciousness. Her body fought against it, shrieking to go back to sleep.

  Her eyelids were like bags full of rocks. But she knew with a certainty bordering on hysteria that she could not go back to sleep. If she did, they would have her. The ones she had felt in the darkness.

  Circles of fear rippled outward from her stomach. She had to fight to stay awake.

  “Help…”

  Something at the back of her head. A throbbing, painful thing, reaching around to her temples like burning tongs.

  Did they have her in a torture chamber?

  Sight of curtains, smell of linen and disinfectant. Sounds of voices outside the room, beeping noises, the soft whirring of machines.

  She was not dead. She was in a hospital room.

  The realization came to her, and with it a wave of such sweet relief that she almost wept.

  Come back, she told herself as her eyelids pressed downward. Don’t sleep!

  A nurse – Millie assumed it was a nurse, hoped it was – floated in through the mists.

  “… feeling?” the nurse said.

  Millie heard herself groan.

  “How are you feeling?” the nurse repeated.

  “Help.”

  “Are you in pain?”

  Was she i
n pain? No, it was beyond pain, as if she were awakening into a thick, burning substance. She felt things attached to her body.

  “Help,” Millie said.

  “I’ll get the doctor.”

  Millie wanted to shout Don’t leave me, as if this nurse represented the last lifeline. But the nurse was gone.

  She was alone. Would she die? The word again popped into her mind. Why should she think that? Her mind slogged forward, barely, frustrating her. She knew who she was, that her mind was a sharp one, well oiled, trained. Or had she suffered some sort of damage?

  What was happening?

  She did not have any idea of time. The next span could have been minutes or hours. But she fought to stay awake. Sharp pains helped her. She became aware of a monitor next to the bed, issuing peak and valley lines. Her heartbeat. She still had a beating heart.

  She heard a voice. A familiar one. “How does Justice feel?”

  Myron Cross. Her doctor. He always called her Justice. Not Madame Justice. Just Justice, as if she herself were the principle of law itself.

  Dr. Cross was one of the best. He had been the doctor to many Supreme Court justices over the years, even getting a spread once in Time magazine about his practice to the powerful.

  But he was a gentle and humble man who loved his work. Millie had never felt a moment’s anxiety around him, until now. Dr. Cross must have seen a tortured look on her. He said, “Are you in much pain?”

  She was, but the physical pain was not what concerned her. “What happened?” she asked. Her voice was thick and slow.

  “You are lucky,” Dr. Cross said. “You survived a bad accident.”

  “I thought I… was dead.”

  “Truth told, we almost lost you. You were in surgery four hours. Dr. Dickinson performed brilliantly. I was there.”

  “How did I…?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  Millie was barely able to shake her head.

  “A car hit you,” Dr. Cross said. “Don’t try to talk about it now. Let me just tell you you’re going to be all right, but you’ll need a lot of recovery time. You have three broken ribs, a collapsed lung, bruises like you wouldn’t believe, and a blow to the head. You were unconscious for twelve hours. It could have been so much worse.”

  But it was. What she had felt in that darkness had been worse than anything she had ever experienced. Yet how could she explain it to Dr. Cross? She had enough sense, even in her foggy condition, to know that what had happened was psychological, not physical. He would have no remedy for that.

  “Did I…”

  “Go ahead, Millie.”

  “Was I ever… gone?”

  He straightened up. “You mean close to death? The answer is yes.”

  “No. Actually…”

  “There was a moment when you flatlined. But it was only a moment.”

  “When?”

  “Do you really want to go into this?”

  “Please.”

  “Your accident caused what we call simple pneumothorax. It happened when one of your broken ribs punctured your lung. You were unconscious and not breathing.”

  A trembling disquiet swept over Millie’s body.

  “So the paramedics brought you in with a bag-valve mask to keep you breathing. What that did, though, was fill you up with air, not in the lung but in the pleural space. That collapsed your lung completely and put pressure on your heart. And that is probably…”

  “Yes?”

  Dr. Cross glanced at the chart in his hands. “At 1:35 a.m. we had a flatline that lasted about one minute.”

  Millie said nothing.

  “But you’re here now,” Dr. Cross said. “That’s the important thing.”

  Pain exploded behind her eyes.

  “You have some heavy bruising to the legs,” the doctor added. “It’s going to be painful to walk.”

  “Will I be able to play the violin?”

  “You think I’m going to fall for that old joke? No, you won’t be able to play the violin unless you could before. Yes, you will be able to walk and do everything else you used to do. Over time.”

  “Thanks,” Millie said, feeling a tiny spot of relief.

  “Don’t talk,” Dr. Cross said. “I should tell you the place is crawling with reporters, police, and all sorts of people who want to see you. I’m keeping them as far away as possible. But they’ll want a report, and I’m happy to say I can tell them your prospects for a full recovery are excellent. Is there anyone you’d like to see?”

  Her mother. That was who sprang to mind. She would be worried when she heard the news. “I want to call my mother,” Millie said.

  “I’ll arrange it,” Dr. Cross said. “Anything else?”

  “Who hit me?”

  “Oh, a man named Rosato or Rosetta, something like that. He is extremely remorseful, I understand. The police are questioning him.”

  “Tell them…”

  “Yes?”

  “It wasn’t his fault.”

  Dr. Cross nodded. “I’ll take care of it. You rest.”

  She could do nothing else. Her body felt like it had been put through a harvester and dumped in a bale on a road. But her body was not what concerned her.

  It was that vision. She wondered, for a few moments, if the blow to her head meant she was going to lose her mind.

  5

  Down the hall from Millie Hollander’s room, Anne Deveraux stuck a finger in a cop’s face. “Did you not hear me?” she said.

  The cop nodded. “And I’m telling you – ”

  She flashed her credential again. “United States Senate, okay?”

  “Nobody sees her,” the cop said. “Not the president, not the Dalai Lama, unless the doctor says so.”

  She looked around at the milling masses, recognizing some members of the press waiting for the impending press conference called by Dr. Myron Cross. That would be a whitewash, of course, telling her nothing she needed to hear.

  But she’d hang around anyway. Maybe there would be an opening somewhere. What would they do if she walked right in?

  She’d say she was paying her respects from a senator. A man concerned about her health, as he would any prominent member of the Court or Congress. A man who had admired her judicial integrity for years.

  She would not reveal the real reason she was there, of course. She would not mention the word Jaws.

  She felt a touch on her arm. She whirled around hard. Anne did not like to be touched.

  She faced a short man with sweat beads on his forehead.

  “You’re Anne Deveraux, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “You work for Senator Levering, right?”

  She was getting rapidly ticked at this guy. He was – what was the word? – ratlike. He had a longish, pointed nose and eyes that seemed to be scouting for food.

  “What business is that of yours?” Anne asked.

  He smiled, showing two prominent front teeth. Rodent choppers. “I know everything that goes on in this town, every poop that’s a scoop. Dan Ricks.” He extended his hand.

  Anne ignored it. “I’m busy now, Mr. Ricks. If you’d like an appointment – ”

  “Get off it,” he said. “I write for The National Exposure.”

  “Tabloid guy?”

  “Reporter,” he said defensively.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Don’t get huffy. You remember when the New York Times sat on that Congressman Conley story?”

  Lawrence Conley had been forced to resign over an allegation that he’d had sex with a sixteen-year-old girl. “What about it?” Anne asked.

  “I broke that.”

  That’s right, Anne recalled. It was originally an Exposure story. And suddenly Anne felt like Bogart in Casablanca, when he realized the ratlike Peter Lorre had murdered two Nazis by himself. I am a little more impressed with you.

  “You have an angle on this?” Anne asked.

  “You’re an angle,” Ricks
said.

  “Me?”

  “What’s the senator sending you over here for?”

  “Who says he sent me?”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Why is that your business?”

  “Everything’s my business in this town.”

  “Everything?”

  “What isn’t, I make my business.”

  Anne nodded. The Exposure was not to be trifled with. It could indeed break things that would follow you around like a bad smell.

  “I like you, Ricks,” Anne lied. “I’ll level with you. Senator Levering is concerned about Justice Hollander’s health. It’s no secret she might be chief justice someday.”

  Ricks nodded. Anne did not like the way he was studying her.

  “She’s also a woman,” Ricks said.

  “Gee, Ricks, you are a good reporter.”

  Ricks didn’t flinch. “What do you know about the accident?”

  “I don’t know anything about anything,” Anne said. “I’m here on an official call, and that’s it. No more, no less.”

  “Uh-huh. The senator has quite a reputation.”

  “You’re scampering up the wrong monument.”

  “Tell me where I should scamper.”

  “Why should I do that?”

  “It pays to be nice to the Exposure.”

  Anne fingered a cigarette in her pocket. “That almost sounds like a threat, Mr. Ricks.”

  “From the press?” he said with over-the-top outrage. “We only want the truth, Ms. Deveraux. Remember our motto – ‘All the news that fits, we print.’ ” He took out a card and snapped it between his thumb and forefinger, like a magician producing the ace of spades.

  “Call me if you hear anything,” he said. “Maybe we can help each other out sometime.”

  And with a political instinct born of countless spin sessions, Anne Deveraux took the card.

  6

  “Is that you, Mom?” Millie whispered hoarsely into the phone.

  “Oh Millie, your voice,” Ethel Hollander said. Her mother’s voice sounded reedy, as it always did when she worried about something.

  “I’m going to be fine, Mom. They tell me.”

  “When I heard it on TV, I about jumped through the phone line. I couldn’t get through. I called and called…”