Why waste time? “How much did Monica Davies want from you to keep quiet about Susan?”
You could never quite forget that she was an actress, not a great one but one who understood some of the basic skills of the craft. And this she did well — rolled her eyes and smiled. “Oh, God, you’re really going to try and bail yourself out with this kind of bullshit?”
“Larson told me it was a lot of money.”
I had the pleasure of watching the word “Larson” have the effect of a bullet between the eyes. “What the hell are you talking about?” The acting wasn’t so good this time.
“He doesn’t want his firm to be associated with blackmail. And I don’t blame him. So before the story breaks he wants to know what’s going on. And so do I.”
She walked past me, headed for the fireplace. At any other time I would assume that she wanted me to admire her body in the silver lamé pajamas. This time she was just stalling. We were well past the point where she’d ever care about me finding her seductive.
When she reached the chairs in front of the fireplace, she said, not turning around, “You may as well sit down.”
“I’ll stand.”
She finished her martini and walked halfway back to me. Her years showed now, and they were cruel years. Winnie was so much more appealing than she’d ever be. Natalie wouldn’t be able to fathom how that would be possible.
“I did it for Susan’s sake.”
“That’s a lie. You did it so there’d be a Cooper in the House and eventually in the Senate. You did it for yourself, not for Susan.”
“I’ve done a whole lot of things for Susan, and the bitch will never be grateful for them. I tried very hard to be her friend. I knew I’d always be her stepmother and nothing more. But some stepmothers and their daughters get on very well. Not her. She wouldn’t have any of it. She hated me from the day I came into this house. You should have seen her at our wedding. She would barely speak to me. Everybody saw it. It was humiliating. She idealized her mother, that was the problem. Her mother was this grand lady who gave herself to helping the poor. And I was this slut — she actually called me that more than once. This slut. She said I was corrupting her father.”
She set her martini glass on a small table. She was performing, but at least the writing was getting better. “When I met John and saw all the opportunities he’d passed up, I wanted to help him. I’d been in Washington a few years by then and I knew a lot of people. He had this big house and this reputation as a reformer, but he didn’t have all that much money. And times were changing. He’d come into office when the liberals dominated. But then things turned around, got very conservative. Susan always says that I made him change his votes. Well, if I hadn’t, he never would have been elected for his last term — maybe not for his last two terms. And so he started traveling in conservative circles. We both did. We met a lot of different people. I’ll grant you they were people he wouldn’t have liked before, but he’d mellowed. And he became friendly with them.”
All this was reverie; I wondered if she’d forgotten I was here.
“I need to know about the blackmail.”
“Well, you can blame that bitch for that.”
She was back at the dry bar then, fixing herself another martini. She talked as she worked. “We sent her to Smith. She stayed two years and then ran off to Paris. And then she traipsed all over the world. The worst part was when she came back to the States. The people she took up with — she was always getting into some kind of scrape. John was beside himself. That was when he developed sleeping problems. I’d find him in the middle of the night sitting up and staring at the wall. I always knew who he was thinking about. Worrying about.”
“The blackmail. Tell me about the blackmail.”
She sipped what she’d created. She turned it into stage business, pursing her lips as if she were a wine taster considering the latest offering, then came around from the bar, toting her glass, and said, “I didn’t know about any of this until recently, when Monica Davies contacted me.”
“Know about any of what?”
“I’m coming to that.”
She seated herself with great style, setting her drink on the arm of the leather chair. “You really should sit down, Dev. This may take a while.”
“Not if you get to the point.”
“The point, dear, is that my sweet little stepdaughter Susan slept around a lot.”
“So?”
“And she didn’t always sleep with the best sort of men. I always wondered if the thugs she dragged home were for my sake — to upset me, to rub my face in it. Her father was more understanding. He always sided with her and said that I was being a snob.”
“And the point is what?”
“The point is that over the years there were two of them who later on tried to blackmail her. Threatened to go to the tabloids when Susan announced that she was running for Congress. I insisted she let me handle them, and I did. I hired a private detective and he found out that they were both on parole — if that tells you anything about the kind of man she was seeing — and he told them he would turn his files about them over to their respective parole officers immediately if they didn’t cease and desist.”
“And did they?”
“Of course. What choice did they have? But then Monica Davies came along.”
“When did this start?”
“We were in Chicago at a regional convention and Davies was there. She took me aside at a cocktail party and whispered a name to me. The name didn’t mean anything to me at the time. But she said to ask Susan about the man. That she’d tell me all about him. So naturally I did. And I had the great pleasure of seeing my stepdaughter start to come apart. All her haughtiness and arrogance — gone, just like that. In fact, she looked sick to her stomach when I started questioning her. At the time I didn’t know anything about the man, but when Davies came back to me and started demanding money, she filled me in about him. A terrible, terrible person.”
“Am I supposed to guess his name?”
“His name is Craig Donovan.”
I walked over to the leather chair facing hers and sat on the arm. “Obviously Donovan went to Monica with his story. Monica would do the blackmailing because she was a lot more dangerous than he was — you knew that. You knew how ruthless she was. And she could destroy Susan overnight. So she cut Donovan in for a piece of it. Then she let you and Susan know what she wanted.”
She lifted the martini to her mouth but not before offering me a coy smile. “Very good. You should have been a private detective yourself, Dev.”
“I’m smart enough to know that Susan has a son named Bobby Flaherty and that Bobby’s in town with his young wife.”
“Goddammit,” she said. She made fists of her tiny hands and squeezed her eyes shut as if trying to will me out of existence. “This is all coming apart.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re paying them for.”
The eyes were open now and they blazed at me. “You’re not very smart after all. A child she gave up for adoption. A sleazebag like Craig Donovan the father. How would that look when the press got hold of it?”
“It wouldn’t look good. But it could be explained. Bobby was born twenty years ago. Susan can make the case that she was in no condition to be a mother. She and Bobby are getting close now. I could see them at a joint press conference talking about all this.”
“Oh, right. Can you imagine what Duffy would do with this?”