The Door To December

'Ah, you're kidding me.'

They grinned at her.

Smiling, she hurried away to take an order at another table.

As Laura unwrapped the straw, put it in the Pepsi, and tried to get Melanie to drink, Dan said to Earl, 'Mrs. O'Hara sounds like the type who would've done more than just walk away from a situation like that. I would expect her to write the Federal Elections Commission and get that PAC closed down.'

'She did write them,' Earl said. 'Twice.'

'And?'

'No reply.'

Dan shifted uneasily in the booth. 'You're saying the people behind Freedom Now have a grip on the Federal Elections Commission?'

'Let's just say they apparently have influence.'

'Which means this is a secret government project,' Dan said. 'And we were smart to get out from under the FBI.'

'Not necessarily.'

'But only the government would be able to pinch off an inquiry by the elections commission, and even they would find it difficult.'

'Patience,' Earl said, lifting his cup.

'You know something,' Dan said.

'I always know something,' Earl said, smiling, pausing to sip his coffee.

Dan saw that Melanie had drunk some of her Pepsi, though not without difficulty. Laura had already used up one napkin, blotting spilled soda from the girl's chin.

Earl said, 'First, let me back up and explain where Freedom Now gets its money. Mrs. O'Hara was only the secretary, but when she began to sense that something was rotten, she went behind Cooper's and Hoffritz's backs and checked the treasurer's records. Ninety-nine percent of the PAC's funds were received as grants from three other PACS: Honesty in Politics, Citizens for Enlightened Government, and the Twenty-second Century Group. Furthermore, when she looked into those groups, she discovered that Cooper and Hoffritz had roles in all of them and that all three of those PACs were primarily funded not, as you would expect, by contributions from ordinary citizens but by two other nonprofit organizations, two charitable foundations.'

'Charitable foundations? Are they permitted to mix in politics?'

Earl nodded. 'Yes, as long as they tread very carefully and if they're properly chartered to support "public-service and better-government programs," which these two foundations were.'

'So where do these foundations get their money?'

'Funny you should ask. Mrs. O'Hara didn't explore any further, but I called the Paladin office from her place and had some of our people start making inquiries. Both of these foundations are funded by another, larger charitable organization.'

Laura said, 'My God, it's a Chinese-box puzzle!'

'Let me get this straight,' Dan said. 'This larger charity funded the two smaller ones, and the two smaller ones funded three political-action committees — Honesty in Politics, uh, Citizens for Enlightened Government, and the Twenty-second Century Group — and then those committees contributed toward the funding of Freedom Now, which did virtually nothing with its money but fund Dylan McCaffrey's work in Studio City.'

'You got it,' Earl said. 'It was an elaborate laundering system to keep the original backers well separated from Dylan McCaffrey in case anything should go wrong and the authorities should find out that he was performing a series of cruel and abusive experiments on his own child.'

The cheerful young waitress arrived with their lunches, and they exchanged innocuous comments about the weather while she put the food in front of them.

When she was gone, no one touched lunch. To Earl, Dan said, 'What's the name of the charitable organization at the center of this Chinese-box puzzle?'

'Hold on to your hat.'

'I don't have a hat.'

'The Boothe Foundation.'

'I'll be damned.'

Laura said, 'The same one that supports orphanages and child-welfare groups and senior-citizen aid programs?'

'The same one,' Earl said.

Dan had been fumbling in a coat pocket. Now he produced the computer printout of the mailing list of customers from the Sign of the Pentagram. He leafed to the third page and showed it to them: Palmer Boothe, heir to the Boothe fortune, current head of the Boothe family, owner and publisher of the Los Angeles Journal, one of the city's most prominent citizens, the guiding force of the Boothe Foundation.

He said, 'I saw this last night, in Joseph Scaldone's office, behind that weird occult shop he was running. It amazed me that a hardheaded businessman like Boothe would be interested in the supernatural. Of course even the hardest heads have soft spots. We all have some weakness, some foolishness in us. But considering Boothe's reputation, his enlightened image… hell, it never occurred to me that he'd be involved in something like this.'

'The devil has advocates in the least likely places,' Earl said.

As Elton John came on the jukebox, Dan looked out at the driving gray rain. 'Two days ago I didn't even believe in the devil.'

'But now?'

'But now,' Dan said.

Laura began to cut Melanie's cheeseburger into bitesize pieces that she might be persuaded to take off a fork. The girl was staring at the wriggling patterns of rain on the window — or at something light-years beyond.

In a far part of the restaurant, a busboy or a waitress dropped a few dishes, and the crash was followed by a burst of laughter.

'Anyway,' Earl said, 'you remember those two letters Mary O'Hara wrote to the Federal Elections Commission? Well, there's not much mystery about why there was no follow-up. Palmer Boothe is a big contributor to both political parties, always a little more to the party currently in power, but always large contributions to both. And here several years ago, when political-action committees first came into vogue, when Boothe apparently saw how useful they could be for things like indirect funding of Dylan McCaffrey's research, he set out to get one or two of his own men on the commission that oversees them.'

Laura finished cutting up the cheeseburger and said, 'Listen, I don't know much about the Federal Elections Commission, but it seems to me that its members wouldn't be political appointees.'

'They aren't,' Earl said. 'Not directly. But the people who manage the bureaucracy that manages the elections commission are political appointees. So if you want to plant someone there, if you want it badly enough, and if you're rich and determined enough, you can accomplish it in a roundabout fashion. Of course, you can't get away with completely corrupting the commission, with outrageous misuse of it, because both political parties watch it intently for abuses. But if your intentions are modest — say, like keeping the commission from looking too closely at a couple of political-action committees that you've established for less than legitimate purposes — then no one's going to notice or particularly care. And if you're as resourceful as Palmer Boothe, you don't use obvious henchmen; you arrange for civic-minded, reputable men from one of the nation's largest charitable foundations to provide their services to the Federal Elections Commission, and everyone is delighted to see such educated, well-meaning types selflessly offering their time and energies to their government.'

With a sigh, Dan said, 'So it's Palmer Boothe, not the government, financing McCaffrey's research. Which means we didn't have to worry that the FBI might want to make Melanie disappear again.'

'I'm not so sure about that,' Earl said. 'It's true that the government wasn't providing the money to support McCaffrey and Hoffritz or to pay for the research that was conducted in that gray room. But now that they've seen the place and had a chance to poke through the papers McCaffrey had there, they might figure there's national-defense applications to what he was doing, and they might like to have a chance to examine and work closely with Melanie… unobstructed.'

'Over my dead body,' Laura said.

'So we're still on our own,' Dan said.

Earl nodded. 'Besides, Boothe apparently managed to get to Ross Mondale, to use the police department against us—'