McGill's Short Cases 1-3, Three Jim McGill Short Stories Page 3

  Professional that she was, Agnes collected and recorded her data before asking, “Ashamed of what?”

  “Being warm, cleanly clothed and receiving medical attention when there are so many who lack all these things.”

  Agnes nodded. “President Kennedy told us life isn’t fair.”

  She’d been a young girl when Kennedy was president, still remembered him as an impossibly handsome man. There hadn’t been a president who came anywhere near him for glamour, until Patti Grant had been elected. Agnes was now two weeks away from retirement.

  “A rather obvious observation,” de Loyola said. “But what did this president of yours do about the inequities he saw?”

  “Started the Peace Corps,” Agnes said.

  “That was him?”

  Agnes nodded.

  “I stand humbled.”

  Truth was, the Jesuit lay in a hospital bed. He was perfectly able to sit or stand, walk or even run. But the bed was so comfortable. He’d almost forgotten the pleasure of lying on a firm mattress with clean sheets. And the pillows, Madre de Dios. Agnes had found him two stuffed with goose down. The ones that had come with the bed were foam. He hadn’t murmured a word of complaint about that, but his face must have shown disappointment. Agnes had fetched these marvelous replacements.

  Feeling guilty, he said, “I should be in a ward with other patients. Souls to whom I might offer consolation to the best of my humble abilities.”

  It had pleased de Loyola deeply to be able to hear Margaret Sweeney’s confession.

  Agnes told him, “Father, we don’t have wards in this hospital.”

  “No?”

  “No. If you’d like, I’ll have the hospital chaplain stop by in the morning. Maybe he’ll have some chores you can help him with.”

  De Loyola smiled, “Thank you. You are very kind.”

  “And you are in good health, though borderline malnourished. I’m going to bring you a carton of chocolate milk. Drink it and then enjoy a good night’s sleep. Eat the breakfast you’ll be given. There are no commandments against any of that.”

  Nurse Agnes was on theologically firm ground there, the Jesuit thought.

  He did as he was told. Drank the milk. Snuggled into the goose down pillows.

  Thanked the Lord for all the comforts afforded to him that night.

  Promised to find a way to express his gratitude by helping others. As he drifted off to sleep, he thought that being allowed to keep the money he had found would help him go a long way toward helping others. What were the chances that would happen?

  Very slight indeed, he felt.

  But Agnes had given him an idea with her mention of the Peace Corps.

  Maybe he could start a Street Corps.

  Uplift all those without a home to call their own.

  After Sheryl Kimbrough had cast the electoral vote that returned Patricia Darden Grant to the White House and the Supreme Court had confirmed the validity of one person deciding a presidential election, the president decided she wanted a room in the Executive Mansion that would be her counterpart to McGill’s Hideaway.

  That room was in the northeast corner of the ground floor. The space’s original purpose was to act as a laundry room for John Adams. Millard Fillmore’s wife, Abigail, repurposed it as a library. The library was used to hold teas in the 1950s. The Kennedys had it recreated as a Federal Style parlor.

  Patti Grant had it redone as the “world’s ultimate reading room.” To that end, she asked that any publication on the planet — including those intended by foreign governments to be kept secret — be available to her in the library. As the theft of data files was far easier to manage than that of printed books, the president did much of her reading on e-readers. Given the sensitivity of perusing other people’s secrets, the walls, ceiling and floor of the room were reinforced with the best available anti-snooping technology.

  Even the curtains on the windows did more than block outside light.

  There were also locks on the doors. Not unheard of in the White House but rare in a place where Secret Service agents were never more than a cry for help away. When the door to the library was locked, only five people had the means to open it: the president, Vice President Jean Morrissey, Chief of Staff Galia Mindel, SAC Elspeth Kendry and James J. McGill.

  McGill and Galia were in the room with the president. Vice President Morrissey was in her home state of Minnesota and Elspeth Kendry had been told do not disturb. If the president absolutely had to be reached, her personal secretary, Edwina Byington, was allowed to buzz the phone extension.

  By now, though, Edwina would have been in bed for hours.

  McGill told Patti and Galia the story of what had rousted him out of the White House on what he’d expected to be a quiet night at home.

  The president deferred to her chief of staff to be the first to respond.

  Galia said, “This was definitely intended to be a smear. In a way, it’s similar to what happened to the Clintons in their first term with the so-called White Water scandal. You get the press worked up with accusations of wrongdoing. Political enemies start yelling for an independent prosecutor. All the administration’s energy goes into playing defense. None is left for its own priorities.”

  Patti nodded. She turned to her husband for his view on the matter.

  McGill said, “No point sticking around another four years just to play someone else’s game.”

  “I agree,” the president said. “Having Sweetie, Deke and Leo find out who’s behind this is important. We have to know who we’re fighting here.”

  Galia said, “We have to do more than that.” The chief of staff knew all the new security features of the library. She felt free to express herself candidly. “We have to kick them in the balls.”

  McGill smiled. The two women saw he had something in mind.

  “Jim?” the president asked.

  He had a question for the chief of staff. “Does Ellie Booker still work for WorldWide News?”

  “She has a first-look agreement with them for any project she might want to do,” Galia said.

  McGill thought the chief of staff must have a room in her own house akin to the one in which they currently sat. The place where she read reports from her spies all over town and across the world. That had to be how she knew the TV producer’s employment status.

  McGill needed to learn what else Galia knew about Ms. Booker.

  “So she’s making money strictly on the chance she might come up with a bright idea?”

  “Yes. If Hugh Collier likes a project she wants to do, he gets first crack at it. If it’s not for him, or he doesn’t want to pay top dollar, she can take it elsewhere.”

  “Is there any personal loyalty between the two of them?”

  Galia said, “I don’t see either of them thinking in those terms.”

  “Good.”

  “What are you getting at, Jim?” Patti asked.

  “The setup of planting the money behind my office depends on setting off a big media storm. Now, Sweetie and the guys can follow the trail their way, but another way to find out what we want to know is to discover who in the media plans to make their reputation with a scoop on my being corrupt. I was thinking if anyone could point us in the right direction, it would be Ellie Booker.”

  Galia said, “But you didn’t take her case when she came to you.”

  Ellie Booker had wanted McGill to help clear her of responsibility in the death of Reverend Burke Godfrey. Politically, that was a nonstarter. McGill, however, had extended the producer the courtesy of meeting with her.

  He said, “No, I didn’t. But I was honest with her. Respectful. And when I told her that I’d sink Sir Edbert Bickford’s ship if necessary, there was a gleam in her eye.”

  “You always were a charmer,” Patti said.

  Galia wasn’t going to say so aloud, but she had to agree.

  Instead of paying McGill a compliment, she asked him, “So you’ll try to use Ellie Booker to find out who
this particular political enemy is?”

  “Not just find him,” McGill said. “Return his money to him. Let him explain the bag of cash that will be found on his doorstep.”

  The president beamed at her husband.

  “A story you’ll present gift wrapped to Ms. Booker.”

  “Yeah,” McGill said. “That works nicely, doesn’t it?”

  “Is there anything else you’ll need to do?” Galia asked.

  It was her job to make sure McGill’s scheming didn’t backfire.

  Cause an unintended scandal for the president.

  McGill admitted, “There is one thing.”

  “What’s that?” Patti asked.

  “I’ll have to corrupt a priest.”

  Alone in the presidential bedroom an hour later, just snuggling because McGill would be working through the night, Patti said, “This is all my fault, Jim.”

  He nodded, “I blame you entirely.”

  McGill made sure to wrap his arms around his wife and kiss her before she could give him an elbow to the ribs.

  Continuing, he said, “If you mean doing just enough to win reelection, you have to share responsibility with Galia, your entire campaign staff, the tens of millions of Americans who voted for you, six members of the Supreme Court who said okey-dokey and me for encouraging you to run the first time.”

  “You forgot Sheryl Kimbrough,” Patti said.

  McGill released his wife from his embrace and slapped his head.

  “Of course, the journalism prof at Indiana University. The final elector to have her say.”

  “Taking your point of view, I’m in good company, but I still feel responsible,” Patti said.

  “I appreciate your concern, but if you look at it a bit more closely, the creeps, whoever they might be, are insulting me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, look at what they did. Tried to make me look sleazy, corrupt and maybe criminal by taking half-a-million dirty dollars. What would that amount of money represent to you? A pittance.”

  Philanthropist Andrew Hudson Grant had left his widow billions.

  “But to me five hundred grand is a hefty chunk of money,” McGill said.

  “What, the bad guys don’t think I’ll share with you?” Patti asked.

  “That’s beside the point. They’ll say my male ego demanded that I grab all the money I could to have and to hold in my own name. Hence the reason I crossed ethical lines at the very least.”

  The president drew her head back and regarded her husband.

  “Nobody who knows you would ever think that.”

  “That’s true. If you ever kick me to the curb, I still have a going business, two police pensions and hold the title to a perfectly nice house back in Evanston, Illinois. But none of that matters because the people behind this scheme will do their best to paint a whole new me to the public. It would not only taint your administration, it would hurt Abbie, Kenny and Caitie.”

  McGill had, for the most part, kept his children out of the glare of the president’s media coverage. But if he was smeared, the kids and McGill’s ex-wife, Carolyn, would inevitably be dragged into the spotlight. Patti’s face hardened as she digested her husband’s surmise.

  “You’re right,” she said. “We can’t have any of that. You’d better get going.”

  They’d been lucky enough to reach Ellie Booker.

  She was editing film footage for some unspecified project.

  Had agreed to meet McGill at one a.m.

  McGill stood and looked at his wife.

  “We’ll find some time for ourselves soon?”

  Patti told him, “I’ll have Edwina block out a whole afternoon for us. How’s that?”

  McGill beamed.

  Not even visiting heads of state got that much of the president’s day.

  McGill sat opposite Ellie Booker with a battered metal desk between them. Shelves of videotape lined the walls. There wasn’t so much as a plastic daffodil in a dimestore vase to relieve the oppressive atmosphere of the small room. The overhead fluorescent lights made the obviously fatigued TV news producer look like she’d just stepped off the set of a slasher movie.

  “Love what you’ve done with the place,” McGill said.

  Ellie gave him a thin smile.

  “I’m paying the rent here, not WorldWide News.”

  “But you have a first-look deal with Hugh Collier.”

  Ellie opened her mouth to ask a question. Like, “How the hell did you know that?” But she remembered the kind of connections McGill must have, being married to the president. She didn’t think McGill had sicced some government agency on her, but Galia Mindel certainly tracked all real and potential enemies of the president. One-stop shopping for McGill when he wanted the lowdown on someone like her.

  “Yes, I do,” she told McGill, “but I’m a thrifty girl. That’s how I keep my independence.”

  He said, “Very wise.”

  “So what do you want?” Ellie asked.

  “Information. Now’s the time to say you can’t help me, if you want to.”

  Ellie laughed and actual points of color appeared on her high cheekbones.

  “I do like to even accounts, but for someone like you to show up here in the middle of the night, I’ll bet you have something interesting to tell me.”

  “Just that I want to give you a scoop.” He looked around the room. “One that might let you indulge in just a bit more creature comfort.”

  “Information, huh? You want me to sell someone out.”

  “I do. I want to know who in the Washington and New York media …” A thought occurred to McGill. “Let’s add London to that list. Who in that media axis might have been gossiping about nailing me with a screaming exposé?”

  Ellie Booker blinked twice. That was all it took for McGill to see she didn’t know. Must have been working too hard on her own project to come up for air.

  “You haven’t heard?” he said. “I’m sorry I bothered you.”

  He started to get up when Ellie raised her hand.

  “Wait, wait, wait. You wouldn’t have come here expecting me to tell you something like that without having something good to offer in return. Is your scoop really that compelling?”

  McGill settled back into his chair. He was glad he’d read Ellie at least halfway right.

  “It is, but if you don’t have the information I need …”

  “If someone’s looking to stick it to you and has been dumb enough to blab about it, I can find out quick.”

  “What if the person is a friend of yours?”

  Ellie smiled broadly. McGill was pleased to see she didn’t have fangs.

  “I don’t have any friends,” she said. “Not the kind that would get in the way of a good story. So you want to tell me what I should look for and how it helps me?”

  McGill told her.

  Then he cautioned, “Don’t just hand me someone you dislike. I’ll know if it’s who I want.”

  “You’ve got someone else looking, too.”

  “I do.”

  “But I’m the only one who gets to go with the story.”

  “It will be yours exclusively,” McGill said.

  Inigo de Loyola was awakened by a soft knock at his hospital room door. He knew it wasn’t Agnes or any of the other nurses. The hospital was their domain. They didn’t need to knock to visit patients. The necessity of caring for the ailing was their admission ticket.

  With a bit of trepidation in his voice, de Loyola said, “Come in.”

  He knew you had to be careful not to extend an invitation to the devil.

  At this hour, though, he thought even Satan must be resting.

  So who could …

  He saw James J. McGill slip into his room and close the door behind him. McGill held a bag in his hand. De Loyola had gained from talking to Agnes and other hospital staffers some measure of the men who had delivered him to the hospital. They were the henchmen of the man called the president’s
henchman.

  De Loyola had rather liked that sobriquet.

  It put him in mind of a knight errant. Someone called upon when the usual instruments of power proved inadequate to surmount a challenge. A man of unusual resources. Willing to commit a sin or two if necessary, repent and accept his penance without complaint.

  McGill drew a chair up to the side of the bed and said, “I’m sorry to disturb you, Father.”

  “And yet you have. For good reason, no doubt.”

  “Yes, for good reason. How are you feeling?”

  De Loyola took a moment to assess. “Better than if I’d spent the night on cold concrete. But there is a hollow ache in my middle. I’ve not supped for a day or two.”

  McGill raised the white bag he’d brought with him into de Loyola’s view.

  “Four sandwiches from the White House kitchen: ham, chicken, roast beef and, if you don’t eat meat, fried onions and roasted tomatoes.”

  De Loyola raised the head of his bed; Agnes had showed him how.

  He said to McGill, “I’ll take them all. May I start with the onions and tomatoes while I listen to your proposition?”

  McGill gave the sandwich to the priest. Poured him a glass of water from the pitcher on the stand next to the bed. He didn’t ask how the priest knew he wanted something. A visit at that hour made it obvious.

  He was pleased to see de Loyola smile as he took his first bite.

  De Loyola took his stole out of the drawer of the night stand on the far side of his bed, pressed it to his lips and draped it over his shoulders. He looked at McGill and smiled, saying, “Yours will not be the first confession I’ve heard from a hospital bed. My labors have taken me to war zones.”

  “As a military chaplain?” McGill asked.

  “That and a guerrilla. My politics might not be the same as yours.”

  “I’m for what’s right for the little guy, Father.”

  De Loyola gave McGill his blessing then and there.

  “We are compadres,” the Jesuit said. “Now tell me how you might have offended God.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, McGill told de Loyola of his roles in the deaths of John Patrick Granby and Damon Todd.

  “I don’t see how I could have acted differently in either case, Father, but I’d never taken anyone’s life before and then I was responsible for the deaths of two men in a short period of time. Sometimes I can sleep through the night without a problem; other times I can’t sleep at all.”