Murder on Capitol Hill Read Online Free PDF Page A

suddenly appeared from behind one of the green folding screens. His face, no longer reflecting his earlier ebullience, was set in atight angry mask as he pushed through a small cluster of guests and disappeared behind another screen that separated the desecrated shrimp tree and melting ice carving from the rest of the room. A waitress was in the process of dismantling the silver tree.
    Lydia looked toward the door. Clarence and Boris had disappeared. She decided to ask Cale Caldwell if he knew where his wife was. She managed only a few steps toward where she’d last seen him when she was intercepted by the director of one of Washington’s semiprofessional repertory theaters full of the good news that Veronica and her board had given them the green light to stage a production at the center. Nodding and trying to move off she saw Quentin Hughes emerge from behind the screen she was headed for and move toward the door. “Excuse me, I…”
    Two Irishmen had encouraged Hughes to play “Danny Boy,” and they now sang loudly out of tune with each other and their accompaniment.
    Lydia finally excused herself and took another step toward the screen—and stopped short as the sound of a female voice cut through the party cacophony. It was a scream, a cry for help. Then a second scream, even louder. The singing cut off, the chatter died. All eyes looked in the direction of the screen as a third and final scream slashed at everyone within earshot, made them immobile like players in a game of statues.
    Lydia, finally out of her trance, moved around the screen. At first she saw only the source of the sound, the young waitress who’d been removing the shrimp tree. Her eyes were open wide, fixed on the floor, her fist against her mouth, as though to stifle another cry.
    Lydia followed the direction of the waitress’s stare to a pair of highly polished men’s shoes and two neatly creased trouser legs extending from behind the table.
    Lydia forced herself to the waitress’s side, where she could share her view. There, on the floor, his eyes open to their widest, his mouth twisted as though trying to say something, was the Honorable Cale Caldwell, the Majority Leader of the Senate of the United States. Water from the melting ice sculpture of his beloved home state of Virginia dripped onto his forehead. His red-and-blue striped tie was still neatly in place beneath a buttoned suit jacket. He looked so typically
neat
.
    Except for the oozing, spreading red stain coming from where an ice pick had been rammed through his chest, just above the button of his suit jacket.
    The waitress gave up to unconsciousness, pitched forward and landed across the senator’s legs.
    Lydia turned to those who’d crowded behind the screen and said what was all too obvious.
    “He’s dead. My God, he’s dead.”

5
    Clarence, Lydia, Boris Slevokian and one of Cale Caldwell’s Senate aides, Richard Marvis, were seated in Clarence’s apartment. It had taken until one in the morning before the Washington Metropolitan Police Department had allowed the guests to leave.
    Now, the initial shock over, Lydia could allow the tears to come as she sat in a corner next to a massive copper bust of Bach.
    “No, I’m all right,” she said to Marvis as he came over to comfort her. “Thank you.”
    “I do not believe this,” Boris said. He’d retained most of his Hungarian accent even though he’d been in the United States for more than thirty years. Now he paced the room, hands clasped behind his back, perspiration on his bumpy, broad forehead glistening in light from pin spots used to illuminate Clarence’s numerous works of art. “It was like being back in a communist country the way the police treated me. I felt like a prisoner. They told me that I am not to leave the city until they question me again. Question
me
.”
    “It’s procedure, that’s all,” Dick Marvis told him. “After all, as far as they’re concerned, anyone at the party
might
have done