Murder on Capitol Hill Read Online Free Page A

apparently reluctant acceptance of it. The senator seemed to want to move closer, to close the gap between them, but it didn’t happen. They remained a few feet apart, hands clasped, their words inaudible to onlookers.
    The pianist, who’d stopped playing for a few minutes, started again, which prompted an increase in conversation. The air was soon filled with the mosquitolike drone of party badinage.
    “Shrimp?” Clarence asked Lydia.
    She saw that a small group gathered around the shrimp tree was systematically stripping it of its shellfish leaves. “We’d better dive in,” he said, “it’s going fast.” She nodded, gave a final look over her shoulder at Cale Caldwell and his son.
    One of those at the shrimp tree was WCAP talk-show host Quentin Hughes, who was known in Washington party circles for his bottomless appetite for freebies. He’d stacked his plate with shrimp, smothered them with cocktail sauce.
    “Hello, Quentin,” Lydia said coolly. She’d known Hughes a number of years, and twice had been a guest on his all-night radio interview and call-in show. She’d never particularly liked him—though she respected his professional talents—but could understand why a good many women did. He was very handsome, tall and erect, with good features and an intensity in his eyes that made people feel when he fixed his attention on them that they were the most important people in his life at that moment. This night he wore a double-breasted blue blazer that was nipped at the waist to show off his trim figure. His gray slacks were creased to a razor’s edge, and a pair of black Gucci loafers had been shined to an appropriately dull sheen. He could, on self-demand, produce charm from every pore, especially when the conquest of a female was in the wind. Women liked men like that, even if they weren’t good for them.
    He smiled at her now. “Oh, Lydia James, girl barrister. How are you?”
    She said just fine and introduced Clarence, whoshook Hughes’s hand, and for a moment his smug facade faded. “Are you still on the air, Mr. Hughes?”
    Hughes smiled tightly, turned to Lydia. “You should come back on the show. You were a good guest, as I recall.”
    She shrugged. “Afraid I have nothing very exciting to talk about these days, nothing like when I was in criminal law. The world of FCC license applications is hardly the stuff exciting radio shows are made of.”
    “I take care of the excitement,” Hughes said as he crammed two shrimp into his mouth, sauce dripping to the floor.
    Wilfred MacLoon, the senior senator from Utah, who happened to have an intense personal and political dislike for Cale Caldwell but whose wife was an active member of Veronica’s board of directors at the performing arts center which, to Caldwell’s chagrin, frequently brought MacLoon into their social life, had already had too much to drink. He swayed as he spoke with a couple near Lydia… “I never could stand Virginia,” he was saying. Lydia thought he was talking about someone with that name, then realized he was referring to Caldwell’s home state. “I was in the Navy there. Hellhole of the world. Backward damn state if I ever saw one.”
    As MacLoon rambled on, Lydia recalled the origins of the MacLoon-Caldwell hostile rivalry. There had been numerous incidents during their long and often parallel careers in the Senate that had caused sparks to fly, but none turned out to be as volatile as the recent, intense controversy over the placement of the most expensive and elaborate missile defensesystem ever conceived by any government. MacLoon had fought long and hard to have Utah chosen as the site for its construction. It would mean a huge infusion of money into his state, and some people felt that his political future depended on how successful he was in bringing home, so to speak, the bacon.
    Not only was Caldwell against Utah as the site, he was opposed to the missile system itself from its conception. Debates,