34

Dan and Laura accomplished nothing of importance that morning, though they didn't fail for lack of trying. The renewed rainfall hampered them because it slowed traffic to a crawl throughout the city. The weather was bad, but the real problem was that the rats who could provide some answers were all deserting the ship: Neither Renseveer nor Tolbeck could be found at work or home. Dan wasted a lot of time tracking them down before he finally had sufficient reason to believe that both men had fled the city for destinations unknown.

At one o'clock, they met Earl Benton at the coffee shop in Van Nuys, as they had arranged the night before. Fortunately, the head wound that he'd suffered at the hands of Wexlersh had not appreciably slowed him down, and his morning had been more productive than Dan's and Laura's. The four of them sat in a booth at the back of the restaurant, as far as possible from the jukebox that was playing country music. They were beside a large plate-glass window, down which a gray film of rain rippled, blurring the world beyond. The place smelled pleasantly of french fries, sizzling hamburgers, bean soup, bacon, and coffee. The waitress was cheerful and efficient, and when she had taken their order and gone, Earl told Dan and Laura everything that he had uncovered. First thing that morning, he had called Mary Katherine O'Hara, the secretary of Freedom Now, and had arranged to see her at ten o'clock. She lived in a neat little bungalow in Burbank, a place half shrouded in bougainvillea, so typical of the architecture of the 1930s and in such good repair that Earl had half expected to see a Packard parked in the driveway.

'Mrs. O'Hara is in her sixties,' Earl said, 'and she's almost as well kept as her house. She's a very handsome woman now, and she must have been a knockout when she was young. She's a retired real-estate saleswoman. Though she isn't rich, I'd say she's definitely comfortable. The house is very nicely furnished, with several superb Art Deco antiques.'

'Was she reluctant to talk about Freedom Now?' Dan asked.

'On the contrary. She was eager to talk about it. You see, your police file on the organization is out of date. She's no longer an officer. She resigned in disgust several months ago.'

'Oh?'

'She's a dedicated libertarian, involved with a dozen different organizations, and when Ernest Cooper invited her to play a major role in a libertarian political-action committee that he had formed, she was happy to volunteer her time. The problem was that Cooper clearly wanted her name in order to lend some legitimacy to his PAC, and he expected her to be manipulable. But manipulating Mary O'Hara would be about as easy as playing football with a live porcupine without getting hurt.'

Dan was surprised and pleased to hear Laura's laughter. She had laughed so little in the past couple of days that he'd forgotten how deeply affected he could be by her delight.

'She sounds tough,' Laura said.

'And smart,' Earl said. 'She reminds me of you.'

'Me? Tough?'

'Tougher than you think you are,' Dan assured her, with the same admiration that Earl evidently felt.

Outside, thunder rolled like great broken wheels of stone across the day. Driven by a gusty wind, rain pummeled the window harder than ever.

Earl said, 'Mrs. O'Hara was there almost a year but, like several legit libertarians before her, she finally walked away from it, because she found out the organization wasn't doing what it was supposedly formed to do. It was taking in a lot of money, but it wasn't supporting a wide array of libertarian candidates or programs. In fact, most of the funds were going to a supposedly libertarian research project headed by Dylan McCaffrey.'

'The gray room,' Dan said.

Earl nodded.

Laura said, 'But what was libertarian about that project?'

'Probably nothing,' Earl said. 'The libertarian label was just a convenient cover. That's what Mary O'Hara finally decided.'

'A cover for what?'

'She didn't know.'

The waitress returned with three cups of coffee and a Pepsi. 'Your lunch will be ready in a couple minutes,' she said. She considered Earl's battered face and the bandage on his head, glanced at the bruise and abrasion on Dan's forehead, and said, 'You guys in a wreck or something?'

'Fell up some stairs,' Dan said.

'Fell up?' she asked.

'Four flights,' Earl said.

'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—'

'Not the department itself,' Dan said. 'Just a few rotten apples in it.'

'Still, who's to say he doesn't have friends in the FBI too? And while we'd be able to get Melanie back from the government if they took her away from us, we'd probably never find her again if Boothe regained control of her.'

For a couple of minutes they were silent. They ate lunch, and Laura tried to feed Melanie, though with little success. A Whitney Houston number faded away on the jukebox, and in a couple of seconds Bruce Springsteen began to sing a haunting song about how everything dies but some things come back and, baby, that's a fact.

In their present situation, there was something decidedly macabre and disquieting about Springsteen's lyrics.

Dan looked at the rain and considered how this new information about Boothe helped them.

They now knew that the enemy was powerful, but that he wasn't as all-powerful as they had feared. That was a damned good thing to know. It improved morale. It was better to deal with an ultrawealthy megalomaniac—with one enemy, regardless of how crazy and influential he might be—than to be confronted by a monolithic bureaucracy determined to carry out a course of action in spite of the fact that it was an insane course of action. The enemy was still a giant, but he was a giant that might be brought down if they found the right slingshot, the perfectly shaped stone.

And now Dan knew the identity of 'Daddy,' the white-haired and oh-so-distinguished pervert who regularly visited Regine Savannah Hoffritz in that Hollywood Hills house that couldn't decide if it wanted to be Tudor or Spanish.

'What about John Wilkes Enterprises?' he asked Earl. Even as he voiced the question, he saw what he should have seen earlier, and in part he answered his own inquiry: 'There's no John Wilkes. It's entirely a corporate name, right? John Wilkes Boothe. The man who assassinated Lincoln, although I think that was spelled B-O-O-T-H, without the E. So this is another company owned by Palmer Boothe, and he called it John Wilkes Enterprises as—what?—a joke?'

Earl nodded. 'Seems like an inside joke to me, but I guess you'd have to ask Boothe himself if you want an explanation. Anyway, Paladin looked into the corporation this morning. It's no deep dark secret or anything. Boothe is listed as sole stockholder. He uses John Wilkes Enterprises to manage a collection of small endeavours that don't fit under his other corporate or foundation umbrellas, one or two of which don't even turn a profit.'