the opening.”
“You look lovely, and so cozy.”
“But Gus has given you a fur coat, surely,” Stella said, checking out Nancy’s cloth number.
“Nothing like yours,” Nancy said truthfully.
Stella Hansen smiled triumphantly at her husband, then turned to McCord. “Well, Gus, now you know what Nancy wants for Christmas. Aren’t you just awful not to have thought of it before?”
“You got me there, Stel,” McCord said, shrugging sheepishly. “But what do you want—I’m just a farm boy. This fancy stuff is beyond me, I swear.”
Stella’s eyes danced over him and her face folded into the layers of her most winning smile. A flake of black mascara separated from her lashes, settling on the soft pink down of her cheek. Gus McCord had been friends with Stella’s older brother when they were kids. Gus had asked her out to a school dance once but, to her everlasting regret, she had turned down the scrawny little guy in favor of the captain of the football team. Then John Lindquist—he of the boozy breath and groping hands—had gone off and gotten himself killed in Korea after his senior year, leaving Stella obliged to spend six months discreetly visiting an aunt in Minneapolis.
Watching Gus McCord now as he moved down the line of the welcoming committee, shaking hands and slapping backs, Stella marveled again at her inability back then to recognize his potential. But who could have known the hyper little guy had had it in him, for crying out loud? Of course, Gus had been smart, marrying a rich girl. Stella watched Nancy McCord as she followed close to Gus, smiling warmly at the people he introduced. It was a good thing her old man had had money, Stella thought, because Nancy had always been kind of a plain thing—always wore her hair simple, just a blunt cut curled behind her ears. She’d gone gray real early on, too, and then white, although it looked kind of nice now, Stella had to admit, kind of striking, especially with those bright blue eyes. And she was still trim—she must go to one of those fat farms that the magazines said rich people like Liz Taylor hid out in when they’d blimped out.
Stella smoothed her fox fur, grateful for the way it camouflaged her own ample body. Still, when she was younger, she’d had a body to kill for—that’s what John Lindquist had always said, and Fred had thought so, as well. He’d panted after her all through high school and had just about choked when she’d returned from Minneapolis and said she’d think about marrying him, after all. And now Fred was mayor and Stella got to ride in the back of an open convertible in the Fourth of July parade, and she got to meet some big shots, and she had a fur coat that even Nancy McCord envied. So things had turned out all right, really, even if she and Fred didn’t fly all over the world in their own private plane.
They climbed into the limousine, Gus wedged between Stella and Nancy, while Fred took up one of the jump seats facing them. Jerry Siddon slipped into the other jump seat after arranging for the photographer to ride with the TV camera crew, which was racing ahead to set up at the hospital before McCord arrived. The limo dipped when Dieter Pflanz climbed into the front passenger seat. The driver gave him a nervous smile, to which Pflanz replied with a curt nod.
During the ten-minute ride to the hospital, Fred Hansen went over the schedule one more time. “You’ll have about thirty minutes to tour the new unit before the official opening,” he told McCord. “Then we’ll have some speechifying and ribbon-cutting and such. Then it’s off to the hotel for lunch. Should be all done by around two, then we’ll get you back to the airport. Jerry here tells me you’re flying out today to Washington?”
Stella Hansen’s eyes grew wide. “Are you going to be seeing the President? What’s he really like?”
McCord shrugged. “Pretty much like most folks, Stel. Puts his pants on one leg at a time.”
She shook her head, obviously skeptical. “I can’t imagine what you must think of poor little Fargo, Gus, after all the places you’ve been and people you’ve met.”
“There’s nothing poor about a place with air as clean and people as fine as this city’s,” McCord said soberly. “Don’t ever think different, Stel.”
Glancing back, Pflanz saw Stella Hansen looking as if she would melt. He and Jerry Siddon exchanged fleeting looks of amusement as they listened to McCord charming the mayor and his wife. Siddon, Pflanz reckoned, would be calculating once again the number of months to the presidential primaries. He had listened to the eager young aide explain ad nauseam why Gus had to run. McCord had everything going for him, Siddon said—money, charisma (despite less-than-classic looks), a charming wife, nice kids and photogenic grandchildren, a Horatio Alger personal history and an outstanding record of community service. He couldn’t possibly lose.
And if Gus McCord went to the White House, Pflanz knew, Jerry Siddon intended to be there as his right hand. Siddon was thirty years old, and had been working for McCord Industries for five years after graduating from Stanford near the top of his business class. But it was his extracurricular activities on behalf of American Families of Missing Vietnam Veterans that had brought a teenage Jerry Siddon to Gus McCord’s attention. Siddon’s father had disappeared in a bombing raid over Hanoi in 1970. Jerry had been the youngest member of a delegation from the AFMVV that had approached McCord in the early eighties to help finance and organize a search for men rumored to be still alive in Vietnam. With the tacit support of the CIA, a mission had gone ahead under the direction of Dieter Pflanz and a team of quietly hired mercenaries. But the evidence the contingent obtained had been inconclusive.
As a result of that first meeting, however, Siddon had caught McCord’s eye and his sympathy. The billionaire had subsequently underwritten Siddon’s college studies and guaranteed him a job upon graduation. Siddon repaid the debt with hard work and unstinting devotion to the interests of Gus McCord. Today, those interests included reaping good PR value from the opening of the latest in a string of McCord charitable facilities.
To Pflanz, however, these hometown good deeds were just so much chaff, incidental to the real mission.
“What’s bugging you, Mariah?” Frank Tucker asked, studying her closely.
She had risen from her chair to leave his office, but when she got to the door, she hesitated, her hand resting on the knob, a frown creasing her forehead. Then she turned back to face him. “Did you see the news last night? CBN?”
Frank exhaled a long sigh and he shook his head regretfully. “Damn. I was hoping you had missed it.”
“Oh, I saw it—and Paul Chaney. And not just on the tube.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was waiting for me when I left David last night,” Mariah said. She moved away from the door and ran her hand along the line of books on Frank’s credenza, straightening the edges—an instinctive reaction against chaos. “And he left a message on my answering machine.” She stopped cold and looked toward the ceiling, her jaw clenched. “Oh, dammit, Frank! Lindsay took the message off the machine. If she ever—”
“Whoa! Slow down. You’re not making any sense. Sit down and tell me what happened.”
She drummed her fingers on the edge of the credenza, then turned and leaned against it, crossing her arms tightly across her chest, looking down at the toes of her shoes. “Paul Chaney showed up at the nursing home yesterday. He had seen David earlier and was waiting for me. Said he needed to talk about what really happened in Vienna—something about the people who did this to David and Lindsay. He called my house, too. And then I saw that thing on the news.”
“You knew him in Vienna, didn’t you?”
Mariah nodded. “David knew him better than I did. They played hockey together, but we all used to get together after the games. And he hung out on the cocktail circuit, of course, trolling for news leads—and women,” Mariah added wryly. “He and David got to be good friends and Paul used to drop by our place a lot, but I never felt very comfortable with him. He’s one of those guys who figures he’s God’s gift to womankind.”
Tucker watched her closely, and then a