Free Murder on K Street by Margaret Truman

room. With him were two other senior lobbyists from the Marshalk Group; Marshalk’s administrative assistant, a stunning blonde who sat with long legs crossed and a notepad on her lap; and the group’s vice president for security, Jack Parish. Representing Betzcon Pharmaceuticals were its governmental affairs VP and four of his staff. The only intrusions came from the house’s elaborate kitchen, where three of Emma Churchill’s catering staff ran Screwdrivers, coffee, and sandwiches to the living room. Emma had been there earlier but left to oversee another luncheon. Churchill Catering catered all of the Marshalk Group’s business and social affairs, although as far as the IRS was concerned, there were no such things as personal and social gatherings. It was all business, all the time.
    Marshalk continued: “We’ve arranged for a fifty-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to her killer. As you know, her son, Neil, our president, won’t be with us today for obvious reasons. Neil and his dad, Senator Simmons, are devastated by this horrendous loss, and the Marshalk Group stands ready to help in any way we can.”
    A few questions were asked about the crime and its investigation, and Marshalk turned to Jack Parish for the answers. “Jack is a former MPD detective,” he told the Betzcon people, “and has maintained links to that agency. He’s the one with the answers.”
    Nondescript
was the appropriate description of Parish, average and medium in all ways except for a mouth that wasn’t exactly straight-and-level. It started low on the left and slanted up to the right, giving him a look of perpetual skepticism. “There’s not much to report,” he said. “It’s too early. But I have been told that they have a few suspects they’re looking into.”
    “I hope whoever did it fries,” a Betzcon executive said.
    “Not here in D.C.,” Parish said. “We don’t have the death penalty.”
    “You should have,” the exec snarled.
    Marshalk had been sitting. He now stood and commanded the room. He was a large carton of a man in his early forties, his bulk mitigated by the cut of his custom-made British double-breasted suits. He was of mixed heritage; a swarthy complexion and coal-black hair honored his deceased Cuban mother. His father, a Caucasian American, had been a successful liability lawyer in Miami until dropping dead one sunny afternoon on a golf course at the age of fifty-six.
    Their only child, Rick, graduated from Cal State with a degree in general studies, and went on to study screenwriting at UCLA. He found minimal success in Hollywood. Two of his scripts sold for the Writers Guild’s minimum but were never produced. He had screenwriting credit on one film that actually made it to the silver screen, a low-budget horror movie that faded from public view within a month of opening.
    But his time in Hollywood wasn’t wasted. It was there that he’d learned a valuable lesson: Networking was everything. Who you knew paid bigger dividends than what you knew. The problem with applying that philosophy in Hollywood, he reasoned, was that once you met the right person, you still had to deliver a workable script. Better, he decided, was to be in a position where you were paid simply for bringing people together, without the need to deliver anything after that.
    Who needs what? And who can deliver it?
    He’d forged friendships with people in Washington, D.C., and made a series of visits to them. Their tales of how lobbying had made countless millionaires of former government employees intrigued the ambitious Marshalk. Business needed access to politicians to head off legislation that would be injurious to their companies, or to encourage laws favorable to their bottom line. Politicians needed money to win elections and to sustain their power bases. It was as simple as that. He picked up stakes in California and headed east. He never looked back. Washington was where he belonged, a place ripe for the