Free The Shadow Cabinet by W. T. Tyler

from the back window of Mrs. Polk’s station wagon.
    4.
    Ed Donlon was only half Irish, but he had a certain Irish charm which many women found seductive. He was a prodigious drinker, raconteur, and philanderer, could quote Yeats and more obscure voices by the hour, especially when he was in his cups, and had a sexual vitality that neither alcohol nor advancing middle age seemed to have dulled. He’d grown up in a sedate Victorian house in Trenton, New Jersey, surrounded by maiden aunts, grandmothers, and older sisters, he and his father, a patent lawyer, the prisoners of a spinsterish sisterhood he wasn’t to escape until he was sent off to Princeton at seventeen. He’d been taking his revenge ever since, he’d once told Haven Wilson. They’d known each other for years. Both had been lawyers together at the Justice Department, both in the criminal division, where they’d shared an office. Donlon had moved on to the Agency as deputy counsel and had ended his government career as an assistant secretary of defense. He’d attempted to persuade Haven Wilson to join him at the Pentagon as his senior deputy, but Wilson had remained on the Hill, more interested in returning eventually to a senior position at Justice. In the late seventies, Donlon had left the Pentagon after a policy dispute and joined a small but prestigious Washington law firm. Wilson had the impression that he didn’t work very hard, kept comfortable hours, and had been drinking and whoring even more voraciously since his wife had left him.
    It was a little before one o’clock as Haven Wilson climbed into the front seat of Donlon’s BMW 2002 and the two men drove out through Fairfax into the Virginia countryside. Donlon was dressed for the country in gray flannels, a tweed hacking jacket with elbow patches, and red-soled walking shoes. Only the ascot was missing. He was smaller and a few years older than Wilson, but his thinning chestnut hair was barely touched by gray and his fair-skinned, robust face was uncreased by worry. In his company, Wilson sometimes felt as dull as the paint on a bus-station door.
    The rain had vanished and the wind had grown colder. The gunmetal sky held the first premonition of winter. On the way out, Wilson mentioned the problems he’d been having with the California woman who wanted to buy Grace Ramsey’s house. Ed Donlon was her lawyer, Grace Ramsey the best friend and former college roommate of Donlon’s wife, Jane. But Donlon had washed his hands of it once he’d turned the house over to the Virginia brokerage.
    â€œShe doesn’t care about money, I’m not going to talk to her about money, her New York lawyers won’t talk about money, and that’s all there is to it,” he said. “I don’t care about these people from California, she doesn’t care about these people from California, and if they won’t meet her price for the house, then she doesn’t care. She didn’t put the price on the house, a broker did, and it took me six months to get her to agree to put it on the market. Grace is strange, flaky. She floats around in a world of her own. Too much money, which is maybe why George drank himself to death.”
    The road narrowed to a single lane and they drove past rolling unkempt fields and abandoned farms, ruined silos and tumbled barns awaiting the developer’s bulldozer.
    â€œThis California woman wants to talk to her,” Wilson persisted.
    â€œGrace won’t talk to her.”
    â€œTo you, then.”
    â€œI won’t talk to her. If I talk to her, I’ll have to talk to Grace, and I’m not going to talk to Grace about money. I’ll talk to her about religion, poetry, buggery, whatever, but not about money. Never.”
    â€œSo what am I supposed to tell these California people?”
    â€œWhat you’ve been telling them. Listen, Grace stayed with us in Georgetown for two months after