by D. W. Buffa
Thomas Browning was waiting for me when I stepped out of the private elevator onto his floor. Though it was only seven-thirty, he looked as if he had been up for hours, rested, perfectly relaxed, as if he did not have a care in the world. Dressed in a V-neck sweater slipped over a tan shirt and a pair of pleated gray checked slacks, he might have been holding a golf club in his hand, one of those weekend players who was not very good but loved the game. He greeted me with the indulgent attitude of someone welcoming home a stray.
We reached the study, that small, private room with the awning-covered balcony that gave a view of the park and the city beyond. Browning settled into the chair behind his desk. His eyes sparkled as if he had been looking forward to something that was just about to start. I tried to remind myself that all he knew about the trial was what he had read in the paper, or what he had been told. He could be forgiven for thinking things had been going better than they were. I sat down on the only other chair in the room, held my briefcase on my lap and snapped open the lock. Browning gave me a puzzled glance.
“I brought something I want you to look at. I’m hoping you can help explain it to me, because…” he shook his head. There was something more important, more interesting, on his mind. He picked up the telephone from the corner of his desk, held his hand over the receiver, and asked me what I wanted for breakfast.
“Nothing,” I replied, anxious to get back to what I wanted to talk to him about.
“You must,” he insisted. “I’d feel like a fool sitting here having breakfast while you sit there twiddling your thumbs.”
“Coffee, eggs,” I said without enthusiasm.
Browning laughed at my sullen reply, turned away and spoke for a moment into the phone.
“I’ve been trying to reach you for days,” I complained.
“They have me going everywhere. The West Coast, the East Coast, the North, the South,” he said, as a grin grew wider on his mouth, mocking the formal sound of his voice. For some reason I did not understand, he was having an enormously good time. His left arm was thrown carelessly over the corner of the chair, his right leg was crossed over the left. He raised his chin and studied me with the clean, decent benevolence of a friend.
“You’ve been killing yourself working on this trial. I know that. And I know that I promised I’d be available anytime you wanted. That’s why I asked if you could come by this morning: so we could talk. I got back last night, and I’m going out again at noon.”
I had one more complaint. “So I did what you told me I should: When I couldn’t reach you, I tried to reach Elizabeth Hartley—the one you said I should reach because she could always reach you.”
It seemed to strike him like some private joke, one he was willing to share, but just not quite yet.
“Elizabeth is the reason I asked you to come this early.”
There was a soft, polite knock on the door. A maid wheeled in a cart with platters stacked with food: eggs and ham and bacon, kippers and potatoes, biscuits, muffins, toast and scones, jams and jellies and seven different kinds of fruit, coffee, tea, orange juice, tomato juice, juices I had never seen or heard of before, and finally, fluted glasses and two bottles of champagne.
With each thing I took Browning kept repeating that I needed to take more, that I looked a wreck, that he was worried about my health. When I had my plate fully loaded, wondering how I was going to get through half of it, he helped himself to a single slice of buttered toast, a cup of black coffee, and ignored the rest.
“Eat!” he cried eagerly. “You don’t have to watch your weight.”
I was not hungry, but to placate Browning I took a few bites before I tried again to get him to talk about the documents I wanted him to see. He stopped me before I could start, told me I needed to eat some more, then glanced at the clock and muttered something about not wanting to miss the beginning. With a remote control he turned on a television set in the corner of the room.
“Have something to drink,” he urged, waving his hand toward the bottles of champagne in two ice buckets standing together on the cart. “This will be worth celebrating, just to see the look on that poor bastard’s face.” Browning was hunched forward, his arms resting on his knees, peering intently at the images flickering on the screen. “This is the reason I asked you to come this early, to see this,” he said, turning his head briefly toward me. “I wanted you to watch this with me,” he added, turning his attention back to the set. “Then you can tell me what you think.”
It was one of the Sunday talk shows. There were two guests: Arthur Connally, the president’s chief of staff, and Elizabeth Hartley, introduced as “the communications director for the Browning for President campaign.”
“He doesn’t look happy, does he?” asked Browning with a sidelong glance. He sat up, folded his arms across his chest and crossed his ankle over his knee. “Thought he was going to be on with me; that he and I were going to have some little debate. Arthur has always suffered from a strange form of megalomania. He spends so much time telling Walker what to think and what to do that he tends to forget that he doesn’t actually hold the office himself.” A harsh look of disdain raced through Browning’s eyes. “He’s a staffer, for Christ’s sake!”
The look in his eyes changed. A sly grin flickered over his mouth as the face of Elizabeth Hartley appeared on the screen.
“He’s a staffer—so I sent one of my own, younger, smarter, infinitely more telegenic.” He looked at me for confirmation. “And with an ambition, I’m afraid, every bit as great as his own.”
The show had two moderators, Martha Riles, a White House correspondent for the network, and Gilbert Graham, the legal affairs reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Both of them wanted to know about the trial.
Riles insisted that the prosecution seemed to be getting the better of things at trial, while Graham claimed that none of it was doing the political prospects of Thomas Browning any good. Riles challenged Elizabeth Hartley to disagree with her assertion that the trial, and particularly the prosecution’s last witness, had raised serious questions about the credibility of what in a rather strident voice she called “the whole Browning defense.”
Elizabeth Hartley smiled. “The ‘Browning defense’? I’m afraid you’re confused. Vice President Browning isn’t on trial; a man named Jamison Scott Haviland is.”
Staring in practiced disbelief, Graham asked her not to disregard the obvious. “Everyone knows the trial is ultimately all about Thomas Browning,” he said in an unctuous, pontificating voice. “If Haviland is guilty, so is Browning; and he can’t possibly stay in the race for the presidency if he is. Isn’t that right, Ms. Hartley?”
The two guests sat next to each other, facing their two interrogators across an oblong table. Hartley held herself erect, a firm, determined look in her hard blue eyes. Instead of rushing to a reply, the instinct of most people suddenly cast into the national eye, she gave herself time.
“Your question has no point. Jamison Scott Haviland isn’t guilty.” She said this in a calm but quite emphatic voice. “Mr. Browning has already stated publicly that Mr.
Haviland is innocent.”
“What else could he say?” interjected Connally as he turned on Hartley with a venomous glance. “He was there. Only now it looks like his story is—what shall I say?—a little less than convincing. Haviland admitted that he killed her and…”
“He admitted no such thing,” Hartley fired back, raising her chin a belligerent half inch. “There is a distinction between what someone says and what someone else tells you he said. I realize that with your penchant for rumor and hearsay that distinction may be a little lost on you, but it’s a distinction that won’t be lost on the court.” she had pulled herself around, clutching with her hand the corner of the chair. She fixed Connally with a relentless stare.
“The witness, the witness called by the prosecution, the witness who claimed that Jamison Haviland told him that he killed Anna Malreaux, is a liar, and everyone who was i
n that courtroom, everyone who saw what Joseph Antonelli did to him on cross-examination, knows it.”
Connally started to reply, to argue the point, but Elizabeth was not through. She talked right over him, growing more confident with each word she spoke.
“Don’t you remember that part? It was only a couple of days ago, Mr. Connally; it was in all the papers.” A mocking smile flashed across her mouth, the kind that, if you have to suffer it, drives you half mad with its assumption of a vast, illimitable superiority. “The confession you just referred to—that was the one supposedly made while both Mr. Haviland and Mr… What was his name?—Fitzgerald—were in a rehabilitation center together? Mr. Haviland was there because of a dependence on pain medication, if I recall correctly; pain medication that had originally been prescribed for injuries sustained in the war. Mr.
Fitzgerald, on the other hand, had an addiction to alcohol, and also cocaine—or was it heroin—or was it both? It was hard to know because—don’t you remember?—in the course of Mr. Antonelli’s cross-examination he was forced to admit that he had been in treatment not only before, but several times after, the time he met Mr. Haviland. Drugs, alcohol—he seemed to have experienced about every kind of addiction there is, except perhaps to telling the truth. And when he wasn’t using some mind-altering drug, he… You remember this, don’t you, Mr. Connally? When Antonelli asked him about the time he served in prison for fraud, the dozens of elderly people whose life savings he had supposedly invested but had instead actually spent.”
Elizabeth turned away from Connally with contempt.
“That’s the witness—the only witness—they’ve got,” she said with an air of quiet triumph as she looked across at the two reporters.
Stunned by the ease with which the relatively young communications director of the Browning campaign had taken apart the president’s feared and inflexible chief of staff, the best either Riles or Graham could do was to look at Arthur Connally and wait for his response.
Connally tried to hide his anger, but the smile that started onto his mouth was strained, awkward, artificial, and died halfway across.
“You take your witnesses as they come. How many convictions do you think there would be of organized-crime figures if you could not use the testimony of informants who had been with the mob?”
Elizabeth was leaning in, ready with a reply. With a thrust of his forehead and an evil stare, Connally cut her off.
“But if you’re so convinced that the witness was lying, that for some strange reason he made the whole thing up, then why refuse to answer the question Gilbert just asked you? If Haviland didn’t kill that girl, then Browning doesn’t have anything to worry about, does he? So there wouldn’t be any reason—would there? —not to agree that if Haviland is found guilty—of this crime he did not commit and that Browning did not cover up—Browning will immediately withdraw.
He’d have to anyway, wouldn’t he? The American people are never going to elect someone who helped cover up a murder—no matter how long ago that murder took place.”
“Now, Elizabeth; do it now.”
I looked across the room. Browning was hunched forward, his eyes narrow, intense.
A smile ran like vengeance across Elizabeth Hartley’s taut, fine-featured face. “You think Thomas Browning should give up the fight for the Republican nomination if Jamison Haviland is found guilty at trial? Is that the question? A better question would be what President Walker will do if he is not.”
Connally had been upstaged by this junior staffer long enough. Slapping his open palm on the table, he turned on her.
“Are you suggesting… ?”
That was all he got out. “Not suggesting anything,”
Elizabeth shot back. “But if Haviland isn’t guilty, then someone is—not of murder, but of something worse.
Who suddenly decided that there was a murder? And not only a murder, but that the vice president was somehow involved? Was it just a coincidence that it’s the same thing—the very same thing—that was done to Thomas Browning in the last election, the last time he had the courage to challenge you and William Walker and all that you and all the people like you represent?”
Connally looked at the two moderators, expecting them to intervene, to caution this out-of-control young woman about her behavior and her tone of voice.
“So the answer, Mr. Connally,” said Elizabeth Hartley in a voice that was suddenly all reason and light, “is yes, absolutely: If Jamison Scott Haviland is found guilty of murder, Thomas Browning will withdraw. And now that I have answered your question, why don’t you answer mine? If Mr. Haviland is acquitted, found innocent, will the president quit as well?”
Arthur Connally looked at her as if she had lost her mind. The show went to commercial. Browning turned off the television set, sat back in the chair and began to stroke his chin. There was a look of immense satisfaction in his eyes.
“She’s a quick study, that one. I talked to her barely ten minutes before she went on. That had to come out— that business about whether if Haviland was found guilty I would quit; and it had to come out just like that: something that can’t possibly happen because Haviland is innocent and the only reason there is a trial is because of them. Don’t you think that was something we had to do,” he asked, “make them talk not just about me, but about them? Make it—what it really is—an issue about who can be trusted and who cannot? If Haviland is guilty, Browning quits! But if Haviland is innocent, then, Mr. President, where does that leave you?”
Browning sprang out of his chair and for a moment stood perfectly still, his hands locked behind his back, brooding on what he had just said. “It had to be done,” he said emphatically. His hand gripped the corner of the desk. He looked at me with a sense of urgency in his eyes. “The chief justice is in the hospital.”
“Yes, I know that, but…”
“He isn’t coming out. A matter of days, I should think; a week, two at the most. I have to make everyone think that Walker may not last.” He gestured toward the darkened screen. “That’s what they’re talking about now, what those people want to know: Whom the president is going to nominate if the position of chief justice should suddenly become vacant. That’s all anyone wants to talk about, that and the trial.” A rueful expression deepened the lines around his eyes and mouth. “Death and political destruction, the wheels on which Washington—at least Washington rumor—runs.” he shook his head as if to banish everything irrelevant from the narrow focus of his mind. “Walker wants Reynolds. We both know that. I have enough support in the Senate to stop it, but only for as long as there is reason to think Walker is in trouble and that I have a chance.” He gave me a sharp, searching glance.
“Do you understand all this? Do you see that so long as I’m in this thing, Walker and Connally won’t dare move on the Reynolds nomination? Because once he does that—nominates him—no one can kid themselves anymore; no one can pretend Walker isn’t every bit as radical as the rest of them, all those moralistic know-nothings, those religious zealots who think they’re the chosen instruments of God.
“I told you at the beginning that it would come to this, that they had to destroy me, that I was the only one in their way. They have the White House, they have the Senate and the House, and now they’re just one dying old man away from having the Court as well. I can stop them, but only if you win. If Haviland is found guilty, Connally is right: I’m finished, and those people will own the country for as far into the future as you and I can see. God knows what will happen then,” he added, shaking his head as a worried look passed briefly over his eyes.
Browning went back to his desk. “I’m afraid it’s all on your shoulders now. What can I do to help?”
Pushing aside the cart with all its wasted food, I pulled my chair up to the desk.
“I did what I could the other day on cross-examination, but it wasn’t enough, not half as effective as Elizabeth Hartley made it sound. I didn’t break Fitzgerald; he held his own.”
/> Browning twisted his head to the side, gave me a questioning look and waited.
“I made sure the jury knew that he had a criminal record and that he used narcotics; but I could not show that he had any reason to lie. I asked him, right at the end, whether anyone had talked to him, offered him anything in exchange for his testimony. I knew he was going to say no; but I had to have it on the record so I could use it against him, show that he is a liar, when I confront him with the evidence that he has taken money, that he was bribed.”
I reached into the briefcase and handed Browning the list of names and numbers that I had not been able to use. He ran his eye down the first page and then the second; then he looked up at me and in a somber gesture nodded twice. He guessed their significance at once.
“Money paid out, but first moved around—is that what you think this is? And Fitzgerald’s name—his testimony was bought?”
“Two names on that list are on the list of witnesses Caminetti intends to call. He called Fitzgerald, and now, this week, he’ll call the other.”
“Then you’ve won,” insisted Browning. Grabbing the sheets of paper in his fist, he raised them high in the air.
“This proves it! It’s what I said from the beginning! The White House is behind it, all of it!” Springing up from his chair, he spread the sheets out on the desk. “Look! There’s no mistake. See what it says, where it comes from? It’s the White House. There isn’t any question.”
“But it’s just names and numbers—they could mean anything! And Gordon Fitzgerald? There’s no proof that it’s the same Gordon Fitzgerald who testified at the trial. It isn’t a particularly unusual name,” I added, frustrated by Browning’s obstinate insistence that I was making up a problem where none existed. But Browning had passed beyond his own impatience. He settled into his chair, clasped his hands under his chin and tapped his index fingers, pressed close together, against his mouth.
