Breach of Trust

by D. W. Buffa

  Whitaker inclined his head a hairbreadth to the side.

  “Yes, I believe that would be correct.”

  “One last question,” I said as I started walking back to the counsel table. “Because you were so familiar with Mrs. Morgan’s signature, I assume you did not think it necessary to have that signature authenticated by anyone else—a handwriting expert, for example?”

  “No,” he answered, wondering why I would ask.

  “There wasn’t any reason to.”

  “No, of course not,” I said as I looked from the witness to the bench. “No more questions, Your Honor.”

  I waited until Ezra Whitaker had left the witness stand and had reached the doors at the back of the courtroom.

  “Your Honor, the defense calls, as its first witness, Arthur Connally.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Arthur Connally came into court with the impatient swagger of a man used to having everyone look to him for direction; he took the oath as if the implied suggestion that he had to swear to tell the truth was a personal affront.

  “You are the chief of staff to the president of the United States, correct?”

  Caminetti bounced up from his chair. “Leading.”

  “Yes, it is,” I remarked, cool and indifferent.

  Throwing up his hands, Caminetti staggered forward as if the burden of correction was too great. “It’s his witness.”

  “Mr. Connally has been called by the defense, but he isn’t our witness,” I replied, ignoring Caminetti as I focused on the judge. “He’s on the other side.

  Permission to treat as hostile, Your Honor.”

  I moved from the front corner of the counsel table, through the shaft of light that cut across the floor, until I was standing directly in front of the witness stand. I was close enough to the jury box to touch the railing with my hand. Tucked under my arm was a single thin file folder.

  “Before you were the president’s chief of staff, you managed his campaign, correct?”

  Connally’s head was bent to the side, a look of angry suspicion in his eyes. His mouth, barely open, scarcely moved when he grunted his reply.

  “That was the campaign in which Thomas Browning was the other leading candidate for the Republican nomination, correct?”

  I started to taunt him with my eyes, to let him know that I was in charge, that I could keep him there, answering questions, for as long as I liked.

  “Would you be kind enough to take a look at this?”

  I stepped close to him and removed from the file a single sheet of paper. He took it with a certain staged reluctance, trying to show his contempt. He held the sheet of paper with his thumb and the tip of his index finger, as if anything that came from my hand must be unclean. But the gesture was too obvious and he realized he had gone too far. He studied it a moment and then looked up.

  “Have you ever seen this document before?”

  “I read about it.”

  Turning my back on him, I faced the jury. “That was not my question.”

  “I don’t understand your question.”

  The eyes of the jury had gone to Connally; I waited until they came back to me. Smiling to myself as if I had heard this same predictable testimony a hundred times before from witnesses who had something to hide, I lowered my eyes.

  “Read it,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Read it!” I shouted as I wheeled around and stared hard at him. “You have it in your hands. Read it out loud!”

  Connally looked at Caminetti, expecting him to do something. Caminetti looked at Scarborough, expecting the same thing. Scarborough looked at me, expecting an explanation.

  “I want the jury to know what it is he’s looking at; and I want there to be no mistake that the witness has actually read and understands what is written on that page. This is the copy Mr. Caminetti gave me of the document the prosecution entered into evidence, the signed statement of Evelyn Morgan, the supposedly eyewitness account of what happened to Anna Malreaux.”

  “Supposedly?” cried Caminetti, bolting to his feet.

  “Exactly! Supposedly!”

  “Very well,” interposed Scarborough, motioning with the back of his hand for Caminetti to sit down.

  “Proceed.”

  Connally read the short, damning statement of Evelyn Morgan, and then, as if it signaled a triumph, the proof of something he had said, or if he had not said, believed all along, gazed at me with a vindictive smile.

  “As I say, I read about it.”

  “In the newspapers?”

  “Yes, in the newspapers.” He bent forward, his elbows on the arms of the witness chair, gripping his hands together. I might still be asking questions, but he was in control now. “I think everyone read about it.” Shifting his weight, he brought his left hand up to his chin, stroking it with confidence and satisfaction.

  “It’s pretty much the same allegation you made yourself, isn’t it? In the last campaign—against Thomas Browning.”

  Connally’s hand flew out to the side, a dismissive gesture that rejected both what I had said and what it implied.

  “That a woman had died—been murdered—in a hotel room in New York, and that Thomas Browning had been involved. Surely, you remember this— South Carolina, the primary you had to win, because if you lost it nothing could stop him from getting the nomination.”

  There was no answer. Connally just looked at me as if none of this was of any concern to him.

  “Are you going to sit there, under oath, and tell us that you don’t know anything about that? That you never heard of anything like that being said about Thomas Browning during that campaign, that campaign you led?”

  Caminetti was on his feet. “Relevance, Your Honor? I don’t know where counsel thinks he’s going with this, but…”

  “I’ll show relevance, Your Honor,” I promised. My eyes were riveted on Connally as I gripped the railing of the jury box. “Answer the question,” I insisted with all the force I could. “You knew about this rumor, didn’t you?”

  Connally shrugged. “There are rumors in every campaign.”

  I kept gripping the railing, my hand almost numb.

  “You were in charge of the overall campaign. You had people whose job it was to research the background, the history, of the opposition—correct?”

  I began to walk around, a few steps one way, then a few steps back, concentrating on everything that was said.

  “Anyone who did that—anyone competent, anyone who knew what they were doing—would have gone all the way back to the beginning, to the earliest days of Thomas Browning’s life, to his family history, the story of how his grandfather had built Stern Motors, the way Thomas Browning had been raised. That’s what any campaign would have done, isn’t that correct, Mr.

  Connally?” he agreed that there was nothing exceptional in doing any of that. Every campaign, at least every campaign for the presidency, wanted to know everything there was to know about the other candidates in the race.

  “And that would include a candidate’s personal life— whom he dated, whether he was ever engaged, whether he was ever involved in an illicit affair—correct?”

  Connally was no fool. He understood perfectly the evil necessities forced upon you by an imperfect world.

  “Yes, I’m afraid the process has become much too intrusive. No one is allowed even a small mistake.

  Things get blown way out of proportion.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes. Now, you had people checking up on Thomas Browning’s personal life, the girls he dated when he was in school… Annie Malreaux. And that meant someone must have learned how she died, must have learned she fell out a window during a party, a party given by Thomas Browning.” I raised my head and searched his eyes. “You knew that, didn’t you? I don’t mean someone in the campaign, I mean you. You knew that Annie Malreaux fell out a window Christmas Eve nineteen sixty-five; you knew that Thomas Browning was there when it happened. Answer the question, Mr.


  Connally. Do you want me to ask it again?”

  “No, you don’t have to ask it again. Yes, I knew that.

  So what?”

  “‘So what’? Well, let’s see. The facts were that she fell out the window and that Browning was there. The rumor, the one that somehow got started in South Carolina when everything—the campaign, the nomination, William Walker’s one and only chance for the presidency—was on the line, was not that she fell, but that she was pushed; not that it was an accident, but that it was murder, and that Thomas Browning was involved. And that rumor started with you, didn’t it, Mr. Connally?”

  Anger, cold and implacable, stalked through Arthur Connally’s deep-set hostile eyes. “That’s a lie. I did no such thing.”

  Suddenly, it hit him: a way to prove that he was not lying and, better yet, prove it out of my mouth.

  “Don’t you remember what you just had me read? There was a witness. It wasn’t some rumor someone made up. It was the truth, and someone had started to talk. That’s what happens, you know; that’s how things come out. Someone tells someone and then he tells someone else.”

  I had begun to move away from him, slowly, so I would not miss anything he said. When he was done, I faced him across the courtroom. The witness stand seemed to fall back into a darkened corner, caught between the jury box on one side and the judge’s bench on the other. I gave him a look that called him a liar.

  “Yes, I see. That must have been what happened. Not some vicious rumor you started or helped to start for purposes of your own, but the truth, making its way into the light after all these years because, of course, as that old saying goes, ‘the truth will out.’”

  I dropped the file I had been holding and picked up another, thicker one, in its place.

  “Now tell us this, Mr. Connally: As chief of staff one of your responsibilities is to decide who gets to see the president?”

  It was a different line of questioning. Connally watched me as I came toward him, trying to guess where I might be going with it.

  “There is some of that,” he replied in a guarded voice.

  I was halfway there, moving toward the witness stand in a rapid stride, the file dangling in my left hand.

  “You are also responsible for the flow of information into the Oval Office: not only what the president sees, but the form it takes—whether, for example, a proposal from someone in the administration goes directly to the president or whether other members of the administration have the chance to comment on it first?”

  Connally rolled on his hip, giving me his shoulder as he faced toward the jury. “There’s a system in place, a process in which… ,” he began to explain.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact nearly everything goes through a sophisticated computer system—isn’t that right, Mr. Connally? A system that’s under the control of someone with the title staff secretary—correct?”

  His eyes cut away from the jury. “Yes, but…”

  “And the staff secretary reports directly to you, because everyone who works in the White House is responsible to you—correct?”

  I was right in front of him. We were just feet apart, staring at one another, hostile and intense.

  “Would you be kind enough to please identify this?” I asked as I took a step back and reached inside the file.

  “It’s a blank sheet of paper,” he replied after he looked at what I had given him. A thin smile of contempt curled along his lower lip.

  “Would you please look at it again—the line across the top. Do you see it there—‘EOP’? Doesn’t that indicate ‘Executive Office of the President’?” I lowered my eyes and then, in a slow half circle, raised them to the jury box.

  “And the rest of it—those different letters and marks— doesn’t that indicate that this has been generated from inside the White House system, and not only that but—I think it’s called an ‘IP’ number—the individual computer terminal from which it was sent?”

  Connally looked at me with a kind of weary indifference. He had better, more important things to do than listen to the meaningless jargon that could only possibly matter to some useless computer hack.

  “Yes, I suppose it does, but I don’t…”

  “And you’re aware, are you not, that while this information doesn’t normally appear at the top of a message, it is easy enough to have it printed out?”

  “Yes, I suppose, but…”

  “Who is Lincoln Edwards?”

  “Who?” he asked, indifference giving way to exasperation. “Lincoln Edwards? I don’t think I know that name.”

  I showed him another sheet of paper, holding it in my hand, folded over so that he could see only the part I wanted him to see, the e-mail address at the very top.

  “This is from the White House system. It has the same address as what I gave you before. Notice the name of the sender.”

  Connally looked at the document and then looked at me. “Lincoln Edwards.”

  “Yes, Lincoln Edwards. But you say you don’t know anyone by that name. That’s strange, isn’t it? You run the White House—you’re in charge—yet there is someone working there whose name you’ve never heard? Of course, quite a few people work in the White House, don’t they? But, then, how many of them would be sending messages directly to the president himself?”

  Connally grabbed at the paper. “Go ahead,” I said, letting it go. “See for yourself. POTUS. That’s the famous acronym, isn’t it? President of the United States.” he held it with both hands, reading what had been sent from Lincoln Edwards to the President.

  “Here, you might as well have the rest.” I removed from the file the five remaining pages from the list of names and numbers that included two of the witnesses the prosecution had originally intended to call.

  “What’s this?” demanded Connally as if I owed him an answer instead of the other way around.

  “It’s a list of names and numbers; it’s a list of monies paid and the extraordinary lengths to which someone went to keep secret what he had done. It’s a list that among other things includes a record of payments made to two witnesses in this trial, one of whom has already testified, the other of whom has not yet been called.”

  With a sidelong glance at Caminetti, who was sitting at the edge of his seat, clenching his teeth, I added: “Perhaps the prosecution is saving that one for rebuttal.”

  My eyes darted back to Connally. “Tell me, is it your testimony that in addition to Lincoln Edwards, the name—there, right on the list, a little farther down— Gordon Fitzgerald… you’ve also never heard of him?”

  “He was a witness in the trial, wasn’t he?”

  It was stunning how well he could lie: the blank look of total incomprehension with which he managed to mask both his knowledge and his guilt. Was it the short-lived memory of the politician, eager to forget the evil he had committed because of the good he was convinced he could still achieve? Jamison Haviland might face the executioner, but all his death would mean to Arthur Connally was that William Walker was one step closer to a second term.

  Connally’s question echoed false and discordant in the hushed stillness. I walked to the counsel table and lifted up a paperbound directory.

  “This is the White House telephone book. No one named Lincoln Edwards is listed inside it. The question becomes, Mr. Connally, how did someone who doesn’t work in the White House have access to a White House computer? And how was he able to communicate directly with POTUS, the president, himself?”

  Connally did not immediately answer, and I did not give him time to think.

  “All messages—and there must be millions of them each year—that go through this system are stored, kept, made part of the historical record, by law—correct?”

  “Yes,” he admitted. He was leaning forward, gripping the arms of the chair, all his senses alert.

  “It’s impossible to remove anything—the hard drive, everything, stays in place—correct?”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

 
“And you’ve already testified that each computer has an identification—an IP number. Each computer is assigned to someone and that person has his own password, the word that gets him into the system—isn’t that correct?”

  “Yes, but I…”

  I tossed the White House directory on the table and picked up another file. Holding it open in front of me, I walked at a slow, steady pace across the courtroom floor, passing through the shaft of sunlight, into the shadowed corner formed by the witness stand and the jury box.

  “This is a list of computer assignments inside the White House. I have drawn a circle around your name.

  Do you see it?” I asked as I handed him the sheet.

  “Yes,” he replied in a cautious, tentative voice.

  “The computer assigned to you is identified by a number, correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Good,” I remarked, nodding politely as I took back the sheet of paper. I started to ask him another question, but then, as if I had just remembered something, I walked quickly to the counsel table and picked up the file I had had before.

  “I almost forgot,” I said as I hurried back. “This, the one I showed you before, the list of names and numbers, the one with Gordon Fitzgerald’s name, the one sent by that Lincoln Edwards who doesn’t work in the White House and whom you don’t know—Take another look. See the number there at the top, that tiny code-like line—the identification number? Now look at this again,” I said in a voice that was suddenly hard, cold and unforgiving. “Look at the identification number of the computer assigned to you.” I shoved the document in front of his face. “It’s the same, isn’t it? It’s the same because, you’re right, Lincoln Edwards doesn’t work in the White House—you do.

  You’re Lincoln Edwards. You took that name so that if someone happened to stumble on a printed copy of it, they wouldn’t know—not without some knowledge of the White House system and the way each computer was assigned—they wouldn’t know it was you, the White House chief of staff, the president’s former campaign manager, the president’s closest friend, who was behind all of this, this conspiracy to buy perjured testimony, to forge documents, to do anything you had to do to bring about first the indictment, then the conviction of an innocent man because it was the only way you had to destroy Thomas Browning before Thomas Browning could defeat William Walker in a fair election!”