Shadow of Power

by Steve Martini

  “So you fed it to us, hoping that it would be enough?”

  She nods nervously several times. “Why didn’t it work?”

  “One obstinate juror,” I tell her. “The way it goes sometimes.”

  “Then if he’d been acquitted, you wouldn’t be here tonight.”

  I shrug. She’s right. If Carl were on the street, free, out from under, this wouldn’t be my job. And given the theory of the prosecution, if Carl were acquitted, they would never be able to convict Scott-that is, if they even found her, which is unlikely.

  “So you went up the stairs, put on the raincoat and the gloves. You had the hammer in your purse.”

  She nods.

  “How did you get into the room?”

  “I knocked on the door. How stupid is that? I wasn’t sure if he was in or, if he was, whether he was alone. I knew when he opened the door he’d be surprised to see me. And standing there in a raincoat. I had a story ready. I was going to tell him that I was in town on business and there was something I needed to talk to him about if he could spare two minutes-anything to get inside the room.”

  “Because you knew you were running out of time,” I say.

  “Yes.”

  “So what happened when he opened the door?”

  “Strange thing was, he never even looked at me. He was busy reading something, a piece of paper in his hand. Before I knew it, he was walking away. He said, ‘Put it on the table’-something about a check. Then I realized he thought I was room service. Suddenly there he was, sitting in the chair, his back to me, reading some papers, making notes, completely oblivious to the fact that I was even standing there. At that moment I think I just exploded. What he had put me through, and he didn’t even know it. Not that Terry would have cared.

  “You want to know the truth?” She looks me straight in the eye now. “It was easier than I ever thought it could be. I closed the door and walked up to the back of the chair, and I swung that hammer, over and over and over again, until the muscles in my arms burned.” She breathes heavily, takes the napkin and wipes her eyes.

  “At some point I must have closed my eyes, because when I opened them again, there was blood everywhere-on the ceiling, on the walls, soaking into the gloves I was wearing, spotting and running down the raincoat. I didn’t realize it at first, but the reason I stopped swinging was that the hammer was stuck. The claws were lodged in the top of his head. I couldn’t look at it. For some stupid reason, I had to pull it out. I pulled and twisted. The hammer came loose, and his body fell on the floor. I dropped the hammer.

  “It’s amazing. I…You’d think you would go into shock after something like that, but I didn’t. I was overwhelmed with this incredible urge to run, to get out of there. I knew that any minute somebody with a tray was probably going to be at the door. But I wasn’t finished.”

  “You had to find the video of Ginnis and Scarborough at the restaurant.”

  “How did you know?”

  “It never came into evidence, but we have a copy,” I tell her, “from Scarborough’s apartment.”

  “The police had it?” she says.

  “Yes, but they didn’t know what it was.”

  “I assumed that Terry had copies, but I didn’t think anyone would pay any attention to it. Terry had tons of tapes and DVDs all over the place. What was one more or less?”

  “That was the reason you were running out of time?” I say. “You couldn’t be sure how long you had before Scarborough went public about the Jefferson Letter, the fact that Ginnis, a member of the Supreme Court, had manufactured it.”

  “Arthur didn’t know he was being taped. I had to find the tape and the letter itself, Terry’s copy, the one Arthur had given him. I knew Terry well enough to know that he would have both of these with him. If he was getting ready to out Arthur in the media over the letter, he would never leave these behind in his apartment or trust them to a safe-deposit box. Terry was paranoid. Put something in a vault and people with power, especially people in government, can always find a way to get at it. The only safe place was in his pocket or the briefcase he was carrying. So I looked.”

  “And of course you were still wearing the gloves.”

  She nods.

  This accounts for all the little smudges of blood on Scarborough’s attaché case, the large sample case by the side of his chair, and the leather portfolio by the television, where she found the letter folded neatly, lying on top.

  “Where did you find the videotape?” I ask.

  “It was in his attaché case. Along with two DVDs. I had to worry about that,” she says. “I didn’t know a lot about the technology, but I knew if he had time to make copies of the tape and transfer them to DVD, there could be more copies someplace else. I had to assume that the video was also downloaded onto a computer somewhere. But Terry wouldn’t have copied the tape himself. He wouldn’t know how. He was always too busy to do anything like that, or learn how. He would have taken it somewhere and had it done. Why not? Raw footage of an old man talking about the value of some obscure letter over a meal in a restaurant wouldn’t mean a thing without Terry to explain what was happening and how all the little pieces fit together. I could only hope that if anybody stumbled on copies or found the video computer file, it would have that same meaningless sense to them.”

  “And since they didn’t find it at the scene of a murder, why would they try to connect any dots?”

  “That’s what I thought,” she says, “until you showed up at my office that day. But at that moment in the hotel room, I had bigger problems. I tried to wipe as much of the blood off of the raincoat as I could, using a wet towel that was already on the bathroom floor. Terry must have taken a shower. I had to make sure there were no fingerprints on the plastic of the coat. I was racing. I wrapped the coat with the same towel and threw it in my bag. I took off the gloves, wrapped them in a small hand towel, and dropped them in the bag. As fast as I was moving, I was careful not to touch anything with my hands. I used wet toilet paper to wipe spots of blood off my face and off the top of one of my shoes and then flushed the paper down the toilet. I used a clean face towel to touch any surfaces in the bathroom, including the handle on the toilet. I checked myself in the mirror and then started for the door. By now the carpet was soaked, and there was blood on the floor in the entry leading to the door. I had to step around it, stay to the left in the entry. I used the sleeve of my coat to open the door, and I ran. I ran down I don’t know how many flights of stairs before I got onto the elevator. When I got outside, I must have run for a mile. I threw the towel with the raincoat into the Dumpster in the parking lot. I got rid of the other towel with the gloves somewhere else. I can’t remember.”

  “And of course you kept Scarborough’s copy of the letter.”

  “You know, I’ve thought about that so many times. I don’t know why I kept it. It had Terry’s blood on it. It was the only thing left connecting me to that room, but for some reason I put it in a drawer when I got home. The DVDs and the videotape of Arthur talking with Terry in the restaurant, those I destroyed, but not before I watched one of the copies on my television. It was shot in early spring. Arthur was still recovering from his hip surgery. You could see his cane hooked on the edge of the table in the restaurant. This frail old man sitting there breaking bread with someone he despised, smiling, his eyes twinkling, thinking all the while that he was about to stick his fork in the devil.”

  “And then Scarborough opened the letter and laid it on the table. You saw the look on Ginnis’s face,” I say. “He wasn’t smiling then.”

  “No.”

  “So that was the plan, to get Scarborough hooked on the Jefferson Letter, to get him to publish a book based on it, then reveal it as a fraud and leave him twisting?”

  She nods. “Arthur had it all set up. He wrote the letter himself. You know, when you’re dealing with Arthur Ginnis, you’re dealing with a first-rate mind. He knew that the old code words for slavery in the Constitution, the
fact that the framers had tried so hard to dodge the issue by avoiding the use of the word itself, made the substance of the Jefferson Letter completely plausible. Terry would buy into it in a heartbeat. Evidence of an offer to the slaving interests of Great Britain as the price to secure liberty for the American colonies and avoid a war-for Terry that was the stuff of dreams. Shatter the American myth. It was what he lived for. Terry hated the power structure. He hated authority, unless he was the one wielding it. He saw conspiracies everywhere.”

  She seems more comfortable now, out from under the dark cloud of the murder, the details of the Jefferson Letter almost seeming to amuse her.

  “First Arthur tried to get Terry to include the Jefferson Letter as part of Perpetual Slaves, a kind of one-two punch-slavery in the Constitution and history’s ultimate dirty deal in the letter. Arthur knew that Terry couldn’t resist. The letter confirmed every evil thought Terry ever had about the white ruling class, rotten to the core from the instant they entered the promised land.

  “If that wasn’t enough, Terry was always the insecure author. Nibbling at the edges of his mind was the ever-present thought, ‘What if I trot out the old language of slavery and all they do is yawn?’ He could never be sure that the language was enough to ignite the firestorm he needed for success. But toss in Jefferson’s letter and Terry had an instant flamethrower. When Arthur dangled it, Terry did a swan dive, chasing the copy.”

  “But of course you were there to stop it,” I tell her. “You convinced Scarborough he needed to authenticate the letter.”

  “You bet I did. Arthur was angry. He could never forgive Terry for what he’d done to him. There’s no question he would have been chief justice but for Terry Scarborough’s lies. He’s one of the most intelligent human beings I’ve ever known. Do you think he would have even considered doing something like this five years ago, even three years ago? Never! Here’s a man with a lifelong reputation to protect, a judicial philosophy etched in law for a quarter of a century. And here he was taking a risk of immense proportions. He hated Scarborough. If you want to know what I thought, I thought Arthur was losing it. The reckless thing he was doing had all the signs of senility, and yet he seemed not to have dropped a single stitch. You bet I tried to stop it.

  “Even after I convinced Terry to hold the letter and told him that he couldn’t use it without authentication, Arthur wouldn’t quit. God, that old man,” she says. “Terry wanted the original, and Arthur wouldn’t give it to him. Terry said he couldn’t convince the publisher to go forward with another book unless he produced the original of the Jefferson Letter and allowed them to authenticate it. Arthur didn’t buy it.

  “He told Terry to call the publisher’s bluff. If they wouldn’t go forward based on the copy and a promise to deliver the original later, Terry should tell them he would take the project to another publisher. Given the sales of Perpetual Slaves, there’d be a bidding war for rights to the next book. When Terry thought about that, he stopped arguing. I think for a moment he might have even considered hiring Arthur to represent him.

  “When Terry threatened, the publisher caved. They gave him a contract, told him where to sign, handed him a seven-figure advance, and promised to wait for the original of the Jefferson Letter that would have to be produced and authenticated before publication. They weren’t happy, but they did it. Terry was throwing parties-not that he needed the money, but the advance was twice what he thought he would get.”

  “But if Ginnis knew he had to cough up the original of the letter before the book went into print, where was the downside for Scarborough? The publisher would know that the letter was a fraud before the book ever went to press,” I say.

  “That’s what I’m saying. Arthur’s smart. He had already burned the original of the letter. He knew he couldn’t show it to anybody, not without revealing it as a fraud. The plan was to leak another copy of the letter to the media, with an anonymous note that Terry was doing a book and the name of the publisher-all this just about the time Terry was finishing the manuscript.

  “The media would be all over the publisher, and they’d already have the contents of the letter, all the dirty little details, the bombshell of a letter, the offered deal on slavery. With all of this in the press, who needs a book?

  “When the time came to produce the original, as far as Arthur was concerned, he was the original man from Mars. He knew nothing. He’d never heard of the Jefferson Letter. He didn’t know what Terry was talking about. By then the publisher-caught between the press, their inability to publish, and the suspicion that Terry had turned the media loose on them in an effort to force publication without the original letter-would have to go into court against Terry even if he was a hot property. When they found the paper trail leading back to Scarborough…”

  “Zobel’s files with Scarborough’s signature on the disclaimer form.”

  “You found that, too?” she says.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “When they found that, the U.S. Attorney would be joining the party, and Terry would be looking at both the civil and criminal sides of the same coin.”

  “How did Ginnis manage to get Scarborough’s signature on that form?”

  She laughs. “He not only had Terry’s signature, he also had his fingerprints all over that form. As a lawyer, Terry didn’t even belong in Arthur’s universe. But he was an author, and he had a large ego. He was used to autographing hundreds, even thousands, of books every year. It wasn’t unusual to have someone come up to him in a line during an autograph party and tell the author that he’d left his book at home. The person might have a paper bookplate to be signed that he could paste in the book later, or just a piece of paper that he could glue in. It happens often enough that writers don’t even think about it.

  “Arthur waited for an autographing appearance at a bookshop in Washington. That was for the book just before Perpetual Slaves. Arthur sent over a clerk with a sheet of paper that had a penciled line where Terry was to sign. The clerk was told not to say anything about Arthur or where the request was coming from. It was some kind of a surprise. The story was simple: She owned a book and had forgotten it at home.

  “The night before the autographing, Arthur printed Zobel’s disclaimer form on his home computer. All he had to do was put a copy of the form under a blank sheet of paper with a little light behind the two, and you could see where the signature went on the disclaimer form. That’s where Arthur drew the penciled line. When he got the sheet back with the signature, he pulled up the form, ran the signed sheet through the printer, and there it was, the form with the signature, all in the right place. He used gloves so his prints wouldn’t be on the form, only Scarborough’s and the clerk’s, who Arthur knew they’d never look for.

  “I know what you’re thinking. How can a man who’s senile think that far ahead? What was happening in his head were all the details-the judgment needed to weigh the totality of what he was doing was gone. It’s why in the video, when Terry tried to hand him the copy of the letter, Arthur went for the bread instead. He refused to touch the paper. He didn’t want his prints on it. What he didn’t know was that Scarborough had already discovered that the letter was a fraud and that Arthur was being taped and recorded as they talked about it over the table. I don’t know how Terry found out. However he did it, the devil was getting ready to roast Arthur.”

  She picks up her glass and takes a drink.

  “Which brings us to the point,” I say. “When did Arthur Ginnis die?”

  She looks at me over the curved edge of the glass. It’s the first hint of surprise I have seen in her eyes, as a tear forms and runs down her cheek. “You knew?”

  “Process of elimination,” I tell her.

  There is a long pause here as she catches her breath, a weight lifted from her shoulders. It was not Ginnis that Herman, Harry, and I saw on the steps of the hotel in Curaçao that night. It was Scott dressed in his clothes and playing the part from a distance. We never got close enough to see
the face. But because Aranda was there, we made the natural assumption. Our eyes saw what we wanted to see.

  Without realizing that Harry and I were already in the air headed for the island, Scott, after slipping the envelope under our office door, headed for Curaçao as well. She would have landed on the island the day after us, about the same time the media showed up. Scott, Aranda, and Ginnis’s wife, Margaret, must have been in a panic by then. When I cornered Aranda at the beach and he slipped away, Scott was already there, coming up with the next plan to bail them out. It would not have been hard with a few phone calls to find out where we were staying, to watch the restaurant veranda with field glasses, and to stage the performance for our benefit across the water. Even if the floating bridge hadn’t moved, Herman would never have gotten there in time. Ginnis-cum-Scott would have hopscotched down the steps, into the car, and away before Herman could have drawn within a block. It was all designed to convince us he was still alive and to discourage us from looking further, because he had escaped.

  “So when did he die?” I ask.

  “It was six weeks, almost to the day, before I visited Terry in that San Diego hotel room,” says Scott. “Margaret, Arthur’s wife, had called me from the islands down in Curaçao. Arthur had gone swimming in the ocean. He’d had a problem. He came out of the water all right, but he didn’t feel good. There was something wrong. The clerk who was with him wanted to take him to a hospital, but Arthur refused. Margaret told me that they got him home, put him on the bed, and he lay there rambling on, mumbling that now everything he’d done was for nothing. Within minutes he was gone.”