by D. W. Buffa
“Someone…?”
“Murdered him, assassinated him, that night. A woman did it, a woman he was with.”
“In the hotel, where he died?” she asked, wanting to be sure.
“He’d picked her up somewhere—which means that she knew where he would be and how she could get his attention, or someone sent her there, someone he knew, someone he trusted. She used a needle, injected him with a drug that stopped his heart, caused cardiac arrest. There’s more to it, but that doesn’t matter now. No one knows about this. You’re the only one I’ve told. I wish I didn’t know, but when she—”
“She?”
“Hillary Constable. At the reception after the funeral, she asked to see me. She wants me to find out what I can about what happened. She thinks that I might be able to do something without anyone finding out. She’s worried about what will happen if it becomes known that the president was murdered before we know who did it and the reason why it was done.”
Laura jumped to her feet, angry at what he had been asked to do.
“You can’t do this, Bobby! She’s using you. Don’t you see that? The only thing she’s worried about is how this might affect her.”
Bobby reached for her wrist and tried to give her assurances.
“That’s why I didn’t promise anything, except to see what I could find out; why I told her that whatever I found out there was going to have to be an investigation, and that the public was going to have to know.”
“Why do it at all, Bobby? What good will it do? Why take the risk?”
“Because there’s a sense in which I think she’s right. Whatever way this affects her—that’s not important. What is important is how it affects the country. If I can find out something before it hits the papers we might stop the kind of panic, the kind of wild rumors, that will tear the country apart.”
She did not disagree, but neither did she doubt her own belief that he was being drawn into someone else’s game.
“There’s something she isn’t telling you. She’s never done anything that wasn’t based on a calculation of her own advantage.”
Bobby got to his feet and took her by the hand. He smiled in a failed attempt to convince her not to worry, that he could take care of himself.
“Whatever she might be thinking, she can’t use me to cover up what happened.”
“Because you told her that you wouldn’t do that? But maybe all she wants is time.”
“If that’s what she’s after, I’m afraid she doesn’t have much left. Constable had a meeting scheduled the next morning with Quentin Burdick of the Times. He must have thought Burdick was onto something important, because he cancelled everything else he had scheduled not just that day but the rest of the week. I know Burdick well enough to know that, whatever he was working on, he won’t give up.”
Chapter Six
The flight from New York arrived in Los Angeles twenty minutes late, but Quentin Burdick had lots of time. He could spend the night in Santa Barbara and not have to leave much before noon. After the dismal, muggy weather in New York, the prospect of an evening walk along the Pacific had the charm of an overdue vacation.
Two hours after he landed, he checked into a motel across from the beach, made a few phone calls, and then, putting on a windbreaker and a pair of sneakers, went for a stroll. Almost painfully thin, with a narrow, angular face and quick-moving, inquisitive eyes, Quentin Burdick looked younger than his age. But today, as he walked beneath the palm trees swaying gently in the late day breeze, he felt older than he was. He had not been able to rid himself of the suspicion that there was more than simple coincidence in the timing of Robert Constable’s death. The rumor that he had been in bed with some woman made Burdick wonder whether Constable’s heart attack might not have been self-induced, or, if not quite that deliberate, the president had set out to test the limits of his endurance, half-hoping that he would not make it.
He had tried for months to get an interview, but instead of a direct refusal, which might have seemed to confirm the president’s involvement, he had been met with ambiguity and evasion, assurances that the president would be only too glad to talk to him once he found the time. There had not been much to work on in the beginning, a few anonymous sources whose information it was impossible to confirm, a few tax returns that raised some questions but scarcely proved anything improper, much less criminal. He had nothing he could use, nothing to write a story that he would want his name on or that the paper would print, and Constable knew it. With each new request for an interview, the excuses became more transparent, until, quite unexpectedly, Burdick got the break he needed. It was just a name, but the name, as he discovered, meant everything. The president now thought he knew a good deal more than he did.
“Tell the president,” he had told Constable’s chief of staff, “that the story I’m working on is about The Four Sisters, and that I think it’s only fair that I get his side of it.”
An hour later Burdick got a call back, not from the chief of staff, but the president himself. Cheerful and exuberant, he made it seem that he had been waiting for months to see Burdick, and not the other way round.
“They’ve got me going from one place to another; no time to do anything I like. Hell, yesterday I was giving a speech in Atlanta, and tomorrow—would you believe it—I’m on my way to Rome for one of those economic summits where all those rich people get together and I try to tell them all the good they should be doing with their money. Now when are we going to get together, Quentin? What’s a good time for you?”
Quentin Burdick stopped walking. He sat on a bench and watched the orange red sun grow larger and larger as it settled down on the far horizon and began slowly to dissolve in the sea. Years before, when he lived for a while out on Long Island, reading The Great Gatsby and wishing he could write like Fitzgerald, he sometimes stayed up all night just to watch the sun rise from somewhere the other side of the Atlantic and paint the sky a dozen different shades of pink and purple, but this was better, now that he was older, more comforting in a way, a sense of dignity and peace and the permanence of things as the world slipped gently into the night and the dreams you remembered danced once again in your never aging mind.
Burdick sat on the bench, listening in the hush of evening to the vanished voice of Robert Constable, that raucous, roguish voice that had given him a boyish charm well past middle age; the voice that, after the first few times he had had the chance to ask a reporter’s question, he had learned it was never safe to trust.
“It’s about The Four Sisters, Mr. President,” he had replied to Constable’s invitation. “I’d like to talk to you about your involvement.”
He had tried to make it seem a fair warning, a preview of what the president could expect. It was of course both more, and less, than that. More, because if half of what he had learned was true, the presidency of Robert Constable would be destroyed; less, because in terms of hard evidence, the kind you needed for a story like this, he did not have a thing.
“I’ll be glad to talk to you about anything you want, but involvement—that wouldn’t be correct. I’ve heard of them, I’m not denying that. And last year, I think it was, I gave a speech at some conference in Switzerland, and, if I’m not mistaken, they were one of the sponsors. But other than that, I don’t know how much I can tell you.”
There was a long pause, and Burdick thought the president was waiting for him to say something—anything—that would give him an idea of how much Burdick knew. The silence became strained, uncomfortable, a confession that the president was worried and, more than that, alarmed.
“Why?” he had asked finally. “Have you heard something different?”
The Four Sisters, the name alone, the fact that he knew it, had put the president in a state of something close to panic. The story was bigger, far bigger, than Burdick had thought. If he had been able to talk to him, if Robert Constable had not died, he was almost certain he could have discovered the truth. Constable would have tried to put the best face
on things he could, but Constable had been scared—Burdick was certain of that. He might have tried to make a deal, trade what he knew, or some of it, for the chance to minimize his own involvement. But now Constable was dead, and, depending on what happened tomorrow, the story might be dead as well.
Quentin Burdick sat on the beachside bench, listening in the cool night air to voices from the past, the different politicians he had known, some of them decent and honorable, determined to do the right thing, but, especially in recent years, more and more of them driven only by their own ambition, willing to do or say anything to get the next thing they wanted. There were still exceptions: Charlie Finnegan, for one. The junior senator from Michigan was always willing to talk openly and honestly about what was going on, and, if there was something he could not talk about, tell you that as well. Finnegan was as well informed as anyone in Washington. When he said he had not heard of The Four Sisters and did not know what it was, Burdick knew that the story he was after involved a closely guarded secret known only to an unknown few. The president had been one of them, and what Burdick had heard in his voice had told him that none of the others who knew about it were likely to talk, even if he found out who they were. Tomorrow was going to be the last chance he had.
The sun had disappeared. The oil drilling platforms far out at sea became smaller, less obtrusive, in the purple shadowed night. When Burdick got up and started back to the motel, the hillside above the city was alive with a thousand flickering lights. He remembered that somewhere up there, on a winding street with a view that took your breath away, Bobby Hart lived with his wife when the Senate was not in session and he could get away. He had not talked to Hart yet, but he intended to. The senator had sources no one else had: his father had been with the CIA and there were still people in the agency who told him things they told no one else. If anyone could find out about The Four Sisters, Hart could. Burdick shoved his hands into the pockets of his windbreaker and, suddenly hungry, headed down the street to a quiet-looking restaurant where he could get dinner.
A little before noon the next morning, Burdick was back on the road, heading north along the coast, past Santa Barbara, out onto a long flat stretch between the ocean and the empty sun-bleached hills. The road cut inland and a hard wind knocked the car sideways, forcing Burdick, who liked to drive fast when he had the chance, to slow down. A few miles later, he turned off the highway and, resuming speed, followed a county road through the coastal range, where the only signs of life among the spreading wind-bent oaks were a few weathered barns that had stood there for half a century or more. The sense of loneliness, of mystic solitude, made Burdick feel that he was living back before the age of highways and automobiles, when life moved at a slower pace and there was more time to think. He wanted to pull off to the side of the road, get out of the car, and look around at the endless skyline and the rugged terrain, but, glancing at the dashboard clock, he knew he had to hurry or be late.
He drove through a small coastal town, and ten minutes later passed a sign to Vandenberg Air Force Base and was on his way to the Lompoc Federal Penitentiary. It did not look like most prisons. There was none of the stark sense of isolation you felt in a place like Alcatraz, that barren rock in the middle of the San Francisco Bay. There were none of the high fortress walls, none of the glass-enclosed guard towers, of Attica or San Quentin. It had more the aspect of a camp, a series of flat-top single-story wooden buildings that could have been the barracks for an army or the classrooms of a school. Clumps of eucalyptus trees towered along the side of the road, and, stretching out in the distance, large well-tilled fields in which some of the prison’s food was grown. Then Burdick saw it, a large blank building with scarcely any windows, surrounded by a cage of metal fencing with double rolls of razor-sharp concertina wire on top.
Burdick signed in at the visitors’ entrance. After he was searched and passed through a metal detector, he was taken, not, as he had expected, to a small narrow room where a visitor sat on one side of a plate of thick glass and the prisoner on the other, but to a large, empty cafeteria. The man he was there to see was waiting for him at a round table next to a window that, looking out onto an inner courtyard, let in the outside light.
“Quentin Burdick of the Times!” said the prisoner with a huge grin.
He lumbered to his feet, placed one large hand on Burdick’s shoulder, and looked him straight in the eye as they shook hands. For a moment, Burdick almost forgot they were in a federal prison and not back in the committee room of the House Ways and Means Committee.
“How are you, Congressman?” he asked with an unexpected catch in his throat.
Frank Morris had been one of his favorites, colorful, profane, with an almost perfect judgment about the strengths and weaknesses of his colleagues, and an equally sharp instinct for just how far he could push them when he was reaching for the kind of compromise by which, as chairman of the committee, he could craft a budget.
“It’s maybe not quite what I had in mind for my retirement,” replied Morris, as the heavy lines around his aging eyes wrinkled deeper. “But I shouldn’t complain. The food isn’t too bad and the nights are quiet, although you should have been here last week. Vandenberg is just a mile away. Three o’clock in the morning, they put up a rocket, and not just any rocket, a moon shot. You ever been that close to a launch? The goddamn place starts to rumble, you think you’re the one going up. Amazing, how much power those things have. I wonder if they know that the guy that made sure they always had the money they needed is living here, right next store.”
Morris had represented the same New York district for nearly forty years, and if he had become a master of Washington and its ways, he had lost none of his native city shrewdness. Heavyset, with broad shoulders and the hands of a mechanic, he had the garrulous manner of a seasoned, back-slapping politician. But even when he was regaling a small crowd of whiskey drinking cronies with some deal-making story, there was always something distant, a little held back, about the way he looked at you. Burdick had noticed it early on, one of the first times he had talked to the chairman in his spacious and ornate committee office, the way that whatever Morris was saying, he was always thinking something else; watching you, sizing you up, putting you in a category that would help him decide how far he could go, whether he could trust you, and, if he could, what use you could be to him.
Morris looked down at his gnarled, spotted hands, folded together on the table. A sly grin inched across his face.
“You didn’t come all the way cross country to hear me talk about all the good I tried to do.” He raised his eyes to Burdick’s waiting gaze. “And I’ve known you long enough to know that you didn’t come to hear me tell you that I’m innocent and should never have been convicted of something I didn’t do.”
Burdick leaned back in the plastic chair and studied Morris with a sad, friendly smile. He liked him, he always had. Frank Morris had not always told him everything, but he had never lied.
“Were you innocent, Frank? Were you convicted of something you didn’t do?”
Morris looked past him, out the window to the courtyard and the shining blue sky above. His mouth twisted down at the corners. He blinked his eyes.
“No, I wasn’t innocent. I did what they said I did.” His eyes moved back to Burdick, but there was now a sense of urgency in them, as if the question of his own guilt was not the end, but only the beginning, of the story. “The interesting thing isn’t that I did it—took money that I shouldn’t have taken—the interesting thing is that someone found out. That wasn’t an accident, Quentin. I was being taught a lesson, a lesson they wanted others to learn. They wanted me, and certain others, to know that they could destroy anyone who got out of line.”
That same shrewd grin, but more serious this time, creased his mouth. He scratched his chin with the tips of two thick fingers and then, as if dismissing what he had started to say, waved his hand to the side.
“But maybe that’s the reason you’re here. Y
ou found out something. What do you want to know?”
Burdick did not change expression. He looked straight at Morris.
“The Four Sisters—is that who we’re talking about, the people you say wanted to teach you a lesson?”
“It’s the reason for all my trouble, and I’m going to be the reason for theirs.”
Burdick took out a notebook. He wrote Morris’s name across the top of the page, and then the words “The Four Sisters.” While he was doing this, Morris stood up, stretched his arms, and then folded them across his chest. Even dressed in prison garb, blue denim trousers and a blue denim shirt, he looked impressive, someone in charge. When he was younger, the first time he ran for Congress, they said he could mesmerize an audience; that with his curly black hair and piercing blue eyes, once he started talking no one looked away, no one thought about anything except what they heard. From the very beginning, he had been a force to be reckoned with, and now, forty years later, supposedly a broken man, locked away in prison, he still had some of the same electricity, the same ability to make you want to listen, and believe.
“Remember that old line about how all politics is local? It used to be true; it isn’t anymore. Politics aren’t local; they’re global. No one has yet quite figured that out. It’s the movement of money. Look, when I was a kid, we understood the way things worked. If you had trouble, if your garbage wasn’t being picked up, if you needed some help, if you needed a job, you went to someone, the ward boss, the city councilman—maybe someone in the mayor’s office—and they did what they could. And then, at election time, you returned the favor. We knew something else, too. We knew that these guys we elected to office lived a lot better than they could have lived on the salaries they were paid. We knew the way money changed hands, the way that if you were a contractor and wanted to do business with the city—build the new schoolhouse or repair the potholes in the streets—you made sure some of the profit wound up in the pockets of your friends at city hall. All politics was local, because that was where you could make a deal.”
