by D. W. Buffa
Burdick glanced at his watch. If he stayed much longer he would miss his flight and have to stay another day. He folded up the notebook and tucked it back in his pocket. Morris did not want him to go.
“Not yet. There’s something you should see.”
Burdick watched with a sense of foreboding as Frank Morris stood up and began to unbutton his shirt.
“At the end of my trial, just after the judge sentenced me, when they took me back to jail, I got this.”
Pulling his shirt open, he pointed to a three-inch scar on his left side, just below his ribs.
“It was a warning. They were telling me to do my time and not talk to anyone. When I said I was going to die of cancer unless that fucking Frenchman killed me first, I wasn’t kidding. But listen to me: write the story, all of it, including what I did. If they come for me, at least I’ll die knowing that I got them back.”
They shook hands and said goodbye. They both knew they would never see each other again, that within months Morris would be dead and that Burdick was not coming back, but they liked each other too much not to lie. Burdick said he would see him soon, and Morris claimed there was still a chance he might get better. And so they parted, better friends than they had been before.
Burdick thought about that as he drove south along the Pacific shore, back toward Santa Barbara on his way to the airport in Los Angeles and his scheduled flight; he thought about the way that, looking death in the face, Morris had come once again to the knowledge of how he ought to live, how he had thrown away everything for the chance to end his life a wealthy man, and how desperate he now was to change that and make everything right.
It was a long drive, more than three hours, but Burdick made his flight and six hours later was home in New York. He was walking through the airport when he first learned what had happened. Glancing at a television set as he passed by a bar, he stopped when he saw a picture on the screen of Frank Morris. He moved close enough to hear that, according to the reports just coming in, the former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee had been killed in prison, stabbed to death with a knife.
Burdick’s blood ran cold. He looked behind him, and then he began to move quickly, trying to lose himself in the crowd. He did not believe for a minute that Morris’s death could have been just another prison stabbing, a mindless act of violence. Someone knew that Frank Morris had talked to a reporter, and they had known it right away. They killed him because the warning they had given him earlier had not worked. Morris had been right: they must have had Constable murdered as well. And if they were willing to do that, murder to keep their secret, there was no reason to think they would not kill him as well.
Burdick began to walk faster, faster with each breath he took, until he was outside on the sidewalk, frantically waving for a cab. He was on the bridge into Manhattan when he remembered who he wanted to call. It was late, but that did not matter. He had his home numbers, both the one on the west coast and the one in Washington, D.C. He felt a sudden surge of relief when Bobby Hart answered on the third ring.
Chapter Eight
Bobby Hart had not been able to stop thinking about what Robert Constable’s widow had sworn him not to tell anyone, that instead of dying of a heart attack, the former president had been murdered. That had been shocking enough, but the cold indifference with which she had reported it, her only thought what might have to be done to cover it up, had him shaking his head. At least he had had the presence of mind to insist that while he would find out what he could about who might have had a reason to have her husband killed, there would have to be a full-scale investigation. He had made that quite clear. He was not going to become part of a conspiracy, no matter how noble its intention, to keep the public from learning the truth about how the president of the United States had really died.
Hart stared out the window of the high-speed train he was taking to New York. He felt trapped by a promise that, as Laura had reminded him, he had had no real reason to make. It was almost uncanny, the way he had been maneuvered into it. He did not owe anything to Robert Constable or his memory, and he owed even less to his widow, but she had somehow made it seem that he did. It had been subtle, even oblique. It was nothing that she actually said, but rather the manner of the way she treated him, an equal partner in a shared responsibility. Because he was now in a position to do certain things, to get answers where few others could even ask questions, and she was now suddenly vulnerable and alone, he had an obligation to do something before the story got out and things went insane.
They were twenty minutes from the station, twenty minutes from Manhattan, the end of the short, three-hour trip that Austin Pearce had asked him to make so he could talk to him alone. The secretary of the treasury during the first term of the Constable administration had something important to discuss, something about the same foreign investment firm that Quentin Burdick had apparently been asking questions about.
And now Burdick, for reasons of his own, wanted to see him as well. He had known Burdick for years, but he had never heard him sound the way he had late last night on the telephone. Burdick might look like the proverbial nearsighted bookworm who, with his halting, diffident speech, was afraid of his own shadow, but he had once been a soldier in Vietnam, decorated for his bravery. Quentin Burdick was not afraid of anyone, which made the whole thing even more unaccountable.
Ten minutes from the station. Eager to get a start, some of the passengers began to grab their luggage from the overhead racks. Hart folded his arms and leaned closer to the window, thinking more about the Constables as the skyline of New York drew closer. Presidents were often divided between those, like most of the early ones, who came from the country, and those, like Kennedy and the Roosevelts, Reagan and some of the other, more recent ones, who had their roots in the life of the cities. Constable, on the other hand, seemed to occupy a position that in a way was neither and both. He had come from a small town and become governor of a small state, but there had always been something about him, a grasping ambition that, even when he had the presidency, never seemed to stop. It was an ambition that seemed to embody that same relentless search for fame and fortune that had drawn so many young men and young women from the rural heartland of the nation to the glittering opportunities of New York. Both of them, husband and wife, had acquired by habit and long practice what every native New Yorker had bred in his bones: the ability—what many who lived other places thought the charlatan’s ability—to make you think that whatever they wanted was something you really thought they should have.
It explained that cold indifference that Hart had not at first been able to understand. Whether manufactured or authentic, it had been part of the appeal. It allowed Hillary Constable to make it appear that she was only asking him to do what was good for the country, to make the kind of sacrifice she had been making for years: protect, so far as he legitimately could, the president’s reputation, find out the reason he had been killed before anyone else knew he had been murdered. Because if the story got out before they knew what had happened, the speculation would not end in their lifetimes. Every rumor, every unfounded allegation, all the sordid details of Robert Constable’s storied life, would become the stuff of legend, a tawdry myth that the truth, whatever it was, would never entirely dispel.
The train pulled into the station, and a few minutes later Hart stepped outside into the blistering New York heat. In Washington the heat became thick and oppressive, seeping into your pores, making movement a burden and ambition someone else’s mindless dream; here it seemed to make everyone move more quickly, more determined to get to cooler, air-conditioned places where they could get to work. Hart checked his watch as he jumped into a cab. The train had run late, but he still had a few minutes before he was supposed to meet Quentin Burdick.
“I’m in a hurry,” he told the driver.
The driver gave him a look in the rearview mirror that made Hart feel a fool. They were in the middle of Manhattan at a time when you were luck
y if traffic moved at all. Twenty minutes and two miles later, the cab pulled up in front of a nondescript East Village restaurant with a faded, painted sign, the kind of place no out of town tourist would think to visit, and no one in the city with serious money would think to go. It was the kind of place that the ignorant would have called with a shudder a joint or a dive, but where those who had an ear for serious music would still gather late on a smoke-filled night to listen to some of the best jazz, and drink some of the worst booze, in Manhattan.
There were no jazz musicians now; no one beating out a new cool rhythm on the piano, no one blowing dreamlike on a trumpet’s burnished brass. There was hardly anyone here at all, two middle-aged women drinking coffee at a table in front, and Quentin Burdick, sitting quietly in the back. Hart blinked into the darkness, and then, as Burdick rose to greet him, made his way through the scattered empty tables in between.
“It’s good to see you, Bobby,” said Burdick as they shook hands. “Thanks for doing this on such short notice.”
Hart sank onto a hard wooden chair and suddenly noticed the pictures covering the wall, jazz musicians, dozens of them, some of them long forgotten, but some of them still famous. He smiled to himself as his gaze came to rest on one just above Burdick’s shoulder. Burdick turned around to look.
“Erroll Garner. Did you ever see him play?” asked Hart, with a distant, wistful look. “In person, I mean. I wish I had. He could not read music, could not read a note, and other than maybe Oscar Peterson, the greatest jazz pianist there ever was.”
Burdick’s eyes lighted with surprise. He had been tense, nervous, not quite sure why he had asked Bobby Hart if he could see him, not quite sure what he was going to say when he saw him; but now that Hart was here, now that he heard him start to talk about something that none of the other politicians he knew would ever think to talk about, he began to feel a little more comfortable.
“I didn’t know you liked jazz that much. I guess I didn’t even know you liked music. It’s easy to forget sometimes that someone in Washington might actually have a life outside politics.”
A young, clean-shaven waiter, an aspiring actor from some Midwestern college, if Hart had had to guess, took their order. Neither of them wanted anything to eat. Burdick, who had already had one cup of coffee while he waited, ordered another. Hart, after a moment’s hesitation, asked for a beer.
“You didn’t have to come, Bobby. When I asked if I could see you, I meant I’d come there.”
The waiter brought Hart a beer and Burdick a second cup of coffee. Hart took a long drink, held the cold bottle in both hands, leaned back, and looked at Burdick.
“You didn’t tell me.”
“Didn’t tell you what?”
“Erroll Garner.”
“No, I never saw him play. I saw Oscar Peterson, though.” The memory relaxed him, and in some degree diminished the sense of urgency that had not really left him since the night before. “Twice, both times right here, late at night when guys would come in after some other show they had just done, something they had been paid for, and just play for themselves and whoever wanted to listen.”
Bobby Hart was watching closely, measuring almost without knowing he was doing it the meaning of each small change of expression on Burdick’s narrow, mobile face. It was one of the reasons, the main one perhaps, that so many people felt so comfortable talking to Hart: the way he knew how to listen, to ask the kind of questions that made them want to tell him more.
“There are certain advantages in living in a city like New York, aren’t there? I would have given anything to see Oscar Peterson play.” Hart paused and took another drink, and then, as if that was all he was going to have, put the bottle on the table and shoved it off to the side. “What is it, Quentin? What’s going on? When you called last night…even if I didn’t have to be here anyway, I would have come up. You sounded terrible.”
“Frank Morris died. He was killed, stabbed to death in prison.”
“I know. It was on the news last night; it’s in all the papers today. Too bad. I knew him, liked him. He was always straight with me. But what does that have to do with—?”
“I was there, at the prison, just before it happened. That was the reason he was killed, the reason he was murdered—because he talked to me!”
Hart planted both feet on the floor and bent forward on his elbows. He searched Burdick’s eyes.
“Because he talked to you? Why? What makes you so sure? Things like that happen, you know. They don’t always happen for a reason. People get killed in prison.”
“He told me he was dying of cancer, that he had maybe six months, unless ‘that fucking Frenchman gets me first.’ That’s what he said, and he meant it, too. He knew what he was talking about. The Four Sisters—have you heard that name before?”
Hart drew back and tapped his fingers on the table.
“It’s the story you’ve been working on now for months.”
A puzzled smile darted along Burdick’s thin lips. He began to fidget with the bowtie that had become something of a trademark for him.
“How did you know that I was working on that?” Then he remembered. “Of course! I talked to Senator Finnegan, and he must have….”
“Charlie asked me if I had heard about it. I hadn’t; but then, when they buried Constable, after the service, at the reception at his house, I heard the name again. Austin Pearce started talking about it. He said he wanted to see me. That’s why I had to be in New York.”
“That means Pearce must have known, or must have learned about it. He’s certainly smart enough to have figured it out.”
“Figured it out? What did Frank Morris tell you? What did he know that would make someone want to murder him?” But before Burdick could respond, a startled expression flashed across Hart’s eyes. “Morris said he was going to die of cancer if ‘that fucking Frenchman’ did not get him first? When I was there, at the Constables’ house, talking to Pearce, he gestured toward a Frenchman he said was the head of The Four Sisters. I’ve forgotten the name. He was just going through the receiving line when Pearce pointed him out.”
“Jean de la Valette,” said Burdick, with a quick nod. “Morris only met him once, said he was impressive, but that he didn’t much like him, and that was before he found out what was going on.”
“What was going on, Quentin? What did Morris tell you?”
“You won’t believe it. I didn’t believe it, not at first anyway. I went out there to see him on nothing more than a hunch, and because, quite frankly, I didn’t know what else to do. I had been working on The Four Sisters story for a long time, but I didn’t really have anything I could use. I knew—I couldn’t prove, but I knew—that a lot of money had changed hands and that Robert Constable had gotten a lot of it, millions of dollars, over a period of several years.
“It was only when I stumbled on the name The Four Sisters that things started to break. I had been trying to get an interview with Constable, but I could not even get close—and then I had the name.” Burdick looked at Hart and shook his head at how simple things had then become. “It was like a password. As soon as I said it, things began to happen. Instead of being put off, told by one of his assistants that they would see what they could do, Constable himself called me. You remember how he operated. We were suddenly old friends. He could not wait to see me, could not wait to talk, but I could tell he was worried.” Burdick hesitated, reconsidering what he had said. “No, not worried—scared—though I was not sure of what. Exposure, I thought. Fear of what might happen if the truth of what he had been doing, taking millions for things he did while he was in office, should ever come out. But now I think that it might have been more than that; that he wasn’t worried about the potential scandal—good God, if there was ever anyone who was not afraid of what a scandal could do, it was Robert Constable—he was worried about what someone might do to him.”
Hart was cautious. He had made a promise to Hillary Constable. He looked at Burdick with a
blank expression.
“What someone might do to him?”
Burdick shot him a questioning glance. The mask behind which Hart had tried to hide had not worked.
“Is that what Austin Pearce wanted to talk to you about?—What someone might have done, the possibility that Constable did not die of natural causes?”
“He did not say anything like that to me,” answered Hart truthfully. “Is that what Frank Morris told you?”
Burdick hesitated, but only for a moment.
“He didn’t know that, but that’s what he thought: that Constable didn’t die of a heart attack, that he was murdered instead. Look, Bobby, I’ve been doing this a long time. I covered Constable the first time he ran for president. I covered him when he was in the White House. He didn’t have a principled bone in his body; there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t say or do to win. But this!—What Frank Morris told me—I wouldn’t have believed it possible for anyone who was president, not even Constable. I would have thought he had, not too much integrity—I knew him too well for that—but too much sense. That was my mistake. I had forgotten that part of his attraction, the reason why people who did not know him, who had never met him, who had never even seen him except on television liked him as much as they did, was this bigger than life quality he had, this feeling that nothing could touch him, that whatever happened, whatever kind of hole he dug for himself, he could always get out of it and end up back in control, stronger, more popular, than ever. The stupid son-of-a-bitch believed it, thought he was too smart, too important, to ever get caught.
“I think maybe that’s why Morris did it, took money he knew he shouldn’t. It was the whole atmosphere Constable brought with him, the sense that there weren’t any limits; that you could do whatever you wanted and take whatever you needed. Morris told me everything. It wasn’t bribery.”
