Hillary

by D. W. Buffa

  “Yes, of course,” replied Jean Valette. “And I am sorry that you were subjected to this indignity. It was necessary to take certain precautions, Mr. Carlyle.”

  “Like grabbing me off the street in Manhattan?” he said with rising anger as he removed the blindfold. He looked at Jean Valette, sitting next to him, and then shot a glance at Marcel Dumont. “Who the hell—?” But then he saw Hart, and his mouth dropped open. “Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed. “What are you—? Where are we, anyway?”

  “My name is Marcel Dumont, Mr. Carlyle: chief inspector of the Surete Generale. The gentleman on your left is—”

  “My name does not matter,” interjected Jean Valette. “But I’m the one responsible for bringing you here. And again, I apologize for the way it was done. My only excuse is that I thought you would probably want to come and it was the only safe way to get you here.”

  Jean Valette turned to Hart, who still did not know who this Mr. Carlyle was, except that he was an American in his early thirties who kept staring at him as if he had just discovered gold.

  “Philip Carlyle, Mr. Hart, is a reporter: a colleague of your friend Quentin Burdick, if I am not mistaken.”

  Carlyle looked across at Dumont.

  “Chief inspector? The Surete? I’m in France, somewhere in Paris?”

  “In France, but not in Paris,” replied Jean Valette. “You’ll go there next, with the inspector, if, after hearing what we have to say, you decide that is what you want to do.”

  Carlyle was confused. He glanced at Hart, and then again at Dumont.

  “The senator is wanted for murder, conspiracy to murder the president, but instead of placing him under arrest, you have me kidnapped and flown across the ocean?”

  However much he might disagree with what Jean Valette had done, dealing with the accusations of this American was a different matter. Folding his arms across his chest, Dumont fixed him with a look of studied indifference.

  “Would you like to leave now, flown back home? It can certainly be arranged.”

  The young reporter could not keep his eyes off Hart who was sitting there, just a few feet away, the story that would make his career.

  “Really,” persisted Dumont, rather enjoying it. “We can have you on a plane in an hour. And perhaps, after all, it’s for the best that you go.” He glanced at Jean Valette. “I told you this was not a good idea, forcing someone to come here against their will, just to give Mr. Hart, who despite the fact that we have reason to believe he is just a pawn in someone else’s game, is still wanted by the American authorities, a chance to tell his side of the story. You had no business doing this. It could put the French government in a very difficult position should Mr. Carlyle here decide to make a formal complaint.”

  “Me? No, I’m not complaining about anything!”

  “But you were kidnapped, ‘grabbed off the street in Manhattan,’ is the way I think you put it,” said Dumont, shaking his head in evident disapproval of the way the young man had been treated. “And tied up and blindfolded, besides. This is a very serious matter, Mr. Carlyle.”

  Carlyle could not take his eyes off Hart.

  “No, really, I’m sure there were good reasons,” he insisted.

  Jean Valette took his cue.

  “If anyone had known where he was going,” he explained to the inspector, “if anyone had known whom he was going to see, I doubt very much that Mr. Carlyle would still be alive.”

  Dumont stroked his chin as he appeared to take this possibility under advisement.

  “Yes, perhaps. But tell me, Mr. Carlyle: Other than the fact you were taken against your will, have you been otherwise ill-treated? Have you been fed properly?”

  Carlyle’s blue eyes lit up at the memory of what he had been given, better than any restaurant, at least of the kind he could afford.

  “And the room was terrific,” he added, eager to start asking questions of his own. “Everything has been great. And if I had been allowed to see anything except the room I was staying in, and now this one, I’d probably never want to leave.” His eyes shot back to Hart. “You didn’t do it—you weren’t involved? Then how in the hell did all this happen?”

  “Did you really think I was?” Hart asked with a stern, caustic glance. “How well did you know Quentin Burdick? Did you know what he was working on when he was killed?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What do you mean, ‘not exactly’?”

  “I knew he was supposed to see Constable, but then Constable died—murdered, as it turns out—and I knew he went out to California to talk to Frank Morris and that Morris was killed. He told me that someone had broken into his apartment the night he got back. He told me he thought everything was connected to something called The Four Sisters.”

  “And your Mr. Burdick was right,” said Jean Valette, exchanging a glance with Hart. “But put that aside for the moment. There was another murder, here, in Paris—”

  “Austin Pearce,” said Carlyle, with a quick nod. “And the head of the political section of the embassy.” He reached inside his jacket for his notebook and then looked from face to face. “You don’t mind if I start making notes?”

  “So long as you don’t use my name,” continued Jean Valette.

  “I don’t know your name.”

  “I insist on anonymity, and not just my identity, but where we are. No one can know where this conversation took place. Do you understand that?”

  “But I don’t know where I am, except that it is somewhere in France.”

  “Do you agree?” asked Jean Valette.

  “Yes, I agree.”

  “Then, my name is Jean Valette, and I am the head of investment house known as The Four Sisters.”

  “The Four Sisters? Burdick said everything led back to—”

  “And it does, as I just told you. But first, the murder of Austin Pearce. Marcel, perhaps you could explain.”

  Placing both arms on the table, the inspector hunched forward and began to describe what had happened the night before last in the apartment of Aaron Wolfe in the 18th arrondissement.

  “And so you see,” he said when he was finished, “Mr. Hart arrived only after the two killers were already there. He was downstairs talking to the landlady when the shooting stared. That means, as you can see, that they were sent there, the two Americans from the embassy—both of them with one of your intelligence agencies, unless I miss my guess—to kill Pearce and Wolfe. There could be only one reason for this: to keep them from telling what they knew about who killed your president.”

  Carlyle scribbled furiously a moment longer and then looked at Hart.

  “You didn’t have anything to do with this—I don’t mean the murder of Austin Pearce—the murder of the president?”

  “Because he slept with my wife? It never happened. This whole thing is a set-up, a way for the real murderers—the real conspirators—to get away with what they did. I didn’t hire that woman, the one who supposedly died trying to get away. And all that evidence they found—bank transactions, money I paid into her account—do you really think a paid assassin would keep records like that, and keep them in a place where they could so easily be found?”

  As Hart watched Carlyle, measuring his reaction, he was reminded of Quentin Burdick. There was the same focused attention on the matter immediately at hand, the same concentration on getting the basic structure of the story right. Carlyle did not yet have Burdick’s years of experience, but he had that deep curiosity about things that experience, by itself, could not teach.

  “I told Quentin almost everything I knew. I’m the one who confirmed that the president had not died of a heart attack, that he had been murdered instead.”

  The next question was out of Carlyle’s mouth before he even thought about it.

  “And who told you, how did you know Constable had been murdered?”

  “Constable’s widow, Hillary, the day her husband was buried.”

  Carlyle did a double-take.


  “She knew it then, that soon?”

  “She wanted me to find out what I could about who might have done it, what reason they might have had. She thought—or at least she said—that if we didn’t know something before the story became public the rumors would never end. She may have had another reason.”

  “Another reason?”

  Hart hesitated, wondering how far he should go. Then he started to laugh, which produced a puzzled reaction, which made him explain.

  “Half the country—more than that, for all I know—probably thinks I should be lynched, and I’m worried whether something I say might get someone else in trouble!” A grim, determined expression twisted slowly across his mouth. “I’m going to tell you everything I know, Philip Carlyle, but Quentin knew something and I still don’t know what it is. The night he died, we talked on the phone. It was late, but he wanted me to meet him at his place right away. He said he had discovered something—he had just gotten back from Washington, so it must have been there—and that it ‘changed everything.’ I don’t know what he meant.”

  For the next hour, Hart described in detail everything that had happened, from that first conversation with Hillary Constable in her study at home, to the meeting in the embassy with Aaron Wolfe.

  “It was probably a mistake, that I agreed to find out what I could, but then, when she told me that I should forget everything, that it was better if everyone was left to believe that her husband had died of a heart attack, I knew something dangerous was going on. I just was not smart enough to know what it was. But Austin was. He thought I had been sent to find out what could be discovered about the president’s death so that it could not be discovered again.”

  Jean Valette had sat in silence listening intently to everything Hart said, but now he had a question.

  “But why were you chosen, Mr. Hart? The head of the Secret Service, this Clarence Atwood, should have been able to conduct that kind of investigation. Instead of starting at the beginning, start at the end: start with what you know now. You’re being blamed for the murder. Isn’t it just possible that this was always the intention?”

  “But why?” asked Carlyle, riveted by the possibility that Hart was the subject of an elaborate conspiracy, a plan that had been in place from the beginning. “What would be the point of doing this to you?”

  Before Hart could answer, Jean Valette offered a suggestion.

  “What other reason than to get rid of a competitor, someone who might take away the thing you most wanted in your life? The presidency, Mr. Carlyle. The White House. Isn’t that what it was about from the beginning?”

  Jean Valette leaned back and with a pensive expression tapped his thin, tapered fingers together. His eyes grew hard and distant. A shrewd, death-like smile made a fugitive appearance at the corners of his mouth. He had no illusions about the dark side of human nature.

  “The president is dead, and someone else takes his place. Fate, chance, the inscrutable workings of providence, God’s will? Is that what we believe, that someone murdered, someone planned the death, of Robert Constable, and it had nothing to do with—as you Americans would put it—the biggest prize of all?” Gesturing toward Hart, he challenged the reporter. “Don’t you think it more than strange—is it not a new record in mass stupidity—that an enormously popular United States senator—a man, from what I’m told, a great many people hoped would run for the presidency himself—is accused of murder because the man he murdered supposedly slept with his wife? These things happen. I don’t need to be told that. A crime of passion has a certain appeal. But hire a professional assassin? Where is the passion—where is the honor—in that? You feel so strongly about a wife’s infidelity that you want the man she slept with dead, but you don’t want to do anything about it yourself? Where is the passion in that, Mr. Carlyle? There isn’t any. This was no crime of passion; this was passion of a different kind: the passion for power, the desire to take control, to seize an office, in perhaps the only way you could ever have it.”

  Jean Valette tapped his fingers together once more, and then dropped his hands onto the table and sat straight up.

  “Tell me, Mr. Carlyle, you cover American politics—that is the reason we invited you—what were the chances, if Robert Constable was still alive, that Irwin Russell would ever become president?”

  Carlyle’s eyes almost popped out of his head. He looked immediately at Hart, but Hart was still staring at Jean Valette, wondering what he was going to say next. Inspector Dumont, for his part, sat with folded arms, gently rocking back and forth, listening with the slightly bored expression of a man who had heard and seen too much to ever be very much surprised at anything.

  “Everything leads to The Four Sisters,” said Carlyle. His eyes were cold, immediate. “You confirmed what Quentin Burdick said. How does this tie into that? What is the connection between The Four Sisters and the possibility that the president had something to do with Constable’s murder?”

  His elbow on the arm of his chair, Jean Valette stretched two fingers along the side of his face and placed his thumb against his chin. He sat there, in that attitude of repose, moving his head side to side, keeping rhythm with his thoughts; debating, as it seemed, how best to answer.

  “When you leave here today, Mr. Carlyle,” he said finally, “you will take with you a collection of documents assembled from some of the companies in which The Four Sisters has an interest. Copies of checks, bank transfers, financial transactions—some of them quite complex—that in some cases go back more than ten years.”

  “What do they explain about the murder?” demanded Carlyle, who wanted a more immediate answer than a series of old bank statements. “Our president was murdered and you’re telling me that another president killed him?”

  To Hart’s astonishment, Jean Valette denied it.

  “That’s not what I said, Mr. Carlyle. I did not accuse Russell, or anyone else, of anything.”

  He said this with a calm, almost playful gaze. He was enjoying it, this game of words; enjoying it as if the question who murdered the president, a political assassination, was nothing more than an intellectual exercise, a method by which to sharpen one’s wits.

  “I only raised the question whether Irwin Russell could have become president in any other way. The same question could be asked about the president’s widow, couldn’t it? Would she have had any chance to become president if her husband had lived?”

  “Good God!” cried Carlyle. “Now you’re suggesting…. You really think she could have done it: arranged to have her husband murdered?”

  He seemed more interested in this possibility than in the other, perhaps because it seemed to fit better the known facts of the former first lady’s ambition, not to mention the known facts of her husband’s rampant infidelity.

  “The answer to your question,” said Hart, turning to Jean Valette, “is that you made a mistake in your assumption.”

  Jean Valette cocked his head. A thin, knowing smile threaded its way across his mouth.

  “A mistake?”

  “Irwin Russell probably could not have become president if Constable had lived, but Hillary Constable could have. She would have run as her husband’s successor; the nomination would have been hers. It’s doubtful anyone could have beaten her; it’s doubtful anyone would have tried. That was one of the reasons he was picked to run with Constable in the last election: so there would not be a vice president who would try to run against her.”

  The smile on the face of Jean Valette deepened and became more profound.

  “Are you sure that was the reason they wanted Irwin Russell on the ticket, Mr. Hart? Are you sure it was really their decision?”

  “Russell helped him carry Ohio,” insisted Carlyle. “With Constable, everything was a political calculation.”

  But Hart and Jean Valette were still looking at each other, measuring, or trying to measure, what the other one knew, or thought he knew.

  “It doesn’t really matter why he was chosen,�
�� observed Hart. “It doesn’t affect the fact that Russell could not have won the presidency on his own and that Hillary Constable could have, and still might. What motive could she have had to want her husband dead? You seem to think she had one. Why don’t you just tell us what you think it was?”

  Jean Valette looked across at Carlyle as if he were seeing for the first time how young he was, and how eager to get this story right, the story that any reporter would have killed to get. That was what struck Hart as he watched: how conscious Jean Valette was of the effect the story was going to have on everyone, not only those directly involved in the events, but those who were going to tell the story, and who would, immediately upon the telling, become the new subject of other people’s stories, the center of attention for everyone who wanted to know more about the secret interview with Bobby Hart and the anonymous and enigmatic source that somewhere in France had first revealed the involvement of The Four Sisters and provided the documentary evidence necessary to prove it. Hart could not quite rid himself of the feeling that everything that was happening, everything that had been said in that room, was exactly what Jean Valette had expected. It was a feeling that immediately became more pronounced.

  “Mr. Hart already knows what it is,” said Jean Valette with perfect confidence. “And so, Mr. Carlyle, do you. You said it at the beginning, what your friend Quentin Burdick first told you: everything leads to The Four Sisters. That’s the secret they shared, the secret none of them could afford to have anyone learn: that millions, tens of millions of dollars, had passed into their hands, money provided through one means and another by companies in which my firm had an interest.”

  Inspector Dumont got to his feet.

  “Perhaps this would be a good time for me to leave. I don’t think I should—”

  “No, it’s all right, Marcel. We weren’t involved in any criminal wrongdoing; certainly nothing that broke the laws of France. There is a difference, after all, between bribery and extortion. I didn’t—The Four Sisters didn’t—offer to give Constable or any of his friends and associates money in exchange for any help we needed. He came to us, explained that he wanted better trade relations, and that the only way to do that was to help elect people who wanted the same thing. He was really quite ingenious, when it came to working out a scheme for his own advantage, ingenious and quite corrupt. Everything with him was a maneuver, a way to get around whatever obstacles stood in his path. Foreigners could not contribute to American political campaigns? Give money for other things—a foundation, a library—or move money into an American company, a subsidiary, and get the money into the right hands that way.”