Margaret Truman's Experiment in Murder

by Margaret Truman

  It occurred to Smith that accusing Borger of having manipulated George Mortinson‘s killer could put Tatum on the receiving end of a slander suit. But judging from the zeal he exhibited on the phone, that possibility wouldn’t deter him. But a much larger issue came to the attorney. If Borger was what Tatum claimed he was, a man capable of masterminding two murders including the leading candidate for president of the United States, he wouldn’t hesitate to eliminate someone accusing him of those crimes, nor would his backers, that element presumably from the CIA that supported Borger in his efforts.

  “Do what you think you have to do, Nic,” Smith said, “but be careful how you go about it.”

  Smith ended the conversation with Tatum and told Annabel what Nic intended to do.

  “He’s walking into a hornets’ nest,” she said.

  “A hornets’ nest would be a walk on the Mall compared with what he’s about to get into.”

  CHAPTER

  45

  SAN FRANCISCO/WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Detective Duane Woodhouse had been involved in numerous cases over the years in which jurisdiction had become a thorny issue, with both the FBI and the SFPD withholding information, even evidence from each other. But the barriers seemed to have come down now that the next president had been gunned down in cold blood. This wasn’t your run-of-the-mill local turf war; Woodhouse and the San Francisco FBI director shared everything they knew.

  * * *

  In Washington, investigators into the assassination went down every possible avenue in search of information.

  An attempt was made to locate a taxi driver who might have taken Itani to the rally. It resulted in two dozen cabbies whose logs indicated that they’d dropped passengers off at the Ronald Reagan Building early that afternoon. They were shown a photo of Itani, but no one remembered having had such a fare, or in one case would not admit it. The driver who’d picked up Itani and a second man remembered them but opted to not tell the authorities because his resident status in the country was shaky. He didn’t need trouble with Immigration.

  Other agents questioned the flight attendant who’d worked the flight Itani had taken to Washington from San Francisco. She remembered him well, even knew the drinks she’d served him.

  “Was he traveling alone? she was asked.

  “There were two other men with him. I mean, they sat on either side of him in coach, but I can’t say that they were traveling together. I mean, I don’t know if they were friends before the flight.”

  “Can you describe them?”

  “Oh, wow, I think so.” She laughed. “One of them kept complaining about the size of the seats in coach. They were big guys. I know that they talked to each other, although the one in the middle, the one who shot the senator, didn’t say much. He asked me for a drink, a Tom Collins or something like that. We don’t carry that drink on board so one of the big men told me how to make it.” She welled up. “Is he really the man who shot the senator? It’s scary that he was that close to me.” She broke into tears and hugged herself.

  Itani was held in isolation and under twenty-four-hour guard in a cell at Fort McNair, the two-hundred-year-old army base at 4th and P streets, on land where the Potomac and Anacostia rivers merge. Teams of FBI special agents took turns around the clock interrogating him.

  “When did you decide to kill the senator?” they asked.

  Itani’s answer: “I want to see my mother and brothers.”

  “You have to answer our questions before you can see them.”

  Itani hadn’t been told that his family had been taken into protective custody in San Francisco and flown on a government aircraft to Washington, where they were being held in secured quarters at the Washington Naval Yard, not far from where Itani was sequestered and where the Washington Nationals baseball team played its home games.

  “Why did you kill Senator Mortinson?”

  Itani: “He had to die.”

  “Where did you get the weapon?”

  Itani: “I want to see Elena.”

  “Who’s Elena?”

  Itani: “I want to see my family.”

  “Did anyone help you plan killing Senator Mortinson?”

  “No. He was a bastard. He had to die. I want to see my family.”

  Armed with information gathered from the flight attendant, the agents pressed Itani to admit that he’d traveled from San Francisco with two other men, which he vehemently denied. Because they didn’t have tangible information about his alleged traveling companions, they were unable to resolve that lead, at least until some corroborating evidence surfaced.

  And so it went, interrogation after interrogation, the agents’ efforts stonewalled at every turn. Some leading attorneys called for Itani to have the benefit of legal counsel and to be properly arraigned, their protests countered by FBI and other government agency claims that Itani represented a threat to national security and was being held as an enemy combatant.

  And conspiracy buffs ratcheted up their theories that Itani was part of a larger plot.

  * * *

  In San Francisco, Detective Duane Woodhouse had another meeting with the FBI’s regional director, who outlined for him the result of the questioning of the flight attendant.

  Woodhouse laughed. “I complain about those small coach seats all the time,” he said. “You have names of the other men, the big guys as she described them?”

  “Yes, based upon their seat assignments.” The director named them.

  “Frankly, that’s disappointing,” Woodhouse said. “I thought the names you came up with might have been different.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “You’ll follow up on their identities.”

  “We already have. The names on their tickets, and the IDs used at Security, don’t match up with anyone. False names.”

  “Which means they were traveling with him. Why else go to the bother of using phony identities?”

  The director ended the meeting by asking how Woodhouse’s investigation of Elena Marciano’s murder was progressing.

  “We’re making progress,” he said. “We sent officers to boatyards in the area where her body surfaced to see whether anyone had rented a boat on the day that the ME determined she’d died. It would have been a wasted exercise if the killer owned his or her own boat, but it was worth a stab. And it paid off. The owner of a boat rental company says that he rented a boat to two men early on the morning in question. One of them signed the rental agreement and gave his name and address: Jacob Gibbons, the same guy who was at Borger’s house, Borger’s so-called business associate. The boatyard owner provided sketchy descriptions of the men, one big and ‘tough looking,’ as he put it, the other also big but ‘sort of puffy.’ He didn’t have a name for the man with Gibbons, but we’re assuming that it was Peter Puhlman, the other guy at Borger’s house.”

  “Another connection between Dr. Borger and the murder,” the FBI director mused. “Anything else come out of it?”

  “Yeah. We ran the names of Gibbons and Puhlman through the FBI’s national database, and the results came back just before I came here. Gibbons is a former prizefighter who’d had run-ins with the law in San Francisco over the years, mostly connected with loan sharks and minor-league hoodlums. His name also surfaced as the result of what was described by Washington cops as having been involved in a minor bar fracas there. No arrests were made, but names of the participants were noted and entered into the daily report. This is what you’ll find interesting. The dustup in the bar occurred just a few days before the assassination.”

  “Then Gibbons was in D.C. at that time.”

  “Right. And if what we suspect is correct, he was one of the two men the flight attendant said were with Itani on the plane.”

  The director scribbled notes as Woodhouse talked. “What have you found out about Mr. Puhlman?”

  Woodhouse sighed and said, “Puhlman is a psychiatrist who’s been charged with Medicare fraud on two occasions. Charges were
dropped both times. He’s been sued twice, once by a landlord claiming back rent was owed, and once by a woman who claimed he’d made unwanted sexual advances to her during a therapy session. Both suits were settled out of court. By the way, did the flight attendant describe the second man as ‘puffy’?”

  “No.”

  “That’s how the boatyard owner described him. You’ve never had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Puhlman, but ‘puffy’ would be an apt description.”

  They ended their meeting and pledged to stay in close touch as new information developed.

  Woodhouse returned to his office and met with colleagues to report on what had come out of the meeting.

  “Catch this,” a junior detective said as he handed Woodhouse a report that had just come in from the FBI after the bureau, at the urging of the SFPD, had run a check on the tax status of Borger, Puhlman, and Gibbons. Borger’s record as a taxpayer was clean, everything paid up to date, but neither Gibbons nor Puhlman had filed tax returns for the past two years.

  “They got paid off the books,” the detective offered.

  “Right,” Woodhouse said, “but for what? Borger says that these two guys are in business with him. What kind of business? Dumping murdered hookers’ bodies in the bay?”

  Woodhouse and his wife had planned dinner out at Waterbar at the Embarcadero. She’d already secured the table when he walked in a half hour late. “Sorry,” he said, kissing her cheek and taking the chair across from her. “I got tied up.”

  “The Marciano case?” she asked, knowing the answer. It was all her husband had talked about for the past few days.

  Woodhouse’s obsession with the Marciano murder and the possible role Sheldon Borger had played in it wasn’t hard to miss. His wife had seen it too often before, cases that were particularly grim and involving victims with whom her husband had bonded in a way. She was never comfortable when he worked on such cases but understood that it went with the territory of being a detective. Like all cops, he spent his days, and too many nights, dealing with the sort of carnage and evil people that most of society only read about in novels and see in movies.

  After twenty-two years on the force, Woodhouse was well aware that turning a case into a personal vendetta was futile at best. But this one was different. Very different. There was a beautiful young woman whose life had been snuffed out prematurely. Sure, she’d been a prostitute, a lawbreaker in her own right. But she didn’t deserve to die by a vicious blow to the head and dumped into San Francisco Bay. The vision of her mother coming to San Francisco to identify her daughter’s body had stayed with him.

  Now there was the assassination of a man who was poised to become president. Woodhouse liked George Mortinson and had intended to vote for him.

  But that wasn’t the driving force behind his obsession.

  It was Dr. Sheldon Borger.

  The detective had no idea how Borger might have been involved in the assassination, nor did he have any evidence that he’d played a direct part in Elena Marciano’s murder. But he knew one thing for certain. He’d formed an immediate dislike and distrust of the man and was committed to pulling out all the stops to nail him for something—anything.

  Dinner at Waterbar was delicious as usual. Woodhouse successfully compartmentalized his constant obsession with Borger in order to be a pleasant, involved dinner companion to his wife of more than twenty years.

  But once they were home and she’d gone to bed, he sat up late, nursing a drink and writing down what was known so far.

  Elena Marciano had been a patient of Dr. Sheldon Borger. (Or was she more than a patient?)

  Two men, Jacob Gibbons and Peter Puhlman, claimed to work for Borger. One of them, Gibbons, had rented a boat the morning that she was killed from a boatyard near where her body had been dragged from San Francisco Bay.

  Both Gibbons and Puhlman fit the description given by the flight attendant as possibly having accompanied Itani, the assassin, on the trip to Washington from San Francisco, and Gibbons had been in D.C. just days prior to Mortinson’s murder, according to the local police. Yet if it was Gibbons with Itani, he’d booked his flight and gone through airport security using false identification. If it was Puhlman on that flight, he, too, had concealed his true identity. Why?

  Senator Mortinson’s killer, Iskander Itani, had been a patient of Dr. Borger’s just as the slain prostitute had been. (Hell of a coincidence!)

  According to a witness (Mica Sphere), Itani had claimed to her that he had a girlfriend named Elena. (The same Elena? Must be.)

  When the detectives had visited Borger’s house, there had been two suitcases in the foyer. (Gibbons and Puhlman just returning from Washington? Good bet.)

  Itani had gained entrance to the rally using a forged pass from the Westside Boxing Club in San Mateo. Detectives had interviewed everyone there and reported on the anger the owners and managers expressed that their organization had been misused by someone in order to kill the next president. It was clear from the report that no one there had ever heard of Iskander Itani and that his credential was phony. (Question: Who arranged for Itani to be on the invite list, and who provided the false ID?)

  Senator Mortinson was killed with four bullets from a Smith & Wesson 638 Airweight revolver. (How did he get the weapon past security? Everything points to his having had help.)

  Woodhouse had also checked out Borger’s history. The physician had a clean criminal record, not even a speeding ticket. The only blot on his professional record was an ethics charge brought against him by the girlfriend of a prominent West Coast columnist who’d shot himself after spending a night at Borger’s house as a patient. The girlfriend claimed professional negligence. The charges were summarily dropped by Borger’s professional peers.

  Borger was in hibernation and being repeatedly questioned by the FBI about what he knew of Itani. According to the bureau, the psychiatrist had nothing to offer aside from having treated Itani as a patient.

  Woodhouse knew in his bones that there was a link between Borger and both the Marciano murder and the assassination of Senator George Mortinson.

  But feelings in one’s bones didn’t make a case in court.

  After an abbreviated night’s sleep, he went into the office the following morning and, after receiving approval from his superior, sent detectives to bring Jacob Gibbons and Peter Puhlman in for questioning in the Elena Marciano murder. His timing was perfection. They arrived at Gibbons’s apartment hours before he was about to leave San Francisco, and it was obvious to the officers that Puhlman was poised to do the same.

  CHAPTER

  46

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Nic Tatum was twice interviewed by the FBI and found the experiences frustrating. They made it plain from the outset that their interest was in what he’d witnessed during the shooting, which took him only a few minutes to cover. It was then that he’d expressed his belief that Dr. Sheldon Borger may have played a role in the assassination. His thesis was summarily dismissed by the special agents. As one of them said, “We don’t need idle speculation about CIA conspiracies, Dr. Tatum.”

  His second meeting with special agents from the bureau was even more dismaying. There was a new face at the table. He was introduced as Bret Lancaster. “Mr. Lancaster is CIA, Dr. Tatum. He’ll be sitting in on our meeting.”

  At first Lancaster’s presence in the room dampened Tatum’s enthusiasm for outlining his beliefs that Borger, using mind-control techniques developed and funded by the CIA, programmed Sheila Klaus and Iskander Itani. But he soon overcame his reluctance and laid out every aspect of his “case.” The two special agents said little; Lancaster uttered not a word, nor did he take notes, leading Tatum to believe that he was being taped. At eleven that morning, when the allotted time was up, one of the agents thanked Tatum for his assistance, and an angry Nicholas Tatum left the room.

  He had a lunch date with Mac Smith scheduled for twelve thirty, but before going to the restaurant he called his friend Dave Consi
dine.

  “Hi, Dave, it’s Nic Tatum. Got a second?”

  “Got two of them,” Considine said. “A patient just left. What’s up?”

  “I was wondering if you ever ran across someone at the Company named Lancaster. Bret Lancaster.”

  Considine paused before answering. “Yeah, I do remember him. Strange-looking guy.”

  “What’s he do there?”

  Another pause, longer this time. “He worked in the Medical and Psychological Analysis Center at Langley, reported to Colin Landow. Why are you interested in him?”

  “He was at a meeting I just got out of.”

  “At the Company?”

  “No, FBI. They’ve been interviewing me about the assassination. Lancaster works for Landow, huh? No surprise.”

  “I meant to call you. Not often that I have a hero for a friend. I read about what you did.”

  “Nothing heroic about it, Dave. You’ll be reading more.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’ve been trying to get someone in government to listen to me about Borger and his role in the assassination.”

  “His role in it? Hey, pal, are you going off the deep end?”

  “Maybe so, but I’m not going to let the official stonewalling shut me up. I’ve avoided press interviews, but I think it’s time that I start agreeing to them.”

  “I’d walk easy, Nic.”

  “Why? So that bastard Borger can keep on destroying people? Can’t do that, Dave.”

  “I think we need to get together again, have a few drinks, maybe more than a few.”

  “Love to, but not for a few days. I’m sort of busy right now. Thanks for the info. I’ll call.”

  Tatum asked Smith over lunch at a restaurant in the Watergate complex if he knew a good investigative reporter who would listen to his charge.

  “I know a few of them,” Smith replied, “but the good ones will question you the way a lawyer would, looking for evidence to corroborate what you’re claiming. Your word won’t be good enough, I’m afraid. Sandra Harding’s column in today’s Post questions the lone assassin theory. She wrote that chalking up the assassinations of the Kennedys, King, and now Mortinson strains the imagination. She doesn’t cite anything to support her feelings, but maybe she’ll listen to what you have to say.”