Murder in the White House

by Margaret Truman

  She was carefully controlled, not without rigid effort. Ron wondered if her control would come through on the tape. “What time was this?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “The eleven o’clock news was still on, on television. The late movie had not begun.”

  “You say he sometimes hung up on you without a word when interrupted while he was talking to you?”

  “Yes. Maybe last night… maybe someone came in. Maybe he just hung up. Maybe I didn’t hear…”

  “How long between this grunt and when the line went dead?”

  She shook her head again, biting her lower lip. “A long time,” she whispered. “They say… I heard he was strangled with some wire or something. Probably he grunted, or choked or… oh, God… I don’t know… but that probably was the sound I heard… then I guess whoever killed him hung up…” She was crying now.

  Ron watched her closely. “I’ll turn off the Dictaphone,” he said quietly.

  She wept for a minute, then sucked in her breath and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

  Ron glanced around the shadowed office. “I have to ask you…” he said. “About the relationship. Did you love him?”

  “Yes…” she whispered. “…and no.” She drew in a breath and found her voice. “I am not a fool, Mr. Fairbanks. You have to be realistic. I had a sense of being a little part of history. I knew there were others. The newspaper says there was another even… even recently. Maybe I was only one of… at the same time.” She swallowed. “I didn’t know about that, but I knew I had no claim on him. I knew there had been others and would be still others. I knew what he wanted. I was willing to give him what he wanted, for what I got in return.”

  “What did he want?”

  She lifted her chin a bit and spoke more crisply. “A fresh, young… vigorous woman. One who would be available whenever he wanted her. One who wouldn’t argue with him or make demands on him. One he could drop when he got tired of her. I understood all that. That’s my realism. In return I… He was a fine man… kind, thoughtful, generous. He talked with me about his duties. I shared some little part of the history he was making. I told myself it would end, and I told myself I would remember it and treasure the memory all my life.”

  “You have a security clearance, don’t you?” Ron asked, following a sudden random thought.

  “Yes. But not for diplomatic and political secrets.”

  “Did he talk to you about resigning?”

  “Yes. He said he was tired of Washington and thought he might return to the campus or find a place with some company.”

  “When did he say that?”

  “Oh, he said it two or three times in the last two weeks.”

  “Was he serious?”

  “Yes. I thought so.”

  Ron turned to another thought. “You say he was generous. In spirit? Materially?”

  “Both ways. I have some lovely gifts I’ll remember him by.”

  “Expensive gifts?”

  “I think so.”

  “Could you give me a list?”

  “Must I?”

  “I’ll need it,” Ron said firmly. He stood. “I’ll try to protect your reputation. I’ll need the list, and there will be more questions—”

  “When they find my fingerprints…?”

  “I’m sure they already have. And when they report to me, I will keep it confidential that you lived part-time in the Secretary of State’s apartment—if I can.”

  ***

  Ron recalled now a weekend at Shangri-La. (Eisenhower had changed the name to Camp David, and Webster had changed it back again.) It was during the second summer of the Administration. Webster never retreated to Shangri-La to brood, or for intense meetings with his inner circle; he went there to relax in the company of people he liked. It had been a well-noted measure of Ron’s relationship with the First Family that he was invited to the weekend mini-vacations in the Maryland mountains. Blaine was invited too. Gimbel was not.

  This was in August. It had been intolerably hot and damp in Washington ever since June. The government had slowed down, literally, because of the heat, the sweat, the fatigue. At Shangri-La it was hot, but here the heat was at least drier, and windy; and drinking long cool drinks in the shade of the trees, the presidential party could loosen some and regain a sense of perspective.

  President Webster was no athlete. He swam lazily in the cool water of the big pool, but he kept away from the tennis courts, from the volleyball games, from the joggers on the trails through the woods. No dedicated walker like Truman, or frantic jogger like Carter. Ron did the same. The sweaty camaraderie of the locker room was alien territory to him. He swam, sat by the pool, sipped gin-and-tonics, and caught some needed shut-eye.

  Blaine jogged. Blaine played tennis. Blaine encouraged Lynne to do likewise. She played a decent game of tennis; he was too old to beat her. Catherine Webster also played tennis, but she was no competition for Blaine.

  Blaine had brought with him to Shangri-La this particular weekend a young woman, an associate professor of far eastern history at Northwestern University. She had been his student a few years previously. An attractive, golden-tanned blonde, she would have been a beauty except for being somewhat overweight. Ostensibly she was spending the weekend with Blaine to brief him on some recent developments in Taiwanese party politics. In fact, she was sleeping with him, slipping from her cottage to his after midnight and slipping back at dawn, pretending that no one knew. She was overwhelmed by the good fortune—actually, Blaine’s good favor—that had brought her to Shangri-La to spend a weekend in the company of the President of the United States. She was conspicuously and—as Lynne put it—disgustingly grateful.

  “Another touch, professor?” the President said to her. Her name was Barbara Galena, but the President had begun to call her “professor” immediately after being introduced to her on Friday afternoon. She was already slurring her words and suppressing giggles with difficulty, and it seemed to amuse him to offer her another drink.

  “Thank you, Mr. President, I believe I will… just a small one, though…” She looked at him over the tops of her sunglasses and grinned. She wore a bright red maillot swimsuit, stretched tight over her generous figure; and when she got up from her lounge chair to accept another Bloody Mary from the President, parts of her noticeably shifted inside the tight thin fabric.

  Catherine Webster, also in a maillot—hers violet—watched the President serve the drink and Barbara Galena accept it. She glanced at Ron. He had decided that Catherine, left to her own inclinations, would be a quiet, introspective observer, would understand better than anyone else what was happening and who worked from what motives, and would offer her husband only occasional terse words of advice. It was the President who could not endure a lonely or a quiet moment, who urged her forward to shake hands, to chat, to know names, to smile—to “politic.” When he chose to be a public man, she held herself apart as long as possible. Now she couldn’t.

  The President, stretched out on a padded lounge chair with his telephone and the bar within reach, had sipped gin half this Sunday afternoon, as he had done Saturday afternoon, and was thoroughly relaxed. He wore a pair of swimmer’s trunks—white with red-and-blue stripes—and a dark blue baseball cap with the presidential seal on the front. He talked easily. He was holding court, in fact.

  Lynne and Blaine were on the tennis court. Senator Syndall and his wife were napping in their cottage. Admiral Mead and his wife were off somewhere jogging.

  “Congress is a pain in the backside,” the President was saying to the professor. “It’s a pain in the backside of every President. On the other hand, what would I do if I could do anything I wanted to, professor? Did you ever wonder? Scary idea, isn’t it?”

  Barbara Galena smiled. “I have confidence in you, Mr. President.”

  “I am flattered,” he said. “I am also frightened. You’re an educated woman, professor. If you have confidence in me, what does the electorate have? It’s a mi
stake ever to have confidence. You should watch the man you entrust with vast power, every minute. Never trust him. Never have confidence. That’s my point. If it weren’t for the Congress frustrating me, what would I do? The idea that I could do anything I want is a very scary… albeit at times damn attractive… notion—”

  “I know it scares the hell out of me,” Catherine Webster said as she got up, stepped to the side of the pool and jumped in. She swam away from the conversation.

  “Scare you, Ron?” the President asked.

  Ron shrugged. “I’m petrified, sir.”

  “He didn’t even vote for me,” the President said to Barbara Galena.

  The young woman glanced incredulously at Ron. A nervous grin flickered on and off her face.

  “Ah well…” said the President, and lifted his glass to take a swallow from his gin-and-tonic.

  The professor rolled off her chair and stood at the edge of the pool, dipping a foot in to test the temperature. She stood with her back to Ron and the President, and Ron wondered if it had not suddenly occurred to her that she had just been made a conversational plaything, and maybe had been throughout the weekend. He did not like that role for anybody. He went to her side, dipping his own toes in the water as if he, too, wanted to test. He looked at her… her face was hard, troubled.

  “I really didn’t vote for him,” he said.

  She looked at him. “Really?”

  He nodded.

  She smiled, as though relieved.

  Ron looked past her to the President. He was watching them, obviously curious about what this exchange was. His fingers drummed the arm of his chair. He seemed anxious to pick up the conversation and wanted his listeners back.

  But his telephone rang.

  The President listened intently to someone on the line, grunting umm-hmms, nodding as if the someone could see, glancing toward the tennis court, frowning. After two or three minutes he hung up and called out, “Blaine. Problem.”

  Lansard Blaine, with a quick small show of reluctance, put his racket down on the bench at the court and walked toward the pool. Lynne picked up some balls before she followed him. Blaine was dressed in tennis whites, with a sweatband around his forehead. Lynne, following him twenty paces behind, was wearing her white two-piece bathing suit. She carried a towel and wiped off the perspiration as she came.

  The President sighed as Blaine reached the pool. “Goddamn Zaire’s invaded goddamn Zambia,” he said. “Two or three army divisions across the border, some paratroops dropped on the airport at Lusaka. Looks like a full-scale operation.”

  “Their own?”

  “Apparently. No report that it’s otherwise.”

  Blaine shrugged. “Then good luck, I guess.”

  The President nodded. “I guess.”

  “The British…?” Blaine asked.

  “Yelling their heads off, of course. They want an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council.”

  “We have to support them on that.”

  “And keep a close watch to be sure it’s only a local operation,” the President said.

  “Right. Support the British in the Security Council. Call home our ambassadors for consultation. Deplore. That’s it. I’ll call the Department—”

  “Not so quick,” the President said. “We need to make it look like we’ve wrung hands over it for a while.” He felt less cynical than he sounded, but the sense of a giant’s impotence to do anything about such actions led him to affect the facade.

  Blaine nodded, understanding. He reached for the scotch bottle on the President’s bar, poured two drinks, one for Lynne.

  Catherine had lifted herself out of the pool and was sitting on the edge, warming her legs on the concrete. “Well?”

  “Well,” Blaine said, “it’s another case of a small country being swallowed by a bigger neighbor. Let’s hope it doesn’t escalate into something more…”

  Barbara Galena still stood at the edge of the pool beside Ron. She had turned and was staring at the President and Blaine. “Isn’t all this a little cynical?” she asked Ron quietly.

  “What else do you think they can do? I mean really do?”

  “Even he,” she said, nodding toward the President, “says he wants it to look like they wrung their hands over it.” She shook her head.

  Blaine had not heard what she said to Ron but he’d noticed her talking and had guessed. He came now to the edge of the pool. “A lesson in what it’s really like, right, Barb?” he said.

  “I’ll keep my promise not to tell anything I’ve seen or heard here this weekend,” she said, “but—”

  “But when you’re sixty years old and departmental chairman, and he’s dead”—he glanced toward the President—“you’ll write for Foreign Policy Review, or for the Journal of the American Historical Society about the Sunday afternoon at Shangri-La when you watched President Robert Webster and Secretary of State Lansard Blaine allow a small African country to be taken over by its neighbor because they didn’t care. Right?”

  “Maybe I will…”

  Blaine nodded. “I’m sure of it… Well, you used to play a fair game of tennis. Any more?”

  Ron winced. It was unfair to her. For whatever reason, she had gained weight, and it seemed fairly obvious she could not play “a fair game of tennis” anymore. She shook her head, looking pained.

  “You do two things exceptionally well, Barb,” Blaine said coolly. “Judging the facts of realpolitik in central Africa is not one of them.”

  “Just what do I do well, in your estimation?”

  “One,” said Blaine, “you are, with perhaps an exception or two, the hardest-working and best student of far eastern diplomatic history I ever knew, and you probably know more about Taiwanese politics than most politicians on Taiwan. Two…” He stopped and grinned. “Your other talent I’ll leave to Ron to speculate on,” and he turned abruptly, walked toward Lynne and motioned toward the tennis court.

  Barbara Galena looked up at Ron, her mouth tight.

  “Let’s take a swim,” Ron said quietly, wishing that ability and compassion were not such apparent strangers in Secretary of State Lansard Blaine.

  The Special Investigation Office, The Justice Department, Thursday, June 14, 10:00 AM

  The Attorney General had assigned an office. Jill Keller had recruited two secretaries and appropriated some furniture and equipment. Gabe Haddad had been to the State Department early and had returned to the Justice Department, bringing with him Judith Pringle, the young woman said to have been intimately associated with Lansard Blaine.

  “I want to avoid embarrassing you,” said Fairbanks. He sat behind the scarred desk appropriated from the GSA, in a chair with one broken spring, looking at Judith Pringle across a desk littered with boxes and files. He fiddled with the controls on a dictating machine also hastily appropriated. “If your name is published, it won’t be because we published it.”

  “It’s been done already,” the young woman said miserably. “Everybody knows who the Star meant.”

  “Everybody at the State Department?”

  “Yes.”

  He was impressed with how much she was like Marya Kalisch. He had a file on her, provided this morning by the FBI. She had a degree in mathematics from the University of Tennessee. She had worked briefly for IBM and had come three years ago to the State Department as a systems analyst and designer… a young woman with ability and a career, yet mousy in appearance and with a quiet manner, a young woman who had been, no doubt, surprised and flattered by the attentions of the distinctly suave Secretary of State of the United States. She had dark brown hair, blue eyes, regular features—nothing exactly memorable. She was wearing a cream-white pants suit, and she was clearly nervous.

  “Is what they said about you in the Star true?” Ron asked.

  “What part of it?”

  “That you had an intimate relationship with Lansard Blaine.”

  “What if I refuse to say?” She spoke with the soft, southern acce
nt of Tennessee.

  “We can stop the interview right now until you get a lawyer,” Ron said. “He’ll tell you that I have the authority to ask you questions and require you to answer.”

  She frowned and sucked in her lower lip.

  He was not moving well. Not yet. He had dinner last night at eleven, in a hurry, nothing very good, and he’d not slept well and this morning his stomach was queasy and his head hurt as if he’d drunk too much the night before… He’d worn a dark blue suit this morning, it was almost a uniform with him, but now his blue and white striped shirt was limp in the June heat and damp. He had loosened his collar and tie. A cup of coffee, turning cold, and a half-eaten Danish sat among the litter on his desk. He carried a pair of half glasses in the inside pocket of his jacket—he almost never put them on when anyone could see; in fact, he never put them on at all except when squinting was painful. Hell, he was thirty-four and too young to be wearing reading glasses. Now he pulled them out and pressed them into place astride his nose. He peered at her file.

  “I propose to switch on this dictator,” he said. “I need to make a tape of what we say. If you don’t want to, I’ll have to arrange for a subpoena and take your testimony with a reporter making the record—”

  “I have nothin’ to hide.”

  “Good, so please let’s get on with it.”

  He switched on the recorder, and she told him her name, how old she was—twenty-nine—and what she did at the Department of State. “Mr. Blaine spoke to me one day when he came in our section. I was sort of surprised. He was, after all, the Secretary of State. Then he seemed to be saying something to me all the time. I kept reading in the papers about him—and hearing his name every night when I watched the TV news—and when he called me and asked me up to his office and then asked me if I’d have dinner with him, I was—”

  “Flattered.” They were all so damned flattered…

  “Yes. And I suppose more than that.”

  “When?”

  “I’ve been… I guess I have to say it, I did see him… for about a year.”