Murder in the White House

by Margaret Truman

  “Did Blaine argue for an exemption for automobiles?”

  “For a partial exemption.” The President abstractly tugged at the fringe on the presidential flag to straighten it. “Is that who you think bribed him? Automobile—?”

  “Great Britain-Hawley-Burnsby.”

  “God!” The President shook his head unhappily. “And others?”

  “Probably. I haven’t found out yet.”

  “And you think,” said Gimbel, interjecting a louder, more impatient voice into the conversation, “that the people who may have paid him bribes are the ones who may have killed him?” He got up, took up the President’s glass of scotch and carried it to him at his desk. “It could be a lot of people then. The investigation widens considerably, doesn’t it?”

  “Not necessarily,” Ron said. “In fact, it narrows it. How many people with access to the White House at night are also involved in potentially vast profits or losses from the trade agreements?”

  “Profits?” the President said.

  “Well, someone who stood to profit from the trade agreements may have killed Blaine to shut up an influential voice against them…”

  The President got up to stand behind his desk. “I think you’re on the right track, Ron. People who try to bribe… you follow me? They’re capable of other crimes. And you’re right, there’s profit and loss involved in these trade agreements. People working for foreign governments, or for foreign business corporations… concentrate on them.”

  “Well, there’s still a problem in the theory, Mr. President. Whoever killed Blaine had access to the second floor of the White House after eleven at night.”

  “Someone who could pay Blaine a hundred thousand to try to talk me out of the trade agreements could also buy someone with that access… household staff… even a Secret Service man… Concentrate on that, Ron. Concentrate on that.”

  “I will, sir. I’m not sure we’ll find our murderer that way but…”

  “What else, Ron? What else do you have in mind?”

  Ron shook his head. “Nothing else, Mr. President, not really—”

  “Spit it out, Ron.”

  “All right.” Ron glanced at Gimbel. “I found it out too easily. I mean, that Blaine was taking money. Someone else must have known, it opens up all kinds of possibilities—”

  “Even that the President might have killed him, right?” said the President. “Or that he conspired in it. Even that, hmm?”

  “I’m hardly thinking of you, sir.”

  “Concentrate as I told you. If that doesn’t produce anything, then look where you think you have to. I told you there is no limit on this investigation. Look where you have to, Ron. Everybody’s a suspect.”

  He nodded vigorously, as though to convince all—including himself—of his sincerity.

  The Blue Lagoon, Friday, June 15, 10:45 PM

  Barbara Lund smoked a joint of marijuana and sipped only occasionally from the bourbon and soda Ron had bought for her. She sat at their table—with Ron and Gabe Haddad—in her stage costume: fringed white bra top, matching fringed briefs. She laughed at the suggestion she knew anything about the murder of Lansard Blaine.

  “Hey, fellas,” she said languidly, “I hardly knew the man.” She used her left hand to brush her long bleached blonde hair back from her bare shoulder. “I mean, what he was to me and I was to him didn’t have anything to do with politics.”

  “How do you suppose I found out you knew him at all?” Ron asked.

  “I’d like to know.”

  “The FBI told me.”

  Her smile vanished. “FBI…? How’d they know, what’d they know?”

  “They know you spent the night in his apartment several times.”

  “Why? Why’d they know that?”

  “They were keeping a tab on him, not on you,” Ron said. “That make you feel better?”

  She nodded, “It makes me feel better. Y’ know, I’m just a Kentucky girl come to the big city to make a little money. No reason the FBI’d have any interest in me.”

  She was, as Ron judged, about thirty years old. She had a small, dark blue tattoo on the inside of her right thigh just below the fringe of her briefs; below the tattoo on her leg was a larger dark red bruise. She was tall, fleshy—a big woman. She talked hard. Her face was pretty; it had a delicacy and innocence incongruous with the rest of her.

  “How did you meet Blaine?” Gabe Haddad said.

  “Here, he came in here one night.”

  “And you hustled a drink from the Secretary of State, and that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship?”

  “I don’t care what you believe.”

  “We can have you brought in to talk to us.”

  Barbara Lund was not frightened. “But you’d rather come in here and get a look at me,” she said.

  “Okay, where did you meet Lansard Blaine?” Gabe persisted, secretly admiring her starch.

  She glanced from him to Ron, back again to Gabe. “You really have to know, huh?”

  Gabe nodded. “We really do.”

  “I was at a party, I was the entertainment. He was there.”

  “Whose party? Where?”

  “In a suite at the Mayflower. Some English character gave it. I don’t remember his name.”

  “Jeremy Johnson?” Gabe asked.

  “Yeah, I think that was it… hey, you guys know everything, don’t you?”

  “The circle closes a little,” Ron said to Gabe.

  “Johnson hired you to entertain Blaine, correct?” Gabe said to her.

  “He hired me to entertain at a party.”

  “Just dancing?”

  She sighed. “Come on.”

  “Johnson hired you for Blaine,” said Gabe.

  “Whatever you say… Listen, I got to put on a show. You want me to come back afterwards?”

  “Yes,” Ron said. “We’ll buy you another drink.”

  “Thanks, big spender.”

  A girl had just left the stage—a raised square platform in the center of the room. Barbara Lund stepped up on the platform. She stood in the center for a moment under bright pink lights, all but ignored by the twenty-five or thirty people at the tables around the platform. She called a word to someone behind the bar and the music began again. She danced.

  Ron watched. It was a sad performance. The men at the tables stared dully. They did not change their expressions when she took off the fringed top. They did not change when she slipped down the briefs. She danced through four records. Between the records she stood nude in the middle of the stage. Waiting. No one applauded. She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand and waited until the music started again. When she took up her bra and briefs off the stage railing and stepped down to the floor, a few actually clapped. Big spenders.

  She returned to the table where Ron and Gabe waited for her, tossed the bra on the table and bent forward and pulled on the briefs before she sat down. She picked up the drink she had only sipped before and gulped it down. She snapped her fingers at a waitress, pointed at her empty glass. Finally she picked up the fringed white bra and put it on again.

  “Jeremy Johnson’s an operator,” she said quietly to Ron and Gabe. “I’ve worked for him a few times.” She looked down at her hands on the table. “I’m a hooker,” she said, looking up into Ron’s face, then into Gabe’s. “I don’t want my mother to know it, but I’m not ashamed of it and I’m not telling you anything you haven’t figured out. It was business with me and Blaine. Johnson paid me to be with Blaine… three, maybe four times. Then Blaine paid me himself. He liked me.”

  “He had more girls than one man could handle,” Ron said, “and he didn’t have to pay them. Why did he pay you, do you suppose?”

  She shrugged. “He never came in here. He never saw me… dance. I put on my act in his apartment for him. I guess it sort of interested him. Everybody asks, but he talked to me about it a lot. He was interested. Maybe it turned him on, the idea. One time he asked me to dance for som
e friends of his. I don’t know who they were. I did it. In his apartment. And so forth. So what’s that got to do with his being murdered?”

  “When did you see him last?” Gabe asked.

  “A month ago, I think.”

  “I want the names of anyone else you saw at parties Johnson gave for Blaine,” Ron said. “If you have to think about it and write them down for me—”

  “Honey, c’mon. People don’t introduce me. I didn’t know who Blaine was the first night. I mean, I did the whole thing and didn’t know who he was. Look, I’m a nude dancer in a crummy joint, and I’m a prostitute. I mean, not knowing who anybody is, is part of my game. Besides, who’d introduce me? At parties the boys that carry off the dirty dishes got more standing than I’ve got, even if I do make ten times their money. Honey, Barbara’s part of the damn furniture.”

  Apartment of Commander and Mrs. George Kingsley, Saturday, June 16, 10:15 AM

  Martha Kingsley knew he was coming—on the telephone she had said she had been wondering how long it would take the chief investigator of the murder to get to her—but she opened her apartment door wearing a bra, a half-slip, no shoes or slippers, and, inviting him to her kitchen to sit down at her kitchen table for a cup of coffee, she did not pick up a robe. The coffee was ready. She offered him a croissant with English marmalade.

  He accepted. “Are you moving?” he asked. The apartment was crowded with taped boxes, the shelves were empty, nails stuck out of bare walls from which pictures had been removed.

  “Don’t you know?” She stood at the kitchen counter spooning marmalade from a jar into a small dish. She was an exceptionally attractive dark-haired, brown-eyed young woman—beautiful was not too strong a word for her. “My husband has been assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Paris. We’re moving there next week.”

  “Did Lansard Blaine arrange that for you?” Ron asked bluntly.

  She looked away from her marmalade to him and smiled. “Knowing him didn’t hurt,” she said.

  “I don’t have to ask you what your relationship with Blaine was,” Ron said. “The FBI has filled me in on that.”

  She smiled again. “The FBI tells you I stayed all night in his apartment and that he stayed all night here—both more than once. What we were doing, the FBI does not know, let me remind you. We might have been working on his stamp collection.”

  “Did he have a stamp collection?”

  “No.”

  He sat at her round glass-topped table and watched her prepare a tray of coffee cups, cream and sugar, butter and marmalade, croissants. Barefoot, in her half-slip and brassiere, she was confident and comfortable—if anything, amused by the contrast between herself and him in his proper dark blue suit, striped shirt, necktie.

  The FBI had furnished him a dossier. Maiden name, Koczinski. Native Washingtonian (rare), twenty-nine years old. She had worked as a secretary at the law firm of McIntyre & Drake, later as secretary-aide to Representative William Horner—working her way through George Washington University, from which she graduated with a degree in English literature. After graduation, public relations writer for Air Transport Association. Married for three years to Commander George Kingsley, Annapolis graduate, career naval officer.

  The FBI dossier was assembled because of her association, not just with Lansard Blaine, but with a variety of prominent people. Her marriage seemed never to have interrupted her active and varied social life. While her husband was away from Washington, on sea duty or otherwise, Martha continued to travel a circuit of cocktail parties, dinners, out-of-town weekends, concerts, and shows with senators, congressmen, diplomats, judges, lobbyists, wealthy businessmen. A report in the dossier described an evening and night spent on a yacht with the press attaché of the Soviet Embassy and a visiting associate editor of Izvestia—the same week when she spent a night in the apartment of Secretary of State Blaine. It was this coincidence and several others like it that had moved the FBI to open a file on her.

  Martha Kingsley put the tray on the table, then the coffee pot. She sat down and poured. “It’s a tragedy about Blaine,” she said. “He was a rare man.”

  “The FBI seems to think you’re a rare woman,” Ron said.

  She broke a croissant. “Don’t be unsubtle, Mr. Fairbanks. Or too subtle. Anyway, what could the FBI know about rare women?”

  She had her point, Ron thought. “When did you last see Blaine?”

  “Two or three weeks ago.”

  “What was the occasion?”

  She smiled. “I spent the night with him in his apartment.”

  “Blaine had a variety of young women available to him, as I think you must have known, and you had your other male friends. So why you and Blaine or the night together? What was the nature of the relationship beyond sex?”

  “It was highly personal. We liked each other.”

  “Let me explain something to you,” Ron said. “Discovering the nature of the relationship between you and Blaine is part of the investigation into his death. It may have no relationship to his death. I hope it doesn’t. But I’m going to find out. If necessary I’ll block your husband’s transfer to Paris and keep you in Washington until I find out.”

  She flushed with anger. “Do you have that kind of power, Mr. Fairbanks?”

  “Yes.” He wasn’t at ease saying it.

  “Well, then… just what do you want to know about my relationship with Lansard Blaine?”

  “Look, Mrs. Kingsley, I don’t like the role of inquisitor, holding a secret-police dossier on a person and confronting you with that kind of advantage. Believe it or not, I’m opposed to it. But I’ve got a job, I have the FBI file on you, and it’s complete with details—”

  “Voyeurs…”

  “Maybe. At any rate I have a good deal of information about you and I’ve drawn some conclusions. The file says, to be frank, that you sleep in a lot of beds. The way I read it, though, I don’t think you do it without motive. You didn’t sleep with Blaine just because he was Secretary of State. That made a big impression on a lot of little girls but I don’t think it did on you. So, why, Martha Kingsley? Why Blaine?”

  She sighed. “How well did you know him? He was a Renaissance man, Mr. Fairbanks. It could have been… I could have fallen in love with him. I really could have—”

  “He didn’t slow you down,” Ron said.

  She winced. “That’s hard talk.”

  “At the time when you were sleeping with Blaine you were sleeping with a variety of other men,” Ron said. “I’m not quite prepared to accept that you were in love with Blaine.”

  “I didn’t say I was in love with him. I said he was worth it.”

  “Well, then?”

  She held her coffee cup in front of her in both hands. She had regained her composure. She smiled. “Your FBI file really doesn’t suggest why I slept with Blaine? It doesn’t suggest why I entertain—or am entertained by—a variety, as you put it, of men? Really, Mr. Fairbanks, isn’t there a word in there?” She sighed again, this time with impatience, “Prostitute, Mr. Fairbanks,” she snapped. “Prostitute.”

  “No,” he said quickly, “no, it doesn’t say that. And I didn’t draw that conclusion either.”

  She laughed quietly. “I’m a very expensive, very high-class call girl, Mr. Fairbanks. I’ll slip in the bedroom for an hour with you right now, if you like, for, say, a hundred dollars. Or I’ll spend a night with you for a minimum of five hundred. I am employed by people to entertain them. Sometimes I am employed by people to entertain other people. How could you and the FBI miss that?”

  “Paris…?”

  “That’s my retirement.”

  “Your husband knows?”

  She shrugged. “He’s a good but naive man. He knows, but he doesn’t know everything. He’s also lazy and willing to let his wife procure a good job for him. He’s also charming, and he doesn’t get in my way.”

  Ron poured himself more coffee. “That explains why you… It doesn’t explain why Blaine… Are yo
u telling me he paid you?”

  She nodded. “He did, or someone else did, every time.”

  “That’s hard to believe.”

  “Why? Because he had his little girls any time he wanted them? If you’re that naive, Mr. Fairbanks, I can see why it’s hard for you to understand. Look, I demand, and get, five hundred dollars minimum for spending a night with a man. There are plenty of young women in Washington, just as good-looking as I am, who will do the same for fifty or a hundred. I have two or three appointments a week at five hundred each. Don’t you really know why? It’s not because I’m better in the sack, I’ll tell you that. Any of them can do anything I do. Lansard Blaine and I… well, let me explain it this way. Do you remember the story about Louis XV? One of his mistresses died, and he wept—he wept, a man who could have his pick of any woman at court or the little girls in the Deer Park. He wept, and he said, ‘Who now will tell me the truth?’ I do what I do in the classic tradition, Mr. Fairbanks. I’m a professional listener, a professional sympathizer, a professional propper-up of sagging egos. Lan was a satyr, but he didn’t have a wife. I’m not sure he had a friend. I spent many quiet hours with him, talking about all kinds of things. I could hold up my end of a conversation with him. Many people couldn’t. We talked. Sometimes we didn’t even talk when he was tired or troubled. The sex part of it wasn’t very much, usually. He never omitted it, but it was not the major part of our relationship. He certainly could and did have that cheaper.”

  Ron wasn’t too sure he believed all this, and said so.

  “Suit yourself.”

  He watched her for a moment as she spread orange marmalade on a piece of croissant and nibbled at it, looking away from him, looking out the window at the single leafy limb that intruded between her window and the white-painted brick wall of the neighboring building.

  “When did you meet him?”

  “A year or so ago,” she said, still looking out the window.

  “How did you meet him?”

  She glanced at him but looked out again. “I was employed to entertain him.”