Murder in the White House

by Margaret Truman

  “By whom?”

  She shook her head.

  “Sorry, but I have to know.”

  She sighed shortly. “I was paid by the Spanish Embassy.”

  “After that?”

  “They paid me once more. After that Lan paid me himself.”

  “Did he ever suggest a different relationship?”

  “He was Secretary of State. I was, am, a call girl, which is known to a great many people, even if the FBI seems to have overlooked it.” She shook her head. “There was no way we could have a relationship other than… occupational.”

  “Even so, your relationship was very confidential,” Ron said. “Do you have any idea who killed him, or why?”

  “No,” she said quietly. “I have no idea.”

  “We believe he took bribes. In fact, you say he accepted a gift of your services.”

  Martha Kingsley frowned. “Lansard Blaine,” she said intently, “was a very complex man, Mr. Fairbanks. It’s difficult to apply simplistic rules of right and wrong to him. I’m afraid he did play a dangerous game. I heard some hints about it.”

  “If what you’ve told me is true,” Ron said, “you spent more hours in intimate conversation with him than probably anyone else in Washington. I’m going to have to review all of that conversation with you. Before you leave for Paris we’ll need to have another talk, longer than this one and on the record. I want you to think about it. Reconstruct some of the talk. You may know more than you think. We need to know. Think, Mrs. Kingsley. You’re a bright lady. Think very hard…”

  She looked at him for a moment, then slowly nodded.

  Special Investigation Office, The West Wing, Saturday, June 16, 2:00 PM

  At 1:00 PM Ron gave a briefing to the newswires, TV networks, and reporters from the newspapers who had people on duty at the White House on Saturday afternoon. He had chosen early Saturday afternoon as a time when not many would be available, a time when the networks and newspaper offices had slowed down for a lazy, late-spring, weekend afternoon. He told the reporters little… he had no solid leads as yet about who had murdered Blaine. The briefing over, he had returned to his office before some of the more aggressive reporters, hastily summoned from their homes, arrived at the White House. They were denied the opportunity to question him.

  In his office at 2:00 he received a call from the Navy, a call arranged for two o’clock by a demand he’d made on the duty officer before noon. Captain Frederick Elmendorfer, Special Counsel to the Secretary of the Navy, had returned from Alexandria to check some files and call Fairbanks.

  “Frankly, Mr. Fairbanks,” Captain Elmendorfer said—his voice was hard and resentful—“you put the Secretary on a spot.”

  “Frankly, Captain, I don’t give a damn. I’m asking you to read me the contents of a file. If what’s in the file puts someone on a spot, then maybe someone has made a mistake. I don’t care about that. I don’t mean to make an issue of it but I intend to know what’s in that file if I have to call the Secretary off the golf course and back to his office this afternoon to read it to me.”

  “It’s highly confidential—” He’d fallen back on his last line of defense.

  “Not to the President, and I’m acting for the President.”

  A sigh. “Okay, Mr. Fairbanks…”

  “Commander George Kingsley, what’s the file got?”

  “Graduated from Annapolis Class of ’68, he’s served in Panama, the Mediterranean, most of the time at sea. Nothing much on his record, actually. No bad reports. He’s second officer on the Spruance—or was until he was assigned recently to the United States Embassy in Paris.”

  “Is there anything in his education or record that suggests embassy duty?”

  “No. And nothing that suggests he’s not qualified for it either.”

  “Does he speak French?”

  “The file doesn’t say so.”

  “Is it customary to assign officers to diplomatic duty in countries where one of the major languages is spoken if they can’t speak that language?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Who appointed him?”

  A pause. “The Secretary.”

  “Personally?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “On whose recommendation?”

  A longer pause. “Secretary Blaine’s…”

  “He was assigned by the Secretary of the Navy on the recommendation of the Secretary of State?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I want that file, Captain. Have it sent by messenger to my office this afternoon.”

  ***

  Jill, who had been sitting on the couch listening all during the conversation, grinned and shook her head. “You talk pretty tough, Mr. Chief Investigator.”

  “A pose,” Ron said. “Sometimes you need it with the career people.”

  “Don’t forget you’re talking to a career civil-service employee.”

  “I’m sorry… I just don’t think I could make a career there.”

  Her grin turned bitter. “Maybe you had a choice.”

  ***

  He had, indeed. When he graduated from Stanford Law he had offers from both California and New York firms, in addition to the offer of a clerkship with Justice Friederich. These offers had come to him in recognition of his promise as an exceptionally able young lawyer. His personality had been shaped by the recognition he had always had as a bright young man who would go far in whatever career he chose. He had been shaped, too, by the acknowledged envy of his peers.

  But Jill’s point was valid. He had had a choice. He still had a choice. He had told President-elect Webster that he would not, probably wasn’t able to, commit himself without reservation. He had a choice.

  Service in the White House, though, had amended his sense of himself. The President thought well of him, respected him as a young lawyer. Still, being a bright young lawyer on the White House staff did not afford him power or even much influence. His perspective changed. As he approached the point where ability like his might realize its potential, suddenly the doors did not any longer open so easily, and being the bright young lawyer did not count for so much.

  Only once had he exerted any influence on a major policy decision… He was in the Oval Office the day the Aeroflot Ilyushin crashed on the approach to Kennedy Airport… specifically, he was there when the angry Soviet message arrived. The President and Catherine Webster had purchased a beach house on the Texas Gulf coast, and Ron was in the Oval Office with them and with the Texas real estate agent, acting as their counsel at the signing of the documents. The papers had been signed and exchanged when the telephone rang. The President abruptly asked the Texan to leave, saying he had a little problem on his hands. When Ron and Catherine got up to leave too the President motioned them to sit down again. He turned on the telephone speaker, and Catherine and Ron listened to the conversation between the President and Deputy Secretary of State William Ahern.

  The Aeroflot plane had crashed into the Atlantic on the approach to Kennedy about five miles off the coast at approximately 11:00 that morning. The President knew it had crashed. He had mentioned it to Ron when he first came into the Oval Office. What he had not known was that Soviet U.N. Ambassador Konstantin Dobrodomov had been a passenger on the Ilyushin and had been killed with several members of his staff. What the President also had not known was that two United States Air Force jet fighters had flown close to the Ilyushin only a minute or two before it crashed.

  The angry Russian note, delivered to the State Department within two hours of the crash, charged that the two fighters had buzzed the Ilyushin, that it had been forced to take violent evasive action to avoid a mid-air collision and that the maneuver had damaged it and caused the crash. The note demanded investigation by a U.N. commission empowered to issue subpoenas within the United States. The note also demanded that the United States keep clear of the wreckage and that it allow a Russian salvage task force to enter the territorial waters of the United States to recover the wreckage and th
e bodies.

  Deputy Secretary Ahern had already talked to the Air Force. The two fighters had flown within half a mile of the Aeroflot Ilyushin. One pilot, Major Donald Hummell, was an Air Force veteran of many years’ experience. The other, Lieutenant Nancy Wilkinson, was flying only her second patrol after finishing her training. The major insisted that neither he nor the lieutenant had buzzed the Ilyushin. The lieutenant had told her commanding officer she thought she might have flown too close.

  There was background. Eleven weeks before, the Vietnamese had suddenly arrested, charged as spies, and executed more than two hundred Russian engineers, technicians and advisers. Since then the Soviet Union, as part of its protest and retaliation, had systematically harassed Vietnamese airline flights—ironically, Ilyushin jets they had themselves sold the Vietnamese—in several parts of the world. Aeroflot pilots crowded Vietnamese flights on the approaches to major airports… a dangerous game, and it had nearly become a fatal one when three weeks ago an Aeroflot Ilyushin on approach to Kennedy had departed from its assigned approach course fifty miles out, intending to fly close to and harass a Vietnamese Ilyushin arriving at Kennedy on a scheduled flight from Paris. The Aeroflot Ilyushin had flown into airspace assigned to a TWA 747, almost causing a mid-air collision. After that incident the President had authorized the Air Force to intercept Aeroflot flights and, as he put it, to herd them into Kennedy. Air Force pilots, angry at the threat represented by huge civilian jets wandering off assigned courses, had herded some Aeroflot flights with enthusiasm… It was not impossible that the two jet fighters this morning had contributed to the crash.

  Secretary of State Blaine was in London. Deputy Secretary Ahern spoke with the President for half an hour: a mechanically hollow voice on the telephone speaker. When he had finished, the President told him to come to the White House. They would meet with someone from Defense, with Eiseman, the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, and they would ring up Blaine in London.

  But it would be an hour before that meeting could convene, and—as Ron knew—it was not the President’s way to put aside a problem like this until a meeting assembled. He was not surprised when the President began to pace the Oval Office and talk. He knew the President had wanted him and Catherine to stay so he could talk—as much to himself as to them, but still to talk with someone listening. This president, he had observed, did not function alone; he functioned in company. He bore his responsibility alone, as any President had to, but he worked best when other people were around him, listening, watching…

  He would tell the Russians to go to hell, he said. They had created a hazard and now were complaining that they were its first victims. Of course he could not allow a U.N. commission to go poking around inside the United States in violation of our sovereignty. The god-damned Russians, he said, were obsessed with turmoil and tension, because they thought they could profit from it.

  Catherine Webster sat quietly. Her eyes were on Ron almost as they were on her husband. He had learned to see her as a complex and subtle personality who communicated with such subtlety sometimes that only a few people sensed what she was saying. Blaine, probably, was one who understood her. As they sat she was sending him an invitation to work together… they should help the President together…

  Sometimes she was content to be a sounding board, sometimes not. This time she wasn’t. She shook her head. That was all. She shook her head, and he stopped. “Huh?” he said, surprised.

  “If you think they want to profit from tension and turmoil, then your course of action is to prevent tension and turmoil,” she said.

  He stopped. His spring unwound. This was why he needed people around him: to stop him. He sat down, facing Catherine and Ron from a wingchair. “How?”

  “Talk-talk,” said Catherine. “Talk-talk. Diplomatic obfuscation. Tell them you can’t imagine how their airplane got on the bottom of the ocean; it’s as big a surprise to us as it must be to them. And we’re going to do everything we can to find out what happened. Don’t tell them we won’t allow a U.N. investigation. Don’t tell them we won’t allow their salvage ships in our waters. Let them find out. Slowly.”

  “Well…”

  “May I make a suggestion, Mr. President?”

  “Sure, Ron.”

  “How about getting a naval vessel over that wreckage… if we know where it is. With a radiation counter. They’re so anxious that we not look at the wreckage, it makes you wonder what was in that plane.”

  “Good idea,” the President said.

  “Then maybe get some divers down there to take a look. We don’t have to tell the Russians we have divers looking. Just do it.”

  The President nodded.

  Encouraged, Ron went on. “As far as the U.N. investigatory commission is concerned, we might suggest its jurisdiction be expanded to cover all air-traffic-control violations by Aeroflot planes over the past several weeks. They’d like to question our two pilots. Okay, we’d like to question several of theirs. The Vietnamese would like to know if anyone in the Soviet government has issued orders to Aeroflot pilots to harass Vietnamese flights. Obviously, the investigation can’t confine themselves to questioning pilots. They’ll have to question people higher up. And so on.”

  “And if they accept the proposition?”

  “I don’t think they will,” Ron said. “They don’t want anyone, U.N. or anyone else, poking around in their closets.”

  “What about the salvage operation?”

  “We’ll cooperate with them. We can do it better in our own waters but we’ll allow some of their people to work on the salvage ships and observe what we do.”

  Catherine Webster was smiling at Ron. He had—he guessed—followed her cue.

  Within a few days he saw President Webster put his suggestions into effect. It was never acknowledged, and the opportunity had not so far come again. But it might…

  Or, rather, it had—with this strange and baffling investigation…

  Sakura, Silver Spring, Maryland, Saturday, June 16, 9:00 PM

  Given their choice of sitting at tables or on the floor in the handsome, quiet Japanese restaurant, Ron and Lynne had chosen to sit on the floor, on cushions, facing a low table. The restaurant had arranged privacy for the President’s daughter by giving her and Ron one of the small rooms to themselves. Now they sat alone, talking, drinking, and nibbling at their appetizer while their diminutive waitress bustled in and out, bringing and taking, anticipating, serving with elaborately courteous attention.

  Lynne had suggested that his appointment as Special Investigator, which had intervened since they had agreed to this dinner date, had been so demanding a job all week that she really did not expect him to spend the evening with her. He told her the anticipation of this evening had been all that had kept him going all week. She had not argued the point further, and they had left the White House at eight. He had driven her out here in his Datsun, with her Secret Service detail following in an inconspicuous Chevrolet. The Secret Service had checked out the room and were hovering about the premises somewhere.

  “Detroit…” Lynne said. “Here in the east I find myself defending it all the time, but actually it’s a good city with a lot to recommend it—”

  “You didn’t actually live there,” Ron said.

  “No, but it was our city, where we went for things only found in a city.”

  “Will you go back there?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t suppose so.”

  His sense of her vulnerability had been strongly reinforced this evening. She was not tough like her mother and father, and Blaine’s death had apparently shocked and hurt her more than it had them. Her eyes looked deeper tonight. Her voice was softer. He had put his hand close to hers on the edge of her cushion, and she had immediately moved her hand to take his. They sat now, holding hands, sipping sake. He had leaned to kiss her lightly on the lips, and she had accepted the kiss very soberly, without a smile.

  “I could never go back to Califor
nia,” he said to her. “It’s a different world out there, and I don’t fit into it anymore. There’s no point in trying to tell your family, your old friends, your old neighbors what all this is, what we live with now… they simply can’t understand it… I can’t talk this way to anyone but you. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “Looking back,” she said softly. “Looking back… it seems that everything used to be so simple. Maybe it wasn’t, really.” She shook her head. “I don’t know, I’ve never had to fight for anything, you know. I don’t know if I can—”

  “I think you’ve changed the subject.”

  “My father… and mother… have given me everything—”

  “Lucky you.”

  “That’s not very perceptive.”

  “No, it isn’t. I’m sorry.”

  She lifted her white sake cup, smiled and drank. She seemed to have dismissed the subject. “So… any idea who killed Lan?”

  He was startled for an instant by what she had called Blaine—“Lan.” It was what Martha Kingsley had called him—and the others. It was possible, of course… he’d not dismissed the thought that Lynne, too, may have had something intimate with Blaine. She fit his bill… she was young, yet very womanly… her skirt had ridden up as she sat on the floor on a pillow, and he had to make a conscious effort not to stare at her lovely sleek legs. She had that seriousness and impressionableness that some others had… Marya Kalisch and Judith Pringle… And she had had opportunity… He felt a traitor even thinking it, but it was a thought process his assignment required of him. Nobody was immune from it.

  “I don’t know, Lynne,” he answered her question now.

  “I can’t believe he’s dead,” she whispered.

  “You cared for him, didn’t you?”

  “What?” Her head snapped around. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, he was a very close friend, of yours and your family.”

  Her hard frown softened. “Yes.”

  “He was always around, since you were a little girl.”

  She nodded, withdrew her hand from Ron’s and poured herself another small cup of sake. The waitress, seeing, hurried in with a fresh flask of the hot rice wine, then in a moment came again with trays of sushi—raw fish—rice and seaweed rolled and sliced.