Murder in the White House

by Margaret Truman

  They ate with chopsticks, and as they did Lynne’s mood seemed to lift and she chatted with animation about the Detroit Tigers and the Cincinnati Reds, about a vacation she wanted to take: a sailing cruise in the Caribbean… “I can’t go, of course. The Secret Service proposes to follow in two PT boats, and a destroyer is to stand by at all times, never more than ten miles away…” She smiled briefly. Even though preoccupation and a return to somber introspection seemed not far below the surface, she was not brittle. It was he, in fact, who was preoccupied, though he tried not to let her see it, tried to be attentive to her, to respond to her, to show her a good time. She deserved at least that. She did relax, she even teased him about glancing every few moments at her legs, and pulled her skirt up another inch and asked him if he liked that better.

  He said he did, who wouldn’t…? And then… “Fritz Gimbel was always close to your family too, wasn’t he?”

  Lynne shrugged, going cool. “There’s always been Fritz,” she said. “As long as I can remember. I grew up in an establishment, you must understand—not just in a household. My father has always attracted people, hordes of people. The house was always full. In some ways I have more privacy in the White House than I did in our houses in Michigan. Fritz was sort of my father’s Figaro, the factotum, moving people out of the way, smoothing things… It was inevitable that he would be chief of staff in the White House. He was chief of staff at the company, for the Senate staff, for the campaign staff… Fritz is effective. I can’t count the things he’s done for me, for me personally, I mean, not just for my father.”

  “Was Blaine around the same way—I mean, as long as you can remember?”

  “Yes. There was always Lan. He wasn’t part of our establishment. He was a friend, a faculty colleague of my mother’s…”

  “Everyone seems to have liked him in their fashion,” Ron said. “I’ve begun to learn some rather unattractive things about him, but even people who had reason to hold him in contempt seem to have liked him… Was it always that way?”

  Lynne frowned. “I’ll tell you something about Lan… there was only one thing in this world that Lan took entirely seriously, and that was Lan. In a sense it was the most attractive thing about him, and in another sense it was the least… I remember times when everyone else was absolutely insane with worry and tension—and he’d be sitting in a corner munching a sandwich or sipping wine, relaxed, unconcerned, effective. Maybe it was because he had a sense of history, but he never let a situation overpower him. He had perspective, he knew the worst wouldn’t happen, or that we would survive even if it did. He didn’t let his emotions overcome his judgment. That was the secret of his success… except about himself. When he was the issue, what he wanted, he could be… well, ugly about anyone or anything getting in his way. He… oh, I’ve said too much, I’m sorry—”

  “Don’t be… by the way, this is noritake.” He held between his chopsticks a slice from a seaweed-wrapped roll of eggs, spinach, and mushrooms. “A specialty here.”

  She took up a slice. “I’m glad we came here,” she said.

  “About Blaine,” Ron said quietly. “You called him your friend. This morning someone told me she doubted he had a friend. I’d like to talk with someone who was really his friend. Do you think your father was his friend?”

  “It’s difficult for my father to give anyone the time the word ‘friend’ implies,” Lynne said hesitantly. “He and Lan respected each other. I never heard them talk much, though, except about business. I doubt they were close friends, I mean in the personal sense.” She shrugged. “Or maybe they were… I don’t know, Ron…”

  “Your mother?” Ron asked. “Was she closer to him than your father?”

  “What does that mean?” She had gone cool again.

  “Nothing. I’m just looking for someone Blaine might have confided in. I know he was upset Tuesday evening. He was nervous. Something was wrong. I wonder if he told anyone what it was.”

  “Someone he was especially close to,” she suggested.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I can assure you that someone was not my mother,” Lynne said with emphasis.

  Ron took up another piece of sushi. He would not pursue the question further, but he would not apologize for it either. It was curious to hear her defensive reaction to his suggestion that her mother had been close to Blaine. He put the questions that raised away in the back of his mind, to be looked at later.

  Her moods swung. As soon as he changed the subject she took his hand again and squeezed it, smiled and relaxed, and returned to the inconsequential banter she had been enjoying before he began asking about Gimbel and Blaine.

  “I wish you weren’t doing this thing, you know,” she said to him over their tea.

  He waited.

  “The investigation, it’s too demanding. And if you fail, well, it could hurt your career—”

  “I don’t know about that.” He took her hand. “Let’s not worry about it now, anyway.”

  “Well… I do want you to know, Ron, that, whatever way it turns out, I… respect you. Whatever happens, it won’t make any difference. None…”

  ***

  His car was a steel blue low-slung Datsun two-seater. He and Lynne had noted with some pleasure on the way to Silver Spring the difficulty the Secret Service men had had keeping up in their carefully nondescript Chevrolet. Now, before leaving Sakura, he told Lester Fitch, head of the detail assigned to them tonight, that he meant to drive through Rock Creek Park, following Beach Drive its whole length. He felt Lynne would enjoy it.

  There was an objection in Fitch’s silent nod—he was faintly disapproving of Ron’s plan to make a long, quiet drive through the park in the middle of the night. As Ron got into the Datsun he smiled at Fitch on the radio in the Chevrolet. He knew what Fitch was saying: that “Hotshoe” (the code name he’d acquired with his appointment as chief investigator) would drive “Kitty” (their code name for Lynne) back to the White House by way of Rock Creek Park and Beach Drive. The detail would follow.

  He entered the park directly. By the time Beach Drive passed under the Beltway the Secret Service car had dropped back out of sight. He did not drive fast. The detail had every chance to catch up, but from shortly after the time when he drove into the park Ron did not see the Secret Service Chevrolet in the rearview mirror.

  “Maybe they’re trying to be a little accommodating for a change,” Lynne said.

  In the dark, under the trees with only a wisp of moon above, he could scarcely see her, but he sensed she was relaxed, stretched out, her legs high and extended, her hands clasped behind her head. Except for the Secret Service car following, which would quickly have caught up if he had stopped, he would have pulled off to the side of the road for a few minutes. As it was he could only reach for her hand, and fumbling for it found his fingers caressing the whispery texture of her hose. She said nothing, accepted his touch.

  “Damn the Secret Service,” he muttered.

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  They had driven some distance in the park, probably out of Maryland and back into the District, when he first noticed headlights behind them, and overtaking rapidly. He supposed it was the Secret Service car, catching up. Of course it could have been someone else, anyone. Then he noticed that the headlights were high. It was a truck, maybe a van. It was coming fast. He edged to the right to let it pass him.

  He caught almost no sight of the van, except to see it was light blue. It was noisy, its muffler probably gone. Its headlights were not equally bright; one was dim and yellow. The driver swerved into the left lane. The van came alongside, fast.

  The right side of the van crashed into the left front fender of the Datsun, jamming the broken fender into the left front tire, which shrieked and exploded. The bulk of the van kept coming right, shoving the Datsun off the road, totally out of Ron’s control. He braked instinctively, wrestled the steering wheel. The Datsun was shoved off the pavement, then off the shoulder of the road, a
nd suddenly it was lurching and skidding down an embankment. The radiator burst. Steam roared loose under the hood. A headlight broke and went out. The windshield shattered. The left front fender ripped loose and rose up like a specter in torn metal. Finally the right side of the car cracked against a tree and the slide stopped in a guttural crunch.

  Lynne was screaming… Ron hadn’t noticed before, but she had been screaming since the van first hit. She was also hurt… he tried to snatch off his seat and shoulder belt to help her. She was sitting on the buckle, shoved over by the collapse of the right door, and when he touched her she called out in pain. “My arm is broken—”

  “We’ve got to get out…” He was afraid it might catch fire.

  He wrenched his belt loose—and hers—in spite of her screams, put his arm under her and tried to pull her across the left seat and out through the one still intact door. She cried out in pain and flailed at him with her left arm. He tried again. Weakened and choking, he was still trying to pull her out of the car when someone pulled him out by the shoulders and thrust his broad shoulders into the car to get Lynne.

  It was Fitch. He put her down on the ground a few feet from the car. She stopped screaming and sat there bent forward, clutching her right arm with her left hand. Fitch bent over her, saying something, examining. The one headlight of the Datsun still shone crazily upward into the leaves overhead. Above them on the road an urgent voice was talking crisply about “Hotshoe” and “Kitty”—the other agent of the detail calling for help. Ron collapsed on the ground, heaved for breath and fought to reorient himself.

  He was not hurt, only bruised, the wind squeezed out of him when he was thrown around inside his shoulder belt. He was able to stand.

  The van had not stopped. “It hit us on purpose,” Ron muttered to Fitch.

  “Sure,” said Fitch.

  Ron didn’t like the tone of voice. “Well, what the hell do you think?”

  “I think you’ve had a little too much to drink, Mr. Fairbanks, but that’s not for me to say, is it?”

  “No, and I suggest you don’t.”

  The District police unit that investigated the accident did not say it. Ron gave his report to two District officers, sitting in the front seat of their car. They did not suggest he submit to an alcohol test. They were quick, and when the third Secret Service detail on the scene offered him a ride home, the District officers did not object to his leaving.

  An emergency squad wagon arrived and gave first aid to Lynne. The paramedics confirmed that her right arm was broken but said they found no other injuries. They left to take her to Walter Reed. Ron told the Secret Service detail now assigned to him to take him there too.

  He was boiling mad, and worried. Someone, clearly, was out to discredit him. Fitch’s crack about him having had too much to drink was no accident. None of it was…

  5

  Ronald Fairbanks’s Apartment, Sunday, June 17, 7:45 AM

  The door buzzer woke him. He’d switched off the telephones—after advising the White House switchboard how to reach him if necessary—and put a Secret Service guard on his apartment door to fend off reporters who had already clustered around it when he came home at 2:00 AM. Their orders were to buzz for no one short of the President, but now the buzzer was persistent. He rolled painfully off the bed, wincing—surprised, in fact, at how much pain he had. He did not own a robe, slept nude and always had. He wrapped a white towel around his waist and made it to the door.

  “It’s Miss Keller, from the Justice Department,” the man outside the door said. “She says it’s important.”

  Jill had brought a stack of newspapers. “Hey,” she said, “you hurt?” He sat down at the table in the kitchen as she put on a pot of coffee. “Seriously. You hurt?”

  He shook his head. “Not yet.” He was looking at the headlines…

  PRESIDENT’S DAUGHTER INJURED IN CAR CRASH

  Special Investigator Driver Possibly Intoxicated

  Lynne Webster, 22-year-old daughter of President Robert L. Webster, was injured in an automobile accident last night in Washington’s Rock Creek Park. Miss Webster was released from Walter Reed Army Medical Center after treatment for a fracture of her right arm and cuts and bruises suffered in the crash of a small Japanese sports car driven by Ronald Y. Fairbanks, 34, Special Counsel to the President, who was this week given special powers to investigate the murder of Secretary of State Lansard Blaine.

  The facts surrounding the accident, which occurred in a secluded wooded area on a winding park road, remain obscure. The investigation by Washington police continues. The small car left the road and plunged down an embankment, striking a tree. Fairbanks told police investigators that he was forced off the road by a van that struck his car as it passed him.

  The President’s daughter and Fairbanks were hurried from the accident scene by Secret Service agents. Fairbanks declined to talk with reporters.

  Drinking Suggested

  Although the Secret Service agents who had accompanied Ms. Webster and Fairbanks to a Silver Spring restaurant followed them in a Secret Service car and were first on the scene after the accident also declined to talk to reporters, one witness at the scene told this reporter that Fairbanks appeared to have been drinking heavily. Inquiries at the Japanese restaurant where the couple had dinner resulted in somewhat confused insistence that Fairbanks had been served nothing but sake, a Japanese rice wine. The witness at the scene said that Fairbanks smelled of alcohol and that his speech was slurred. But police officer James St. John, who took the accident report, said he did not detect any sign of excessive drinking by Fairbanks and had seen no reason to give him a drunkometer test.

  Secluded Road

  No explanation has been offered as to why Fairbanks chose to return to the White House from Silver Spring by driving through Rock Creek Park. The long dark road may have, some speculated, provided a romantic interlude for Fairbanks and the President’s daughter, whose names have often been linked. Washington gossip has had it for more than a year that Fairbanks might become the President’s son-in-law.

  “They’re all the same,” Jill said. “Some of them aren’t as fair as that one.”

  She was right. The story that had gone out on the wire included the statement that a witness said he had been drinking but did not include the statement by the police officer that he had detected no sign of it. Out of town that was the way the story would read, at least at first.

  He was a tangle of sore muscles. Every move he made hurt. Some bruises had appeared overnight: on his hips where the seat belt had restrained him and prevented his going against the windshield, on his legs where the steering wheel had hit him, and on his arms. A cut across the back of his hand that had gone almost unnoticed had bled overnight—he’d find the blood on his sheets—and produced a smeared scab. Jill saw him wince when he moved. She served him coffee and offered to scramble some eggs.

  “Thanks for coming. I really appreciate it…”

  He remained at the table, dressed in the towel looped around his hips. She had come hurriedly, dressed in sand-colored slacks and a white blouse, wearing no makeup. “Gabe called me,” she said. “He heard about you on the radio, at five this morning.”

  “What’s he doing up at five in the morning?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “Am I paranoid to think I was deliberately run off the road?”

  “Who’s your phantom witness?” she asked. “That’s what I want to know. Who gave some reporter the story you smelled of booze, words slurred?”

  He rubbed his forehead with the tips of his fingers. “I know who did that,” he said. “I’ve no doubt about it.”

  “Who?”

  “Lester Fitch, the head of the Secret Service detail that was supposed to be following us—”

  “Supposed to be following…?”

  “Supposed to be, but dropped back. I wasn’t driving fast. Lynne and I wondered if they’d dropped back deliberately, to give us the sense of privacy… Now
I wonder, more than wonder, if they didn’t drop back to give the van a chance to run us off the road and make me look like a damned drunk driver.”

  Jill pushed the eggs aside on the counter and turned to face him, hands on hips, “Lord, man—”

  “It makes some kind of sense, if you think about it.” His head ached, he was not altogether awake even yet. “Blaine was killed by someone in the White House. Let’s not forget that. If we’re getting close to someone, why so farfetched that someone wants to discredit the investigation? Or at least try to scare me off.”

  She shook her head. “You’re accusing Fitch?”

  “No, not of killing Blaine—”

  “Then someone would have to have had enough authority, or enough influence over Fitch…”

  “Gimbel,” Ron said.

  “That’s a guess.”

  “It fits, though.”

  “Have you said this to anyone but me?”

  “I just got up.”

  “Well, don’t. I think maybe you had your brains a little scrambled last night. Before you make an accusation like that you’d better have a ton of hard evidence to back it up. Ron, you’re the lawyer—”

  “I don’t have any hard evidence to back anything,” he muttered. “So I’m beginning to speculate just like any other layman. I have another thought—”

  “I’m not sure I even want to hear it.”

  “Based on Lynne’s reaction to something I said, I’m beginning to think Catherine Webster had an affair with Blaine.”

  Special Investigation Office, The West Wing, Sunday, June 17, 11:00 AM

  Ron sat behind his desk. He was stiff, had had to ease himself into his chair. Gabe Haddad smiled, having already heard him joke grimly about his aches and bruises, but Walter Locke, the FBI agent, frowned and looked away.

  Lying on Ron’s desk was a note from the President. It was handwritten in the familiar hasty scrawl. “Carry on,” it said. “Our confidence in you remains all that it was. RLW.”