Murder in the White House

by Margaret Truman

  The Dash article of Monday morning had been followed on this morning by another, reporting more details of the personal finances of the late Secretary of State. He had had, Barbara Dash now reported, an inexplicable habit, developed only since he became Secretary of State, for paying bills with cash—he ran up accounts with stores but came in, or sent his chauffeur in, to pay the bills with cash in large denominations. A wire story said that Blaine had reported an annual income of less than one hundred thousand dollars in each of the past five years—hardly enough to pay for his art collection, his wardrobe, his wine cellar, his vacations, his gifts to women…

  “It’s just beginning,” Ron said. “It’s going to break… Whatever he says, they’ll say he put the investigation in the hands of a bunch of amateurs to cover up, delay… but I don’t think he’s sacrificing us, I just can’t believe that, Jill—”

  “He’s a convincing man,” she said noncommittally.

  “Well, we can’t just quit, walk out.”

  “No.”

  The telephone buzzed. He picked it up. “All right, in a minute.” He said to Jill, “There’s a man here to see me. Look… I can get you out, you and Gabe. I can send you back to Justice—”

  “No, damn it.”

  He smiled, a graveyard smile. “Okay, kid… but if you change your mind—”

  “I won’t,” and she went out to send in the man waiting to see him.

  It was Burke Kincaid, security officer from the Canadian Embassy. A crisp, quick, middle-aged man, he sat in the chair beside Ron’s desk, and briskly opened a small leather briefcase.

  “You sent us an inquiry about one Philippe Grand,” he said.

  “Yes,” Ron said, surprised. He’d called the inquiry to the embassy only early this morning. “The name mean anything to you?”

  “It does, and we’re curious that an inquiry should come from the office investigating the murder of Lansard Blaine. I hope there’s no connection.”

  “Who is Philippe Grand?”

  “I wish we knew,” the Canadian said. “It’s a name used by one or more operatives of the Quebec liberation movement. Probably more than one. Whenever there’s mischief, it’s attributed to Philippe Grand… a bomber, a sniper, a saboteur. They paint his name on walls. If he’s done half what they claim for him we could hang him… Why have you inquired?”

  “During the four months before his death Lansard Blaine had a number of telephone calls at the State Department from a man who called himself Philippe Grand. Blaine returned those calls.”

  “Your Secretary of State had conversations with a Quebec terrorist?” Kincaid was indignant.

  “He had conversations with someone named Philippe Grand who spoke with a French accent. We’re checking all the names on his telephone log. This is one of them we have no explanation for.”

  “The only explanations that come to mind are ones I should very much not want to hear.”

  “Look, since Blaine is dead and I have no information other than the name Philippe Grand on a telephone log—plus the recollection of a secretary that she heard a French accent on the telephone—I’m afraid the explanation will have to come from you,” Ron said.

  “I should like,” said Kincaid, “to have some assurance that Blaine’s contacts with the Quebec liberation movement did not have the sanction of official U.S. policy—”

  “I’ve no authority to give you that assurance, I think it’s apparent, though, if you’ve been following what’s come out since Blaine’s death, that he was involved in a great many things that didn’t have the sanction of U.S. policy.”

  “Will your government disavow him?”

  “I don’t know. Frankly I don’t think it’s necessary.”

  “I’ve brought here,” Kincaid said, taking a document from his briefcase, “a summary of what we know about Philippe Grand. If you learn anything that might help us track him down we should be very grateful to hear it.”

  ***

  “Quebec liberation movement!” Gabe Haddad was looking at the report Kincaid had given Ron. “For God’s sake, what was Blaine doing?”

  “Complicating our investigation,” said Ron glumly… “as far as I’m concerned it’s just someone else who might have killed him. Playing cozy with fanatics can be dangerous stuff…”

  “I had a call this morning from Barbara Lund,” Gabe said. “You know, the nude dancer? Jeremy Johnson called her yesterday, wanted to know if we’d talked to her and if so what she told us. He told her she was stupid to talk to us and she wouldn’t talk to us any more if she knew what’s good for her. I feel like shaking him up a little—”

  Ron shook his head. “We have worse problems, time is running out.”

  “I know.”

  “I offered Jill the chance to go back to Justice.”

  “She didn’t take it,” Gabe said, again looking at the paper from Kincaid—or pretending to.

  “Did she tell you?”

  “No. I can guess what she said. I know what kind of woman she is; I hope you appreciate her.”

  He paused, said quietly, “I do… she’s capable, tough—”

  “Not what I mean.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Gabe glanced down at the Kincaid paper again. “She’ll stick with you, you’ve made an impression on her.”

  “Meaning…?”

  “Meaning is obvious, for God’s sake.”

  Ron nodded, changed the subject. “I make you the same offer I made Jill. We look like we’re falling on our faces. If you want out, I won’t blame you—”

  Gabe shook his head. “I’ll stick,” he said. “I’m a sucker for lost causes.”

  ***

  Ron had a one o’clock appointment for lunch. He worked until twelve at his desk, making calls about the names on the Blaine telephone logs. In a week the FBI hadn’t been able to identify four more names—George Vogel, Sandra McGraw, Allison Keller, and William Furst. The usual sources had produced nothing, and Ron’s calls on hunches produced nothing. He spoke to the President’s press secretary and promised either to submit to questioning at a news conference the next day or issue a statement about the progress of the investigation. He reviewed a report from an FBI field agent in Las Vegas, sent in response to an order from Locke, saying he had reason to suspect Lansard Blaine had money on deposit with two casinos even though he’d never been to Las Vegas and had never gambled there. The evidence behind the agent’s suspicion was not hard, and Ron put the report aside. An effort to find out whether or not Blaine had kept number accounts in Zurich had run up against a wall. Very blank.

  He locked his files and desk. He was ready to leave for his lunch date when the telephone buzzed. Lynne was outside and wanted to see him.

  “I’ve been reading the papers, watching television,” she said quietly, unhappily. She sat on his couch, wearing a faded red blouse, a sleeve of which had been split to let the cast on her arm through. “They’re not treating you very well.”

  “It’s to be expected—”

  “No. When they said you were drunk Saturday night, that was bad enough. Now they’re saying you’re incompetent to conduct this investigation, even that you’re covering up something for my father.”

  “We had to understand, Lynne, from the moment Blaine was killed that things would get very, very tough.” He stood facing her, leaning back against the front of his desk. “I didn’t have to accept this job. When I did I knew the possible consequences—”

  “They don’t have to be personal,” she said, half whispering. “The political attacks, they don’t have to be so personal…”

  He smiled. “You should be used to them by now.”

  She shook her head. “Not the personal things… I only hope… when it’s all over, you won’t wish you’d never heard of us—my family… me…”

  He bent forward and kissed her. “I doubt very much I’ll ever wish that.”

  The Supreme Court of the United States, Tuesday, June 19, 1:00 PM

 
; He was on time, even though he’d had to break away from Lynne too abruptly—he’d not told her where he was going. It was the Justice, though, who was a few minutes late, and so he had a moment to talk with Elizabeth Delsey, the Judge’s secretary; and when word passed around that he was in Justice Friederich’s office and waiting for him, others drifted in to see him—pages, secretaries, two of the library staff… they all remembered him, a former law clerk to the judge. It was like a family…

  It was almost ten years now since he’d come to the Court to clerk for Justice Friederich. To be chosen by him was a special distinction. In the tradition of Felix Frankfurter, Friederich chose no one but the best and expected nothing but the best from them. That they should spend a part of their careers in the public service was part of that tradition. In addition to a Special Counsel to the President, Justice Friederich’s ex-clerks included a former Attorney General of the United States, the current Deputy Attorney General, a Securities and Exchange Commissioner, the Ambassador to the United Nations, a Judge of the United States Court of Appeals, two Judges of United States District Courts, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, a former United States Senator, and the Mayor of San Francisco. None of them ever failed at least to telephone Justice Friederich when they came to Washington or, if they lived there, to call on him once or twice a year. He remained their mentor, their sponsor.

  From that first day ten years ago the Supreme Court never failed to intrigue Ron Fairbanks. He was fascinated by the vested power of the Court, the subdued tensions among the justices, and the self-conscious traditions in which the Court enveloped itself to conceal both power and tension. His only defined—and secret—ambition was to become a Supreme Court judge himself, though it was so lofty an ambition he had never dared mention it to anyone…

  “Ron…” Justice Friederich said warmly, shaking his hand. He, too, was a politician; he’d been a district attorney in upstate New York, then a New York Court of Appeals judge and a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit before he was appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States thirteen years previously. But he was a politician of a rare stripe… he communicated a genuine warmth, Ron could feel he was really glad to see him. Judge Friederich was a tall man, six-feet-three, with gray hair around the edges of his spotted bald head. He wore horn-rim spectacles and favored bow ties. “Sit down, be comfortable. A whisky before lunch? You take scotch, as I recall.”

  Their lunch was to be served in the Justice’s office. Ron said he’d like the scotch and soda, then sat down in the fat brown-leather couch where he’d sat so many times, years ago, while he reviewed with the judge his research into the complexities of some case pending before the Court.

  “Got yourself a real mess, haven’t you?” Friederich settled into the huge leather armchair that faced the couch across a big, low table.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “He asked you to take it on?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you couldn’t have refused. He’s in trouble himself. Deep trouble. And you can’t be a member of a president’s official family and refuse your share of the trouble when it comes.”

  “Given time, we can wind up this thing, but it takes time—”

  “Given time you could bail out the ocean with a bucket. Well, do you want to talk about it?”

  “I’d like to, yes.”

  “It won’t be coming before this Court?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  After a discreet rap on the door Elizabeth Delsey entered and served their scotches, told them lunch would be ready in fifteen minutes.

  “Are you sure Webster’s not making you the goat? Do you trust him?”

  “Yes… I do, but I also feel he hasn’t told me everything I need to know, and I’m damn troubled by that…”

  “Well, if it’s any comfort to you, it’s my estimate of the man that he’s as honest as you can be and be President of the United States today. I wouldn’t have suggested you join his administration if I didn’t think so—”

  “Blaine threatened him,” Ron broke in. “Blaine threatened to make public something that’s intensely painful to Webster, and his wife. I’ve no idea what it is. He insists it’s personal and has nothing to do with his conduct of the presidency—”

  “Everything in his life has to do with his conduct of the presidency.”

  Ron nodded, but as he watched the judge, sipping his scotch, he wondered if in his successive judgeships he’d not withdrawn a bit from the real world, if it were not a little too easy for him to pronounce his judgments. The world didn’t intrude much into this room of leather chairs, leather-bound books, old wood, thick carpets; if it had, it had left no visible sign.

  “You’re telling me, Ron, that he had a motive?”

  “I am.”

  “Do you really think he had anything to do with it?”

  Ron shook his head. “Maybe I’m just naive—”

  “No,” Friederich said thoughtfully, “I don’t think so. Between you and me, and strictly off the record, I think Robert Webster is potentially a great President. His notion of the multilateral trade agreements may be a return to mercantilism, but it represents about the only fresh thought in international economics in fifty years. I know he didn’t originate the idea but he had the sense to consider and adopt it, and for that he deserves credit—”

  “I just can’t think he’d kill a man this way. It’s that basic for me—”

  “I agree”—he took another sip of scotch—“nothing so crude as a piece of wire, and in the White House itself… Seriously, did I ever tell you, Ron, how I met him?”

  “No, sir.”

  “We were on a program together. He was a senator. I spoke, then he did. We were seated together at the dinner that followed. His wife was there—Catherine. She’s a psychiatrist, as you doubtless know… she was a professor of psychiatric medicine at the University of Michigan at the time. I admire a man who’s not embarrassed to openly display affection for his wife, and when I saw he was holding her hand under the dinner table, I began to like him. After dinner they asked me to have a drink in their suite and I went up with them. There were some people in and out, but after a while we were alone and sat and talked. They’d had enough to drink, both of them, to be fairly open, and they began to tell me about their children… Bob, Junior, you know, is a successful lawyer on Wall Street. Sam’s a marine biologist. Lynne was still in high school then, but they told me how well she was doing. They came to a sort of self-conscious break, then looked at me, obviously expecting me to say something about my children. I only have one child, as you know, and of course I had to tell them that my son was retarded. A lovable thirty-five-year-old child. Catherine Webster began to cry.”

  Ron stared into his glass, not knowing what to say.

  “An exchange like that tends to make people friends sooner than they’d expect.”

  “Yes… sir, do you have any idea what Blaine was talking about when he threatened to reveal something from the Websters’ personal lives?”

  “No, but it’s hard to imagine that people who’ve lived in the public eye as long as they have could have too many skeletons in their closet.”

  Ron sipped his scotch. “Well, it’s obviously something that troubles them pretty deeply…”

  Lunch served, Friederich asked Ron about the confirmation hearings soon to begin on the President’s appointment of Judge Roscoe Runyon to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and over lunch they talked about that appointment and the senatorial opposition to it. He’d confided to Ron before that he hoped President Webster would appoint Judge Runyon to the next vacant seat on the Supreme Court. Although Justice Friederich did not expect ever to be Chief Justice, he was flattered to hear the present Court called “the Friederich Court.” If Runyon could join him, his group of pragmatic intellectuals would be in a solid position to dominate the Supreme Court. Ron also knew Runyon’s chances weren’t too good. The President admired
Friederich but he wasn’t sure he wanted to give him the majority swing in the Supreme Court. The Senate opposition to Runyon’s Sixth Circuit appointment was not real and would go away when the time came to vote. Ron suspected it had been quietly arranged by Fritz Gimbel, probably at the President’s suggestion, to make it easier to pass over Judge Runyon when a Supreme Court seat did become vacant.

  It was only after lunch that Friederich led the conversation back to Ron’s murder investigation… “What you call a consortium is real, I’m sure. I’m sure it exists, and I’m sure Blaine was involved in it some way. Indeed, he may have been its victim. But it seems to me you’re losing something. I think perhaps you’ve misplaced your emphasis—”

  “How?”

  “What in your judgment, Ron, is the most significant single fact about the murder of Blaine?”

  Ron smiled. The judge was reverting to his favorite conversational technique—the Socratic dialogue. “What’s the most significant fact in your judgment, sir?”

  Friederich shrugged. “That Blaine was murdered inside the White House.”

  “I can’t disagree with that—”

  “So the killer must have been—”

  “A White House insider,” Ron said, finishing the sentence as he knew the Justice expected him to do.

  “So?”

  “So whoever did it covered it very well. I can’t clearly identify a suspect—except Fritz Gimbel, and my suspicion of him may be only a prejudice on my part. To find a suspect, to build a case against a suspect, I need a motive. It’s primer stuff, but only when I know why Blaine was killed will I be able to get close to who killed him—”

  “And your motive lies in the so-called consortium and in Blaine’s corruption—”

  “I haven’t found any other.”

  “All right, let’s assume that… but he was killed inside the White House. You need the link between the consortium outside and the killer inside.”