Murder in the White House

by Margaret Truman

  Ron watched them for a moment, then turned away. His impulse was to leave the room, to give them their privacy; but to get up now and leave would be awkward and perhaps hurtful. He heard them speaking very quietly and was glad he couldn’t make out what they said. He tried to be absolutely still, wished he could make himself invisible.

  Finally, after a minute or so, the President told him to go on. “But tell us who it is. No more prologues.”

  “Mr. President,” Ron said quietly, “Mrs. Webster, after every conversation with Blaine, Martha Kingsley called the White House and reported to Fritz Gimbel—”

  “Fritz… yes, you suspect Fritz… you have from the beginning—did from the beginning.”

  Ron was determined not to be intimidated. “If you can tell me, Mr. President,” he said, “that Gimbel reported to you what Martha Kingsley reported to him, then my suspicions become a lot less valid.”

  The President looked hard at him.

  “Bob…” Catherine whispered.

  The President shook his head… “It doesn’t prove… Fritz wouldn’t necessarily report something to me he’d been told by a prostitute… anyway, how do you know she told him anything? Who says she did?”

  “She does—”

  “So we’re to accept her word? Suppose I call him in here and he denies it?”

  “I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t, sir. Not yet… Mr. President, it’s my job to report to you what the evidence indicates. I admitted I couldn’t prove my case… yet.”

  “You’ve talked to this woman?” Catherine Webster asked.

  “Yes, twice. Saturday morning and this afternoon. After the first meeting she called Gimbel and reported what I’d asked her—”

  “According to her,” the President said.

  Ron nodded. “According to her.”

  Catherine said, “Are you sure Lan told her…?”

  “She told me he did.”

  “But she didn’t tell you what?”

  “No.”

  Catherine reached for her husband’s hand, then looked at Ron. “Do you feel you must know the story to finish the investigation?”

  “I’m not sure. There are other reasons for suspecting Gimbel. I think he arranged my automobile accident Saturday night, but I’m not certain why. Is he in the pay of the consortium too? Even if he is, why would they kill Blaine in the White House? Why not at his home or somewhere else? So what other motive? Maybe—to be entirely frank—to protect your secret. It all keeps coming back to that… Gimbel is one of the very few who knows Blaine threatened you. Even the Attorney General, who knows Blaine threatened you, doesn’t know what he threatened to tell. Is it something important enough, damaging enough, Mrs. Webster, for Gimbel to have killed Blaine to prevent him telling…?”

  “We are not going to tell you,” the President said bluntly. “If we have to deal with this woman—pay her, or whatever—we will do that. But I tell you it has nothing to do with the murder of Lansard Blaine. And Fritz did not kill Blaine. I just don’t believe it.”

  Catherine shook her head while the President was talking. “I think you’re making a mistake, Bob.”

  Ignoring her, he said to Ron, “Blaine made his threat in a burst of temper. I admit I took it seriously at the time but… I told you this… he came to us and apologized and said of course he wouldn’t reveal a personal matter. He said he was deeply ashamed even to have mentioned the notion… He promised to keep our confidence, just as he had for more than twenty years. We felt we could trust him to keep it in the future, in spite of his momentary tantrum. He offered me his resignation then, and I accepted it. He asked for time, I gave it. The incident was closed. And Fritz heard it all. If Fritz ever thought of killing Blaine to keep him from telling our secret, that motive evaporated.” The President shook his head. “No. It’s your damn consortium that killed Blaine. And you haven’t linked Fritz to that.”

  “Martha Kingsley links him to it,” Ron said.

  The President was about to say something in rebuttal when the telephone buzzed. He went to his desk and picked it up… “I’ll have him call you,” he said after listening for a moment. “As soon as he can.” He turned to Ron. “Your office. But let’s finish this. As I hope I’ve made clear, I’m not ready to accept your accusation of Fritz—you don’t really have very much to back it up, and it doesn’t make any sense to me…”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but the investigation still seems to focus on him—”

  “We’re about to lose control of the investigation,” the President said impatiently. “It’s ready to break out in all directions—”

  “Do you want my resignation?”

  The President shook his head. “You have an impossible job, Ron. I knew it might be, and so did you… God, I guess it might be Fritz. To be honest, we’ve thought of it too… and if Fritz did have anything to do with it it will bring down the Administration. Blaine… then Fritz… everything we’ve worked for… Find me somebody else, Ron. God, let it be somebody else…”

  Ron, stunned by this naked show of emotion by a president admitting his vulnerability, asking for help, putting himself and his presidency in his hands, tried to get out something reassuring, and was abruptly stopped by the President’s next words.

  “If Fritz did it, we can’t protect him, no matter his good motive… we can’t cover it up…” And then, as if grasping at straws, the President said very quietly, “But you said you didn’t have evidence, only a strong suspicion—”

  “Ron,” Catherine broke in, “why don’t you check in with your office? The call may have been important…”

  The President sat on the couch, hunched forward with his folded arms resting on his knees while Ron went to his desk and picked up the telephone. Catherine caressed the President’s back.

  Ron called the switchboard. The operator said the call was from the FBI agent Walter Locke, and she would connect him. He was at FBI headquarters.

  “Mr. Fairbanks? I’m sorry to interrupt. They said you were with the President, but I think you ought to know what’s happened.”

  “It’s all right, go ahead.”

  “We have standing orders with the Metropolitan Police. They have a list of people. They’re to notify us immediately if anything happens involving any of those people. We had a call about an hour ago. One of the people on that list is Martha Kingsley. The woman is dead, Mr. Fairbanks. She’s been murdered.”

  4

  The President’s face was an alarming, unnatural high pink. His voice was unsteady. “It hasn’t anything to do with…”—he glanced at Catherine—“I mean, a woman like that… plenty of people could have had reason…”

  Ron, still standing beside the desk, rested his hand on the telephone he had just returned to its cradle. If the President’s face were conspicuously red, he imagined his own was white. Catherine Webster had covered her face with her hands. Was she crying? He couldn’t tell.

  Ron spoke first. “The police think she might have been raped. Locke went to the apartment and saw the body before it was taken away. She’d been beaten and strangled, and she was naked. It could have been a rape-killing… might have nothing to do with this at all.”

  “Coincidence…” the President said weakly.

  “It could be…”

  Catherine looked up. “Both of you know better.”

  “Even if it was a complete stranger,” the President said, “her life, and the people in it, will become news… including her customers… and maybe that she and Fritz were… friends. Complete security with someone like her would be near-impossible… someone else must know about the contacts between Fritz and her…”

  “Except for ourselves,” Catherine said woodenly, “no one has known about our personal matter except Lan, and Fritz, and then, apparently, this young woman. Lan is dead, and now she’s dead—”

  “What are you suggesting?” the President said, knowing only too well what it was, and not wanting to face it.

  “It’s another
of Ron’s links, Bob. What did the two have in common? Not much, except that both of them knew our secret—”

  “And Gimbel knew they knew it,” Ron finished for her.

  “Doesn’t prove anything,” the President muttered.

  “Coincidence again?” asked Catherine.

  The President looked thoughtfully at Catherine. “You never liked Fritz.” He said it with regret in his voice.

  “That’s right, Bob… I admit it, I just don’t trust men who can be so devoted…”

  “Assuming I even understand you, who should I have trusted? Lan Blaine?”

  “Right now you had better trust Ron… and, Bob, if you won’t tell him the whole story, I will—”

  “I said before it isn’t necessary, has nothing to do with—”

  “Bob… someone is going around killing the people who know. It might be a coincidence but it’s irrational to persist in thinking so. Ron is entitled to know. You made him investigator and put him in an impossible position. He has something at stake too. You have to trust him. Besides, please remember that Lynne cares for him, he may even be a member of the family someday…”

  The President looked up at Ron, who still stood by the desk with his hand still on the telephone. The President inclined his head toward the chair where Ron had been sitting before. Ron sat down. The President rubbed his mouth with a fist.

  “Ron… I’m afraid Catherine is right. You have to know.”

  “Perhaps I should tell him?”

  Robert Webster shook his head… “I called Blaine a liar, told him I couldn’t trust him, that he’d lost his integrity. Which not surprisingly made him furious. He all but screamed at me. ‘I’ll tell the world what integrity means to Bob Webster,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell the world what it means to Catherine Webster.’ He said he would tell, unless I accepted some exemptions from the trade agreements. He said—and it was pretty chilling, I can tell you, to hear him—that he would tell what he knew about Catherine and me… Ron, I could have killed him, and for sure I can’t honestly tell you I’m sorry he’s dead…” It was apparent he had to struggle to speak. He was still flushed, shook his head and took a deep breath.

  “Bob…” Catherine said, “I can tell it, it’s my story anyway—”

  The President shrugged miserably.

  Catherine turned on the couch to face Ron. The President was between them, and she leaned forward a little, to see past him to speak directly to Ron. She put her hand on the President’s hand… “We lived, as you know, in Ann Arbor. Bob’s business was in Detroit, and I taught at the University of Michigan. This was twenty-two years ago… twenty-three. I was—what?—thirty-one? The boys were home. Bob was building his business, we certainly had no thought of ever going into politics. We had a comfortable little circle. Lan was on the faculty. I met him there. He was, I suppose, more my kind of person than Bob’s. I liked Lan, I made him our friend. He was at the house often. He knew the boys. Fritz Gimbel was around too, and the contrast between them then was even greater than later. Fritz—Bob doesn’t like me to say this—was Bob’s factotum… He worked at the company and made himself so ingratiating, so useful, you just couldn’t run him off. So he was around too. Anyway, there were the two of them… There were stories around that Lan and I were lovers. Well, we were not. Never. I suppose in this investigation you’ve come across suggestions to the contrary. I’m telling you it never happened. Bob knows it never happened…”

  Ron, feeling increasingly uncomfortable in the face of such personal exchanges, could only listen and nod rather dumbly.

  “My field is psychiatry, as you know,” she went on. “I’m a psychiatrist, not a psychologist. I have my M.D. I taught, and I also practiced. Some of my patients were students. I saw them at home. We had a big house and I had room for a study where I saw my patients. Bob’s business kept him away a good deal. Many nights he worked late, he traveled some. We have always loved each other, but we have lived independently, each having a career, interests, friends… As you know, I didn’t give up my career to be an adjunct to his until he was elected President… All right, I’m setting the scene, in a roundabout way, for what happened…”

  Ron nodded automatically, his attention fixed not only on the story she was telling but on her effort at self-control. Her tone was calm, cool, but the tension beneath was palpable; so far she’d managed to overpower it. She was, by any standards, a handsome woman, poised and polished.

  The President, too, was watching her closely.

  “As I said, there were Bob’s friends, and my friends, and our friends, although inevitably the friends became intermixed some. One of Bob’s friends was a man named Oakes, George Oakes…

  “George Oakes was a business acquaintance of Bob, and Bob arranged for the Oakeses and us to meet for dinner. George and Betty Oakes were some ten years older than us, but we became friends and saw a good deal of each other. We were at each other’s houses, went out to dinner, to shows. One year we even took a vacation together in Jamaica…

  “Our boys were still young,” Catherine was saying. “Bob, Junior, was in high school at that time, and Sam was in elementary school. The Oakeses had a son… Stan. He was graduating from high school about the same time we met the Oakeses and was a student at the university during this time when we were such friends with his parents. Uh… Stan was a handsome, personable, warm-hearted kid, you couldn’t help liking him… but he had a problem—”

  Catherine stopped abruptly, looked at her husband and whispered something to him that Ron could not hear. The President, sotto voce, said something back, perhaps, Ron guessed, that she didn’t have to go on.

  “George pretty much dominated his son,” the President said, taking up the story with obvious reluctance. “I’m not the psychiatrist in this family but I always thought that that had a bit to do with what was wrong with Stan. He was plain afraid of his old man, could never do enough to suit him. The boy was bright, all right, but never bright enough to suit George, who’d scrambled his way up at General Motors and had ambitions to go even higher and saw life generally as a constant fight to do more, earn more, get recognized more—and in the process never to be satisfied. I have to say this for him, though… he was as hard on himself as he was on Stan.”

  “He was a severely flawed man,” Catherine said. “We didn’t know it then, he was pleasant enough to be around and a psychiatrist isn’t always too perceptive out of the office… everyone needs time off…”

  Was she apologizing, Ron thought? It seemed so. Strange…

  “His wife had her problems too,” the President said. “You know, people like that pass through your life, you sort of fall in with them because on the surface they’re pleasant enough, you have some apparent, surfacey things in common…”

  “We had to keep Lan Blaine away from the house when the Oakeses were there,” Catherine said, rather abruptly taking back the story. “He would cut little slices off George—conversationally, I mean—and either George was too self-absorbed to notice or too much the gentleman to fight back.” She sighed, and her face colored. “Anyway, as we said, their son Stan had an emotional problem. He needed help, that was plain. One night at dinner George and Betty proposed that I take Stan on as a patient. I declined, I said our personal relationship precluded my taking their son as a patient. They brought it up several times after that, literally begged me to take their son on as a patient. They argued that I owed it as a friend, and besides if Stan were my patient, it could be considered just friendly counseling or some such, and I suspect they rationalized on their own behalf that they wouldn’t have to admit, to themselves or anybody, that their son needed and was getting psychiatric treatment… Well, I felt for the boy. You could see he was living in some kind of hell, but still, I felt I couldn’t mix a personal and professional relationship. Then one night we got a call…

  “George asked us to come to their house. He sounded scared to death. He said Stan had tried to kill himself. The police were all over the place.
The emergency squad had taken him away, pumped phenobarbital out of him, and barely managed to save him. George and Betty Oakes, having denied the truth so long, were unable to cope. They just couldn’t understand how…

  “So… against my better judgment,” Catherine said, “I did take on Stanley Oakes as a patient.”

  She stared hard at Ron for a moment, as if trying to guess how he would react to the rest of the story and trying to decide how to tell it. Clearly, Ron thought, it was deeply painful for her to go on.

  “Catherine,” the President said, “how about I go out and make us some drinks?”

  She nodded gratefully.

  The President put his hand first on her shoulder, then on Ron’s as he went by them out of the room.

  “Mrs. Webster, I’m really sorry to put you through this, maybe the President is right, maybe it isn’t necessary—”

  She smiled weakly, shook her head. “No, I’ve gone this far, it wouldn’t be right to stop now… Well, Stan’s suicide attempt was kept quiet. I persuaded him to go on with his classes at the university. He was doing well in spite of his emotional problem. He would go to classes until the middle of the afternoon, and about three he would come to our house. I would meet with him in my little home office… Ron, I don’t know how much you’ve studied psychology so let me put it this way… Stan Oakes was emotionally empty. Never mind the technical term for it… He was convinced no one loved him. That sounds like a sob story, except when it’s not, it’s a terrible thing. This is what this boy literally believed. He felt—and that’s what counts—that he had never received any love, and so he believed he was unworthy of it, that he didn’t deserve it. And he couldn’t give what he didn’t feel worthy to receive. He was a boy without a shred of self-esteem. The sessions were painful. He would break down and cry. His parents had taught him it was not manly to cry, that his father never cried. With me he at least was able to risk crying. It wasn’t easy for him… Do you see where this is leading?”