Murder in the White House

by Margaret Truman

  Ron shook his head.

  “No, of course you don’t… why should you? …Well, I made the mistake of a lifetime,” she said bleakly. “And not just a professional lifetime… He felt he couldn’t give, or receive, love. I, his doctor and counselor, proved to him he was wrong. I’m not defending it, although I suppose I could… It was unprofessional. It was disloyal to my husband and children”—she did not look back at Ron—“it was, God knows, stupid, at best, bad judgment. And it didn’t even help him, although he said otherwise. He had never been allowed anything much before, by girls his age. I… introduced him… and he was shrewd enough to think of the best way to encourage me to continue… He pretended it helped him, and he was very convincing.

  “I know, I know, I should have seen through all this, but psychiatrists are human too, they’re vulnerable almost by definition. Still, no question, I was a fool. Even when I told myself that my instinct had been wrong, my judgment bad, I still went on with him… he would come to the house for his appointment, and almost every day… in my office… for a month…”

  She had closed her eyes, “Oh yes, I wanted to stop. But now I was compromised… he demanded that I go on. I lost control… I was afraid he’d become hysterical and go screaming to his parents, maybe to others… Even so, I at least began to… well… extricate myself from the situation. I stopped seeing him on a daily basis. He would call and say he had to see me, that he was feeling very depressed. I couldn’t be sure when he was lying… it’s not so easy to tell as you might think, and remember, he’d tried to commit suicide… I would tell him he could come to see me, but only to talk. He would come, and too often he got what he wanted… He would beg, he… he would threaten suicide, and he was suicidal… The sessions were exhausting… each one was a war… But at least gradually I was weaning him away, I felt… the last time was ten days after the time before… And then, I found I was pregnant.” She looked directly at Ron, who could not face her.

  “I told Bob,” she said. “It was—to put it mildly—the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life. Bob Webster is a finer man than you can imagine… he was shaken at first… who wouldn’t be? …but then he told me that we would just announce that we were having another baby. We would raise the child. He would be its father and we would never tell Stan Oakes that he had had anything to do with it. Yes… we talked about my having an abortion, but decided against it. It was illegal at the time, and in any case we were opposed to it in principle. Bob reminded me that no one but ourselves would ever know the baby was not his… and it wasn’t his, if you’re wondering… we weren’t doing much together at that time. Too preoccupied with our separate worlds. No question, the child was Stan Oakes’s.”

  Ron opened his mouth and formed a word. It did not come. He tried again. “Lynne?” He could barely get it out.

  Catherine Webster nodded.

  “Does she know?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Blaine knew? And Gimbel?”

  She nodded again. “There’s more, and if you can believe it, it gets worse…”

  Ron remembered what Martha Kingsley had said, that even she pitied the Websters. The cynical call girl, hearing the story only from Blaine, had pitied the President of the United States and the First Lady. No wonder…

  Catherine straightened, took a deep breath. “Things went all right for a while. I was three months pregnant and we hadn’t told anyone as yet. Bob assured me he would love the child. I did the same. I kept Stan Oakes away from me. Bob helped. I could tell Stan that Bob was home. And he was. Stan would call and beg for a session but I kept him away. I didn’t see him at all for more than two weeks. George and Betty asked me why I wasn’t seeing their son anymore, and I said something also unprofessional… that Stan had improved enough to cut down on his therapy. I should have told them to get him another doctor, even to a hospital if necessary, but, to be frank, I was afraid he would tell them, or another psychiatrist, what I had done. I could have lost my license. I should have lost it…

  “Finally there was the night Bob and I were having a small dinner party. It was an unusual party, just Lan Blaine and Fritz Gimbel were there. Fritz, because we were celebrating some contract Webster Corporation had just won. Lan, because he was almost always there. I had drunk a good deal of wine. I felt almost relaxed, for a change…”

  The telephone was ringing. The maid answered and told Catherine that a patient was calling, he said it was an emergency and he sounded scary. Catherine, of course, knew immediately who it was. And, all unreasonably she told herself, she felt a tremendous anger, resentment. Damn it… this was the first time in months she’d felt almost human… she tried to suppress her feelings, but they were dangerously close to the surface… Stan was crying. He said he’d lost her love, that she was the only person who had ever cared anything for him and now he had lost her… He had to see her, he said. He demanded she leave the house that minute and meet him somewhere, anywhere. She told him she couldn’t do that, and that she was not going to see him at her home anymore, only at her office at the university. And with the door open. He knew what that meant, of course… He sobbed and groaned and carried on as he’d done before. He told her he would kill himself if she didn’t go on with him… it was all he lived for… She was the only person who’d ever loved him, the only person he’d ever been able to love. Catherine, fighting to regain her composure, told him he would find other women who would love him, now that he had learned how to love… No, he said, he hadn’t learned, he’d only lost his love. And on and on…

  “Well,” she said, “I finally lost patience, became sharp with him. I told him to try to control himself and stop acting like an idiot. I actually used that word. I was no longer the doctor talking to a patient, I was a woman in her own home reacting to an infuriating, terrifying, personal situation… I’m not excusing it, just explaining, as best I can… I talked to him just the way his father had. It was, of course, the worst thing I could have done.

  “Finally I hung up on him. I went back to the dinner table, told Bob who had called and said I had told him never to call me again. Bob handed me a glass of wine, and, God help us, we drank a toast to that. Neither Lan nor Fritz understood, of course. Not then… An hour later we got another call. This time it was from George Oakes… Stan was dead. He had shot himself.”

  She was weeping quietly now, and went to the President’s desk and pulled a handful of tissues from a drawer to wipe her eyes.

  When the President returned, she was sitting slumped, holding tissues to her face, quietly sobbing.

  Ron looked up at the President, who stood just inside the door with a tray of glasses. “I’m so sorry,” he half whispered, “I’m sorry I insisted that you tell me—”

  “Did she tell you about the note?” the President asked as he put the tray on the coffee table.

  “No.”

  “I didn’t get to it.” Catherine’s voice was barely audible.

  “All right,” the President said. “Might as well get it all out now… There was a suicide note.” He handed a scotch and soda to Catherine, then one to Ron. “When we got the call saying the young man had shot himself, Catherine was, of course, terribly upset—”

  “I was hysterical,” she said. “The great psychiatrist…”

  The President shook his head, went on. “The Oakeses were on the telephone begging us to come over, to help them, deal with the police… Catherine was crying. I went to the Oakeses’ house and Fritz Gimbel went with me. Lan Blaine stayed with Catherine. When Fritz and I got to the house the police hadn’t yet been called. Fritz and I went upstairs, to look at the body. I found the note. It said too much, and I put it in my pocket. Later, at home, I burned it.”

  “That was the night when Lan learned everything,” Catherine said. “I told him everything that night. He was sympathetic, he was more than a casual friend—”

  “She wanted to give up her license to practice psychiatry,” the President cut in. “She wanted to r
esign from the faculty. Lan had at least talked her out of those notions before I got back. He had a special knack for getting to people in a crisis, propping them up. Well, we were grateful to him. We damn well had to be—”

  “George and Betty Oakes vaguely blamed me for their son’s death,” Catherine was saying, “but, of course, they didn’t know how much I really was to blame. All they could criticize me for was cutting down on the number of Stan’s appointments, God… As you can imagine, we saw less and less of them after Stan’s death.”

  They sat there together now, not the President and First Lady, just a man and woman who had relived an awful tragedy in their lives. They looked as they felt… exhausted, drained. And Ron felt the same way.

  “You said you told Lynne all this?”

  “Not all of it,” Catherine said dully. “Not as much as you have just heard. She knows who her father was. She knows that he killed himself. We told her the story, gradually, once we felt she was old enough to understand. We thought she had to know, we were afraid someday she would find out from somebody else first. Better that we tell her. But we’ve never told anyone else.”

  Catherine held her glass in both hands and stared into it as though hoping it would yield up, finally, her forgiveness. Then abruptly she looked up and went on… “When Lan threatened Bob—I mean, threatened to go public with what he knew—we told Lynne about it. That was probably a mistake, but we’ve always been honest with her, and it’s worked out pretty well. We’re a very close family now…”

  “I thought I’d noticed that she was upset,” Ron said. “I mean, before Blaine died.”

  “That’s what I could never have forgiven him,” said the President. “The pain he was ready to cause that innocent girl… It outweighed all his friendship. All of it…”

  “There isn’t much political damage in the story,” Ron said. “Mostly personal. In a lot of people’s minds, I suspect you’d be bigger people, not smaller, for what you did. I mean afterward…”

  “Maybe,” Webster said. “But I did destroy the suicide note…”

  Ron nodded, and for a moment sat silent, staring at his shoes. “Mr. President… Mrs. Webster,” he said slowly, “I’m sorry, but I still think Fritz Gimbel is the most likely suspect. His motive may have been personal, or political, or some of both. It may be he’s involved with the consortium too, though I can’t identify the specific connection. But the coincidences are just too many. Too much points at him. And, nothing points to anyone else. Frankly I can’t think where else to look. Except for Fritz Gimbel. This thing is dead stuck.”

  The President thought for a moment, then: “There may at least be a simple way to prove he didn’t kill Martha Kingsley.”

  “How?”

  “Check with the Secret Service. People have to check in and check out of the West Wing, you know that. What time was she killed? If Fritz was in the West Wing at that time, then he at least didn’t kill her himself. He might have sent somebody, but he didn’t do it himself.”

  “Well, I left her apartment a little before five. The FBI called me here shortly after eight, and the man said the call to the FBI had come an hour before. That puts it between five and seven.”

  “Fritz rarely leaves the West Wing before eight or nine.” The President got up and went to the telephone. Frowning, he chose a line and pushed the button. The line was answered immediately. “This is the President,” he said. “Is Mr. Gimbel still in the West Wing? No. Well, what time did he leave? I see. Thank you.”

  “What time, Bob?” Her voice had reverted to the near-whisper.

  The President did not look at her as he said, “Five-fourteen.”

  5

  Along with his underlying competence and acumen, Robert Webster had a sense of the dramatic. He’d found out long ago that a confrontation could help strike through complexities to clarify and reduce a problem to a hard solution. Tonight his emotions were strung tight. The evening had generated a sense of doom for him, an unaccustomed pessimism for the dynamic Midwesterner. Worse, he felt defensive, partly for himself, more for his wife. Which made him angry.

  He called Fritz Gimbel—the switchboard found him at home—and ordered him to come to the White House. He summoned the Attorney General. He would take charge, settle right now, once and for all, the question of Gimbel’s innocence or guilt.

  Although he generally disdained them, he would use the trappings of the presidency. He led Catherine and Ron through the corridors of the White House into the West Wing, to the Oval Office. Lights in the Oval Office in the middle of the night, the spreading word that the President was there… all alerted the media and the duty officers in a score of offices. Abruptly, shortly before midnight, the White House came tensely to life.

  The Attorney General arrived before Gimbel. The President, taking him aside in the Oval Office, briefed him quickly, quietly. At the same time Ron was on the telephone to FBI headquarters, asking that Walter Locke report to the White House as soon as possible, then directed the switchboard to locate and summon Les Fitch, the man who had headed the Secret Service detail assigned to Lynne on Saturday night. He also called Jill Keller’s apartment and Gabe Haddad’s home, but no one answered at either number.

  Ron sat on one of the couches, watching the President talking quietly at a window with the Attorney General. Catherine Webster stood at another window, staring out at the lights of the city in the summer’s night sky. It occurred to Ron that this might be the last time he would see this room. If Gimbel survived the confrontation the President had arranged, Ron’s resignation would be expected—not just as investigator but as Special Counsel to the President as well. No one had said so, but it was clearly understood. Even if he were right and Gimbel confessed to Blaine’s murder, his tenure here was probably foreshortened. Assuming the Webster Administration survived—which would by no means be certain—he would almost surely be eased out—kill the messenger of bad tidings… Another unspoken understanding had been, from the first, that he find some graceful way for the President not to be involved in whatever happened… and he had not found that way. To the contrary, by rushing headlong to Martha Kingsley this afternoon he had probably, in a sense, at least provoked her death, and he’d brought the focus of the investigation directly back to the President himself. It had not exactly been a subtle preference… he’d win no thanks no matter how this turned out. Between a rock and a hard place… Jill Keller had been right about that.

  He’d lost control of the investigation as the days passed and he failed to score a clear breakthrough. He wished, though, that he could have had another day or two of digging instead of this midnight round-up. The investigation had turned in on itself. Now it involved only a few people close to the President; men like Osanaga, Johnson, Grand, and others, who might well be important to it, were abruptly outside, all but forgotten.

  The telephone buzzed. The President picked it up, listened, spoke curtly. “Fritz is here.”

  Fritz Gimbel came in. He stopped just inside the door and peered through his round, steel-rimmed spectacles at the assembled group—the President, just sitting down beside Catherine on one of the couches, the Attorney General, sitting beside Ron on the other. The points of Gimbel’s blue eyes were the only color in his pallid face; the gray of his hair seemed, somehow, to blend with the gray of his loose-hanging gray-checked suit. He was a small man, no more than five-feet-six, with the misleading air of a bemused accountant. It was difficult to believe that this insignificant-looking man was the terror of the White House staff: indeed, a feared and hated man. He ambled across the room and sat down in an armchair facing the group on the two couches. He glanced at each person in turn, said nothing.

  The President spoke first. “Have you guessed what this is about, Fritz?”

  Gimbel nodded. “I expect so.”

  “I’m sorry to subject you to this. If we’re wrong, there will never be any apology strong or deep enough to make up for it. You’re of course entitled to refuse to say any
thing. I have one question, maybe just one. If you answer it, maybe it’s all we need to know.”

  Gimbel glanced at Ron. His eyes were very cold. He nodded curtly.

  “You left the West Wing at five-fourteen,” the President said. “I need to know where you were between then and seven o’clock. And can you come up with witnesses?”

  Gimbel’s lips were white, rigid, his pallid face stayed fixed in its original hostile mask. He said nothing.

  “Fritz?” the President said.

  “I went home.”

  “When you got there did you call the White House switchboard and tell them where you could be found?”

  “No.”

  “You always do.”

  “I didn’t today. Didn’t feel well, didn’t want any calls—”

  “And no one saw you, no one saw you enter your building.”

  “No, not that I know of.”

  The President looked at Ron. “Ron,” he said curtly.

  Ron picked it up. “You received a telephone call from a woman about five o’clock,” he said… it was a guess but an informed guess… all right, a bluff, actually. “Her name would be on your secretary’s telephone log. Who was she?”

  “Donna Kemper.”

  Donna Kemper. Of course… Martha Kingsley would have been told to use a pseudonym when she called Gimbel at the White House, where a record was kept of every incoming call. “Who’s Donna Kemper?”

  “A friend.”

  “We can identify her and interview her. In fact if you’ll give us her number we can call her now—”

  Gimbel turned to the President. “Bob…” Never before had Ron heard anyone but Catherine Webster call the President by his first name. “…how much of this do I have to tolerate?”

  “You can settle it damn easily, Fritz.” He was clearly appealing to Gimbel to do just that.

  Gimbel looked at Ron. “I will not allow you to disturb Donna Kemper in the middle of the night—”

  “Walter Locke is here,” Ron said to the President. “I’ll give him the name. The FBI can make a quick check to see who she is, or if there really is such a person—”