Murder in the White House

by Margaret Truman

  “A five o’clock telephone call, where I was from five to seven, what does all this have to do with anything—?”

  “Martha Kingsley,” Ron interrupted him, “was killed between five and seven. If you weren’t involved you can easily prove it by letting us call your friend Donna Kemper. Except you can’t let us call her, can you? You can’t because Donna Kemper is the name Martha Kingsley used when she called you at five o’clock—”

  “I don’t have to prove anything to you—”

  “Mr. President,” Ron said—he glanced at Gimbel, then fixed his eyes on the President—“let’s at least find out if there’s a Donna Kemper in the telephone book. Let’s find out if the FBI can identify such a person.”

  The President looked to Catherine, as if to see if she could save him from the misery of this confrontation. Then he looked at the Attorney General. Catherine was staring at the floor and did not look up. The Attorney General stared back at the President through the curling smoke of his cigarette, showing no intention to intervene. The President sighed heavily. “Call the FBI.”

  Ron picked up the telephone on the end table, told the switchboard to find Locke, who was in the West Wing, and send him to the Oval Office. The operator told him Les Fitch had also arrived, and Ron told her to send him in.

  Gimbel sat stiffly erect during this telephone call. To Ron he seemed caged… he couldn’t get up and stalk out, he couldn’t withstand interrogation. A facade seemed to be breaking up as he sat there.

  Locke and Fitch had been waiting just outside, and when there was an immediate rap on the door Ron went to it, separated Locke and Fitch, told Locke what he wanted and led Fitch into the room.

  “Mr. President,” Ron said, “I think we can settle another matter. You know Les Fitch. He was head of the Secret Service detail that was assigned to protect Lynne Saturday night. He’s going to tell us what really happened.”

  Fitch, ordinarily a self-possessed man, was stunned. Here he was facing the President, Catherine Webster, Gimbel, the Attorney General, and Ron Fairbanks all at once—in the Oval Office, at midnight. “Uh… just what is it you want to know—?”

  “Please just answer the question,” the President said in a flat, weary voice without looking up at Fitch.

  “We already know a good deal,” Ron told Fitch, “but we’d like your contribution. Just tell us what happened Saturday night.”

  “Well… it’s of course not true that you were drinking too much, Mr. Fairbanks. I… I wasn’t the source of that story.” He paused, hoping that he had told them what they wanted to hear. “I… just somehow lost you, Mr. Fairbanks. We try to be courteous, to combine security with courtesy… that’s the ticket… I guess I overdid the courtesy… I’m sorry…”

  “Who told you to drop back?” he asked. “Who told you to leave Lynne and me without Secret Service protection for ten or fifteen minutes?”

  Fitch shook his head. “I—”

  “Fitch, you’re talking bull and you know it. I’d say you were in a bag of trouble.”

  “Mr. Gimbel?” Fitch snapped.

  Gimbel did not react. During the exchange between Ron and Fitch he’d sat motionless, staring straight ahead. He’d shown no sign that he was even aware Fitch was in the room. He continued to stare ahead.

  “What am I supposed to say, Mr. Gimbel?” Fitch demanded. “They’re asking questions you promised wouldn’t be asked…”

  Gimbel looked up at him, shrugged.

  “Well, at least that settles that,” Ron said.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Catherine put in, and swung around on the couch to face Fitch directly. “Who ordered you to do what? I want to know exactly what your orders were.”

  Fitch’s defiance collapsed. “Mrs. Webster—”

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “I want Lynne to hear this.” She picked up the telephone.

  “No, Catherine,” the President’s voice was more a plea than an order. “Lynne needn’t—”

  “She’s going to hear plenty secondhand. I want her to hear how they left her unprotected, let somebody break her arm… maybe trying to do worse.” She spoke to the White House operator on the line.

  “Catherine…” Gimbel said, shaking his head. “Please…”

  “Let Fitch tell us,” she said firmly. “Go ahead, Fitch. Who ordered you to do what?”

  “Catherine,” Gimbel protested. “No, don’t do this… please… leave Lynne out of it…”

  “Fitch. Enough of this. Tell us.”

  The Secret Service man gave up. “All right… I was ordered to drop back,” he said. He swallowed hard. “Mr. Gimbel ordered me to drop back and leave a gap between my detail and the Datsun Mr. Fairbanks was driving. The other men in the detail didn’t know. I pretended I was having trouble with my Chevy. I lost the Datsun just after it entered the park. I was supposed to give somebody five minutes’ time to… interfere with the Datsun—”

  “Interfere.” Catherine stood up. “Fritz, my God, you actually tried to kill Lynne—”

  “No.” Gimbel shouted it. “No, Catherine, for God’s sake. She wasn’t supposed to be hurt, not even a little. The man who hit them is an expert. He was to run them off the road, scare Fairbanks, make him out to look like a drunken driver. She wasn’t supposed to be hurt, I guarantee you… I knew she always wore her belt in the car, she was not to be hurt… There was not to be any chance of it—”

  Catherine stood looking at him, shaking her head. Gimbel stared at her, whispered something inaudible, then put his hands to his face.

  “You valued her… and her life… very very little, Fritz, if you could do what you did,” the President said.

  Gimbel spoke through his hands in a voice now clearly breaking.

  “No… wrong… my God, I love that little girl, I couldn’t possibly hurt her… I watched her grow up, you know that… She’s always been so lovely, so innocent—”

  “And the daughter you never had,” Catherine said coldly. “I’ve heard you say it more than once.”

  Gimbel nodded. He uncovered his face, pulled off his glasses and dabbed at his eyes with his fingertips. “So I couldn’t hurt her… just the opposite—”

  Ron broke in. “You wanted to discredit me because I’d been to see Martha Kingsley. I was getting too close to you.”

  Gimbel only glanced up at Ron. He did not respond.

  “I interviewed Martha Kingsley again this afternoon,” Ron went on. “As soon as I left her she called you. She told you what I had asked. She told you how much she had told me. She told you… just a minute. Fitch, you can leave.”

  The Secret Service man left the Oval Office, shoulders slack, red-faced.

  Ron spoke directly to Gimbel. “Blaine had told Martha Kingsley all about Mrs. Webster and Stanley Oakes and Lynne. She knew it all. This afternoon she told me she did. And when she called you, she told you she knew. Didn’t she?”

  Gimbel appeared to sag inside his over-large suit. He sighed and nodded, and he turned to the President.

  “Sir, over the last year and a half I’ve paid Martha Kingsley some twenty-five thousand dollars out of the reptile fund—”

  “What the hell is the reptile fund?” the Attorney General asked.

  Webster explained. “It’s the fund we use for bribing snakes.”

  Gimbel went on, ignoring the interruption. “Blaine in many ways was a fool. He ate too much, he drank too much, he even talked too much, and for a man in his position… well, not all of the young women he condescended to sleep with were the little idiots he thought they were.” Gimbel looked at Ron. “Marya Kalisch, who was in his apartment when he was being killed, reported back to Eiseman the things Blaine confided in her. But in Martha Kingsley he met a woman every bit as smart—street smart, anyway—as Blaine. She knew how to work him. She’d played the game before. She was interested in money. I paid her, she reported Blaine’s conversations to me. I’ve known for a long time he was taking outright bribes.”

  “Why didn’t y
ou tell me?” the President said.

  “Was I to accuse your Secretary of State, your brilliant, witty friend, on the word of a prostitute?”

  The President shook his head. “I didn’t know we dealt with—”

  “There are a lot of things you don’t know,” Gimbel said. “They’re my job. The dirtier the better…”

  Ron wanted to bring things back on course. “Blaine told Martha Kingsley about Stanley Oakes,” he repeated.

  “Is someone going to tell me who Stanley Oakes is?” the Attorney General said.

  “Isn’t that right, Gimbel?” Ron said, avoiding the question. “She knew about Oakes… and all the rest of it.”

  Gimbel nodded. “Blaine was a damn fool.” He bit off the words. “When she called me this afternoon she said, ‘Don’t worry, I didn’t tell Fairbanks the big secret.’ I asked her what secret. ‘The one about Lynne,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I won’t tell it. It’s the kind of thing I don’t tell.’ Of course I knew better. She would tell it the first time she saw enough advantage in telling. She would sell the story to the highest bidder. If she didn’t tell Fairbanks here, it was only because he wasn’t important enough. He didn’t shape up as the highest bidder.” He said that last with a certain amount of relish, despite his circumstances.

  “You didn’t know before this afternoon that Blaine had told her?” Ron said, not believing it.

  Gimbel shook his head. “Blaine spent the night with her the same day he threatened Bob, tried to blackmail him. He told her then, but she didn’t tell me that. She told me all about that night but not that he’d told her about Oakes.”

  Ron looked for a moment at the President, then spoke again to Gimbel. “I say you killed Martha Kingsley. If she talked, the whole story would come back around, and it would be obvious who killed Blaine.”

  Gimbel stared thoughtfully for a moment at Ron. Then, abruptly, he shrugged and turned up the palms of his hands.

  Catherine Webster was quietly sobbing, holding tight to her husband’s hand.

  The President stared downward. “I guess this is the end of my presidency… my Chief of Staff involved in…”

  The Attorney General seemed not to have heard the President. “Fritz, will you sign a confession?” he asked Gimbel.

  Gimbel looked at him, appearing not to have understood the question. Again he shrugged.

  “Well, we—” the Attorney General began, and stopped.

  Lynne had just come in. She had knocked once, then walked in. She was wearing a pair of faded blue jeans and her FIRST DAUGHTER T-shirt, and a black sling for her broken arm.

  “Tell her to go back upstairs,” Gimbel said intensely to Catherine. His eyes seemed especially naked without the spectacles that always covered them. “Don’t let her—”

  Lynne glanced around the Oval Office, walked over to the couch where her mother sat. “What’s going on?” She sat down beside her mother in the space. Catherine and the President had made for her. She looked at Ron. “Actually, I think I know…”

  “Lynne…” said the President quietly, “we are talking about Lan, about who killed him… Fritz has admitted he arranged the automobile accident you and Ron had Saturday night. Also”—the President stiffened and spoke crisply—“also, Fritz has admitted he killed a woman named Martha Kingsley, he did it late this afternoon—”

  “Fritz…” Lynne was up from the couch, “My God… who is Martha Kingsley? Why did you have to… what’s that have to do with Lan? Why somebody else…?”

  Gimbel’s face was a mask of anguish.

  “Lynne…” The President stood to face his daughter. “What are you saying? What do you know? You said ‘somebody else’? Did you know that Fritz killed Blaine too—?”

  “He’s right, Lynne,” Gimbel said quickly, and nodded urgently at her. “Don’t say anything more… it’s true… I killed Blaine… for good reason—”

  She shook her head, spoke with a weird calm. “No… I killed Lan. I had to do it… and I did.” She looked from her mother to the President, and finally to Ron. “I killed him,” she whispered.

  And repeated, “I killed him.”

  ***

  The President held his daughter in his arms, an island of humanity, abruptly cut off from all trapping of office, from all others except themselves. Lynne finally was able to look away… to Ron, who looked as stricken as the Webster family. He looked away, at Gimbel, sitting there hunched over, his hands covering his face.

  “Listen to me,” Gimbel was saying to Ron, and including the Attorney General. He spoke now in a weak, throaty voice, held his spectacles in his left hand and with his right rubbed his eyes. “It’s absolutely true, what you said. I did kill Martha Kingsley… I didn’t realize until she called at five o’clock that Blaine had told her everything… enough to destroy Bob, and Catherine… and Lynne… enough to destroy this administration, and me with it… She knew all about Lynne, that Blaine took bribes… and I knew she’d use what she knew, use it to her best advantage, as soon as she found out what that was… I’d thought before about doing it… today I had to. There was no more time once I found out what she knew… except I moved too fast to try to cover myself… well, it doesn’t matter—”

  “You face a murder charge,” the Attorney General said. “Aggravated murder. I’m sorry, Fritz, there’s no way around it—”

  “I know,” Gimbel said, and shrugged. “It’s end of the line… but it doesn’t need to be for her…” and looked for the first time directly at Lynne. “No one outside this room knows what she’s done, or has heard her say it… As you say, there’s no way out for me now, so what difference if I go to jail for one murder or two? I confess to both of them, and an innocent girl… yes, damn it, innocent in the real sense, will be spared what she doesn’t deserve anyway…”

  “Oh, Fritz…” Catherine began, tears in her eyes, but the Attorney General broke in.

  “I can’t go along with that, Fritz… none of us can… we’d all be accessories to Blaine’s killing…” He shook his head vehemently. “Frankly I find it very hard… hell, almost impossible… to accept Lynne’s confession, but now there’s nothing for it except to have it go through the legal process… I’m sorry… but—”

  “You’re right, of course,” Webster said. “Fritz, we’re grateful for the… gesture, but it’s no good, it can’t be done and it would be wrong…”

  “Look here,” the Attorney General said, “Lynne says she did it but a court may find differently. Ron, does it seem plausible from the facts you’ve uncovered—?”

  But before Ron could answer him, Lynne broke away from her parents and spoke up, going over to Ron and touching him briefly on the shoulder, his face, as she began to speak. “Please, don’t make a mockery of what I did. I appreciate what everybody is trying to do for me, but I have no regrets over what I did. My God, you have to understand, I really had to do it… Ron, by now you know what Lan Blaine really was, or you know some of it. But there’s more…” And she turned to look at her father. “Remember, dad, when I used to call him Uncle Lan…? He was our very best friend, the one we loved and trusted the best. He brought me presents from the time I was a little girl. He kept our secret, right from the first… you told me he knew when you first told me about it… you said we could always trust him. You, too, mother… Well, it’s not so surprising, I guess I fell in love with him… One night during the campaign—I never told either of you this, and it’s obvious he never told you—I think it was somewhere in Kentucky… Louisville, that was it, I got his key, said I wanted to talk, got into his bed before he got there… I offered myself to him that night… and he was so incredibly kind… He told me I was a beautiful girl, and if I were anybody else… well, nothing really happened. He was kind and gentle and that was it… So you see, again he seemed to be showing we could trust him… God knows, I trusted him even more after that night, though maybe I was just a little surprised that—anyway, you see now what he was really doing. Just pu
tting us off-guard, putting me off-guard, just waiting for the chance to use what he knew to make the most of it…”

  She looked a little wild now as she spoke… “When the time came to profit from our friendship, from mine, he didn’t care what he did or how much it could hurt…”

  “Lynne,” Ron said very quietly, still not wanting to believe it, hoping against reason that somehow it was a temporary delusion or something… “how was Blaine killed, I mean do you know…?”

  She looked directly at him. “Thank you, Ron, I know what you’re trying to do, but it’s no good, just like the Attorney General said a minute ago. Yes, I know because I did it… I’d read somewhere, I don’t remember, about how if you pulled a wire tight, pulled hard enough”—she held up her hand—“no, don’t stop me, let me get it all out… well, I got a guitar string and wrapped it around a roller and… Lan liked to have me rub his shoulders, and I used to like doing it, so it didn’t seem unusual when I walked up behind him, he just went on talking into that telephone…”

  The silence was like thunder. Finally the Attorney General nodded to Gimbel. “And you?”

  “I happened to walk in, I wanted to talk to Blaine about something. I was too late. I took the wire and roller out of her hands and told her to go to her room and not to say a word. Afterward I disposed of the… You know the rest.”

  Abruptly Lynne, who had seemed so strong in telling what she’d done, broke into tears, long terrible shudders wracked her body, she began to sway as though she would fall before her father could rush over to hold her… And now she looked around the room, to her father, her mother, and finally to Ron. And she was more like a little girl, strangely reverted, looking bewildered, looking for understanding…

  “This is the way she was right afterward… when I found her that night,” Gimbel said. “I’m not sure, at one level at least, that she understands what she really did—”

  “Then maybe that’s the defense,” Ron said quickly, looking to the Attorney General and the President.