The Last President: A Novel of an Alternative America

by Michael Kurland

  Now the curve.

  The item in the Washington News was brief, and Kit, idly skimming the pages over his morning coffee, almost missed it. He was turning the page when something made him turn back and read.

  Bethesda. A freak one-car accident at 10:15 p.m yesterday evening on the Little Falls Parkway killed the lone driver. The victim, Miss Dianna Babbington Holroyd, 49, of the Bethesda Garden Apartments, reportedly died instantly when her foreign sports car went out of control and plunged into one of the deep ravines beside the Potomac River.

  The State Highway Patrol stated that a mechanical failure on a sharp curve had apparently caused the fatal accident.

  Miss Holroyd was employed in the Office of Management and Budget.

  Kit read it through slowly three times, expecting the words to somehow rearrange themselves between readings. They refused to do so. Carefully putting down his cup, he called up the White House switchboard and left word for his assistant that he wouldn’t be in. He poured himself another cup of coffee, and read the brief news story three more times. Then he picked up the phone again and called Sergeant Veber at Second District Police Station. “I need a favor,” he said.

  “Who doesn’t?” Veber asked. “Lets hear it.”

  “Do you have any connections in the Maryland State Police?”

  “I could manage an introduction,” Veber said cautiously. “What for?”

  “I need to look at an accident report,” Kit told him.

  “That, ah, sounds arrangeable.”

  “I need to look like I’m coming from you,” Kit said.

  “You mean as opposed to—”

  ”You got it.”

  “I don’t like it,” Veber said. “But for a friend.… You are a friend?”

  “I do my best,” Kit said.

  “I’ll call you back. Give me your number.”

  Two hours later Kit was at the Maryland State Police Headquarters for Montgomery County in Rockville introducing himself to a Sergeant Yost, a thin, graying man with a pencil mustache.

  “Yes, sir,” Yost said, shaking his hand. “Sergeant Veber said you were coming, Mr. Archer, and he said not to ask for any ID.”

  “I appreciate his calling,” Kit said. “And I appreciate your taking the time to help.”

  Yost shrugged. “Luckily, I’m not a very curious man. Veber said to expect a Miles Archer, and here you are. He said you wanted details on the Holroyd case. I’ve pulled the file for you. We only have a prelim—ah, a preliminary workup—”

  ”I know the terminology, Sergeant,” Kit said.

  “Yes,” Yost said, “I thought you might. We have the prelim: accident report, eyewitness account, coroner’s prelim. No reason we can see to go further. Of course, we’ll follow the routine, but right now it looks like a typical traffic accident.”

  “Anything to say it wasn’t?” Kit asked.

  “The fact that you’re here.”

  Kit took the report folder, opened it, and leafed through the typed forms. “Who was the investigating officer?”

  “As it happens,” Yost said, “I was.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “The victim was alone in her car, driving fast—but as far as we can tell, not abnormally fast—southbound on the Little Falls Parkway when the car failed to negotiate a sharp left curve and shot off into the ravine. This is the testimony of the two eyewitnesses, and it’s substantiated by the tire marks, which start right before the edge of the pavement and continue straight off through the shoulder and over. The pavement was dry. There are no skid marks—that is, no breakway marks to either side. The tire marks show locked brakes, so it was clearly not suicide. Car caught on fire, but it didn’t burn too bad. We put it out with hand extinguishers when we showed up.”

  “Is that what killed her?” Kit asked.

  “No, sir. The body was burned some, but the coroner says she broke her neck clean—died instantly.”

  “Badly burned? Any question of identity?”

  “Oh, no. Thumbprints check with Motor Vehicle Bureau records. It’s Miss Holroyd, all right.”

  “Um,” Kit said, feeling sick.

  “Witnesses were a couple in a parked car on a turnout above the curve. Had a clear view. Said the car just shot right off. They looked out when they heard the brakes squeal.”

  “Any other witnesses?”

  “That’s not clear. There was a car behind. Our couple saw it pass by a few seconds after. But it might not have been close enough to even know there had been an accident.”

  “The driver must have heard the brakes squeal if the people above did.”

  “You’d think so. Anyway, he didn’t stop.”

  “Where’s Miss Holroyd’s car now?”

  “In the police garage. Our mechanic will give it a going-over, probably this afternoon.”

  “Mind if I watch?”

  “I don’t, but he might,” Yost said. He scribbled on a note pad, then ripped the page out and handed it to Kit. “Take this over with you.”

  “Thanks,” Kit said, sticking out his hand.

  Yost took it. “My pleasure, Mr. Archer,” he said. “Stay out of alleys.”

  “What?”

  “I read mysteries,” Yost said. “Love them. Miles Archer was Sam Spade’s partner. Died in an alley in San Francisco. Shot through the pump.”

  “Veber picked the name,” Kit said. “I didn’t know he had a sense of humor.”

  Dianna’s Jag was up on the rack with two men going over it when Kit arrived at the garage. The body was burned paint and twisted metal, except, miraculously, for the front end; the sleek feline bonnet with its twin headlamps still gleamed British racing green. But from the windshield back, the car was junk.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” one of the mechanics said, as Kit walked past the row of police cruisers being serviced, toward the Jag, “but this area is off limits to civilians.”

  Kit handed him the note. “Yost sent me,” he said. “I’d like to ask a few questions.”

  “Yes, Mr. Archer,” the mechanic said after reading the note. “Always glad to help you government people. What can I do for you?”

  The note said:

  Jim—give Mr. Archer whatever assistance he requires.—Yost.

  Kit wondered how and where it was encoded that he was a government man, but he knew better than to ask. “It’s about the Jag,” he said, pointing. “You been looking it over?”

  “That’s right, Mr. Archer. We just got started.”

  “Looking for anything special?”

  Jim shrugged. “We’ve got to assign some cause to the accident,” he said. “Have to rule out sabotage. It doesn’t happen very often—but it does happen. If the brakes failed, we check for rusty or rotted brake lines—or for cleanly cut or hacksawed ones. If its a wheel lost, we check for stripped threads, or saw marks. If it’s a gas fire or explosion, we check near hot spots for fresh-looking punctures or cuts in the tank or fuel lines. Once found a drilled tank directly above a drilled-through muffler. Never found out who did it, though.”

  “And if it’s steering?” Kit asked.

  “That’s what it was with this one, okay,” Jim said. “Faulty maintenance, probably, but an accident. The universal went. It does that sometimes.”

  “The what?”

  “The rubber universal on the steering column. Here, I’ll show you.” He called over to his assistant. “Bill, lower the thing, will you?”

  The assistant dropped the hydraulic lift, and Jim opened the hood, raising it onto its stand-bar. “There,” he said, pointing to the disconnected joint halfway down the steering linkage.

  “Got a flashlight?” Kit asked.

  “I’ll do better than that,” the mechanic said, and he swung a powerful sodium light down from its stand and turned it on.

  Kit focused the light on the broken piece. The hard rubber-metal bonded part had separated from its lower U-fitting, which now dangled uselessly from the lower arm.

  “It just came
apart,” the mechanic said. “Old and brittle. Cracked. The heavy strain of a high-speed turn ripped it apart. It should have been replaced years ago.”

  “I want it,” Kit said.

  “Well,” the mechanic licked his lips. “I dunno—”

  ”Call Yost if you want,” Kit said, “but get that part out for me.”

  “I guess it’s okay,” the mechanic said. He went off for his socket wrench set and in two minutes had the unit off. “You’ll sign for it?”

  “Sure,” Miles Archer said.

  Lowell MacDuffee of MacDuffee’s English Motors, Silver Spring, Maryland, stared sadly down at the rotted rubber of the universal. “This piece of crud was not off Dianna’s car,” he said.

  “I saw the police mechanic remove it,” Kit told him.

  “I don’t care what you saw,” MacDuffee said. “This is a standard maintenance item, and I’ve been maintaining Dianna’s car for two years. For that matter, she bought it here. Wait a minute.” He turned to the office file behind him and slid open one of the drawers, leafing through it until he found the right folder. “Here’s a record of the work we’ve done on the car. And here—wait a minute—here is the part. We sold it to her a little over a year ago.”

  “You install it?”

  “It doesn’t say. She may have done it herself—she did all her own minor maintenance. Or I may have done it for her. She wasn’t charged for labor, but for good customers we’re careless about that.”

  “But you can’t swear you installed it.”

  “No, I can’t. But look”—he picked up the defective part—“this thing’s at least five years old. Hell, it’s probably ten. It’s a routine replacement point on all circa 1960 Jaguars—the XK-150 sports cars, the three-point-four, and three-point-eight sport saloons, even the big Mark IX mothers. It’s a five-dollar part, takes five minutes to change. This isn’t the one that was on her car. This is off a junker—or a junk pile.” He pulled a jeweler’s loupe from his top desk drawer and stuck it in his right eye. Then he carefully went over the part: the severed metal end-plate, the eight bolts, the eight nuts and washers.

  “There’s two overlapping sets of impressions where the end pieces have been socked up against the holding flanges on the steering column arms. That means this piece of crud has been installed twice. And look at this rubber: most of it has torn across, but here where it started is a clean, even break. It was sliced about a quarter of an inch to get it started. I’m not a detective, but it sure looks to me like someone wanted that part to give at the next major strain.”

  “You’re doing fine,” Kit said. “Thank you.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Uriah “Billy” Vandermeer inspected the front page of the Washington Post and slowly his thin lips arranged themselves in a tight, bloodless smile of satisfaction. “It’s pretty,” he said, “it’s very pretty.”

  Charlie Ober nodded from where he stood, his ramrod-straight back to Vandermeer’s closed office door. “They bought it,” he said. “It took them three months, but they bought it.”

  “‘Documents Link Kennedy to Diem Assassination’ right across the front page. Do they mention anywhere where they got the documents?”

  “They’re, ah, reticent about that point,” Ober said. He looked out the window and saw the roses blooming in the White House formal garden. “What’s our move?”

  “Sit down, Charlie, you make me nervous standing there like an usher. Our move? I suppose we must take some sort of official action. Against the Post. Against Coles. Of course we have to show that Coles is responsible first. Get the FBI in on that.” He tapped a pencil against the desk and stared across at the framed picture of himself and the President getting off a helicopter at Camp David.

  Ober perched on a chair in front of the desk, even now retaining his military bearing but for the reflexive tapping of his foot. “I’ll call the Director, see that he’s pointed in the right direction. We don’t want to lose momentum on this.”

  “Right. Hit the Democrats where it hurts—right in the Kennedy myth. We can keep this in the front pages until the election, and all the time we’re the good guys, trying to suppress government leaks. Put Coles in prison for a few years. Get the Post shut down, or hit them with a big fine, or something.”

  Ober nodded. “We need a friendly judge on this one. I’ll speak to the boys in Justice, see who they advise. The right handling of this might put someone on the Supreme Court.”

  Vandermeer put down the paper. “I saw the Old Man this morning,” he said. “We had breakfast. He passed the word to okay that operation of St. Yves. The toned-down version.”

  “That code-word thing? Sibilant?”

  “That’s it. I’ll never get used to these code words. But I suppose if we’re going to use CIA types, we have to put up with their little idiosyncrasies. Sibilant. Use the Hoover blackmail file, or what we have of it. But that hiring a yacht full of whores is out—too expensive. After all, this is a midterm election.”

  “But it’s such a great image,” Ober said, chuckling. “Those fat asses humping in the air”—he pantomimed with his hands—“with our little cameras going behind the glass. And the little girlies with vacant smiles on their faces and wireless mikes in their pillows. Or, better yet, little boys.”

  “You’ll have to live with just the image for a while,” Vandermeer said. “We’ve already got a few of our noble legislators pinned down.”

  “Senator Slater, Senator Chaymber, Congressman Pliney, and Congressman Korr.”

  “So far.”

  “When do we put it to them—and how?”

  “That’s up for discussion soon. The Old Man isn’t sure whether to use the material to recruit them or to eliminate them. Slater’s up for reelection, and Korr, of course, is too. Chaymber we could get recalled. With what we’ve got on him, we could get him lynched.”

  “I think we should use them—if they’ll play.”

  Vandermeer laughed. “Playing is what’s getting them in trouble.”

  Kit sat on the edge of Aaron Adams’ pool and swished his long legs through the tepid water. “Twelve pages single-spaced,” he told Adams. “I stuck them in a March Time on your desk. The one with the drawing of an African nation emerging on the cover.”

  Adams looked casually around to make sure none of his other guests was within earshot, then sat next to Kit on the cement. “Here,” he said, handing Kit a tall glass. “A Tom Collins for your troubles. Give me the highlights. Anything good?”

  “Barry’s trial starts this week,” Kit said.

  “Not news,” Adams said.

  “You wonder how the FBI was able to track him down so fast when the Post refused to reveal their source?” Kit asked. “Ober told them who to look for.”

  “Told them? By name?”

  “That’s right. It was a setup. And I think those cables were phony.”

  “So,” Adams said.

  “A lot of trouble to go to just to get Barry Coles,” Kit said.

  “Coles was secondary,” Adams said, “or even tertiary. The real objects were the Post and the Democrats and the Kennedy myth.”

  Kit sipped at his drink, feeling the ice-cold booze wash down his throat. “Its incredible,” he said. “What’s going on in this government right now is—there’s no other word for it—incredible. On the surface, as far as the people can see, everything’s all right and business goes on as usual. The President goes to China. And we’ve all got to pull together now to end the dissension that’s polarizing the country. The great silent majority is behind the President, and only a few nuts are going around the country bombing things. On the surface.”

  “That’s right,” Adams said. “On the surface this administration is no more troubled and no less responsible than any other.”

  Kit put his drink down and tipped himself into the pool, sliding down feet first until he reached the bottom. The water was up to his chest. “You don’t suppose,” he said, turning back to where Adams squatted o
n the concrete, “that all other administrations were actually like this one, except we never found out about them? You don’t think that Roosevelt had his political enemies’ phones tapped, or that Wilson knocked off his opponents?”

  Adams shook his head. “There’s one fundamental difference between this bunch of sweethearts and any previous administration. All the rest used public-relations techniques—to the extent that they used them at all—to put a good light on what they were doing. These people put up a public-relations front of what they should be doing—and it has no relation at all to what’s happening or what they really intend.”

  “I still want out,” Kit said. “Someone in room sixteen murdered Dianna Holroyd, and I have no way of finding out for sure who it was, and no chance in hell of proving it.”

  “What good will your quitting do,” Adams asked, “except to cut me off from the best source of information I have?”

  “I notice you don’t say ‘only’,” Kit observed. “I hope you’re feeding this stuff to the Old Boy Network. If you’re a conduit to the Russians, or the French, or the Democrats, I’m going to be very disappointed.”

  Adams sighed. “It’s a problem,” he said. “Your friend the President is getting a tight grip on CIA, and pretty soon we won’t know who to trust. It’s a very effective technique.”

  “Well, at least he’s on his last term,” Kit said. “If we can keep him from doing too much damage for the next few years, maybe we can make some of the bastards accountable after the seventy-six election.” He pulled himself out of the water and grabbed for a towel.

  “I thought you wanted out,” Adams said.

  “More than anything in the world,” Kit said. “I want to wake up tomorrow morning and find that this has all been a dream. But, barring that, I want the man who got Dianna Holroyd to swing from the nearest oak.”