by D. W. Buffa
“Yes, I see your point,” he said presently. “And that is the reason you did not use this against the witness— after you asked him if anyone had ‘talked to him, offered anything in exchange for his testimony’?” He repeated the phrase that had come off the top of my head as if it were something he had read in a book and then memorized. “How did you get this? It has to be someone in the White House. Who?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“You don’t know who gave it to you?”
I started to tell him that Gisela had given it to me, and that it had been given to her by a friend. I changed my mind. What Gisela had done was between her and me.
“It came from an anonymous source. I don’t know who it is.”
“But this is all they gave you,” he said, glancing at the sheets of paper scattered over his desk, “and you obviously don’t think it is enough.”
I shook my head in discouragement. “Even if it really did come from inside the White House, the name at the top, the person who supposedly put together the list… No one with that name works at the White House.”
With the tips of two fingers, Browning dragged one of the sheets of paper closer to get a better look.
“‘Lincoln’—sounds like what one of those pretentious fools would use for a cover.”
Pausing, he seemed to look at me from a different perspective, as if he were reminding himself that there were things he took for granted that I did not know.
“Everything in the White House,” he explained, “everything that anyone sends to the president— everything anyone sends to anyone—goes through the staff secretary. The office of the staff secretary is in the West Wing, directly below the office that, before my arrival, had been used by the vice-president. You remember: I took you over there. The office is set up to provide some discipline, some organization to what gets to the president. If a cabinet officer wants to send a proposal to the president, the staff secretary makes certain that everyone the president would want to comment on it does so before it’s sent on to the president. The system stores everything. Every e-mail— all of it—is kept forever. The law requires it; there are millions of these things on the database. There is something else. The system works only inside the Executive Office of the President: EOP. That’s what the rest of that means,” he said, pointing toward the top of one of the pages on the desk. “The address: ‘So-and-so at EOP.’ Nothing sent from a White House computer can escape the system. It’s all stored; it’s all kept; it’s all still there, including the originals of these,” he explained. “All you have to do is produce them. That will prove where they came from; that will prove that all of this was done by someone inside the White House.”
“But it still would not prove what they mean,” I replied with a hopeless gesture.
Browning had his mind on something else: a fact that suddenly seemed the key to everything else.
“All those millions of messages—it doesn’t matter what names were used—every one of them can be traced back to its source. That’s how you get the name; that’s how you’ll know. That’s how you can show that if this whole business didn’t go right into the Oval Office, it went close enough. Call the staff secretary as a witness.” His eyes were eager, intense, alert.
He was adamant about it, determined that I see it his way. He was too close to it; he had too much at stake. It was almost willful, this refusal to acknowledge that nothing that he had said, nothing about the way the White House system worked, proved what those names and numbers really meant.
“I have to have more; and whoever gave me this knows it, too. He’s following the trial: He knew Fitzgerald was going to be a witness.” I looked straight at Browning. “I know you’re right about what Connally and those people have done. This person—whoever he is—knows that, too. He knows I didn’t use what he gave me; he knows there is something wrong.”
Browning sank back into his chair. His eyes moved back and forth in small, measured half circles as he gazed about the room. He began to rub the knuckles of his index finger along the slope of his upper lip.
“And if he has gone as far as he can? If he won’t run the risk of making direct contact with you; if he can’t run the risk of getting you more than he has given you already—what then? What will you do if you can’t get proof that those records mean what you think they mean?” he watched me closely, gauging my confidence, trying to see how much I believed that whatever might still happen, we were going to win. Not whether Haviland was going to win, not whether I was going to win, but we—Haviland and Browning, Browning and I, whichever way you wanted to put it, so long as you understood that he played the crucial part in the drama that was fast approaching its final act. As much as any defendant—more than Haviland himself—Browning seemed to need the assurance that everything was going to turn out all right.
“What will I do?” A broad, automatic smile cut across my mouth, the instinctive accompaniment of the lie I had told so often that I was no longer quite certain it was not true. “I’ll invent something; I’ll make something up.
I haven’t been in a trial yet where something unexpected did not happen, something that changes everything—if you’re quick enough to see it and know how to use it.”
Browning smiled back, but it was a pale imitation, mocking by deliberate understatement the empty sincerity of my own.
“In other words, you have no idea what you might do.”
The smile on my mouth grew smaller, and more honest. “That would be a fair summary.”
There was one thing more I needed to ask. Why had he never bothered to tell me that Jimmy Haviland had been on retainer with the company for years? Browning lowered his eyes. “Is it important?”
“Caminetti made it sound like it was a payoff; a way to keep Haviland quiet; to make sure he would never confess to what he had done—because of the damage that could do to you. And I didn’t know anything about it. Haviland had not said a word.”
Browning continued to study his hands. “I knew a little bit about what Haviland had gone through: Annie… the war. I thought I should do something.” He looked at me with a guarded expression. “He’s a good lawyer,” he said, his voice solemn, subdued. “And he’s a good man. Why shouldn’t I have?”
“He thinks you did it out of guilt.”
Browning did not say a word.
“That’s why he did not tell me,” I continued. “He’s embarrassed by the fact that he took it. He tried to tell himself that he was only doing what any lawyer would: agree to a retainer from a major client. But he knows he did it because he needed the money, and he hates himself for that. He thinks it was blood money. He doesn’t think Annie’s death was an accident; he thinks you killed her. He thinks you were angry because Annie went after him, that you argued, that you pushed her, and that’s why she fell.”
There was something sad and distant in Browning’s eyes. He nodded slowly, as if he not only understood but also sympathized with what Jimmy Haviland believed.
“I know that’s what he must think.” he saw the question in my eyes, the question that no matter how many times I thought I had answered it, kept coming back.
“I didn’t do it. That’s the last thing I would have done.” he looked as if he was watching in the darkness of his mind the scene with which he must have tortured himself for years: the moment that Annie fell.
“It was an accident; it wasn’t anyone’s fault,” he said, turning to me with a look that brought the matter to an end.
I got up to go, but Browning waved me back to the chair. “Don’t go just yet; I have a little more time.” There was an awkward pause before he added, as if in passing, that Joanna had asked him to say hello. “She wanted to see you,” he remarked in a voice that had become formal and even a little forced. His eyes drifted toward the sliding glass door as if they wanted a place to hide.
“She was with me in California; we got back only late last night. I thought it best not to wake her.”
&nb
sp; It was a decent, civilized lie; a polite reminder that what may have happened in the past had no bearing on the way things were now. After that lunch in Georgetown I had had the feeling that I would not see her again, that what had been said that day was a kind of second goodbye.
I was sure of it now, sure that Joanna was gone; almost as sure as I was that after the trial I would never hear from Thomas Browning again. Browning wanted to change things, to bend the future to his will, no doubt to make things better, but better according to him. He lived with the vision of what, if only he had the power, he could do.
I had nothing like that kind of ambition, and the older I got the less I thought about what might happen next year or the year after that. I wondered instead about the past and the way things that had happened had shaped and sometimes destroyed so many lives.
“Mary Beth Chandler testified the other day.
Caminetti called her because she had seen Jimmy and Annie talking together that day….”
“Who?” asked Browning with a blank expression.
“Mary Beth Chandler. She’s an old friend of yours.
She’s married to that investment banker.”
Browning did not seem to remember, and then, when he did, he did not seem to care.
“I recognized her. There was something about her, that cutting look in her eyes; I knew I had seen her before—that night, at Maxwell’s Plum, that summer I was in New York.”
There was a look of annoyance in Browning’s eyes, as if he could not understand where any of this could lead; but I was caught in the growing enthusiasm of what I was watching in my mind: the avid, determined look on Mary Beth Chandler’s much younger face as she tried to get Browning to pay all his attention to her.
“She was sitting right next to you—you remember! It was that night you used me as an excuse to leave….” I almost said Joanna, but I held back just in time. “… to leave everyone there because you were meeting someone in the Village.”
Nothing registered. He had no idea what I was talking about. But then his eyes lit up and his whole expression changed. Then color flooded his cheeks.
“That’s when I started seeing Annie: early that summer in New York. You’re right. I’d forgotten all about it. I didn’t want Joanna to know,” he began to explain. His eyes left mine and raced into the distance, searching for what now seemed immediate and real.
“That night. Yes, I remember all about it now. You and I sneak out of there like a couple of thieves, going off to have dinner with some lawyer on some dull business I supposedly had to take care of.”
“She testified, and so did Clover Dell—remember her? And Abigail—Abby—Sinclair. It’s surprising how much both of them are just the way you would have thought they would be. Maybe no one really changes, after all; maybe we just get older.”
The names meant nothing to him. He gave me a puzzled glance, wondering, I think, whether there was some reason they should. Annie he would never forget, but the rest of the people he had known then he did not seem to remember at all.
The sun was shining through the glass. The gray morning mist had burned away and Central Park glowed clean and dark and elegant under a blue, unbroken sky.
“They all remember you,” I remarked as I rose and extended my hand. “Even Judge Scarborough considers you a friend.”
Browning gave me an uncomprehending look.
“I used to know a lot of people when I ran the company, and a lot of people knew me. Now everyone knows me, and I don’t know anyone. Except you, of course, my old friend,” he said as he gripped my hand.
There was something warm and consoling in the way he looked at me, as if he knew all the things I had ever done wrong and all the things I wished had never happened, and instead of thinking less of me because of it, only regretted that he had not been there to help. It was what I had always felt under his intelligent, benevolent gaze: the sense that he saw things I could not see and that I could trust him with my life. He kept looking at me, but the past slowly vanished and he began to talk eagerly about what might happen next. I think I had always known Thomas Browning was destined to become a very great man.
“It’s going to be an interesting few weeks, don’t you think?” said Browning, resuming an exuberance that made you feel he was unstoppable, that no matter what the odds he would always find a way to win.
“Come on, I’ll walk you out. I’ll do better than that.
It’s such a gorgeous day, I’ll walk you partway across the park.” he slapped me on the shoulder, took two steps and then, remembering what he had to do, shook his head.
“Better let them know,” he said, mainly to himself. He picked up the telephone and said he was going out. “A little walk in the park with my old friend.”
The Secret Service agent was waiting for us when the elevator opened on the lobby floor. His eyes began to move ahead of us as we made our way toward the front door.
“You remember Mr. Antonelli, don’t you?” asked Browning with an impish grin. “The fellow who turned us down when we offered him a ride after that dinner over at the Plaza, the one you had to go get later and bring back here.”
Agent Powell nodded politely. “Yes, sir; I remember.”
“Good to see you, Agent Powell,” I replied, nodding back.
The doorman held open the glass door. Agent Powell went ahead, holding his arm behind him to keep Browning close. Out on the sidewalk, Browning raised his head and squinted into the sun. Then he turned to Powell.
“We’ll just cross the street and walk a little ways. I’m sure that will be all right.”
Powell looked worried. He turned to Browning and said something. That is when I saw him: a man with his hands shoved into the pockets of a tan windbreaker, coming right at us—fifteen, or maybe twenty, feet away—moving quickly, faster than a walk, not quite a run. There was a strange, determined look in his eyes.
His hand was coming out of his pocket. I knew before I saw it that he had a gun and that he was there to murder Thomas Browning. “Watch out!” I cried as I threw myself at the man as hard as I could. He fired just before I hit him. I felt a searing pain in my shoulder and then I heard the second shot. I looked behind me and saw Browning sprawled on the sidewalk, thrown there by agent Powell, who lay on top of him. Blood was pouring out of Powell’s head, and I knew immediately that he was dead.
CHAPTER 22
The secret service tried to pull Thomas Browning away, but he refused to leave.
With a look of utter desolation, he watched Powell’s body being placed inside a black bag. He walked next to the gurney and waited while it was loaded into the coroner’s van. When the doors were shut, he came over to the ambulance, where a paramedic was wrapping a bandage around my shoulder and upper arm.
“It wasn’t anything,” I said. “The bullet passed through my arm. I’m sorry about Powell. If I’d been just a second faster…”
Browning shook his head. “You saved my life, and so did he.” He shifted his gaze to the paramedic, a Hispanic woman in her late twenties. “Is he going to be all right?” her hands kept moving. “He’ll be fine,” she said as she tore another piece of tape. “He shouldn’t be in the hospital more than a couple of hours.”
“You saved my life,” Browning repeated in a solemn, whispered voice. “Now I have to call Harold Powell’s wife and tell her that her husband was one of the two bravest men I ever knew.”
A crowd had begun to gather, filling the street and stretching out across the sidewalk next to the park.
Television had begun to broadcast live coverage from the scene, and reporters shouted questions above the noise. No one knew what had happened to the shooter, only that in all the confusion he had managed to get away. More insistent than before, the Secret Service told Browning that they had to get him inside. With the siren wailing, the ambulance started to move.
The doctors told me that I had been lucky, that the bullet had not hit bone and had not done any damage to the nerves. “It
will just hurt like hell,” said one of them with a physician’s practiced touch. They gave me something for the pain, scheduled an appointment to change the dressing on the wound and sent me home.
Released from the hospital, a little before two in the afternoon, I took a cab to the apartment on Central Park West. I tried not to think too much about what had happened, but I could not think about anything else. It is a strange feeling: the sad euphoria of surviving a shooting in which someone else is killed. I had not thought about Browning or Powell or doing something heroic when I threw myself at the gunman. If I thought about anything, it was only about myself. I saw the look in the killer’s eyes; I knew what he was going to do. I thought I was close enough to stop him before he fired, that I could take away the gun, but Harold Powell put himself in the line of fire. That was bravery, something worth remembering, something worthy of honor; all I could claim for myself was that I had not been a coward.
The telephone was ringing when I walked in the door. With my hand on my bandaged shoulder, I hobbled across the room, hoping to reach it in time. I thought it was Gisela calling to make sure I was safe. It was Jimmy Haviland, and he sounded depressed.
“Are you all right? That agent—he was the one I saw that night after the dinner, wasn’t he? I recognized the picture they showed on television.”
I dropped onto the sofa and kicked off my shoes. The sunlight through the French doors barely reached the edge of the blue Kerman rug that covered part of the polished parquet floor.
“Maybe we should make a deal, plead to something, get this over with before someone else gets killed. They missed Browning; that doesn’t mean they won’t try again.”
“There’s nothing you can plead to,” I reminded him.
“You didn’t do anything.” he knew that as well as I did. Browning was the only witness who could testify that Annie Malreaux’s death was an accident and that Jimmy Haviland had not been in the room. If Harold Powell had not taken the bullet meant for Thomas Browning; if Browning had died instead—Haviland would have had no defense. When the first confused reports started coming in, when he first heard that there had been an assassination attempt and that someone had died, he could be forgiven if he had started to wonder what it might mean for him.