“We don’t have much time,” I tell her.
“There was no other choice,” she says. “All the way out on the plane, I got more and more angry. Terry Scarborough was the kind of person who left a trail of ravaged souls as he cruised through life. By the time I got to that hotel, I was seething.”
“You don’t have to say anything. You’ve probably already said too much.”
“No,” she says. “I’ve been holding it in so long. Nobody I could talk to. I have to…I was thinking as far ahead as my brain would allow. I had the cab let me out two blocks from the hotel so there’d be no record of a taxi having dropped me. For a time I actually thought that—given how I felt, the anger—that I could kill him with my bare hands. But he was bigger than I was, stronger. I didn’t have a gun. Even if I did, I wouldn’t know how to use it. I thought about a knife. Maybe I could buy one. But I’d read enough briefs on appeal in criminal cases. I knew if I did that, even if I got rid of the knife, there’d be a trail. Wounds in the body would tell them the length of the blade, whether it was serrated, probably right down to the make and model. I’d read enough about it. I knew they could do it. They’d start checking all the shops, recent sales, anybody buying a single hunting or butcher knife. And even if I used cash, the salesclerk would remember this woman, because her eyes were all red from crying. I decided I couldn’t buy a weapon. I’d have to improvise, use whatever I found in the room—a lamp, a heavy knickknack off one of the shelves.”
“But then you didn’t have to go looking for a weapon, did you?”
“No. But you already know about that, the hammer in the stairwell. I didn’t want to get into the elevator. Too many people would see me.”
“How did you know what room he was in?”
“I called Dick Bonguard on his cell the night before. I had Dick’s number in Outlook on my computer. I knew that Dick would be trailing along with Terry on the book tour. I told Dick I had something I needed to fax to Terry. He gave me the hotel and the suite number.
“I climbed fourteen floors, all the way to the top. Every three or four flights, I’d stop to catch my breath. That’s when I saw it.”
“The hammer?”
“It was as if God had reached down and put it there and I was his avenging angel. I took it, put it in my purse. I had a good-size bag I always used for travel. I carried it over my shoulder, and I climbed to the top.”
“And the raincoat, the gloves?”
“The raincoat was in a little pouch, in the bottom of my purse with the gloves. I knew if I hit him with the hammer, there would be blood. It would get all over me and I’d be trapped there. From everything I read in the papers—and believe me, I kept up with the progress of your case every day,” she says, “the police never found the gloves?”
I shake my head.
“I dropped them in a trash can someplace. I don’t even remember where.”
“The police wouldn’t have looked very hard,” I tell her. “It didn’t fit the facts of their case. They had a fingerprint on the murder weapon. But it wasn’t yours.”
“I know,” she says. This seems to bother her more than the actual killing itself, the fact that Carl and his parents have been dragged through hell. “I would never have let him go to prison or die,” she says. “You have to believe that. I was buying time. That’s all I was doing. I knew that sooner or later I would have to do something to put an end to it. When the news of the Jefferson Letter broke, it was almost a relief. The very thing I’d been hiding so long was now out in the open. There was no need to hide it any longer.”
“So you fed it to us, hoping that it would be enough?”
She nods nervously several times. “Why didn’t it work?”
“One obstinate juror,” I tell her. “The way it goes sometimes.”
“Then if he’d been acquitted, you wouldn’t be here tonight.”
I shrug. She’s right. If Carl were on the street, free, out from under, this wouldn’t be my job. And given the theory of the prosecution, if Carl were acquitted, they would never be able to convict Scott—that is, if they even found her, which is unlikely.
“So you went up the stairs, put on the raincoat and the gloves. You had the hammer in your purse.”
She nods.
“How did you get into the room?”
“I knocked on the door. How stupid is that? I wasn’t sure if he was in or, if he was, whether he was alone. I knew when he opened the door he’d be surprised to see me. And standing there in a raincoat. I had a story ready. I was going to tell him that I was in town on business and there was something I needed to talk to him about if he could spare two minutes—anything to get inside the room.”
“Because you knew you were running out of time,” I say.
“Yes.”
“So what happened when he opened the door?”
“Strange thing was, he never even looked at me. He was busy reading something, a piece of paper in his hand. Before I knew it, he was walking away. He said, ‘Put it on the table’—something about a check. Then I realized he thought I was room service. Suddenly there he was, sitting in the chair, his back to me, reading some papers, making notes, completely oblivious to the fact that I was even standing there. At that moment I think I just exploded. What he had put me through, and he didn’t even know it. Not that Terry would have cared.
“You want to know the truth?” She looks me straight in the eye now. “It was easier than I ever thought it could be. I closed the door and walked up to the back of the chair, and I swung that hammer, over and over and over again, until the muscles in my arms burned.” She breathes heavily, takes the napkin and wipes her eyes.
“At some point I must have closed my eyes, because when I opened them again, there was blood everywhere—on the ceiling, on the walls, soaking into the gloves I was wearing, spotting and running down the raincoat. I didn’t realize it at first, but the reason I stopped swinging was that the hammer was stuck. The claws were lodged in the top of his head. I couldn’t look at it. For some stupid reason, I had to pull it out. I pulled and twisted. The hammer came loose, and his body fell on the floor. I dropped the hammer.
“It’s amazing. I…You’d think you would go into shock after something like that, but I didn’t. I was overwhelmed with this incredible urge to run, to get out of there. I knew that any minute somebody with a tray was probably going to be at the door. But I wasn’t finished.”
“You had to find the video of Ginnis and Scarborough at the restaurant.”
“How did you know?”
“It never came into evidence, but we have a copy,” I tell her, “from Scarborough’s apartment.”
“The police had it?” she says.
“Yes, but they didn’t know what it was.”
“I assumed that Terry had copies, but I didn’t think anyone would pay any attention to it. Terry had tons of tapes and DVDs all over the place. What was one more or less?”
“That was the reason you were running out of time?” I say. “You couldn’t be sure how long you had before Scarborough went public about the Jefferson Letter, the fact that Ginnis, a member of the Supreme Court, had manufactured it.”
“Arthur didn’t know he was being taped. I had to find the tape and the letter itself, Terry’s copy, the one Arthur had given him. I knew Terry well enough to know that he would have both of these with him. If he was getting ready to out Arthur in the media over the letter, he would never leave these behind in his apartment or trust them to a safe-deposit box. Terry was paranoid. Put something in a vault and people with power, especially people in government, can always find a way to get at it. The only safe place was in his pocket or the briefcase he was carrying. So I looked.”
“And of course you were still wearing the gloves.”
She nods.
This accounts for all the little smudges of blood on Scarborough’s attaché case, the large sample case by the side of his chair, and the leather portfolio by the television, where she f
ound the letter folded neatly, lying on top.
“Where did you find the videotape?” I ask.
“It was in his attaché case. Along with two DVDs. I had to worry about that,” she says. “I didn’t know a lot about the technology, but I knew if he had time to make copies of the tape and transfer them to DVD, there could be more copies someplace else. I had to assume that the video was also downloaded onto a computer somewhere. But Terry wouldn’t have copied the tape himself. He wouldn’t know how. He was always too busy to do anything like that, or learn how. He would have taken it somewhere and had it done. Why not? Raw footage of an old man talking about the value of some obscure letter over a meal in a restaurant wouldn’t mean a thing without Terry to explain what was happening and how all the little pieces fit together. I could only hope that if anybody stumbled on copies or found the video computer file, it would have that same meaningless sense to them.”
“And since they didn’t find it at the scene of a murder, why would they try to connect any dots?”
“That’s what I thought,” she says, “until you showed up at my office that day. But at that moment in the hotel room, I had bigger problems. I tried to wipe as much of the blood off of the raincoat as I could, using a wet towel that was already on the bathroom floor. Terry must have taken a shower. I had to make sure there were no fingerprints on the plastic of the coat. I was racing. I wrapped the coat with the same towel and threw it in my bag. I took off the gloves, wrapped them in a small hand towel, and dropped them in the bag. As fast as I was moving, I was careful not to touch anything with my hands. I used wet toilet paper to wipe spots of blood off my face and off the top of one of my shoes and then flushed the paper down the toilet. I used a clean face towel to touch any surfaces in the bathroom, including the handle on the toilet. I checked myself in the mirror and then started for the door. By now the carpet was soaked, and there was blood on the floor in the entry leading to the door. I had to step around it, stay to the left in the entry. I used the sleeve of my coat to open the door, and I ran. I ran down I don’t know how many flights of stairs before I got onto the elevator. When I got outside, I must have run for a mile. I threw the towel with the raincoat into the Dumpster in the parking lot. I got rid of the other towel with the gloves somewhere else. I can’t remember.”
“And of course you kept Scarborough’s copy of the letter.”
“You know, I’ve thought about that so many times. I don’t know why I kept it. It had Terry’s blood on it. It was the only thing left connecting me to that room, but for some reason I put it in a drawer when I got home. The DVDs and the videotape of Arthur talking with Terry in the restaurant, those I destroyed, but not before I watched one of the copies on my television. It was shot in early spring. Arthur was still recovering from his hip surgery. You could see his cane hooked on the edge of the table in the restaurant. This frail old man sitting there breaking bread with someone he despised, smiling, his eyes twinkling, thinking all the while that he was about to stick his fork in the devil.”
“And then Scarborough opened the letter and laid it on the table. You saw the look on Ginnis’s face,” I say. “He wasn’t smiling then.”
“No.”
“So that was the plan, to get Scarborough hooked on the Jefferson Letter, to get him to publish a book based on it, then reveal it as a fraud and leave him twisting?”
She nods. “Arthur had it all set up. He wrote the letter himself. You know, when you’re dealing with Arthur Ginnis, you’re dealing with a first-rate mind. He knew that the old code words for slavery in the Constitution, the fact that the framers had tried so hard to dodge the issue by avoiding the use of the word itself, made the substance of the Jefferson Letter completely plausible. Terry would buy into it in a heartbeat. Evidence of an offer to the slaving interests of Great Britain as the price to secure liberty for the American colonies and avoid a war—for Terry that was the stuff of dreams. Shatter the American myth. It was what he lived for. Terry hated the power structure. He hated authority, unless he was the one wielding it. He saw conspiracies everywhere.”
She seems more comfortable now, out from under the dark cloud of the murder, the details of the Jefferson Letter almost seeming to amuse her.
“First Arthur tried to get Terry to include the Jefferson Letter as part of Perpetual Slaves, a kind of one-two punch—slavery in the Constitution and history’s ultimate dirty deal in the letter. Arthur knew that Terry couldn’t resist. The letter confirmed every evil thought Terry ever had about the white ruling class, rotten to the core from the instant they entered the promised land.
“If that wasn’t enough, Terry was always the insecure author. Nibbling at the edges of his mind was the ever-present thought, ‘What if I trot out the old language of slavery and all they do is yawn?’ He could never be sure that the language was enough to ignite the firestorm he needed for success. But toss in Jefferson’s letter and Terry had an instant flamethrower. When Arthur dangled it, Terry did a swan dive, chasing the copy.”
“But of course you were there to stop it,” I tell her. “You convinced Scarborough he needed to authenticate the letter.”
“You bet I did. Arthur was angry. He could never forgive Terry for what he’d done to him. There’s no question he would have been chief justice but for Terry Scarborough’s lies. He’s one of the most intelligent human beings I’ve ever known. Do you think he would have even considered doing something like this five years ago, even three years ago? Never! Here’s a man with a lifelong reputation to protect, a judicial philosophy etched in law for a quarter of a century. And here he was taking a risk of immense proportions. He hated Scarborough. If you want to know what I thought, I thought Arthur was losing it. The reckless thing he was doing had all the signs of senility, and yet he seemed not to have dropped a single stitch. You bet I tried to stop it.
“Even after I convinced Terry to hold the letter and told him that he couldn’t use it without authentication, Arthur wouldn’t quit. God, that old man,” she says. “Terry wanted the original, and Arthur wouldn’t give it to him. Terry said he couldn’t convince the publisher to go forward with another book unless he produced the original of the Jefferson Letter and allowed them to authenticate it. Arthur didn’t buy it.
“He told Terry to call the publisher’s bluff. If they wouldn’t go forward based on the copy and a promise to deliver the original later, Terry should tell them he would take the project to another publisher. Given the sales of Perpetual Slaves, there’d be a bidding war for rights to the next book. When Terry thought about that, he stopped arguing. I think for a moment he might have even considered hiring Arthur to represent him.
“When Terry threatened, the publisher caved. They gave him a contract, told him where to sign, handed him a seven-figure advance, and promised to wait for the original of the Jefferson Letter that would have to be produced and authenticated before publication. They weren’t happy, but they did it. Terry was throwing parties—not that he needed the money, but the advance was twice what he thought he would get.”
“But if Ginnis knew he had to cough up the original of the letter before the book went into print, where was the downside for Scarborough? The publisher would know that the letter was a fraud before the book ever went to press,” I say.
“That’s what I’m saying. Arthur’s smart. He had already burned the original of the letter. He knew he couldn’t show it to anybody, not without revealing it as a fraud. The plan was to leak another copy of the letter to the media, with an anonymous note that Terry was doing a book and the name of the publisher—all this just about the time Terry was finishing the manuscript.
“The media would be all over the publisher, and they’d already have the contents of the letter, all the dirty little details, the bombshell of a letter, the offered deal on slavery. With all of this in the press, who needs a book?
“When the time came to produce the original, as far as Arthur was concerned, he was the original man from Mars. He knew nothin
g. He’d never heard of the Jefferson Letter. He didn’t know what Terry was talking about. By then the publisher—caught between the press, their inability to publish, and the suspicion that Terry had turned the media loose on them in an effort to force publication without the original letter—would have to go into court against Terry even if he was a hot property. When they found the paper trail leading back to Scarborough…”
“Zobel’s files with Scarborough’s signature on the disclaimer form.”
“You found that, too?” she says.
“Uh-huh.”
“When they found that, the U.S. Attorney would be joining the party, and Terry would be looking at both the civil and criminal sides of the same coin.”
“How did Ginnis manage to get Scarborough’s signature on that form?”
She laughs. “He not only had Terry’s signature, he also had his fingerprints all over that form. As a lawyer, Terry didn’t even belong in Arthur’s universe. But he was an author, and he had a large ego. He was used to autographing hundreds, even thousands, of books every year. It wasn’t unusual to have someone come up to him in a line during an autograph party and tell the author that he’d left his book at home. The person might have a paper bookplate to be signed that he could paste in the book later, or just a piece of paper that he could glue in. It happens often enough that writers don’t even think about it.
“Arthur waited for an autographing appearance at a bookshop in Washington. That was for the book just before Perpetual Slaves. Arthur sent over a clerk with a sheet of paper that had a penciled line where Terry was to sign. The clerk was told not to say anything about Arthur or where the request was coming from. It was some kind of a surprise. The story was simple: She owned a book and had forgotten it at home.
“The night before the autographing, Arthur printed Zobel’s disclaimer form on his home computer. All he had to do was put a copy of the form under a blank sheet of paper with a little light behind the two, and you could see where the signature went on the disclaimer form. That’s where Arthur drew the penciled line. When he got the sheet back with the signature, he pulled up the form, ran the signed sheet through the printer, and there it was, the form with the signature, all in the right place. He used gloves so his prints wouldn’t be on the form, only Scarborough’s and the clerk’s, who Arthur knew they’d never look for.
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