by D. W. Buffa
“Then who found out that he’d been murdered?”
“There was an autopsy, private, controlled; the Secret Service arranged it. There was a puncture mark in his armpit. That’s what made them think they had better take a closer look at the cause of death. When they discovered the drug, Clarence called in the agent and told him what they had found. Then Clarence came to me.”
“What about the FBI? Who’s investigating this?”
“There isn’t going to be an investigation; not yet, anyway. Not until you find the answer to the only question that matters.”
“Me? What question? What matters?”
“You know everything about the intelligence community; you know who you can trust. The question is who was behind his murder and what was the reason they wanted him killed. That’s what is important: the reason. Robert had connections all over the world. Everyone wanted something from him, and of course,” she added in a curious undertone, “there were people willing to do almost anything for him. But something happened, he got involved in something—I’m not quite sure what—and he started to worry, become even more secretive than usual, and then, for no reason at all, fly into a rage. It was like he found himself inside a circle and the circle was starting to close. I have to know what was going on, what he was afraid of. I have to know why he was killed, if it was because of something he knew, something he was covering up. That’s why this has to be kept quiet. Do you have any idea what a scandal like that would do, not just to his reputation, but to the country?—The idea that a president of the United States was murdered to keep him from talking about some criminal enterprise in which he might have been involved. You don’t think I’m serious? When did you ever know Robert Constable to think the rules that ordinary people have to live by applied to him?”
The question seemed to answer itself in the silence that followed as Hillary Constable crossed over to the desk and removed a black date book from the middle drawer.
“This is his calendar. I took it from his study downstairs.” She opened to a place already marked by a ribbon. “That next week, the week after he was killed, like almost every week, was filled up with appointments, places he had to go, speeches he had to give; but then all of them were crossed out, all except one, an appointment he had for the next morning with Quentin Burdick of the New York Times. Why did Burdick want to see him? And why did Robert cancel everything else? Was it because he knew what Burdick was going to ask him, and that it was a story that, once it was published, was going to change everything?”
Chapter Five
Robert Constable had made a mockery of his marriage by frequent acts of infidelity; Bobby Hart had never once betrayed his wife. He was young and good-looking and, if that were not enough, a United States senator who was not only widely respected but, in the phrase so often used, destined for higher things. In a city in which power, and not money, was the leading aphrodisiac, Bobby Hart did not lack for opportunities, and, except perhaps in the minds of rigid moralists, would not have lacked excuse.
Bobby Hart had been in love with Laura from the first moment he saw her. She had been too shy to trust her instincts and a little too scared of what she felt to come quite as quickly to the same conclusion. It was only later, after they were married, after the collapse, that Bobby fully realized how fragile, how vulnerable, she had always been. Beautiful in a way that at times seemed almost otherworldly, she moved entirely in her own orbit, indifferent to what others might think, or what others might say, interested only in what she knew and loved, which was Bobby Hart and Bobby Hart alone. She would have lived a life of perfect bliss if they could have lived, just the two of them, a life of solitude, but she had tried instead to live the life her husband thought important. She had helped in his first campaign for Congress; appeared smiling at his side in front of crowds that terrified her, and, acting with a bravery that passed unnoticed, even gave short speeches of her own.
Then they moved to Washington and she discovered that she was not just expected to share her husband with the world, but that they were not to have in any real sense any life at all. Other people seemed to thrive on it, the constant movement, the constant rush, the endless gossip, the endless rumors, the belief that Washington was the center of the universe, the only place that mattered, a place where everyone was always busy, where everything, even the smallest detail, was important, a place where everyone was always certain what was going to happen next, and where everyone almost always was wrong. It was a madhouse, a charnel house of incoherent voices, and after a while all she could hear inside her head was the constant, crazy noise, and she knew, deep down inside her, that if she did not leave she would quickly lose her mind. Had she been less unworldly and more experienced she might have decided she was the only sane one there, and become ironic.
No one had seen the inner turmoil beneath the smiling surface of Laura’s gentle, lovely face; no one had known how much effort it had taken just to keep herself together, to show the world what the world wanted, and expected, to see. She began to make excuses, invent reasons why Bobby should go to some event alone; and when, rebelling against what she thought her own failings, she forced herself to go, she would sometimes fall into sudden silences or suddenly start chattering aimlessly about something that had nothing to do with the conversation. She was slipping away, but it was gradual, like a slowly changing mood, the way boredom takes the place of excitement when the novelty wears off. Bobby had not understood that the endless whirl of official gatherings and Georgetown parties had lost their freshness and become a tired routine—until the night she told him with a lonely smile that she had to go away.
“I can’t live here, I just can’t—I’ve tried. I’d do anything for you, Bobby, but I can’t do this. I have to go home, our home, Bobby; the one we bought together, where we said we’d always live. I’m not leaving you; I don’t want you to leave me. I’ll be there, at home, waiting every night.”
It was only then that he realized what he had done to her, and from that day forward his ambition lived, so to speak, on borrowed time. He promised himself, and he promised her, that as soon as he finished the more important things he had started, he would quit the Senate, resign his seat, and come home to Santa Barbara. This was what he thought he owed her, and it was what he wanted for himself. He was still in love with her—he would always be in love with her—and he could not stand the thought that, for however short time, they would live apart.
Laura moved back to Santa Barbara and Bobby started spending weekends there as often as he could, and then, two years later, at almost the same time, Bobby said it was time to quit and Laura told him that instead of that she wanted a second chance. She insisted she was stronger, that she had now quite recovered, and that she loved him too much to let him stop what he was doing because of her. And so she came back to Washington, and Bobby for his part made sure that things were different. They rarely went to Georgetown parties and they seldom saw anyone who was not an old friend. They spent a lot of time with Charlie Finnegan and, when she was not at home in Ann Arbor where she had her medical practice, his wife, Clare.
Bobby did everything he could to protect her. He almost never told her what he learned on the Senate Intelligence Committee, no matter how angry and depressed he might have become listening to more tales of wanton violence and every form of evil. He tried always to be cheerful and eager, as if the only thing he had had on his mind all day was getting home to her. But Laura had acquired an almost mathematically precise ability, a kind of calculus of false exuberance, to measure the degree of his well-intentioned duplicity. She knew what he was doing and loved him even more because of it.
Their life settled into a comfortable routine. And if it was not everything she had wanted, it was good enough. She knew for certain that she would rather live with him in the apartment they had taken in Washington’s northwest corner, she would rather live with him anywhere, than live anywhere else, even Santa Barbara, without him. Sometimes, if he was traveli
ng overseas, or had to give a speech somewhere out of town, she would fly back to California where he would join her on the weekend. The week the president died, when all of Washington gathered for the funeral, Bobby told her no one would notice if she was not there.
“I never quite understood what people saw in him,” she remarked when Bobby drove her to the airport for the flight home to Santa Barbara. The Potomac glistened in the morning sun as they passed the Jefferson Memorial and started across the bridge. “I’m not sure I liked her any better,” she added as she reached in her purse for her dark glasses. “You wonder what goes on in private between people like that.” A smile full of puzzled affection broke suddenly across her face. “I suppose there are people who wonder that about us, aren’t there? Wonder what we’re really like—whether we make love or you just give speeches.”
Bobby kept his eyes on the road, but she could see—he wanted her to see—the teasing sparkle in his eyes.
“Did I speak too much last night?”
“I like it when you speak like that,” she said in the silky voice that he never tired of hearing. “You can speak like that every night to me.”
When they reached the airport, he parked at the curb and got her suitcase out of the car. She put her arms around his neck and laughed softly into his ear.
“Come home, to Santa Barbara; we’ll talk some more.”
He stood on the sidewalk and watched her walk away, and then, when she was safe inside the terminal and he could not see her anymore, he got back in the car and drove off and felt the sudden aching emptiness and wished she had not gone. It was now, at times like this, that he realized not just how much he loved her but how, through his own unthinking ambition, he had come so close to losing her. The doctors and psychologists might say that she suffered from depression, but, so far as he was concerned, the madness had been his. The choice between spending all his time with the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, holding hands on a beach in Santa Barbara and making love in a moonlit bedroom with a long view of the sea, or wrangling with a pack of penny politicians over cuts in someone’s budget was not a choice at all, except to someone quite demented.
The three days away from her seemed like three years, and what he had learned at the president’s funeral made the separation even worse. The secret he had been told by Hillary Constable, the secret about the president’s death, was something he was going to have to share. This was of a different order, a different magnitude, than the things he had in the past thought best to keep to himself. It was a secret that he had known immediately would change not just his life, but the lives of a great many others. He had to tell her, if not for her, than for himself: he always had a better sense of things after he talked with her.
It was a bright, clear, windless afternoon when he drove home from the airport, the kind of lush summer day that made him wonder, not just what kind of fool would want to fly back and forth to Washington, but what it must have been like, back in the Twenties, when Los Angeles was still new and exotic and Santa Barbara was a long way away from everything and the house that Laura loved was a good half mile from its closest neighbor. Perhaps because his own life, the life he had with Laura, had involved so much heartache and tragedy, he had always had a certain fondness for the past. It was the great secret, the one no one talked about. The great American dream was not about the future, it was about what might have been but wasn’t.
He made the last turn on the winding, narrow road. The gleaming white Spanish-style house, buried in the sunburst colors of clinging bougainvillea, was just ahead. He passed through the open gate, parked the car, and went inside.
“Laura,” he called, but there was no answer.
He put his suitcase down on the cool tile floor and went into the kitchen. An empty coffee cup with a trace of lipstick had been left on the table next to the morning paper. The paper had been folded back to the third page where the story of the president’s funeral had been continued next to a picture of a somber-looking “Senator Robert Hart of California, entering the National Cathedral.” Bobby smiled to himself, imagining for a moment the look in Laura’s eyes when she turned the page and found the picture of him. He glanced at it again and felt a little the hypocrite for having, like the others, played the mourner for someone he would not miss.
He found Laura in the backyard, the other side of the pool at the far edge of the lawn, cutting roses in her usual methodical way, each one exactly the same length, then laid side by side in the woven wicker basket held on her arm. She treated them like children, speaking soft words of encouragement as she carefully selected the ones she thought were ready. Standing in the shadows of the back patio, Bobby watched with growing amusement as she danced from one rose bush to the next.
“Bobby!” she cried, half-embarrassed when he finally started toward her.
She stamped her foot, pretending petulance that he had not let her know he was home. She put the basket of roses on the ground, unfastened the straw hat she was wearing, and let her hair flow free. Wiping her dusty hands on the sides of her blue summer dress, she laughed self-consciously.
“I didn’t expect you until this evening. I thought I’d fill all the vases with flowers and have everything nice.”
He was right in front of her. She touched the side of his face and her hand felt warm against his skin. He put his arm around her and kissed her gently on the cheek.
“Let’s go inside. I’ve got a lot to tell you.”
They sat in a room just off the kitchen, a small second living room where they often spent their evenings, Laura curled up in a corner of the sofa, Bobby in an easy chair, watching as the sun slipped down the western sky and set fire to the Pacific.
“What is it, Bobby? I read all about the funeral; I watched a little of the television coverage. Why do you seem so worried? Is it whether Russell can do the job?”
“Russell? I’d almost forgotten. Strange. Well, maybe not so strange: if there was ever anyone easy to forget, it’s Irwin Russell. And now he’s president, though that shouldn’t last very long—a year from November to be precise.”
“He won’t run, he won’t try to get elected on his own?”
“That was the reason Constable picked him, the reason he dropped Jamison from the ticket.”
“He put Jamison on the Supreme Court. Isn’t that what Jamison wanted?”
Bobby arched an eyebrow. He shook his head as if to tell her that nothing that happened in Washington was ever quite what it seemed to be.
“Jamison wouldn’t have agreed to become vice president, wouldn’t have agreed to be on the same ticket with Constable, someone he didn’t think was half as qualified as he was to be president, if he had thought there was any chance he would not be there at the end of eight years, next in line for the office, with a clear path to the nomination. The first time he ever thought of being on the Court was when Constable told him that he was not going to be on the ticket again, when he told him that he could either fill the vacancy that was about to occur on the Court, or go back home and try to run for governor again.”
“But why, what did he think Irwin Russell would bring to the ticket that Tom Jamison couldn’t?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing in the way of any political advantage, but then Constable did not need any help to get reelected. Russell was supposed to be someone who could help him in Congress. He had been there damn near thirty years, was chairman of the Finance Committee, had a solid reputation, members on both sides of the aisle liked him. But he is colorless, dull as dust, slow, plodding, the moment he starts to speak you start checking your watch. In other words, he was the perfect combination: someone who would not cause any trouble and was smart enough to know that the vice presidency was as far as he could go.”
Laura folded her arms and frowned. She still did not understand.
“I don’t know this for sure,” confided Bobby. “No one ever came out and said it, but the rumor was that
Constable wanted to stay in office, and that he had a way to do it, or at least that he thought he did. He could not run again, he could not serve more than two terms in office, but what difference did that make, if his wife could take his place.”
Laura had never been surprised at anything the Constables had done. She had once remarked that they seemed to think that everything, that all of history, everything that had happened in the past, had been leading up to them.
“I imagine the only real question is which of them thought of it first.”
Dazzled by how quickly she could get to the heart of things, Bobby felt the smile fade from his lips.
“There are people who were around them for years, who thought they knew them better than they ever knew anyone, who insist that it was only after a lot of other people started talking about what a great president she would be, and how this was the first real chance to elect a woman, that they began to consider the possibility.”
Laura’s eyes went wide with wonder. Her mouth began to quiver as if she were about to laugh.
“What was it you told me, not that long ago: the closer some people are to power the more willing they are to believe? But, whichever of them was the first to think of it, that’s all gone now, isn’t it? Robert Constable is dead. Or do you think she might try anyway?”
“Run for president? I doubt it. She has other things she has to deal with now.”
He said this with a worried expression, and then hesitated, not quite sure how to tell her what had happened, and what, because of it, he had to do. He got up from the chair and sat next to her on the sofa.
“Constable didn’t die of a heart attack.”
Laura guessed at once what it meant.