by D. W. Buffa
“Quentin Burdick,” she reminded him. “What is it he thinks he knows?”
“That millions of dollars ended up in your husband’s pockets; that it was routed through a number of different sources, but that all of it originated with The Four Sisters. This isn’t based on some vague suspicion he has; Frank Morris confirmed it.”
“Frank Morris, the congressman who was killed in prison? What does he have to do with any of this? Wasn’t he convicted of bribery?—He doesn’t sound like a very credible source.”
“Burdick thinks so. He went out to California, talked to him in prison. Morris was murdered right after that, the same day.”
“And Morris said…?”
“That he had been taking money from The Four Sisters, helping get defense contracts for some of the companies The Four Sisters controlled, but when he discovered what they were really up to—helping foreign interests acquire some of the major media companies in this country—he decided he had to stop it. He went to see the president and the next thing he knew he was on trial for bribery and sent to prison.”
“You’re suggesting the president had something to do with that?”
“Morris told Burdick that the president had been the one who first encouraged him to talk to the people connected with The Four Sisters, and that—”
“That doesn’t prove anything!” cried Hillary Constable, throwing up her hands. “Suggesting that someone talks to someone hardly constitutes a crime!”
“He knew all about it!” Hart shouted back. They glared at each other across the room. “He knew everything. He told Morris there was nothing to worry about. He told him that they—‘they!’—hadn’t done anything wrong. He—”
“They hadn’t done anything wrong—that’s what he said? You see, he hadn’t. Isn’t that what—?”
Hart looked straight at her, his eyes cold, immediate.
“He said no one would ever find out!”
Hillary Constable turned on her heel. Folding her arms in front of her, she stared out the window, too angry to say another word. She began to tap her foot.
“What have you found out about his…death?” she asked finally.
She would not turn around, would not look at him. Hart’s eyes were drawn back to the photograph of her on the beach. The thought flashed through his mind that she must have had a temper then as well, but had always gotten away with it: No one who wanted her would have risked telling her that she had misbehaved. How many times has the beauty of a woman taught cowardice to men?
“Your husband was involved with The Four Sisters. He was taking money, vast sums of it, in return for doing things he shouldn’t have done. He told someone what Morris told him. Morris was convinced that by doing that the president signed his own death warrant, that—”
Hillary Constable wheeled around. She seemed puzzled and confused.
“Signed his own death warrant? Even if all this is true, why would the fact he told someone that Morris had changed his mind about what he was doing mean that?”
“Because if the president was willing to betray Morris, there was no reason to think he would not betray the people he was doing business with.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. If you and I are in a conspiracy with someone else and you tell me that the other person is thinking about telling the police, I can understand getting rid of him, but why get rid of you?”
She said this as if instead of conspiracy and murder, she was discussing a problem in formal logic. If A equals B, and B equals C, then A…whatever follows, follows; there is nothing moral or immoral about it. Hart had a different understanding of things.
“Because it’s the only way to be absolutely safe, the only way to make sure, now that everything is starting to fall apart, that there isn’t anyone left who knows what you’ve done.”
“Yes, I suppose you have a point.”
Pursing her lips, she seemed to think about it. She went over to the bookshelves where she kept the liquor and poured herself another glass. She closed the bottle and then remembered.
“Would you like…?”
“No, I’m fine,” replied Hart, glancing at the drink he had barely touched. Instead of going back to the window, Hillary Constable took the easy chair next to his.
“What do you think of our new president?”
Though he tried not to show it, Hart was stunned. They were talking about the death of her husband, talking about who might be responsible for his murder, and all of sudden she wants to know his opinion of Irwin Russell? He searched her eyes, but he could see nothing beyond what appeared to be a genuine interest. That in itself revealed more about who she was than anything he might have discovered had he been able to penetrate the veneer of near perfect self-possession.
“What do I think of…? I’m afraid I’ve been a little too busy trying to find out who might have murdered your husband to have given much thought to his successor.”
“Interim successor might be the better description. Irwin was the perfect vice president: quiet, inoffensive, someone everyone liked because he was not a threat to what anyone wanted for themselves.” She gave Hart the knowing look of the consummate insider, someone who can size up a situation, take the measure of everyone involved, judge the play of forces with a physicist’s precision, and do it all in the blink of an eye. “That was the reason we chose him,” she added. “Unlike most of the people in Washington, he didn’t wake up every morning full of resentment because someone else was president.”
“And now he is,” said Hart in a way that suggested something more than the obvious fact. “I’m sure you’re right. I doubt he ever felt any resentment that someone else was sitting in the Oval Office, but are you sure he never thought about it, never wondered what it might be like, especially after he was put on the ticket and became vice president?”
That same knowing look was in her eyes.
“Oh, he thought about it, all right; rather I should say, worried about it; worried whether he could hold up under the strain, the pressure, the requirements of the office—if something ever happened. Do you know the first thing he wanted to know when Robert asked him to be his running mate?—Was his health as good as the published reports said it was. Was his heart condition really just a minor matter? Does that sound like someone who spends his time dreaming about what a great president he would be?”
The irony of course, as Hart quickly noted, was that was exactly the kind of question someone desperate for the office might ask; and exactly the way someone would have to ask it, as if his only concern was that nothing was likely to happen and that he would not have to serve. But she was right about Irwin Russell: he was that creature almost extinct in Washington, a politician without ambition for what he did not have.
“As I say, I really haven’t had any time, and it hasn’t yet been two weeks. But everyone seems to think he’s doing as well as could be expected under the circumstances. Why do you ask?”
She stood up and, holding her drink in her hand, crossed over to her desk. She seemed distracted, uncertain what to do next. Her eyes darted from one thing to another, until, finally, they came to rest on the same photograph that had caught Hart’s attention. For a moment it seemed to take her back, not just to the past, but to a different remembered future, to a time when she had lived her life in the expectation of things that had not happened. Her blue eyes brightened and the rigid discipline of her mouth gave way to something softer and more sincere.
“Have they always called you ‘Bobby’? They never called him that. It was always ‘Robert’ or ‘Bob.’ ‘Bobby’ is more endearing, isn’t it? There is a kind of intimacy in it—you know, the easy familiarity you have with someone you grew up with, someone who knows all the innocent secrets you had when you were kids. That’s the way people feel about you. But you know that, don’t you? You’re too smart not to know that. No one ever called him that,” she went on, caught in a recollection that was new to her. “He wouldn’t have let them; he wasn’t strong
enough for that. He thought it sounded weak. ‘Bobby.’ I asked him once about it. I mentioned Bobby Kennedy; he started talking about Jack, and how it sounded better, more in charge, than ‘Johnny.’ He thought about things like that. Names—they don’t mean anything, really, do they? And then, again, they mean everything, don’t they? There are people who want me to run; people who think I should be the nominee. What do you think I should do?”
There was not so much as a pause between the one thing and the other; not so much as a second’s delay before she went from what seemed an idle reminiscence about her husband’s name and the announcement that she was thinking about running for president herself. Hart was beyond the point of being shocked, much less surprised, by anything she said. He was watching what he knew was a performance, but he still was not clear why she was giving it. He was sure she wanted something; he just was not sure what it was.
“You asked me to see what I could find out about your husband’s death. You told me that he had not died of a heart attack, that he had been murdered,” he reminded her in a firm tone of voice. “I’ve talked to Clarence Atwood, and I’ve talked to the agent who was in charge of the detail that night. They confirmed what you said. How could you even be thinking about running for president, how could you be thinking about anything, before we get to the bottom of this? And remember something else: I told you at the beginning that this couldn’t be kept secret for more than a very short time, that it was going to have to come out, that there would have to be an investigation.”
He was becoming angry as he spoke, angry with her, angry with himself. He should never have agreed to any of this. He should have turned her down and insisted that an investigation begin at once. He had made a mistake; he was not going to make another.
“The president was murdered! That’s the only thing you should be thinking about, the only thing that matters. I said I’d see what I could find out and I have. He was murdered because someone wanted to keep him quiet; murdered so he couldn’t tell anything to Quentin Burdick. And it seems pretty damn obvious that The Four Sisters—someone involved with The Four Sisters—is behind it. The president was murdered. And if you don’t tell what you know to the authorities, I will!”
“But he wasn’t murdered! That’s what I had to see you about, what I said was so urgent.”
Hart was on his feet, staring hard at her.
“What are you saying? You told me he was given a drug that caused his heart to stop. They found evidence of it at the autopsy. Atwood confirmed it.”
Hillary Constable stepped closer. She seemed almost contrite, as if she had bungled things and made his life difficult because of it.
“I was distraught, out of my mind with grief; and yes, I admit it, with anger, too. He dies in bed with some whore, one of those women he always had to have; and worse than that, everyone knows it, everyone is talking about it! The pressure I was under, all the things I had to do—I overreacted, misinterpreted what I was told. Clarence Atwood didn’t tell me that—”
“You’re going to tell me that Atwood didn’t tell you your husband was murdered? Atwood told me that himself. And you can trust me: I didn’t misinterpret what he said!”
Her chin came up a defiant half inch.
“You may find he’s changed his mind.”
Her eyes were hot and full of warning, but then, an instant later, they changed, became, if not quite friendly, accommodating, willing to discuss their differences.
“It doesn’t really matter how he died, does it? He’s dead. Why tarnish his reputation with more allegations, more rumors about things he might have done that he should not have done? He did some good things, some great things, as president. It seems to me we have some duty to protect that, the legacy, the public record, of what he did.”
“Protect it with a lie?” cried Hart, as angry as he had ever been. “Lie about the fact that he didn’t die of natural causes, that he was assassinated? Lie about the fact that in the years he held office he was part of a criminal conspiracy? Lie, so you can run to take his place, the widow of our beloved president, and not the widow of a charlatan, a fraud?”
“I’m going to run, and I’m going to win! I need your help, Bobby,” she said with a savage look. “Don’t let me down. There’s more at issue here than you think.”
Hart did not answer. He turned on his heel and started out of the room.
“Think about it, Bobby!” she shouted after him. “I’ll deny I ever said anything about the way my husband died. And don’t think that Clarence Atwood will back you up. He’ll say whatever I tell him to say.”
Hart wheeled back around.
“Don’t you care anything about the fact that your husband was murdered, that someone assassinated the President of the United States?”
“Of course I care about that. But there’s nothing can be done about it that won’t make things worse.”
“That’s the difference between the truth and the lie: whether it makes things better or worse for you?”
“Not for me,” she insisted. “For the country.”
“What kind of country do you think this is: a country too stupid to deal with the truth?”
Chapter Thirteen
Ten minutes after Bobby Hart left Hillary Constable, ten minutes after he stalked out of her lit up house, he was not quite sure what had happened, why she had changed her mind. She had told him that contrary to all the published reports her husband had been murdered and asked him to find out what he could, impressed upon him the urgency and the need for discretion, the concern that they find out who was behind it before it became public knowledge that the president had been murdered and all the rumors started. And now for some reason she had changed her mind, decided that it had not been murder after all; or rather that it was simply better, more advantageous, to ignore what had happened, ignore the fact that her husband had been murdered, because she had political ambitions of her own. Austin Pearce thought Hart had missed the point.
“She always means what she says, when she says it.”
He clasped his hands behind his neck and leaned back. They were sitting in the living room of Pearce’s townhouse on Washington Square. Austin Pearce was in his favorite chair, next to the open French doors where almost every evening and nearly every Sunday afternoon, he could, depending on his mood, look up from the book he was reading and gaze across the street at the moving crowd in the tree-lined park, the young women who brought their children to play, the old men who sat in silence on the benches reading the newspapers, or glance instead at the bookshelves that towered fifteen feet up to the gold inlaid ceiling of a building that, he was almost certain, had been the one Henry James had in mind when he wrote his story about a long vanished family that had lived here more than a hundred years ago. Even if it was not true, Austin Pearce liked the thought of it, the way it seemed, like his own attachment to the past, to give a greater sense of permanence to things.
“I don’t think she changed her mind at all,” he said. Sitting up, he looked at Hart, slouching in another easy chair on the other side of the French doors. “She asked you to find out what you could about who might have murdered the president, and you did, didn’t you?”
Hart heard what Austin Pearce said, but he did not quite understand it. He was still angry about what had happened the night before, frustrated by his inability to see what he suspected must be right in front of him, something that he thought might be obvious to Austin Pearce, who not only had the most penetrating intelligence of anyone he knew but had known both of the Constables for years. It was the reason he had flown up to New York.
“Consider what you’ve done for her, what she knows now that she didn’t know before, and probably wouldn’t have known, if you had not helped.”
“The Four Sisters?”
“Yes, of course. She knows that was the story Burdick was working on; she knows that was the reason that the president was meeting with him.” Pearce spread his fingers and tapped them together. He seeme
d to concentrate on a thought, a question that was taking shape in his mind. “Did she seem surprised?”
“She didn’t deny that she knew Jean de la Valette, and she knew the name of the firm. She resented the suggested that any money might have changed hands; insisted that the money they had came from friends of theirs who would have been paid back from what they expected to make after Constable left office. But, no, now that you ask, she didn’t seem surprised. She never does, though, does she? Seem surprised, I mean.”
“She’s hard to read, I’ll give you that. But the point is that, thanks to you, she knows the story is out there, that Burdick is onto it. She knows about Frank Morris, that Morris implicated the president and that Morris believed that The Four Sisters had the president killed. She knows something else, too: she knows that there isn’t any way to prove any of this without her or the Secret Service.” The brown eyes of Austin Pearce seemed to take on a deeper shade as he tried to grasp her intentions. “Has it occurred to you that maybe Robert Constable wasn’t murdered after all?”
“What are you talking about? She told me he was murdered, and Atwood confirmed it.”
“Would you have gone looking for his killer, would you have discovered anything about The Four Sisters—would you have been all that interested in what Burdick told you—if she hadn’t told you that? Don’t misunderstand, I think she told you the truth when she told you he had been murdered, but I don’t think that’s the reason she wanted you to find out what you could. I think she wanted to know what was out there, what someone with your connections could discover. She wanted to know what she had to worry about. She was lying when she told you that a few close friends gave them the money they needed. That was a cover story they fabricated together. What was it she said to you?—that Jean de la Valette is someone they could have asked if they had wanted to; could have asked, but didn’t, because they knew what it would look like. You see, she understood exactly what the position was, what they had to do to protect themselves against too close an inquiry. They had friends who would help them, and a lot of them did, but not the kind of money—tens of millions, if not more—that The Four Sisters moved into various accounts for them.”