Damage Control

by Robert Dugoni

  “Sir?”

  Meyers looked back at the agent, perturbed. “I said send her in.”

  The agent cleared his throat. “Mrs. Meyers is in your office, sir. She said she would wait for you—”

  Meyers tilted his head as if he had not heard.

  “She said she’d wait for you there.”

  He felt the dull ache at his temples penetrate the back of his eyes like two serrated daggers. “Leave,” he said.

  WHEN THE DOOR to the office opened, Elizabeth did not move. The grandfather clock in the corner of the room chimed as if to announce Robert Meyers’s arrival. He paused in the doorway at the sight of her sitting in the captain’s chair. His chair. She knew that he had positioned it directly in front of his desk to face two mustard-yellow couches separated by a glass coffee table. It was the same type of chair and setup John F. Kennedy had used in his Oval Office.

  Meyers closed the door behind him and walked calmly to the river-rock fireplace. “What we must determine, Elizabeth, is a measured response.” He spoke to the plate-glass windows. “What we must determine is an appropriate form of punishment. I understand that you are testing me—testing the limits of my patience and tolerance. I understand that you are seeking my attention, that you want me to punish you.” He stopped and turned to her. “What will that punishment be?”

  “My life,” she said softly.

  He shot forward, knocking the vase of freshly cut flowers from the glass coffee table and gripping both sides of the chair. His face contorted within inches of hers, but he spoke barely above a whisper. “Don’t think I haven’t considered that very thought.

  “Just like you killed James Hill.”

  He smiled. “Yes, just like I killed James Hill.”

  “The difference, Robert, is you can’t kill someone who’s already dead.”

  He laughed, softly at first, with a shake of his head, but it grew in intensity until he collapsed on one of the couches. He put his head in his hands and rubbed at his face. “Do you know how ridiculous you sound, how fucking melodramatic? Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?” He stood again and looked around the room, his arms sweeping. “You’re in one of the grandest homes ever built, with a staff at your beck and call.”

  “You built a prison and employed guards to watch me.”

  “Really? You’ve traveled to nearly every country in the world, met the most famous people alive, worn the most expensive clothes, and eaten the most exquisite food.” He gripped the arms of the chair again, shaking it, shouting, “I’ve given you more than even you could have possibly dreamed. What would you have preferred? Did you want the beat-up home in Green Lake with the view of the back of a building? Was that my competition—an underpaid law professor at a second-rate law school?”

  “James Hill was a better man than you’ll ever be,” she said.

  He started laughing again. “This has got to end. This demented and tormented way of thinking must come to an end.”

  “I’m glad you agree, Senator.”

  Meyers’s gaze remained on his wife. Slowly, he removed his hands from the chair and stood upright, a thin, almost imperceptible grin creasing his lips, as if he were enjoying this. “Is she what this is about?” he asked his wife. He waved his hand in the air. “This whole charade of insisting that I meet you here in my office, you sitting in my chair like a defiant brat?” He turned and held out his hands. “Welcome, Ms. Hill. I don’t believe I invited you, but please make yourself at home. Don’t let the surroundings intimidate you.”

  Dana stood just inside the door that led to Meyers’s private bathroom. “I’m not intimidated by the surroundings or by you.”

  Meyers walked toward her. “Good.” He spread out his arms. “Well, here I am. If your presence is supposed to have made a statement, I’m afraid I missed it.”

  “I’m not surprised; I doubt you’ve ever seen anything clearly.”

  “And you’re going to be the one to enlighten me, is that it?” Meyers walked behind his desk, pulled out the high-back leather chair, and sat, offering Dana a seat with an upraised palm. “Please, by all means tell me what I have been missing.”

  Dana stepped forward. “The question is not whether you had my brother killed or even how you did it. You did. The question was always the evidence needed to convict you. How could I link a United States senator and presidential candidate to two petty thieves who killed a law professor in the middle of a botched robbery? Peter Boutaire got us close, but not close enough. He might have helped if he were still alive, but even alive, I doubt he would have said anything.”

  Meyers nodded. “May he rest in peace. He was a dedicated public servant and a sick son of a bitch.”

  Dana pulled the earring from her jacket pocket and held it so that it dangled from the end of the chain.

  Meyers smiled. “Ah, yes. The precious jewel. I’ve thought of it often, since the moment I saw it perched so elegantly between your breasts. I must admit, I found it a bit erotic. Elizabeth, remind me to get you something similarly suitable. You see, Ms. Hill, since the moment I opened the little care package brought to me, I’ve been considering the problem of the missing earring. It was Mr. Boutaire who initially noticed that Elizabeth had left your brother’s home that morning without them, and that the earrings could very well tie me to your brother’s death. Still, when King and Cole failed to deliver both, I decided to disregard it. I speculated that they had pawned it and that it would disappear forever. But then you took your trip to the jeweler and to the Hawaiian Islands, and I had to conclude you indeed had it. So I had it replaced with an identical, if less expensive, duplicate.”

  Meyers reached into his desk drawer and pulled out the matching earring. “The thing about a pair of earrings is that they’re not much good unless you have them both. One without the other isn’t a pair. It’s just an earring.” He put the earring on the desk pad and pulled his chair forward. “You can still admire it, of course, but it isn’t quite the same, is it?”

  In one swift motion, Meyers reached for the bronze bust of a buffalo on the corner of his desk, stood, and smashed the blue and diamond jewels, continuing his assault until he was breathing heavily through his nostrils. Strands of hair fell across his face. He flung the buffalo across the room, hitting a bookshelf and toppling ornamental plates.

  “Worthless,” he said, out of breath, swallowing hard. Then, just as abruptly as he had stood, he smoothed his hair back with his palms and sat back down.

  Dana stepped forward and placed the other earring on the desk. “I agree. One without the other is no evidence at all. What I needed was evidence you couldn’t destroy, something that could exist on its own.”

  She pulled a folded sheet of paper from the front pocket of her shirt. Meyers’s gaze grew more intense as she unfolded it. “One of the problems with being a public figure is the public scrutiny accorded such a person. A public figure can’t engage in the anonymous types of activities that others routinely engage in. Even the most minor ailments can be blown out of proportion.” She dropped the sheet of paper on the desk. “A childhood illness like the German measles is just a childhood illness. When, however, it leaves a man sterile, without sufficient sperm production such that, even in this technologically advanced age, it is impossible for that man to conceive, that information can become a valuable piece of evidence, don’t you think?”

  Meyers stared at the sheet of paper, then reached forward and picked it up.

  “For someone with ambitions of someday being president, it takes on even greater significance when the wife of that man somehow does become pregnant. How, Senator, does something like this happen? And how does that man react—a man who knows he’s sterile—when he learns that his wife is bearing the child of another man? What does he do? He’d prefer that she get an abortion, but there are several problems with that scenario, a lack of privacy being preeminent among them, as I just mentioned. Where would she go? How could it be done quietly, discreetly, especially now, with a
campaign and all the comparisons to John Kennedy? If the religious right found out, his election campaign would be over before it started. And why would she do it? How could he convince her? She has no idea he’s sterile. He’s blamed her for his lack of progeny. The doctors tell her there is nothing wrong with her, but he has convinced her otherwise. So if he insists on an abortion, she will suspect immediately that he knows the child is not, that it cannot be, his. And that would reveal that he knew of her affair, which is the very reason why he needed to make the duplicate earring. If she has both earrings, she will not suspect that she’s left behind evidence to alert him and given him a reason to kill her lover. So, no, abortion is not a good option.”

  Elizabeth, who had sat like a jury listening to a lawyer give a closing argument, stood and faced her husband. She reached beneath her blouse and pulled out the tape recorder and wire that led to the tiny microphone hidden behind a button of her leather jacket. “It’s over, Robert.”

  “At a preordained time today, fax machines throughout this city will start sending two documents to every major news network and newspaper in the country,” Dana said. “The first document will be a copy of your medical records—the one you had Peter Boutaire kill Frank Pilgrim to retrieve. The second will be bloodwork that proves, conclusively, that the child your wife is carrying is not yours but the son of James Andrew Hill, who was murdered in his Green Lake home.”

  The door to the office opened. Detective Michael Logan stepped in with several uniformed officers.

  “After that,” Dana said, “the Seattle Police Department will issue a statement that you are charged with conspiracy to commit murder and two counts of murder in the first degree.”

  Meyers stood and came out from behind the desk, his voice more a plea than defiance. “Elizabeth, I did this for you. Don’t you see? I did this because I love you. You’ll be ridiculed and humiliated; your son will be a bastard. Think of what the press will write. Think of how they will treat you.”

  “I already have,” she said. “And I can’t think of anything they could do that would be worse than how you’ve treated me all these years.”

  Logan and the uniformed officers neared the desk, handcuffs in hand. Dana watched the blood vacate Robert Meyers’s face. His blue eyes seemed to turn black. “Elizabeth!” Dana screamed. But it was too late. Meyers’s right arm moved quickly, locking across his wife’s throat. His left hand pressed the barrel of a gun against her forehead. Logan and the officers froze.

  “I can’t let you do this, Elizabeth.” Meyers spoke into his wife’s ear. “We were meant to be together. I can’t let you go like this. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Don’t do this, Senator,” Logan implored. “Put the weapon down and let her go.”

  Meyers pulled his wife toward the exit with his face buried in the flow of her hair. “We’re supposed to be together, Elizabeth. That’s why you came back tonight. That’s why you’re here, to be with me, forever.”

  Dana looked to Logan. This was not what she had foreseen. She thought of William Welles, and her heart swelled with the guilt that, blinded by her thirst for justice, she had been irresponsible, and it had resulted in his death. She couldn’t bear to think that Elizabeth Meyers would face the same fate.

  “I came back,” Elizabeth said, her voice strangled but still strong, “because I wanted to see the expression on your face when I told you to go to hell.”

  She stepped down hard on his foot and at the same time whipped her head backward, smashing the bridge of his nose. Meyers stumbled, blood flowing down his face, but the gun still in hand. Logan and the officers pulled their weapons. He repeatedly exhorted Meyers to drop the gun. Meyers twisted his neck, the vertebrae popping and cracking, and looked at them as if just noticing them for the first time. Then he smiled, raised the gun, and pulled the trigger.

  62

  THE NEWS OF Robert Meyers’s suicide exploded across the state and the nation, erupting on the afternoon newscasts and spreading quickly to the front page of special editions of the Times and the Post-Intelligencer. Television stations interrupted scheduled broadcasts. It became the lead news story on CNN, MSNBC, and the other national news networks—national coverage of the grandest proportion. No coverage was too much. No story was too small. Camera crews and news reporters camped outside the locked gate to the Highlands. Helicopters broadcast shots of the Meyers family compound until police helicopters patrolled the skies.

  Washingtonians watched the news in stunned silence. In downtown eating establishments and bars, from the Pike Place Market to Pioneer Square, televisions were tuned to news of the event. Patrons mumbled in low-level disbelief. Those old enough to remember said it was like the day John F. Kennedy died. Those younger likened it to the day the space shuttle Columbia exploded or to 9/11, events that would forever change the world. Everyone would remember exactly where he or she had been when ABC News correspondent Bill Donovan broke the story that presidential candidate Robert Samuel Meyers was dead. A helpless feeling caused most to simply stare dumbfounded at the television, considering in silence what had actually happened and what the ramifications would be.

  Footage showed Meyers being rushed by ambulance to Northwest Hospital, but it was a formality. He had been pronounced dead at the scene. The news hung over Seattle like the persistent gray, an event that transcended race, gender, and social status. People who would never again speak with one another were suddenly bonded by a familiar topic. They said it was more than the death of a man. It was the death of another generation’s dreams and hopes. It left them feeling hollow and, unlike the assassination of John Kennedy, without anyone at which to direct their anger. There was no Lee Harvey Oswald to vilify. They could only stand in shock and disbelief, asking why. The question started as an almost imperceptible murmur, but by the end of the day, it had grown to a chorus of millions. At a candlelight vigil held outside the gates, everyone wanted to know what had happened. It didn’t make any sense. When no clear answers emerged, the public began to speculate, as only Americans could, and rumors spread quickly that there was more to the suicide than was being revealed.

  For two weeks, Elizabeth Meyers healed in seclusion, unseen and unheard from except at the formal affairs—funeral and burial. Then one afternoon she appeared unexpectedly on the front lawn of the family compound to address the press. Dressed in black, standing behind a throng of microphones affixed to a podium, she stoically announced to the American public that she was a fraud. She told them she and her husband had had marital difficulties, that Robert Meyers had been verbally and physically abusive, and despite the conception of their first child, she had recently informed her husband of her intention to end their marriage. She said Meyers had become despondent and irrational and that his behavior had caused her to flee the compound two nights before he took his own life. She returned after he called to plead that she meet with him and talk things over.

  Meyers’s security staff and house servants would confirm those details. They spoke of a man in a heightened emotional state, agitated and irrational. They reported that he had sent several of his security staff out in search of his wife, demanding that they bring her home. Others would come forward to report having overheard violent clashes between the couple. From there, the rumors spread like the tributaries of a river, and it would be quite some time before Washington and Hollywood had its fill of the story. Dozens of people would become wealthy writing accounts of life in the Meyers compound.

  Elizabeth Meyers apologized to the nation for what she termed a deceptive public persona and said she had chosen to reveal the truth because she had a duty to be a role model, as her husband had repeatedly demanded. She said she hoped her own public acknowledgment would help women similarly situated to find the courage to change their lives, and she said she would use her abilities and wealth to influence government agencies to help them. Her news conference was both hailed and assailed. Some questioned her motivation to cleanse her soul and ruin the image of the
fair-haired young senator with the charming smile. Like those people who continued to cling to their perception of Kennedy’s Camelot despite the stories of his infidelity, they did not want their perception shattered by reality. They wanted to believe in the man who had so confidently vowed to lead the nation on a course of change. They didn’t want to see cracks in their leaders or believe that the men they elevated to bronze busts and marble statues were really just men with all the same flaws and weaknesses. They didn’t want to know that Robert Meyers, stripped of his outer garments, was an abusive husband. They wanted the fairy tale. They wanted the storybook ending. They wanted a return to Camelot.

  Those were not the people to whom Elizabeth Meyers addressed her comments. She spoke instead to the verbally and physically abused women, and to them she became a modern-day Joan of Arc. She brought attention to a problem that had been far too long ignored, a problem that the O. J. Simpson fiasco had only exacerbated, and that had left so many similarly situated women feeling hollow and empty.

  As for Dana’s quest for justice, she and Elizabeth decided that any announcement of Meyers’s involvement in James’s murder would only serve to ruin the lives of those left behind—most notably Elizabeth and James’s unborn child. It would be a selfish act that James would not have wanted.

  The day after her press conference, Elizabeth Meyers left the compound. Staff within the compound walls would later report that she left nearly everything behind, taking only one small suitcase. Her clothes, perfumes, strands of pearls, diamonds, and other jewelry were given to a cook named Carmen Dupree. Elizabeth returned to southern California, not far from the small beach town where she had been raised. She implored the press to allow her to raise her child in peace.

  Dana Hill had left the compound through the servants’ entrance in the trunk of Michael Logan’s car. She thought it fitting. She returned to her mother’s home and stayed several days. It was while standing in the kitchen, making a cup of tea, that she heard the news on the radio about Elizabeth Meyers’s plane landing at the airport in La Jolla. Dana wondered if the woman would ever find peace, or if she would, tragically, end up like Jacqueline Onassis and Princess Diana.