Thomas Sunderland finally spoke. “Good Lord, is it serious?”
“I don’t know how the old dear is doing, but Stephen’s daughter is doing all right, under the circumstances.”
“‘The circumstances’? What circumstances?” It was Sunderland again.
“They were both raped. Several men broke into the house in the middle of the night and after they were done wrecking it, they raped them. Then they set the house on fire before they took off, but the fire was put out in time.”
The room fell completely silent. Clearly most of them were struck by the same thought. Wesley caught a look between Donald Beglaubter and his boss, Lance Burton. It was loaded with disbelief. For someone who knew them as well as Wesley, it was clear the two men were on guard.
Communications Chief Burton squinted and looked at the president. “Have the culprits been apprehended?”
“I don’t know. It’s not mentioned here, but we can find out after the meeting.” The president and Burton were old friends—or rather, they’d known each other a long time—but the look they gave each other was anything but friendly. “What’s this, Lance?” he continued. “Are you accusing me of something?”
Billy Johnson’s labored breathing was the only sound in the room.
“Accusing . . . ?” This made Burton stop and consider his next words. “No, I’m just thinking that if I happened to be in the attorney general’s place right now, there’s no doubt I’d be the world’s biggest supporter of the president’s plan.”
“Listen, Lance.” Now Thomas Sunderland was on his feet. “I think that’s how we all feel, okay? It’s a terrible coincidence. We have to think clearly and objectively. What the attorney general is going through at the moment is his own affair. Each of the rest of us must fulfill our responsibility regarding this discussion.”
The communications chief ignored Sunderland and looked straight at his president. “Just one more thing. If I’d been the one calling this meeting, I’d have assembled the entire Cabinet. Why isn’t the secretary of the interior here today? If we’re to make any progress, at least she and the vice president should be here. They all should! It would have been more logical than having me and Donald and Wesley present, doesn’t the president agree?”
“The secretary of the interior sanctioned the proposal long ago,” the president replied.
“I see . . .” What else could Lance Burton say?
None of them, including Wesley, knew the secretary of the interior very well. Betty Tucker had been on the move the whole time since the new government had come into power. Even though they didn’t know much about what she was like as a person, they knew there was no one in the House of Representatives who was as effective a lobbyist as she. Nobody had as many personal friends in both parties, and no one was as young, attractive, and eloquent.
Jansen must have sent her out around the country to prime the local party organizations, unions, and other groups for what was to come. It was so obvious. One had to prepare the soil properly in order to reap a good harvest.
* * *
—
In the course of the day a large-scale manhunt was put in motion in and around Baltimore, but no leads emerged as to who had attacked Attorney General Lovell’s mother and daughter. The incident was constantly in the news, and the public was outraged. Raping an eighty-two-year-old woman and her sixteen-year-old granddaughter was going much too far, and there was enormous pressure on the police to solve the case. Almost all precincts in the area were put on overtime, and the slightest clue was analyzed in minute detail, no matter how many man-hours it took.
* * *
—
Later that day the attorney general arrived by helicopter at the White House in a blaze of media floodlights. He was received on the lawn by the president and two bodyguards and led to the Oval Office to talk in private.
After they’d spoken together a few hours, Wesley and the rest of the staff were told to prepare for the next meeting. A few minutes later the vice president and the remaining Cabinet members arrived while Wesley stood outside the Roosevelt Room, receiving directives from Chief of Staff Sunderland. Most of the Cabinet seemed to be in a good mood, completely unaware of what awaited them.
Sunderland asked the vice president to come with him into his office while the others went into the Oval Office. That was worrying in itself.
Wesley tried to make himself picture his bed at home with the remote control lying ready on the nightstand. Sometimes this consoled him in stressful situations, but not now.
It seemed like the seventh of March had already been endless, yet it had only begun. It was going to be a long, long night.
CHAPTER 7
Doggie had been keeping to herself the past few weeks, as she’d done pretty much since her first day at the White House. She went to work, did her job to everyone’s apparent satisfaction, and twelve hours later left the office, took the metro from Metro Center to Dupont Circle station, and walked the few yards to her apartment. She went shopping once a week, stuffing a taxi with necessities, and that was about it.
Her apartment clearly reflected the extent of her despair; everything stood exactly as it had been left by the movers. Her bedclothes were bunched up in a pile on the futon in the middle of the room, and the moving boxes were stacked on top of one another, half-open. The only signs of life came from the traffic noise outside on Connecticut Avenue and the coffee maker that snuffled all night long on the kitchen counter. She couldn’t even be bothered to have the TV running in the background. Three weeks had passed in this fashion, and even though her father’s trial was finally about to begin, her state of gloom, disappointment, and burning animosity remained unchanged.
She was powerless to break out of this troubled mood.
* * *
—
Only days after the murder, Doggie’s father’s lawyers had filed a request as to where the trial would be held. Naturally, they wanted to have something to say about which court would handle the case, and they informed the prosecution that, due to the nature of the case and the celebrity witnesses that would be called to testify, they were asking that the trial be held in Washington, DC, rather than Richmond or Norfolk, which would have been the natural choices.
Then all hell broke loose. Of course Bud Curtis’s lawyers could not care less how much time it took the president to get to and from the courthouse; what was important was escaping Virginia’s all-too-well- known and very consistent method of dealing with murder cases. In other words, they wanted to make sure Curtis wasn’t automatically going to end his days with a syringe in his arm in Sussex or Greensville State Prison’s execution chamber.
Needless to say, the hard-boiled chief prosecutor wanted the opposite. With more than seventy murder trials under his belt, Mortimer Deloitte was looking for a death sentence. Time after time he’d claimed that “no punishment could be too severe for a traitor and conspiracy mastermind like Curtis.” The problem for Deloitte was that he would never get his death sentence if the trial were held as a civil case in the District of Columbia. No one had been executed there since a certain Robert E. Carter, in April of 1957. So, if the trial had to be held in DC, he demanded that it be conducted as a federal case, and then if Curtis lost, there was little doubt he’d end up being executed at the federal prison in Indiana.
As Deloitte said: What was good enough for Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, was good enough for Bud Curtis.
And the defense was back where it started.
* * *
—
Curtis took this unpromising news relatively well when they visited him in his eight-by-ten-foot pretrial detention cell in the Richmond jail. He weighed the situation and considered what should be done next, then asked his defense lawyers to tell the prosecution that he still wished to be tried in Richmond. Better here, he said, where all his friends and relatives lived, tha
n in Washington, the headquarters of everything he despised.
Then two of Curtis’s lawyers began listing the judges who might preside over the trial in Virginia. None of them sounded very encouraging, so they picked out the judge who looked most likely to get the case if it were tried in Washington. It was a certain Marsha W. Tanner, who had shown astuteness in complicated federal cases built solely on circumstantial evidence. She was known for being stringent and merciless but fair—someone who didn’t allow bullshit in her courtroom. It wasn’t a hard choice if one cherished one’s life.
Afterwards, Bud Curtis asked for an hour to formulate a statement. In it he still proclaimed his innocence, but for a number of reasons he no longer opposed being tried in federal court in Washington. He stated that, in the impossible, unjust, and unreasonable event of his being sentenced to death, he would demand being imprisoned and executed in Virginia. This was the deal his lawyers had to promise to make with the prosecution.
As he put it, there was no way in hell he was going to die in Indiana.
Curtis’s lawyers counseled him strongly against this kind of trade-off, but he was adamant. If there was to be a miscarriage of justice, it was damn well going to have to happen on his home turf. The lawyers’ continued attempts at dissuasion resulted in Curtis yelling to the guards to be taken back to his cell.
This was the chain of events that Bud Curtis’s lawyers conveyed to Doggie. It was the first time she was directly confronted with her father’s case.
* * *
—
Since her father’s arrest, Doggie had had neither the desire nor the energy to initiate any form of contact with him, and now his lawyers were calling with information she had no wish to know about. They also told her that dispensation had been granted for her to visit her father any day she wanted. This was so that her job wouldn’t stand in the way of her seeing him and trying to persuade him to consider what they were saying. That is, to impress upon him the importance of having the case tried in federal court in one of the many states that didn’t allow capital punishment, even though a brawl with the prosecution was unavoidable.
This countermove would draw out the case—that was the point. They said that, as the burden of proof stood at the moment, the greater the time interval since the crime was committed, the better. They could always settle for Washington, DC, if they had to.
No one asked her how all this made her feel, and even if someone had, she wouldn’t know what to say. There was much too much at stake, and she felt taken advantage of. One moment she was cursing her father straight to the hottest regions of hell, and the next moment she was sitting impotently, staring into space. At times like these, she wasn’t on her father’s side. The evidence against him was strong, and he’d always been capable of doing what was necessary to achieve his goals, so why not this time, too?
Only at night—when sleep was finally overpowering her and she’d wrapped her blanket tight around her to protect herself from the world—could she see things differently. It was that murky moment where reason surrendered to feelings, where she realized that this person was her father, in spite of everything. Suddenly nothing was proven, nothing was predetermined, and her anger towards him vanished. But it only lasted a second.
Finally, on an ice-cold Friday afternoon a few days before her job in the White House was to begin, and after much soul-searching, Doggie arranged a visit to her father. She would tell him what the lawyers had asked her to, and the rest was up to him. That was all anyone could demand of her.
* * *
—
Her father had lost some weight and was very pale and quiet, but he was smiling, well-groomed, his orange prison uniform was freshly ironed, and he had the old devil-may-care glint in his eye. He actually looked better than he had in years, but she was still about to break down at the mere sight of him in the freezing, neon-lit visitation room. No matter how much anger she had inside, she still hated seeing her father like this: helpless and godforsaken, with chains on his legs and his arms handcuffed behind his back. No normal human being would enjoy seeing her father like this, she told herself.
The guards asked her to sit down at the table across from him, then retreated a few steps. They pretended to be unconcerned, but aside from the horrible sniper killings in New York, Curtis’s case was the talk of the town. How could the guards ignore their conversation? Of course that was precisely why her father was sitting in this room and not in one of the glass stalls twenty yards away. Here nothing went unnoticed.
She nodded to her father and tried to reciprocate his smile.
After a moment’s silence she explained the purpose of her visit, and he replied that the purpose didn’t matter, after which he gave her such a gentle look that it felt like an accusation.
She shook her head. No, her father had lured her into suggesting to Bruce Jansen that he use her father’s Splendor Hotel on election night, and then his fucking handyman had repaid her by murdering Jansen’s wife. She hated her father for having used her, whether he was guilty or not, so he could quit eyeing her like that, as though she were a little girl.
She swallowed a lump in her throat and looked at her watch. They’d have to get going if they were to deal with the issues she’d come to discuss. She presented the defense attorneys’ conclusion that it would be best to hold the trial in West Virginia, where capital punishment wasn’t practiced. This would delay the trial, giving them time to fight the prosecution’s demand of the death sentence. There were many angles from which one could approach the situation, they’d told her.
Her heart was beating hard as she finally prepared to say what, for her, was the most important thing of all:
“If you’re guilty, now’s the time to say it,” she whispered. “Do you hear me? Then your attorneys will be able to negotiate a life sentence, just like what happened with the guy who assassinated Robert Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan. Wouldn’t that be better, in spite of everything?”
“I am innocent and I intend to prove it, so why should I plea-bargain? I’m paying lawyers a fortune to be exonerated, not to be locked up for life for a crime I haven’t committed.”
“And what if you’re found guilty? Are you certain you have such a strong case? ’Cause I’m not.”
Bud Curtis studied his daughter for a moment before replying. “Dorothy, you’re my angel. I’m prepared to take things as they come, just as long as you’re with me.”
Doggie’s temples began to throb. She didn’t believe him; he never took things as they came. He was either lying or hopelessly naive, and she didn’t believe the latter. And then he’d asked her to be with him. What the hell could ever make him ask such a thing?
“Dad, listen to me, and listen well,” she said, ignoring how he was looking at her. “You say you’re not guilty, but if you are, I want you to say it! I won’t promise to visit you that often, but if you say you’re innocent now and it turns out that you’re proven guilty, don’t expect to ever see me again. I mean it: never, ever! So I’m asking you again: Are you guilty in the murder of Mimi Todd Jansen?”
She closed her eyes, then raised her hand. “No, wait, I want to rephrase that: Are you guilty of having prompted Toby O’Neill to commit murder? Did you pay him or in some other way lure him into doing it? Now’s the time to say it, dammit!”
She finally looked straight at him.
Her father’s eyes didn’t waver in the least. He looked straight back and once again declared his innocence, adding that he had never agreed to move the trial to West Virginia.
But she wasn’t fooled. It was obvious he was suppressing his feelings. There was despair hidden behind his calm expression—she just wasn’t supposed to see it. He didn’t want her getting involved too deeply. He was trying to spare her, and this hit her hard. There was always this air of doubt: She thought he was guilty, but she couldn’t be certain—not the way he was making her feel now. That was the
trouble.
She left the jailhouse, her eyes red and with an awful lump in her throat. She hadn’t walked far before she bumped shoulders with an old schoolmate coming towards her the other way, someone whom she’d helped to graduate with top grades and now was a lawyer in town. He stopped in his tracks and quickly looked down before she caught his eye, then he began rummaging around in his briefcase. He only looked up again when she was half a block down the street.
That hurt, too.
* * *
—
Anyway, this was what she’d report to the defense lawyers: No, her father was not interested in changing his wishes as to where the trial should be held, and no, he couldn’t plead guilty because he’d had nothing to do with the murder.
When the prosecution lawyers received a copy of Curtis’s statement, they were said to have had a hard time concealing their glee. Of course there were juridical matters yet to deal with—plenty of them—but the demands Bud Curtis’s lawyers presented looked like they could be worked out.
This meant the case would be tried in DC as a federal case, and if Curtis eventually received the death sentence, he would be executed in Virginia.
BUD CURTIS WANTS DEATH PENALTY CARRIED OUT IN WAVERLY, VIRGINIA was the front-page headline in USA Today. The New York sniper became second-page news.
This was far better than a Hollywood movie. The accused had demanded the right to choose where he’d be executed, and damned if they hadn’t let him. There was a sharp rise in letters to the editor, and while the majority of people were offended by the mere notion that an accomplice in a crime of such a dastardly nature should have the right to say anything at all, a fair number praised Bud Curtis for his determination and courage, even calling him “the Real McCoy” or saying he was “taking it like a man.” At the same time the usual zealous opponents of capital punishment demonstrated outside various state courthouses, and even more were picketing the 1,100 Jansen’s drugstores across the country. Everyone had an opinion on this case.
The Washington Decree_A Novel Page 9