Murder in the White House Read online

  Ron nodded, half-smiled. “The good old missing link. The anthropologists haven’t found it after years of hunting. I hope to God I have better luck…”

  TWO

  1

  But he thought he might know the link. No doubt it was impetuous to rush into a confrontation, he should telephone his office, tell Jill or Gabe where he was going and why. But for the first time in this investigation he let himself be moved by an instinct, a feeling that maybe he was about to break the case… He didn’t want anyone to tell him to wait, to consider alternatives. Maybe he could provoke a break…

  He took a cab. He did not stop to telephone. He over-tipped the driver instead of waiting for change. He poked impatiently at the doorbell, making successive, demanding rings.

  When Martha Kingsley opened the door she was already irritated. “Well! Mr. Investigator. Why didn’t you just smash the door in?”

  “May I come in?”

  “Do I have a choice?” She was standing in the doorway, leaning on the doorframe, wearing cut-off blue jeans, complete with frayed edges, and a white T-shirt. She was barefoot, as she’d been the first time he saw her. Reluctantly she now stepped out of the doorway and with a toss of her head indicated he could follow her into the apartment.

  Her packing appeared to be finished. Boxes were stacked high all around the rooms, labeled so that he could see some were going into storage, some to Paris. She had been eating off of two stacked cartons. Now she gathered the scattered newspapers and magazines off her couch to make a place for him to sit.

  “When are you leaving?”

  “Thursday, two days.”

  “Then you have two days to tell me what you didn’t tell me Saturday morning.”

  She sat at the far end of the short, pale-yellow couch, facing him. “Since Saturday morning I’ve been questioned once by you and twice by the FBI. It’s getting more than a little tiresome—”

  “It stops when I find out what I want to know.”

  “Frankly, you’re something of an amateur… these characters from the Bureau were much tougher than you, and they asked better questions. In any case, I told them everything I’m going to tell. You’re wasting my time, and yours.”

  “Where’s your husband?”

  “He’ll be here tomorrow, we’re flying to Paris together—”

  “Whether you are or not depends on how much you cooperate—”

  “Bull.” She got up from the couch, her face flushed. “I really think it’s past time. Now please leave.”

  Ron shook his head.

  She drew a deep breath. “Look, I read the papers too… you talk a big deal, you can do this and that. The fact is, you’re falling on your face. My God, you got drunk and damn near killed the President’s daughter. That was Saturday night, wasn’t it? The day before you were here. You’re about to get a vote of no-confidence on the Hill—”

  “Mrs. Kingsley, it’s no big deal to stop you going to Paris. Your husband is not qualified for his assignment and was given it only as a personal favor to Blaine. That’s on record in his file at the Navy. The Secretary of the Navy is already nervous about it. A call from me… all I’d have to do is suggest the assignment be rescinded…”

  She turned her back to him, walked between two stacks of boxes to a window, then leaned wearily against the window frame. “Do your damndest,” she said. “I don’t have to go to Paris.”

  “My damndest is a little more than that, Mrs. Kingsley. I can get a warrant and have you held in jail as a material witness.”

  She turned to face him, her back still touching the window frame. He could see her only between the stacks of boxes, which made a curious optical illusion that she was farther from him than she was. She was staring at him, debating with herself, and he recalled what Paul-Victor Chamillart had said about her… She was beautiful, no question about it. Conventional wisdom had it that an admitted prostitute should look coarse, at least worn, used. She didn’t. She looked younger than her years. She looked ingenuous and vulnerable—which she wasn’t.

  “We’ve been arguing,” she said quietly, “about whether or not I will answer your questions. So far you haven’t even asked one.”

  All right, so he’d won. At least for the moment. “As far as I am concerned,” he said, “you can go to Paris. I probably won’t even need you as a witness. But I think you know some of the things I need to know.”

  She sighed, came between the boxes and sat down again on the couch. “Just what do you think I know?” she asked wearily.

  “What did Blaine tell you about the President?”

  She frowned. “What do you mean? Half his talk was about the President.”

  “What did he say about his relationship with the President—his special, personal relationship?”

  “Well, he always said he had a unique personal relationship with the President based on years of friendship. He said he was closer to the President than Gimbel was—”

  “Was he jealous of Gimbel?”

  She shrugged. “He didn’t like Gimbel.”

  “What did he tell you about the President’s wife?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing, nothing much… she was his friend too.” She kept a straight face.

  “Look… I know Blaine told you more than that about Catherine Webster—”

  “What do you want me to say, that he told me he had an affair with her? Well, I can’t tell you that. He didn’t say that.”

  “But…?”

  “What do you want? He told me she sometimes used to drink too much… she was restless… with being the wife of a corporation president, with being the wife of a senator… she’d been a professor herself… a professional woman, just like me…” She said that with a straight face too.

  Ron let it go. Then… “I guess I’d better explain something”—she was evading him, being cute, he’d try a small bluff—“after I was here Saturday morning and we had our little chat you called the White House and reported to someone. You told him I was here, and you told him what I asked you.”

  “You’re crazy,” she said, but there was a sharp edge in her voice. A defensive edge?

  “From time to time over the last couple of years,” he said, encouraged, “people have planted bits of misinformation with you, to see if they would show up at the White House. They always have. Some people aren’t as stupid as you think.”

  She was clearly frightened now.

  He pressed. “So please no more games, Mrs. Kingsley. You don’t, for example, know how much I already know.”

  She said nothing, then sighed, shook her head.

  “Now—please tell me what he told you about Catherine Webster.”

  “I swear to you, he never told me he had an affair with Catherine Webster—”

  “What about Lynne?” He hated the question, and himself at the moment.

  “No.”

  “You told me Blaine confided in you. Well, let’s try this another way. What did he confide in you?”

  She pressed her lips together hard. “Let’s have a drink, Mr. Fairbanks. Scotch okay?”

  He said it was and went with her to the kitchen, where everything was packed now but some paper cups and paper plates. Two half-empty bottles stood on the counter: one gin, one scotch. She poured scotch over two rocks for him, gin over rocks for herself. They went back to the couch in the living room.

  “You said I don’t have to be a witness…”

  “I doubt your testimony would carry much weight no matter what you said,” he told her bluntly.

  “Thanks.” She lifted her cup and swallowed her bitterness with the gin. “All right, I know how he got the money all the papers are asking about. People gave it to him, people paid him… he did favors and got paid for them. He also said the same thing you just did, now that I think of it—that my testimony couldn’t hurt him, and he could afford to tell me anything. He was a peculiarly cynical man. I don’t think he had a conscience… if he did, he’d long since anesthetized it, o
r at least seemed to have.”

  “Who gave him money, Mrs. Kingsley?”

  She shrugged. “More than one. When General Ortiz was killed in Santo Domingo our government gave his nephew political asylum. That nephew was no student. Ortiz’s money came out of Santo Domingo through that nephew by arrangements he’d made in Miami and Las Vegas. They brought ten million dollars into the United States, most of it in dollars. Blaine was paid twenty thousand for his help—”

  “What did he do, exactly?”

  “He didn’t say, exactly. It had to do with entry permits, visas. It had to do with Santo Domingan embassy people and their diplomatic immunity. It was complicated.”

  “Go on.”

  She shook her head. “What else do you want to know?”

  “I’m going to run some names by you,” Ron said. “I want to know what Blaine said about each of them.”

  She shrugged. “Fire away.”

  “Philippe Grand.”

  She shook her head. “He never mentioned that name.”

  “Inoguchi Osanaga.”

  She shook her head again. “Never mentioned Osanaga either.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “Sure. Osanaga is a bag man. He’s the payoff man when Japanese companies buy anything over here.”

  “Jeremy Johnson.”

  She smiled. “Blaine and Osanaga were in one league. Johnson is in another one entirely.”

  “Senator Walter Finlay.”

  She smiled again. “Finlay plays Osanaga’s game, but he belongs in Jeremy Johnson’s league.”

  “All right. What game were Blaine and Osanaga playing?”

  “The big one,” she said. “To kill the trade agreements. Blaine promised he could kill them. If you want my theory about his death, he was killed because he couldn’t stop Webster from going to Paris and signing those preliminary agreements… aren’t you impressed? Lan taught me a lot about his work, I could probably be an undersecretary…” This time she allowed herself a grin, “He’d taken a lot of money. Some very important—and tough—people had put their confidence in him.”

  “Who, besides Osanaga and Johnson?”

  “Schleicher of Nord Deutschland… Fantalone of IIG. There were others whose names I don’t know.”

  “But he was killed in the White House. Who inside the White House?”

  She shook her head, hard. “I wouldn’t know, I haven’t a clue.”

  Nor, Ron thought, did he… He stared into his scotch. “I guess I asked you this before,” he said blandly, “but when did you last see Blaine?”

  “You did and I told you… two or three weeks before his death. The FBI got me to be more specific… it was two weeks before his death. I spent the night with him in his apartment. I never saw him after that.”

  “Did you and Blaine have a falling-out of some sort?”

  “No.”

  “But you never saw him after that night?”

  “It wasn’t unusual for me not to see him for two weeks or more.”

  Ron decided to try another bluff, a very small one. “Did he tell you about his… emotional scene with the President?”

  “Yes, that’s why he wanted me that night. He was upset, very upset.”

  It had worked. If she had said Blaine had not told her about his scene with the President, he couldn’t have contradicted her… “He came to you the day he’d had the scene with the President. Right?”

  “Well… he called me from the White House. His voice was breaking. I couldn’t tell if he was angry or what. He asked me to go to his apartment. I had a key. He came home about ten o’clock. I was waiting for him.”

  “Was this the kind of appointment he paid for?”

  Her face went tight. “Yes. He paid me five hundred dollars, for the night… Would you like to hear the details? Is that a part of the investigation?”

  “No, but I want the details of what he said.”

  She sipped at her gin, and as she did Ron thought he could almost read her thought… maybe she should stop now, refuse to say any more… If she had a few minutes to think she would probably realize he didn’t know much, really, and she could lie to him with impunity… he couldn’t risk letting her have time to think—

  “I was in his apartment waiting for him,” she was saying now quietly. “I had some champagne on ice. He unlocked the door and stalked into the apartment. He said he was out, an ex-Secretary of State. It turned out, of course, that that was an exaggeration, but he said he had to resign. He said he’d lost his temper and had said something to the President. I sort of laughed. I thought maybe he’d called him a son of a bitch or something like that, but he said it was worse than that and wasn’t at all funny. He kept prowling around the room, muttering to himself. I tried to calm him down. I got him to take some champagne. He hadn’t eaten so I made him some sandwiches. I… I did something for him… you understand. It calmed him down. But then he was depressed, said he was in deep trouble—”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “He said he’d lost the President’s friendship, that he really did have to resign. He said he didn’t know what he would do, he couldn’t go back to a university campus after he’d been Secretary of State—”

  “Did he describe the scene with the President? Did he tell you what he’d said that had cost him the President’s friendship?”

  “Not then, he didn’t… later.”

  “Go on.”

  She looked hard at Ron, appraising him. “I encouraged him to tell me,” she said. “Do you understand why?”

  “Someone would pay you for the story.”

  “Well, put it this way… I thought I might find out something that could be… valuable.” Her expression didn’t change. “He told me everything later, after we were in bed—”

  “What?”

  “A lot of it you already know. The multilateral trade agreements, he was supposed to change the President’s mind. He apparently had told people he could do it, and he believed he could—”

  “But he couldn’t,” said Ron.

  “I said he believed he could… after all, he said, he’d taught the President everything he knew about foreign policy and international economics. It was well understood in informed circles, he said, that President Webster’s foreign policy was really his foreign policy. He’d established an outstanding record in his three years as Secretary of State… he was very high on that, he talked about it a lot.”

  Blaine was, Ron reminded himself, indeed a highly successful Secretary of State. He no doubt would have had his Nobel Prize…

  “He thought he could turn the President around,” she was saying. “After all, he was the expert on international affairs, and if he told the President he had changed his mind, had decided the trade agreements weren’t a good idea after all, he thought Webster would go along… He’d been really shocked to find the President so stubborn on the subject, shocked that he had such strong convictions in this area…”

  “Was he being threatened by the people who paid him?”

  “He never said he was.”

  “Go ahead… what happened?”

  “That evening, early that evening just before he called me, he’d had a real bitter fight with Webster. It had broken down to name-calling, he told the President the multilateral trade agreements were going to produce economic catastrophe. The President asked him why he hadn’t said that at the beginning, three years earlier when the policy was being developed and the first steps taken toward negotiating the agreements. Lan said—”

  “What did Blaine really think about the agreements? Was he for them or against them, personally?”

  “You know, I don’t think he really cared all that much… trade and economics, he said, had never really grabbed him the way diplomatic wheeling and dealing did. Anyway, when the President asked him why he had changed his mind and suddenly become such an opponent of the agreements, Lan didn’t have a good answer. He said something like he’d studied the thing more thoroughly
than he had at first. The President laughed, said that wasn’t the reason. That’s when things began to heat up.”

  “Were they alone?”

  “Oh, no, I should have told you. Mrs. Webster was there. Catherine… this exchange was upstairs, not in the office.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Nothing until later. I’m coming to that. When the President said he didn’t buy Lan’s reason for changing his mind, Lan got sore, asked what the President was suggesting, and the President told him flat out he had reason to believe Lan was accepting money and favors and such from people against the agreements. He challenged him to deny it, Lan said he wouldn’t dignify an accusation like that by denying it… This was when Mrs. Webster spoke up. She told Lan she couldn’t believe he would betray them like this. He said she had tears in her eyes when she said it, and I can tell you, cynic or not, he had some in his when he told me all this…”

  “They’d been friends for a long time,” Ron said quietly.

  “Yes… well, the President used the same kind of words his wife had used. He said Lan had betrayed them, betrayed their friendship. He called him a cheat and a liar. If you knew Lansard Blaine, you’d know something was about to blow at that point… He had a very strong sense of his personal dignity, and being faced with the truth made the humiliation even worse. So he struck back—”

  “What did he say to them?”

  “He told the Websters they were fine people to call him a liar when they’d been living with a lie for more than twenty years. He said they’d been glad enough for him to lie when he had lied for them. If they wanted to call him a liar, then he would return the favor… if they wanted to disgrace him and drive him out of office, fine—he could do the same to them and they damn well knew it… if they wanted to destroy him and bankrupt him by telling the whole world that he had no influence on the foreign policy of the United States, fine—but he had some weapons to protect himself with and he would use them… You understand I’m trying to give you the best idea I can about what happened from what he said. That’s all I know—”