(1976) The R Document (7 page)

At last the game show was over. Rose Tynan grunted her way to her feet, snapped off the television set, took her son by the arm, led him into the small dining room, and sat him down at the head of the table.

‘Lunch is coming,’ she said.

‘Mom, the alarm was off when I came in. You should keep it on all the time. For my sake.’

‘I forget sometimes. I’ll try to remember next time.’

‘Be sure you do.’

‘How are things at the office?’

‘As usual. Busy.’

‘I won’t keep you here long.’

‘Mom, I’m here because I want to be here. I enjoy seeing you.’

‘So then let’s be making it twice a week for lunch.’

She disappeared into the kitchen and returned with the platter of corned beef and cabbage. His normal lunch, just as the Old Man’s had been, was cream-of-cbicken soup and cottage cheese. But this was Saturday.

‘Smells great, Mom.’

‘The bread’s on the table. Pumpernickel. Have some. Sure you won’t have a bigger slice? Oops, I forgot the beer.’

She went into the kitchen again and emerged with a

foaming beer stein. Setting the beer before him, she lowered herself noisily into her chair.

‘Well, Vera, what was your morning like?’

‘Not very happy, I’m afraid. I was a pallbearer at Noah Baxter’s funeral.’

The funeral was today? That’s right, it was.’

‘It was this morning.’

‘Poor Hannah Baxter. Well, at least she has her son, and a grandson also. I’ll have to call Hannah.’

‘You should.’

‘I’ll call her tomorrow. How’s the corned beef? Is it too fatty?’

‘It’s perfect, Mom.’

‘All right, now tell me what’s new.’

‘You tell me.’

They fell into the never-changing Saturday routine.

Rose Tynan first. She recounted the latest gossip about her neighbors in the Senior Citizens Village. Midweek there had been a movie about a man and an orphan and a dog. She gave a lengthy synopsis of the entire scenario. Then she spoke of the letters she had written and the mail she had received.

Vernon T. Tynan’s turn. He spoke of Harry Adcock.

‘How’s Harry?’

‘He sends his regards.’

‘He’s a fine young man.’

He spoke of Christopher Collins, the new Attorney General.

‘He’s nice, Vera?’

‘I don’t know, Mom. We’ll see.’

He spoke of President Wadsworth. He discussed two murderers on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list who had been apprehended in Minneapolis and Kansas City. He came to the 35th Amendment just as he took the last bite of the stringy corned beef.

‘Don’t worry, Vera. You’ll win it.’

We need one more state, and there’s only one left.’

You’ll win.’

The lunch was over on schedule. There were ten minutes left before the driver was due to return.

‘Ready for the OC file, Mom?’ ‘Always ready,’ she said with a broad smile. He left the table, went into the living room, and brought the top-security Official and Confidential file back with him. This file, for the next ten minutes, was his regular Saturday gift to his mother. This file contained the FBI’s weekly input, largely sexual and potentially scandalous, on celebrities of the stage, screen, and sports worlds, with additional juicy tidbits on a variety of well-known politicians, industrialists, and jet-setters. Rose Tynan, who read all the fan magazines and national weekly newspapers, reveled in the gossip.

Again, Tynan felt that had J. Edgar Hoover been here, he would have approved. After all, it had been Hoover who had gathered material on the sex lives and drinking habits of prominent Americans and who had regularly passed this secret material on to President Lyndon B. Johnson for the Chief Executive’s more pleasurable bedtime reading.

Tynan opened his folder and took up the OC memorandums one by one.

‘For starters, a real treat, Mom. Your favorite movie star.’ He read off the name of the handsome liberal motion-picture actor his mother adored, and she clucked with anticipation. ‘He went to a massage parlor in Las Vegas last week, undressed, had two nude girls tie him down to a cot, and then had them whip him.’

‘That’s all?’ said the jaded Rose Tynan, a connoisseur of the outrageous, with disappointment.

‘Well, some people think that’s pretty hot stuff,’ said Tynan. ‘But I can do better. You know the Congresswoman who makes all those anti-Pentagon speeches?’ He gave his mother the name. ‘Nobody knows this, but we’ve found out she’s a lesbian. Her press secretary, a Radcliffe girl of twenty-two …’

He went on, then on and on, for the remainder of the ten minutes, as Rose Tynan sat enchanted.

When he was done and had closed the folder, his mother said, ‘Thank you, Vern. You’re a good boy. You’re always thoughtful about your mother.’ ‘Thank you, Mom.’

At the door, she studied his face.

‘You have lots of troubles,’ she said. I can see.’

“These are bad times in the country, Mom. There’s a lot to do. If we don’t get the 35th Amendment through, I don’t know what will happen.’

‘You know what’s best for everybody,’ she said. ‘I was telling Mrs Grossman the other day - she’s in the apartment above me - I was telling her you’d know what to do if you were President I believe it. You should be President’

He winked at her as he opened the door. ‘Maybe I’ll be better than that one day,’ he said. ‘We’ll see.’

*

It had been a long day for Chris Collins. Trying to make up for the time he had lost attending Colonel Baxter’s funeral in the morning, he had worked straight through without taking off his usual hour for lunch. Now, seated with his wife and two of their closest friends near the white Parian marble hearth in the upstairs dining room of the 1789 Restaurant on 36th Street in Georgetown, he was just beginning to satisfy his hunger.

Two scotches, a bowl of French onion soup, and the Caesar salad he had shared with Karen had brought him to his first moment of relaxation today. Cutting and eating his roast duck in orange sauce, Collins glanced up to see whether Ruth and Paul Hilliard were enjoying the entre6s they had ordered. Obviously, they were.

Collins considered Hilliard - it was hard to think of him as the junior Senator from California - with affection. He had known Hilliard from their beginnings, when Hilliard had been a San Francisco city councilman and he himself had been an ACLU attorney. In those early days, they had played handball together three times a week at the Y, and Collins had been best man at Hilliard’s wedding. And here they were, years later, both in Washington, he Attorney General Collins and his friend Senator Hilliard. They both had made it big.

Hilliard was a pleasant man, bespectacled, scholarly, moderate, soft-spoken, the perfect companion for an evening like this. The talk, as usual, had been easy - some gossip about the Kennedys, the prospects for the Washington Redskins football team in the fall, yet another film on the life of Lizzie Borden that everyone was going to see.

Hilliard had finished with his broiled filet mignon, placed his fork and knife neatly on his cleaned plate, and begun to fill his new Danish pipe.

‘How’d you like the wine, Paul?’ Collins asked. ‘It’s California, you know.’

‘Just look at my glass.’ He indicated his empty glass. ‘The best testimony for our vineyards.’ ‘Want more?’

‘I’ve had enough of California wine,’ said Hilliard, lighting his pipe. ‘But not enough of California. I was waiting to discuss it with you. I guess that’s where it’s all going to be happening from now on.’

‘Going to be happening? Oh, you mean the 35th.’ ‘Ever since the Ohio vote the other night, I’ve been getting calls from California. The whole state is buzzing with it.’

‘What’s the word?’

Hilliard blew a smoke ring. ‘The odds are the bill’s going to be ratified, from what I hear. The Governor is going to be announcing his support of it later in the week.’ ‘That’ll make the President happy,’ said Collins. ‘Between us, it’s a deal,’ said Hilliard. ‘The Governor is going to run for the Senate after this term. He wants Wadsworth’s backing, and the President’s always been lukewarm about him. So they’ve made a trade. The Governor’ll come out for the 35th if the President will come out for him.’ He paused. ‘Too bad.’

Collins, who had been chewing his last morsel of duck, ceased chewing. ‘What does that mean, Paul?’ He swallowed his food. ‘What - what’s too bad?’

‘That the big guns are lining up behind the 35th in California.’ ‘I thought you were for it.’

‘I wasn’t for it or against it. I sort of played the innocent bystander. I just watched and waited to see what would happen. I suspect that’s the way you’ve felt privately. But

now that the decision is in our backyard, I’m inclined to act, to get involved.’

‘On which side? Against it?’

‘Against it.’

‘Don’t be hasty, Paul,’ Ruth Hilliard said nervously. ‘Why don’t you wait and see how people feel about it?’

‘We’ll never know what people feel until they know how we feel. They’re depending on their leaders to tell them what’s right. After all -‘

‘Are you sure what’s right, Paul?’ Collins interrupted.

‘I’m becoming sure,’ said Hilliard quietly. ‘Based on what I’m gradually learning of the situation back home, the provisions of the 35th Amendment amount to overkill. That bill is loaded with too heavy an armament aimed at too small an enemy. That’s what Tony Pierce thinks, too. He’s coming into California to fight the Amendment.’

‘Pierce isn’t to be trusted,’ said Collins, remembering Director Tynan’s tirade against the civil rights advocate in the White House the other night. ‘Pierce’s motives are suspect. He’s made the 35th a personal vendetta. He’s fighting Tynan as much as the Amendment, because Tynan fired him from the FBI.’

‘Do you know that for a fact?’ said Hilliard.

‘Well, that’s what I’ve heard. I haven’t checked it.’

‘Check it, because I’ve heard different. Pierce became disillusioned by the FBI when he was part of it. He threw his support to some Special Agents Tynan was manhandling. In retaliation, Tynan decided to exile him to somewhere -Montana or Ohio or some such place - and so Pierce resigned to fight for his reforms from the outside. I’m told Tynan spread the story that he was fired.’

‘No matter,’ said Collins with a trace of impatience. “What matters is that you say you’ve decided to side with those opposing the 35th.’

‘Because that bill troubles me, Chris. I know the underlying purpose of it, but it’s too strong, and more and more I feel its provisions could be abused or misused. Frankly, the only thing that makes me feel safe about its passage is that John Maynard is on the high bench as Chief Justice. He’d

keep it honest. Still, the possibility of its passage is really beginning to bother me.’

‘There’s a positive side, Paul. It’ll keep crime from overwhelming us. Crime in California alone is just becoming too much -‘

‘Is it?‘said Hilliard.

‘What do you mean, is it? You read the FBI statistics as well as I do.’

‘Statistics, figures. Who was it said that figures don’t lie, but liars figure?’ Hilliard squirmed uneasily in his chair. He put down his pipe and then looked directly at Collins. ‘Actually, that is something I’ve been wanting to discuss with you. Statistics, I mean. I’ve been a little hesitant about bringing it up, because it’s your Department and I was afraid you might be touchy.’

‘What do I have to be touchy about? Hell, we’re friends, Paul. Speak your mind.’

‘All right.’ Still, he hesitated, then decided to go ahead. ‘I had a disturbing call yesterday. From Olin Keefe.’

The name did not register with Collins.

‘He’s a newly elected state legislator from San Francisco,’ Hilliard explained. ‘He’s a good guy. You’d like him. Anyway, he’s on some committee that required him to talk to a number of police chiefs in the Bay area. Two of them -the police chiefs - wondered aloud why the FBI was trying to make them look bad. The police chiefs claimed the figures on crime that they submitted to Director Tynan -and which they said were accurate - were nowhere near as high as the figures you put out.’

‘I don’t put out any figures, except technically,’ said Collins, mildly irritated. ‘Tynan gathers them from local communities and computes them. Formally, my office releases them, makes them public for him. Anyway, that’s not important. What are you telling me, Paul?’

‘I’m trying to tell you that young Keefe - State Assemblyman Keefe - suspects Director Tynan is doctoring those national crime statistics, tampering with them, especially the figures delivered to him from California. He’s giving us a bigger crime wave than we actually have.’

‘Why should he do that? It makes no sense.’

‘It makes plenty of sense. Tynan is doing that - if he is doing it - to scare our legislators into passing the 35th Amendment.’

‘Look, I know Tynan is gung-ho on getting the Amendment passed. I know the Bureau has always been statistics-happy. But why trouble to do a risky thing like falsifying figures? What does he have to gain?’

‘Power.*

‘He already has power,’ said Collins flatly.

‘Not the kind of power he would have as head of the Committee on National Safety, if the emergency provision of the 35th were ever invoked. Then it would be Vernon T. Tynan uber Alles.’

Collins shook his head. I don’t believe that. Not one bit. Paul, I live in Justice. I’ve been part of it for eighteen months, in one capacity or another. I know what goes on in the Department. You’re removed from it. And that young Assemblyman of yours, Keefe, he’s also on the outside. He doesn’t know a damn thing.’

Hilliard would not be stopped. He pushed his rimless spectacles high on the bridge of his nose and said earnestly, ‘He seems to know plenty, from our phone conversation. There are some other things he knows, too, and they’re not pretty. You don’t have to take it from me, Chris. Find out for yourself firsthand. Earlier, you said you might be going to California soon. Fine. Why don’t you let me have Olin Keefe look you up? Then, just hear him out.’ He paused. ‘Unless for some reason you don’t want to.’

‘Cut it out, Paul. You know me better than that. There’d be no reason I wouldn’t want to hear facts - if they are facts. I’m not a company man. I’m as interested in the truth as you are.’