Capitol Reflections (6 page)
Mark looked wistfully out of his window. Gwen. He could still measure the time between thinking about her in hours. And each time, he’d never been anything less than mystified over how Gwen had so completely subtracted herself from his life. Gwen had Jack, the FDA, and no place in her life for a man she once must have loved.
Gwen was in town, for she would have undoubtedly come up from D.C. to attend Marci’s funeral. “I know you’re out there somewhere,” he mumbled, echoing a line from an old Moody Blues song.
He moved his gaze to the bookshelves opposite his desk and located an edition of Wordsworth’s poetry. He got up, walked across his office, and picked up the book, carefully opening the faded, embossed cover.
Gwen knew that Mark liked to read poetry from old editions since he believed slightly yellowed pages had more character than pristine white stock purchased at Barnes and Noble. He looked at the inscription and smiled: “To Don Quixote. All my love—Gwen.” Yes, they did love each other once. Even if only one of them remembered it now.
At least she’d understood who he was. “Don Quixote?” Yeah, that was as good a description as any. Gwen was sympathetic to Mark’s mission on behalf of the underdog as evidenced by her Herculean effort to make a go of her father’s practice, but Mark’s personal style was simply too anachronistic for the more practical and scientific Dr. McBean. “Grow up and join the rest of us,” Gwen had told him. “You might actually enjoy the experience.”
“Bingo, Gwen,” he uttered, placing the volume back on the shelf.
For a brief moment, he considered trying to find her and meet her for a drink. He could locate anyone he wanted, even in a city the size of the Big Apple, but tracing her through the Newmans would be inappropriate at such a time. There were other ways to do it, but the timing was a mistake. Gwen would be shattered by losing Marci. And then there was her husband to consider. While Jack Maulder wasn’t the jealous type, he was a former Secret Service agent and too tightly wound for Stern’s liking. Federal cops always reminded him of Big Brother.
“Though nothing can bring back the splendor in the grass, we will grieve not,” Stern said, philosophically quoting a snippet of Wordsworth.
Let it go. How many times had he told himself that?
He needed to get back to work. The reporter turned back to his computer screen and to his examination of Gregory Randall’s dynasty. Why in the world, he wondered, had Randall spent the last week globe-trotting? Wasn’t he officially in mourning for his father?
Yeah, right. More than likely, Randall had found himself a pretty, young woman—Asian, no doubt—in some exotic location. Mark wondered if the younger Randall gave the elder a moment’s thought, while some nubile lovely performed acts on him no Western woman knew.
Gwen did not expect to find what looked like a tornado debris field in Marci’s Fifth Avenue apartment. Marci was a neat freak, maybe even a tad bit obsessive-compulsive. Her precision of thought was matched by a precision in most everything she did. She was an avid reader, but leaving an open book on the sofa? No, that wasn’t Marci Newman. A place for everything, and everything in its place; now that was Marci.
The apartment Gwen saw as she walked through the front door had not been cleaned for weeks. Books, legal briefs, empty Diet Coke cans, and clothes were everywhere. Black, rotten bananas sat on the kitchen counter next to an open jar of lowfat peanut butter, which Marci probably used as energy food when she didn’t have time to eat a proper meal—and Gwen was starting to wonder exactly how many proper meals Marci had eaten recently, if any.
An open pack of Virginia Slims Light was lying on the glass end table by the couch in the living room. Gwen considered Marci’s choice of brand to be morbidly appropriate given her ninety-five-pound weight. At least ten cigarette butts were visible in a mound of ashes.
Gwen scoped out the rest of the apartment, but the same domestic litter was everywhere—clothes, partially-eaten food, books, and ashtrays. She next examined Marci’s desk. The little ivory seagull Marci got at the shore and loved so much sat next to her PC, where Gwen imagined she enjoyed seeing it so much of the time. When Gwen touched the mouse, the screen came to light, the cursor still blinking. She sat down in front of the screen, put her purse on the floor, and tapped a few keys. Nothing. The entire system was password protected.
“Piece of cake,” Gwen said to the empty apartment. First, she tried Marci’s birthday, her name, and her parents’ names, all without success. Absentmindedly (but admitting to a little nudge from her ego), she typed “Gwen”—and Marci’s personalized desktop floated onto the screen. Gwen’s pleasure at guessing the password was muted by the realization that she would probably never again be blessed with such a close friend. A picture of the dunes at Montauk covered the screen, a background to the many scattered icons. Gwen went straight to the directory and looked at the list of documents. There were hundreds, but she didn’t have time to inspect so many files or even print them out for later inspection. Highlighting the first line, she pressed the “arrow down” key and scrolled through the document titles, looking for something that would raise the proverbial red flag. Most of the files were related to her cases—Aaron v. Thompson, Brown v. Altman, and so on—and Gwen didn’t bother to open a single one.
Haydn104—now that was a file she would open.
Marci had loved all the symphonies of Josef Haydn and regarded them as musical “uppers” in college, always playing them when she had to pull an all-nighter to write a paper due the following day.
Gwen clicked on the file, only to be rewarded with a password prompt. Of all the files for Marci to lock, why this one? She tried a variety of passwords but each attempt generated, “password incorrect, enter password.” Displayed ad infinitum. She saved the file to CD. She would have Jack, a specialist extraordinaire in the matter of computers and the cyberworld, take a look at the file to see if he could find a way inside.
Marci’s “Personal” e-mail folder was filled with letters from Gwen and memos from Susan Parks. Nothing unusual in the least.
Turning off the laptop, Gwen put the CD in her purse and headed for the front door. Her hand was already on the knob when she turned around and looked at her friend’s apartment for the last time. She walked back and picked up the ivory seagull. So many of Marci’s happy times had been spent at the ocean side, watching the waves roll onto the shore, sometimes for hours at a time.
Gwen decided this would be her keepsake. She took the seagull and deposited it in her purse along with the copied CD. She needed to rendezvous with Jack at the hotel and then get to the airport. It was time to go home.
PART II
FALL 1977
8
The Cottage Club was ensconced in an antebellum mansion on Prospect Street, a tree-lined lane that served as the address for all of Princeton’s eating clubs. Admission to Cottage was highly selective; the athletically-inclined scholar needed the right family background, membership on a suitable sports team, and grades respectable enough so as not to leave the club financially strapped after February’s typical flunk-out season. Cottage men were known for entering in coats and ties, out-drinking the lower life forms in other clubs, and never waking up in their own detritus.
Henry Brome was the quintessential jock—golf, crew, hockey, soccer, and rugby—and he spent far more time in Cottage’s taproom playing poker than he did taking notes in class. Such was his stature, his strength, wit, and ruthlessness, that he was invariably surrounded by a group of fawning vassals known as Broome’s Brigade.
Like most undergrads headed for the family business, Henry chose one of the soft majors—in his case, history. His brushes with academic censure were usually swept under the rug following a phone call from the Alumni Office to an understanding dean. Princeton was in the habit of getting a new building from the Broome family, owners of the small Hawaiian island of Lanai, once every generation. Those entrusted with the growth of the university’s endowment had no intention of strangling that golden goose.
Unbeknownst to the university’s chancellors, said goose was in extremis, since the family’s sugarcane and pineapple crops had failed four years in a row. The stock portfolio of Henry’s father, Henry Bramwell Broome III, was good for little more than lining the cage of the family’s macaw, thanks to his habit of swimming around in gin and tonic from noon to eight o’clock each evening. While attempting to keep up appearances, the Broomes had become convinced that any hope of rebuilding their small Pacific empire lay in Henry’s following the path trodden by his ancestors since Henry Broome, family progenitor, had taken his theology degree at Princeton and shipped out as a missionary to convert the heathens of Hawaii. In those days, missionaries went to do good … and usually ended up doing quite well.
Henry IV’s parents had less lofty hopes. Nevertheless, they prayed that their son, who favored quite a different kind of missionary position, would somehow acquire the skills to rehabilitate the island, the crops, the portfolio, and, most importantly, the Broome family name. Henry III, though a consummate lush, still had a few markers he could call in after his son graduated. He planned to place Henry with any one of a dozen companies where his heir could hone his entrepreneurial skills, be ushered into the boardroom in record time, and parlay the Broomes’ declining reputation back into solvency with an infusion of capital. Hopefully, their son would not only shore up the dwindling portfolio, but also return to run the plantation full-time. First, however, it would be necessary for Henry to run the corporate gauntlet in order to acquire experience.
Though the elder Broome placed an awesome responsibility on his son’s shoulders, Henry had an uncanny way of making things happen. From earliest childhood, he had been a leader, an organizer among his cadre, and heaven help the boy—or occasional girl—who didn’t fall in line with Henry’s plans for a game of football, a party, or a day-trip to Maui. Loud and strong, he was persuasive to an extreme, a one-man wrecking crew if the situation warranted.
By age sixteen, Henry supervised virtually all the plantation’s workers during the summer, earning a reputation as a taskmaster among people four times his age. The Asian workers would glumly chant, “Yes, Mr. Henry” or “No, Mr. Henry” as they chopped, bundled, and loaded sugarcane onto flatbeds destined for the docks at Kaumalapau on the island’s southern coast. He’d pull off the family’s plan to stay in the social register all by himself if necessary.
The senior, class of ’78, therefore felt entirely justified in loudly regaling his Cottage coterie with his latest accomplishments. He’d led Princeton’s soccer team to a decisive victory over Brown earlier in the afternoon, three of the four goals attributable to Henry. Soccer was a rough game, and Henry played to win.
Always.
The slight-framed Bruce Merewether was a prime example. Bruce was a Classics major and captain of the men’s equestrian team. While riding horses barely met Cottage entrance requirements, the presence of Bruce’s grandfather on Cottage’s Board of Governors rendered the issue moot. Bruce made it clear—foolishly, on this particular evening—that people of Henry’s ilk lacked the aptitude to excel in their studies.
More precisely, Bruce had muttered that, “Jocks like Henry Broome were placed on Earth to make Neanderthal Man seem intelligent by comparison.” Having injected this acerbic gem into the pub’s pulse of activity just loudly enough for Henry and his comrades to hear, he resumed holding forth on Chaucer’s rhyming couplets.
Henry could hold six beers and still walk a straight line for the campus police, which he’d had to do on more than one occasion. He had chugged ten thus far tonight, and his not-so-considered opinion was that Bruce’s remark had slighted the honor of all true Princeton athletes, past and present. “At least I don’t spend my time reading a lot of queer poetry,” he stated, strutting over to Merewether and his two companions.
Bruce pushed his chair back with a screech and stared blankly up at the muscular figure of Henry, who, at six-foot-four, towered above a literary discussion that dwindled with each passing second. “I don’t believe you were invited to join our group,” Bruce said confidently. “And to assume that Chaucer’s poetry is more queer than a group of grown men in shorts dancing around a spotted ball, giving each other love taps on the ass … ” Bruce concluded the rebuttal with a mocking grin.
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