Guilt by Association (37 page)

If Robert intended to announce his candidacy for the Senate during the holiday, there would be no rest. Instead, there would be a nonstop round of press conferences, photo sessions, and interviews, with people underfoot every moment, and she would be expected to participate. She sighed deeply and made a mental note to have her prescription refilled.

Robert settled back against the leather cushions. It was going to happen just as he had dreamed it, and one day very soon he would have it all. The endless schooling, the long apprenticeship at Sutton Wells, the confining proper marriage, the petty congressional duties he performed, the tiresome committees on which he was obliged to serve—each was merely a rung up his ladder to the White House. When he looked at it like that, he knew it was worth it.

The limousine pulled up in front of the house on Jackson Street. Robert took Adam, Randy helped Elizabeth, and the four of them went up the steps.

“I want to spend a few minutes with Mother,” Robert told his wife, handing the boy over. “And then Randy and I have some people to see.”

Elizabeth hardly heard him.

“Where are we headed?” Randy asked half an hour later as the two men climbed back into the limousine.

“I don’t know where
you’re
headed, old man,” replied the congressman with a sly wink. “But I’m on my way to give an interview.”

Randy grinned on the outside but cringed on the inside. It wasn’t that he was a prude. In fact, he wasn’t in the least. But,
after three years, he knew that Robert’s sexual appetites sometimes got the better of his good sense—and boffing a news reporter on the eve of announcing for the United States Senate was certainly not what Randy considered using good sense.

T
he jumbo jet sped steadily toward the sunset. Mary Catherine O’Malley sipped her champagne, nibbled at her smoked-salmon appetizer,
and contemplated the strategy session that would begin almost the moment the plane touched down—the announcement that would result from that session, and the impact it would have on the rest of her life.

She had been working for Robert Willmont for a scant three years now and he was considered damn lucky to have her, because Mary Catherine was regarded by many to be the best administrative assistant on Capitol Hill. She had earned that reputation over almost thirty years of shepherding congressmen through the political quagmire.

For a girl from the wrong side of the Winston-Salem railroad tracks, with only a high school education to her name, who had started her career as a temporary filing clerk, that wasn’t half bad.

She did her share of stumbling in the beginning, but she was a quick learner and it took her hardly any time at all to realize that she was smarter than most of the duly elected world-beaters with their multiple degrees who moved in and out for a few years at a time.

By the time Mary Catherine attended her sixth congres
sional swearing-in ceremony and her third Presidential inaugural, she was on a first-name basis with just about everyone in Washington who counted. She was invited to most of the parties that mattered, the press courted her, insiders sought her advice,
and politicians trusted her. Over the years she discovered where all the bodies were buried, where all the skeletons lurked,
and which pairs of shoes hid Achilles’ heels, and she accomplished it all without ever having to take off her clothes.

Mary Catherine was barely five feet tall, but people rarely realized that. They noticed instead that, at the age of forty-eight,
she still displayed a classic hourglass figure, an abundance of glossy brown hair, and brown eyes that were faintly reminiscent of Bambi.

She managed her staff with the patience of Penelope and the determination of a drill sergeant, she managed the public with humor and impartiality, and she managed her congressmen with the utmost tact and discretion.

Robert had inherited her from his predecessor, and two months into his first term, he had actually written that conservative gentleman a note of appreciation.

“If you don’t know what to do or how to do it,” he was soon telling everyone, “ask Mary Catherine.”

Born seventh in a family of nine to a schoolteacher mother and an alcoholic father, Mary Catherine had learned the wisdom of knowing the right answers and keeping a low profile by the age of six. Her gentle North Carolina drawl camouflaged an exceptional mind and her soft Southern ways managed to convince many a man that he was really the one in charge.

When she was twenty-nine years old, a White House aide asked her to marry him. He was reasonably handsome and fun and even quite bright, and by that time, they had been enjoying each other’s close company for some months.

“What will you do after your Administration is out of office?” she asked him.

“Oh, we have five years before we have to worry about that,” he said and laughed.

“But then what?” she persisted.

“Go back to Boston, I guess,” he replied. “It’s too hard to tell your friends from your enemies in this town.”

But after all it had taken to get herself established, Mary Catherine had no intention of leaving Washington, in five years or ever. She refused his proposal with sincere regret. While the two of them vowed to remain intimate friends, less than a year later, when the Administration he worked for ended so abruptly, so tragically, the aide said good-bye and faded into memory.

Robert Willmont was Mary Catherine’s third congressman from California. With her ability and experience, she could easily have had her pick of the biennial crop, but she liked Califor-nians. They had a style that other members of the House often lacked. Women seemed to sit up straighter in their presence, men tended to order wine instead of bourbon.

This one, however, had a lot more than style. He had looks and he had brains and he had an ambition that wasn’t going to quit with a third-floor office on the House side of the Capitol Building. This one was on his way up, as they said, and he was the one Mary Catherine had been waiting for.

Like almost everyone else who came with purpose to the nation’s capital, the soft-spoken North Carolinian dreamed of ending her career in the White House. For decades, she had studied the mostly indistinguishable features of those who took up residence in the Senate and the House, looking for just the right combination of qualities that she could help hone into a presidential great. In the part of her gut where her most trusted instincts lay, Mary Catherine knew that Robert Drayton Willmont was the one.

The prestigious law firm of Sutton, Wells, Willmont and Spaulding, while officially neutral when it came to politics, was nonetheless pleased to provide the congressman, and former partner, with a suite of offices on the twelfth floor of its Front Street building.

Five days after Mary Catherine hit San Francisco, she had leased an apartment on Telegraph Hill for herself and anyone
else from out of town who might need it, outfitted the Front Street headquarters, hired two secretaries and a clerk from a local temporary agency, and called in two assistants from Washington to help set up operations.

At two o’clock in the afternoon of Thursday, December 17, perfectly timed to take advantage of the evening newscasts, she stood beside Randy Neuburg, just outside the glare of the television lights, as Robert Willmont announced to the press and the people of California his intention to be a candidate for the United States Senate.

Mary Catherine approved of Randy. He was smart and realistic, and under her tutelage was developing into one of the most savvy aides in Washington. To the congressman’s right was his lovely wife, holding their cherubic little boy Adam in her arms. A nice touch, the shrewd administrative assistant conceded. Mary Catherine approved of Elizabeth Willmont, too. Not only was she beautiful and fashionable, she had the kind of grace and charm that was considered an enormous asset in Washington and which would play very well in the media.

From the corner of her eye, the assistant scanned the local newspeople she would get to know again in the eleven months to come. In the front row sat a pretty young blonde with brown eyes, a short tight skirt, one leg thrown ever so casually over the other, and an insolent little smile on her face. She was the only member of the group who wasn’t taking notes. Mary Catherine frowned. She had seen that same smile on a number of other pretty young faces over the past three years and it always triggered an alarm bell in her head. A slight sigh beside her told her that Randy was noticing, too.

“I think it went well,” Robert observed once the lights had been turned off and the reporters had rushed away with their stories.

“It’ll play in Pasadena,” Randy agreed.

“So long as the conservative voters of our good state continue to focus on my sound fiscal policies and the liberal voters concentrate on my progressive social programs,” the candidate summed up, “I think we’ve got it made.”

He stretched broadly and made a point of glancing at his wristwatch. “See that Elizabeth and the boy get back to Jackson Street,
will you?” he directed his aide. “I’m late for an appointment.”

Randy and Mary Catherine exchanged glances.

“I don’t have anything down in the book for you this evening, Congressman,” the administrative assistant noted.

Robert grinned. “It’s just a quick stop.”

Quick, as in before she has to do the six-o’clock news, Mary Catherine interpreted.

Quick, as in quickie, thought Randy.

“Do you think that’s really such a good idea?” the aide wondered aloud. “I mean, the media is bound to be all over you every minute from now on.”

The congressman chuckled. “Oh, I’ve become an expert at dodging those snoops.”

“Still, you know, all it takes is one slip,” Randy persisted.

“Well, if I do slip,” came the reckless reply, “I know you’ll be there to pick me up.”

“It’s the blonde in the first row,” Randy said as soon as Robert had departed.

Mary Catherine nodded. “Janice Evans, from Channel Seven. Another reporter! You’d think he’d learn, wouldn’t you?”

“All I can say is that he’d better make damn sure there are no hidden cameras around this time.” Randy sighed “I’ve done my last second-story work.”

Shortly before the congressman’s reelection to the House, Randy had actually been induced to commit burglary to clean up a particularly messy liaison. The wide-eyed young woman in question had claimed to be a graduate student in political science from some Midwestern university, spending the summer soaking up the Washington scene. But she was actually a scandal-sheet stringer hoping to make it big on a major-city newspaper.

Only after Randy had broken into her apartment and retrieved some incriminating photographs and negatives was the congressman able to dump her. Then, in case she might
have had in mind to spread any unfortunate publicity, he arranged, with the help of a small-time lowlife who owed him a favor,
to have the stringer implicated in a prostitution and drug deal, thereby destroying her credibility. He never even blinked when she was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to nine months in prison.

Mary Catherine sighed. If Robert Drayton Willmont had one fault, one weakness that could cost them all everything were he not very careful—were she and Randy not constantly vigilant—it was that he didn’t know how to keep his zipper zipped.

1991

It is circumstances and timing

that give an action its character,

and make it either good or bad.

—
Agesilaus

K
aren emptied the last of the wardrobe containers and heaved a sigh of relief. It was the thing she hated most about moving,
trying to find places in a new home for all the things they had so easily accumulated in the old, and this was the fourth occasion in ten years she had had to do it.

It was especially difficult this time because the house here in San Francisco was smaller than the one in Tucson had been.
When they had made the first move, from New York to Atlanta, they had gone from the compact brownstone apartment on West Seventy-eighth Street into a stately six-bedroom colonial. Again, when they went from Atlanta to Houston, it was into a sprawling hacienda that had taken Karen almost an hour to walk from end to end. And when they had to make the hop from Houston to Tucson, they had found an equally spacious adobe. But now, with Gwen grown and Jessica almost finished with college, they had no need for all that acreage.

Karen secretly thought Atlanta and the colonial too pretentious, Houston and the hacienda too hot, and Tucson and the adobe too dry. But she liked this house, set on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean, at the southern edge of San Francisco, in a section of the city known as St. Francis Wood.

It was quasi-Mediterranean in style, with stucco walls and a red tile roof, inlaid wood floors, high arched windows, and a stunning art deco skylight. There was a delightful solarium off the kitchen that they turned into a breakfast room, and a sunporch off the master bedroom that they glassed in.

“Quintessential 1920s,” Ted said when he saw it.

“We don’t really need more than three bedrooms,” Karen told Gwen over the telephone, “now that Amy is the only one at home full-time.”

“But what if Larry and the twins and I want to come out when Jessica’s there?” her oldest stepdaughter had protested from her home outside Philadelphia. Brightest of the three girls, she was the image of her father except for her blue eyes.

“Your dad has already thought of that,” Karen assured her, thinking of the sunporch.

“How come you picked San Francisco?” Jessica asked from her dormitory at the University of Colorado. The middle girl was the tallest of the three and the only one with her mother’s brown hair and eyes and quiet determination.

“As usual, it picked us,” Karen replied. “Your father’s been commissioned to design a megacomplex in China Basin.”

“Why do we have to move again?” Amy complained. She had grown into a lively teenager, combining her father’s coloring with her mother’s serenity. “I only have one more year of high school. It’ll be absolutely awful to have to go to a new school for just one year. I won’t know anyone, I won’t have any friends, I’ll be miserable.”