Murder in the White House (Capital Crimes Book 1) (3 page)

Lynne had a nose that turned up, a pert lively face, a lithe figure (although a little heavy in the bust). Of all the presidential family, the burden of the White House seemed heaviest on her. She seemed to labor under a sense of it: the dignity and burden of it.

Ron Fairbanks watched her rub Blaine’s shoulders, looking curiously intent and grim. Ron sipped Irish whisky—Old Bushmills, which they had not served at the White House before Catherine Webster noticed his preference for it and ordered it. He was not jealous of Lynne’s somewhat intimate attention to the Secretary of State. He had no claim on her; and, after all, Blaine had
been a close friend of her family for many years before he even met her. It
did
annoy him, just the same, to see the way Blaine accepted her ministrations without seeming even to notice, as though it were his due. Ron had seen her do this many times before, and he had seen Blaine receive it just this way.

Lansard Blaine was the author of an estimable two-volume history of American foreign relations, a number of single volumes on specific episodes of that history, and numberless monographs in scholarly journals. He was a rare bird, one editorialist had said: a theoretician who had been given the opportunity to put his theories into practice and had seen them work as well in fact as they did on paper. His skillful, subtle—still almost brutally forceful—intervention between India and Pakistan a year ago had averted a war, conceivably even an atomic war; and a quiet campaign was underway to promote a Nobel Peace Prize for him. He had reason to be satisfied with his tenure as Secretary of State, and the President had reason to be satisfied with it. The rumors of his likely resignation were inexplicable to Ron Fairbanks. Seeing him unlike himself tonight—nervous, withdrawn—gave credence to the rumors. Ron watched him, and wondered….

***

During the first six months of the Webster Administration, Blaine had hardly spoken to him. Their duties did not throw the Secretary of State and the Special Counsel together very often. Besides, Blaine had been quoted as disdaining lawyers; he was fond of quoting
Henry VI
—“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” But over coffee and brandy one night, when the President
and Catherine Webster had called Blaine and Ron upstairs to relax with them for half an hour at the end of a particularly difficult day, Ron had won Blaine’s momentary admiration and at least a small share of friendship from him. “Come,” Blaine had said over the cups and snifters—in his very personal way disdainful yet challenging his opposite to overcome his disdain—“what, really, does it require to be a lawyer? What qualities of mind, personality, character? What?” Ron had smiled tolerantly. “To name just one quality,” he had said, “I think we might mention tact.” The President had guffawed. Catherine Webster had leaned back and laughed. And Blaine… Blaine had laughed too and leaned over and slapped Ron’s knee. “Damn good, Fairbanks.
Damn
good.”

Like almost everyone in politics, Blaine had a public persona and a private personality; and, as was often with people in politics, the private personality was rather less attractive than the public persona. Publicly he was smooth, self-confident, erudite, witty. Privately he was often self-contained, impatient, egoistic. Sometimes he smoked cigars, strong-smelling cigars whose aroma pervaded a dozen rooms. One thing he never was—bland. No one forgot him. No one mistook him for someone else. He defied categorization. Every pundit—and there were many—who tried to settle Blaine into a tiny pigeonhole was sooner or later embarrassed by his error. Ron remembered a luncheon at the Madison Hotel when a
Post
columnist, commenting on the election of an independent as governor of Florida, called it a fluke and compared it to the Bobby Thomson home run that won the National League pennant for the
New York Giants in 1951. “Your simile is inapposite,” Blaine remarked. “The Bobby Thomson home run was no fluke. Thomson was a great hitter.” The newspaperman, a gray-head of many years’ experience, pulled his pipe from his mouth and smiled on Blaine. “I didn’t know you were a baseball expert, professor,” he said sarcastically. Blaine shrugged. “Bobby Thomson hit 32 home runs in 1951. And .264 in his career. He is one of the seventy-five or so all-time great home-run hitters.” Period….

The White House, Tuesday, June 12, 11:47 PM

In the darkness of his office, Fairbanks saw the light in the button on his telephone before he heard it ring. He had just switched off the lights in the room and was checking the lock on the door to be sure it was secure, when the telephone line lit up and the telephone began to ring. He closed the door and left it blinking and ringing in the darkened office. It was Fritz Gimbel, probably, checking to see if he had read the Pillsbury memorandum—another irritating habit of Gimbel’s was to check repeatedly to see if someone were really doing what he had promised to do. Fritz could go to the devil. At this hour he was not going to stay in the office another two minutes to assure Fritz Gimbel he had read the Pillsbury memorandum.

The West Wing was quiet. The meeting in the Oval Office evidently had not lasted long. Ron loosened his tie. His car was parked on Executive Avenue, and he could be home in ten minutes in the light traffic at this
time of night. He did not carry a briefcase. He would be back here before eight in the morning, there was no need to take anything home.

“Mr. Fairbanks.”

One of the night guards greeted him perfunctorily, and Ron nodded perfunctorily.

Another night man was on duty at the door, as always. But this time the night guard was standing, blocking the door, frowning as Ron walked toward him along the dimly lighted corridor past the closed and locked doors of offices.

“Mr. Fairbanks, I’m sorry; I can’t let you out.”

There was of course no arguing with these fellows. Most of them were humorless, all of them were armed, and some of them were touchy. This one was named—as he recalled—Swoboda; he was one of the Secret Service men who had been with the President in Chicago when the shot was fired from the hotel roof. “What now?” Ron asked wearily.

“I’ll check, sir,” said the man. He picked up the telephone.

Ron stood impatiently and watched Swoboda call someone for instructions. He could see the bulge of the pistol under the man’s suit jacket. They had ceased to be subtle about the way they guarded the President.

“The President wants to see you, sir. As quickly as possible. In… the Lincoln Sitting Room. You’re to go to the elevator. Someone will be waiting for you there.”

Ron hurried through the West Wing halls. When he reached the Mansion itself he found the doors held open for him. At the elevator, Bill Villiers of the Secret Service was waiting for him.

“What’s up?”

The Secret Service man only shook his head. Villiers was ordinarily not a difficult man to talk to; but now he ran the elevator in grim silence.

They went up to the second floor. Villiers led Ron briskly through the long east-west hall. It was silent and deserted until they reached the east end, where Fritz Gimbel stood, talking quietly but with clear tension in his voice, in the center of a knot of Secret Service men. Ron recognized an FBI agent, too. Still without a word, Villiers led him to the door of the Lincoln Sitting Room. He rapped on the door.

The President opened the door. “Come in,” he said. He was pallid. His voice was hoarse and somber.

Ron stepped into the room. Two more Secret Service men were there—Wilson and Adonizio—and Dr. Gilchrist. They stood around one of the horsehair-upholstered Victorian chairs, and at first Ron did not see what was on the chair. Then he saw—

Blaine. Not Blaine. The remains of Blaine. The body of the Secretary of State was sitting on the ugly black chair, the head lolling forward and to one side, the chest—the shirtfront and jacket—drenched with blood. Blaine’s right hand still clutched a telephone. His left was clenched in his lap, clutching the fabric of his jacket. The blood—so much of it—soaked his trousers, the chair, even the carpet beneath the chair. His throat had been cut. The wound circled his throat just above the glistening red collar, and the blood still oozed from it.

Ron felt the President’s grip on his arm. Then he heard his barely audible voice… “My God… murder in the White House…”

The Lincoln Sitting Room, Wednesday, June 13, 2:20 AM

If Woodward and Bernstein were right, Nixon and Kissinger knelt and prayed on the floor of this room the night before Nixon resigned in 1974. Ron Fairbanks had read about that a long time ago. As far as he could recall, that was all that had ever happened in this room. It was a small room, as rooms in the White House went; and it was not a very attractive room—he did not like the heavy Victorian furniture, which he thought gave the room a close, brooding atmosphere. It would have to be re-carpeted now, and the chair replaced. The late Secretary of State Lansard Blaine had bled to death, and clearly not by his own hand.

It was two o’clock before they removed the body. The President had asked Ron to stay while the Secret Service men and the FBI agents—joined for a while by two homicide detectives from the Metropolitan Police—did the mechanical, routine things murder investigators did. They did it all with Blaine’s body still slumping—stiffening, Ron supposed—in the chair.

He sat now with the President, and with Gimbel in the room, talking quietly and watching.

Blaine’s body began to turn pale. When Ron first saw the body, Blaine had looked alive, as though he might look up and laugh—as though he might put his head back on, so to speak. But after an hour, what sat in the chair was conspicuously a corpse, what remained of a man after the life was gone and much of the blood was drained out of him. The investigators worked around Blaine. They didn’t cover him. They took photographs, they dusted for fingerprints, they ran a vacuum all
around the room. They worked with a self-conscious, artificial briskness—the pose of official investigators. Ron went out to the bathroom, but he still had to return.

The President watched and said little. Gimbel said almost nothing. The investigators told the President what they learned.

“His throat was cut, sir. Probably with a wire. Probably someone sneaked up behind him, dropped a loop of fine wire over his head, and pulled. The wire was fine enough, and strong enough, to cut through, so he couldn’t call out.”

“Where’s the wire?”

“Gone. Whoever did it could tuck it in his pocket and walk out, easy.”

“Why wouldn’t a wire that cut his throat have cut the hands of the man who used it?” Ron asked.

It was a Washington homicide detective talking… “Maybe he wore gloves, sir. Probably used a handle of some kind. All it would take would be a stick, a long bolt, even a ball-point pen.”

“Did you ever see a murder committed that way before?” Ron asked.

“Yes, sir—once. They teach that technique in the military. You can shut up a sentry that way.”

Blaine had apparently been talking on the telephone—to whom, would probably be an important question. Someone had come in—or maybe someone had already been there with him. Someone could have gotten behind him if he were not paying attention. Or, maybe someone he knew had stood behind him. Killing him had taken one very determined person only a few seconds.

“Why?” the President said. “
Why?
”

“How strong a man would it take to do it?” Gimbel asked the detective.

The man shook his head. “Not very strong, sir,” he said. “It’s a pretty easy way to kill someone. It doesn’t take much strength or much ingenuity—just the… determination to do it.”

The President spoke quietly to Ron and to Gimbel. “It had to be someone who could come in here without being challenged by anyone. It had to be someone who could move unchallenged in the White House in the middle of the night.”

“Or we’ve got one incredible lapse of security,” said Gimbel.

The President shook his head. “No. It had to be someone who could come to the second floor…”

“Another night,” said Ron, “that would be a very limited number. Tonight, with your return from Europe… some of the senior staff were here… some of Blaine’s staff too.”

“We have got to know
why
,” Gimbel said grimly. “It could have been too damn many people. Until we know
why
…”

“White House…” muttered the President through clenched teeth. “Someone
inside
. Tomorrow… goddamn newspapers, television…
inside the White House
, for God’s sake…”

“We’ve got to release the story,” said Gimbel. “He’s been dead three hours…”

The President sighed heavily, looked at Ron. “I had some kind of hope that maybe the investigation would come up with something so that when we announced it we could say we knew who did it—
or
at least we had a
suspect. I suppose we’ll be criticized for not announcing—”

“Not necessarily,” Ron interrupted. “It’s accepted investigative procedure to hold the story for a few hours.”

The President stood. He seemed suddenly to have shaken off the shock that had subdued him. He nodded decisively toward the door, and Fairbanks and Gimbel followed him out of the Lincoln Sitting Room. The passageway was blocked by a knot of investigators—one scribbling in a small notebook. They jostled each other to make way for the President, but he turned abruptly into the Lincoln Bedroom. He switched on the lights and closed the door.

“Who’s in charge of the investigation?” the President asked. He looked around the room, then chose to sit on the edge of the ornately carved Victorian bed.

“Well, it’s a Secret Service operation first,” said Gimbel. He sat on a chair facing the President. “Of course, the FBI… And the Metropolitan Police…” He frowned. “Too damn many.”

The President nodded.

Ron stood uneasily beside Gimbel, resting a hand on the back of the chair Gimbel had chosen. “It needs a coordinator,” he said.

“Right,” said the President. “Lansard Blaine is dead, and that’s reason enough for a thorough and efficient investigation… God, I don’t want to sound callous—particularly not tonight—but do you realize what this could do to us?” He shook his head. “The murder of Blaine could bring down this administration. I mean, literally. We could lose every bit of political power we have, every bit of moral authority… We could be left
with congressional government. And as for reelection… This investigation has got to be complete and quick. What’s more, it’s got to look as good as it is… thorough, effective. And there can be
no
suggestion in it anywhere that
anyone
is beyond it. That anyone is being protected. Including me…”