Murder in the White House (Capital Crimes Book 1) (8 page)

“You’ll never find out,” said Gabe Haddad. “No President ever did, and I don’t think you’re any more likely to.”

“Well, it’s clear someone’s talking,” Ron insisted. “And whoever it is,” he said, picking up a ham salad sandwich, “could be our killer—”

“Oh, come on now, Sherlock Holmes,” Jill protested.

“Well, it’s not so farfetched, really… Blaine didn’t become a sexual acrobat last week or last month. He was at it from the time he came to Washington, and, as they say, probably before. And he wasn’t too secretive about it. Still, the media apparently never found out, though it’s the kind of thing they thrive on. Then suddenly, within hours after he’s dead, they all know it. I doubt that his Watergate neighbors called the papers and blew the whistle. The women involved didn’t call.
Someone
here
did. Someone leaked it, made a point of leaking it. Why? To divert attention from whatever, whomever—”

“A smokescreen,” Jill said.

Ron nodded. “To confuse, to obscure, blur the lines.”

Gabe Hadded shrugged. “So all we have to do is third-degree a reporter until he tells us who fed him the story. Right?”

Ron nodded again. “All we have to do is make a reporter reveal his confidential source.”

“And after we’re black and blue and covered with lumps,” said Jill, “we’ll have nothing more than a suggestion that supports your theory and no hard evidence. All we can do is just refuse to take the bait, to be distracted.”

“Right. If I’m right,” Ron said, “Blaine probably wasn’t killed by a jealous lover or a woman scorned, as they say. It was someone who would like us to think he was…”

“But is our killer that naive?” Gabe asked. “I mean, to think he could throw us off this way?”

“Probably not,” Ron said. “But it’s worth something to him to make a confusion.”

Gabe Haddad shook his head solemnly. “Too bad, I was looking forward to interviewing Blaine’s girl-friends.”

“Don’t worry,” said Ron. “We’ll interview them… every one of them. My theory
could
be all wet. And besides, the ladies had big ears, and it seems the Secretary was less than discreet in filling them. It seems he left secret diplomacy at the office.”

The Special Investigation Office, The West Wing, Thursday, June 14, 2:45 PM

“We’ll fly to Detroit,” said Lynne. She was telling Ron that she and her parents would go back to Michigan the next day to attend the funeral of Lansard Blaine. “Then out to Ann Arbor. We’ll be back here early in the evening, as I understand it.”

“I’m not going, of course,” said Ron.

“Well… my father told me to tell you to come with us if you want to. I… I’d appreciate it if you came.”

“I’d like to, Lynne, I’d like to be with you, you know that…”

She wore no makeup, her eyes were swollen, and she spoke in a subdued, almost trembling voice. Was it possible that
she
had been one of Blaine’s young women too…? He put the notion aside, but it was there—to be, he realized, followed up if necessary. The shock she felt at the sudden death of Blaine would, of course, be deepened if she’d been intimate with him… He looked at her… she was not like Marya Kalisch or Judy Pringle. She was a damn sight prettier, and younger. The
whole world was still open to her, she was receptive and fresh and—

“Do you have any idea who killed him?” she asked, breaking into his thoughts.

“Afraid not. It looks like a long by-the-numbers investigation.”

“I’m sorry it’s fallen in your lap,” she said.

He shrugged. “It’s not exactly my kind of thing.”

“My father has complete confidence in you—”

“I appreciate that… and try to relax, Lynne. You look a little beat yourself. Just leave it to supersleuth.”

He said it with a straight face, and then they both allowed themselves a smile and a moment’s letdown from the tension.

***

“This is not finished, you understand.” The FBI man Walter Locke scowled over a list in his hand, marking out typographical errors with a Cross pencil. “There’s still a lot of work yet to be done—”

“I understand that,” Ron said. “And I appreciate your coming up with what you have as quickly as you have.”

“We’ve got his home telephone bills from the Watergate apartment, our copies of the telephone logs and appointment books from his State Department office. We used the past four months as a preliminary basis. Later we’ll have to go back more months, but using the past four months we have a list of two hundred eighteen names. Of those we can positively identify all but twenty-seven. They’re all people he obviously had business with.”

“Do you include Judy Pringle and Marya Kalisch in
the twenty-seven or the hundred ninety-one?” Gabe Haddad asked.

“We include them in the twenty-seven,” he said. “We know who they are, but their business with the Secretary of State is not apparent.”

“What in the world do you mean by ‘positive identification’ then?” Gabe asked.

“We mean we know who the person is and why, probably, he talked to the Secretary of State. Among the twenty-seven are some people we know but we don’t know—aren’t certain—why they had telephone conversations with the Secretary of State. For example, here’s the name Diego Lopez-Ortiz. He’s the ambassador from Costa Rica. It seems apparent that he would have business with the Secretary of State and reason to receive a call from him. We’ve listed him among the hundred ninety-one. On the other hand, on April 24 he received a call from Barbara Lund, and later that day he returned her call. Barbara Lund is a dancer at a place called The Blue Lagoon, which is where he called her. We know who she is, but we’re not certain why he called her. Oh, sure, I know, with all the stories going around now we
think
we know why he called her, but we could be wrong. Diplomacy works in strange ways, I hear. Anyway, that’s why she’s in the twenty-seven.”

“Do the names suggest anything?” Jill Keller asked.

“We might be curious about the number of times some of the names occur,” said Locke. “For example, during the four months before his death the Secretary of State made or received fourteen calls from an Inoguchi Osanaga. Osanaga is the accredited correspondent for the
Honshu Shinbum
. We know who he is, but why did the Secretary talk to him so often?”

“Are there any names you can’t identify at all?” asked Gabe.

“Several. Of course we’ve only begun to look. We identified the ones we know so far simply by checking the telephone book and other available references. But there’s one that’s especially interesting—a man named Philippe Grand called Blaine repeatedly over the past four months. Blaine always returned his calls. No one knows who he is.”

“Have you asked Mary Burdine, Blaine’s secretary?” Ron put in.

“Yes. She doesn’t know who Grand is.”

“Does she know who Osanaga is?”

Locke nodded. “But she doesn’t know why Blaine received calls from him and made calls to him.”

“What about the home phone?” Jill asked.

“He didn’t keep a home telephone log, of course,” said Locke. “We have the long-distance bill and are working on that with the telephone company. There’s a name that appears on the State Department logs and also on the apartment telephone bill we have no explanation for either. We’ve identified the man—Jeremy Johnson is United States sales manager for Great Britain-Hawley-Burnsby Motors, Limited. Blaine called him at his home in Virginia, from the Watergate apartment, half a dozen times in the last four months. Besides that, his name is on the logs as having called Blaine or having received calls from Blaine at his Washington office some eighteen times during the same period. The FBI has a dossier on Johnson. I’ve ordered a copy be delivered here. It’s on its way.”

“Why do you have a dossier on Jeremy Johnson?” asked Gabe Haddad.

“I’d rather you read the file yourself. I don’t want to draw conclusions, but it’s hard to understand why the Secretary of State would have so many contacts with a man who came to our attention as a possible money launderer.”

“Clarify
that
,” Ron said.

“Let the file do it. It speaks for itself.”

***

“I’m worried about something we haven’t even talked about,” Ron said to Jill Keller and Gabe Haddad when they were again alone in his office.

He was sitting behind his desk, Coke can within reach, in shirtsleeves, feet on the corner of his desk. Jill had settled into a corner of his couch, had kicked off her shoes, and sat now with her legs stretched out on the couch. Only Gabe had not shed his jacket as yet, and he sat in the chair facing Ron, frowning over a page of handwritten notes.

Ron went on… “He spent a lot of money, have you noticed? He lived at the Watergate—which isn’t cheap. He ate at Le Bagatelle and places like it—all not cheap. He bought art. (You remember the Louise Nevelson in his office is his, not Uncle Sam’s.) I expect we’ll find more expensive things in the apartment. He wore expensive clothes. He gave Judy Pringle and Marya Kalisch expensive gifts—as we’ll probably find he did for others. The Secretary of State earns eighty thousand dollars a year. A professor of history is paid considerably less. Where did all the money come from?”

“Corruption in the Webster Administration?” asked Jill lazily.

“I hope not,” Ron said. “I’d like to see this case resolved without damage to the President—”

“I’ve read the autopsy report,” Gabe said. “Word for word. Gruesome damn thing. We need to interview the pathologists. Personally I don’t see anything in it except what we expected—that Blaine’s throat was cut and he strangled and bled to death. There’s one thing I’d like to know more about, though. Why did the contents of his stomach and intestines include distinct traces of dextroamphetamine?”

“How much alcohol was in him?” Jill asked.

“Point zero eight percent,” said Gabe. “He was sober enough to drive a car. I expect, though, he was feeling pretty good.”

“What’s dextroamphetamine?” Ron asked.

“A mood lifter,” said Jill. “An upper, as they used to say.”

“He’d had sex within the preceding eight hours,” Gabe said as matter-of-factly as he could manage. “Since we know it wasn’t with Judy Pringle or Marya Kalisch, we have to wonder who it was…”

“I want a minute-by-minute of his last twenty-four hours,” said Ron. “
Everything
…”

A courier delivered the FBI file on Jeremy Johnson. Ron called the British Embassy and asked Christopher McLeod to have dinner with him at Dominique’s while Jill and Gabe scanned the Johnson file.

“Spooks,” Jill said. “Sneaks. They know a lot about this man, and there’s nothing in here to so much as suggest he’s a criminal. It makes me wonder what they have on
me
.”

“Spare me the editorial,” Ron said, “What’s it say?”

“‘Johnson, Jeremy Richard. Stirrup Lane, Alexandria, Virginia. Vice President and North American representative, Great Britain-Hawley-Burnsby Motors, Limited.’”
She stopped reading and summarized. “Londoner, red-brick university. An engineer. Spent some time in Africa, some in India. Seems to have gotten around all the colonies. Divorced, father of three. Ah… married and divorced a second time. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, looking at some of the other junk in here… He frequents the gambling casinos in the Bahamas and Las Vegas, where he’s known and where his room and board are invariably given him free of charge.”

“Standard procedure for a high roller,” Gabe put in.

“Yes. He has virtually unlimited credit at the casinos. On the other hand he brings cash and takes away cash, sometimes in large quantities. That’s what the FBI is interested in. That’s why they think maybe he launders money.”

“Is there any mention of Blaine in the file?” Ron asked.

“Yes, as a matter of fact. Jeremy Johnson gives parties—large and small, all expensive. He’s not a registered representative of a foreign government but has taken the trouble—and gone to the expense—to entertain prominent members of Congress and some members of the Administration. Including Secretary of State Lansard P. Blaine…”

Dominique’s, Thursday, June 14, 8:00 PM

Ron had particularly chosen Dominique’s for his dinner meeting with Christopher McLeod because of its small, private niches—favorites by couples looking for intimacy. He knew Christopher would prefer to meet him inconspicuously; and he knew that Christopher appreciated
good food and wine. At the last moment, just before he had left the office, on impulse he had invited Jill to come with him. He had asked her to bring a pad and be prepared to make a few notes of the dinner conversation, but his invitation had been on an impulse that had nothing to do with taking notes.

McLeod was late.

Jill ordered Glenlivet on the rocks, and Ron went along. In the light of the candle they toasted each other quietly and for minutes sipped thoughtfully and said nothing.

“Are you going to marry Lynne Webster?” Jill asked.

Ron only shook his head.

“The newspapers think you are.”

“It makes copy.”

“I saw you holding her hand on television.”

“I’ll hold yours.” He put his hand over hers on the table. “I’m basically just an affectionate guy, I also react to attractive women.”

“But not enough to marry them?”

He smiled. “Not enough to marry them just because they let me hold their hands.”

“You’d make a fetching couple.”

He closed his hand around hers. “Why don’t you drop the subject, Jill?”

She lifted her glass. “This job you let Webster talk you into, it will make you or break you, you know. You don’t get two jobs like this. Just one. To make or break.”

“Which do you think it will be?”

Her eyes followed her glass back to the table and stayed there, fixed on the scotch and ice. “I happen to think it’s more likely to break you. If you don’t find out
who killed Blaine, they’ll say you were either stupid or covered up for somebody. If you do, probably it will destroy somebody Webster doesn’t want destroyed, and he won’t appreciate it. Neither will the Democratic Party.” She shook her head. “Between the proverbial rock and a hard place.”

“Why’d you agree to come work with me then?”