Shadow of Power (10 page)

“So you don’t know the date, when the letter was written?”

She shakes her head.

“Or whom it was written to?”

“No.”

“Not much to go on,” I tell her.

“No, it isn’t.”

“Still, it’s more than I had this afternoon.” I smile at her from across the table, close up my notebook, and slip it back into the inside pocket of my coat along with the pen. “Did you mention any of this to the cops, when they talked to you?”

“They didn’t ask. I had no reason to think it might be important until you mentioned it.” She takes another sip of her drink. “There is one other thing,” she says. “It’s about Justice Ginnis. I’m certain that Terry would not have gotten the letter from Arthur.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because Arthur despised Terry. He had no use for him. He saw Terry as an opportunist, somebody who would use anybody to get ahead and dump them as soon as he got what he wanted. He warned me not to get emotionally involved. He wouldn’t have crossed the street to help Terry with anything, especially anything as controversial as Terry’s book. Believe me, as a former Supreme Court clerk—there wasn’t a member of the Court who wouldn’t lift their robes and run shrieking to put distance between themselves and anything Terry wrote.”

“You say Ginnis despised Scarborough?”

“Oh, here we go,” she says.

“Sorry. I can’t help picking up on little words.”

“Forget I ever said it.” She reaches for her purse under the table, ready to walk out.

“Don’t get angry. I’m just looking for background. I need to know who Scarborough was, the kind of man I’m dealing with as a victim.”

She wears a stern expression. Then she softens, puts her purse back down.

“I’ll tell you,” she says. “You will have no difficulty finding enemies of Terry Scarborough in this town. Just turn over any rock,” she says. “I didn’t know it when I first met him. I was young, naïve, impressionable, straight out of law school. Terry was a well-known published author, on television almost daily. I was dazzled.

“It wasn’t until later, months later, that I found out that Terry had savaged Justice Ginnis in one of his earlier books. It was the case of the century,” she said, the presidential election almost twelve years ago now, the squeaker decided by the Supreme Court.

“Terry published a book that kicked the insides out of the Court. He claimed to have sources, people privy to private conversations between the justices and those on the outside, the parties and their lawyers. The decision by the Court came down five to four; it ended the election and effectively anointed the new president. Arthur was the swing vote, and Terry excoriated him for it in public print. He called Arthur a party hack and claimed that he’d been in direct contact with lawyers for the new president before he voted on the case. It wasn’t true. It hurt Arthur, and it hurt him deeply.

“But that’s the thing about the Court—you just had to sit there and take it. They all knew that. It was the price the nine of them, and all their predecessors, paid for a lifetime appointment to an institution that’s not supposed to be political. When somebody takes a shot, they can’t go to the media and fight back. You just have to live with it, and Arthur did. It’s the reason I laughed when you said someone had told you that Terry and Arthur were friends. Justice Ginnis would have put an ocean between himself and Terry Scarborough if he could have. When I introduced Terry to him at the reception, I thought Arthur would choke. The next day Arthur took me into his office and warned me that Scarborough would try to use me to find out what was going on
in chambers, to dig up dirt on cases. I told him I would never reveal anything like that.”

“Did he? Scarborough, I mean?”

She nods. “More than once. I told him I couldn’t discuss any part of my work at the Court, and I wouldn’t. I did two years clerking for Arthur. I was getting ready to leave the Court—this was about the time that Terry was finishing up the early draft of
Perpetual Slaves,
the one that included the stuff from the letter. By then we weren’t living together any longer. I think Arthur was relieved, for me, if not for himself.”

“It sounds like you and Justice Ginnis are very close.”

“Friends,” she says. “No, it’s more than that. Arthur has a father complex. Almost all the clerks who’ve ever worked for him have felt this. He means well.” She pauses, smiles, and looks down at the table for a moment. “And I owe him a lot. He could have fired me. I mean, he knew that Terry was a threat to the confidentiality inside the Court. I was living with him. Other members of the Court would have either fired me or found some less-important duties for me outside their chambers. Arthur didn’t do that. He warned me. I gave him assurances, and he trusted me. I can’t explain it,” she says, “but there’s a kind of almost nuclear bond that forms from all of that.”

“And Terry Scarborough?” I ask. “How did he fit into all this?”

“In the beginning I suspect he gravitated to me because I could mingle with people Terry wanted to be seen with.”

“I think you underrate yourself,” I tell her.

“Thank you. But you have to live in this political hothouse to understand it,” she says. “It may be the power center of the world, but it’s actually a very small town. Everybody knows everybody. They attend the same receptions, do the same parties, and the press hangs out. The media make mental notes of who’s talking to whom. It was important for Terry to be seen at functions socializing with members of the Court and Court staff. You see, Terry sold himself to the national media as one of the prime legal insiders, on call twenty-four hours a day to go on the air, to be quoted in the
Washington Post
or the
New York Times.
He lived to be seen and heard.”

“And of course only a fool would fail to grasp the symbiotic relationship between face time on the tube and book sales,” I tell her.

“With Terry it was more than that.”

“What do you mean?”

“He liked being recognized at airports, in crowds. He craved it. Someone would come up to him and tell him that he looked familiar, and Terry would casually flip the celebrity over his shoulder like some people discard a cigarette butt. He would say, ‘You probably saw me on
Larry King
last night,’ and walk away. He loved it. They say that celebrity is its own narcotic. For Terry it was the drug of choice. I remember at one point he told me about the night he did his first appearance on cable news. All his friends called to tell him how they’d seen him on the tube. For Terry it was like doing lines of cocaine. He couldn’t get on the next show fast enough. He hired a PR firm with media connections. He told me he was paying them seven thousand dollars a month on his teaching salary, dipping into savings while he was writing his first book on spec. That was part of the problem with the relationship,” she says.

“In what way?”

She looks at me, suddenly realizing that maybe she’s already said too much. “Nothing. But you get the picture,” she says.

“So Ginnis was relieved when you broke it off?”

“Hmm?” I catch her musing, lost in thought.

“Your relationship with Scarborough.”

“Oh, absolutely. He told me I’d get over it, move on, find someone else. He was right. It was better for me, much healthier.”

“So where do you think I could find him?”

“Find who?”

“Ginnis.”

“You haven’t heard a word I’ve been saying. You’re dogged. You’re awful.” She laughs. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to contact a sitting justice of the Supreme Court? I mean, unless you’re a personal friend or a family member, it’s probably easier to get through to the Oval Office. I told you, he doesn’t know a thing about Terry’s book or the letter. You’re chasing rainbows—give it up,” she says.

“I wish I could, but there’s a man sitting in a jail cell back in San Diego, and unless I can figure out who else may have had a reason to kill Scarborough, Carl Arnsberg is looking at a possible death sentence.”

I
f you think politics is the occupational calling of the Antichrist today, you should have been around in Jefferson’s time.” Harry gestures toward the pile of paper in front of him. “This stuff gives me a whole new insight into the founding generation.”

Harry has been doing research while I was gone. Spread out on the table in our conference room are notes, stacks of photocopied pages, and computer printouts. “If they didn’t invent partisan bickering,” says Harry, “they sure as hell took it to the level of a whole new art form.

“The current crop in D.C. would have nothing on these guys,” says Harry. “Jefferson kept his own muckraker-in-chief on payroll. A guy named James Callender. Callender was a kind of one-man Defamation Incorporated. And he didn’t need a word processor. For a fee he would do a journalistic gut job on anybody you wanted. Lies passed through his quill at a rate that would make the turkey feathers wilt. What’s more troubling,” says Harry, “is that Jefferson didn’t seem to be too bothered by any of this. When it came to political enemies, he wasn’t interested in sweating the details. Paint ’em with a broad brush,” says Harry. According to my partner, the author of the Declaration of Independence followed his own creed of political warfare: defame ’em first and let posterity sort out the facts.

“What we didn’t learn in high-school history,” I tell him.

“Along with Sally Hemings, the slave bride,” says Harry. “But we’ll get to that later. The problem for us is the volume of documents.”

According to Harry, when it came to letter writing, Jefferson didn’t know when to quit. “You get different numbers when you go to different sources, but everybody seems to agree that the total is somewhere north of twenty thousand,” says Harry.

“Separate letters?” I ask.

Harry nods. “No Internet and no computer, and the man wrote letters on everything from Eskimos to enchiladas. He did have a machine to make copies so he could file them away.” Harry paws through his notes. “Ironically, it was called a polygraph.” He flips me a page across the table from one of the stacks in front of him. There’s a small picture of the device and some brief script. A machine Jefferson acquired in 1804, which was patented a year earlier. According to the article, Jefferson called it “the finest invention of the current age.”

“What’s more,” says Harry, “the authorities seem pretty certain that not all of his letters have been found or documented to date.”

“So there’s a chance there might be some authentic correspondence still floating around out there?”

“A good chance, though documenting it could prove difficult, depending on where it’s found and under what circumstances.”

“Fortunately for us, all we have to show is that the killer believed it was authentic,” I say.

“But according to what Bonguard told you, Scarborough only had a copy,” says Harry.

“True.”

Harry shakes his head. There is no seeming answer to this riddle. According to Harry, Jefferson’s papers are spread around, scattered in several different places. Most of them are in the Library of Congress. But a wild piece of correspondence that has eluded scholars all this time could be anywhere.

“Let’s start with the Library of Congress,” I tell him. “That
is
why you called me when I was back in D.C., right?”

“Right,” says Harry. “According to everything I can find, Jefferson’s papers with the Jefferson Library—that’s the Library of Congress—” says Harry, “include twenty-seven thousand documents. That’s corre
spondence, commonplace books in Jefferson’s own hand, financial accounts. The man was a fanatic about keeping financial records. There are also manuscript volumes written by Jefferson. In addition to this, there are rare book manuscripts, part of Jefferson’s original library that was sold to Congress in 1814 after the Brits burned the capital in the War of 1812. A lot of controversy over that,” says Harry.

“What controversy?”

“Jefferson was getting on in years and teetering on the personal financial precipice when Congress paid him a lot of money for his library. People squawked. They thought it was too much, twenty-some-odd-thousand dollars. It doesn’t seem like much now, but back then it was a bundle. More than that,” says Harry, “the library was what you might call eclectic. It contained everything from philosophy to cookbooks. There were those in Congress who thought it included items that weren’t appropriate for a government library. According to Jefferson, if it was printed on paper and bound between two covers, it was a book, and that’s what libraries were made of. The man read everything.”

“So where do we start?”

“That’s why I called you in D.C.,” says Harry. “Congress formed a commission about eight years ago to digitize private presidential papers held in the Library of Congress, to put them on computers for access by the public. The group is called CEPP, short for Commission on Electronic Presidential Papers.”

“So?”

“So guess who the chairperson is.”

I shake my head.

“Arthur Ginnis. It seems history is one of his passions. They must have figured the commission could use somebody with his bona fides—a member of the Supreme Court.”

“Could have been just a ceremonial role,” I tell him.

“That’s a possibility, except for one thing,” says Harry. “Scarborough’s notes. The ones the cops seized from his Georgetown apartment.”

“What about them?”

“There are at least four references in Scarborough’s own hand to CEPP.”

“Yes.”

“And a note in one of the margins.” Harry hands me a photocopied page.

I study it. Double-spaced typed notes, some underlined in pen with interlineated handwritten notations I assume are Scarborough’s. Toward the bottom of the page, in the margin in ink, the words “get the letter from CEPP.” I read the typed notes in the body of the text. Scarborough is talking about the economics of slavery in Colonial America, where the most valuable import was Africans in bondage.

“Think about it,” says Harry. “If you’re Ginnis, you have an army of staff combing through piles of historic documents that no one has looked at in a long time. There’s no telling what you might find. What did she tell you?” Harry is talking about Trisha Scott.

“She knew about the letter,” I tell him. “She says Scarborough made reference to it in earlier drafts of the manuscript, before the book was published, but that this was all deleted because she says Scarborough couldn’t authenticate the letter. She claimed Ginnis wouldn’t know anything about it. That he wasn’t the source.”

“Did she tell you about his participation in this little venture?” Harry means CEPP.

“No.”

“You have to figure she clerked for him. A close friend, she must have known what he was involved in. So what do we have?” says Harry.

“A tiger by the tail,” I tell him. “A Supreme Court justice who probably won’t talk to us. Unless we can subpoena him.”

“That’ll be a neat trick,” says Harry, “getting through the phalanx of federal marshals that guard the Supreme Court building. And we don’t know what he’s gonna say.”

Harry is right.

“Let’s face it,” he says. “The letter is problematic. We don’t know what it’s worth on the open market. We don’t know whether someone might kill to get it, only that it’s a possibility. According to everything Bonguard and Scott told you, Scarborough only had a copy of the letter.”

“And that he may have had access to the original through someone else,” I add.

“Ginnis?”

“Maybe.”

“Still, we can’t prove that he had the original in his possession when he was killed,” says Harry. “Without that, you can’t prove motive for murder.”

“There is another possibility.”

“What’s that?” says Harry.

“That whoever killed Scarborough didn’t do it to get the letter.”

“Then why?”

“To keep its contents from being published.”

Harry gives me a quizzical look.

“Scarborough’s book, the language of slavery, the fact that this was still in the Constitution—these were known facts,” I tell him, “though not generally items of controversy until Scarborough mainlined them, put them up on a marquee, at which time they stirred up riots around the country.”

“So?”

“So people often don’t pay much attention to government until it hits them in the head like a two-by-four. Scarborough spelled it out in big letters, the continuing stigma, the national insult. If the letter is as explosive as he believed, there’s no telling what kind of fires it might ignite if it were published, especially in the kind of flammable prose used by Terry Scarborough. Not some dry scholarly work but a racial call to arms.”

“In which case it wouldn’t matter whether he had the original of the letter or a copy,” says Harry.

“Exactly.”

“But who would kill him for that?”

“Not our client,” I tell him.

“No,” says Harry. “Probably not.”

Harry and I have had our share of high-profile cases, but this one, tinged as it is by the issue of race, possesses an explosive quality all its own. To the extent possible, I have avoided the media, for there are obvious pitfalls here, questions the answers to which can be twisted to fit a dozen different political agendas.

This morning one of these has exploded on us like a roadside bomb during our trek to trial. In an effort to extinguish the flames from this, Harry and I meet with Carl Arnsberg at the jail. It is nearly seven in the evening, the first chance we’ve had to talk to him. Harry and I have been locked up in court all day with jury selection and pretrial motions.

Inside the closed cubicle, the little concrete conference room, Harry is first to erupt.

“Why the hell didn’t you tell us about these people? Surprises like this can lead to the death house. Who are they?” Harry’s face is flushed. He is angry.

Arnsberg avoids eye contact. “Friends,” he says.

“Why didn’t you tell us about them?”

“Didn’t think it was important,” says Arnsberg. He is sitting at a small stainless-steel table that is bolted to the floor, his head resting in his hands as he gazes down at its scratched surface.

“Not important?” Harry’s voice rises a full octave. “Lemme ask you. Do you know what they’re saying?” Harry looks at him.

“No.”

“They’re saying that you talked openly about kidnapping Scarborough, that you tried to talk the two of them into helping you. And that this all took place just two days before Scarborough was killed.”

“It’s not true.” For the first time, Arnsberg’s gaze comes up from the table. He looks at Harry straight on. “That’s a lie. I never asked anybody to help me. I was only talking.”

“We have their statement,” says Harry.

“I don’t care what you have. It’s a lie.”

It is a game played by prosecutors: Bury the needle in a stack of other needles. In reply to our request for discovery, the district attorney, in addition to reports and photographs of the physical evidence, has sent us a list of more than three hundred potential witnesses—people who worked at the hotel, acquaintances of the defendant, some of whom have known him but not talked to him since grade school, others who might be eyewitnesses who may have seen Arnsberg in the hall outside Scarborough’s room that morning. Harry, with investigators for our side in tow, has been forced to waste valuable time checking all these out.
Most of them are chaff, people the D.A. will never call, because they have nothing of value to offer in his case. They are put on the list to distract us, to waste our time and limited resources. Most of all they are there to provide camouflage, to hide the handful of razor-sharp pieces of real evidence lying just beneath the surface over which they hope to drag us and tear us to pieces. Unfortunately for us, Walter Henoch and Charles “Charlie” Gross threaten to do just that.

“You say you were only talking to these friends,” I chime in. “Talking about what?”

“Passin’ the time o’ day. Shootin’ the shit. You know. Just talkin’.”

“About what?” If he could, Harry would waterboard Arnsberg at this point. To my partner, torturing a client who lies to his own lawyer should be part of the attorney-client privilege. Misdirection from a client is one of the things that sets off Harry’s naturally short fuse.

“All right, sure we talked about the man.”

“Scarborough?” says Harry.

Arnsberg nods, then puts his head back in his hands, elbows propped up on the table.

“Look at me,” says Harry. “What did you tell them? Specifically. Details.”

“I told ’em it would be a piece of cake.” Arnsberg still won’t look at him. “So what?”

“What would be a piece of cake?”

“Kidnapping him. I maya mentioned it, that’s all. But it was only talk. We weren’t gonna do anything. I never talked about killin’ him.” To Arnsberg this seems to make everything all right.

“Still, the man’s dead,” says Harry. “Somebody did something.”

“Wasn’t me.”

“How long did you know these two guys?” I ask.

“I dunno. Charlie I known for a year, maybe a little more. The other guy—”

“Walter Henoch.”

“Yeah. I didn’t know him hardly at all.”

“I see,” says Harry. “Just well enough to discuss a kidnapping with the man.”

“You make it sound bad.” Arnsberg finally looks up at him.

“Not half as bad as the prosecutor will make it sound. Believe me,” says Harry.

Arnsberg’s eyes are bloodshot, as if he is missing a lot of sleep in the jailhouse maelstrom at night.

“Where did you meet these guys—Charlie and Walter?”

“Like I said, we just had a few drinks. Met at a bar.”

“Does the bar have a name?” says Harry.

“Del Rio Tavern. Place out offa I-8, near El Centro.”

“Why way out there?” says Harry.

“We were meetin’ some other people.”

“The Aryan Posse?” I ask.

The kid looks at me, kind of cross-eyed. “Some of ’em might have been members.”

I have been alerted to this by Carl’s father, who warned me that his son had gotten involved in something called the Aryan Posse, a neofascist group with connections out in the desert halfway to Arizona, at some kind of meeting place. Mail used to come to the house when Carl was living there with his mother and father. His father saw it and raised hell. But it didn’t do any good. This has been the other shoe waiting to drop. There have been a few items in the newspaper, references to Arnsberg as a neo-Nazi, but to date nothing definitive. This makes me wonder what the cops have that they will drop on our heads come trial.