The Inside Ring (26 page)

44

DeMarco sat with Emma in the bar of the Georgetown Four Seasons, sipping a cobalt-blue martini. They were there because Emma liked the piano player, a man she claimed sounded like Tony Bennett, though DeMarco had never heard him sing.

“Are you sure you want to be here for this meeting, Emma?” DeMarco said. “If this guy finds out who you are, he could turn your life upside down.”

“Let him,” Emma said. “I have nothing to hide.” Then she said something that made DeMarco choke on his drink: “My life’s an open book.”

Donnelly arrived at that moment accompanied by four of his agents, all strapping six-footers who towered over their boss. Donnelly, DeMarco realized, loved to travel with a contingent of bodyguards as if he was an ancient rock star and needed his guards to beat back the autograph seekers.

Donnelly saw Emma and DeMarco and pointed at their table for his agents’ benefit. The agents glared at them, then spread out, taking up positions around the room. They stood out like cactus plants in a rain forest, holding no drinks, grim expressions on their faces, the ever present earpieces in their ears.

Donnelly walked over to DeMarco, his face a thundercloud. “Who’s this?” he said, pointing at Emma.

“She’s—”

“I’m Emma,” Emma said, smiling brightly. “Now sit down, you little shit.”

“Lady, I don’t know who the hell you think you are but I run the Secret Service. I can—”

“Pardon me,” Emma said. She stood and walked over to the piano player, chatted with him briefly, then put a large bill into his tip bowl. Donnelly, confused and not knowing what else to do, took a seat. As Emma walked back toward their table, the pianist began to play “As Time Goes By.”

“I love that song,” Emma said, resuming her seat. “Now let’s talk about you, little man.”

“I want to see some ID from you, you bitch,” Donnelly said. “Right—”

“In 1963,” Emma said, “you were twenty-five years old and working at the Secret Service’s Los Angeles field office. On November 23rd of that year you were sent to Dallas to help investigate the Kennedy assassination. You didn’t fly—I’ve heard you don’t like to fly—and you drove from LA to Dallas in an agency car.”

“So what?” Donnelly said. He was still angry but there was a tone of uncertainty in his voice that hadn’t been there a moment ago.

“Your car broke down in Odessa and you called the Texas highway patrol and told them to send a car to get you. The highway patrolman who gave you a lift to Dallas was a young man named Maxwell Taylor.”

Donnelly inhaled sharply. He started to say something but Emma kept going.

“On I-20, thirty miles east of Abilene, a hundred and sixty miles from Dallas, you and Patrolman Maxwell Taylor came upon a one-car accident. A car driven by one Ivan Antonio Guerrero had overturned. The front of the car was badly damaged, a dead deer was found on the side of the road, and Mr. Guerrero was dead. Do you have any recollection of this event, Mr. Donnelly?”

“What the hell does this—”

“You and Maxwell Taylor became suddenly and mysteriously rich in the winter of 1964. Taylor quit his job with the highway patrol three weeks after you two good Samaritans happened upon that accident.”

“I inherited—” Donnelly said.

“Ivan Antonio Guerrero was a Cuban national,” Emma said, “and there is no documented explanation for why he was in Texas in November of 1963. But I have to wonder, Mr. Donnelly, what would the Warren Commission have concluded had they known that in Mr. Guerrero’s car was four million dollars in cash?”

“Four million?” Donnelly said. “What in the hell are you talking about?” Donnelly was trying to act as if he was completely lost by Emma’s narrative but he was too nervous to bring off the lie.

“That’s right. Four million. You were financially reborn in 1964, Mr. Donnelly. You paid taxes on two million dollars that year and claimed you’d inherited the money. I guess you felt the need to come up with a cover story to explain your newfound wealth. Coincidently, Maxwell Taylor started to buy acres of real estate at the same time you supposedly inherited, but unlike you he gave no accounting for the source of his capital. So I did the math, Mr. Donnelly. I multiplied your two million dollar bogus inheritance by two and deduced that the amount of money you found in Guerrero’s car was four million, assuming you and Taylor split it down the middle.”

Fat Neil had previously been unable to find any connection between Taylor and Donnelly, but he had discovered that Taylor had been a highway patrolman in Texas in 1963. It occurred to Emma, when she heard about the strange notation in Montgomery’s notebook, that a Secret Service agent assigned to the Los Angeles field office in 1963 just might have been sent to Dallas after Kennedy’s assassination to assist with the investigation.

Emma, Neil, and DeMarco had spent four days in Texas looking through boxes and boxes of old records. They’d pushed and prodded and bribed and lied to people to get access to those records. And they finally found what they were looking for: a documented link between Taylor and Donnelly. On November 23, 1963, Texas highway patrolman Maxwell Taylor gave young Secret Service Agent Patrick Donnelly a ride from Odessa to Dallas. This simple fact would never have surfaced had Taylor not reported Guerrero’s accident. Why he’d reported the accident was not clear.

There was no mention of Patrick Donnelly in Montgomery’s notes, but Emma assumed that Montgomery had tried to determine the source of Taylor’s wealth and had traced Taylor’s career back to Texas in 1963. He would have learned either from the same records that Emma and Neil had found or from other sources, such as acquaintances of Taylor’s during his time in Texas, that Taylor quit his job with the state patrol three weeks after coming upon a car accident involving a Cuban national. If Montgomery found the same report, the one that mentioned that a Secret Service agent was traveling with Taylor when they found Guerrero’s body, he would have made the same assumption that Emma did: that the Secret Service agent was in Texas at that time because of the Kennedy assassination.

That Guerrero had cash on him, and that Taylor and Donnelly, two young men who had been poor all their lives, had decided on the spot, as they stood over a bloody corpse on a bleak Texas highway, to split the money and tell nobody, was pure speculation. But it made sense to Emma as it had made sense to Philip Montgomery.

“Who was Ivan Guerrero,” Emma said to Donnelly, “this Cuban national with a load of money in his car? A second gunman fleeing with the money he’d been paid? Or maybe he was just a bagman, and the money in the car was for Oswald and whoever helped him. Or maybe he wasn’t even connected to Kennedy.”

“Oswald acted alone,” Donnelly muttered—but by now all the belligerence had leaked out of him like air escaping a punctured tire.

“Well I guess we’ll never really know, Mr. Donnelly. Thanks to your greed.”

“I’m leaving,” Donnelly said. “This is all nonsense and you can’t prove a damn thing you’ve said.” To DeMarco that statement sounded more like a question, and he noticed Donnelly had made no effort to rise from his chair.

“I
can
prove you had a large amount of unexplained income in 1964, Mr. Donnelly,” Emma said.

“I inherited that money, goddamnit.”

“From who, Mr. Donnelly? Never mind, we’ll let the FBI ask you that question.”

“The FBI isn’t going to ask me shit,” Donnelly said. “I run the—”

“But the most important thing I can prove, based on a report filed in Texas in 1963, is that you and Max Taylor knew each other.” Emma leaned across the small table until her face was almost touching Donnelly’s. “That I can prove, you little bastard.”

“We met once. It doesn’t mean a—”

“You assigned Mattis to the President’s security detail when Taylor ordered you to,” Emma said. “You may not have known that he planned to kill the President but after the assassination attempt you did everything you possibly could to hinder the investigation. And why? Because Taylor has been holding over your head—over the head of the director of the Secret Service—what you and he did in November of 1963. The last thing in the world you ever wanted discovered was your connection to Maxwell Taylor.”

“You can’t prove any of this,” Donnelly said again, maybe for the third time.

And he was right. They couldn’t. There was no record of any communications between Taylor and Donnelly; both men were too careful for this. There was no way they could prove Donnelly and Taylor had found a large amount of cash in Guerrero’s car. They couldn’t even use the IRS to squeeze Donnelly; he’d paid his taxes regardless of the source of the money. But none of that mattered.

“Proof is for judges, Mr. Donnelly,” Emma said, “but journalists don’t require proof to make your life a living hell. We have a string of coincidence and strong circumstantial evidence that will be more than enough for Stone Phillips to stand up on
Dateline
and make you look like an accomplice to robbery, murder, and conspiracy while saying with every other breath that you’re not an official suspect. And the FBI will be forced to dig harder. Who knows what they might find at Taylor’s house linking the two of you. And your friends in Congress, not that you have any, will invite you to televised hearings. You’re going to have to explain why you lied about giving lie detector tests to Secret Service agents and why you didn’t investigate the link between Dale Estep and Billy Mattis. You’ll be asked repeatedly, and for the rest of your life, about your ties to a madman in Georgia and your role in the attempt to murder the man you were sworn to protect.”

Mahoney had told DeMarco not to tell Donnelly that Montgomery was the real target of the assassination. It’s one thing to conspire to kill an author; it’s a whole other thing to conspire to kill a President.

Donnelly’s face had turned ashen. DeMarco was guessing that he was probably a heartbeat away from a stroke.

“No,” Donnelly said. He rose from his chair on shaky legs. “No,” he said again, louder this time. “You can’t get to me. Nobody can get to me. I run the Secret Service.”

He left the table walking slowly at first, trying to maintain his dignity, but before long he was walking as fast as his short legs could move. His bodyguards had to run to catch up to him.

“Well that was fun,” Emma said.

45

The Speaker was torturing a pigeon.

He and DeMarco were sitting next to each other on the steps of the Capitol looking west toward the Washington Monument. The sky was cloudless and there was just enough wind to make the flags around the monument fly in picture-perfect fashion.

Mahoney, who had bought a bag of unshelled peanuts from a street vendor, had dropped a peanut on the ground only a couple of inches from one of his oversized feet. A few yards away stood a pigeon with tail feathers that looked as if they’d been caught in a lawn mower. The pigeon had just waddled in toward the peanut, then waddled away, then waddled back in again. The bird was a study in indecision, its small brain trying to decide if a single nut was worth coming within stomping range of the huge white-haired animal that smelled of fermented grain.

“You actually went to his retirement ceremony?” DeMarco said.

“Hell, yes. And I took Andy Banks with me.”

“Banks went with you?”

“Yeah, I had to explain things to him, make sure he understood why we were doin’ what we were doin’ and why he needed to keep quiet about it. He didn’t like it at first, straight arrow like him, but he figured out pretty quick that I was right—and that it’s better having me and the President on his side than not. He’s actually a pretty good guy. I’m glad he’s in that job.

“Anyway, I had a ball at that damn ceremony. Wouldn’t have missed it for the world. The little shit was so popular that only about twenty people were there; the bosses probably made their secretaries go. The neat thing was they held it in an auditorium that seated three hundred. That was a
nice
touch on somebody’s part.”

“If he was fired, why hold a retirement ceremony?”

“Woulda looked funny if we hadn’t. The press might have asked why a guy as important as him wasn’t given a send-off.”

Mahoney dropped another peanut next to his foot, doubling the pigeon’s temptation. The pigeon flapped its wings madly, loose feathers flying; the bird’s way of protesting Mahoney’s cruelty.

“Yeah, the President got up, said about three sentences, and then he gave Donnelly a pin and a cheap watch and the kinda little plaque they give postal workers for luggin’ the mail.”

A third peanut slipped from Mahoney’s paw. The pigeon was now insane, darting back and forth on its little pigeon feet—toward the peanuts, away from the peanuts, toward the peanuts. Mahoney was oblivious to the bird’s anguish.

“Banks just glared at Donnelly the whole time he was there, like he was trying to laser the skin off his face with those eyes of his. But not me. I walked up to him while people were eatin’ this shitty little cake they got him. He was just standing there by himself, lookin’ damn near catatonic. Anyway, I leaned down and said, ‘This was for Marge Carter, you little fuck.’ And you know what he said? He said, ‘Who?’ I almost belted him, Joe.”

The pigeon was now moving sideways toward the peanut pile, a crab with feathers, apparently thinking this maneuver rendered it invisible. It had just entered the shadow created by the creature’s body, the peanuts only inches away.

“But right at the end, when everyone’s ready to leave, this woman comes up and screams at him, right in front of the journalists. ‘I’m gonna tell ’em all what you did, you bastard,’ she says. Naturally Donnelly doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about. How could he, he never met her. But the journalists surrounded her right away.”

“Who was the woman?” DeMarco asked.

“The beginning of Donnelly’s legal troubles,” Mahoney said with a wink.

Then Mahoney whooped a laugh and slapped a knee to punctuate his joy—and the pigeon exploded into the sky like it had a bottle rocket up its ass. Its ragged feathers almost hit Mahoney’s square chin.

“Jesus!” Mahoney said. “Crazy fuckin’ bird. What’s its problem?”

“So that poor bastard Edwards is going to go down in history as an assassin, and nobody will ever know about the link that may have existed between Kennedy and a dead Cuban,” DeMarco said.

Mahoney waved a hand, removing this small obstacle. “Nah, I wrote up a memo last night. I’ll have it put over in Archives, not to be opened for fifty, sixty years. Can’t you just see it when people read it? I wish I could be there to see the fuss it’ll cause.”

Given his luck, DeMarco thought, he probably would be.

Mahoney stood up and dusted off the back of his pants.

“I gotta get goin’. It’s my anniversary, did I tell you?”

“No,” DeMarco said.

“Yeah, we’ve been married, Mary Pat and me, almost forty years now. Can you believe it?”

DeMarco decided to remain silent.

“How ’bout you, Joe? What’s a handsome young fella got planned for a perfect Friday night?”

“I’m meeting a woman I know. She works over at Interior.”

“Good for you. It’s about damn time you got back in circulation. Get yourself laid, get drunk, have a good time.”

“Actually she’s gonna help me pick out some furniture,” DeMarco said.