Watergate (49 page)

“They stabbed him in the heart, six times,” Brooke said matter-of-factly.

The shift in subject proved strangely calming, as if Rose were a restive child being soothed with a scary story beside the campfire.

“Neither Richardson nor I was ever sure he did it,” said Brooke, as he and Rose both regarded DeSalvo’s old mug shot. “We finally put him away on another charge entirely. But I can tell you one thing for sure. The stranglings ended once he was arrested.”

Rose could remember reading about each one of them in the
Daily News
during the law-firm years in New York. Every time she did, no matter that she was two hundred miles from Boston, she would get up to check the deadbolt on her front door, before scolding herself for acting like an idiot.

“At least he got stabbed in the
front
,” she said, recovering her anger.

Exasperated now, Brooke sighed. “I’d like you to tell the president—whom I still like, and still admire—”

“Oh, spare me, Ed.”

“I’d like you to pass on to him a piece of advice. He ought to get Lee Bailey to replace Charles Alan Wright.”

Rose could not believe her ears. The president of the United States should hire the lawyer for the Boston Strangler!

“The president says he’s not a crook,” Brooke explained. “I’d still like to believe him. But if being a crook is now the issue, then he needs a powerhouse criminal lawyer like Bailey instead of a constitutional scholar like Wright.”

As evenly as she could, through her fury, Rose responded, “I’m sure the president will speak to you again. He’ll have to, on some occasion or other. But I never will.”

She stormed out, wishing the door were the old-fashioned wooden kind that could still be slammed. With the blood pounding in her ears, she marched toward the elevators instead of her apartment. As she went, Charlie Rhyne’s words repeated themselves inside her head:
Promise me you’ll think about it
.

She would
not
think about it, even for her own protection. Rhyne wanted her to tell the press that “certain people” were bent on making her a scapegoat. Yes, that would throw dust in the eyes of the prosecutors,
would cast further doubt on the whole sorry erasure “phenomenon,” and help to set up “reasonable doubt” if she were ever charged. But it would also increase suspicion of Richard Nixon himself.

She pressed the button for the parking-garage level, and her stomach dropped along with the elevator while she remembered the worst moment of all in court. One of the other prosecutors, not bitchy Mrs. Volner, had pointed out that anything she said could be used in later proceedings against her. She was being read her rights.

She
was the one who needed Bailey. If they’d been ready to go after Judy Agnew over the veep’s taxes, they would certainly go after the president’s secretary.

For a moment, after the elevator doors opened, she just stood still and thought: she would never be able to bear a prosecution; she would rather be strangled by an intruder in her bedroom. Hesitating to step into the dark underground space, she wondered, staring, if she should go back to Ohio, as if she might somehow be safe there. No; even if it were possible,
that would be the cowardly thing to do
. According to Al Haig, those had been the boss’s words to Brooke in reply to the suggestion that he quit.

Finally, she walked forward. Her own heels sounded terrifyingly loud and seemed to belong to someone else. She kept expecting Albert DeSalvo to come out from behind one of the concrete pillars, holding a necktie or a rope in his hands. But she pressed on, moved ahead, until she reached Senator Edward Brooke’s blue Mercedes.

She looked around—no one was in sight—and then she took Don’s sharp-edged ring to the driver’s door, raking it as deeply as she could, leaving a gash that no one would ever fully be able to erase.

Inside his second-floor study, Howard Hunt put down the glass of milk he was drinking for his ulcer and rubbed the bursitis in his elbow. He told himself, in the deliberate inner voice he’d learned from Transcendental Meditation, that he was enjoying “a normal Sunday morning at home.” And yet, despite the calm insistence with which he thought the words, he could not, a mere three weeks since his release from prison, fully believe that they were true. Still, the comforting facts remained: a higher court than the Wop’s had deemed his motion for appeal worthy of consideration, and, moreover, declared him entitled to his freedom until a final decision about a new trial could be rendered.

He was all alone here in Potomac. His daughter Kevan had returned to Smith and his two other grown children, Lisa and St. John, were sharing an apartment over in Kensington. They’d been moved there before Christmas by William Snyder, the new young lawyer Bill Buckley had secured for him. The plan at that point was to sell the Potomac house, since nobody, least of all Hunt himself, had been anticipating his sudden release.

David, his youngest son, would remain in Miami with Manuel Artime—almost squaring a circle, given that a decade ago, after his release from a Cuban prison for participation in the Bay of Pigs, Artime had spent time with the Hunts. David would be better off around Manuel’s young children than inside this big gloomy house with his mother’s ghost—not to mention the likelihood of his father’s reimprisonment: Leon Jaworski, Cox’s replacement as special prosecutor, had called the appeal “frivolous” and would probably get his way before long.

Thinking about all this, Hunt realized that he’d forgotten to put the business of Manuel’s long-ago stay with his family into the proposal for an autobiography that he would soon be shopping. Ed Chase at Putnam
had told him the book might command six figures, leaving politely unspoken his hope that a memoir by Hunt would recoup some of what the publisher had lost on
The Berlin Ending
.

He was hard at the book each day, either here in the study or down in the basement, where he’d set up a work table near the giant imperial flag brought home as a souvenir of his Agency posting to Japan. He was determined that these memoirs would outperform the ones being written by Jeb Magruder and Mitchell’s wife, let alone the book Elliot Richardson was under contract to produce, a surefire snorer on the American political system.

He left off rubbing his elbow and finished the glass of milk. Unfortunately, the silence of the study seemed even worse than what surrounded him in the basement. The Afghan hound, glad to have him back, occasionally wandered in but didn’t say much. Hunt had put away almost all tangible reminders of Dorothy, including the jade pin from Helen C. Lander, which he’d managed to keep hidden in prison until he got one of his daughters to take it home. He’d explained that the piece of jewelry had only lately been discovered by an honest attendant in the Chicago morgue.

Since his release he’d wondered almost continually about what Miss Lander had told him. And because the terms of his release allowed him unsupervised movement within the District of Columbia, he had decided that today would be the day to do a little investigation of what she had suggested.

He rose and went into the bathroom and lightly powdered his hair, adding five years to the five that prison had already etched into him. The powder certainly provided a more subtle transformation than the wig he’d used in the ITT operation a couple of years back—another fiasco that you could lay at the feet of Chuck Colson.

Putting on a pair of dark glasses, he exited the front door of 11120 River Road and made the long walk to his car. He was soon driving east, past Potomac’s split-rail fences and toward Washington. The fences, alas, reminded him of the five thousand cows whose pastures he had recently had to tend at Allenwood federal prison, a miserable job performed at five a.m., with the flimsiest of coats to protect him from the cold.

His period as a commuter witness from Danbury had ended when the government decided it was more convenient to park him for a couple of months at Fort Holabird, here in Maryland, where a dozen or so Mafia canaries had proved more appealing company than Jeb Magruder. Holabird’s best feature had been a typewriter that the government provided. He’d at last been able to answer the more rational and interesting of the letters that still came his way, including two additional cryptic communications from Miss Lander.

But as winter approached he’d been uprooted once more, dispatched to Allenwood, where he might have died from the misery and cold—a “country club,” the journalists called it—had his work detail not eventually been changed from the pastures to a clerical job inside a barn. And then on January 2, twenty-five days ago, he’d been recalled to life, like Dickens’s Dr. Manette, and hustled off to Washington, D.C., whose downtown he was now approaching in a spirit of contentment, actually taking pleasure in the cold air hitting his face through the open car window.

Although the streets were deserted on this Sunday afternoon, he parked more than two blocks from his destination and purposely left his overcoat in the front seat. Walking south, he looked across Seventeenth Street to the EOB and could almost imagine it was early ’72 and that he was ready to do his mental hopscotch over the black-and-white floor tiles of the building’s corridors, on his way to an afternoon of b.s. and bombast with Gordon Liddy.

He had to remind himself that his current destination was neither the EOB nor the CRP, which had occupied a third corner at this intersection. He was headed for 1700 Pennsylvania, the site of his old cover job at Robert R. Mullen Company.

Once inside the lobby, he had no trouble getting past the bored security guard, who left him a bit crestfallen by not asking for the pictureless ID card he’d recently forged, with someone else’s name, at his basement work table. He was soon entering the Mullen offices with the same key he’d used from ’70 through ’72, and which no one had ever thought to ask him to return.

The premises, where he’d never spent much time, contained not a soul this afternoon, a development that relieved him but also renewed
his disappointment. He would have no chance to use the dialogue he’d rehearsed in the bathroom mirror at home, no need to tell anyone that he, Harvey Leonard, had just now come down from the firm a floor above, hoping to use the Mullen Company Xerox machine, which Bob Bennett had told him he was welcome to whenever their own was on the fritz. If he ran into someone he actually knew, someone who saw through the powdered hair, his plan was to say that he’d come back, after all this time, simply to return his key, an action just strange enough to comport with the odd personality the newspapers now attributed to him.

Atop a desk not far from where his own had been, he thought he recognized a few framed pictures of somebody’s children, the color drained from their faces by the photos’ exposure to sunlight, the way his own complexion had faded last year from a lack of the same element. The two buff-colored file cabinets he was seeking were not in the exact place he remembered, but he soon spotted them. He opened the bottom drawer of the nearest one and found inside it a broken stapler, a fold-up umbrella, and—yes, just as it had reappeared to his memory in prison—an interoffice-mail envelope that was secured with a little red string.

He undid the fastener, reached in, and found another envelope, white and legal-sized and quite thick, which bore a 1957 Canadian postmark. It was addressed to a law firm in Jackson, Mississippi, and had the word “MOOT” written boldly across it, front and back. Too big for the breast pocket of his suit, it fit more comfortably into the right-hand one where he had his keys. He now replaced the outer envelope inside the drawer, slid it shut, and prepared to exit the premises—though not before feeling the old Kilroy-was-here temptation to leave his mark. Not the self-destructive calling card of that personal check left behind in the Watergate Hotel; just some small sign of an improbable job well accomplished. He hated the reputation as a bumbler that he’d acquired in the press.

But he couldn’t think of anything that would be intelligible. So he shut the single light he’d put on and made his way down to the lobby, past the guard who was now actually dozing, and out onto the street, wondering as he went if he now had the Rosetta Stone to the whole
Watergate affair in his jacket pocket. Walking up Seventeenth Street, he passed a magazine store that still had Sirica’s Man of the Year
Time
cover in its window. The issue might be weeks old, but there would still be some tourist wanting to bring it home as a memento of time spent in the edgy, scandalized capital.

On November 9, the Man of the Year had given him a final sentence of eight years in prison and a ten-thousand-dollar fine. During the proceedings, Hunt had refused to shake hands with McCord—a good piece of playacting that made him appear as angry as Liddy over the way McCord’s March letter to Sirica had broken open the case. Whereas, of course, Hunt remained happy that McCord had written it, just the way Hunt knew he would after receiving that other letter in his mailbox:
The WH will try to use even the plane crash in order to shift blame for Watergate over to the agency …