Fatal Conceit (50 page)

“Apparently. He went there.”

“How did he know how to find it, if you didn't tell him?”

“I don't know. Rod didn't say anything to me about what was going on.”

“Or did you all know about the cabin because Jenna told you that's where she would go sometimes with General Allen?”

“I knew that. But I don't know where Baum got the information. I never told him or talked to him or Rod about it. To be honest, I didn't remember it at the time.”

“That's your story and you're sticking with it?” Faust said.

“Miss Faust,” Judge Hart said, “is that a question or a comment? Because if it's the latter, please refrain.”

“Yes, Judge,” Faust said. “Miss Lee, was Ray Baum part of your blackmail ring? Your muscle?”

“There was no blackmail ring. Baum was Rod's man. I had as little to do with him as possible.”

“And Ray Baum isn't here to tell us anything different, is he?”

“I guess not.”

“You guess not? He was shot and killed after allegedly trying to force Jenna Blair and Ariadne Stupenagel into digging their own grave, apparently intending to murder them. At least that's what the jury was told by Miss Stupenagel.”

“That's what I've heard.”

“From the district attorney. Did he feed you this story?” Faust said angrily.

“OBJECTION!” Karp said as he jumped to his feet.

“There you go again, Miss Faust. How many times do I have to warn you about making allegations without a legitimate offer of proof? Sustained,” the judge said, shaking his head.

“Miss Lee, is it possible that this was a falling-out among your little blackmail ring?”

“There was no blackmail ring.”

“Maybe Ray Baum knew where to find Miss Blair because you sent him to kill her, is that right, Miss Lee?” Faust said, her voice rising to almost a shout.

Lee looked as if she was about to shout back, but then she glanced at Karp, who gave her a small nod. She visibly relaxed. “There was no blackmail scheme. I hardly knew Ray Baum. And you're making all of this up.”

The witness's regaining control seemed to take the wind out of Faust, who, given the court's admonitions, gave up after a few more questions. Then Karp rose for redirect, keeping it short and simple.

“Miss Lee, who sent Tucker Lindsey to meet Jenna Blair at the theater on 13th Street?”

“Rod told me to tell her that Lindsey would meet her at the theater.”

“Were you ever in a position to direct the president's national security adviser or the defendant Fauhomme to engage in any such schemes involving murder or blackmail?”

The question seemed to melt Lee's resolve to be strong. She sobbed. “No. I'm just a yoga instructor and a lousy actress.”

Karp walked up to the witness stand and grabbed a box of tissues, which he offered to Lee. “It's okay,” he said gently, “take a moment.”

The young woman blew her nose and dabbed at the tears. At last she nodded. “Thank you.”

“You're welcome,” Karp replied. “Are you ready to go on?”

When the young woman nodded, Karp turned to Judge Hart and said, “Your Honor, at this time it seems abundantly appropriate for the people to play for the jury People's Exhibit 32, a recording of a conversation between the witness and Jenna Blair on the morning following Sam Allen's murder.”

Faust's eyes grew large and Caulkin turned red as she jumped to her feet. “Objection, Your Honor, we have no record of this on the evidence list given to us by the district attorney.”

“Your Honor, please accept this as a matter of legitimate rebuttal concerning, particularly, counsel's attempted impeachment of the witness. Once again counsel has delved into the realm of fantasy in which she continues to assert without any evidence that the witness and others were involved in a conspiracy to murder General Allen,” Karp said patiently, as if schooling a young law student. “She just attacked the witness's account of this conversation and intimated again that whatever was said was somehow self-incriminatory. This recording should clear that up.”

“Miss Faust, I will not repeat any more admonitions. You opened the door. I'll allow it,” Judge Hart said tiredly.

Karp walked over to the prosecution table, where he pressed a button that would play the recording for those in the courtroom to hear. His computer tech, the same one who'd been insulted by the FBI agents at the murder scene, had discovered an app on Lee's telephone that recorded all of her conversations and stored them in a database.

As Jenna Blair's desperate voice rang out in the otherwise silent courtroom, Karp smiled to himself. He'd taken another piece from his opponent's board, and the black king was in sight, sitting at the defense table with his head in his hands. And there were more traps to come.

“Connie, oh, my God, Connie . . . he was murdered!”

T
HE YOUNG WOMAN SAT IN
the witness chair with her head bowed and tears streaming down her face and dripping onto the stand in front of her. It was a little after noon and Jenna Blair had been on the stand for nearly four hours while Karp questioned her. She was exhausted, and her grief was palpable in the silent courtroom.

When he met with her that morning before the trial resumed, she looked as if she'd been crying and hadn't slept since arriving in New York from New Mexico, which she admitted was true. “I was okay in Taos,” she said. “Maybe it was being around Lucy and Ned, and living in such beautiful natural surroundings, but I slept, for the most part. When I cried, they seemed to be cleansing tears and I would be at peace, for the moment anyway. But since I've been back in New York, I've only dozed, and my tears feel hot and bitter.”

Karp told her that it was okay to be afraid and nervous about her testimony. “I won't sugarcoat it, the defense is going to come after you with everything they got,” he said. “They're going to call you names and accuse you of everything from prostitution to murder. I'll be able to head some of it off at the pass, but not all; it will get rough.”

However, instead of worrying her, his warnings seemed to give her more resolve. “I don't care what they call me—some of it is even true—or what they accuse me of doing. I know the truth and they can't take that away,” she said. “I'm sad and anxious, but I'm not afraid. In fact, mostly what I am is angry. Those men took something precious from me that I will never be able to replace, and it's not just Sam, though my heart is broken and right now it doesn't feel like I'll ever be whole again. But they also robbed me of my trust. I was pretty apolitical before this; I suppose that because I'm young I leaned more to being a liberal. But in the end, I figured that in spite of all the things that get said, the people in power all have the country's best interests at heart, and just disagree on how to accomplish that. But it's not true. They only care about their own interests, and some of them are even willing to kill a man like Sam Allen to protect those.”

Although new tears had sprung to her eyes as she spoke, she'd looked at him and smiled. “I'll be okay out there today, Mr. Karp. I won't let you, or Sam, down.”

Blair was true to her word. With Karp feeding her questions, she had calmly described how a small-town girl from Colorado who came to New York City to be an actress had instead become “essentially a call girl,” beginning with the Israeli businessman Ariel Shimon. “I accepted money for dating wealthy, and sometimes powerful, men, which usually led to sex,” she said. “I began to see it all as just a business deal.”

When asked where the money came from, without hesitation Blair said she knew that Fauhomme supplied it. “Connie told me,” she said. “And she'd also tell me sometimes how pleased he was with the reports I gave her, or because one of the guys had told him that he was happy with me.”

Everything changed when she was introduced to Sam Allen. She told the jury about the meeting with Fauhomme when he said the president wanted to know if the general could be counted on to be a team player. So she'd agreed to meet Allen and “see where
it led, as I had done with the other men I'd dated for Fauhomme.” For the first time in her testimony, Blair had faltered and choked up. “But Sam was like no other man I've ever met. He had the spirit and love of life of a young man, but the depth and soul that I've never found in guys my age.”

Blair said she fell in love quickly. “And it was the best day of my life when he told me that he loved me, too.”

At that point in her testimony, Karp had altered the course of the questioning just slightly when he asked, “What, if anything, did he say to you about the events in Chechnya?”

Describing how they'd been at the bed and breakfast in Virginia when he heard the news, she said, “He was angry that it took several hours for Lindsey to tell him about the attack. He was in charge of the CIA but it was like they were trying to keep a lid on it.” But he was soon consumed with getting to the bottom of what occurred, which affected the amount of time they could spend together.

“I was okay with it,” she said. “I understood that if there was anything he loved more than his family, or me, it was our country. He didn't tell me much, but I knew he felt that he and the American people weren't being told the truth, and he was going to dig until he found out what it was. I didn't realize how deeply he felt about it until I saw that tape he made at the cabin after he . . . after he died. Only then did I realize what he was dealing with, and why they killed him.”

Returning to his original line of questioning, Karp asked, “Did there come a time when you realized that something about your relationship with General Allen needed to change?”

“Yes,” she replied. “I'd been thinking about it for some time, but it came to a head that last weekend at the cabin on Loon Lake. We were both pretty preoccupied. He had the congressional hearing coming up, and, though I didn't realize it at the time, he was being blackmailed by Fauhomme and Lindsey. . . .

“Anyway, he had his confirmation hearings coming up after
the election and the last thing he needed was a scandal,” Blair said. “And to be honest, I couldn't live with it anymore. Maybe it sounds funny coming from a . . .” She sighed before going on. “. . . coming from someone who'd worked as a call girl, but I was having a hard time dealing with the fact that he was married, and I know he was having a hard time with it, too. Having an affair was not a natural state for Sam Allen to be in. So I told him that I thought it was best that we take a break until after the hearings . . . and that if he wanted to continue to see me, he needed to do the right thing and divorce his wife. I wasn't going to be the ‘other woman' anymore.”

“Was that an ultimatum, ‘Divorce your wife or I'm gone'?” Karp asked.

Blair shook her head. “It wasn't like that,” she said. “I loved him very much. It was more like giving him an out if he wanted it. And I think we both needed to step back for our sanity and clear up these things in our lives. I'd also made up my mind to tell him about what I had been doing for Rod Fauhomme. He deserved to know, so I told him there was something important I needed to discuss with him—something that might change the way he looked at me—but I didn't want to do it until after the congressional hearing.”

During the trip home from the cabin, they'd both been lost in thought. He'd dropped her off and then gone to the Casablanca “to work on his presentation,” but had contacted her via webcam that evening, wanting to talk. “I remember he was getting sleepy, which was unusual for Sam; he was usually the Energizer Bunny. But he said he'd been drinking scotch, and I knew he'd been dealing with a lot of stress. I told him that I was just getting in the shower and would call him in twenty or thirty minutes when I got out.”

Blair's voice grew husky as she struggled to finish. “That was the last thing we ever said to each other.” It was too much, and she buried her head in her hands and wept.

Karp waited for a minute so that she could gather herself before gently moving her on. “What did you do after your shower?”

Lifting her head from her hands, Blair wiped her nose with a tissue. “I came back to my computer; my screen had gone dark, but I noticed that it was still recording his room. I thought he might still be on but all I could see were shadows. I thought he'd gone to bed.”

“How did you learn that Sam Allen was dead?”

Blair took several deep breaths. “I was in a coffee shop,” she said. “He hadn't texted me . . . he always sent me a text every morning . . . so I thought he'd left early to go see his friend at West Point and just forgot. I was going to give him a hard time about it.” She stopped and smiled at the memory. “But then I saw the news . . . Sam was dead. Somebody, I don't remember if it was the news or someone standing around me, said it was suicide, but I didn't believe it. Sam Allen was not the sort of man to quit or give up on anything. So I looked at the recording on my computer to see if there was some clue that he was suicidal, but what I saw . . .”

Again the young woman stopped. She tried to speak, but her voice came out first as a sort of thin keening. Karp walked up to the stand and poured her a glass of water, which she accepted gratefully.

“You were saying that you saw . . .” Karp encouraged her.

Blair nodded sadly. “I saw a man . . . the man with the tattoo on his arm . . . murder Sam,” she said, her voice now a monotone.

“This man?” Karp asked, holding up the photograph of Ray Baum already entered into evidence.

“Yes, that's him,” she answered.

After seeing the murder on her laptop, Blair explained, she'd called Connie Rae Lee. “I didn't know who else to turn to,” she said. “I was scared and thought that maybe Rod Fauhomme would be able to help because he was the president's friend. Connie said Rod was sending a security man over; I was looking at the camera feed from the outside of my apartment building when I saw these
two guys pull up in a dark car. But one of them was the man with the tattoo. I knew I'd been betrayed, so I ran for it.”