Grand Master (13 page)

CHAPTER TEN

Bobby Hart was annoyed and, more than that,
perplexed. First he was told that Clarence Atwood was out of town
and would not be back until sometime the next week; then, when he
made it plain that he would not be put off, that it was a matter of
some urgency, he was told that someone would get back to him by the
end of the day. No one did. That night Hart called Madelaine
Constable. An hour after they finished talking, Clarence Atwood
finally called.

“Sorry, Senator; this is my fault. With all
changes going on - the Vice-President taking over - my staff has
become a little overprotective. I’ll be glad to meet with you
whenever you like.”

He said this in an even tone of voice, calm,
unflappable, exactly what one would expect from a man in his
position. Hart told him he would like to see him the next morning.
At first, Atwood seemed to hesitate, but finally agreed that they
would meet at ten o’clock in his office. And then, just before
midnight, Atwood called Hart at home and asked if he would be
willing to meet the next night instead of the next morning, and at
his apartment instead of at his office. He did not offer a reason
and, after giving Hart his apartment number at the Watergate, did
not wait for a reply. “I’ll see you then,” was all he said before
he ended the call.

Hart got off the elevator, glanced at the
piece of paper on which he had jotted down the apartment number,
and headed down the hallway. The door opened before he had a chance
to knock. Without a word of welcome, Clarence Atwood pulled Hart
inside, stuck his head out just far enough to look both ways down
the empty corridor, and then quickly shut the door. Hart was
wearing a sports jacket and a shirt open at the collar, but Atwood
was still dressed in a dark suit and tie, the nondescript clothing
of a Secret Service trained to blend in with the crowd.

“Anyone follow you?” he asked as he led his
guest into the living room. The curtains were drawn. There was
nothing, not even a magazine, on the coffee table in front of the
sofa that, along with two end tables and a single leather recliner,
was the only furniture.

“Did anyone follow me?” asked Hart, more
puzzled by the minute. “Why would anyone be following me?” But even
as he said it, he knew. “You think whoever did this knows someone
is looking into it? But even if they knew that, why would they
think I knew anything about it?”

Atwood looked at the sofa, then at the chair,
as if he were trying to decide exactly where to sit.

“This isn’t your apartment, is it? This isn’t
where you live?”

Atwood ignored him. He gestured toward the
sofa as he sat down on the recliner, but he sat too far back and
had to push himself forward to the front edge of the chair. Tall
and gangly, nothing seemed to fit him right. His suits pants were
just a trifle short, the sleeves on his jacket just a shade too
long. Everything about him seemed discordant and uneven; everything
except his face, which was for the most part a perfect blank
expression, the triumph of either a severe self-discipline or the
successful purge of all emotion. He had a way of looking at you
that almost made you doubt your own existence.

“What do you know, Senator? What is the
reason you wanted to see me?”

“What’s the reason…? No, you tell me - why
would anyone be following me?”

Atwood shrugged his shoulders. There was no
change in his expression. “No reason.”

Hart would have none of it. “Of course
there’s a reason. You wouldn’t have asked if there wasn’t.”

There was no response. It was not that Atwood
had not heard the question; the question did not count. His gaze
remained the same: steady, and if it is not too strange a thing to
say, relentless, as if this were some kind of psychological
experiment designed to test the reaction of someone systematically
ignored. Hart was not in the mood to play.

“You wouldn’t have called me last night to
ask if I’d meet you here instead of your office if you didn’t think
- what is this place, anyway?” he asked as he cast a glance of
disapproval around the soulless, sparsely furnished room. “A safe
location, a place you have meetings you don’t want anyone to know
about?”

There was nothing, not the slightest
movement, in Atwood’s immobile face. Hart’s voice echoed into a
silence that became profound. “What do you know, Senator?” asked
Atwood, and then repeated the second question. “What is the reason
you wanted to see me?”

This was maddening. Hart felt the anger rise
in his throat. He turned his head, ready to lash out, when he
suddenly thought he understood.

“You’re afraid of something. What is it? -
That someone is going to find out that the President didn’t die of
a heart attack in that hotel room, find out that he was murdered?
Why are you afraid of that? You’re the head of the Secret Service -
You don’t have any reason to cover this up….”

Finally it was there, the first glimmer of
something genuine in that manufactured face, a spark of anger in
those deliberately impenetrable eyes. “It wasn’t our fault. We did
everything we’re supposed to do.”

Hart was quick to take advantage. He fixed
Atwood with a piercing stare. “Not your fault? You let a woman into
his room, a woman you obviously knew nothing about; a paid
assassin, as it turns out, who murdered him. I can understand why
you might not want to see that story in the papers, but that
doesn’t change what happened, or what has to be done about it.”

“That was always the hardest part about
protecting Robert Constable: protecting him from himself,” replied
Atwood with a brief nod. “You think we had time to do a background
check on every woman he had to have? Do you know how many times he
had an agent bring a woman to his room, someone he had just spotted
in the crowd? I lost of couple of the best agents I had. I had to
transfer them to other duties or they would have quit. President or
not, they weren’t going to be anybody’s pimp. To tell you the
truth, they’re the ones I most admired. Now, what do you know and
why do you want to see me.” He paused, and then relented. “I know
what she told me, but I need to hear it from you.”

Did that mean that Atwood did not trust the
former first lady, wondered Hart; or that he did not trust him. It
seemed a point of some importance. “I understand that you became
the head of the Secret Service on her recommendation.”

A slight smile flickered briefly on Clarence
Atwood’s stoic mouth. “She told you that, did she? It might even be
true, for all I know.”

“She doesn’t always tell the truth?”

“Do you know anyone in this town who does?
But don’t misunderstand, Senator; I have no complaint of Mrs.
Constable. She - and her husband, within his limits - always
treated me fairly.”

“’Within his limits’? That’s an odd way of
putting it.”

“There were things he did, things that put me
in an awkward situation, things I can’t talk about.”

“I think I understand,” replied Hart, trying
to feel a little more sympathetic. “You want to know what I know
and why I wanted to see you. Because the President’s widow asked me
to, after she told me what you told her: that the President was
murdered. She knows the truth will have to come out, but she first
wants to know what happened: who killed him and why. Because
otherwise -”

“Everyone will have their own idea, each one
more vicious than the last. I can’t say I disagree. There are only
a handful of people who know about this, and you’re the only one I
don’t quite trust. It’s nothing personal, Senator; I don’t trust
anyone I don’t know, and frankly, I don’t trust most of the ones I
do know. I’ve been here too long; I’ve seen too much. And the
others that know about this - it isn’t that I trust them any more
than I trust you, but they have careers they want to protect. Most
of them, anyway,” he added in an allusion Hart grasped at once.
Madelaine Constable had a lot of things, but a career of the sort
Atwood could affect wasn’t one of them.

“It’s true, then?” asked Hart. There isn’t
any doubt? A woman he was sleeping with shoved a needle in him and
killed him with a drug.”

“What have you been able to find out -
anything useful, anything at all?”

Hart had agreed to look into things, to see
what he could find out; he had not agreed to report to the Secret
Service.

“Your job is to protect the President, not
conduct an investigation into the cause of his death. This is
something for the FBI. The President has been murdered, and you
still haven’t told them?”

Atwood looked down at his large hands with
their three misshapen fingers, broken years earlier in a fight. The
lines in his forehead deepened as he pondered over what he was
going to say next, and just how far he could go.

“I’ve had conversations.” He said this
slowly, as if to impress upon Hart that he knew what he was about;
that he knew to protect himself from any later charge that he had
withheld information, or delayed revealing what he knew, in a
murder investigation of this magnitude.

“You’ve had a conversation - with the
Director? You told him that the President was murdered, and the FBI
hasn’t started an investigation?”

Atwood answered with another silent look.

“They have started an investigation,” said
Hart; “but quietly, discreetly. Is that what you’re telling
me?”

“There is some concern about panic, the way
the public might react, the kind of rumors that might -”

“Yes, I know all about that,” said Hart with
a show of irritation. He got to his feet and walked over to the
window. He pulled the drapes open far enough to look out. When he
turned around, he did nothing to hide his disgust. “If it wasn’t
bad enough that Constable did something that got himself killed,
he’s managed to involve first his wife, and then the head of the
Secret Service, and now the director of the FBI, in a conspiracy to
conceal a murder! Don’t you see the irony in that? We’re doing
everything we can to stop speculation about what might have
happened in that hotel room when it’s becoming more and more likely
that the truth is far worse than what anyone right now could
possibly imagine!”

With a halting, disjoined movement, Atwood
got to his feet. He stood there, staring at Hart in a way that,
with those who worked under him, was usually all that was necessary
to force an explanation. But Hart did not work for him, and the
only effect was to make the Senator less inclined to tell him
anything.

“You know something,” said Atwood. “What is
it? What have you found out?”

Hart ignored him. “How long do you think it’s
going to be before the fact that the President was murdered leaks
out?” Before Atwood could respond, Hart shook his head as if to
tell him that it did not matter, that the question was irrelevant.
“It’s already leaked out. There’s at least one reporter who is all
over this story. This secret you’re trying to keep - you’re going
to be reading it in the papers and there’s not a damn thing you or
I or anyone else can do about it. So it seems to me that unless you
want to find yourself on the wrong end of a congressional
investigation, you better start telling me what you know and you
better start doing it now.”

To Hart’s immense surprise, Atwood actually
seemed relieved, as if he had been expecting him to put it in
precisely these terms. “Wait here a moment.”

He was gone a few moments and when he came
back he was not alone. “This is Dick Bauman, the agent in charge
that night.”

For the next several hours, until well past
midnight, they sat there, the three of them, going over everything
that had happened the night Robert Constable died. Atwood became a
different man around poor Bauman, who had almost reached the point
of blaming himself for the President’s murder. Atwood kept telling
him that it was not his fault, that his only failure was a failure
of decency, trying to protect the President, and the President’s
family, from Constable’s gross misbehavior. Hart agreed, telling
him that in the circumstances in which he had found himself, it
would have been heartless, almost an act of cruelty, not to keep
the tawdry details of Constable’s last night private.

Bauman’s answer stopped them both. “The fault
goes farther back than that. There wouldn’t have been any need to
do what I did, clean up after him, if we had made it plain in the
beginning, when we first started guarding him, that there were some
things we wouldn’t do.”

Atwood could not argue the point; Hart did
not try. “Tell me everything that happened. How did the girl get
there?”

“We’re not sure. He had this arrangement -
whenever he stayed in the city. There was always a second room
connected to the suite. He kept the key himself and gave it to
whomever he chose. There was always someone.”

“But there was Secret Service protection all
around him,” objected Hart.

Bauman exchanged a glance with Atwood.

“Go ahead. It’s all right. You can tell
him.”

“We learned to look the other way. A woman -
a good-looking woman - gets off the elevator. We all
understood.”

“But this woman - where did she come from?
Did Constable meet her somewhere that night? Where was he earlier
that evening? What had he been doing?”

“He gave a speech at a fund-raising dinner at
the Plaza Hotel. It finished up around 10:30, but we did not get
him out of there for another half hour. He never wanted to leave
anywhere if there was someone left to talk to, another hand to
shake. It’s funny, but now that I think about it, I don’t remember
him ever saying even once that he wanted to be alone.”

“The girl - how old was she, anyway?”

“Late twenties, early thirties; the way most
of them were.”

“Was she there, at the dinner? Is that where
he met her?”