Grand Master (44 page)

“A whore?” she laughed. A sly, knowing grin
tripped across her fine, lovely mouth. “There are worse things than
being married to a man other people think would kill the man who
took advantage of her. No, Bobby, I’m stronger than I was. Don’t
worry about me; think only about what you have to do. When it’s all
over, when you’re finished, we’ll come back here. Think about all
the things we’ll have to talk about.” They went inside and Bobby
noticed a package on the table in the entryway.

“It just came this morning,” explained Helen.
“I was so excited to see you, I forgot all about it. It’s from some
place in France.” She waited while he opened it. There was a thick
manuscript inside with a few lines scribbled on the cover.

“It’s Jean Valette, the book he has been
working on, a book he wanted me to read.” Bobby thumbed through the
pages. He looked again at the cover. Jean Valette had written in a
flamboyant hand: “Read it, study it; do it slowly, take your time.
That is all I ask.”

“I looked at it briefly while I was there:
four hundred tightly reasoned pages, full of historical and
philosophical analysis. The crisis of the West,” said Bobby,
shaking his head at the enormity of the task. “It took him twenty
years to write it; it will probably take me that long to work my
way through it.”

Helen noticed the time. “It’s almost six. He
said he would come back. He does every day.”

Bobby was confused. “Who is coming back?
Every day?”

Starting four or five days ago, six o’clock.
He’s very polite. He calls from the gate, asks if you’re here and
when I tell him you’re not, he thanks me and says he’ll try again
tomorrow.”

“Maybe you should have called the police,”
said Bobby, a little worried.

“No, he’s fine. The second time he came, I
went out and spoke to him through the gate. He told me he had met
you once and -”

“Met me once? That could be anyone, some
crank; or worse, some -”

“No, I told you, it isn’t like that at all.
He said he had met you once and that Quentin Burdick told him he
could trust you.”

“What did he look like?” asked Bobby with a
sudden sense of urgency. “Middle-aged, medium height, medium
weight, someone you wouldn’t notice in a crowd?”

A sad smile crossed her mouth as she
nodded.

“I think that you might not notice him if you
passed him on an empty street. He’s very nice, painfully
polite.”

“And he’s coming at six, five minutes from
now?” asked Bobby, just to be sure. “I better go meet him.” Bobby
walked up the long driveway to the iron gate that stretched between
the vine covered white stucco walls that kept the house, and the
two people who lived in it, safe from the prying eyes of the world.
At six o’clock an aging beige automobile that no one would ever
notice much less want to buy pulled up and the driver got out. Hart
pushed the button that opened the gate and Richard Bauman quickly
slipped inside.

Bobby had not seen the former Secret Service
agent since the night he met with Clarence Atwood at the Watergate.
Bauman had not changed in any obvious way, but there was still a
difference: He seemed more certain of himself; all the guilt he had
felt that night was gone.

“Come inside,” said Hart as they shook
hands.

“No, I don’t want to be a bother.”

“What can I do for you then? My wife told me
that you had been here every day.”

“She’s been very nice about it. Yes, every
day. I knew you would come back here. I could not stay in
Washington. I would have been dead by now.”

“Come in,” said Bobby. “We can talk.”

“Can you come with me?” asked Bauman
politely, but with insistence. “There’s something I have to show
you. It’s what I gave Quentin Burdick, what probably got him
killed. It’s in my room, at the motel where I’m staying. I didn’t
want to carry it around with me, in case I was being followed.”

“Sure, all right. Tell me where it is. I’ll
just grab my keys and tell Helen where I’m going.”

The motel was one of the cheaper places,
where tourists on a budget liked to stay, rooms with a view of the
parking lot and a long walk, a mile or more, to the beach. Bobby
sat on one of the two plastic chairs, Bauman sat in the other. A
tattered leather briefcase lay on a wooden table next to them.
Bauman removed a large, manila envelope and handed it to Bobby.

“It’s all here, everything I got from
Atwood’s office. I made copies and put the originals back. I gave
one to Burdick - decent man, told me there might not be anyone else
around to trust, but that I could trust you. They were all
involved, you know; one way or the other, all of them: Constable,
his wife, Russell, the others. Whether they knew what was going to
happen, whether they had any part in the decisions that got made -
doesn’t matter, they were all responsible.”

Bobby bent toward him. Bauman was a
completely honest man. He knew that, but he still was not sure what
Bauman was trying to tell him. He tapped his finger on the
envelope. “You got this from Atwood’s office, and you gave it - a
copy of it - to Quentin Burdick?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” said Bauman with a
slight, embarrassed smile. He would try to be clearer. “Atwood
hired the girl. All the records of payment are in there. But the
girl wasn’t just some paid assassin; she was one of ours, someone
who did things that no one is supposed to know. Atwood knew
everything about all of them, what they had done, the money they
had taken - all of it. That was the leverage he had, that and the
fact that he didn’t have any reservations about doing whatever
seemed to be necessary.”

“But he wouldn’t have had any reason to have
Constable killed,” objected Bobby. “Russell and Madelaine Constable
had a lot to lose if Constable lived, and a lot to gain if he died.
Atwood had to be working for them, didn’t he?”

“That’s right. Atwood didn’t do this on his
own, have the President murdered, I mean. Because the rest of what
happened: Burdick, what happened to those two in Paris, the attempt
to make it seem like you were the one responsible - I’m pretty sure
Atwood did that on his own; did it, as far as I can tell, with the
consent of both Russell and Mrs. Constable. Once the President was
killed, all they cared about was protecting themselves and getting
what they wanted. They depended on Atwood for that. Do what’s
necessary, that’s what they would have told him, and no one needed
to tell him what that meant.”

Bobby was on the edge of his chair. “But
then, if it wasn’t Atwood on his own, and if it wasn’t Russell or
Constable’s wife, who told Atwood to kill the President?”

Richard Bauman nodded toward heavy envelope.
“There, on the last page, I think you’ll find the answer. It’s how
the whole thing started, isn’t it?” he asked as Bobby dug through
the documents.

Bobby pulled out the last page, read it
through quickly, and then, scarce believing what he had seen, read
it through again. He looked up at Bauman. “It’s a whole page of
payments, a ledger with the amounts and the dates on which they
were paid. And all of this, millions of dollars, from the same
source? You’re sure? You’re absolutely sure of this?”

“Same as with the others. Atwood was not
working for the President, or the President’s wife. He certainly
was not working for Irwin Russell. Atwood was always working for
The Four Sisters. He was on the payroll of Jean Valette.”

When Bobby got home he was angry, disturbed,
and, as it seemed to Helen, ready to find any excuse for a fight,
not with her, but with anyone else who happened to get in his way.
She tried to calm him down, but he kept pacing back and forth,
spitting out in short bursts what he had just learned.

“Jean Valette, the same man who helped save
my life, the same man who helped restore my reputation, the same
man who provided the evidence to destroy Madelaine Constable and
Irwin Russell, ordered the murder of Robert Constable!”

She tried to teach him prudence with her
eyes. “There’s no proof of that. All you know for sure is that
Atwood was paid a great deal of money by The Four Sisters. There is
nothing in that to link Jean Valette to murder. Atwood could have
done it on his own, for the same reason as the others: to keep
Constable from talking about what he knew.”

Bobby stopped moving. He fixed her with a
steady, unrelenting gaze. “Jean Valette did it, ordered Constable
killed. I know he did. He told me, but I wasn’t smart enough to
understand it. He said he knew I would become president. He knew it
because he set everything in motion. He moved everyone around like
we were pieces on a chess board, put us in situations where we had
only one choice, the choice he knew we would have to make. He said
I would be president, and because of him I’m going to be. And what
that really means is that Jean Valette is the Grand Master, the
only one who knows the game.”

The End

A Note from the Author

Thank you for reading The Grand Master.
Please let me know what you think! You can email me personally by
visiting my official website at http://www.dwbuffa.net.

If you enjoyed this Bobby Hart novel, Rubicon
by Lawrence Alexander (my pen name) also features the same
protagonist. My other novels feature defense attorney Joseph
Antonelli, the character who brought my work into the circle of
main stream crime fiction. Read more about my books at my website
or at various online retailers.

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