Grand Master (9 page)

“But you don’t know that he didn’t die of a
heart attack, whether or not he was alone. He had a history.”

Morris gave him a caustic, laughing glance.
“He had a history for a lot of things. Did he die of a heart
attack, like they say? Yeah, maybe; but did that just happen
because his time was up, or he got a little too excited in bed? Or
was it caused by something else? You ask me if I know for certain
if he was murdered. No, but that’s what I believe. He knew too
much, and he wasn’t someone you could trust. That’s what Constable
was always too damn stupid to understand. Once he betrayed me, once
he told them what I was going to do, they knew what he was like,
that he’d sell his mother if he had to, which meant he’d sell them
too. You were going to see him; he knew why you were coming. What
makes you think that someone who works for them wasn’t listening in
on your call? What makes you think that one of the people that
worked for him, someone who kept track of his schedule, wasn’t
working for them? Let me tell you something, for all the obvious
disadvantages, I have more privacy here in prison than you have out
there.”

“If you’re right,” said Burdick, “if he was
murdered - how do I find out? Who is going to tell me?”

Morris sunk his chin on his chest. He tapped
two fingers on the table and stared straight ahead. “Start with who
feels the worst about what happened,” he said after thinking about
it. “The agent in charge, the secret service agent who was there
that night, if you can find him - Ask him about the woman, the one
that, according to all the rumors you’ve heard, was in the room
with Constable when he died. Listen, figure it out. The guy is
there to protect the President. The President dies. It looks like a
heart attack The girl - if there was a girl, and if there wasn’t
there had to be someone else - is in the room. The agent had to
know she was there. Christ, you couldn’t guard Constable for ten
minutes and not know what he was like. The girl is there.

“The first question the agent had to deal
with was what to do with her. The President is dead. What is your
next obligation - what do you do? If you do things by the book, you
hold her there and make a full report, but this is a president
we’re talking about. What would you do, what would we both do?
Protect his reputation, save his family - whatever you might think
about his wife - the shame and embarrassment of a useless scandal.
That’s my guess, anyway, about what he might have done.”

Morris moved his head like a boxer,
anticipating an opponent’s next move. His eyes narrowed into a look
of intense concentration. “He gets rid of her, gets her out of the
way, makes sure no one knows she was ever there. But then what
happens, if it turns out it wasn’t a simple heart attack, if it
turns out it was murder? Was the girl involved, the girl he let go?
If that’s what happened, this guy is now a mess, damned both for
what he did and what he did not do.”

Morris nodded in agreement with his own
conjecture. He looked at Burdick. “If you can find him, if you can
get him to talk to you, he might just spill his guts, tell you what
he knows. He’s probably dying to clear his conscience, to make
things right. Remember, if it was a murder, in addition to
everything else, he’s now being forced to play a part in a
cover-up. Do you think he wants to spend the rest of his life
worrying about what’s going to happen when someone finds out what
he did? Would you?”

Burdick glanced at his watch. If he stayed
much longer he would miss his flight and have to stay another day.
He folded up the notebook and tucked it back in his pocket. Morris
did not want him to go. “Not yet. There’s something you should
see.”

Burdick watched with a sense of foreboding as
Frank Morris stood up and began to unbutton his shirt.

“At the end of my trial, just after the judge
sentenced me, when they took me back to jail, I got this.” Pulling
his shirt open, he pointed to a three inch scar on his left side,
just below his ribs. “It was a warning. They were telling me to do
my time and not talk to anyone. When I said I was going to die of
cancer unless that fucking Frenchman killed me first, I wasn’t
kidding. But listen to me: write the story, all of it, including
what I did. If they come for me, at least I’ll die knowing that I
got them back.”

They shook hands and said goodbye. They both
knew they would never see each other again, that within months
Morris would be dead and that Burdick was not coming back, but they
liked each other too much not to lie. Burdick said he would see him
soon, and Morris claimed there was a still a chance he might get
better. And so they parted, better friends than they had been
before.

Burdick thought about that as he drove south
along the Pacific shore, back toward Santa Barbara on his way to
the airport in Los Angeles and his scheduled flight; he thought
about the way that, looking death in the face, Morris had come once
again to the knowledge of how he ought to live, how he had thrown
away everything for the chance to end his life a wealthy man, and
how desperate he now was to change that and make everything
right.

It was a long drive, more than three hours,
but Burdick made his flight and six hours later was home in New
York. He was walking through the airport when he first learned what
had happened. Glancing at a television set as he passed by a bar,
he stopped when he saw a picture on the screen of Frank Morris. He
moved close enough to hear that, according to the reports just
coming in, the former chairman of the House Ways and Means
Committee had been killed in prison, stabbed to death with a
knife.

Burdick’s blood ran cold. He looked behind
him, and then he began to move quickly, trying to lose himself in
the crowd. He did not believe for a minute that Morris’ death could
have been just another prison stabbing, a mindless act of violence.
Someone knew that Frank Morris had talked to a reporter, and they
had known it right away. They killed him because the warning they
had given him earlier had not worked. Morris had been right: they
must have had Constable murdered as well. And if they were willing
to do that, murder to keep their secret, there was no reason to
think they would not kill him as well.

Burdick began to walk faster, faster with
each breath he took, until he was outside on the sidewalk,
frantically waving for a cab. He was on the bridge into Manhattan
when he remembered who he wanted to call. It was late, but that did
not matter. He had his home numbers, both the one on the west coast
and the one in Washington D.C. He felt a sudden surge of relief
when Bobby Hart answered on the third ring.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Bobby Hart had not been able to stop thinking
about what Robert Constable’s widow had sworn him not to tell
anyone, that instead of dying of a heart attack, the former
President had been murdered. That had been shocking enough, but the
cold indifference with which she had reported that it, her only
thought what might have to be done to cover it up, had him shaking
his head. At least he had had the presence of mind to insist that
while he would look into it, find out what he could about who might
have had a reason to have her husband killed, there would have to
be a full-scale investigation. He had made that quite clear. He was
not going to become part of a conspiracy, no matter how noble its
intention, to keep the public from learning the truth about how the
President of the United States had really died.

Hart stared out the window of the high speed
train he was taking to New York. He felt trapped by a promise that,
as Helen had reminded him, he had had no real reason to make. It
was almost uncanny, the way he had been maneuvered. He did not owe
anything to Robert Constable or his memory; he owed even less to
his widow. Somehow, she had made it seem that he did. It had been
subtle, even oblique. It was nothing that she actually said, but
rather the manner of the way she treated him, an equal partner in a
shared responsibility. Because he was now in a position to do
certain things, to get answers where few others could even ask
questions, and she was now suddenly vulnerable and alone, he had an
obligation to do something before the story got out and things went
insane.

They were twenty minutes from the station,
twenty minutes from Manhattan, the end of the short, three hour
trip that Austin Pearce had asked him to make so he could talk to
him alone. The secretary of the treasury during the first term of
the Constable administration had something important to discuss,
something about the same foreign investment firm that Quentin
Burdick had apparently been asking questions about.

And now Burdick, for reasons of his own,
wanted to see him as well. He had known Burdick for years, but he
had never heard him sound the way he had late last night on the
telephone. Burdick might look like the proverbial nearsighted
bookworm who, with his halting, diffident speech, was afraid of his
own shadow, but he had once been a soldier in Vietnam, decorated
for his bravery. Quentin Burdick was not afraid of anyone, which
made the whole thing even more unaccountable.

Ten minutes from the station. Eager to get a
start, some of the passengers began to grab their luggage from the
overhead racks. Hart folded his arms and leaned closer to the
window, thinking more about the Constables as the skyline of New
York drew closer. Presidents were often divided between those, like
most of the early ones, who came from the country, and those, like
Kennedy and the Roosevelts, Reagan and some of the other, more
recent ones, who had their roots in the life of the cities.
Constable, on the other hand, seemed to occupy a position that in a
way was neither and both. He had come from a small town and become
governor of a small state, but there had always been something
about him, a grasping ambition that, even when he had the
presidency, never seemed to stop. It was an ambition that seemed to
embody that same relentless search for fame and fortune that had
drawn so many young men and young women from the rural heartland of
the nation to the glittering opportunities of New York. Both of
them, husband and wife, had acquired by habit and long practice
what every native New Yorker had bred in his bones: the ability,
which many who lived other places thought the charlatan’s ability,
to make you think that whatever they wanted was something you
really thought they should have.

It explained, Hart realized, that cold
indifference he had not at first been able to understand. Whether
manufactured or authentic, it had been part of the appeal. It
allowed Madelaine Constable to make it appear that she was only
asking him to do what was good for the country, to make the kind of
sacrifice she had been making for years: protect, so far as he
legitimately could, the President’s posthumous reputation, find out
the reason he had been killed before anyone else knew he had been
murdered. Because if the story got out before they knew what had
happened, the speculation would not end in their lifetimes. Every
rumor, every unfounded allegation, all the sordid details of Robert
Constable’s storied life would become the stuff of legend, a tawdry
myth that the truth, whatever it was, would never entirely
dispel.

Hart had agreed, but, again, only to a point.
Whatever he discovered, and even if he discovered nothing at all,
once he was finished looking into it, he would not keep secret what
she had just told him. He wished now that he had not agreed to do
even that.

The train pulled into the station, and a few
minutes later Hart stepped outside into the blistering New York
heat. He rather liked it, the way the burning air had a different
scent, a different feel, than what a miserably humid day in
Washington was like. In the District, the heat became thick and
oppressive, seeping into your pores, making movement a burden and
ambition someone else’s mindless dream; here it seemed to make
everyone move more quickly, more determined to get to cooler,
air-conditioned places where they could get to work. Hart checked
his watch as he jumped into a cab. The train had run late, but he
still had a few minutes before he was supposed to meet Quentin
Burdick

“I’m in a hurry,” he told the driver. The
driver gave him a look in the rearview mirror that made Hart feel a
fool. They were in the middle of Manhattan at a time when you were
lucky if traffic moved at all. Twenty minutes and two miles later,
the cab pulled up in front of a nondescript east village restaurant
with a faded, painted sign, the kind of place no out of town
tourist would think to visit, and no one in the city with serious
money would think to go. It was the kind of place that the ignorant
would have called with a shudder a joint or a dive, but where those
who had an ear for serious music would still gather late on a smoke
filled night to listen to some of the best jazz, and drink some of
the worst booze, in Manhattan.

There were no jazz musicians now; no one
beating out a new cool rhythm on the piano, no one blowing
dreamlike on a trumpet’s burnished brass. There was hardly anyone
here at all, two middle age women drinking coffee at a table in
front, and Quentin Burdick, sitting quietly in the back. Hart
blinked into the darkness, and then, as Burdick rose to greet him,
made his way through the scattered empty tables in between.

“It’s good to see you, Bobby,” said Burdick
as they shook hands. “Thanks for doing this on such short
notice.”

Hart sank onto a hard wooden chair and
suddenly noticed the pictures covering the wall, jazz musicians,
dozens of them, some of them long forgotten, but some of them still
famous. He smiled to himself as his gaze came to rest on one just
above Burdick’s shoulder. Burdick turned around to look.

“Errol Garner. Did you ever see him play?”
asked Hart, with a distant, wistful look. “In person, I mean. I
wish I had. He could not read music, could not read a note, and
other than maybe Oscar Peterson, the greatest jazz pianist there
ever was.”