Murder in the White House (Capital Crimes Book 1) (17 page)

Catherine shrugged, looked away from the President and sipped the Courvoisier from her snifter.

“Ron,” said the President, “bluntly said, maybe
I
had a motive to kill Blaine. Before I tell you what that reason was, I want you to summarize for me—and for Catherine, who hasn’t heard it—what you’ve found out about Blaine. Maybe you’ve found out more since you last reported to me. Anyway, whatever it is…”

Ron put his cup and brandy snifter on the table by his chair. The President sat leaning forward on the couch, his hands clasped between his knees. Catherine Webster sat straight up, staring hard at Ron.

“Short and not so sweet,” Ron said, “Blaine took bribes. He was influenced in the conduct of his office by payoffs he received from foreign governments and representatives of foreign economic interests—and maybe by payoffs from American interests too… I haven’t found out about that yet. He spent a great deal more
money than he earned. Even so, I suspect there’s a Swiss numbered account with a very large amount of money in it. When it’s all traced out, it may be a major scandal. Or maybe, since he’s dead, it doesn’t have to be traced. Personally, I hope we don’t find he was killed because of one of these deals of his. But I’m afraid we will, and it will all come out…”

“I’m not surprised,” Catherine said quietly.

“He betrayed us, simple as that,” the President said, his voice tight.

“And in more ways than one,” Catherine said. “You must tell Ron now.”

It was a painful moment. The President and his wife for once did not hide their intense emotions, which made Ron acutely uncomfortable. They apparently felt compelled to tell him something neither of them really wanted him to know. The situation compelled it…

The President sighed, nodded. “When I began to develop my ideas about the multilateral trade agreements—this was before I ran for President, when I was still in the Senate—Blaine made some halfhearted arguments against those ideas, all based on his old liberal adherence to the notion of absolute free trade, and then he conceded I was right. He conceded grudgingly maybe, but he conceded. And he helped me convert a loose body of ideas into a specific program. He was a part of it, Ron—I mean, a part of my program, one of the
authors
of it. He played a role in some of the early negotiations. He went along. If he didn’t really believe in what we were doing, at the very least he went along. Then, maybe a year ago, he began to talk against me. Privately, of course. In meetings. More often with me
alone. He turned around and became an outspoken opponent within the Administration.

“I didn’t know why. I suppose his old liberal conscience hurt. Maybe he got some criticism from the academic community. Anyway, I was willing to concede that his opposition was honest. Then it changed. He stopped reasoning with me and became emotional. He argued with me, vehemently. It was always in private, and as time went by he became downright irrational. He badgered me about it, every chance he had, every time we were alone. It was—”

Catherine interrupted. “He began to talk about exemptions from the agreements. The exemptions he wanted didn’t make any sense. We had to suspect some motive other than reason and honest judgment. Looking back, it’s perfectly obvious. But you couldn’t believe it. The idea of the Secretary of State being influenced by… money, or whatever. We couldn’t believe it. Maybe we were too naive.”

The President drank his brandy as Catherine talked, and when she stopped he shook his head and sighed again. “About ten days before Blaine was killed—in other words shortly before Catherine and I went to Europe—there was an ugly scene between Blaine and myself. Ron, I don’t think we need to go into the details. I will tell you it was extremely painful. After it was over, it was impossible for him to continue to serve in my administration in any position of trust and confidence. And he knew it. When Ted O’Malley of CBS asked about rumors that Blaine was going to resign, he was onto something. Blaine
was
going to resign, he was on his way out—”

“Tell Ron
all
of it, Bob,” Catherine said. “He probably knows most of what you’ve just said.”

A quick nod. “What happened was that… well, there’s no other way to put it but to tell you that Blaine tried to blackmail
us
.” The President glanced at his wife. “In our background, Catherine’s and mine, there is something we would not want revealed. It has
nothing
to do with my qualifications to be President. It does not involve any crime or anything of that nature… but it would be extremely painful for us if it were revealed. Lansard Blaine had been our close personal friend for a very long time, and he knew about this thing. He threatened to tell it… to influence me to drop the multilateral trade agreements”—the President said it with grim anger—“he threatened to tell this thing that would hurt us so personally. It was done in a fit of temper, I suppose, and the next day he apologized and promised not to mention the matter again, but our confidence in him was completely, permanently destroyed. Neither of us would ever have trusted him again. He understood that. He offered to resign and I accepted his resignation immediately. Then he asked me for a little time to put a good face on it. He thought he could arrange a faculty appointment—maybe a chair in history—at some university if he had a few weeks to explore it. I agreed to give him a few weeks. But not more. He had to go.”

From now on, Ron realized, the investigation took a new turn, more dangerous for him, more dangerous for the President. “How many people knew about this?”

“Besides Catherine and myself—and now you,” the President said, “I guess it’s just Fritz Gimbel and the Attorney General. Fritz and me and the Attorney General… we discussed it—”

“And Lynne,” said his wife. “We talked about it over dinner, and Lynne heard. In fact, we considered not telling her, but we decided to. She had to know why we were so upset. Anyway, Blaine was a special friend of hers and she had to know why he was leaving and why we weren’t friends anymore. Naturally it upset her.”

“Yes,” the President said, “it was a cruel thing to do, I wish we hadn’t.” He glanced at Catherine, as though to remind her of his original feelings.

Ron got up to leave, thoroughly embarrassed now by such a personal exchange.

Office of the Attorney General, Monday, June 18, 8:45 AM

Ron lifted his coffee cup from the tray on the Attorney General’s desk. They were having breakfast in the Attorney General’s office. Attorney General Charles Sherer had eaten little of the scrambled eggs, toast, and bacon on his tray. Now he leaned back in his tall leather chair, a cup of coffee in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and regarded Ron with a wry smile.

“I know it’s a tough damn question,” Ron said as he sipped from his cup. “I don’t expect an answer, just a reaction.”

The Attorney General was sixty-two, one of the oldest members of the Webster Administration and one of the most experienced. He had been a deputy assistant attorney general as long ago as the Johnson Administration; he had been special counsel in the Carter White House; and in the years between his tours of duty with the government he had practiced law with the Washington firm of Wiley & Salmon. He was an old Washington hand, and he maintained—at least in Ron’s judgment—a degree of separation from the Webster
Administration. Like Ron, he withheld something of himself. Ron trusted him and over the years had come to him for advice a number of times.

Attorney General Sherer reached now to the big ashtray on his desk and ground out his cigarette. “I suppose she did,” he said. “Sometime or other…”

Ron had just asked him if he thought Catherine Webster had possibly had an affair with Lansard Blaine, and, more important, if
that
was what Blaine had threatened to reveal to embarrass the President. “But it hasn’t been recently, not since they’ve been in the White House. At least I don’t think so.”

Ron thought of how Catherine Webster had said she felt someone was creating a diversion with the publicity about Blaine’s social life, and how that would seem to have argued against her as a suspect. But it might also have been a clever diversion of her own… especially if she retained strong feelings about Blaine.

…No, the Attorney General was saying, “I suspect it was something more damaging than that… I think they should tell you—”

“Lynne…?”

The Attorney General shrugged. “Could be.” He paused for a moment. “The day it happened, the day Blaine threatened blackmail, I was called to the Oval Office. When I got there the President was with Gimbel, and the two of them were as angry as I have ever seen two men. They were so angry, Ron, it makes them suspects, yes, either one of them, even the President… especially the President… was capable of killing Blaine… at least that afternoon. They didn’t tell me what it was Blaine had threatened, only that he had threatened to publicize something that would be personally devastating
to the Websters. They wanted to talk about getting rid of Blaine, how to get rid of him. They wanted to know if we could hold a prosecution over his head to keep him quiet.”

“Prosecution for what?”

“Malfeasance in office. They said they knew something about him—”

“He took bribes,” Ron said.

“Yes. They told me. They suspected it, they thought evidence could be found.”

Ron shook his head. “Then why in God’s name hadn’t he fired him?”

The Attorney General shrugged. “After a couple of days the President called and told me Blaine had offered to resign. I assumed he had fought fire with fire—had threatened to prosecute him for taking bribes unless he kept his mouth shut and got out.”

“The President told me Blaine had a change of heart and offered his resignation.”

“Well, maybe…”

“Do you really think the President was involved in his death?”

“Do you? You’re the official investigator.”

Ron shook his head. “But I think Gimbel could have been.”

The Attorney General, a ruddy-faced man whose fierce black eyebrows sometimes all but hid the upper rims of his eyeglasses, threw up his hands. “Despite what I’ve just said, I find it difficult to believe either of them did it… Bob Webster is a well-organized personality. He’s smart. He’s in control of himself. If he had killed Blaine—it’s really a farfetched notion—he’d have done it differently, and somewhere else. Fritz Gimbel is
easy to underestimate. But he’s surely too smart to kill a rat for his master and leave the carcass on his master’s doorstep.”

“Dammit, I’m still betting he’s involved some way,” Ron said.

“Blaine was corrupt, you’ve identified one man who was paying him bribes. There’s your lead, in my judgment. Maybe it does come back to Gimbel some way.
Maybe
it even comes back to the President. But there’s your lead. Put the pressure on that fellow Jeremy Johnson. Put it on the others, if you can find them. That’s my advice to you.”

Ron heard it, nodded, and at the same time wondered if perhaps the Attorney General, like himself, just couldn’t face the possibility of the unacceptable… that someone on the White House staff…
in
the White House… was somehow responsible…

Special Investigation Office, The White House, Monday, June 18, 10:00 AM

Jill Keller was in Ron’s office. Walter Locke, the FBI man, sat beside her on the couch reviewing once more Blaine’s telephone log. He’d identified several more of the names that initially had escaped identification.

“But nothing on Philippe Grand,” he was saying. “I’m betting it’s a code name.”

“Which would make it all the more interesting,” Ron said.

“Yes. Inoguchi Osanaga… he’s interesting too. He covers himself too well. All of us leave a trail—bills, checks, tax returns, medical records, credit applications,
correspondence… we leave a trail of paper behind us—perfectly innocent, usually, but a record that tells who we are and where we go and what we do. It’s usually nothing that needs to be covered, we don’t worry about it. But not Osanaga. He does business in cash. He even pays his apartment rent with cash. He gets no mail but ads. His trail is too clean.”

“Not much of a reason to suspect someone,” Jill put in.

“Pick him up and bring him in,” Ron said.

“He’ll squawk, he’s a heavyweight.”

“Treat him with elaborate courtesy,” Ron said.

Locke nodded. “I’ll make a call.”

“Next,” said Jill. “I think we’d better take a look at this.” She handed Ron a newspaper. “Have you seen the morning’s offering from New York?”

By Barbara Dash

“Damn,” Ron said. “What else?” He scanned the article. The writer went into Blaine’s furniture, the wines in his rack, his clothes, his tabs at expensive Washington restaurants, his resort vacations… his lifestyle. She concluded that all this could not have been supported by his salary and other visible earnings such as the royalties on his books. So where did he get the money to live “like a sheik”?