Murder in the White House (Capital Crimes Book 1) (24 page)

“If Fritz did it, we can’t protect him, no matter his good motive… we can’t cover it up…” And then, as if grasping at straws, the President said very quietly, “But you said you didn’t have evidence, only a strong suspicion—”

“Ron,” Catherine broke in, “why don’t you check in with your office? The call may have been important…”

The President sat on the couch, hunched forward with his folded arms resting on his knees while Ron went to his desk and picked up the telephone. Catherine caressed the President’s back.

Ron called the switchboard. The operator said the call was from the FBI agent Walter Locke, and she would connect him. He was at FBI headquarters.

“Mr. Fairbanks? I’m sorry to interrupt. They said you were with the President, but I think you ought to know what’s happened.”

“It’s all right, go ahead.”

“We have standing orders with the Metropolitan Police. They have a list of people. They’re to notify us immediately if anything happens involving any of those people. We had a call about an hour ago. One of the people on that list is Martha Kingsley. The woman is dead, Mr. Fairbanks. She’s been murdered.”

The President’s face was an alarming, unnatural high pink. His voice was unsteady. “It hasn’t anything to do with…”—he glanced at Catherine—“I mean, a woman like that… plenty of people could have had reason…”

Ron, still standing beside the desk, rested his hand on the telephone he had just returned to its cradle. If the President’s face were conspicuously red, he imagined his own was white. Catherine Webster had covered her face with her hands. Was she crying? He couldn’t tell.

Ron spoke first. “The police think she might have been raped. Locke went to the apartment and saw the body before it was taken away. She’d been beaten and strangled, and she was naked. It could have been a rape-killing… might have nothing to do with this at all.”

“Coincidence…” the President said weakly.

“It could be…”

Catherine looked up. “Both of you know better.”

“Even if it was a complete stranger,” the President said, “her life, and the people in it, will become news… including her customers… and maybe that she and Fritz were… friends. Complete security with someone like her would be near-impossible…
someone
else
must know about the contacts between Fritz and her…”

“Except for ourselves,” Catherine said woodenly, “no one has known about our personal matter except Lan, and Fritz, and then, apparently, this young woman. Lan is dead, and now she’s dead—”

“What are you suggesting?” the President said, knowing only too well what it was, and not wanting to face it.

“It’s another of Ron’s links, Bob. What did the two have in common? Not much, except that both of them knew our secret—”

“And Gimbel knew they knew it,” Ron finished for her.

“Doesn’t
prove
anything,” the President muttered.

“Coincidence again?” asked Catherine.

The President looked thoughtfully at Catherine. “You never liked Fritz.” He said it with regret in his voice.

“That’s right, Bob… I admit it, I just don’t trust men who can be so
devoted
…”

“Assuming I even understand you, who
should
I have trusted? Lan Blaine?”

“Right now you had better trust Ron… and, Bob, if you won’t tell him the whole story, I will—”

“I said before it isn’t necessary, has nothing to do with—”

“
Bob
… someone is going around killing the people who know. It
might
be a coincidence but it’s irrational to persist in thinking so. Ron is entitled to know. You made him investigator and put him in an impossible position. He has something at stake too. You have to trust him. Besides, please remember that Lynne cares for him, he may even be a member of the family someday…”

The President looked up at Ron, who still stood by the desk with his hand still on the telephone. The President inclined his head toward the chair where Ron had been sitting before. Ron sat down. The President rubbed his mouth with a fist.

“Ron… I’m afraid Catherine is right. You have to know.”

“Perhaps I should tell him?”

Robert Webster shook his head… “I called Blaine a liar, told him I couldn’t trust him, that he’d lost his integrity. Which not surprisingly made him furious. He all but screamed at me. ‘I’ll tell the world what integrity means to Bob Webster,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell the world what it means to Catherine Webster.’ He said he
would
tell, unless I accepted some exemptions from the trade agreements. He said—and it was pretty chilling, I can tell you, to hear him—that he would tell what he knew about Catherine and me… Ron, I
could
have killed him, and for sure I can’t honestly tell you I’m sorry he’s dead…” It was apparent he had to struggle to speak. He was still flushed, shook his head and took a deep breath.

“Bob…” Catherine said, “
I
can tell it, it’s
my
story anyway—”

The President shrugged miserably.

Catherine turned on the couch to face Ron. The President was between them, and she leaned forward a little, to see past him to speak directly to Ron. She put her hand on the President’s hand… “We lived, as you know, in Ann Arbor. Bob’s business was in Detroit, and I taught at the University of Michigan. This was twenty-two years ago… twenty-
three
. I was—what?—thirty-one? The boys were home. Bob was building his
business, we certainly had no thought of ever going into politics. We had a comfortable little circle. Lan was on the faculty. I met him there. He was, I suppose, more my kind of person than Bob’s. I liked Lan, I made him our friend. He was at the house often. He knew the boys. Fritz Gimbel was around too, and the contrast between them then was even greater than later. Fritz—Bob doesn’t like me to say this—was Bob’s factotum… He worked at the company and made himself so ingratiating, so useful, you just couldn’t run him off. So he was around too. Anyway, there were the two of them… There were stories around that Lan and I were lovers. Well, we
were not
. Never. I suppose in this investigation you’ve come across suggestions to the contrary. I’m telling you it never happened. Bob knows it never happened…”

Ron, feeling increasingly uncomfortable in the face of such personal exchanges, could only listen and nod rather dumbly.

“My field is psychiatry, as you know,” she went on. “I’m a psychiatrist, not a psychologist. I have my M.D. I taught, and I also practiced. Some of my patients were students. I saw them at home. We had a big house and I had room for a study where I saw my patients. Bob’s business kept him away a good deal. Many nights he worked late, he traveled some. We have always loved each other, but we have lived independently, each having a career, interests, friends… As you know, I didn’t give up my career to be an adjunct to his until he was elected President… All right, I’m setting the scene, in a roundabout way, for what happened…”

Ron nodded automatically, his attention fixed not only on the story she was telling but on her effort at self-control.
Her tone was calm, cool, but the tension beneath was palpable; so far she’d managed to overpower it. She was, by any standards, a handsome woman, poised and polished.

The President, too, was watching her closely.

“As I said, there were Bob’s friends, and my friends, and our friends, although inevitably the friends became intermixed some. One of Bob’s friends was a man named Oakes, George Oakes…

“George Oakes was a business acquaintance of Bob, and Bob arranged for the Oakeses and us to meet for dinner. George and Betty Oakes were some ten years older than us, but we became friends and saw a good deal of each other. We were at each other’s houses, went out to dinner, to shows. One year we even took a vacation together in Jamaica…

“Our boys were still young,” Catherine was saying. “Bob, Junior, was in high school at that time, and Sam was in elementary school. The Oakeses had a son… Stan. He was graduating from high school about the same time we met the Oakeses and was a student at the university during this time when we were such friends with his parents. Uh… Stan was a handsome, personable, warm-hearted kid, you couldn’t help liking him… but he had a problem—”

Catherine stopped abruptly, looked at her husband and whispered something to him that Ron could not hear. The President,
sotto voce
, said something back, perhaps, Ron guessed, that she didn’t have to go on.

“George pretty much dominated his son,” the President said, taking up the story with obvious reluctance. “I’m not the psychiatrist in this family but I always thought that that had a bit to do with what was
wrong with Stan. He was plain afraid of his old man, could never do enough to suit him. The boy was bright, all right, but never bright enough to suit George, who’d scrambled his way up at General Motors and had ambitions to go even higher and saw life generally as a constant fight to do more, earn more, get recognized more—and in the process never to be satisfied. I have to say this for him, though… he was as hard on himself as he was on Stan.”

“He was a severely flawed man,” Catherine said. “We didn’t know it then, he was pleasant enough to be around and a psychiatrist isn’t always too perceptive out of the office… everyone needs time off…”

Was she apologizing, Ron thought? It seemed so. Strange…

“His wife had her problems too,” the President said. “You know, people like that pass through your life, you sort of fall in with them because on the surface they’re pleasant enough, you have some apparent, surfacey things in common…”

“We had to keep Lan Blaine away from the house when the Oakeses were there,” Catherine said, rather abruptly taking back the story. “He would cut little slices off George—conversationally, I mean—and either George was too self-absorbed to notice or too much the gentleman to fight back.” She sighed, and her face colored. “Anyway, as we said, their son Stan had an emotional problem. He needed help, that was plain. One night at dinner George and Betty proposed that I take Stan on as a patient. I declined, I said our personal relationship precluded my taking their son as a patient. They brought it up several times after that, literally begged me to take their son on as a patient. They argued
that I owed it as a friend, and besides if Stan were
my
patient, it could be considered just friendly counseling or some such, and I suspect they rationalized on their own behalf that they wouldn’t have to admit, to themselves or anybody, that their son needed and was getting psychiatric treatment… Well, I felt for the boy. You could see he was living in some kind of hell, but still, I felt I couldn’t mix a personal and professional relationship. Then one night we got a call…

“George asked us to come to their house. He sounded scared to death. He said Stan had tried to kill himself. The police were all over the place. The emergency squad had taken him away, pumped phenobarbital out of him, and barely managed to save him. George and Betty Oakes, having denied the truth so long, were unable to cope. They just couldn’t understand how…

“So… against my better judgment,” Catherine said, “I did take on Stanley Oakes as a patient.”

She stared hard at Ron for a moment, as if trying to guess how he would react to the rest of the story and trying to decide how to tell it. Clearly, Ron thought, it was deeply painful for her to go on.

“Catherine,” the President said, “how about I go out and make us some drinks?”

She nodded gratefully.

The President put his hand first on her shoulder, then on Ron’s as he went by them out of the room.

“Mrs. Webster, I’m really sorry to put you through this, maybe the President is right, maybe it
isn’t
necessary—”

She smiled weakly, shook her head. “No, I’ve gone this far, it wouldn’t be right to stop now… Well, Stan’s
suicide attempt was kept quiet. I persuaded him to go on with his classes at the university. He was doing well in spite of his emotional problem. He would go to classes until the middle of the afternoon, and about three he would come to our house. I would meet with him in my little home office… Ron, I don’t know how much you’ve studied psychology so let me put it this way… Stan Oakes was emotionally
empty
. Never mind the technical term for it… He was convinced no one loved him. That sounds like a sob story, except when it’s not, it’s a terrible thing. This is what this boy literally believed. He
felt
—and that’s what counts—that he had never received any love, and so he believed he was unworthy of it, that he didn’t deserve it. And he couldn’t give what he didn’t feel worthy to receive. He was a boy without a shred of self-esteem. The sessions were painful. He would break down and cry. His parents had taught him it was not manly to cry, that his father never cried. With me he at least was able to risk crying. It wasn’t easy for him… Do you see where this is leading?”

Ron shook his head.

“No, of course you don’t… why should you? …Well, I made the mistake of a lifetime,” she said bleakly. “And not just a professional lifetime… He felt he couldn’t give, or receive, love. I, his doctor and counselor, proved to him he was wrong. I’m not defending it, although I suppose I could… It was unprofessional. It was disloyal to my husband and children”—she did not look back at Ron—“it was, God knows, stupid, at best, bad judgment. And it didn’t even help him, although he said otherwise. He had never been allowed anything
much before, by girls his age. I… introduced him… and he was shrewd enough to think of the best way to encourage me to continue… He pretended it helped him, and he was very convincing.

“I know, I know, I should have seen through all this, but psychiatrists are human too, they’re vulnerable almost by definition. Still, no question, I was a fool. Even when I told myself that my instinct had been wrong, my judgment bad, I still went on with him… he would come to the house for his appointment, and almost every day… in my office… for a month…”

She had closed her eyes, “Oh yes, I wanted to stop. But now I was compromised… he demanded that I go on. I lost control… I was afraid he’d become hysterical and go screaming to his parents, maybe to others… Even so, I at least began to… well… extricate myself from the situation. I stopped seeing him on a daily basis. He would call and say he had to see me, that he was feeling very depressed. I couldn’t be sure when he was lying… it’s not so easy to tell as you might think, and remember, he’d tried to commit suicide… I would tell him he could come to see me, but only to talk. He would come, and too often he got what he wanted… He would beg, he… he would threaten suicide, and he was suicidal… The sessions were exhausting… each one was a war… But at least gradually I was weaning him away, I felt… the last time was ten days after the time before… And then, I found I was pregnant.” She looked directly at Ron, who could not face her.