Murder in the White House (Capital Crimes Book 1) (7 page)
Read Murder in the White House (Capital Crimes Book 1) Online
Authors: Margaret Truman
“Maybe I will…”
Blaine nodded. “I’m sure of it… Well, you used to play a fair game of tennis. Any more?”
Ron winced. It was unfair to her. For whatever reason, she had gained weight, and it seemed fairly obvious she could not play “a fair game of tennis” anymore. She shook her head, looking pained.
“You do two things exceptionally well, Barb,” Blaine said coolly. “Judging the facts of
realpolitik
in central Africa is not one of them.”
“Just what do I do well, in your estimation?”
“One,” said Blaine, “you are, with perhaps an exception or two, the hardest-working and best student of far eastern diplomatic history I ever knew, and you probably know more about Taiwanese politics than most politicians on Taiwan. Two…” He stopped and grinned. “Your other talent I’ll leave to Ron to speculate on,” and he turned abruptly, walked toward Lynne and motioned toward the tennis court.
Barbara Galena looked up at Ron, her mouth tight.
“Let’s take a swim,” Ron said quietly, wishing that ability and compassion were not such apparent strangers in Secretary of State Lansard Blaine.
The Special Investigation Office, The Justice Department, Thursday, June 14, 10:00 AM
The Attorney General had assigned an office. Jill Keller had recruited two secretaries and appropriated some furniture and equipment. Gabe Haddad had been to the State Department early and had returned to the Justice Department, bringing with him Judith Pringle, the young woman said to have been intimately associated with Lansard Blaine.
“I want to avoid embarrassing you,” said Fairbanks. He sat behind the scarred desk appropriated from the GSA, in a chair with one broken spring, looking at Judith Pringle across a desk littered with boxes and files. He fiddled with the controls on a dictating machine also hastily appropriated. “If your name is published, it won’t be because
we
published it.”
“It’s been done already,” the young woman said miserably. “Everybody knows who the
Star
meant.”
“Everybody at the State Department?”
“Yes.”
He was impressed with how much she was like Marya Kalisch. He had a file on her, provided this morning by the FBI. She had a degree in mathematics from the University of Tennessee. She had worked briefly for IBM and had come three years ago to the State Department as a systems analyst and designer… a young woman with ability and a career, yet mousy in appearance and with a quiet manner, a young woman who had been, no doubt, surprised and flattered by the attentions of the distinctly suave Secretary of State of the United States. She had dark brown hair, blue eyes, regular features—nothing exactly memorable. She was wearing a cream-white pants suit, and she was clearly nervous.
“Is what they said about you in the
Star
true?” Ron asked.
“What part of it?”
“That you had an intimate relationship with Lansard Blaine.”
“What if I refuse to say?” She spoke with the soft, southern accent of Tennessee.
“We can stop the interview right now until you get a lawyer,” Ron said. “He’ll tell you that I have the authority to ask you questions and require you to answer.”
She frowned and sucked in her lower lip.
He was not moving well. Not yet. He had dinner last night at eleven, in a hurry, nothing very good, and he’d not slept well and this morning his stomach was queasy and his head hurt as if he’d drunk too much the night before… He’d worn a dark blue suit this morning, it was almost a uniform with him, but now his blue and
white striped shirt was limp in the June heat and damp. He had loosened his collar and tie. A cup of coffee, turning cold, and a half-eaten Danish sat among the litter on his desk. He carried a pair of half glasses in the inside pocket of his jacket—he almost never put them on when anyone could see; in fact, he never put them on at all except when squinting was painful. Hell, he was thirty-four and too young to be wearing reading glasses. Now he pulled them out and pressed them into place astride his nose. He peered at her file.
“I propose to switch on this dictator,” he said. “I need to make a tape of what we say. If you don’t want to, I’ll have to arrange for a subpoena and take your testimony with a reporter making the record—”
“I have nothin’ to hide.”
“Good, so please let’s get on with it.”
He switched on the recorder, and she told him her name, how old she was—twenty-nine—and what she did at the Department of State. “Mr. Blaine spoke to me one day when he came in our section. I was sort of surprised. He was, after all, the Secretary of State. Then he seemed to be saying something to me all the time. I kept reading in the papers about him—and hearing his name every night when I watched the TV news—and when he called me and asked me up to his office and then asked me if I’d have dinner with him, I was—”
“Flattered.” They were all so damned flattered…
“Yes. And I suppose more than that.”
“When?”
“I’ve been… I guess I have to say it, I
did
see him… for about a year.”
“Tell me about it. How would you describe the relationship? A love affair?”
Judy Pringle frowned. “I would… like to call it that,” she said in a voice close to breaking. She shook her head. “It wasn’t that, I guess. Not really.”
“A sexual relationship?”
She nodded.
Ron sighed. He did not want to cause pain for this young woman but he felt he had too little time for subtlety. “Why you, Judy?”
She lowered her eyes. “Because I was willing, I suppose. I mean… with
him
! He was so great, the things he did… he was making world
peace
. I… I would have done about anything for him. And I did, too—just about…”
“Did he take you to Le Lion d’Or?”
She nodded.
Ron glanced around the shabby room. “Do you know anything about his death?” he asked casually.
She shook her head. “No,
nothing
. I swear it.”
“When did you see him last?”
She drew in a long breath. “I was with him Sunday afternoon.”
“Where?”
“In his apartment, at the Watergate.”
“How long?”
She sighed. “All afternoon. We had champagne and caviar and pâté. That’s the way it was with him. No… quickies. He was a wonderful lover, I’ve never known anyone like him—”
“Did he talk to you? Confide in you?”
She nodded—but without conviction. “He didn’t talk about his official life, his work for the government. He talked about his ex-wife and about his personal life… I was surprised at how much he told me.”
“Such as?”
“About his… preferences. About his experiences. Unless he was a liar—and I don’t believe he was—he’d certainly been, well, around. Which isn’t surprising, considering who he was and where he traveled.”
“Could he back his words with performance?” Ron asked bluntly.
“Yes.” Her voice was very low.
“Did he say anything about resigning?”
She shook her head. “As Secretary of State? No. It was the biggest thing in his life, what he’d always wanted. He was
proud
of being Secretary of State. He was a proud man, a
great
man.”
“Did he spend much money?”
“On me? Expensive dinners. Wine…
one bottle
, forty years old, a hundred dollars! Checks at the Bagatelle… He gave me some lovely… lingerie—”
She paused abruptly. “Oh my God… that
stuff
… it’s all in a drawer in his apartment…”
The State Department, Office of the Secretary of State, Thursday, June 14, 11:30 AM
“It was Dr. Blaine’s. It does not belong to the government,” said Mary Burdine. She was Blaine’s secretary, the only person Ron Fairbanks had ever heard call Blaine by his academic title. She was talking about a Louise Nevelson wood sculpture mounted on the office wall.
“Do you have any idea what he paid for it?” Ron asked.
“No, sir.”
It seemed inappropriate to sit behind Blaine’s desk. Ron sat on the couch. Jill Keller sat beside him. They faced Mary Burdine, who sat in a chair—a woman in her fifties, gray, sitting stiffly erect, conveying, maybe unintentionally, an air of building hostility. She had ordered coffee brought in, and all three of them had cups in their hands.
He had already covered all the inevitable questions… No, she had never heard the Secretary of State threatened; no, he had not seemed nervous or worried the day of his death; no, he had not told her he was considering resigning. She knew nothing that suggested any reason at all for his death.
“All I’m turning up so far,” said Ron, “is one young woman after another who seems to have had a love affair with him. What do you know about his personal life?”
“Mr. Fairbanks,” said the woman primly, “I was Dr. Blaine’s secretary. I made it a point not to know anything about his personal life.”
“But if a Judith Pringle called, you put the call through.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And if a Marya Kalisch called, you put the call through.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why?”
“Because he told me to,” she said crisply.
“Well, who did you think they were?”
“That was none of my business.”
“Unfortunately, Mrs. Burdine, it’s become
my
business. What about the others?”
She stared for a moment at the carpet, shook her head. “I can give you a list,” she said quietly.
“About how many names will be on it?”
She looked up. “Five or six.”
“All current?”
“
No
, sir. Consecutive.”
Mary Burdine had allowed herself a small smile, and Ron returned it and hoped the meeting would now be less a confrontation. “Do you know who they are?” he asked. “I mean, the two I’ve mentioned are career women with the government. Are they all?”
Mary Burdine sipped her coffee. “Mr. Fairbanks,” she said, “when I first had occasion to see that Dr. Blaine was having, shall we say, an intimate relationship with a young woman, I was most sympathetic. He was, after all, a divorced man, and the girl, the first one I noticed, was a nice girl who worked at the French embassy… she was an American but she worked at the French embassy. He had what I suppose you might say was a pretty intense relationship with her… I thought he might even marry her. He sent her flowers. He took her to South Carolina with him one weekend on a holiday. Then I discovered he had another one, and after a while he dropped the first. It was, well, a pattern. He was discreet about it, though, and they didn’t make scenes when he dropped them—or if they did they didn’t do it publicly. I… never quite understood this side of him…”
Jill Keller spoke. “It’s my impression he was not very secretive about it. He took them to Le Lion d’Or, for example. They went to his apartment.”
“But it was a
small
element of his life, after all,”
Mary Burdine said. “Let’s not forget that. He
was
Secretary of State. He had relatively little time for a personal life of any kind. The newspapers talk about his taking girls to Le Lion d’Or for dinner. How many times could he have done it? How many evenings was he actually free to have dinner there? The stories exaggerate, I
assure
you…”
The White House News Office, The West Wing, Thursday, June 14, 1:00 PM
Sitting at a red and black NEXIS terminal, Ron touched the keys and called up newspaper stories from all over the United States. They appeared on a television screen, and he frowned as he read. “Look at this,” he said to Jill Keller. “New York…”
People who live in the Watergate apartment complex in Washington probably wish history would keep its distance. The name of their home became a synonym for political chicanery in 1973 and 1974. Now it seems likely to become a synonym for erotic fun and games—even for harem-keeping—by high-ranked public officials.
The death of Secretary of State Lansard P. Blaine has blown the cover he maintained over his personal life, and we learn now, after his untimely and tragic death, that the Secretary of State all but sustained a harem in his Watergate apartment. Indeed, on the very night he died, a young woman spent the night in his apartment—to which he never returned. It was only in the cold gray hours of dawn
that she gave up her wait—or maybe she woke up—and left the Secretary’s luxury apartment.
She was, it seems, one of many, including professionals, though the Secretary’s tastes were said to be catholic.
A White House source insists that President Webster had no knowledge of his Secretary of State’s personal life. It has become known, however, that—except for the enhanced opportunities afforded him by his high public office—Secretary Blaine was continuing a lifestyle established many years ago.
Ron touched a key, and a newspaper story from Chicago began to appear on the screen…
Among the persons being questioned by investigators working on the Blaine murder are a number of young women said to have been intimately involved in the personal life of the late Secretary of State. A White House source has confirmed that at least two young women have been identified as having had keys to the Secretary’s Watergate apartment. It is understood that there are others.
One theory is that Secretary of State Blaine was not murdered for any reason involving his official duties, but as the consequence of some emotional conflict arising out of his complex personal life.
“Look here,” said Ron. “The wire story…”
The investigation into the death of Secretary of State Lansard Blaine has been complicated by revelations
that he was intimately involved with a number of young women in Washington, some of whom at least stayed overnight in his Watergate apartment. Although investigators have not revealed the identities of any of the women involved, it is understood that at least one is a civil service career worker employed at the State Department and one is rumored to be a sometime prostitute.
Lunch for Ron, for Jill Keller, and for Gabe Haddad—fruit salad, sandwiches, Cokes—was brought to Ron’s office. His jacket tossed over a chair, Ron in his shirtsleeves leaned back in his reclining chair and propped his feet on the corner of his desk. “I’m assuming none of us has talked to reporters,” he said. “None of
us
are ‘White House source.’ So who the hell is?”
