The President's Killers (18 page)

SEVENTY-NINE

There were a half-dozen cars in the lot beside the Qwik Mart. Crittenden watched as a young blonde with wide hips and skinny bare legs hurried past his car, crossing in front of the pay phones and entering the store.

As eager as he was to talk to Wick again, he had plenty of time. It was only 4:10 P.M. He’d wait until the blonde came out before he made the call.

Wick was going to be surprised to hear his voice. It had been almost a year and a half since their last conversation. Wick was going to want to know all the details. He was going to want to congratulate Crittenden and tell him how proud of him he was.

It had been so long since their last meeting that it all seemed a little unreal now how close he had become with a man of Wick’s stature.

He remembered how stunned he was by that first phone call.

“I’m Gordon Pepperday, a literary agent,” the voice said, “and I’m trying to find someone who can write a book about the Secret Service, a book worthy of the subject. Everybody tells me you’re a man I should talk to.”

He agreed to meet Pepperday for lunch the next day at the ritzy Hay-Adams Hotel. Except when Crittenden arrived at the bar, as the agent suggested, Pepperday wasn’t there. Someone at the bar handed him a note asking him to meet Pepperday at his seventh-floor suite.

To Crittenden’s astonishment, the door to the suite was opened by Arthur Wickham, one of Washington’s most respected elder statesmen, a man who had been White House counsel to one President, Secretary of Defense for another, and Special Adviser to a third. For years he’d been part of the inner-circle that once ran the country.

Now a semi-retired partner in one of Washington’s most powerful law firms, Wickham looked much older than the newspaper pictures of him, his face paler, his thinning hair whiter and curlier, but Crittenden recognized him immediately.

He was all alone in the suite. There was no Gordon Pepperday.

“I hope you’ll forgive me for luring you here in such a devious manner,” Wickham said. “I’m in a rather awkward position. My wife and I — it’s embarrassing — we’re having a few problems, and I’m afraid this is my residence at the moment. We’re trying to keep it out of the papers.”

The table beside the French doors had already been handsomely set with grilled sea bass, cream of corn soup, and white chocolate cake. Beneath them, visible in all its splendor through the French doors, was the White House.

As they sipped Pinot Grigio, Wick talked about his lifelong admiration for the Secret Service. His contacts there all had assured him, he said, that Crittenden knew more about the agency than any other living person.

“It’s a wonderful organization, Bud,” he said. “Ever think of writing a book that would give the Service the credit it deserves? I’d be more than happy to put up some money to cover your expenses and provide reasonable remuneration.”

The offer and the amount of money — $300,000 — bowled Crittenden over. He’d thought about writing about the agency for years. He had even kept voluminous files with that in mind.

Just as stunning was how much Wick knew about him. It turned out he’d shared a room at Yale many years ago with Dr. Meyerson, the shrink who treated Crittenden in the months after he tried to kill himself with vodka and a massive overdose of Tylenol. Now Wick and Meyerson were practically neighbors in posh McLean, Virginia, just outside of Washington.

It was obvious Meyerson had told Wick many things Crittenden had related to him in confidence, a gross violation of the doctor-patient relationship. Normally, that would have infuriated Crittenden, but Wick was so casual about everything, so friendly and completely supportive, that he was not offended.

After that, the Great Man invited him to three other luncheons — all equally private — in hotel suites in Baltimore, New York City, and Philadelphia. From the very outset Wick made clear his disdain for the current White House occupant. Wick’s good-natured bluntness was part of his public image, and age hadn’t tempered that.

Now, all these months later, their conversations were still fresh in Crittenden’s mind. No one, not even Dr. Meyerson, had shown as much interest as Wick in how President Patrick had mistreated him. It was a subject Wickham constantly brought up, always pressing for details and assuring him he had every right to loath the man.

“No one should have to endure what you did,” Wick said. “You have a very profound grievance, Bud. In some cases, you know, a grievance of this sort has literally transformed people’s lives, giving them a greater purpose in life. The pain they felt drove them to do things no one ever imagined they were capable of doing. Do you remember the words Shakespeare put in Marc Antony’s mouth? ‘This was the noblest Roman of them all. This was a man.’ He was talking about Brutus, history’s most famous assassin.”

On another occasion they were talking about how much the country had changed during their lifetimes. Wick seemed particularly impressed by the impact of the assassinations that shook the country in the Sixties.

“I can’t help thinking of how the great French cynic Voltaire put it, Bud. The most ideal form of government, he said, is democracy, tempered with assassination.”

He chuckled, dabbing his mouth with his red napkin.

“Nobody thinks you can get away with an assassination in a country as advanced as ours,” he said. “But look at Oswald. Or James Earl Ray. A couple of losers if ever there were any. Does anybody really believe they could have done what they did alone? Even dear old Lyndon Johnson, God rest his soul, could never bring himself to believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.”

It would be especially easy, Wick said, for an insider to take out a President. He used the Secret Service as an example. Its people knew the all the measures used to protect the President, had access to his daily schedule and travel plans, and even socialized with the individuals assigned to the Presidential Protective Detail.

In all their conversations there was never the faintest hint that Wick hoped someone might actually take out Patrick someday. But Crittenden wasn’t stupid. He could read between the lines. He was certain that was exactly what the Great Man was hoping someone would do.

EIGHTY

Wickham not only knew all about him, but Crittenden was impressed by how much he knew about Lee Groark.

Groark was at the center of an incident that had attracted a lot of media attention in Washington. One night he and Sal, Crittenden’s brother-in-law, were taking a handcuffed young black man into the agency’s local field office. He was a former mental patient who had sent threatening letters to the President, and he began to struggle and shout obscenities.

Groark hurled him headfirst into a glass door. The impact damaged his spinal cord and left him paralyzed below the waist.

In the old days, Groark would have been given a slap on the wrist and that would have been the end of it. But Connie Brooks, the woman Patrick had appointed as head of the Secret Service only a few months earlier, suspended Groark, without taking away his pay, and ordered a full investigation.

With each passing month, there was growing speculation that Groark would not only be booted out of the agency but that criminal assault charges would be filed against him.

Wickham knew the particulars of the case because Dr. Meyerson had been employed to examine Groark. In his conversations with Crittenden, Wick brought the case up several times, defending Groark as passionately as he defended Crittenden. Twice he suggested Groark might be helpful in the research Crittenden was doing for his book on the Secret Service.

Neither Groark nor his brother-in-law Sal knew anything about Crittenden’s relationship with Wick. In the end, Crittenden recruited both of them, cutting them in on the payments he received from Wick. Sal had helped bring Groark on board. He was in almost as much trouble in the agency as Groark. When it was determined he had lied about the glass-door incident to protect Groark, Director Connie Brooks not only gave Sal a formal reprimand but ordered an investigation of his record in the agency, which turned up a series of fraudulent expense claims. The case was still unresolved, but it was clear Sal no longer had a future with the agency.

The bad blood between Wick and President Patrick went back a long way. Digging into Government data bases and pumping a couple of old-timers within the Secret Service, Crittenden discovered Patrick once dated a niece of Wickham’s and got her pregnant. She wanted the baby very badly, but Patrick persuaded her to get an abortion. Five days after the abortion, he dumped her for someone else.

Crittenden brought the incident up at one of their private luncheons. The fury of Wick’s response surprised him.

“The son-of-a-bitch didn’t just knock her up,” he said, raising his voice for the first time. “He forced her to get an abortion. Mary loves kids. Always wanted to be a mother. After that damned abortion she was never able to have them.”

And there were other reasons why Wick resented Patrick. Just three years ago, in a politically charged perjury case, Patrick had refused to pardon a member of Wickham’s law firm.

What had always impressed Crittenden the most about Wick were his wisdom and the breadth of his knowledge.

“From the moment we come into this world we’re presented rules we’re supposed to obey,” he said over a plate of pasta in his suite at the Pierre Hotel in New York. “But who made those rules, Bud? They were handed down over thousands of years by people looking out for their own interests. People with the guts to take what they wanted. The world isn’t ruled by love and brotherhood and all that other cotton-candy poppycock, my friend. It’s ruled by people who very carefully calculate and exploit their advantages. It’s ruled by the power you gain through money and political influence. And it’s up to each of us, Bud, to choose. Are we going to be the anvil or the hammer?”

Wick stared at his glass of wine for a moment and laughed. “Good ol’ Lyndon. There was a man who knew how to get what he wanted. It really takes only two things, he always said. Brains and balls.”

The words had echoed in Crittenden’s mind ever since.

There were only three cars in the lot now. The blonde with the big hips had come out of the Qwik Mart and driven off. Nobody else was around.

Crittenden knew Wick would be excited to hear his voice again. In the months that had passed since their last luncheon, he had tried to call Wick several times but never got through to him. He was always out, and Crittenden hung up when Wick’s secretary asked for his name and number.

Although Wick must have wondered if any of those calls were from him, he never returned them. As deeply disappointing as that was, Crittenden understood. Wick was a Great Man in Washington, a very, very busy man.

Crittenden took a quick look at the lot around him. He slipped a Washington Nationals souvenir baseball cap on his head, got out of the car, and went over to the pay phone next to the Qwik Mart.

“Just a minute, please,” Wick’s secretary told him. She put the phone down but was back again in a few moments. “I’m sorry, Mr. Wickham has stepped out.”

“When will he be back?

“Oh, gosh, he didn’t indicate. May I take your name and number?”

EIGHTY-ONE

At 10 P.M. Crittenden stared into the blackness beside the Reflecting Pool but could see nothing.

He could hear the muted traffic noises in the distance and the hum of an airliner high above him, but the big leafy trees lining the walkway beside the Reflecting Pool blocked out all light.

The total absence of light was spooky. He couldn’t even make out Sal, who was wearing night-vision goggles and moving parallel with him only thirty feet to his left.

Crittenden touched the pistol on his hip for reassurance and slowly moved forward along the walkway. There was no way young Kinney was going to come out of this alive.

To his right he saw a vague black form. With short, cautious steps, he moved towards it. When he was close enough to reach out and touch it, he realized it was only a park bench.

Ahead of him, the white socks and sneakers of a runner suddenly materialized. They were less than twenty feet from him. In a moment the runner padded past. He could make out the long hair and hear the soft panting. It was a woman running alone. Crazy fool!From behind him, an airliner suddenly roared overhead. Through the tree branches, he saw half-a-dozen small white lights in the gray sky and the dark silhouette of the plane’s long nose and tail.

Every few minutes another plane appeared, passing low over the Lincoln Memorial as it prepared to land at Ronald Reagan National Airport.

He turned and gazed at the monument. In the flood lights, it seemed ivory, its beauty breathtaking.

It was a fitting tribute to a great man, a President who deserved to be honored. Lincoln was a man of noble character, a man of intellectual distinction.

The outpouring of grief for Colin Patrick had shocked Crittenden. The line of people waiting to file past the casket seemed endless. On TV, the saccharine tributes went on and on, as if this charlatan were another Lincoln.

Didn’t people realize the enormous public service he had performed by eliminating this contemptible creature? Patrick was no hero. He was a drunk, a womanizer, a sleazy politician who cheapened the presidency. And now, thanks to Crittenden, this arrogant Yalie snob was no longer a national embarrassment.

Storm troopers. That’s what Patrick had called them. That was how this vile politician demeaned Secret Service agents who had sworn to lay down their lives for him.

“Guard!” he barked, as if he was calling a waiter. “Come over here.” And he scoffed at Crittenden’s objections as the head of the presidential protection detail.

Patrick even used Secret Service agents to pick up girlfriends at airports and chauffeur them to hotel rooms.

When the tabloids ran stories claiming that women were visiting his hotel room on presidential trips, he blamed the Secret Service, convinced its agents had tipped them off. And he took it out on Crittenden.

“You sons-of-bitches can’t be trusted.”

The President had had too many martinis that night. Bolting out of his chair in the Oval Office, he knocked a framed picture of the First Lady off his desk.

“You know what I’m going to do, Crittenden? I’m going to replace the whole goddamn lot of you. We’ll get Pinkerton in here. They know how to keep their mouths shut.”