Gretchen ignored this.
“I understand that one of the problems the Bureau is facing is that its records concerning Mr Cheney have been destroyed, or mislaid. According to Mr Christie, that is. He has confided to me that he destroyed many of those documents and ‘doctored’ others, his word, and I am unclear what that implies for the veracity and reliability of other files and records to which he had had access in the last ten years. I should imagine that gives the Bureau a bit of a headache… ”
“If your client refuses to co-operate under the terms of the immunities agreed he will still got to the electric chair!”
Gretchen recoiled — a little theatrically — and adopted a mildly perplexed expression.
“My client is only too happy to co-operate in any way he can with the FBI, Mister Director,” she pointed out. “The problem is that he does not know what you do not know about Cheney and his associates. While he agrees with the FBI that Cheney and his son Isaac were responsible for the Bedford Pine Park atrocity, and has supplied you with detailed information about other killings Cheney and or his associates may have been complicit in, he complains that since there is no reciprocal flow of ‘case information’ his ability to help you is necessarily limited… ”
“He’s holding out on us!”
“No, Mr Director. He is not!”
The hairs on the back of Dan Brenckmann’s neck were standing on end. It was all he could do not to hide behind his chair and yet Gretchen was fearlessly slugging it out toe to toe with the old ogre!
She was magnificent…
Hoover was staring at Gretchen.
He glanced to Clyde Tolson who shrugged imperceptibly.
“Look,” Gretchen sighed. “Mr Christie is a seasoned field operative with recent personal familiarity with the subject of your investigation. In many ways he is as committed to hunting down Galen Cheney as you or any of your agents. Nobody is suggesting letting him free at this time; but surely it makes sense to make the best use of his experience, proven skills, and his knowledge of your suspect’s methods and psychology?”
Tolson leaned over and said something into his boss’s ear.
“You’d guarantee Christie wouldn’t make a break for it?”
Gretchen laughed a short, gentile laugh.
“No, Mister Director.” She met his cold gaze. “This is your investigation. You take the risks and you get the glory if it all turns out for the best. That’s the deal the Department of Justice and the FBI signed up to earlier in the week. We are here to ensure that the FBI abides by that agreement. We are not here to tell you your business.”
Chapter 28
Whenever he visited the South Claude Betancourt felt like he was leaving his country and travelling to somebody else’s. Before today he had never visited the LBJ Ranch, situated some fourteen miles west of Johnson City and felt no little discomfiture to be well over fifty miles from the nearest centre of what in Texas roughly approximated — in his opinion — to civilization, the city of Austin. The problem was that he needed the Vice President a lot more than the man who was a heartbeat from the White House needed him; that after all, was the true measure of how badly things were going for his clients. He would never have made the long, wearying and now very dusty trek down to what he regarded as universally hostile territory unless he — or rather, Jack and Bobby, and most of the rest of the Administration — was desperate.
Of course, Claude Betancourt no longer spoke for the Kennedy boys or what was left of Camelot from the glory days. He had been Joe Kennedy’s lawyer, and friend when it suited the old bootlegger, something of a distant, protective uncle to the two surviving older sons but they, and he, had never actually been that close. Jack had asked his advice a couple of times; ignored it both times. Bobby well, Bobby always knew best. Ever since Joe Kennedy’s death he had been attempting to navigate the stormy cross currents of the Kennedy family; and come to the conclusion that no feuding mediaeval dynasty — excepting perhaps, the Medici family or the Hapsburgs — were in the same league as the Hyannis Port mafia.
Now that old Joe was gone the clan was a very Catholic matriarchy, ruled over by the Presidents mother, Rose. Like everybody else in the family Rose, since 1951 the ‘Countess of the Holy See’ courtesy of Pope Pius XIII — the pontiff who failed to speak out against the Holocaust — had been under her husband’s thumb during his life. She had coped with his infidelities with, among other prescription medications, the help of Seconal, Placidyl, Librium, Lomotil and Librax, and sustained by her faith. Faith notwithstanding, there was no evidence she had lifted a finger to stop her eldest daughter being lobotomized, her prudishness was legendary, and she had made several of her children’s lives a misery insisting that they all marry within the Catholic communion. It was Rose who exiled her second daughter, Kathleen — killed in an air crash in France in 1948 — from the family for marrying ‘outside the Church’ during the Second War. Since her husband’s death it was Rose that was the keeper of the family’s secrets and the implacable guardian of what she imagined was its ‘good name’.
At times Rose had done her level best to make Claude Betancourt’s job…impossible.
The strangest thing was that he had put up with it for so long. On the one hand there was the bungling and the moral corruption of the Kennedy boys in the White House, on the other the back-biting and infighting, the grasping for the wealth of the family; all overseen by the malignant presence of the Countess of the Holy See from her Cape Cod castle.
The latest news was that as he scrabbled around attempting to cobble together enough support for Jack Kennedy not to be completely humiliated at the Atlantic City Convention in a couple of month’s time; Rose Kennedy’s lawyers were ‘secretly’ preparing a barrage of multi-million dollar suits against his firm for negligence and a failure to enact the instructions laid down in the old monster’s will. Actually, he and his people had been scrupulous in their work, it was just that Rose and ‘the boys’ did not like the size of his bills. That was the trouble with really rich people; they always thought other people should pay their dues. Publicly, he would be accused of not doing enough to guard her Joe Kennedy’s legacy.
God in Heaven!
The man’s sons had blown up half the world!
That would be the Kennedy family legacy for all time!
If a saint like the Countess of the Holy See could not do anything about that what was he, a mere mortal, supposed to do about it?
But then he was not even of her Church, so he was always going to betray the family in the end!
Jackie Bouvier had been right all along about Rose: ‘I don't think Jack's mother is too bright and she would rather say a rosary than read a book.’
In any event Claude Betancourt had decided there was nothing more he could do in New England. Old Joe Kennedy’s affairs were as ‘sorted out’ as they were ever going to be and if Betancourt and Sallis was going to have to defend itself in a Boston court — after all he had done for the Kennedys in the last thirty years — well, Rose and Jack and Bobby and the rest of that bunch were welcome to get their own lily-white hands dirty.