That was the understanding, at any rate.
“No,” Vaughan then says, shaking his head. “This situation cannot be allowed to develop. It is not acceptable.”
Beth Overmyer nods in agreement. “Absolutely.” She pauses and straightens out a crease in her skirt. “What would you like me to do about it?”
Vaughan thinks about this for a while, swiveling in his chair. But there’s only one thing he can do, isn’t there?
“Don’t worry about it,” he says eventually, standing up from the desk. “I’ll take care of this.”
“O-kay.”
“But in the meantime can you get me a copy of the damn thing? Of this stupid book?”
“It should be possible, yeah. But Mr. Vaughan, is that really a good idea-”
“Yes. It is. I want to see what he’s written.”
“Very well. I’ll send it to you as soon as I get my hands on a copy.”
“Good.”
He remains there for a moment, distracted, gazing at her legs.
“Mr. Vaughan?”
“Er, yes.” He looks into her eyes. “Thank you. That’ll be all.”
She stands up, but seems reluctant to move.
“Okay, okay,” he says to her. “I get it, I get it. I just have one phone call to make and then I’m leaving.”
Ellen spends a lot of Tuesday on the couch in front of the TV, flicking between analysis of the Frank Bishop story and live coverage of the Connie Carillo murder trial. When the analysis becomes unbearable, either too convoluted or just too close to the bone, she switches to the murder trial. And when the trial becomes too much, with its longueurs and its overreliance on trivial detail-Ray Whitestone’s signature technique-she switches back.
She feels bad for Frank. She feels she should have seen this coming, and done something. She did see it coming, in fact, but not soon enough. And anyway, what could she have done?
This has all just compounded her general sense of uselessness. The thing is, instead of vegetating on the couch, she should probably be working on her next piece for Parallax, the one on West Virginia congresswoman Jane Glasser. But it’s not happening. There’s nothing in the tank to kickstart that story.
“Now, Mrs. Sanchez, could you kindly describe for the court the exact layout of the kitchen?”
Ray Whitestone is getting closer here, finally, to the heart of the matter. This is where the murder took place. Or at least it’s where Howard Meeker’s naked body was found.
In the kitchen, on the floor.
A lot of people will be relieved that the prosecution’s case seems to be entering its final phase-though no one is quite sure yet where this massive accumulation of detail Whitestone has built up is leading. So far no motive has been established, no tearing apart of Connie’s character has taken place-there’s been no real drama, in fact. The appeal of the trial, weirdly, appears to lie in its very banality, in this slow-burn, slightly soporific, almost tantric quality. It’s as if the promise of an explosive resolution is what has been carrying everyone forward.
Appropriately drowsy, Ellen stares at the screen.
There are only three fixed angles allowed in the courtroom. One takes in both the prosecution and defense teams, with Connie Carillo herself sometimes visible, sometimes obscured, at the far end. The second angle is of the witness box, which provides virtual close-up shots of those giving evidence, and the third angle is of the bench and of the fifty-eight-year-old presiding judge, ex-Olympic shot-put silver medalist J. Shelley Roberts.
“Well, first off, Mr. Whitestone, let me tell you, it’s a big kitchen, specially when you got to clean it…”
Ellen flicks over.
“… to be honest, what this sap did, what his daughter did-and I’m not condoning it, obviously, God forbid-but I don’t understand why there hasn’t actually been more of it, because when you look at the situation, when you consider the scale of what’s been perpetrated on the American people…”
And back.
“… the countertop, that part of the island, it’s of marble, I guess, I don’t know, a kind of dark, black marble, and it has these light fixtures hanging over it, they’re made with copper, I think…”
“… I mean really, were we all asleep at the wheel when these bozos passed the bill in 2000 exempting toxic assets like CDOs, repos, and swaps from regulation? Were we smoking crack when the ratings agencies declared that junk mortgages were as safe as Treasury bonds? I mean come on…”
After a few more rounds of this, Ellen has had enough and flicks the TV off. She goes over to her desk and calls up the House of Vaughan file.
She’s not sure if she’s ready for this either, but she wants to finish it. The last chapter she read was a vivid account of how James Vaughan’s grandfather, Charles A. Vaughan, was one of the seven men who met in secret at a remote hunting lodge on Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia in 1910 to plot the creation of the Federal Reserve System. The book’s final chapter then takes the reader back to Vaughan’s youth decades earlier and describes how he effectively came out of nowhere and got started in business.
The really surprising thing, as far as Ellen is concerned, is the detailed account of an incident that Gilroy chooses to close the book with, an incident that seems to identify-and with pinpoint precision-the very beginnings of the Vaughan family fortune. As she’s reading it, fully awake now and engaged, two aspects of this strike her as significant. One, the story is nothing short of incendiary-but kind of deceptively so, as it describes something that happened way back in late August of 1878. And two, in the unlikely event of the book ever being published, and sparking controversy, debate, or even litigation, Gilroy has built a pretty solid and impressive firewall around it in the form of multiple primary and secondary source citations. These include newspaper reports and contemporary eyewitness accounts.
The incident in question, which was quick and brutal, involved Charles Vaughan himself and Gilbert Morley, a renowned Wall Street speculator, as well as, indirectly, Arabella Stringham, the daughter of dry-goods magnate “Colonel” Cyrus T. Stringham.
When Ellen has finished the book, she gets on the phone and calls Gilroy up.
“Hi, Ellen.”
“Jimmy.” She whistles. “I’ve just finished House of Vaughan.”
“Oh.” Flicker of insecurity, standard issue. “And?”
She gives it to him straight-largely positive, one or two things she’s not sold on, one or two editorial suggestions. But her most enthusiastic comments she saves for last. The closing section of the book, she tells him, is fantastic, an absolute bombshell of a thing. She quizzes him for a few minutes on his methods, how and where he managed to dig up this material and how confident he would be about defending it.
Completely, he says. The ironic thing is that Vaughan’s subtle and not-so-subtle attempts to sabotage the project effectively drove it underground, causing a shift in focus, and steering Jimmy’s gaze ever deeper into the past-so that instead of trying to research and interview contemporaries of Vaughan’s, he ended up bunkering down in various basement libraries and trawling through, for the most part, old newspaper archives.
They then discuss the killing of Craig Howley and all the publicity surrounding it, but Jimmy guesses that for most publishers the link with Vaughan and his family history would still be too tenuous to justify acquiring the book and putting it out there. Vaughan really needs to stick his head above the parapet, Jimmy says, and that’s pretty unlikely at this stage.
But he’s fine with it.
The relief of getting the book finished has been liberating, and he’s looking forward to moving on.