Laura had never been surprised at anything the Constables had done. She had once remarked that they seemed to think that everything, that all of history, everything that had happened in the past, had been leading up to them.
“I imagine the only real question is which of them thought of it first.”
Dazzled by how quickly she could get to the heart of things, Bobby felt the smile fade from his lips.
“There are people who were around them for years, who thought they knew them better than they ever knew anyone, who insist that it was only after a lot of other people started talking about what a great president she would be, and how this was the first real chance to elect a woman, that they began to consider the possibility.”
Laura’s eyes went wide with wonder. Her mouth began to quiver as if she were about to laugh.
“What was it you told me, not that long ago: the closer some people are to power the more willing they are to believe? But, whichever of them was the first to think of it, that’s all gone now, isn’t it? Robert Constable is dead. Or do you think she might try anyway?”
“Run for president? I doubt it. She has other things she has to deal with now.”
He said this with a worried expression, and then hesitated, not quite sure how to tell her what had happened, and what, because of it, he had to do. He got up from the chair and sat next to her on the sofa.
“Constable didn’t die of a heart attack.”
Laura guessed at once what it meant.
“Someone…?”
“Murdered him, assassinated him, that night. A woman did it, a woman he was with.”
“In the hotel, where he died?” she asked, wanting to be sure.
“He’d picked her up somewhere-which means that she knew where he would be and how she could get his attention, or someone sent her there, someone he knew, someone he trusted. She used a needle, injected him with a drug that stopped his heart, caused cardiac arrest. There’s more to it, but that doesn’t matter now. No one knows about this. You’re the only one I’ve told. I wish I didn’t know, but when she-”
“She?”
“Hillary Constable. At the reception after the funeral, she asked to see me. She wants me to find out what I can about what happened. She thinks that I might be able to do something without anyone finding out. She’s worried about what will happen if it becomes known that the president was murdered before we know who did it and the reason why it was done.”
Laura jumped to her feet, angry at what he had been asked to do.
“You can’t do this, Bobby! She’s using you. Don’t you see that? The only thing she’s worried about is how this might affect her.”
Bobby reached for her wrist and tried to give her assurances.
“That’s why I didn’t promise anything, except to see what I could find out; why I told her that whatever I found out there was going to have to be an investigation, and that the public was going to have to know.”
“Why do it at all, Bobby? What good will it do? Why take the risk?”
“Because there’s a sense in which I think she’s right. Whatever way this affects her-that’s not important. What is important is how it affects the country. If I can find out something before it hits the papers we might stop the kind of panic, the kind of wild rumors, that will tear the country apart.”
She did not disagree, but neither did she doubt her own belief that he was being drawn into someone else’s game.
“There’s something she isn’t telling you. She’s never done anything that wasn’t based on a calculation of her own advantage.”
Bobby got to his feet and took her by the hand. He smiled in a failed attempt to convince her not to worry, that he could take care of himself.
“Whatever she might be thinking, she can’t use me to cover up what happened.”
“Because you told her that you wouldn’t do that? But maybe all she wants is time.”
“If that’s what she’s after, I’m afraid she doesn’t have much left. Constable had a meeting scheduled the next morning with Quentin Burdick of the Times. He must have thought Burdick was onto something important, because he cancelled everything else he had scheduled not just that day but the rest of the week. I know Burdick well enough to know that, whatever he was working on, he won’t give up.”
Chapter Six
The flight from New York arrived in Los Angeles twenty minutes late, but Quentin Burdick had lots of time. He could spend the night in Santa Barbara and not have to leave much before noon. After the dismal, muggy weather in New York, the prospect of an evening walk along the Pacific had the charm of an overdue vacation.
Two hours after he landed, he checked into a motel across from the beach, made a few phone calls, and then, putting on a windbreaker and a pair of sneakers, went for a stroll. Almost painfully thin, with a narrow, angular face and quick-moving, inquisitive eyes, Quentin Burdick looked younger than his age. But today, as he walked beneath the palm trees swaying gently in the late day breeze, he felt older than he was. He had not been able to rid himself of the suspicion that there was more than simple coincidence in the timing of Robert Constable’s death. The rumor that he had been in bed with some woman made Burdick wonder whether Constable’s heart attack might not have been self-induced, or, if not quite that deliberate, the president had set out to test the limits of his endurance, half-hoping that he would not make it.
He had tried for months to get an interview, but instead of a direct refusal, which might have seemed to confirm the president’s involvement, he had been met with ambiguity and evasion, assurances that the president would be only too glad to talk to him once he found the time. There had not been much to work on in the beginning, a few anonymous sources whose information it was impossible to confirm, a few tax returns that raised some questions but scarcely proved anything improper, much less criminal. He had nothing he could use, nothing to write a story that he would want his name on or that the paper would print, and Constable knew it. With each new request for an interview, the excuses became more transparent, until, quite unexpectedly, Burdick got the break he needed. It was just a name, but the name, as he discovered, meant everything. The president now thought he knew a good deal more than he did.
“Tell the president,” he had told Constable’s chief of staff, “that the story I’m working on is about The Four Sisters, and that I think it’s only fair that I get his side of it.”
An hour later Burdick got a call back, not from the chief of staff, but the president himself. Cheerful and exuberant, he made it seem that he had been waiting for months to see Burdick, and not the other way round.
“They’ve got me going from one place to another; no time to do anything I like. Hell, yesterday I was giving a speech in Atlanta, and tomorrow-would you believe it-I’m on my way to Rome for one of those economic summits where all those rich people get together and I try to tell them all the good they should be doing with their money. Now when are we going to get together, Quentin? What’s a good time for you?”
Quentin Burdick stopped walking. He sat on a bench and watched the orange red sun grow larger and larger as it settled down on the far horizon and began slowly to dissolve in the sea. Years before, when he lived for a while out on Long Island, reading The Great Gatsby and wishing he could write like Fitzgerald, he sometimes stayed up all night just to watch the sun rise from somewhere the other side of the Atlantic and paint the sky a dozen different shades of pink and purple, but this was better, now that he was older, more comforting in a way, a sense of dignity and peace and the permanence of things as the world slipped gently into the night and the dreams you remembered danced once again in your never aging mind.