They shook hands and said goodbye. They both knew they would never see each other again, that within months Morris would be dead and that Burdick was not coming back, but they liked each other too much not to lie. Burdick said he would see him soon, and Morris claimed there was still a chance he might get better. And so they parted, better friends than they had been before.
Burdick thought about that as he drove south along the Pacific shore, back toward Santa Barbara on his way to the airport in Los Angeles and his scheduled flight; he thought about the way that, looking death in the face, Morris had come once again to the knowledge of how he ought to live, how he had thrown away everything for the chance to end his life a wealthy man, and how desperate he now was to change that and make everything right.
It was a long drive, more than three hours, but Burdick made his flight and six hours later was home in New York. He was walking through the airport when he first learned what had happened. Glancing at a television set as he passed by a bar, he stopped when he saw a picture on the screen of Frank Morris. He moved close enough to hear that, according to the reports just coming in, the former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee had been killed in prison, stabbed to death with a knife.
Burdick’s blood ran cold. He looked behind him, and then he began to move quickly, trying to lose himself in the crowd. He did not believe for a minute that Morris’s death could have been just another prison stabbing, a mindless act of violence. Someone knew that Frank Morris had talked to a reporter, and they had known it right away. They killed him because the warning they had given him earlier had not worked. Morris had been right: they must have had Constable murdered as well. And if they were willing to do that, murder to keep their secret, there was no reason to think they would not kill him as well.
Burdick began to walk faster, faster with each breath he took, until he was outside on the sidewalk, frantically waving for a cab. He was on the bridge into Manhattan when he remembered who he wanted to call. It was late, but that did not matter. He had his home numbers, both the one on the west coast and the one in Washington, D.C. He felt a sudden surge of relief when Bobby Hart answered on the third ring.
Chapter Eight
Bobby Hart had not been able to stop thinking about what Robert Constable’s widow had sworn him not to tell anyone, that instead of dying of a heart attack, the former president had been murdered. That had been shocking enough, but the cold indifference with which she had reported it, her only thought what might have to be done to cover it up, had him shaking his head. At least he had had the presence of mind to insist that while he would find out what he could about who might have had a reason to have her husband killed, there would have to be a full-scale investigation. He had made that quite clear. He was not going to become part of a conspiracy, no matter how noble its intention, to keep the public from learning the truth about how the president of the United States had really died.
Hart stared out the window of the high-speed train he was taking to New York. He felt trapped by a promise that, as Laura had reminded him, he had had no real reason to make. It was almost uncanny, the way he had been maneuvered into it. He did not owe anything to Robert Constable or his memory, and he owed even less to his widow, but she had somehow made it seem that he did. It had been subtle, even oblique. It was nothing that she actually said, but rather the manner of the way she treated him, an equal partner in a shared responsibility. Because he was now in a position to do certain things, to get answers where few others could even ask questions, and she was now suddenly vulnerable and alone, he had an obligation to do something before the story got out and things went insane.
They were twenty minutes from the station, twenty minutes from Manhattan, the end of the short, three-hour trip that Austin Pearce had asked him to make so he could talk to him alone. The secretary of the treasury during the first term of the Constable administration had something important to discuss, something about the same foreign investment firm that Quentin Burdick had apparently been asking questions about.
And now Burdick, for reasons of his own, wanted to see him as well. He had known Burdick for years, but he had never heard him sound the way he had late last night on the telephone. Burdick might look like the proverbial nearsighted bookworm who, with his halting, diffident speech, was afraid of his own shadow, but he had once been a soldier in Vietnam, decorated for his bravery. Quentin Burdick was not afraid of anyone, which made the whole thing even more unaccountable.
Ten minutes from the station. Eager to get a start, some of the passengers began to grab their luggage from the overhead racks. Hart folded his arms and leaned closer to the window, thinking more about the Constables as the skyline of New York drew closer. Presidents were often divided between those, like most of the early ones, who came from the country, and those, like Kennedy and the Roosevelts, Reagan and some of the other, more recent ones, who had their roots in the life of the cities. Constable, on the other hand, seemed to occupy a position that in a way was neither and both. He had come from a small town and become governor of a small state, but there had always been something about him, a grasping ambition that, even when he had the presidency, never seemed to stop. It was an ambition that seemed to embody that same relentless search for fame and fortune that had drawn so many young men and young women from the rural heartland of the nation to the glittering opportunities of New York. Both of them, husband and wife, had acquired by habit and long practice what every native New Yorker had bred in his bones: the ability-what many who lived other places thought the charlatan’s ability-to make you think that whatever they wanted was something you really thought they should have.
It explained that cold indifference that Hart had not at first been able to understand. Whether manufactured or authentic, it had been part of the appeal. It allowed Hillary Constable to make it appear that she was only asking him to do what was good for the country, to make the kind of sacrifice she had been making for years: protect, so far as he legitimately could, the president’s reputation, find out the reason he had been killed before anyone else knew he had been murdered. Because if the story got out before they knew what had happened, the speculation would not end in their lifetimes. Every rumor, every unfounded allegation, all the sordid details of Robert Constable’s storied life, would become the stuff of legend, a tawdry myth that the truth, whatever it was, would never entirely dispel.
The train pulled into the station, and a few minutes later Hart stepped outside into the blistering New York heat. In Washington the heat became thick and oppressive, seeping into your pores, making movement a burden and ambition someone else’s mindless dream; here it seemed to make everyone move more quickly, more determined to get to cooler, air-conditioned places where they could get to work. Hart checked his watch as he jumped into a cab. The train had run late, but he still had a few minutes before he was supposed to meet Quentin Burdick.
“I’m in a hurry,” he told the driver.
The driver gave him a look in the rearview mirror that made Hart feel a fool. They were in the middle of Manhattan at a time when you were lucky if traffic moved at all. Twenty minutes and two miles later, the cab pulled up in front of a nondescript East Village restaurant with a faded, painted sign, the kind of place no out of town tourist would think to visit, and no one in the city with serious money would think to go. It was the kind of place that the ignorant would have called with a shudder a joint or a dive, but where those who had an ear for serious music would still gather late on a smoke-filled night to listen to some of the best jazz, and drink some of the worst booze, in Manhattan.