“I won’t call you unless I absolutely have to. If I can find another source for the letter,” I tell her, “I won’t have to.”
She thinks about this.
“If you stop now, you’re my only source. I will have nowhere else to turn. If you tell me what you know, you may give me other leads, in which case there’s a good chance I may not need you.”
I’m making a sales pitch. She knows it. She considers this for a moment, the canny lawyer behind the icy tumbler. She puts the glass down. “You have to promise that you will do everything possible to keep me out of it.”
“Agreed.”
“All right.” She takes a deep breath. “As I said, I just saw references to the letter in the early manuscript. And then I only got fleeting glimpses. I never actually had a chance to look at the manuscript in detail. We never got that far.”
“But there was no reference to any Jefferson letter in Perpetual Slaves,” I say.
“No. Terry removed it all before it was published.”
“Why?”
“We’ll get to that,” she says.
“Do you know where the earlier manuscript is?” I ask.
“It was destroyed.”
“You’re sure?”
“I was there when he shredded it. Terry always shredded the earlier versions of what he wrote. He said it was because of liability if he ever got sued. He didn’t want other lawyers rummaging through his files looking for early rewrites and trying to infer what was really going through his mind when he published the final book. He said it was safer that way. Terry was more than a little paranoid, especially about his work. He saw conspiracies under every rock and behind every bush. No pun intended,” she says.
“He couldn’t have been afraid of libel or slander,” I say. “If Jefferson wrote the letter, he’s long dead. Unless they changed the law when I wasn’t looking, you can’t libel the dead.”
“It wasn’t libel or slander he was worried about.”
“What then?”
“Violence,” she says. “Terry was convinced that what he was writing had the potential to incite a race war. Mind you, I’m not sure Terry would have objected. I rather think he would have applauded the actual violence. From what I understand, when the riots erupted on his tour for the current book, he was tickled that there were people who actually sat up and took notice of what he’d written and were motivated enough to burn vehicles and break windows.”
“Riots being the highest form of flattery,” I say.
“In Terry’s mind, probably true. But the letter was another matter. According to Terry, if readers had seen the actual text of the Jefferson letter, they would have torched Washington, every monument and stick in the place. There wouldn’t have been much left anywhere in the inner city. At least that’s what he said.”
“So he didn’t want to be the cause of this?”
“Not exactly. The problem was, he couldn’t authenticate the letter. What he told me was that he possessed a photocopy, but he was certain that at some point within a few months he’d be able to get his hands on the original. Then he could authenticate it using state-of-the-art forensics. Once he did that, what he’d be publishing would be history, and you can’t blame the author for that.”
“At least he thought it through,” I say. “The consequences, I mean.”
“Actually, he didn’t. I did. It’s what we argued about,” she says. “For all his supposed legal expertise, the truth of the matter was that Terry wasn’t much of a lawyer. He allowed his passions to run away with his head. He wanted to use the material, the letter, even though all he had was a copy. When I asked him if he knew whether it was authentic, he said he didn’t care. Even if it wasn’t authentic, it accurately reflected what had occurred regarding slavery and the hypocrites who founded the country. That’s what he told me. Almost his exact words.”
“And what did you say?”
“I told him he was sticking his head in the lion’s mouth. What if it spawned violence and people were killed? Terry told me that that was always the price to be paid for social progress and past injustice.
“I told him he wasn’t thinking clearly. That if he published it, the letter was likely to gain a lot of traction in the press-in newspapers and on television. I told him that people who don’t read books were likely to see the contents of the letter in the media because of its controversial nature and the fact that it had never been publicly revealed before. I told him that if it wasn’t authentic and if violence erupted, he could be responsible for anything that happened, legally responsible for inciting riots.”
“I’ll bet that put the chill into him.”
“He didn’t say much, not at first. There was a lot of silence. He hadn’t considered it. You should have seen the look on his face. He was like a child whose toy had been taken away. It was like, ‘I asked you to look and listen to what was in my book. I didn’t expect you to actually tell me there was something wrong with it.’ He kept me up all night talking, trying to figure some way to get around this. I asked him where he got the letter, that he might be able to authenticate it if he could get his hands on the original. He wouldn’t tell me where he got it, only that the source was unimpeachable and that if I knew where he’d gotten it, I wouldn’t be questioning it either. But he still wouldn’t tell me. By morning I don’t know if he was just exhausted or if reason had finally set in, but he realized he couldn’t use it-the letter, I mean-not without authentication.
“He shredded the manuscript, the only printed copy,” she continued. “I told him not to, that he might wait until he had a chance to get the original letter, but he wouldn’t listen. He was angry with me. It wasn’t the message he wanted to hear, so he wanted to shoot the messenger. He had to call the publisher and tell them he would be late delivering the book. It set him back several months. He had to do a heavy rewrite, building up the slavery language in the Constitution, using that as a stepping-off place. But I know that he was intent on using the letter for a later book.”
“He told you this?”
“More than once. It was as if he blamed me for forcing him to do the extra work. I just told him the facts. But Terry didn’t like facts when they got in the way of something he wanted to do or say. It was the beginning of the end for us, though I didn’t realize it at the time. I had come between him and his mistress.”
“His work?” I say.
“Publicity,” says Scott. “Terry needed the celebrity for validation. He had a big emotional hole inside him.”
“About the letter,” I say. “Assuming it’s authentic, you’re sure Jefferson wrote it?”
“All I know is that Terry referred to it as ‘the Jefferson letter’ or ‘the infamous Jefferson letter.’ As I said, I never saw it, and even the references in the manuscript I only got to glance at. As soon as he told me what he was doing and I told him there would be problems, Terry pulled the manuscript away from me. I never got another look at it.”
“So you don’t know the date, when the letter was written?”
She shakes her head.
“Or whom it was written to?”
“No.”
“Not much to go on,” I tell her.
“No, it isn’t.”
“Still, it’s more than I had this afternoon.” I smile at her from across the table, close up my notebook, and slip it back into the inside pocket of my coat along with the pen. “Did you mention any of this to the cops, when they talked to you?”
“They didn’t ask. I had no reason to think it might be important until you mentioned it.” She takes another sip of her drink. “There is one other thing,” she says. “It’s about Justice Ginnis. I’m certain that Terry would not have gotten the letter from Arthur.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because Arthur despised Terry. He had no use for him. He saw Terry as an opportunist, somebody who would use anybody to get ahead and dump them as soon as he got what he wanted. He warned me not to get emotionally involved. He wouldn’t have crossed the street to help Terry with anything, especially anything as controversial as Terry’s book. Believe me, as a former Supreme Court clerk-there wasn’t a member of the Court who wouldn’t lift their robes and run shrieking to put distance between themselves and anything Terry wrote.”