“You say Ginnis despised Scarborough?”
“Oh, here we go,” she says.
“Sorry. I can’t help picking up on little words.”
“Forget I ever said it.” She reaches for her purse under the table, ready to walk out.
“Don’t get angry. I’m just looking for background. I need to know who Scarborough was, the kind of man I’m dealing with as a victim.”
She wears a stern expression. Then she softens, puts her purse back down.
“I’ll tell you,” she says. “You will have no difficulty finding enemies of Terry Scarborough in this town. Just turn over any rock,” she says. “I didn’t know it when I first met him. I was young, naïve, impressionable, straight out of law school. Terry was a well-known published author, on television almost daily. I was dazzled.
“It wasn’t until later, months later, that I found out that Terry had savaged Justice Ginnis in one of his earlier books. It was the case of the century,” she said, the presidential election almost twelve years ago now, the squeaker decided by the Supreme Court.
“Terry published a book that kicked the insides out of the Court. He claimed to have sources, people privy to private conversations between the justices and those on the outside, the parties and their lawyers. The decision by the Court came down five to four; it ended the election and effectively anointed the new president. Arthur was the swing vote, and Terry excoriated him for it in public print. He called Arthur a party hack and claimed that he’d been in direct contact with lawyers for the new president before he voted on the case. It wasn’t true. It hurt Arthur, and it hurt him deeply.
“But that’s the thing about the Court-you just had to sit there and take it. They all knew that. It was the price the nine of them, and all their predecessors, paid for a lifetime appointment to an institution that’s not supposed to be political. When somebody takes a shot, they can’t go to the media and fight back. You just have to live with it, and Arthur did. It’s the reason I laughed when you said someone had told you that Terry and Arthur were friends. Justice Ginnis would have put an ocean between himself and Terry Scarborough if he could have. When I introduced Terry to him at the reception, I thought Arthur would choke. The next day Arthur took me into his office and warned me that Scarborough would try to use me to find out what was going on in chambers, to dig up dirt on cases. I told him I would never reveal anything like that.”
“Did he? Scarborough, I mean?”
She nods. “More than once. I told him I couldn’t discuss any part of my work at the Court, and I wouldn’t. I did two years clerking for Arthur. I was getting ready to leave the Court-this was about the time that Terry was finishing up the early draft of Perpetual Slaves, the one that included the stuff from the letter. By then we weren’t living together any longer. I think Arthur was relieved, for me, if not for himself.”
“It sounds like you and Justice Ginnis are very close.”
“Friends,” she says. “No, it’s more than that. Arthur has a father complex. Almost all the clerks who’ve ever worked for him have felt this. He means well.” She pauses, smiles, and looks down at the table for a moment. “And I owe him a lot. He could have fired me. I mean, he knew that Terry was a threat to the confidentiality inside the Court. I was living with him. Other members of the Court would have either fired me or found some less-important duties for me outside their chambers. Arthur didn’t do that. He warned me. I gave him assurances, and he trusted me. I can’t explain it,” she says, “but there’s a kind of almost nuclear bond that forms from all of that.”
“And Terry Scarborough?” I ask. “How did he fit into all this?”
“In the beginning I suspect he gravitated to me because I could mingle with people Terry wanted to be seen with.”
“I think you underrate yourself,” I tell her.
“Thank you. But you have to live in this political hothouse to understand it,” she says. “It may be the power center of the world, but it’s actually a very small town. Everybody knows everybody. They attend the same receptions, do the same parties, and the press hangs out. The media make mental notes of who’s talking to whom. It was important for Terry to be seen at functions socializing with members of the Court and Court staff. You see, Terry sold himself to the national media as one of the prime legal insiders, on call twenty-four hours a day to go on the air, to be quoted in the Washington Post or the New York Times. He lived to be seen and heard.”
“And of course only a fool would fail to grasp the symbiotic relationship between face time on the tube and book sales,” I tell her.
“With Terry it was more than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“He liked being recognized at airports, in crowds. He craved it. Someone would come up to him and tell him that he looked familiar, and Terry would casually flip the celebrity over his shoulder like some people discard a cigarette butt. He would say, ‘You probably saw me on Larry King last night,’ and walk away. He loved it. They say that celebrity is its own narcotic. For Terry it was the drug of choice. I remember at one point he told me about the night he did his first appearance on cable news. All his friends called to tell him how they’d seen him on the tube. For Terry it was like doing lines of cocaine. He couldn’t get on the next show fast enough. He hired a PR firm with media connections. He told me he was paying them seven thousand dollars a month on his teaching salary, dipping into savings while he was writing his first book on spec. That was part of the problem with the relationship,” she says.
“In what way?”
She looks at me, suddenly realizing that maybe she’s already said too much. “Nothing. But you get the picture,” she says.
“So Ginnis was relieved when you broke it off?”
“Hmm?” I catch her musing, lost in thought.
“Your relationship with Scarborough.”
“Oh, absolutely. He told me I’d get over it, move on, find someone else. He was right. It was better for me, much healthier.”
“So where do you think I could find him?”
“Find who?”
“Ginnis.”
“You haven’t heard a word I’ve been saying. You’re dogged. You’re awful.” She laughs. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to contact a sitting justice of the Supreme Court? I mean, unless you’re a personal friend or a family member, it’s probably easier to get through to the Oval Office. I told you, he doesn’t know a thing about Terry’s book or the letter. You’re chasing rainbows-give it up,” she says.
“I wish I could, but there’s a man sitting in a jail cell back in San Diego, and unless I can figure out who else may have had a reason to kill Scarborough, Carl Arnsberg is looking at a possible death sentence.”
6
If you think politics is the occupational calling of the Antichrist today, you should have been around in Jefferson’s time.” Harry gestures toward the pile of paper in front of him. “This stuff gives me a whole new insight into the founding generation.”
Harry has been doing research while I was gone. Spread out on the table in our conference room are notes, stacks of photocopied pages, and computer printouts. “If they didn’t invent partisan bickering,” says Harry, “they sure as hell took it to the level of a whole new art form.
“The current crop in D.C. would have nothing on these guys,” says Harry. “Jefferson kept his own muckraker-in-chief on payroll. A guy named James Callender. Callender was a kind of one-man Defamation Incorporated. And he didn’t need a word processor. For a fee he would do a journalistic gut job on anybody you wanted. Lies passed through his quill at a rate that would make the turkey feathers wilt. What’s more troubling,” says Harry, “is that Jefferson didn’t seem to be too bothered by any of this. When it came to political enemies, he wasn’t interested in sweating the details. Paint ’em with a broad brush,” says Harry. According to my partner, the author of the Declaration of Independence followed his own creed of political warfare: defame ’em first and let posterity sort out the facts.