“What we didn’t learn in high-school history,” I tell him.
“Along with Sally Hemings, the slave bride,” says Harry. “But we’ll get to that later. The problem for us is the volume of documents.”
According to Harry, when it came to letter writing, Jefferson didn’t know when to quit. “You get different numbers when you go to different sources, but everybody seems to agree that the total is somewhere north of twenty thousand,” says Harry.
“Separate letters?” I ask.
Harry nods. “No Internet and no computer, and the man wrote letters on everything from Eskimos to enchiladas. He did have a machine to make copies so he could file them away.” Harry paws through his notes. “Ironically, it was called a polygraph.” He flips me a page across the table from one of the stacks in front of him. There’s a small picture of the device and some brief script. A machine Jefferson acquired in 1804, which was patented a year earlier. According to the article, Jefferson called it “the finest invention of the current age.”
“What’s more,” says Harry, “the authorities seem pretty certain that not all of his letters have been found or documented to date.”
“So there’s a chance there might be some authentic correspondence still floating around out there?”
“A good chance, though documenting it could prove difficult, depending on where it’s found and under what circumstances.”
“Fortunately for us, all we have to show is that the killer believed it was authentic,” I say.
“But according to what Bonguard told you, Scarborough only had a copy,” says Harry.
“True.”
Harry shakes his head. There is no seeming answer to this riddle. According to Harry, Jefferson’s papers are spread around, scattered in several different places. Most of them are in the Library of Congress. But a wild piece of correspondence that has eluded scholars all this time could be anywhere.
“Let’s start with the Library of Congress,” I tell him. “That is why you called me when I was back in D.C., right?”
“Right,” says Harry. “According to everything I can find, Jefferson’s papers with the Jefferson Library-that’s the Library of Congress-” says Harry, “include twenty-seven thousand documents. That’s correspondence, commonplace books in Jefferson’s own hand, financial accounts. The man was a fanatic about keeping financial records. There are also manuscript volumes written by Jefferson. In addition to this, there are rare book manuscripts, part of Jefferson’s original library that was sold to Congress in 1814 after the Brits burned the capital in the War of 1812. A lot of controversy over that,” says Harry.
“What controversy?”
“Jefferson was getting on in years and teetering on the personal financial precipice when Congress paid him a lot of money for his library. People squawked. They thought it was too much, twenty-some-odd-thousand dollars. It doesn’t seem like much now, but back then it was a bundle. More than that,” says Harry, “the library was what you might call eclectic. It contained everything from philosophy to cookbooks. There were those in Congress who thought it included items that weren’t appropriate for a government library. According to Jefferson, if it was printed on paper and bound between two covers, it was a book, and that’s what libraries were made of. The man read everything.”
“So where do we start?”
“That’s why I called you in D.C.,” says Harry. “Congress formed a commission about eight years ago to digitize private presidential papers held in the Library of Congress, to put them on computers for access by the public. The group is called CEPP, short for Commission on Electronic Presidential Papers.”
“So?”
“So guess who the chairperson is.”
I shake my head.
“Arthur Ginnis. It seems history is one of his passions. They must have figured the commission could use somebody with his bona fides-a member of the Supreme Court.”
“Could have been just a ceremonial role,” I tell him.
“That’s a possibility, except for one thing,” says Harry. “ Scarborough ’s notes. The ones the cops seized from his Georgetown apartment.”
“What about them?”
“There are at least four references in Scarborough’s own hand to CEPP.”
“Yes.”
“And a note in one of the margins.” Harry hands me a photocopied page.
I study it. Double-spaced typed notes, some underlined in pen with interlineated handwritten notations I assume are Scarborough’s. Toward the bottom of the page, in the margin in ink, the words “get the letter from CEPP.” I read the typed notes in the body of the text. Scarborough is talking about the economics of slavery in Colonial America, where the most valuable import was Africans in bondage.
“Think about it,” says Harry. “If you’re Ginnis, you have an army of staff combing through piles of historic documents that no one has looked at in a long time. There’s no telling what you might find. What did she tell you?” Harry is talking about Trisha Scott.
“She knew about the letter,” I tell him. “She says Scarborough made reference to it in earlier drafts of the manuscript, before the book was published, but that this was all deleted because she says Scarborough couldn’t authenticate the letter. She claimed Ginnis wouldn’t know anything about it. That he wasn’t the source.”
“Did she tell you about his participation in this little venture?” Harry means CEPP.
“No.”
“You have to figure she clerked for him. A close friend, she must have known what he was involved in. So what do we have?” says Harry.
“A tiger by the tail,” I tell him. “A Supreme Court justice who probably won’t talk to us. Unless we can subpoena him.”
“That’ll be a neat trick,” says Harry, “getting through the phalanx of federal marshals that guard the Supreme Court building. And we don’t know what he’s gonna say.”
Harry is right.
“Let’s face it,” he says. “The letter is problematic. We don’t know what it’s worth on the open market. We don’t know whether someone might kill to get it, only that it’s a possibility. According to everything Bonguard and Scott told you, Scarborough only had a copy of the letter.”
“And that he may have had access to the original through someone else,” I add.
“Ginnis?”
“Maybe.”
“Still, we can’t prove that he had the original in his possession when he was killed,” says Harry. “Without that, you can’t prove motive for murder.”
“There is another possibility.”
“What’s that?” says Harry.
“That whoever killed Scarborough didn’t do it to get the letter.”
“Then why?”
“To keep its contents from being published.”
Harry gives me a quizzical look.
“Scarborough’s book, the language of slavery, the fact that this was still in the Constitution-these were known facts,” I tell him, “though not generally items of controversy until Scarborough mainlined them, put them up on a marquee, at which time they stirred up riots around the country.”
“So?”
“So people often don’t pay much attention to government until it hits them in the head like a two-by-four. Scarborough spelled it out in big letters, the continuing stigma, the national insult. If the letter is as explosive as he believed, there’s no telling what kind of fires it might ignite if it were published, especially in the kind of flammable prose used by Terry Scarborough. Not some dry scholarly work but a racial call to arms.”