“You want to know the truth?” She looks me straight in the eye now. “It was easier than I ever thought it could be. I closed the door and walked up to the back of the chair, and I swung that hammer, over and over and over again, until the muscles in my arms burned.” She breathes heavily, takes the napkin and wipes her eyes.
“At some point I must have closed my eyes, because when I opened them again, there was blood everywhere-on the ceiling, on the walls, soaking into the gloves I was wearing, spotting and running down the raincoat. I didn’t realize it at first, but the reason I stopped swinging was that the hammer was stuck. The claws were lodged in the top of his head. I couldn’t look at it. For some stupid reason, I had to pull it out. I pulled and twisted. The hammer came loose, and his body fell on the floor. I dropped the hammer.
“It’s amazing. I…You’d think you would go into shock after something like that, but I didn’t. I was overwhelmed with this incredible urge to run, to get out of there. I knew that any minute somebody with a tray was probably going to be at the door. But I wasn’t finished.”
“You had to find the video of Ginnis and Scarborough at the restaurant.”
“How did you know?”
“It never came into evidence, but we have a copy,” I tell her, “from Scarborough’s apartment.”
“The police had it?” she says.
“Yes, but they didn’t know what it was.”
“I assumed that Terry had copies, but I didn’t think anyone would pay any attention to it. Terry had tons of tapes and DVDs all over the place. What was one more or less?”
“That was the reason you were running out of time?” I say. “You couldn’t be sure how long you had before Scarborough went public about the Jefferson Letter, the fact that Ginnis, a member of the Supreme Court, had manufactured it.”
“Arthur didn’t know he was being taped. I had to find the tape and the letter itself, Terry’s copy, the one Arthur had given him. I knew Terry well enough to know that he would have both of these with him. If he was getting ready to out Arthur in the media over the letter, he would never leave these behind in his apartment or trust them to a safe-deposit box. Terry was paranoid. Put something in a vault and people with power, especially people in government, can always find a way to get at it. The only safe place was in his pocket or the briefcase he was carrying. So I looked.”
“And of course you were still wearing the gloves.”
She nods.
This accounts for all the little smudges of blood on Scarborough’s attaché case, the large sample case by the side of his chair, and the leather portfolio by the television, where she found the letter folded neatly, lying on top.
“Where did you find the videotape?” I ask.
“It was in his attaché case. Along with two DVDs. I had to worry about that,” she says. “I didn’t know a lot about the technology, but I knew if he had time to make copies of the tape and transfer them to DVD, there could be more copies someplace else. I had to assume that the video was also downloaded onto a computer somewhere. But Terry wouldn’t have copied the tape himself. He wouldn’t know how. He was always too busy to do anything like that, or learn how. He would have taken it somewhere and had it done. Why not? Raw footage of an old man talking about the value of some obscure letter over a meal in a restaurant wouldn’t mean a thing without Terry to explain what was happening and how all the little pieces fit together. I could only hope that if anybody stumbled on copies or found the video computer file, it would have that same meaningless sense to them.”
“And since they didn’t find it at the scene of a murder, why would they try to connect any dots?”
“That’s what I thought,” she says, “until you showed up at my office that day. But at that moment in the hotel room, I had bigger problems. I tried to wipe as much of the blood off of the raincoat as I could, using a wet towel that was already on the bathroom floor. Terry must have taken a shower. I had to make sure there were no fingerprints on the plastic of the coat. I was racing. I wrapped the coat with the same towel and threw it in my bag. I took off the gloves, wrapped them in a small hand towel, and dropped them in the bag. As fast as I was moving, I was careful not to touch anything with my hands. I used wet toilet paper to wipe spots of blood off my face and off the top of one of my shoes and then flushed the paper down the toilet. I used a clean face towel to touch any surfaces in the bathroom, including the handle on the toilet. I checked myself in the mirror and then started for the door. By now the carpet was soaked, and there was blood on the floor in the entry leading to the door. I had to step around it, stay to the left in the entry. I used the sleeve of my coat to open the door, and I ran. I ran down I don’t know how many flights of stairs before I got onto the elevator. When I got outside, I must have run for a mile. I threw the towel with the raincoat into the Dumpster in the parking lot. I got rid of the other towel with the gloves somewhere else. I can’t remember.”
“And of course you kept Scarborough’s copy of the letter.”
“You know, I’ve thought about that so many times. I don’t know why I kept it. It had Terry’s blood on it. It was the only thing left connecting me to that room, but for some reason I put it in a drawer when I got home. The DVDs and the videotape of Arthur talking with Terry in the restaurant, those I destroyed, but not before I watched one of the copies on my television. It was shot in early spring. Arthur was still recovering from his hip surgery. You could see his cane hooked on the edge of the table in the restaurant. This frail old man sitting there breaking bread with someone he despised, smiling, his eyes twinkling, thinking all the while that he was about to stick his fork in the devil.”
“And then Scarborough opened the letter and laid it on the table. You saw the look on Ginnis’s face,” I say. “He wasn’t smiling then.”
“No.”
“So that was the plan, to get Scarborough hooked on the Jefferson Letter, to get him to publish a book based on it, then reveal it as a fraud and leave him twisting?”
She nods. “Arthur had it all set up. He wrote the letter himself. You know, when you’re dealing with Arthur Ginnis, you’re dealing with a first-rate mind. He knew that the old code words for slavery in the Constitution, the fact that the framers had tried so hard to dodge the issue by avoiding the use of the word itself, made the substance of the Jefferson Letter completely plausible. Terry would buy into it in a heartbeat. Evidence of an offer to the slaving interests of Great Britain as the price to secure liberty for the American colonies and avoid a war-for Terry that was the stuff of dreams. Shatter the American myth. It was what he lived for. Terry hated the power structure. He hated authority, unless he was the one wielding it. He saw conspiracies everywhere.”
She seems more comfortable now, out from under the dark cloud of the murder, the details of the Jefferson Letter almost seeming to amuse her.
“First Arthur tried to get Terry to include the Jefferson Letter as part of Perpetual Slaves, a kind of one-two punch-slavery in the Constitution and history’s ultimate dirty deal in the letter. Arthur knew that Terry couldn’t resist. The letter confirmed every evil thought Terry ever had about the white ruling class, rotten to the core from the instant they entered the promised land.
“If that wasn’t enough, Terry was always the insecure author. Nibbling at the edges of his mind was the ever-present thought, ‘What if I trot out the old language of slavery and all they do is yawn?’ He could never be sure that the language was enough to ignite the firestorm he needed for success. But toss in Jefferson’s letter and Terry had an instant flamethrower. When Arthur dangled it, Terry did a swan dive, chasing the copy.”