“So when did he die?” I ask.
“It was six weeks, almost to the day, before I visited Terry in that San Diego hotel room,” says Scott. “Margaret, Arthur’s wife, had called me from the islands down in Curaçao. Arthur had gone swimming in the ocean. He’d had a problem. He came out of the water all right, but he didn’t feel good. There was something wrong. The clerk who was with him wanted to take him to a hospital, but Arthur refused. Margaret told me that they got him home, put him on the bed, and he lay there rambling on, mumbling that now everything he’d done was for nothing. Within minutes he was gone.”
She stops, takes a drink of water, and wipes her eyes with the cloth napkin.
“Margaret told me that nobody else knew except Aranda, his clerk. We talked about Arthur for a while. We cried. She talked about the things that were important to him in his life and the result, the effect this would have on the Court. We both knew what Arthur meant when he said it was all for nothing. He was desperate to stay on the Court until after the next election. He had talked to me about it before the surgery on his hip. It was ingrained in him, so many years and so many battles-then one appointment and it could all slip away. If he had died in a hospital or dropped dead on a crowded street, that would have been it, but instead here we were the only three people on the planet who knew he was gone.
“I don’t remember how it started, whether it was a joke or if we were serious. But that’s when we decided,” she says. “It was right there, that day on the phone. We knew that it wouldn’t be easy. We convinced ourselves that all we were doing was buying some time. I flew down to Curaçao the next day. We had the body cremated. Being on the islands turned out to be an advantage. Arthur and his wife had never been to Curaçao before. She had rented the house because their own place on St. Croix was being repaired. Nobody on Curaçao knew who he was. I won’t tell you how we did it, but we were able to secure a death certificate with the date left open.
“I think we knew from the beginning that we couldn’t make it all the way through to the next election. That was seventeen months away. We talked all night. Aranda, the clerk, was getting scared. I think he thought we were out of our minds. He was right. But that was the thing about Arthur-once you knew him, you couldn’t help but fall under his spell, and Aranda was already there. He just needed a little convincing. We found a calendar and started looking at it. The more we looked, the more we realized we only had to keep the secret for nine months, from October until the following June-a single term. As we sat there in the islands, the Court was in recess. They wouldn’t start their next term until October. If we could keep the world at bay from then until the following June, the Court would start its next summer recess. Any correspondence coming in would be easy. Margaret had signed Arthur’s name on checks and other documents for years. We were far enough away that we didn’t have to worry about visitors dropping in. The problem was the phone.
“Still, the longer we looked at the calendar, the more plausible it sounded. The media back home was already fixated on the presidential primaries. Members of the House and Senate were in election mode. By the following June, with a presidential election five months away and the Court in recess, nobody would be looking for Arthur or wondering where he was. By the time the Court reconvened, the election would be a month away. No sitting president was going to nominate a candidate to the Supreme Court and secure Senate confirmation when he’s a lame duck and the election to replace him is a month out. Not in the climate of today’s politics.” As she says this, her eyes seem to sparkle. Trisha Scott is a true believer.
“You had it all worked out.”
“I know that looking back at it, you must think we were crazy, except for one thing. We had a trump card. Without it we would never have given the idea a second thought. We told ourselves that anytime things got too hot, we could simply fill in the date on the death certificate, call the Court to send out a press release, pack up the ashes, and fly home. Who would ever know? At least that’s what we thought.”
“That’s when Scarborough and his videotape caught up with you.”
“Yes. For six weeks everything went like clockwork. If court staff called, Aranda took care of it, supposedly shuttling answers, as the justice was too tired to talk. It even worked with two members of the Court. You’d be surprised how few phone calls you get when everybody thinks you’re sick and you need your rest.
“And then it happened. Out of the blue, from a direction I never even looked. It was the morning before Terry was scheduled to appear on Leno. He had been all over the airwaves for days. It was hard to turn on the television and not see his face. I got a call from a woman I knew. She wasn’t really a friend. I would bump into her once in a while downtown shopping or jogging out on the Mall. You might say we once ran in the same circles. She was just coming to the end of a relationship with Terry, and she was angry. Terry’s liaisons always ended the same way. At first I thought she only wanted somebody to talk to. She knew that I’d been through the same wringer two years earlier. And so we talked.
“But partway through the conversation she said, ‘You’re a friend of Arthur Ginnis, aren’t you?’ I said yes. Then she told me that Terry had some video of the justice in a restaurant. He was looking at it on the television a few days earlier when she went to his apartment to pick up the last of her things. He didn’t turn it off, but she didn’t know what it was, only that Terry seemed to be gloating. This was something you would always recognize if you were around him regularly. Then she told me he laughed and said something weird, something she didn’t understand. He said, ‘That old man’s about to find out what it’s like to be the author of the Hitler Diaries.’” She asked if I had any idea what he meant. I told her no. By then the blood in my veins had turned to ice.
“With everything that had happened, with Arthur dead, I’d forgotten entirely about the letter. Margaret never knew about it, nor did Aranda. I hadn’t thought about Terry in months. Suddenly I realized that Terry knew the letter was a hoax and that he was getting ready to go public. What seemed so easy in the islands six weeks earlier was now a nightmare, and there was no one I could share it with.”
The reason she now unburdens herself becomes clear. Trisha Scott has been trapped in a psychic isolation cell of horrors for almost a year, without a soul to share her tortured thoughts with.
“I couldn’t go to Terry and tell him that Arthur was dead. He wouldn’t care. Terry would simply have a second scandal to take to the bank. If I did nothing and he went public with the letter and what he knew about it, every reporter in the Western Hemisphere would be looking for Arthur. He’d be at the top of every headline in the States. And then I thought if I tried to put a date on the death certificate and Arthur turned up dead just as Terry was breaking the story on the letter, you’d have to hunt with dogs to find anybody in the country who didn’t believe that Arthur Ginnis had gotten caught in a scandal and committed suicide.
“What made it worse were Margaret and Aranda. They were innocents,” she says. “They followed my lead. They knew nothing about Scarborough or the letter or how Terry had died. All they were doing was buying time, doing what they thought Arthur would want them to do. If we couldn’t use Arthur’s death certificate to bail out, they would be caught in the middle of investigations and risk possible jail time for their part in concealing Arthur’s death. I had to stop Terry. I had no choice. What would you have done?” she says. “Tell me.”