"Seven." We hung up, leaving just one immediate question, at least for me: would someone try to kill me before I could get in?
At this point, I had no choice but to call Peter Martin, who snapped up the telephone on the first ring as if he had been waiting for my call all day. Just as Havlicek preserved the story in the moments before he died and passed it on to me in the form of Stemple's address, I needed to make plans in case I came in harm's way.
"Well, we were right about one thing," I said. "Curtis Black was definitely involved in the shooting. Only he was the victim, not the attempted assassin."
Martin said, "What? What are you talking about?"
I said, "Here's the short version. Curtis Black is the president of the United States. One of the guys from his old criminal gang told me so today." I paused and added, "Take this one to the bank."
"I don't understand." You don't hear Martin say that all that often.
I said, "Curtis Black became a federal witness. He came out with a new identity, that of Tony Clawson. A few years later, he ditched the name Clawson and assumed the name Clayton Hutchins, who, I have a raw hunch, was an actual person who had died very young. He's a smart guy. He went off and made a fortune in computer software. He came into politics almost unwittingly. He became governor of Iowa at the last minute, and then he rose up almost in spite of himself. And when it was time to run for president, think about it. He had a fabricated background. It was real, but it wasn't. It was chosen as a best-case scenario, so there could be nothing wrong with it, except it was a lie.
Remember when David Souter won confirmation to the Supreme Court? One of his best qualities was that no one knew anything about him because he was such a recluse and never wrote anything down. This is like that. In a media age when all we do is look for scandal, he didn't have any because his whole life was made up. And fortunately for him, we all found scandal in his opponent, so we were distracted."
I could hear Martin breathing heavily into the phone, playing out every angle of this story, every possible thing that could go wrong versus what might be right.
"You have it firm enough to go with?"
"No. But Hutchins has agreed to see me. I'm heading over there in about an hour."
"Is it safe for you to go?" Good question; Martin getting his bearings.
"Don't know, but it's even less safe not to go."
"All right. I'll be in the office when you get back. Be careful, and be good."
When I paged Drinker next, he returned the call before I could even lean back in my chair.
I said, "I need to speak with you soon. I'm ready to go with a story and want to go over some angles. You know as well as I do that I wasn't the intended target at Congressional. I'll give you one final chance to help."
He replied, sounding sincere, "Go ahead."
"No. In person. Meet me in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in twenty minutes. And just so you know, I've already written everything I know down and passed it on to my superiors. Don't fuck with me. It won't do anyone any good."
Maybe it was rude to leave him hanging in a hotel lobby on the night before this historic election. But maybe it was ruder still to kill Havlicek in cold blood, and try to kill me. Screw him.
I paused and ran my fingers over a picture I had in my luggage of Katherine, eight months pregnant, sitting at our patio table, her chin resting on the palm of her right hand, smiling at me. "This is it," I whispered. Then I snuck out the back, through the kitchen.
It was after dusk, chilly. I scanned the parked cars, checking to see if any of them pulled out and followed me as I walked, but none did. I had the feeling that death waited around every corner. I headed down Sixteenth Street with a baseball cap pulled low over my head and flanked by the two gentlemen I had assigned to protect me. I ducked into the Hay-Adams Hotel, just across Lafayette Park from the White House. I sat at the bar, ordered a Coca-Cola, and wrote out the lead to my story dozens of times on the keyboard of my mind, glancing constantly at the door all the while.
About forty minutes later, out the tall windows, I could see Marine One descending from the sky and disappearing from view to land on the South Lawn. One more time, I pulled my cap low, and hurried straight across the park at a pace that was closer to a trot than a walk. At any minute, I felt, my life could end. I also felt as if my destiny was out of my hands.
I arrived at the northwest gate, where I flashed my badge to a Secret Service agent. I felt safe on the White House grounds, maybe wrongly.
The agent buzzed me in with a bored nod. An interview like never before.
Truth be known, I didn't have anything close to what I needed to get this story into print. Like I said, I had the word of two admitted felons, one of whom was dead. I don't think even the National Enquirer would go to bed with this one.
So what I needed here, like a good cop trying to create an airtight case, was a confession. And just as a good detective uses the power of the law to scare the bejesus out of suspects, I needed to use the power of the written word to intimidate a president on the verge of his own election. I needed him to think that his fate had already been decided, at least in terms of the coverage in the Boston Record. I needed him to think about the inevitable onslaught to come, the media maelstrom that would follow my story, the classic feeding frenzy from which there would be no escape. I needed him to believe that the best and perhaps only way out was an honest admission of fault.
When I was led into the Oval Office, Hutchins was sitting at his desk in shirtsleeves and a crisp red tie loosened at his neck, the top button undone. He was alone. Dozens and dozens of lawyers and dozens more political advisers and newly minted friends in every corner of official Washington, and he chose on this evening to handle this topic alone, just as I suspected he would. That, in itself, was interesting.
He held a heavy lowball glass in his hand, and the glass was filled with about three fingers' worth of what looked to be whisky and ice.
As I sat in a chair in front of his desk, he nervously slid the glass around, causing the cubes to smash softly against each other. He brought the glass up to his face and absently took a sip.
"You believe in redemption?" he asked me, his voice deep, animated, breaking the heavy silence like a clap of thunder.
I considered that question for a moment and replied, "I do, sir.
There's something very human about it, something almost moral, and something uniquely American. We have the right to screw up. More important, we have the right to another chance, at least in most cases."
He pondered that for a minute, shook the ice around in his glass again, and took another sip.
"It's election eve," he said, looking me in the eye. "My pollsters informed me this afternoon that I'm going to win. You care for a celebratory Scotch?"
Why not? Create a mood of confidence, two men exchanging secrets. "If it's convenient, sir."
He pressed a button on the side of his desk, and a dark-skinned steward, Indian-looking, came silently through a side door. "Raj, get my friend a Johnnie Walker, please," Hutchins said. To me, "Rocks or no rocks?"
"No ice."
"Neat," he said to the steward, who turned and walked quietly out the door he came in. Hutchins called out after him, "Make it a double, Raj. We're celebrating."
After I got my drink, Hutchins bore into me with his eyes. "I watched you guys go after my opponent early in the campaign. Christ, what did he do? Fudge some information on his mortgage application or something ten years ago, and you guys try taking him down, try ruining his political career. You were throwing around half-truths and nontruths and buying into anything you were fed. I thought it was sickening then, but it helped me, so I kept my mouth shut. The guy, he wins his party's nomination. He's sacrificing his time, his livelihood, his fucking reputation. He's on the doorstep of the White House, for God's sakes. He's campaigning all over the country twenty hours a day for something he believes in, even if that something is only himself.