reading

“Whodunit? Ask the president’s daughter…. Truman has upheld executive honor.”

“Marvelous… Terrifically readable… She has devised a secret for her President and First Lady that is wildly imaginative.”

“Truman ‘knows the forks’ in the nation’s capital and how to pitchfork her readers into a web of murder and detection.”

“Truman keeps throwing surprises at us…. The characterization is deft, the story moves at a lively clip, and the solution is a shock.”

Murder in the White House

Margaret Truman

Murder in the White House
Copyright © 1980, 2015 by Margaret Truman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Electronic edition published 2015 by RosettaBooks
Cover design by Brehanna Ramirez
ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795344909
www.RosettaBooks.com

ONE

The radio on the helicopter was tuned to the tower frequency, and the crisp metallic voices said Air Force One was on final approach long before anyone could see it. The little welcoming party—the Vice President, the President’s daughter, the President’s Special Counsel—climbed down from the helicopter and crossed the ramp under umbrellas held by the Marine attendants. They passed through the knot of media people waiting in the drizzle and stood apart from them, a little closer to the roll of red carpet that would be unrolled to the foot of the steps when Air Force One was on the ground. They joined the media group in staring expectantly at the overcast sky.

Lynne Webster, the President’s daughter, found Ron Fairbanks’s hand. She squeezed it. One of the television people noticed and nudged the woman beside him. It was nothing odd. Washington knew there was something between the President’s daughter and his Special Counsel. The NBC camera zoomed for a moment to the clasped hands, and suddenly hundreds of thousands of people saw. For many it was more interesting than the President’s return from Paris, where he had just signed some kind of trade agreement. His daughter was a tall, handsome, brown-haired girl. The nation had watched her mature in three years in the White House: from a gawky adolescent to a young woman gaining self-assurance, poise, and presence. Fairbanks was an obscure figure. Everyone had seen his picture in Time or somewhere: one of the bright young men who worked for the President; but what he did, exactly, was not clear. Anyway, he was a good-looking young fellow; he made a good picture standing in the rain holding the hand of the President’s daughter. They made an appealing couple, a good picture for the home screens and for tomorrow’s tabloids.

Air Force One appeared beneath the overcast—a Boeing 747 now—huge, majestic, vaguely eerie in its landing configuration, with flaps down, gear down, long thin beams of light extending from its wings toward the runway. It settled slowly, its movement almost imperceptible, silent, powerful. The honor guard came to attention just as the tires touched the runway with a quick screech, and the airplane rushed past, noisy now, roaring, slowing. It passed the ramp and ran almost to the end of the runway; then slowly it turned and began its slow taxi back to the ramp.

Wind drove the rain momentarily into the faces of the little welcoming party. Fairbanks put a finger to Lynne’s cheek and pushed away a strand of her hair that had been blown there and stuck in the glistening rainwater. It was an intimate gesture the television cameras missed. He smiled at her, she returned it. They were not lovers, whatever the speculation. Since last fall, when she left for her third year of college, he had seen her only two or three times. Now that she was back at the White House for the summer, he would see her more often. He might become, over the summer, something more than a convenient, quasi-official escort for her—the staff bachelor who was available to accompany her when it was awkward for her to be alone. They might decide if they wanted their relationship to be anything more… they were amused, both by the situation and by the speculation it generated. They understood each other. She liked him, he liked her.

The 747 taxied to the ramp, its great engines whining, overpowering the chatter among the media people and the low monotone of the network narrators. Air Force One never failed to awe. Even the bold legend along its body—UNITED STATES OF AMERICA—was awesome by its simplicity. President Webster understood the dramatic value of the big airplane, and he took full advantage of it. He had retired the 707 that had long served as Air Force One and substituted this 747 for it—not without some grumbling from the Congress—probably as much from a sense of its grandeur as from the practical need. The pilots swung its nose around, and the airplane came to a stop only a foot from the stairway that was now nudged up to it.

The airplane sat there in the white glare of floodlights—raindrops sparkling in the unnaturally bright electric light. The engines stopped. Marines rolled out the red carpet to the foot of the stairs. The door opened. The Marine Band struck up “Ruffles and Flourishes.” The President appeared in the door. “Hail to the Chief.” He smiled and turned to speak to his wife. She stepped out. They stood for a moment, blinking into the glare of the light, both smiling, nodding blindly at the small crowd at the foot of the stairs. Two Secret Service men trotted up the stairs with umbrellas. The President grinned and motioned them away. With his wife’s hand in his, he hurried down the stairs.

Robert Lang Webster, President of the United States. He was fifty-five years old and looked maybe a few years younger. They said he had thrived on the presidency; and, although his face was deeply lined, he was gray only at the temples and his hair was thick and dark; he was hard and thin and given to abrupt, decisive movement. He allowed another Secret Service man to drape a raincoat over his shoulders as he stepped up to the microphones and faced the television cameras.

Catherine Steele Webster. She was fifty-four and looked forty. She acknowledged that a New York surgeon had taken some tucks in the flesh around her face and subdued some wrinkles, and she said she would have it done again whenever she thought she needed it. She accepted a raincoat as she sidestepped the microphones and reached out to take Lynne’s hands. She stood for a moment, facing Lynne and smiling, then nodded at Ron Fairbanks and winked before she moved to her husband’s side. She nudged her husband and muttered something that the CBS microphone, a little closer to her than the others, picked up for the nation—“Let’s get on with it, it’s raining.”

The President beckoned Lynne to come and stand beside him. He kissed her on the cheek.

The Vice President, Allan Torner, began to say something about the President’s quest for peace and prosperity and about how the nation had watched what he had done in Paris and now welcomed him home. The President listened to Torner and nodded at him as he spoke, but he was unable—and not at much effort—to conceal his impatience.

“Thank you, Mr. Vice President—Allan,” said the President as soon as Torner paused and might be finished. “I appreciate your coming out to meet us. I appreciate the ladies and gentlemen of the print and electronic media also coming here. This is not a very dramatic homecoming. We made a quick trip to Paris to initial the preliminary trade agreements entered into among many nations in the interest of mutual aid and shared prosperity. It really was not necessary for me to go, as some have pointed out, except that I wanted to demonstrate to the people of the United States and the people of the participating nations of Europe, Asia, and North America—all of whom will be called on to make certain sacrifices to achieve our joint goals—that the President of the United States is wholly committed to the economic program represented by the multilateral agreements. That is why I went. The negotiations are continuing. The initial accomplishment of this agreement will be followed by other accomplishments, other elements of the program. We have charted a difficult course. But we will achieve our goals.”

He wiped rainwater from his forehead with the back of his hand, and he could be seen to chuckle quietly as he flipped the water in the direction of the TV cameras. It was somehow the right gesture for the moment, one of the small gestures for which he seemed to have an unconscious but almost infallible instinct. Some of the media people laughed.

The President stepped back from the microphones and glanced at the Secret Service man nearest him: a suggestion the party was ready to be led to the helicopter.

“Mr. President!” The CBS man, Ted O’Malley, was trying to ask a question. “May we ask why the Secretary of State did not go to Paris with you? Is there anything to the rumor he is resigning?”

The President pointed, grinning, at O’Malley. “Hi, Ted!” he yelled. He was away from the microphones, and they were not picking him up. “Don’t believe all the rumors you hear,” he called over his shoulder as he turned away from the media group and herded his party toward the helicopter. He waved and grinned again at O’Malley before he turned his back and moved decisively away.

The President and Catherine Webster, Lynne, the Vice President, and Ron Fairbanks climbed into the helicopter. The floodlights had been swung away from Air Force One and now glared on the green and white helicopter. The rotor was turning slowly above the helicopter. The red lights on it were blinking. The President’s face appeared for a moment in a window. He waved at the media people and the small crowd behind the fence. The rotor swung fast, and the helicopter rose.

The copter hovered above the ramp, heavily, gracelessly, and tipped forward slightly and slid over the ground, away from the ramp and the lights, into the darkness. Two others, just like it, rose and joined it before it gained altitude and left the area of the Air Force base. The other two were helicopter gunships, carrying electronics to detect any threat to the presidential helicopter—from a missile, from an airplane, from a shot fired from the ground—and to take electronic countermeasures, or to fire shots if necessary. The three helicopters flew in formation. The presidential helicopter flew on the left of the formation tonight. Sometimes it flew in the middle, sometimes on the right; an attacker would not know which helicopter carried the President.

Ron Fairbanks disliked the helicopter. No matter it was the President’s helicopter, it was always noisy, always shook, and its erratic motion unsettled his stomach. He could never be less than fully conscious that it was the presidential helicopter and that he, Ron Fairbanks of Fairfield, California, was aboard with the President of the United States; but it unsettled his stomach just the same. The President was saying something, but it was not directed at him, and he did not try to listen.

The President was talking to Lynne. Fairbanks had noticed before how, at times like this when no one else could claim his attention, the President would focus his attention on Lynne and for a few minutes give himself exclusively to her. It did not happen by chance; he made a point of it. She was his youngest child, and he had been absent during years that were important to her—absent running for the Senate, then being a senator, absent running for President, then being President. At moments like this—and they were always private moments—he would lean toward her and speak quietly but with intensity and animation. And warmth. If the public had seen the genuine, human warmth he showed in these private moments, his public image might have been radically different.

The public image was of an able, tough, decisive man. He inspired confidence. The editorialists and pundits said of him that he was the first President in decades from whom the American people were willing to accept leadership, because he inspired confidence. He was combative. (He had utterly declared war on the Congress—privately he had once referred to the Senate as a “collection of minor-league dipsomaniacs and fugitives from dementia praecox.” Publicly, he had called the United Nations General Assembly a circus. He had called a sign-waving, chanting crowd of anti-nuclear power demonstrators “a mob of infants having a public tantrum.”) He was almost ruthless at times. When his first Secretary of the Treasury admitted on “Meet the Press” that an income tax rate adjustment the Administration was sponsoring might have an inflationary effect, the President summarily fired him. (“In this administration everyone sings from the same sheet,” he had said.) He was blunt. (He told a summit conference of European heads of government that “the basic foreign policy of the United States is pursuit of the enlightened self-interest of the United States.”) The American people loved all of it. He had a high approval rating in the polls.

But he was not shallow. (The remainder of his statement to the European heads of government was that the enlightened self-interest of the United States dictated adherence to the program of multilateral trade agreements he had doggedly promoted for three years, and he had been telling them that their own self-interest would be best served if they, too, adhered to that program.) He had courage. (He had anticipated the political furor that would follow his firing of the Secretary of the Treasury and had decided to tough it out.) He could be subtle. (His statement about the anti-nuclear demonstrators was a signal to a hundred other groups of all kinds, who had made a fad of street tantrums, that demonstrations would not influence him to take positions he didn’t believe in.) And he was a consummate political manipulator. (Even the Senate he had so colorfully characterized passed most of the legislation he wanted, because he had a thumb, and a dossier, on forty or fifty senators.)

He was powerful. He carried people along with him. His own sense of purpose was real. He was able to communicate much of that sense to the people who worked for him and some of it to the nation. He communicated more of his self-confidence.

He had almost walked away from his appointment with President-elect Webster without seeing him. He had flown from Washington for a two-o’clock appointment with Senator and President-elect Webster in his transition headquarters in the Renaissance Center in Detroit; and when five o’clock came and he knew he would miss his return flight if he waited any longer, he almost walked out and caught a cab back to the airport. He might be only a young lawyer working his way up in a Washington firm, but he had his self-respect, and the apparent rudeness of Webster or of his organization turned him angry. Anyway, the dramatic impact of walking out on an appointment with the President-elect of the United States somehow appealed to him; and it was only the thought of the explanations he would have to make back in Washington that kept him in the bleak temporary reception room, pacing, staring down from fifty floors at the gray waters of the Detroit River through heavy snow swirling on a gusty winter wind….

It was after five. A secretary had brought him from the headquarters offices to the Detroit Plaza Hotel—still in the Center—and up to a suite sixty floors above the river. The President-elect, wearing a black cashmere jacket and crisply pressed gray slacks, used his first name immediately, even though they had never met before. Fairbanks had expected a slightly more restrained man.

“Let’s get some fresh coffee. That’s… actually, it’s after five. How about a drink? Scotch?”

The President-elect was almost too comfortable. Maybe it was a facile judgment, but Fairbanks felt that Webster did not wear his triumph too well, was somehow pushing it… He summoned a secretary to pour scotch, and while she worked in the corner of the room he made precisely measured small talk: enough to cover the moment, no more. Ron had flown to Detroit in bad weather. Was it as bad in Washington? He had graduated from Stanford Law, hadn’t he? He knew Bill Guthrie, didn’t he? How was Bill? The secretary delivered two generous scotches. Webster took a manful swallow from his, leaned back in the corner of his couch.

Crisp. Abrupt. Fairbanks knew he had been called to Detroit to be offered some kind of job in the Webster Administration; he had no idea what. He knew his old mentor, Justice William G. Friederich of the United States Supreme Court, had recommended him. He had clerked for Justice Friederich. It was the thought of having to explain to him that had kept Ron from walking out this afternoon.

“Justice Friederich is a friend,” said Fairbanks. It was a careful, bland answer. He had determined to keep a wary distance. He did not want a job in the Webster Administration, really. He had come to Detroit out of courtesy to Justice Friederich, and, of course, out of curiosity.

“I’m looking for a few people with a special sense of commitment,” Webster said. “There are not many things in this life that are worth a total commitment, and I’ve known people who made that kind of commitment for nothing very much. But this… the presidency for four years. It is worth it. I’ve made the commitment for myself, and I’m looking for people who will make it with me. I’m looking for one hundred percent dedication. You think you could give that to me, Ron?”

Fairbanks looked over his scotch. “To be altogether frank, I don’t think I could. I usually hold back a little something of myself… for myself, I guess… I don’t think I could change that, even if I wanted to.” He smiled faintly. “I’m sorry. I don’t see any point in lying about it.”

“I knew that. Bill Friederich told me. He also told me you had your reasons. He said you were circumspect and, if you agreed to work for me, would support me while you were with me. Was he right about that?”

A door from another room in the suite opened, and Webster’s daughter came in. Fairbanks recognized her from her pictures. “Lynne,” said Webster. “Pour yourself a drink and sit down. This is Ron Fairbanks. I’m about to offer him a job.”

The young woman settled a critical eye on Fairbanks. She was nineteen or twenty, as Fairbanks remembered the press stories about the Webster family: a student, the President-elect’s youngest child. She was attractive, not to say beautiful; but Fairbanks thought she looked tired. He remembered reading somewhere too that Lynne Webster had said the campaign had exhausted her. She did pour herself a drink, and came to stand behind her father, as if waiting for him to dismiss Fairbanks and then she could have a word with him.

“I want you to serve as Special Counsel to the President,” Webster said to Fairbanks….

“I didn’t expect it,” Ron said to Lynne an hour later. He had not expected what followed, either. Webster had said he realized Ron had missed his return flight. He told him there was a room for him there at the Plaza; and then, for a further surprise, he said to Lynne that he could not have dinner with her after all, since Senator Fleming was arriving within the hour, and since Ron was stuck overnight in Detroit, alone, maybe it would be pleasant if they had dinner together.

Here they were, then, in La Fontaine, the fine French restaurant in the hotel, sitting opposite each other at a table: the daughter of the President-elect and his new Special Counsel. Lynne was not pleased. She had expected to have dinner with her father, not to be pushed off on a stranger and be compelled to make conversation about such things as her impending move to the White House. She was silent. She dipped her hand in the water in the fountain from which the restaurant took its name—it was immediately beside their table—and said casually that the water was room temperature. People in the restaurant recognized her. They stared. She noticed and was uncomfortable; she stared at her hands. Two Secret Service agents sat at a nearby table too, rarely taking their eyes off her. Lynne glanced around. People were embarrassed to be caught staring and quickly looked away.

The waiter lingered over their table, extending the ritual of opening a bottle of white wine so he would have more time to study the daughter of the President-elect, to memorize her features, her clothes, her figure, the better to be able to describe them vividly to friends later. Lynne accepted a glass of wine and held it between her hands, staring into it, frowning.

“There are two things,” said Ron slowly, “that being the daughter of the President-elect does not involve.”

“First, it involves no obligation on your part to entertain me this evening, simply because your father held me in Detroit so long I missed my plane. Second, it involves no obligation on my part to attempt to entertain you when obviously you are uncomfortable and bored. I suggest I pay for the wine and leave.”

“Third thing, no obligation to apologize. We were thrown together, no fault on either side… does he do that often?”

“He meant well,” she said quickly. “He thought you and I would have things to talk about, things in common. He meant to relieve me of another evening of political talk.”

And from there it went quite well. The daughter of the President-elect defrosted, though still a bit edgy… nervous… in a way that made him more curious than he could explain…

Waiting in the Yellow Oval Room were the Secretary of State, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the ranking Republican of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the White House Chief of Staff. They had watched on television the return of Air Force One to Andrews, and when the helicopter landed on the lawn they were assembled in the Yellow Oval Room, sipping drinks and munching on chips and nuts.

Senator Kyle Pidgeon, the Republican, flushed and wheezing, held the Secretary of State tight in conversation; and it was only with visible effort that Lansard Blaine was able to break away, cross the room, and shake the hand of the President.

“I’ll want you with me downstairs,” was all the President said to Blaine. He referred to a meeting in the Oval Office, scheduled for 10:30, when he would report to the other members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and to some from the House Foreign Affairs Committee. (“It makes them feel damned important to meet with the President in the middle of the night,” he had remarked to Lynne as they walked from the helicopter.)

Blaine sipped brandy from a snifter. “Solid front, hmm?” he said. “I heard O’Malley ask you if I’m resigning.”

“I’ll deal with O’Malley,” the President said under his breath—just before he smiled broadly and reached to shake the hand of Senator Pidgeon.

Ron Fairbanks studied the Secretary of State. Blaine had always impressed everyone with his self-assurance, with the reserve and calm he could display under intemperate attack by a senator or a protestor or an aggressive interviewer. It was plain tonight, however, that he was ill at ease. Ron watched him slip away from Senator Pidgeon once again and walk purposefully to the steward to order another cognac.

“Are you going to check over the Pillsbury memorandum before you leave for the night?”

Fairbanks’s attention was diverted by the question from Fritz Gimbel, the Chief of Staff. “I suppose so,” he said to Gimbel. “This is breaking up shortly…?”

In eight minutes. Yes, in eight minutes precisely if that militaristic little creep had anything to do with it, Fairbanks thought… if he left the White House before the Webster Administration left office, it would be because of Gimbel. He was an unpleasant man, invested by the President with a great deal of authority. Small, wearing an ill-fitting gray checked suit, peering about with unfriendly eyes that stared through his austere steel-rimmed glasses, Gimbel orchestrated everything in the White House. In a minute he would order the steward to leave, so stopping the drinking. A few minutes later he would suggest firmly to the President that the meeting in the Oval Office should begin in three minutes if it were to begin on time. Likely, the President would accept the suggestion. Gimbel would hold open the door.

Blaine too disliked Gimbel. Two men could hardly have been more in contrast. Blaine was a preppy, then a Yalie, and he had spent two years at Oxford. Gimbel was from Indiana and had graduated without honors from some small-town Indiana college. Blaine was a scholar of diplomatic history—had come, indeed, to the State Department from a professorship at the University of Michigan, which he had held with distinction for twenty years. Gimbel had gone from college to the Webster Corporation, first as an accountant, then as an administrator, finally as executive assistant to the President—he served Robert L. Webster in the White House almost exactly as he had served him in Detroit. Blaine had a calm, aloof panache. Gimbel was a nervous, abrasive little man.

Blaine and Gimbel had aroused cries of cronyism early in the Webster Administration. Both of them had been personal friends of Robert and Catherine Webster for years. Catherine was a psychiatrist; and, until she moved into the White House as First Lady, she had held a professorship in psychiatric medicine at the University of Michigan. She and Blaine had taken leaves of absence from the Michigan faculty at the same time—Blaine was more of a friend of hers than of her husband, although Webster had retained Blaine as a consultant on foreign affairs during his senatorial campaign and again during his presidential campaign and had expressed both privately and publicly his confidence in Blaine’s judgment in matters of foreign relations. Gimbel had served the Webster family as well as the Webster Corporation in Michigan—as a babysitter sometimes, as a driver, as a runner of errands, as well as a trusted get-things-done man in the executive offices of Webster Corporation.

“Why don’t you sit down, Lan?” the President’s daughter said to Lansard Blaine, She took hold of his arm. “I’m sure the senator will surrender you to me.”

“Of course,” said Senator Pidgeon. He was a little drunk—on the couple of scotches he had had; that was all it ever took—and he attempted what he supposed was a courtly bow and stepped back two paces.

Blaine allowed Lynne to lead him to a wing chair, where he sat staring into his brandy while she, standing beside the chair, firmly kneaded his shoulders. Blaine did not look up. He accepted a massage from the President’s daughter without acknowledging it.

Lynne had a nose that turned up, a pert lively face, a lithe figure (although a little heavy in the bust). Of all the presidential family, the burden of the White House seemed heaviest on her. She seemed to labor under a sense of it: the dignity and burden of it.

Ron Fairbanks watched her rub Blaine’s shoulders, looking curiously intent and grim. Ron sipped Irish whisky—Old Bushmills, which they had not served at the White House before Catherine Webster noticed his preference for it and ordered it. He was not jealous of Lynne’s somewhat intimate attention to the Secretary of State. He had no claim on her; and, after all, Blaine had been a close friend of her family for many years before he even met her. It did annoy him, just the same, to see the way Blaine accepted her ministrations without seeming even to notice, as though it were his due. Ron had seen her do this many times before, and he had seen Blaine receive it just this way.

Lansard Blaine was the author of an estimable two-volume history of American foreign relations, a number of single volumes on specific episodes of that history, and numberless monographs in scholarly journals. He was a rare bird, one editorialist had said: a theoretician who had been given the opportunity to put his theories into practice and had seen them work as well in fact as they did on paper. His skillful, subtle—still almost brutally forceful—intervention between India and Pakistan a year ago had averted a war, conceivably even an atomic war; and a quiet campaign was underway to promote a Nobel Peace Prize for him. He had reason to be satisfied with his tenure as Secretary of State, and the President had reason to be satisfied with it. The rumors of his likely resignation were inexplicable to Ron Fairbanks. Seeing him unlike himself tonight—nervous, withdrawn—gave credence to the rumors. Ron watched him, and wondered….

During the first six months of the Webster Administration, Blaine had hardly spoken to him. Their duties did not throw the Secretary of State and the Special Counsel together very often. Besides, Blaine had been quoted as disdaining lawyers; he was fond of quoting Henry VI—“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” But over coffee and brandy one night, when the President and Catherine Webster had called Blaine and Ron upstairs to relax with them for half an hour at the end of a particularly difficult day, Ron had won Blaine’s momentary admiration and at least a small share of friendship from him. “Come,” Blaine had said over the cups and snifters—in his very personal way disdainful yet challenging his opposite to overcome his disdain—“what, really, does it require to be a lawyer? What qualities of mind, personality, character? What?” Ron had smiled tolerantly. “To name just one quality,” he had said, “I think we might mention tact.” The President had guffawed. Catherine Webster had leaned back and laughed. And Blaine… Blaine had laughed too and leaned over and slapped Ron’s knee. “Damn good, Fairbanks. Damn good.”

Like almost everyone in politics, Blaine had a public persona and a private personality; and, as was often with people in politics, the private personality was rather less attractive than the public persona. Publicly he was smooth, self-confident, erudite, witty. Privately he was often self-contained, impatient, egoistic. Sometimes he smoked cigars, strong-smelling cigars whose aroma pervaded a dozen rooms. One thing he never was—bland. No one forgot him. No one mistook him for someone else. He defied categorization. Every pundit—and there were many—who tried to settle Blaine into a tiny pigeonhole was sooner or later embarrassed by his error. Ron remembered a luncheon at the Madison Hotel when a Post columnist, commenting on the election of an independent as governor of Florida, called it a fluke and compared it to the Bobby Thomson home run that won the National League pennant for the New York Giants in 1951. “Your simile is inapposite,” Blaine remarked. “The Bobby Thomson home run was no fluke. Thomson was a great hitter.” The newspaperman, a gray-head of many years’ experience, pulled his pipe from his mouth and smiled on Blaine. “I didn’t know you were a baseball expert, professor,” he said sarcastically. Blaine shrugged. “Bobby Thomson hit 32 home runs in 1951. And .264 in his career. He is one of the seventy-five or so all-time great home-run hitters.” Period….

In the darkness of his office, Fairbanks saw the light in the button on his telephone before he heard it ring. He had just switched off the lights in the room and was checking the lock on the door to be sure it was secure, when the telephone line lit up and the telephone began to ring. He closed the door and left it blinking and ringing in the darkened office. It was Fritz Gimbel, probably, checking to see if he had read the Pillsbury memorandum—another irritating habit of Gimbel’s was to check repeatedly to see if someone were really doing what he had promised to do. Fritz could go to the devil. At this hour he was not going to stay in the office another two minutes to assure Fritz Gimbel he had read the Pillsbury memorandum.

The West Wing was quiet. The meeting in the Oval Office evidently had not lasted long. Ron loosened his tie. His car was parked on Executive Avenue, and he could be home in ten minutes in the light traffic at this time of night. He did not carry a briefcase. He would be back here before eight in the morning, there was no need to take anything home.

One of the night guards greeted him perfunctorily, and Ron nodded perfunctorily.

Another night man was on duty at the door, as always. But this time the night guard was standing, blocking the door, frowning as Ron walked toward him along the dimly lighted corridor past the closed and locked doors of offices.

There was of course no arguing with these fellows. Most of them were humorless, all of them were armed, and some of them were touchy. This one was named—as he recalled—Swoboda; he was one of the Secret Service men who had been with the President in Chicago when the shot was fired from the hotel roof. “What now?” Ron asked wearily.

Ron stood impatiently and watched Swoboda call someone for instructions. He could see the bulge of the pistol under the man’s suit jacket. They had ceased to be subtle about the way they guarded the President.

“The President wants to see you, sir. As quickly as possible. In… the Lincoln Sitting Room. You’re to go to the elevator. Someone will be waiting for you there.”

Ron hurried through the West Wing halls. When he reached the Mansion itself he found the doors held open for him. At the elevator, Bill Villiers of the Secret Service was waiting for him.

The Secret Service man only shook his head. Villiers was ordinarily not a difficult man to talk to; but now he ran the elevator in grim silence.

They went up to the second floor. Villiers led Ron briskly through the long east-west hall. It was silent and deserted until they reached the east end, where Fritz Gimbel stood, talking quietly but with clear tension in his voice, in the center of a knot of Secret Service men. Ron recognized an FBI agent, too. Still without a word, Villiers led him to the door of the Lincoln Sitting Room. He rapped on the door.

The President opened the door. “Come in,” he said. He was pallid. His voice was hoarse and somber.

Ron stepped into the room. Two more Secret Service men were there—Wilson and Adonizio—and Dr. Gilchrist. They stood around one of the horsehair-upholstered Victorian chairs, and at first Ron did not see what was on the chair. Then he saw—

Blaine. Not Blaine. The remains of Blaine. The body of the Secretary of State was sitting on the ugly black chair, the head lolling forward and to one side, the chest—the shirtfront and jacket—drenched with blood. Blaine’s right hand still clutched a telephone. His left was clenched in his lap, clutching the fabric of his jacket. The blood—so much of it—soaked his trousers, the chair, even the carpet beneath the chair. His throat had been cut. The wound circled his throat just above the glistening red collar, and the blood still oozed from it.

Ron felt the President’s grip on his arm. Then he heard his barely audible voice… “My God… murder in the White House…”

If Woodward and Bernstein were right, Nixon and Kissinger knelt and prayed on the floor of this room the night before Nixon resigned in 1974. Ron Fairbanks had read about that a long time ago. As far as he could recall, that was all that had ever happened in this room. It was a small room, as rooms in the White House went; and it was not a very attractive room—he did not like the heavy Victorian furniture, which he thought gave the room a close, brooding atmosphere. It would have to be re-carpeted now, and the chair replaced. The late Secretary of State Lansard Blaine had bled to death, and clearly not by his own hand.

It was two o’clock before they removed the body. The President had asked Ron to stay while the Secret Service men and the FBI agents—joined for a while by two homicide detectives from the Metropolitan Police—did the mechanical, routine things murder investigators did. They did it all with Blaine’s body still slumping—stiffening, Ron supposed—in the chair.

He sat now with the President, and with Gimbel in the room, talking quietly and watching.

Blaine’s body began to turn pale. When Ron first saw the body, Blaine had looked alive, as though he might look up and laugh—as though he might put his head back on, so to speak. But after an hour, what sat in the chair was conspicuously a corpse, what remained of a man after the life was gone and much of the blood was drained out of him. The investigators worked around Blaine. They didn’t cover him. They took photographs, they dusted for fingerprints, they ran a vacuum all around the room. They worked with a self-conscious, artificial briskness—the pose of official investigators. Ron went out to the bathroom, but he still had to return.

The President watched and said little. Gimbel said almost nothing. The investigators told the President what they learned.

More praise for Margaret Truman and Murder in the White House

Murder in the White House

Margaret Truman

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