This speech was delivered in a tone of finality. Phelps, still bristling and muttering, shoved his photographs back into their envelopes. V.T. took him aside and spoke earnestly to him for some minutes in a low voice. Karp turned to the coroner. "Sorry about this, Doc. Things are apt to get heated around here."
Wendt tried on a smile. "It was sweetness and light, I assure you, compared with some of our panel's meetings."
"Oh? What's the problem? Murray throwing his weight around?"
"Not at all. But there seems to be a certain… reluctance to stray too far from the Warren findings. Whether Mr. Phelps's theories about the documentary material will have any weight with them I can't say."
Karp couldn't say either. Wendt took his leave and Phelps left too.
"Well, that was certainly fun," said V.T. when they were alone. He fussed with the projector and began to rewind the film. "Don't mind Phelps. He really is a top-notch photo analyst."
"Yeah, with a good imagination. Did you see the back of Kennedy's head missing in that film?"
V.T. shrugged. "Like you said, we'll get somebody else to check it out."
"Right. Meanwhile, the inmates are in charge of the asylum. The secret dissection, my God! You know we're doomed, don't you?"
"Semidoomed, maybe. One still has hopes. One of the little threads might pull something loose."
"Maybe, but I doubt it," said Karp. "And you know why?" He clenched his fists and adopted a Job-like pose, his arms and face raised to the uncaring heavens, and shouted, "Because this isn't a real investigation!"
"My, my, Butch," said V.T. in a soothing tone. "You seem to be having a nervous breakdown. Would you like to watch the executions film again? It might settle your nerves."
Karp snorted and rumbled, "Speak for yourself, buddy. You look like shit-you must've dropped ten pounds since you got here."
"Yes, well, as you know, you can't get a decent knish in this town."
There was some more of this weak humor, and they were laughing companionably when a secretary stuck her head in and said Fulton was on the line and did Karp want it sent in here.
"What's happening, Clay?" said Karp when they were connected.
"I'm at the Sheraton in Reston," said Fulton. "This old spooks' meeting's just breaking up."
"And?"
"Zilch. I waltzed our boy up to Mr. David and he introduced himself as Antonio Veroa. David didn't bat an eye. He just said, 'I'm happy to meet you. I know the name, of course.' Then Veroa moved on. When I asked him if David was Bishop, he looked sort of funny, and he said, 'They are very similar in appearance but that is not Bishop.' "
"Oh, shit!"
"My feelings exactly. So-what should we do with Mr. Veroa now?"
"Crap, I don't know! We might as well ship him back to Miami. Did Al Sangredo pull up anything on the drug charge against Veroa?"
"Yeah, it's apparently some heavy weight of coke, found in his boat. He could go away for a long time."
"Want to bet he doesn't as long as he sticks to this line of bullshit? Want to bet they'd throw away the key if he testified that David was Bishop?"
"You think the fix is in, huh? Want Al to try and check it out?"
"No, fuck it," said Karp wearily. "Why screw up his life too. I know when I'm whipped. Just thank the little bastard, kiss him for me, and stick him on a jet back to Miami."
"What was that all about?" asked V.T. when Karp had finished the call. Karp told him.
"Well, then," said V.T. brightly. "A perfect day."
Marlene now found herself transported to a somewhat higher circle of purgatory. Early, yet not too early, she packed young Lucy up and made her way, via several buses, to the Dobbs home in McLean. Lucy played with the Dobbs children while Maggie and Marlene had coffee and cake and discussed the day's research plans, and chatted amiably. Thereafter, Maggie disappeared, as did the children. Maggie either took them somewhere nice, or else she went on her own wife-of rounds, and left them to the efficient and grateful Gloria of El Salvador. Afternoons were spent at play group, except when it was Maggie's turn to be hostess, at which time Marlene abandoned her duties on the book and helped out with the kids.
During most of most working days, however, Marlene was left delightfully alone, in a well-appointed and cozy little room that Maggie called "the study." (This was different from "the den," a larger room, where the congressman had his home office.) There were two windows looking out at an alley of bare and graceful dogwoods; inside, the room boasted built-in walnut bookshelves, several wooden filing cabinets, a long, shiny refectory table, a blue IBM Selectric on its own stand, lighting from desk and standard lamps, a worn chaise lounge of the Dr. Freud-in-Vienna type, and a working fireplace. This last was supplied daily with logs and kindling by Manuel, the Dobbses' gardener and houseman. Marlene was thus often to be found working away in front of a cheerful blaze. In one corner of the room there was set up, incongruously, a movie projector on a rolling metal stand, and there was a folding screen that went with it.
The romance of the situation was not lost on Marlene. A poor but honest lady, down on her luck, finds genteel employment in the home of a powerful aristocrat with a dark secret-it was pure Bronte, and she luxuriated in it: the comfortable and elegant surroundings, the freedom from drudgery, the refuge from the ignominy of Federal Gardens. In that she regarded her Washington exile as a catastrophic hiatus in her real life, she had no trouble in slipping into the persona of a sort of upper servant. Sitting in front of her fire, laboring at her papers, she thought that, to complete the image, she lacked only a floor-length brown dress with buttons up the front, and a ring of keys at her waist. That and her hair in a neat bun with a center parting.
The work itself she attacked with an energy born of months of enforced intellectual idleness. Maggie had made a perfunctory start at organizing and indexing the Richard Ewing Dobbs archives, and Marlene spent several weeks updating this and becoming familiar with the material. This comprised several drawers full of clippings related to Dobbs and his arrest and trial, and the political arguments and commentary that resulted from that event; boxes of photographs, letters from prison, and other personal memorabilia; the transcript of the trial itself, with all the documents produced by discovery, and notes made by Harley Blaine, the defense lawyer; a thin sheaf of material yielded by the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act; and finally, a large archive of 8mm home movie film.
The senior Dobbs, it turned out, had been an avid home cameraman, from almost the first period in which such equipment had become available to the general public. There were four library shelves stacked with neat green file boxes in which were stored hundreds of spools in Kodak yellow cardboard sleeves, all neatly labeled with dates from the late thirties to the late fifties. Marlene had watched dozens of these films selected at random from each year of the record. At first, she ran film when she was bored with reading; later she became fascinated with the verite aspects of the record. She watched a young, soft-looking, but handsome Yalie in sleeveless sweaters, saddle shoes, and slicked-down dark blond hair become a studious grad student and then a pipe-puffing New Deal bureaucrat in baggy three-piece suits. She watched his play: horses, croquet, tennis, engaged in with other men of the same type and clouds of bright young things, that cloud gradually resolving itself into one, a slim, elegant girl with good bones, a corona of blond hair, and a dignified expression. After 1938, she appeared on nearly every reeclass="underline" Selma Hewlett Dobbs, the wife, now the Widow. Marlene saw the courtship, the wedding (two reels), the honeymoon (Havana, Rio, eight reels), the new house on L Street, a more subdued Selma, her belly swelling from one reel to the next, and finally, in 1939, the infant congressman, little Hank (six reels).