“What do you know, Senator?” asked Atwood, and then repeated the second question. “What is the reason you wanted to see me?”
This was maddening. Hart felt the anger rise in his throat. He turned his head, ready to lash out, when he suddenly thought he understood.
“You’re afraid of something. What is it?-That someone is going to find out that the president didn’t die of a heart attack in that hotel room, find out that he was murdered? Why are you afraid of that? You’re the head of the Secret Service-you don’t have any reason to cover this up…”
Finally it was there, the first glimmer of something genuine in that manufactured face, a spark of anger in those deliberately impenetrable eyes.
“It wasn’t our fault. We did everything we’re supposed to do.”
Hart was quick to take advantage. He fixed Atwood with a piercing stare.
“Not your fault? You let a woman into his room, a woman you obviously knew nothing about; a paid assassin, as it turns out, who murdered him. I can understand why you might not want to see that story in the papers, but that doesn’t change what happened, or what has to be done about it.”
“That was always the hardest part about protecting Robert Constable: protecting him from himself,” replied Atwood with a brief nod. “You think we had time to do a background check on every woman he had to have? Do you know how many times he had an agent bring a woman to his room, someone he had just spotted in the crowd? I lost a couple of the best agents I had. I had to transfer them to other duties or they would have quit. President or not, they weren’t going to be anybody’s pimp. To tell you the truth, they’re the ones I most admired. Now, what do you know and why do you want to see me?” He paused, and then relented. “I know what she told me, but I need to hear it from you.”
Did that mean that Atwood did not trust the former first lady, wondered Hart, or that he did not trust him? It seemed a point of some importance.
“I understand that you became the head of the Secret Service on her recommendation.”
A slight smile flickered briefly on Clarence Atwood’s stoic mouth.
“She told you that, did she? It might even be true, for all I know.”
“She doesn’t always tell the truth?”
“Do you know anyone in this town who does? But don’t misunderstand, Senator; I have no complaint of Mrs. Constable. She-and her husband, within his limits-always treated me fairly.”
“‘Within his limits’? That’s an odd way of putting it.”
“There were things he did, things that put me in an awkward situation, things I can’t talk about.”
“I think I understand,” replied Hart, trying to feel a little more sympathetic. “You want to know what I know and why I wanted to see you. Because the president’s widow asked me to, after she told me what you told her: that the president was murdered. She knows the truth will have to come out, but she first wants to know what happened: who killed him and why. Because otherwise-”
“Everyone will have their own idea, each one more vicious than the last. I can’t say I disagree. There are only a handful of people who know about this, and you’re the only one I don’t quite trust. It’s nothing personal, Senator. I don’t trust anyone I don’t know, and frankly, I don’t trust most of those. I’ve been here too long; I’ve seen too much. And the others that know about this-it isn’t that I trust them any more than I trust you, but they have careers they want to protect. Most of them, anyway,” he added in an allusion Hart grasped at once. Hillary Constable had a lot of things, but a career of the sort Atwood could affect wasn’t one of them.
“It’s true, then?” asked Hart. “There isn’t any doubt? A woman he was sleeping with shoved a needle in him and killed him with a drug.”
“What have you been able to find out-anything useful, anything at all?”
Hart had agreed to look into things, to see what he could find out; he had not agreed to report to the Secret Service.
“Your job is to protect the president, not conduct an investigation into the cause of his death. This is something for the FBI. The president has been murdered, and you still haven’t told them?”
Atwood looked down at his large hands with their three misshapen fingers, broken years earlier in a fight. The lines in his forehead deepened as he pondered over what he was going to say next, and just how far he could go.
“I’ve had conversations.” He said this slowly, as if to impress upon Hart that he knew what he was about; that he knew to protect himself from any later charge that he had withheld information, or delayed revealing what he knew, in a murder investigation of this magnitude.
“You’ve had a conversation-with the director? You told him that the president was murdered, and the FBI hasn’t started an investigation?”
Atwood answered with another silent look.
“They have started an investigation,” said Hart, “but quietly, discreetly. Is that what you’re telling me?”
“There is some concern about panic, the way the public might react, the kind of rumors that might-”
“Yes, I know all about that,” said Hart with a show of irritation.
He got to his feet and walked over to the window. He pulled the drapes open far enough to look out. When he turned around, he did nothing to hide his disgust.
“If it wasn’t bad enough that Constable did something that got himself killed, he’s managed to involve first his wife, and then the head of the Secret Service, and now the director of the FBI, in a conspiracy to conceal a murder! Don’t you see the irony in that? We’re doing everything we can to stop speculation about what might have happened in that hotel room when its becoming more and more likely that the truth is far worse than what anyone right now could possibly imagine!”
With a halting, disjointed movement, Atwood got to his feet. He stood there, staring at Hart in a way that, with those who worked under him, was usually all that was necessary to force an explanation. But Hart did not work for him, and the only effect was to make the senator less inclined to tell him anything.
“You know something,” said Atwood. “What is it? What have you found out?”
Hart ignored him.
“How long do you think it’s going to be before the fact that the president was murdered leaks out?” Before Atwood could respond, Hart shook his head as if to tell him that it did not matter, that the question was irrelevant. “It’s already leaked out. There’s at least one reporter who is all over this story. This secret you’re trying to keep-you’re going to be reading it in the papers and there’s not a damn thing you or I or anyone else can do about it. So it seems to me that unless you want to find yourself on the wrong end of a congressional investigation, you better start telling me what you know and you better start doing it now.”
To Hart’s immense surprise, Atwood actually seemed relieved, as if he had been expecting him to put it in precisely these terms.
“Wait here a moment.”
He was gone a few moments and when he came back he was not alone.
“This is Dick Bauman, the agent in charge that night.”
For the next several hours, until well past midnight, they sat there, the three of them, going over everything that had happened the night Robert Constable died. Atwood became a different man around poor Bauman, who had almost reached the point of blaming himself for the president’s murder. Atwood kept telling him that it was not his fault, that his only failure was a failure of decency, trying to protect the president, and the president’s family, from Constable’s gross misbehavior. Hart agreed, telling him that in the circumstances in which he had found himself, it would have been heartless, almost an act of cruelty, not to keep the tawdry details of Constable’s last night private. Bauman’s answer stopped them both.