He was becoming angry as he spoke, angry with her, angry with himself. He should never have agreed to any of this. He should have turned her down and insisted that an investigation begin at once. He had made a mistake; he was not going to make another.
“The president was murdered! That’s the only thing you should be thinking about, the only thing that matters. I said I’d see what I could find out and I have. He was murdered because someone wanted to keep him quiet; murdered so he couldn’t tell anything to Quentin Burdick. And it seems pretty damn obvious that The Four Sisters-someone involved with The Four Sisters-is behind it. The president was murdered. And if you don’t tell what you know to the authorities, I will!”
“But he wasn’t murdered! That’s what I had to see you about, what I said was so urgent.”
Hart was on his feet, staring hard at her.
“What are you saying? You told me he was given a drug that caused his heart to stop. They found evidence of it at the autopsy. Atwood confirmed it.”
Hillary Constable stepped closer. She seemed almost contrite, as if she had bungled things and made his life difficult because of it.
“I was distraught, out of my mind with grief; and yes, I admit it, with anger, too. He dies in bed with some whore, one of those women he always had to have; and worse than that, everyone knows it, everyone is talking about it! The pressure I was under, all the things I had to do-I overreacted, misinterpreted what I was told. Clarence Atwood didn’t tell me that-”
“You’re going to tell me that Atwood didn’t tell you your husband was murdered? Atwood told me that himself. And you can trust me: I didn’t misinterpret what he said!”
Her chin came up a defiant half inch.
“You may find he’s changed his mind.”
Her eyes were hot and full of warning, but then, an instant later, they changed, became, if not quite friendly, accommodating, willing to discuss their differences.
“It doesn’t really matter how he died, does it? He’s dead. Why tarnish his reputation with more allegations, more rumors about things he might have done that he should not have done? He did some good things, some great things, as president. It seems to me we have some duty to protect that, the legacy, the public record, of what he did.”
“Protect it with a lie?” cried Hart, as angry as he had ever been. “Lie about the fact that he didn’t die of natural causes, that he was assassinated? Lie about the fact that in the years he held office he was part of a criminal conspiracy? Lie, so you can run to take his place, the widow of our beloved president, and not the widow of a charlatan, a fraud?”
“I’m going to run, and I’m going to win! I need your help, Bobby,” she said with a savage look. “Don’t let me down. There’s more at issue here than you think.”
Hart did not answer. He turned on his heel and started out of the room.
“Think about it, Bobby!” she shouted after him. “I’ll deny I ever said anything about the way my husband died. And don’t think that Clarence Atwood will back you up. He’ll say whatever I tell him to say.”
Hart wheeled back around.
“Don’t you care anything about the fact that your husband was murdered, that someone assassinated the President of the United States?”
“Of course I care about that. But there’s nothing can be done about it that won’t make things worse.”
“That’s the difference between the truth and the lie: whether it makes things better or worse for you?”
“Not for me,” she insisted. “For the country.”
“What kind of country do you think this is: a country too stupid to deal with the truth?”
Chapter Thirteen
Ten minutes after Bobby Hart left Hillary Constable, ten minutes after he stalked out of her lit up house, he was not quite sure what had happened, why she had changed her mind. She had told him that contrary to all the published reports her husband had been murdered and asked him to find out what he could, impressed upon him the urgency and the need for discretion, the concern that they find out who was behind it before it became public knowledge that the president had been murdered and all the rumors started. And now for some reason she had changed her mind, decided that it had not been murder after all; or rather that it was simply better, more advantageous, to ignore what had happened, ignore the fact that her husband had been murdered, because she had political ambitions of her own. Austin Pearce thought Hart had missed the point.
“She always means what she says, when she says it.”
He clasped his hands behind his neck and leaned back. They were sitting in the living room of Pearce’s townhouse on Washington Square. Austin Pearce was in his favorite chair, next to the open French doors where almost every evening and nearly every Sunday afternoon, he could, depending on his mood, look up from the book he was reading and gaze across the street at the moving crowd in the tree-lined park, the young women who brought their children to play, the old men who sat in silence on the benches reading the newspapers, or glance instead at the bookshelves that towered fifteen feet up to the gold inlaid ceiling of a building that, he was almost certain, had been the one Henry James had in mind when he wrote his story about a long vanished family that had lived here more than a hundred years ago. Even if it was not true, Austin Pearce liked the thought of it, the way it seemed, like his own attachment to the past, to give a greater sense of permanence to things.
“I don’t think she changed her mind at all,” he said. Sitting up, he looked at Hart, slouching in another easy chair on the other side of the French doors. “She asked you to find out what you could about who might have murdered the president, and you did, didn’t you?”
Hart heard what Austin Pearce said, but he did not quite understand it. He was still angry about what had happened the night before, frustrated by his inability to see what he suspected must be right in front of him, something that he thought might be obvious to Austin Pearce, who not only had the most penetrating intelligence of anyone he knew but had known both of the Constables for years. It was the reason he had flown up to New York.
“Consider what you’ve done for her, what she knows now that she didn’t know before, and probably wouldn’t have known, if you had not helped.”
“The Four Sisters?”
“Yes, of course. She knows that was the story Burdick was working on; she knows that was the reason that the president was meeting with him.” Pearce spread his fingers and tapped them together. He seemed to concentrate on a thought, a question that was taking shape in his mind. “Did she seem surprised?”
“She didn’t deny that she knew Jean de la Valette, and she knew the name of the firm. She resented the suggested that any money might have changed hands; insisted that the money they had came from friends of theirs who would have been paid back from what they expected to make after Constable left office. But, no, now that you ask, she didn’t seem surprised. She never does, though, does she? Seem surprised, I mean.”
“She’s hard to read, I’ll give you that. But the point is that, thanks to you, she knows the story is out there, that Burdick is onto it. She knows about Frank Morris, that Morris implicated the president and that Morris believed that The Four Sisters had the president killed. She knows something else, too: she knows that there isn’t any way to prove any of this without her or the Secret Service.” The brown eyes of Austin Pearce seemed to take on a deeper shade as he tried to grasp her intentions. “Has it occurred to you that maybe Robert Constable wasn’t murdered after all?”