“That explains it, doesn’t it?” insisted Bauman, his eyes aflame. “Why Atwood didn’t have me work with a sketch artist, why he didn’t want an investigation. He arranged it, he organized the whole thing: the murder, the cover-up-everything!”
Burdick smiled patiently. He understood the pressure Bauman was under, the guilt he must feel, but still he had to wonder why, despite all that, he had not seen the flaw; why, despite his emotions, he had not realized his mistake.
“But Atwood is the one who told you that Constable had been murdered,” he reminded him in a quiet, sympathetic voice free from any hint of criticism. “If he hadn’t told you that, you wouldn’t have known there was anything to investigate.”
Burdick thought this would cause Bauman to hesitate, to reconsider what he had said, but instead Bauman dismissed the objection out of hand.
“He didn’t have any choice; not after I had seen the girl.” Bauman’s eyes were eager, alive, filled with a certainty so complete that it was impossible to doubt that he had thought it all through and was utterly convinced he was right. “It didn’t go the way they thought it would: Constable didn’t die quietly, he didn’t just pass out from that injection. He cried out for help. Maybe he saw the needle, maybe he saw what she was going to do; maybe when he first felt it he struggled to get away. Whatever happened, he made enough noise that I went running for the door. She had to open it; she could not just hide behind that locked door. Everyone on the floor would have been alerted and she never would have gotten away. She knew that, she had to know that. She had to open the door; she had to go into that act of hers: pretend she was scared, panic-stricken, that in the middle of having sex with the president he had had a heart attack and died!”
Burdick waited, expecting more. Bauman seemed momentarily transfixed by the certainty of his own account; sufficient, it seemed to him, to remove every question, every doubt. Burdick gave him a puzzled glance.
“But that still doesn’t explain why he told you that Constable had been murdered. You saw the girl, but you didn’t know then that she was pretending anything. You believed her when she told you what happened. That was the reason you…the reason you did what you did.”
With a brief nod, Bauman acknowledged the truth of what Burdick said. Then he gestured toward the package.
“It’s all in there: the autopsy, the report. There had to be one, but Atwood made sure it was carried out in private, as few people as possible involved. It probably never occurred to him that anyone would notice a small puncture wound, and if that hadn’t been discovered there wouldn’t have been any reason to look for evidence of a drug. It would have been a simple case of heart failure, exactly what you would expect to find, given his age and his history.”
But even as he said it, Bauman now seemed uncertain. Despite his seeming confidence, he was bothered by a latent suspicion that would not go away.
“Or maybe it did occur to him,” he ventured after a pause. “Maybe that’s what he was counting on; maybe that’s what he wanted: a way to prove that it was not a heart attack, that it was murder.”
“What do you mean? If he hired her, if Atwood hired someone to kill the president, what reason could he have to want anyone to know that the president had been murdered?”
A look of contempt shot across Bauman’s troubled mouth.
“Why would he want it known that the president had been murdered?-I guess that would depend on who he wanted to blame.”
Leaning on his elbow, Burdick rubbed his chin as he seized on that fugitive thought and tried to follow it through to all its awful consequences. If Bauman was right, if Atwood had hired someone to kill the president, the obvious question was why. It was more than doubtful-it seemed to him an absurdity-to think that Atwood could have had any reason of his own to want the president dead. Robert Constable had made him head of the Secret Service: that seemed to rule out the possibility of some deep sense of disappointment, the kind that required revenge. But if it was not personal, then Atwood had to have been acting at the direction of someone else, someone who had something to gain from the death of Robert Constable, something they could not have so long as Constable was still alive. And not just that, it had to be someone who could convince Clarence Atwood that it was worth his while to betray his office-betray his country, if you will-and risk his own life, to say nothing of his reputation, on a charge of conspiracy to murder the President of the United States. Burdick was almost afraid to ask.
“Who put Atwood up to this? Who is he working for? Do you know?”
Bauman began to scratch the back of his heavily veined hand. Staring blindly into the distance, he kept scratching at it, scratching it as if it were the only way to erase from his memory what he wished he had not learned.
“It’s all in there,” he said finally, though even now he refused to shift his gaze, to look back at the package that now belonged to Burdick. “Every rotten, dirty part of it.” Slowly, and as if with a conscious effort, his eyes came back round. He looked straight at Burdick. “You won’t believe it, the first time you go through it. You’ll think it’s all a pack of lies. You’ll want to destroy it, throw it in the fire and burn it, hope that once you’ve done that it will leave you alone and you won’t remember it,” he remarked in a strained, hopeless voice. “It’s sort of like being told that someone you love is dead. I lost my wife a couple of years ago; she died in an accident. There’s a moment when you think that if you can just go back a few minutes, even just a few seconds, you can start all over and that what you’ve just been told won’t happen. But you can’t, can you?-And then you know with that awful, perfect certainty that nothing is ever going to be the same again.”
Looking somehow much older than he had just an hour earlier, when Burdick had first seen him, Richard Bauman stepped out from behind the table with the threadbare tablecloth and the tarnished silverware and stood for what seemed a long time in the darkened silence of the deserted café. Finally, he put his hand on Burdick’s shoulder and told him that whatever the consequences, no matter who it might hurt, it all had to come out, and that he trusted Burdick to make sure that it did.
“The country deserves the truth.”
“Where are you going to be?” asked Burdick. “How do I get in touch with you?”
“I’ll try to reach you, but right now, I’ve got to disappear.” He glanced one last time at the package, the tale of horrors he had found in Clarence Atwood’s private office. “Read that; you’ll see what I mean. And be careful. No one is safe.” And then he turned and headed out the door, into the streets of Washington and the hoped for anonymity of the city.
Burdick watched him go, struck by the cautious efficiency of the way he moved, the pigeon-toed gait that former fighters and former football linemen had, the clean discipline of the athlete, trained to strength and quickness, who knows as little about hesitation as he does about fear. If he was not certain of it before, he was certain of it now: Bauman was not bragging when he said he would have taken a bullet for Robert Constable. It was who he was.
After the door swung shut and Bauman was somewhere safe outside, Burdick asked the waitress for another cup of coffee and, measuring in the right amount of milk and sugar, began to examine the contents of the stolen file. He started with the photographs. The longer he looked at them, the more unlikely the young woman seemed for the part of a killer. She looked too young, too alive, too innocent, really, to have anything to do with death. But then perhaps that was why she was so good at what she did, why she found it so easy to get close to the men she killed. That was one point on which Burdick was quite clear: this woman who appeared to be still in her twenties had done this kind of thing, not just once or twice before, but probably dozens of times. You did not hire an amateur to murder the president of the United States.