She looked away, took a drink as if she were trying to steady her nerves, and then sank into an easy chair. She took another drink, longer, slower this time, and appeared to lose herself in thought. A moment later, she looked up at Hart and gestured toward the chair next to her.
“I’m in some trouble, Bobby, and you’re the only one I can think of who might be able to help.”
Hart barely knew her. He had never before this had a private conversation with her. He could not think of anything that would have made her think of him. She read his mind.
“You’re too modest. Or, perhaps,” she added with a shrewd glance that made Hart cautious and a little uncomfortable, “you’re not modest enough. You know perfectly well that you can do a good deal more than most people around here. You have great influence; everyone-or nearly everyone, because there are always a certain number of idiots and fools-respects you. The point is you know how to get things done, and, that rarest of qualities, you have a sense of what is important and what is not. Look out that window; look down at that crowd of well-wishers who only wish well for themselves. Think they care anything about the great Robert Constable now? Think they cared anything about him when he was alive, except what he might do for them? They’re all free now, whatever they might have owed him. I’ve got the burden of the great man’s reputation, the obligation to make sure that no one ever finds out the truth, the whole truth, of what he really was.”
Hart had seen too much of politics and what it did to people to be shocked very easily, but this was stunning, the harsh bitterness with which she described her husband and what his death meant for her. He was almost afraid to ask what she wanted him to do.
“You said you were in some kind of trouble. I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”
Hillary Constable stared into the middle distance, her mood changing in the flick of an eyelash from angry defiance into a dark depression. One moment she was all energy, her eyes eager and electric; the next she seemed to have lost the capacity to move, and even the will to live. Suddenly she was on her feet and at the window, shaking her head not just at the vanity of the world but, from the look in her now anguished eyes, something much more personal to herself.
“He died in a hotel, a hotel in Manhattan, of a heart attack,” she said, leaning against the window casement. She kept watching the crowd below, fascinated, as it seemed, by the familiar strangers that for so many years had made up the world she had first wanted to conquer and then, having conquered, had begun to despise. “I was in love once, a long time ago, when I was still in college.” She turned to face Hart directly. “He was a gorgeous-looking boy. He wanted to be…well, I don’t know what he wanted to be, except to be with me. But that wasn’t the kind of ambition I thought I needed. I wanted to be something, be someone everyone knew, someone-the someone I became.” She tapped her foot, stopped, and then, a moment later, threw her head back and laughed. “I became what I always was-a fool. I married Robert and I got what I deserved, a husband who thought he was being faithful if he went through a weekend without sleeping with another woman. I got what I deserved, Bobby; I got to wear black and sit in the first pew at his funeral, and then stand in that receiving line and listen to everyone tell me how much they sympathized with my loss while they’re wondering whether the rumor was true: that he died of a heart attack while he was screwing one of the many other women he often took to bed.”
Hart tried to object. “I don’t think-”
“It’s not a rumor, Bobby: It’s true. He was with someone that night. That isn’t the problem.”
“The problem?”
“The problem: what I meant when I said I’m in some trouble. Robert didn’t die of a heart attack, he was murdered.”
“Murdered! What makes you think…?”
A dozen different thoughts raced through Hart’s brain; or rather, only two: her husband had been murdered and she was in trouble. There seemed to be only one conclusion, but it was impossible, it could not have happened. But he had to ask.
“They think you…?”
“Not that I didn’t have good reason, but no, that’s not the kind of trouble I meant. It isn’t that simple.”
She came back to her chair, picked up the half finished glass of scotch, and drank some more.
“Do you know Clarence Atwood, head of the Secret Service?”
“Not very well; we’ve met.”
“I’d like you to see him.”
But Hart was still stunned by what she had said.
“He was murdered?”
“He came to see me. Clarence Atwood,” she explained. “What I’m going to tell you now, no one else knows. No one else can know. Do you understand what I’m saying? No, of course you don’t.” Her eyes full of a new vulnerability, she shook her head in frustration. “You have to forgive me. After everything that’s happened, things get jumbled up and I’m not always as coherent as I should be.”
Hart tried to help.
“Atwood came to see you. He told you that your husband had been murdered?”
“Clarence was the head of the detail when we-I mean when Robert was first elected. We had a certain understanding.” She rose from the chair and, as if drawn by the crowd, the need to know that what she had helped accomplish could still dominate the time and attention of other people, went back to the window. “He didn’t have to tell me everything-I didn’t need to know every time Robert was falling into bed with someone-only when he did something that might become a public embarrassment.”
The vulnerability vanished from her eyes, replaced by a cold, and even ruthless, calculation, as she remembered the sacrifices, and the bargains, she had been forced to make.
“I never promised Clarence anything for his help, for his discretion; but when the head of the Secret Service retired, I made sure he got the job. He’s remained a loyal friend. He knows how to keep this quiet.”
“Keep it quiet?” Hart jumped to his feet. “The president was murdered, and you want to keep it quiet? You can’t!”
“Hear me out! Listen before you rush to judgment. It has to be kept quiet. No one can ever know. He was not murdered by some jealous husband; he wasn’t killed by someone in a moment of rage! It was an assassination. He was killed by lethal injection, a drug that stopped his heart almost instantly.”
Hart stared at her, not certain what to believe.
“I spent most of my time while he was alive doing what I had to do to protect his reputation,” she went on. “I have to do the same thing now that he’s dead. He was in a hotel room, having sex with a woman who turned out to have been a hired killer. The agent who was with him helped her get away. He didn’t know that’s what he was doing. The great irony is that he thought he was protecting me. Isn’t that just too funny for words? He didn’t want anyone to find out that the former leader of the western world was screwing his brains out when he died, so he cleaned up everything and got rid of the girl, told her to get out of the hotel and made sure she was gone before he called for help.”
“Then who found out that he’d been murdered?”
“There was an autopsy, private, controlled; the Secret Service arranged it. There was a puncture mark in his armpit. That’s what made them think they had better take a closer look at the cause of death. When they discovered the drug, Clarence called in the agent and told him what they had found. Then Clarence came to me.”
“What about the FBI? Who’s investigating this?”
“There isn’t going to be an investigation; not yet, anyway. Not until you find the answer to the only question that matters.”
“Me? What question? What matters?”
“You know everything about the intelligence community; you know who you can trust. The question is who was behind his murder and what was the reason they wanted him killed. That’s what is important: the reason. Robert had connections all over the world. Everyone wanted something from him, and of course,” she added in a curious undertone, “there were people willing to do almost anything for him. But something happened, he got involved in something-I’m not quite sure what-and he started to worry, become even more secretive than usual, and then, for no reason at all, fly into a rage. It was like he found himself inside a circle and the circle was starting to close. I have to know what was going on, what he was afraid of. I have to know why he was killed, if it was because of something he knew, something he was covering up. That’s why this has to be kept quiet. Do you have any idea what a scandal like that would do, not just to his reputation, but to the country?-The idea that a president of the United States was murdered to keep him from talking about some criminal enterprise in which he might have been involved. You don’t think I’m serious? When did you ever know Robert Constable to think the rules that ordinary people have to live by applied to him?”