“Your father said that?”
“Uh-huh. And I agree with him. I should have been more understanding about the pressure you were under.”
“Well, maybe you could develop that understanding if you practiced.”
“I can’t practice from my house in Georgetown.”
Pace’s heart leaped. “You could move closer.”
“How much closer do you think I’d have to come?”
“It depends on how proficient you want to get. If you want to become an expert on me, I guess you’d have to live here.”
“Would I be welcome?”
“How fast can you get here?”
“Tomorrow night.”
“I’ll come by and help you with your things.”
“No, I’ll just show up. Maybe about dinner time. How’s that sound?”
“Could we have dinner right now?”
She laughed again. The sound thrilled him. “It’s too early. Besides, I’ve got a great idea for dessert.”
“When I was a kid, if I was real good all day, my mom sometimes would let me have dessert before we ate.”
“I don’t believe that for a minute. But tomorrow night we could make an exception.”
“Then again after we ate.”
“Possibly.”
“Hurry.”
Pace’s phone was ringing urgently when he reached his desk at the office. “You don’t know the half of it,” George Ridley said without preliminaries.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were writing about the Cobra? I could have helped.”
“I don’t have a Harold Marshall quota,” Pace replied. “I can write about him as many times as I have something to say.”
“I appreciate you not mentioning my name in the story, by the way, but you need to know I’m not the only one he sent to the NTSB.”
“Who else?”
“Chappy Davis, at least once. Chappy debriefed me before he saw Lund.”
“Did he say why he was going to Lund?”
“Yeah, sure. He said he was going to try to help Converse some more. It was right after Chappy went out there that Lund held the extra briefing where he said there wasn’t any reason to ground the 811s.”
Pace whistled softly. “Did Chappy ask for that?”
“Dunno. But I don’t believe in coincidence.”
“I guess I’ll call Mr. Lund and Mr. Davis and see what they have to say about all this.”
“I got something else for you, too.”
“You’re a bundle of information today, aren’t you, George?”
“I’m adorable, too. You been by the SEC?”
“Why would I be?”
“To check on Marshall’s holdings in Converse.”
“That’s not public information beyond what Marshall discloses in his Senate forms.”
“Yes, it is, you dumb shit, if he owns more than five percent of the outstanding shares of the company.”
“I never considered that. Where would a simple lawyer get—”
“Ask if the man’s ever filed a Schedule Thirteen-D. And, Pace?”
“Yeah?”
“Have fun.”
Behind the locked door of an office in the Russell Building, the three Democratic members of the Senate Ethics Committee met privately to discuss the matter of Senator Harold Marshall. They couldn’t make a decision for the whole committee, but they hammered out their own feelings so they could present a united front. Seats on the panel were divided equally between Republicans and Democrats so that whichever party ruled, the Senate could not use the committee for partisan politics. To have given the majority party more seats than the minority—as was the case with most other congressional committees—would have put in the majority’s hands a tool too tempting should anyone want to attack a disliked member of the minority on flimsy or outright bogus charges. Hugh Green, in whose office the committee members met, favored the even split. It meant committee investigations were the result of bipartisan decisions, much more palatable to the public than political decisions.
“We don’t want to leave ourselves open to charges we railroaded him,” Green said.
“You’re jumping to the conclusion we’re going to find him guilty of something, Hugh,” said Virginia Senator Stephen Hay Adams, considered among the more level heads in the Senate despite a confused genealogy. He was descended from the second and sixth Presidents of the United States, John Adams and John Quincy Adams, both federalists, and from John Hay, who was Republican President William McKinley’s third and last Secretary of State. That he called Virginia home was traceable to the Hay side of the family, which had originated in the District of Columbia. His generally liberal voting record was hard for many Virginians to swallow, but the senator, in his mid-fifties, was in his third term. He won initially by the narrowest of margins, with the liberal voters in northern Virginia and the blacks of Richmond and Norfolk slightly edging the conservative voters from the southern and western parts of the state. Adams proved adept at constituent service and won his second term with a six-percent plurality, his third term with an eight-percent margin. It seemed he could stay in the Senate for as long as he liked, or for as long as he tended dutifully to the myriad interests of the home folk.
“You’re right, Stephen,” Green said. “I’ve got an attitude problem when it comes to Marshall. Perhaps I should disqualify myself from these deliberations.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” Adams said. “It doesn’t matter what you say among friends. You’ll have to be careful in the hearings. Marshall is likely to come equipped with considerable legal help, and they’ll jump on any hint of personal prejudice. So, I could add, will our friends on the other side of the aisle.”
Harley Stinson cleared his throat. It was loud enough to gain him the floor. Stinson was a rotund Senate fixture from West Virginia. He was among the most conservative of Democrats and came to the meeting with a natural bent against an investigation of another member of the club, regardless of the member’s political affiliation. He was shaking his head, and if the meeting hadn’t been on such a serious subject, the sight of his head going one way and his four chins flapping the other, then vice versa, would have been comical.
“Ah truly believe we are lettin’ partisanship cloud our vision here,” Stinson said with more of a hill drawl than came naturally to him. He often reverted to the old West Virginia twang when he was thinking as he spoke. The slowness of speech gave him time to think.
“What do you mean, Harley?” Green asked.
“What has our colleague from Ohio done to warrant an ethics investigation? There is no evidence, no evidence a-tawl, he has done anythin’ for his own personal gain. He has gone to the limit to defend a constituent, I will admit, but ah do not believe his confrontation with that reporter in the halls of this very buildin’ is an ethics matter. He was tryin’ to leave a meetin’, and the media people would not leave him be. They blocked his way and refused to allow him to pass”—which came out as “pay-iss.” “Are we to judge him for forcin’ his way through a mob?”
“He didn’t force his way through; he assaulted a man without justifiable cause,” said Adams. “And we can’t ascribe his actions on behalf of Converse to mere constituent service, Harley. He owns a fortune in Converse stock, and he sent a tax-paid aide to the NTSB to plead the company’s interests. That would be dead wrong even if he didn’t own the stock. Constituent or no constituent, it’s improper to attempt to influence a federal investigation.”
“You gonna base an Ethics Committee investigation on an uncorroborated newspaper article?” Stinson asked. “And on the other, about him hittin’ the reporter, if there was a wrong done, then it’s up to the victim to press charges. It’s not up to this committee to sit in judgment.”