“The way it works is like this,” Vincent Meredith explained. This morning he looked his age; in much the same way Sabrina had been feeling hers lately. As attorneys went he was a man who had been around the block not once but several times. Lawyering had never really paid his bills or his alimony — not according to either of his two ex-wives — so over the years he had turned his hand to ‘investigations’ and other quasi-legal, ethically borderline work facilitating the requirements of his large and varied, but never terribly well healed, client base. He had been following, watching and avoiding corrupt LA cops, low life attorneys who made him look like St Francis of Assisi, marvelling at the convoluted machinations of the County District Attorney’s Office and local hoodlums and mobsters ever since he came back from the war in 1946. Two purple hearts — one from the first day of the landings on Betio, the other from standing too close to a Jap grenade on Iwo Jima had kept him from getting drafted for Korea — but once a Marine, always a Marine. Semper Fidelis; always faithful. Margery, his first wife whom he regretted losing in all the ways he did not and would never miss Juanita, his second, used to call him the ‘patron saint of lost causes’. Margery came from an old southern family and her folks had always known a burnt out Marine Corps Captain who had qualified for the California Bar in 1940 and never made a go of it, was exactly the wrong guy for their little angel.
He collected his thoughts.
“We don’t have any other angle to break Sam, or Doug Weston out of jail. We’re operating under a State of Emergency so we can’t even get the guys in front of a Grand Jury, and even if we could it wouldn’t do any good. The cops have got their stories straight. We know it’s a frame up, any lawyer who takes a look at it knows it’s a frame up but if this thing goes to trial Doug Weston gets to sit on death row and if he’s very lucky, Sam gets five to thirty years in San Quentin. That’s why I haven’t wasted much effort lawyering on this one. The cops and their guys at the County DA’s Office have got this one in their pockets. Or rather, they did have until Sam got himself some serious connections.”
Judy was less baffled, and a little perversely in the rapidly shifting circumstances, much more angry now.
“I said I didn’t want to worry Sam’s folks!” She reminded Vincent, her face creased with disappointment and alarm.
The man shrugged and grinned apologetically.
He looked to Sabrina and back to the tearful younger woman.
“You ladies didn’t hire me to sit on my hands. Besides, nobody’s said a word to Captain Brenckmann or his wife. Not so far as I know, leastways.”
“Oh,” Judy felt really silly now. Not to mention mean.
Frank Lovell, the svelte man from the State Department coughed.
“When the Commandant of the Marine Corps’s note was passed on to the Protocol Secretary at State,” he explained, mistakenly thinking this would clarify matters to everybody’s satisfaction as opposed to impossibly muddying the waters, “it was flagged for ‘immediate action’.”
Vincent Meredith winced, realising that he had no option but to come clean with his clients. That was never bad news even for a lawyer who actually had their best interests close to his heart.
“You see, the thing is I was with General Shoup at Tarawa,” he murmured sheepishly. “We were lifted off the beach on the same boat. We were both shot up pretty good at the time. He asked me my name and how I’d got ‘winged’. Anyway, cutting to the chase, I was on his staff the rest of the war. Right up to Iwo Jima when I got ‘winged’ again. This is the first time I ever asked the hard-nosed old SOB for a favour. I didn’t even know if he’d want to remember me.” He grinned apologetically at the man from the State Department. “But apparently, he does.”
Chapter 37
John Fitzgerald Kennedy greeted the old man at the door to the cabin as if he was welcoming a long lost prodigal favourite uncle back into the fold. If Claude Otto de Chateau-Betancourt was in any way surprised or even remotely impressed to find both the Vice President and the Secretary of State waiting in the reception line to add their smiling salutations to the President’s, he betrayed no sign of it.
“How goes Gretchen’s recovery?” Jack Kennedy inquired solicitously.
“Slower than she’d like,” Claude Betancourt admitted. “Slower than we’d all like. They think she’ll walk again but they keep talking about ‘nerve damage’. Still we know she’s on the mend because, just like a woman she’s starting to get worried about the scars and such nonsense!”
“She’s in my prayers, Claude.”
The two other men in the cabin echoed this with quiet gusto.
“Come on in and sit down,” Jack Kennedy invited the last great mover and shaker of his father’s generation. The President’s father, Joseph senior had suffered a stroke in December 1961which had paralyzed him down his right side. Worse, the stroke had left him with aphasia, a language disorder which made it hard for him to speak. Although the old man had been starting to respond to therapy and to make his first, halting, steps with the aid of a cane at the time of the October War, the murderous influenza which had swept through New England in the winter after the war had carried him away like tens of thousands of others; leaving the family the almost impossible task of ‘quietly’ resolving the old rascal’s affairs. If it had not been for Claude Betancourt countless half-forgotten scandals and feuds would have resurfaced; for his had been the shrewd, sagacious hand at the wheel steering the Kennedy dynasty through horribly treacherous financial and political waters in the last year. The President’s father had never taken his eldest surviving son aside and told him that Claude was the only man who knew where ‘all the bodies were buried’; he had not had to tell him because, everybody close to the family already knew it to be the case. Since the old man’s death no man had done the Kennedy family truer service than today’s honoured guest at the Presidential retreat.
Claude Betancourt understood why he had been invited to Camp David. He remained inextricably entwined, enmeshed within the Party machine, intimately attuned to its mood and the tides which ebbed and flowed within the broader New England caucus. He might no longer be the President’s father’s enforcer but he remained Kennedy family’s behind the scenes powerbroker and the Party’s most reliable bellwether this side of the Mississippi.
The men in the room needed to know if they still carried what was left of the Party ‘base’ with them. It was one thing for the President to have spent most of the last three weeks on the stomp — two to three events per day — from coast to coast and from the north to the south of the continental United States; but had it changed anything?
The polls suggested Jack Kennedy had halted the slide; the jury was still out on whether he was actually winning back hearts and minds which meant that today was about subtler things than poll numbers and the political punditry of Party outsiders.