Murder in the White House (Capital Crimes Book 1) (27 page)
Read Murder in the White House (Capital Crimes Book 1) Online
Authors: Margaret Truman
“
Listen
to me,” Gimbel was saying to Ron, and including the Attorney General. He spoke now in a weak, throaty voice, held his spectacles in his left hand and with his right rubbed his eyes. “It’s absolutely true, what you said. I did kill Martha Kingsley… I didn’t realize until she called at five o’clock that Blaine had told her
everything
… enough to
destroy
Bob, and Catherine… and Lynne… enough to destroy this administration, and me with it… She knew all about Lynne, that Blaine took bribes… and I knew she’d use what she knew, use it to her best advantage, as soon as she found out what that was… I’d thought before about doing it… today I
had
to. There was no more time once I found out what she knew… except I
moved too fast to try to cover myself… well, it doesn’t matter—”
“You face a murder charge,” the Attorney General said. “Aggravated murder. I’m sorry, Fritz, there’s no way around it—”
“I know,” Gimbel said, and shrugged. “It’s end of the line… but it doesn’t need to be for her…” and looked for the first time directly at Lynne. “No one outside this room knows what she’s done, or has heard her say it… As you say, there’s no way out for me now, so what difference if I go to jail for one murder or two? I confess to both of them, and an innocent girl… yes, damn it,
innocent
in the real sense, will be spared what she doesn’t deserve anyway…”
“Oh, Fritz…” Catherine began, tears in her eyes, but the Attorney General broke in.
“I can’t go along with that, Fritz… none of us can… we’d all be accessories to Blaine’s killing…” He shook his head vehemently. “Frankly I find it very hard… hell, almost impossible… to accept Lynne’s confession, but now there’s nothing for it except to have it go through the legal process… I’m sorry… but—”
“You’re right, of course,” Webster said. “Fritz, we’re grateful for the… gesture, but it’s no good, it can’t be done and it would be wrong…”
“Look here,” the Attorney General said, “Lynne says she did it but a court may find differently. Ron, does it seem plausible from the facts you’ve uncovered—?”
But before Ron could answer him, Lynne broke away from her parents and spoke up, going over to Ron and touching him briefly on the shoulder, his face, as she began to speak. “
Please
, don’t make a mockery of what I
did. I appreciate what everybody is trying to do for me, but I have no regrets over what I did. My God, you have to understand, I really
had
to do it… Ron, by now you know what Lan Blaine really was, or you know some of it. But there’s more…” And she turned to look at her father. “Remember, dad, when I used to call him Uncle Lan…? He was our very best friend, the one we loved and trusted the best. He brought me presents from the time I was a little girl. He kept our secret, right from the first… you told me he knew when you first told me about it… you said we could always trust him. You, too, mother… Well, it’s not so surprising, I guess I fell in love with him… One night during the campaign—I never told either of you this, and it’s obvious he never told you—I think it was somewhere in Kentucky… Louisville, that was it, I got his key, said I wanted to talk, got into his bed before he got there… I offered myself to him that night… and he was so incredibly kind… He told me I was a beautiful girl, and if I were anybody else… well, nothing really happened. He was kind and gentle and that was it… So you see, again he seemed to be showing we could trust him… God knows, I trusted him even more after that night, though maybe I was just a little surprised that—anyway, you see now what he was really doing. Just putting us off-guard, putting
me
off-guard, just waiting for the chance to use what he knew to make the most of it…”
She looked a little wild now as she spoke… “When the time came to profit from our friendship, from mine, he didn’t care what he did or how much it could hurt…”
“Lynne,” Ron said very quietly, still not wanting to believe it, hoping against reason that somehow it was a
temporary delusion or
something
… “how was Blaine killed, I mean do you know…?”
She looked directly at him. “Thank you, Ron, I know what you’re trying to do, but it’s no good, just like the Attorney General said a minute ago. Yes, I know because I
did
it… I’d read somewhere, I don’t remember, about how if you pulled a wire tight, pulled hard enough”—she held up her hand—“no, don’t stop me, let me get it all out… well, I got a guitar string and wrapped it around a roller and… Lan liked to have me rub his shoulders, and I
used
to like doing it, so it didn’t seem unusual when I walked up behind him, he just went on talking into that telephone…”
The silence was like thunder. Finally the Attorney General nodded to Gimbel. “And you?”
“I happened to walk in, I wanted to talk to Blaine about something. I was too late. I took the wire and roller out of her hands and told her to go to her room and not to say a word. Afterward I disposed of the… You know the rest.”
Abruptly Lynne, who had seemed so strong in telling what she’d done, broke into tears, long terrible shudders wracked her body, she began to sway as though she would fall before her father could rush over to hold her… And now she looked around the room, to her father, her mother, and finally to Ron. And she was more like a little girl, strangely reverted, looking bewildered, looking for understanding…
“This is the way she was right afterward… when I found her that night,” Gimbel said. “I’m not sure, at one level at least, that she understands what she really did—”
“Then maybe that’s the defense,” Ron said quickly, looking to the Attorney General and the President.
The President frowned, began to shake his head.
“Oh, I don’t mean a literal insanity plea,” Ron hurried on, reading the President’s thoughts. “More that Blaine had involved her, manipulated her, got her into such an emotional state that she did what she did without understanding, when she did it, that it was wrong. There are plenty of precedents for that…”
Catherine looked to her husband, then the Attorney General. “Well,” he said, “we’d have to establish that the emotional impact of what he did or threatened—or what Lynne honestly thought he did or threatened—was so strong that she was deprived of her normal perception of right and wrong. It wouldn’t be easy, but it’s certainly not unreasonable… A sympathetic jury would be a help and—”
“She’d have one,” Ron put in quickly. “How could they be otherwise—?”
“If,” Catherine said, “they had all the facts.
All
of them.”
Lynne was shaking her head now, a bit more composed. “
No
, that’s what Lan was going to do, tell everything, ruin everything; don’t you see? …oh, Daddy, it would be terrible for you, ruin your chances for reelection…”
“I’ll survive, honey. I’ve had it, we don’t need it any more—”
“Forgive me, Mr. President.” The Attorney General seemed almost angry. “I don’t see that at all.”
“Neither do I, sir,” Ron put in.
“Well, my own handpicked Secretary of State and longtime friend turned out to be a liar and a cheat and a thief working against the interests of this country—”
“And,” Gimbel said morosely, “your Chief of Staff has killed a woman—”
“But none of that is
his
fault or responsibility,” Ron said, and spoke now directly to the President. “Sir, you had no idea what Fritz was doing. When the investigation began to point to him, you immediately confronted him… As for Blaine, you picked him for the right reasons and he performed well in many areas. When you began to suspect him of what he was doing, you immediately asked for his resignation. Except for tearing up a suicide note twenty years ago, what have you done wrong?”
Catherine tightened her arm around her daughter and looked directly at the President. “It does seem a poor time, Bob, to talk about quitting. It’s never been your way…”
He took a deep breath, tried to break a smile. He kissed his daughter and his wife. “All right, we’ll do what we have to do… we’ll go this one together, just like we always have with all the others… all of it, all the way. We’ve been a family a long time. It’s never been easy. But we’ve made it this far…” He stopped for a moment, as though gathering up his resources from the furthest depths of himself. “I say we go on.
No matter what
….”
***
Ron, wrung out, went back to his office. He was still carrying the pistol he had taken from his filing cabinet earlier in the evening and wanted to put the thing back before he left the White House.
He unlocked his office door. It was not dark inside. The lamp burned on his desk.
On his couch, stretched out asleep, was Jill Keller. He nudged her, and she woke up.
“It’s all over,” he said. And he told her everything.
“Oh, my God, Ron… Lynne…?”
“The President thought he had to resign but I think he’s been persuaded otherwise… You know, they’re quite a family, the Websters. I mean
all
of them…” He looked at her, undid his tie. “Well, I guess it’s over, at least our part in it…”
She got up from the couch, took his arm. “Then, sir, I suggest you take the girl home and let her buy you a drink. Some things end, some others begin… You get my drift, counselor?”
“I do,” he said, and he did.