The President's Killers (19 page)

EIGHTY-TWO

In the darkness behind him, Crittenden heard voices.

The sounds came closer. Then a young couple emerged from the blackness, talking softly. He could see her white sweatshirt and white sneakers. Her companion was wearing darker clothing.

There were fewer joggers now than there had been two hours earlier, but there were still too many. The joggers made things much more difficult.

Crittenden wondered how much the shrink had told Wick. Had Dr. Meyerson mentioned what he said to that prissy smart-ass in the therapy group?

I’ll put a bullet in you, wise-ass!

That jerk Ebert was always smirking. And the other one, the fat bitch with the glasses, liked to make the whole group think Crittenden had a screw loose.

What in the world did Dr. Meyerson expect? Was he supposed to pretend he didn’t notice their insults?

He went over all these things in his emails to Meyerson. Twenty-two email notes pointing out exactly how silly his group therapy sessions were. And Meyerson never acknowledged them. Never thanked him for the time and effort he put into them.

Crittenden wondered if Meyerson ever told Wick how he used to fantasize about Patrick dying. How he used to picture Patrick being cut down in a hail of bullets. When Crittenden tried to commit suicide, Meyerson said he was simply redirecting his murderous impulses against himself.

He remembered the grave expression on the face of that Human Resources bitch when she broke the news. “The agency is reassigning you to another area, Bud.”

They were relegating him to the agency’s Archives to look after its historical documents. The lowest of grubby desk jobs.

It was a stab in the heart. The people running the agency had never given him the respect he deserved. Didn’t any of them know about the commendations he had received in his thirty years with the service?

He could feel the anger welling up in his chest again.

“Patrick’s throwing me out?”

“It’ll broaden you, Bud. It’ll be a different kind of experience.”

That was it. His whole career, everything he’d worked for, was gone…

Now he was not only a non-entity, but he was being constantly watched. It had started, he was sure, with Patrick. Patrick had ordered everybody to keep an eye on him.

Patrick wanted them to find grounds for forcing him to take early retirement. Nobody would admit it, of course, but that’s what was going on.

Ahead of him, something moved. Two sets of white feet appeared in the darkness. Without a word, two more runners jogged past.

He turned to watch them. The air was chilly and he was getting cold.

That snot-nosed Kinney. They had planned to take him out after the assassination. Bury the body somewhere. Leave the whole world believing he had simply vanished, somehow eluding every effort to apprehend him.

That idiot Groark had screwed everything up. But it didn’t matter now. In an hour, Kinney would be dead. They’d plant him in the ground right here in the middle of the tourist midway.

EIGHTY-THREE

“How in the world are we going to get over that?” Meesh whispered.

They were in the shadowy concrete alley behind Crittenden’s home, staring up at a wooden fence that must have been close to seven-feet high. Beyond it, the house loomed above them. It looked huge.

“We’ll find a way,” Denny said.

They crept along the alley for another seventy feet. Near a telephone pole there were three large plastic garbage containers nestled against the fence.

They set one container on top of the others. Denny gave Meesh a boost, heard her drop to the ground on the other side of the fence, and followed her.

The tiny yard behind the house was much darker than the alley, but they found a brick walk leading to the house.

They knew Crittenden wasn’t in the building. A half-hour earlier, they’d driven past the house and seen lights inside. Meesh parked the car and knocked on the door.

When Crittenden appeared, he was wearing a warm-up suit.

Her heart was pounding, but she smiled sweetly. “I’m looking for the Langs. Bill and Joan Lang.”

He stared at her for a moment before shaking his head. “Can’t help you.”

She drove a few hundred feet down the street, and they sat there waiting. Twenty minutes later, Crittenden backed his car out of the garage attached to the house and drove off.

They had no idea whether someone else might be inside. The small porch at the rear of the house was locked. Beneath it, they discovered a basement door.

Denny found a shovel under the staircase, used the handle to smash one of the small window panes, and reached inside to unlock the door.

Crouching inside the pitch-black basement, they listened carefully. There were no sounds of anybody moving about above them. No yapping dog.

Groping their way along the wall, they found a staircase and crept up to the first floor. The kitchen and living room were lighted, but there was nobody in them.

While Denny checked out the upper floors, Meesh opened a door off the hallway and flicked a light on. When he reappeared, she said, “Look at this!”

The room could have been an office at Secret Service headquarters. On the dark-paneled wall behind the big wooden desk was a huge picture of a silver star with a striped shield. Encircling the star were the words UNITED STATES SECRET SERVICE.

Another wall was covered with glass-mounted photographs and certificates. A Crittenden diploma from the University of Maryland, a certificate from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia, certificates from a half-dozen specialized law-enforcement courses.

There were several pictures of Crittenden and other trim, well-groomed men and women.

One was similar to the picture Denny had seen on TV. It showed Vice President Merrill in a crowd, with Crittenden just ahead of him in the standard Secret Service mode, in sunglasses with an intent look on his face as he surveyed the faces around him.

Just above that picture was a full-color portrait of Merrill as President.

“Let’s start with the desk,” Denny said.

EIGHTY-FOUR

They forced open the locked drawers with a screwdriver Meesh had bought on one of her shopping trips.

The drawers contained pencils and ballpoint pens, empty binders, folders filled with Crittenden’s personal financial records, and an appointments book. None of entries in the appointments book suggested anything significant.

Along one wall of the room were four metal file cabinets. They pried the drawers open, removed the folders inside, and stacked them in neat rows on the floor.

None of the labels on the folders meant anything to them, so they sat on the floor and began to flip through the contents of each folder.

One was filled with newspaper and magazine stories about Joe Merrill. There were also several official-looking memos.

“Did you know Crittenden once worked for Merrill when he was Vice President?” Meesh said.

“Guess that explains the photo on the wall.”

She gave him the articles to scan. Most dealt with the coming year’s elections. Many questioned whether President Patrick would keep Merrill on the ticket when he sought a second term.

It was clear the relationship between the two men was strained.

Patrick, fifteen years younger than Merrill, was the scion of a wealthy and prominent New York family. His forebears included a governor of New York and an ambassador to France. With no prior service in public office, he had been elected to the United States Senate.

Five years later, he won his party’s nomination for President and upset his heavily favored opponent, Harold Keller, a Senator with a long and distinguished political career.

For Merrill, the path to power had been much longer and much more difficult. The son of a railroad engineer, he worked his way through Pennsylvania State University and was a lowly political science instructor there when he ran for the State Legislature.

After serving three terms as a State Representative, he ran for Congress, completing two terms in the House before winning election to the Senate. Over a period of twenty years, he built a reputation as a shrewd legislator and one of the Senate’s most influential members.

Some newspaper articles suggested there had been friction between Merrill’s staff and the White House staff. Other stories dwelt on policy differences between the two men. Merrill apparently had made little effort to conceal his lack of enthusiasm for Patrick’s positions on defense spending, immigration, and tax and regulatory issues.

Two articles suggested Merrill had considered the President a lightweight in the Senate and resented his wealth and meteoric rise to the apex of American politics.

Denny put the folder aside. Interesting stuff, but not what he needed. He needed hard evidence of Crittenden’s role in the assassination.

EIGHTY-FIVE

After wading through dozens of additional folders, Denny came across one labeled Memos to File, notes Crittenden had apparently written as a record for himself.

Most were dull, esoteric reports on the internal workings of the Secret Service — reorganizing units within the agency, changing reporting relationships, reassigning people, and the like.

“Hey,” Denny exclaimed, “the blue pencil! Do you remember the imprint on that pencil?”

“Some letters or numbers. Sure.”

“JJRTC. The James J. Rowley Training Center. It’s just outside D.C., something for Secret Service types. There’s a reference to it in one of these notes.”

In another memo, Crittenden was clearly very upset. The President had gone to Canada the year before with several Congressional leaders to attend the funeral of Canada’s Prime Minister. In Ottawa, two Secret Service agents, acting on the orders of a Patrick aide, placed a wiretap on the phone of Senator Laird, one of Patrick’s leading political rivals.

To Crittenden, that was not only a violation of the law but also of the Secret Service’s sacred code of ethics.

The folder contained another angry Crittenden memo. This one had to do with a governors’ conference Patrick addressed in Houston. On that occasion, Secret Service agents had gone through the hotel’s records of phone calls made from the suite of Governor Zehme of Ohio, another of the President’s political enemies. The agents were obviously interested in the activities of Mrs. Zehme, who apparently was involved in an affair with one of her husband’s principal aides. Two agents had even tailed them to a motel.

“Talk about sleazy,” Meesh said. “The Secret Service, for God’s sake!”

Another memo described a problem involving Vice President Merrill’s teenage daughter. She’d been caught stealing a bracelet at a campus shop at Princeton.

Merrill’s staff persuaded the store owner to drop the matter and managed to keep the incident out of the news, but the Secret Service brass passed word of the incident along to the President. Other memos indicated the shoplifting incident and the Zehme affair were later leaked to friendly reporters and columnists.

All of this infuriated Crittenden. His memos railed against Patrick for compromising the Secret Service’s integrity and its long tradition of political independence. He seemed to believe the President was placing the very existence of the Secret Service in jeopardy. There were even notes in which he seemed convinced the White House was engaged in a deliberate effort to destroy the agency. But nothing upset him more than the conduct of his superiors in bowing to White House pressure and allowing the agency to be corrupted.

Meesh looked up from a stack of folders. She sprang to her feet and looked into the hallway.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Thought I heard something. I’m getting nervous, Denny.”

EIGHTY-SIX

Crittenden stared at the gray, pencil-like image of the Washington Monument in the black water of the Reflecting Pool. Beyond the monument, he could see the top of the Capitol’s lighted dome.

He was furious. Three times he and Sal had hiked back and forth between the monuments. There was no sign of Kinney.

Maybe he had smelled a trap. Or maybe he’d tricked them.

Why had that young woman come to Crittenden’s house looking for someone? It could have been legitimate, of course, but why tonight of all nights? But how could Kinney find out where he lived? His phone number was unlisted. He hurried off to find Conti, who had disappeared in the shadows to take a leak. He wanted to make sure his home was secure.

Meesh, gazing out the window at the street in front of Crittenden’s house, was growing increasingly nervous.

She hurried back to the den, and tapped Denny on the head.

“We’ve got to get going!”

“I know.”

“It’s almost midnight.”

“Okay, okay, I’m almost done.”

He was sprawled on the floor, scanning some newspaper clippings and Government news releases.

One release, issued two years ago, announced President Patrick’s appointment of Connie Brooks as Director of the Secret Service. She was identified as the Boston police department’s Deputy Commissioner for Public Information. The newspaper articles on the appointment said Brooks was the agency’s second female Director and the first person to be named to the position from outside the ranks of the Secret Service.

A more recent release announced the appointment of Linda Hess to head up the Secret Service’s New York City field office, one of the agency’s largest. According to the newspaper clippings, she would be the first black woman to run the office. The articles said she would be in a position to succeed Brooks someday.

Denny came across three handwritten one-sentence notes that made him sit up.

“More Affirmative Action bullshit!”

“Those assholes in the White House are killing us, Bud!”

“POTUS won’t be happy until every goddamn Director uses Kotex or hair-straightener.”

All three notes were addressed to “Bud.” One was signed “Roy,” another “Wallie,” and the signature on the third was “Stan.”

Flipping through the news releases and newspaper articles in the folder, Denny found two other scribbled notes.

“Hey, where the hell is Lee Harvey Oswald when we need him?”

“The next time somebody takes a potshot at POTUS it might be one of our guys!”

“POTUS?” Meesh said.

“President of the United States. It’s pretty inflammatory stuff! And some were written just months before Patrick was shot.”

He put the folder on an end table with the releases on the appointments of Brooks and Hess, and began to sort through another stack of folders.

Meesh groaned. “We’ve got enough, dear! We’ve got to get out of here.”

“We still haven’t got what I really need.”

“Besides the stuff we’ve found here,” she said, “you’ve got Groark on your voice mail at home.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“You told Crittenden.”

“I lie.”

“Oh, boy!”

“Groark would never leave a message on my voice mail.”

She shook her head in frustration. “Crittenden could walk in here any minute, Denny. And he might not be alone. Let’s just take what we have to the police or the FBI.”

“Five more minutes, okay? Why don’t you take the stuff we’ve got out to the car, and you can be my lookout. I’ll be there in five minutes.”