Death of a Political Plant (16 page)

Then, she recalled an ominous detail from Gil’s ravings: he had referred to Jay in the past tense. Her stomach tightened with anxiety. She didn’t really think Whitson was a killer. Yet Gil had to have been one of the last people to see Jay alive, for the police told her that her friend had been dead for around twelve hours when she found him. She had not told Geraghty about Gil, and it was just the kind of information the detective would later accuse her of withholding on purpose. Or at least Morton would; Geraghty always forgave her for her blunders, but George Morton never would. Next time she saw the police, she would mention Gil.

With a start, she realized there also was Charlie. Impolite, utterly arrogant Charlie Hurd, who had been in a power struggle with his older employer over the issue of sharing information. Why hadn’t she even thought of him when she talked to the police? The reporter was the closest person to Jay McCormick in the past week. Hurd had talked to Jay far more than
she or Bill had: he was in the loop. And she realized this eager young man had everything to gain, and nothing to lose, with Jay’s death. Why, he could simply gather up Jay’s disk and take major credit for the story—whatever it was.

She heard a sound in the woods. Normally she would have attributed it to a bird or small animal scrabbling through the brush, or even a child traipsing through the leafy paths that wound through Sylvan Valley. But now a keen sense of danger overcame her. She was truly vulnerable here, all alone on the patio of her wide-open house, with a killer again loosed upon the neighborhood. Detective Morton, despite his crabby ways, was quite right: she should be more careful. No better time to start than now, she thought, and she went into the house, rinsed her dishes, and locked up. Her house key went carefully into the watch pocket of her gardening shorts.

But after just a few minutes, it was intolerable being locked indoors. A little gardening, she was sure, would purge her guilt and help her think straight, being fully as good for her as the solution of confession to a priest was to a Catholic. It was two o’clock now, and the Virginia air was growing close and breathless. Big clouds had piled in and were playing hide-and-seek with the sun, so that the woods had moments of brightness followed by periods of deep gloom that transformed friendly trees into macabre forms capable of hiding enemies. Her eyes darted around, looking at the army of huge sweetgums to see if anything was concealed behind them.

She had to get a grip on herself. Jay’s murder had little connection with her, and at any rate, a killer would hardly lurk in the woods at two in the afternoon. With firm strides, she crossed the distance to her toolshed to retrieve her shovel and a pail of potting soil. She threw open the door, and out poured the aromatic smells of the good earth.

If there was anything that ruled Louise’s life, it was order in the house itself, and blithe disorder in the garden. Before her was a picture of order, each tool in place against the back wall, shovels, picks, hoes, pitchfork, and cultivators hanging against another, pails of peat moss, soil, perlite, and soil mix like a row of soldiers ready for service.

But something caught her eye, something out of order. It was the corner of a piece of plastic protruding from underneath the pail in the corner. She picked up the pail and uncovered a see-through plastic folder containing papers.

In the woods, a bird called and there was a distant roll of thunder. A shudder rolled through her body as if it were an echo of the rumbling sky. Quickly, she grabbed the folder off the floor, replaced the pail, and withdrew from the toolshed. She went to the back door and tried the handle, and felt real panic when it didn’t open.

Was the door handle broken? Had someone inside locked her out? In an instant, she remembered she had locked the place up; she shook her head for being such a silly fool. Taking the key from her shorts pocket, she let herself in and carefully locked the door from the inside. So much for safety: It was time-consuming and nerve-racking to have to lock herself in and out of her own house.

She looked down at the plastic sheaf, and tears welled in her eyes as she remembered those fleeting summer days of long ago with her clever friend at her side. The minute she saw the papers, she knew that Jay had prevailed: hiding the things that needed to be hidden, and delivering the goods in the end, just as he had done years before.

• • •

A wizard had written the memos. They contained no names, just game plans. At the side of each recommended plan of action were three numbered boxes. No initials, but all the boxes on the first page, at least, were checked, in different pen strokes, which presumably meant three people had signed off on the specifics.

The papers outlined specific steps in a dirty tricks campaign. It had to be the blueprint for the assault against President Jack Fairchild, though neither Fairchild’s nor Congressman Goodrich’s names were mentioned anywhere; instead, there was reference to the “opponent” and his family. There were dates, ranging from earlier in the summer to as recent as ten days ago. The first missive, Louise noticed, came out about the time Goodrich had prevailed in the California primary and assured himself the nomination.

The first memo set out a plan to co-opt the media, especially the tabloids and conservative talk shows, and included a proposal to reward news outlets that used the campaign’s information in an effective way. Another made recommendations for planting derogatory stories in tabloids about the candidate’s “spouse.” This memo concerned a DUI conviction from years ago and purported information about her treatment in a rehabilitation clinic. All had been done according to this paper, Louise realized; the tabloids had eagerly taken up the story, with the reluctant major media outlets following suit. There was even a brief, cruel synopsis of ways to denigrate the children of the family by dredging up teenage incidents that resulted in minor scrapes with the law.

The one that stopped her eye sketched out the scenario for tying the “opponent” to a political assassination, including his part in a cover-up murder. Louise knew this must refer to the story about Fairchild’s purported part in the assassination of
President Diem and the subsequent murder of an army file clerk.

The last memo made her scalp tingle. It tersely stated that there could be a mole in the campaign. The memo recommended ways to check this out, uncover the mole, and perform “damage control” One recommendation was to give all campaign staffers Me detector tests. This had received the checked approval of the three anonymous readers. Another was to reexamine all employee files to assure that they were authentic. A private investigator was to be hired to track down the residences of all employees and see if there was anything suspicious about their home lives.

Louise thought back on the man in the dark clothes with the bulge in his suit jacket. That could very well have been a private detective checking out Jay McCormick.

The final recommendation on this page regarded moles. It suggested that if a mole was identified, a task force should be sent out to retrieve all “purloined materials to assure that the infiltrator has no more opportunity to peddle stories either to the opposition campaign or to the press.” Interestingly, this last recommendation had received a hearty check from two of the three people who signed off on the item, with the third check being lighter, showing less conviction. Alongside it she found the only handwriting on any of the pages: a scribbled few words that said plaintively “Can’t we avoid violence?”

The answer to that was no.

Jay McCormick had to have been the mole, the political plant, and he had started arousing suspicions. He had come to Washington, D.C., after Goodrich’s strong win in New Hampshire, and parlayed his experience as a political writer into a job on the congressman’s campaign staff. From the little Jay had told her, this timing made sense. Being from the West
Coast, his bland face was unfamiliar to most Washingtonians; knowing Jay, he might even have added a few disguise elements to his appearance for additional insurance. His wife, Lannie Gordon, would have been the only one who could have identified him.

And not being an advance man or in some other high-profile job, Jay probably stuck to the office and did his work out of the sight of the public. Being smart and a good writer, he had probably made himself invaluable, gaining access to both these memos and the campaign’s deepest secrets.

She riffled through the sheets again and felt a sense of disappointment. When she found them, she had felt the thrill of discovery, as if they would give her all the answers. But the memos themselves were sketchy outlines. They didn’t prove much. They just laid out a plan for the Goodrich campaign that was like a reenactment of Nixon’s in 1972. And Nixon won then by a landslide, she recalled.

The very idea of a concerted dirty tricks effort was odious to fair-minded Americans—or was it? Were Americans, jaded now by over two decades of political scandals, too cynical to care? And telling the dirty truth about a politician wasn’t against the law. She wondered if these were dirty lies, or dirty truths.

It wasn’t the lurking stories about Mrs. Fairchild’s past alcohol problems, the President’s character, nor being involved in Diem’s murder that dogged the President. It was the alleged murder of the army clerk, bringing forth the horrid question, “Did the President kill to cover up his past?” That single rumor was drawing Fairchild down in the polls, day by day. No one, not even Tom Paschen, who often was the President’s front man with the media, had been able to do anything so far but issue angry denials.

The picture became clear: Jay witnessed the sleazy senatorial campaign managed by Rawlings in California. When the man became head of Goodrich’s presidential effort, Jay’s outrage drew him back into investigative journalism. He came to Washington and rooted out the truth over the past five months. And then a murderer had come along and killed the political plant, taken his computer and his disks, and with them, the most important story of Jay McCormick’s life.

Or was she wrong: Did the clever Jay hide both his computer and his disks, as he felt ever greater pressure to get his story done?