Shadow of Power

31

Over the phone that night, Harry and I put our heads together and came to the same conclusion, that the magic pill that caused the judge to declare a mistrial was not the declaration of the jury foreman but the whispered message of R2-D2, his clerk, as they huddled behind the judge’s chair in chambers seconds before we came back out.

Quinn had said something to Ruiz as we were first going into chambers to argue over the dynamite instruction. Harry and I will never know, but if we had to guess, the judge had dispatched his clerk to talk to one of the bailiffs who normally usher the jury around. Dirt travels, and people talk. It is not unusual for deputies and bailiffs to pick up smoke signals and drums telling them with some certitude what’s going on behind closed doors.

This is what Ruiz was telling the judge behind the chair. That they were deadlocked eleven to one and that the single holdout had her heels dug in and her position had become a question of pride.

The blond hairs in the envelope presented me with a process of elimination, a question between the two of them, Trisha Scott and Richard Bonguard. If you didn’t think long and hard, you might flip a coin trying to come up with the answer.

I made the long-distance call and left a message with the secretary. Less than an hour later, the secretary called back, a meeting was set. The next day I flew east.

Harry had asked me once what possible reason Bonguard might have to kill the golden goose, his megabucks client Terry Scarborough. Among the theories is that it’s possible he had no choice. He knew Margaret Ginnis. They met at a political function. He thought that Antonin Scalia, the leading edge of the right wing on the Court, was the wit, but he didn’t like his politics. Ginnis held the balance of power on the Court. So when things happened in the islands, who was Margaret to call but her friend, her former agent, her political ally, Richard Bonguard? It was possible that working together, in secret, they could change history. It was possible, but not likely.

The reason, unless I miss my bet, is that there’s no way Bonguard could have known at the time of the murder that the Jefferson Letter was a fraud. And it was this fact that propelled the murder. Unless I’m wrong, Ginnis would never have told his wife what he was doing. The risks were too great. He would not want to put her in jeopardy if things went wrong, risked having her accused of collusion and conspiracy. But there was one person, sufficiently in the shadows and therefore safe, with whom he might share the secret: his trusted former clerk.

That night, as Harry and I flew east toward Miami and south to Curaçao, we must have passed Trisha Scott in the air, jetting the other way. She was in a frantic dash to reach our office, racing to slip the envelope with the Jefferson Letter and a few of her own clipped hairs under our office door. Scott saw what was happening. Reading news reports of the trial, watching the revelations minute by minute on television, she knew that the only way to stop us from looking further, to prevent us from stumbling over what was really happening, was to deliver the evidence and hope that this would draw the attention of the world back to the trial. But she was already too late.

When I called to make the arrangements, I insisted that we meet in a public place. I no longer know who it is I’m dealing with. Here in a crowded room, I feel safer. It is the same Washington restaurant where we first met for dinner.

We spend a couple of minutes in false pleasantries-the weather, politics. I’m not entirely certain if she realizes why I’m here. She is animated, sitting erect in the chair, actually laughing once at something she heard in one of the campaigns. She is also very nervous.

Then I broach the subject. “I take it you do understand that it’s over now?”

She gives me a quizzical expression, then leans in toward the table. “Excuse me?”

“It’s over. All of it,” I tell her.

She makes a perfect oval with her mouth as if she wants to say, What’s over? But as she studies my face, she stops herself. She closes her mouth and doesn’t say a word.

In this instant, Trisha Scott looks as if she’s aged ten years in the seven months that have passed since our last meeting.

“I am not a cop. I’m not a reporter. Under other circumstances I wouldn’t even be here tonight. But I have a client, and he’s still hanging out there on the line, in jeopardy. Do you understand?”

“I read that in the newspapers. I’m sorry to hear it,” she says. “But I’m not sure what that has to do with me.”

“Then let’s cut to the chase,” I tell her. “I left a memorandum on my desk with an e-mail to my partner as well as to the district attorney with your name, phone number, and address on it, just in case something bad were to happen to me during my trip here tonight. I told them to find you and to pluck a few hairs and that all their questions would be answered.”

This seems to freeze her in place.

Trisha Scott could feel safe sending off bits of her hair in an envelope under our office door because she knew there was no national database for hair samples as there is for fingerprints. Unless there was someone to point the way, to connect her to the crime, the hair evidence might serve to exonerate Carl without implicating her. I wanted this on the table early, so that if she had plans to send me to join Scarborough, she would know from the get-go that they are fruitless.

“It’s over. Do you understand?”

It takes a few seconds, and then she seems to wither in the chair. Whatever will or determination was left evaporates almost in the blink of an eye. I find myself suddenly looking at a different person across the table, at what I can only characterize as a catatonic mask.

For a long time, she says nothing. She takes a drink of water, her eyes suddenly scanning the restaurant. She sets the glass back down and seems to look right through me as she gathers her thoughts.

“I want you to understand…I wonder…I wonder if I could go to the ladies’ room?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I say.

“Police?”

I nod. They’re not here yet. They are on their way, but she doesn’t have to know this.

“Oh, God! I want you to understand how it was. It’s important that you understand.”

“We don’t have much time,” I tell her.

“There was no other choice,” she says. “All the way out on the plane, I got more and more angry. Terry Scarborough was the kind of person who left a trail of ravaged souls as he cruised through life. By the time I got to that hotel, I was seething.”

“You don’t have to say anything. You’ve probably already said too much.”

“No,” she says. “I’ve been holding it in so long. Nobody I could talk to. I have to…I was thinking as far ahead as my brain would allow. I had the cab let me out two blocks from the hotel so there’d be no record of a taxi having dropped me. For a time I actually thought that-given how I felt, the anger-that I could kill him with my bare hands. But he was bigger than I was, stronger. I didn’t have a gun. Even if I did, I wouldn’t know how to use it. I thought about a knife. Maybe I could buy one. But I’d read enough briefs on appeal in criminal cases. I knew if I did that, even if I got rid of the knife, there’d be a trail. Wounds in the body would tell them the length of the blade, whether it was serrated, probably right down to the make and model. I’d read enough about it. I knew they could do it. They’d start checking all the shops, recent sales, anybody buying a single hunting or butcher knife. And even if I used cash, the salesclerk would remember this woman, because her eyes were all red from crying. I decided I couldn’t buy a weapon. I’d have to improvise, use whatever I found in the room-a lamp, a heavy knickknack off one of the shelves.”

“But then you didn’t have to go looking for a weapon, did you?”

“No. But you already know about that, the hammer in the stairwell. I didn’t want to get into the elevator. Too many people would see me.”

“How did you know what room he was in?”

“I called Dick Bonguard on his cell the night before. I had Dick’s number in Outlook on my computer. I knew that Dick would be trailing along with Terry on the book tour. I told Dick I had something I needed to fax to Terry. He gave me the hotel and the suite number.

“I climbed fourteen floors, all the way to the top. Every three or four flights, I’d stop to catch my breath. That’s when I saw it.”

“The hammer?”

“It was as if God had reached down and put it there and I was his avenging angel. I took it, put it in my purse. I had a good-size bag I always used for travel. I carried it over my shoulder, and I climbed to the top.”

“And the raincoat, the gloves?”

“The raincoat was in a little pouch, in the bottom of my purse with the gloves. I knew if I hit him with the hammer, there would be blood. It would get all over me and I’d be trapped there. From everything I read in the papers-and believe me, I kept up with the progress of your case every day,” she says, “the police never found the gloves?”

I shake my head.

“I dropped them in a trash can someplace. I don’t even remember where.”

“The police wouldn’t have looked very hard,” I tell her. “It didn’t fit the facts of their case. They had a fingerprint on the murder weapon. But it wasn’t yours.”

“I know,” she says. This seems to bother her more than the actual killing itself, the fact that Carl and his parents have been dragged through hell. “I would never have let him go to prison or die,” she says. “You have to believe that. I was buying time. That’s all I was doing. I knew that sooner or later I would have to do something to put an end to it. When the news of the Jefferson Letter broke, it was almost a relief. The very thing I’d been hiding so long was now out in the open. There was no need to hide it any longer.”

“So you fed it to us, hoping that it would be enough?”

She nods nervously several times. “Why didn’t it work?”

“One obstinate juror,” I tell her. “The way it goes sometimes.”

“Then if he’d been acquitted, you wouldn’t be here tonight.”

I shrug. She’s right. If Carl were on the street, free, out from under, this wouldn’t be my job. And given the theory of the prosecution, if Carl were acquitted, they would never be able to convict Scott-that is, if they even found her, which is unlikely.

“So you went up the stairs, put on the raincoat and the gloves. You had the hammer in your purse.”

She nods.

“How did you get into the room?”

“I knocked on the door. How stupid is that? I wasn’t sure if he was in or, if he was, whether he was alone. I knew when he opened the door he’d be surprised to see me. And standing there in a raincoat. I had a story ready. I was going to tell him that I was in town on business and there was something I needed to talk to him about if he could spare two minutes-anything to get inside the room.”

“Because you knew you were running out of time,” I say.

“Yes.”

“So what happened when he opened the door?”

“Strange thing was, he never even looked at me. He was busy reading something, a piece of paper in his hand. Before I knew it, he was walking away. He said, ‘Put it on the table’-something about a check. Then I realized he thought I was room service. Suddenly there he was, sitting in the chair, his back to me, reading some papers, making notes, completely oblivious to the fact that I was even standing there. At that moment I think I just exploded. What he had put me through, and he didn’t even know it. Not that Terry would have cared.

“You want to know the truth?” She looks me straight in the eye now. “It was easier than I ever thought it could be. I closed the door and walked up to the back of the chair, and I swung that hammer, over and over and over again, until the muscles in my arms burned.” She breathes heavily, takes the napkin and wipes her eyes.

“At some point I must have closed my eyes, because when I opened them again, there was blood everywhere-on the ceiling, on the walls, soaking into the gloves I was wearing, spotting and running down the raincoat. I didn’t realize it at first, but the reason I stopped swinging was that the hammer was stuck. The claws were lodged in the top of his head. I couldn’t look at it. For some stupid reason, I had to pull it out. I pulled and twisted. The hammer came loose, and his body fell on the floor. I dropped the hammer.

“It’s amazing. I…You’d think you would go into shock after something like that, but I didn’t. I was overwhelmed with this incredible urge to run, to get out of there. I knew that any minute somebody with a tray was probably going to be at the door. But I wasn’t finished.”

“You had to find the video of Ginnis and Scarborough at the restaurant.”

“How did you know?”

“It never came into evidence, but we have a copy,” I tell her, “from Scarborough’s apartment.”

“The police had it?” she says.

“Yes, but they didn’t know what it was.”

“I assumed that Terry had copies, but I didn’t think anyone would pay any attention to it. Terry had tons of tapes and DVDs all over the place. What was one more or less?”

“That was the reason you were running out of time?” I say. “You couldn’t be sure how long you had before Scarborough went public about the Jefferson Letter, the fact that Ginnis, a member of the Supreme Court, had manufactured it.”

“Arthur didn’t know he was being taped. I had to find the tape and the letter itself, Terry’s copy, the one Arthur had given him. I knew Terry well enough to know that he would have both of these with him. If he was getting ready to out Arthur in the media over the letter, he would never leave these behind in his apartment or trust them to a safe-deposit box. Terry was paranoid. Put something in a vault and people with power, especially people in government, can always find a way to get at it. The only safe place was in his pocket or the briefcase he was carrying. So I looked.”

“And of course you were still wearing the gloves.”

She nods.

This accounts for all the little smudges of blood on Scarborough’s attaché case, the large sample case by the side of his chair, and the leather portfolio by the television, where she found the letter folded neatly, lying on top.

“Where did you find the videotape?” I ask.

“It was in his attaché case. Along with two DVDs. I had to worry about that,” she says. “I didn’t know a lot about the technology, but I knew if he had time to make copies of the tape and transfer them to DVD, there could be more copies someplace else. I had to assume that the video was also downloaded onto a computer somewhere. But Terry wouldn’t have copied the tape himself. He wouldn’t know how. He was always too busy to do anything like that, or learn how. He would have taken it somewhere and had it done. Why not? Raw footage of an old man talking about the value of some obscure letter over a meal in a restaurant wouldn’t mean a thing without Terry to explain what was happening and how all the little pieces fit together. I could only hope that if anybody stumbled on copies or found the video computer file, it would have that same meaningless sense to them.”

“And since they didn’t find it at the scene of a murder, why would they try to connect any dots?”

“That’s what I thought,” she says, “until you showed up at my office that day. But at that moment in the hotel room, I had bigger problems. I tried to wipe as much of the blood off of the raincoat as I could, using a wet towel that was already on the bathroom floor. Terry must have taken a shower. I had to make sure there were no fingerprints on the plastic of the coat. I was racing. I wrapped the coat with the same towel and threw it in my bag. I took off the gloves, wrapped them in a small hand towel, and dropped them in the bag. As fast as I was moving, I was careful not to touch anything with my hands. I used wet toilet paper to wipe spots of blood off my face and off the top of one of my shoes and then flushed the paper down the toilet. I used a clean face towel to touch any surfaces in the bathroom, including the handle on the toilet. I checked myself in the mirror and then started for the door. By now the carpet was soaked, and there was blood on the floor in the entry leading to the door. I had to step around it, stay to the left in the entry. I used the sleeve of my coat to open the door, and I ran. I ran down I don’t know how many flights of stairs before I got onto the elevator. When I got outside, I must have run for a mile. I threw the towel with the raincoat into the Dumpster in the parking lot. I got rid of the other towel with the gloves somewhere else. I can’t remember.”

“And of course you kept Scarborough’s copy of the letter.”

“You know, I’ve thought about that so many times. I don’t know why I kept it. It had Terry’s blood on it. It was the only thing left connecting me to that room, but for some reason I put it in a drawer when I got home. The DVDs and the videotape of Arthur talking with Terry in the restaurant, those I destroyed, but not before I watched one of the copies on my television. It was shot in early spring. Arthur was still recovering from his hip surgery. You could see his cane hooked on the edge of the table in the restaurant. This frail old man sitting there breaking bread with someone he despised, smiling, his eyes twinkling, thinking all the while that he was about to stick his fork in the devil.”

“And then Scarborough opened the letter and laid it on the table. You saw the look on Ginnis’s face,” I say. “He wasn’t smiling then.”

“No.”

“So that was the plan, to get Scarborough hooked on the Jefferson Letter, to get him to publish a book based on it, then reveal it as a fraud and leave him twisting?”

She nods. “Arthur had it all set up. He wrote the letter himself. You know, when you’re dealing with Arthur Ginnis, you’re dealing with a first-rate mind. He knew that the old code words for slavery in the Constitution, the fact that the framers had tried so hard to dodge the issue by avoiding the use of the word itself, made the substance of the Jefferson Letter completely plausible. Terry would buy into it in a heartbeat. Evidence of an offer to the slaving interests of Great Britain as the price to secure liberty for the American colonies and avoid a war-for Terry that was the stuff of dreams. Shatter the American myth. It was what he lived for. Terry hated the power structure. He hated authority, unless he was the one wielding it. He saw conspiracies everywhere.”

She seems more comfortable now, out from under the dark cloud of the murder, the details of the Jefferson Letter almost seeming to amuse her.

“First Arthur tried to get Terry to include the Jefferson Letter as part of Perpetual Slaves, a kind of one-two punch-slavery in the Constitution and history’s ultimate dirty deal in the letter. Arthur knew that Terry couldn’t resist. The letter confirmed every evil thought Terry ever had about the white ruling class, rotten to the core from the instant they entered the promised land.

“If that wasn’t enough, Terry was always the insecure author. Nibbling at the edges of his mind was the ever-present thought, ‘What if I trot out the old language of slavery and all they do is yawn?’ He could never be sure that the language was enough to ignite the firestorm he needed for success. But toss in Jefferson’s letter and Terry had an instant flamethrower. When Arthur dangled it, Terry did a swan dive, chasing the copy.”

“But of course you were there to stop it,” I tell her. “You convinced Scarborough he needed to authenticate the letter.”

“You bet I did. Arthur was angry. He could never forgive Terry for what he’d done to him. There’s no question he would have been chief justice but for Terry Scarborough’s lies. He’s one of the most intelligent human beings I’ve ever known. Do you think he would have even considered doing something like this five years ago, even three years ago? Never! Here’s a man with a lifelong reputation to protect, a judicial philosophy etched in law for a quarter of a century. And here he was taking a risk of immense proportions. He hated Scarborough. If you want to know what I thought, I thought Arthur was losing it. The reckless thing he was doing had all the signs of senility, and yet he seemed not to have dropped a single stitch. You bet I tried to stop it.

“Even after I convinced Terry to hold the letter and told him that he couldn’t use it without authentication, Arthur wouldn’t quit. God, that old man,” she says. “Terry wanted the original, and Arthur wouldn’t give it to him. Terry said he couldn’t convince the publisher to go forward with another book unless he produced the original of the Jefferson Letter and allowed them to authenticate it. Arthur didn’t buy it.

“He told Terry to call the publisher’s bluff. If they wouldn’t go forward based on the copy and a promise to deliver the original later, Terry should tell them he would take the project to another publisher. Given the sales of Perpetual Slaves, there’d be a bidding war for rights to the next book. When Terry thought about that, he stopped arguing. I think for a moment he might have even considered hiring Arthur to represent him.

“When Terry threatened, the publisher caved. They gave him a contract, told him where to sign, handed him a seven-figure advance, and promised to wait for the original of the Jefferson Letter that would have to be produced and authenticated before publication. They weren’t happy, but they did it. Terry was throwing parties-not that he needed the money, but the advance was twice what he thought he would get.”

“But if Ginnis knew he had to cough up the original of the letter before the book went into print, where was the downside for Scarborough? The publisher would know that the letter was a fraud before the book ever went to press,” I say.

“That’s what I’m saying. Arthur’s smart. He had already burned the original of the letter. He knew he couldn’t show it to anybody, not without revealing it as a fraud. The plan was to leak another copy of the letter to the media, with an anonymous note that Terry was doing a book and the name of the publisher-all this just about the time Terry was finishing the manuscript.

“The media would be all over the publisher, and they’d already have the contents of the letter, all the dirty little details, the bombshell of a letter, the offered deal on slavery. With all of this in the press, who needs a book?

“When the time came to produce the original, as far as Arthur was concerned, he was the original man from Mars. He knew nothing. He’d never heard of the Jefferson Letter. He didn’t know what Terry was talking about. By then the publisher-caught between the press, their inability to publish, and the suspicion that Terry had turned the media loose on them in an effort to force publication without the original letter-would have to go into court against Terry even if he was a hot property. When they found the paper trail leading back to Scarborough…”

“Zobel’s files with Scarborough’s signature on the disclaimer form.”

“You found that, too?” she says.

“Uh-huh.”

“When they found that, the U.S. Attorney would be joining the party, and Terry would be looking at both the civil and criminal sides of the same coin.”

“How did Ginnis manage to get Scarborough’s signature on that form?”

She laughs. “He not only had Terry’s signature, he also had his fingerprints all over that form. As a lawyer, Terry didn’t even belong in Arthur’s universe. But he was an author, and he had a large ego. He was used to autographing hundreds, even thousands, of books every year. It wasn’t unusual to have someone come up to him in a line during an autograph party and tell the author that he’d left his book at home. The person might have a paper bookplate to be signed that he could paste in the book later, or just a piece of paper that he could glue in. It happens often enough that writers don’t even think about it.

“Arthur waited for an autographing appearance at a bookshop in Washington. That was for the book just before Perpetual Slaves. Arthur sent over a clerk with a sheet of paper that had a penciled line where Terry was to sign. The clerk was told not to say anything about Arthur or where the request was coming from. It was some kind of a surprise. The story was simple: She owned a book and had forgotten it at home.

“The night before the autographing, Arthur printed Zobel’s disclaimer form on his home computer. All he had to do was put a copy of the form under a blank sheet of paper with a little light behind the two, and you could see where the signature went on the disclaimer form. That’s where Arthur drew the penciled line. When he got the sheet back with the signature, he pulled up the form, ran the signed sheet through the printer, and there it was, the form with the signature, all in the right place. He used gloves so his prints wouldn’t be on the form, only Scarborough’s and the clerk’s, who Arthur knew they’d never look for.

“I know what you’re thinking. How can a man who’s senile think that far ahead? What was happening in his head were all the details-the judgment needed to weigh the totality of what he was doing was gone. It’s why in the video, when Terry tried to hand him the copy of the letter, Arthur went for the bread instead. He refused to touch the paper. He didn’t want his prints on it. What he didn’t know was that Scarborough had already discovered that the letter was a fraud and that Arthur was being taped and recorded as they talked about it over the table. I don’t know how Terry found out. However he did it, the devil was getting ready to roast Arthur.”

She picks up her glass and takes a drink.

“Which brings us to the point,” I say. “When did Arthur Ginnis die?”

She looks at me over the curved edge of the glass. It’s the first hint of surprise I have seen in her eyes, as a tear forms and runs down her cheek. “You knew?”

“Process of elimination,” I tell her.

There is a long pause here as she catches her breath, a weight lifted from her shoulders. It was not Ginnis that Herman, Harry, and I saw on the steps of the hotel in Curaçao that night. It was Scott dressed in his clothes and playing the part from a distance. We never got close enough to see the face. But because Aranda was there, we made the natural assumption. Our eyes saw what we wanted to see.

Without realizing that Harry and I were already in the air headed for the island, Scott, after slipping the envelope under our office door, headed for Curaçao as well. She would have landed on the island the day after us, about the same time the media showed up. Scott, Aranda, and Ginnis’s wife, Margaret, must have been in a panic by then. When I cornered Aranda at the beach and he slipped away, Scott was already there, coming up with the next plan to bail them out. It would not have been hard with a few phone calls to find out where we were staying, to watch the restaurant veranda with field glasses, and to stage the performance for our benefit across the water. Even if the floating bridge hadn’t moved, Herman would never have gotten there in time. Ginnis-cum-Scott would have hopscotched down the steps, into the car, and away before Herman could have drawn within a block. It was all designed to convince us he was still alive and to discourage us from looking further, because he had escaped.

“So when did he die?” I ask.

“It was six weeks, almost to the day, before I visited Terry in that San Diego hotel room,” says Scott. “Margaret, Arthur’s wife, had called me from the islands down in Curaçao. Arthur had gone swimming in the ocean. He’d had a problem. He came out of the water all right, but he didn’t feel good. There was something wrong. The clerk who was with him wanted to take him to a hospital, but Arthur refused. Margaret told me that they got him home, put him on the bed, and he lay there rambling on, mumbling that now everything he’d done was for nothing. Within minutes he was gone.”

She stops, takes a drink of water, and wipes her eyes with the cloth napkin.

“Margaret told me that nobody else knew except Aranda, his clerk. We talked about Arthur for a while. We cried. She talked about the things that were important to him in his life and the result, the effect this would have on the Court. We both knew what Arthur meant when he said it was all for nothing. He was desperate to stay on the Court until after the next election. He had talked to me about it before the surgery on his hip. It was ingrained in him, so many years and so many battles-then one appointment and it could all slip away. If he had died in a hospital or dropped dead on a crowded street, that would have been it, but instead here we were the only three people on the planet who knew he was gone.

“I don’t remember how it started, whether it was a joke or if we were serious. But that’s when we decided,” she says. “It was right there, that day on the phone. We knew that it wouldn’t be easy. We convinced ourselves that all we were doing was buying some time. I flew down to Curaçao the next day. We had the body cremated. Being on the islands turned out to be an advantage. Arthur and his wife had never been to Curaçao before. She had rented the house because their own place on St. Croix was being repaired. Nobody on Curaçao knew who he was. I won’t tell you how we did it, but we were able to secure a death certificate with the date left open.

“I think we knew from the beginning that we couldn’t make it all the way through to the next election. That was seventeen months away. We talked all night. Aranda, the clerk, was getting scared. I think he thought we were out of our minds. He was right. But that was the thing about Arthur-once you knew him, you couldn’t help but fall under his spell, and Aranda was already there. He just needed a little convincing. We found a calendar and started looking at it. The more we looked, the more we realized we only had to keep the secret for nine months, from October until the following June-a single term. As we sat there in the islands, the Court was in recess. They wouldn’t start their next term until October. If we could keep the world at bay from then until the following June, the Court would start its next summer recess. Any correspondence coming in would be easy. Margaret had signed Arthur’s name on checks and other documents for years. We were far enough away that we didn’t have to worry about visitors dropping in. The problem was the phone.

“Still, the longer we looked at the calendar, the more plausible it sounded. The media back home was already fixated on the presidential primaries. Members of the House and Senate were in election mode. By the following June, with a presidential election five months away and the Court in recess, nobody would be looking for Arthur or wondering where he was. By the time the Court reconvened, the election would be a month away. No sitting president was going to nominate a candidate to the Supreme Court and secure Senate confirmation when he’s a lame duck and the election to replace him is a month out. Not in the climate of today’s politics.” As she says this, her eyes seem to sparkle. Trisha Scott is a true believer.

“You had it all worked out.”

“I know that looking back at it, you must think we were crazy, except for one thing. We had a trump card. Without it we would never have given the idea a second thought. We told ourselves that anytime things got too hot, we could simply fill in the date on the death certificate, call the Court to send out a press release, pack up the ashes, and fly home. Who would ever know? At least that’s what we thought.”

“That’s when Scarborough and his videotape caught up with you.”

“Yes. For six weeks everything went like clockwork. If court staff called, Aranda took care of it, supposedly shuttling answers, as the justice was too tired to talk. It even worked with two members of the Court. You’d be surprised how few phone calls you get when everybody thinks you’re sick and you need your rest.

“And then it happened. Out of the blue, from a direction I never even looked. It was the morning before Terry was scheduled to appear on Leno. He had been all over the airwaves for days. It was hard to turn on the television and not see his face. I got a call from a woman I knew. She wasn’t really a friend. I would bump into her once in a while downtown shopping or jogging out on the Mall. You might say we once ran in the same circles. She was just coming to the end of a relationship with Terry, and she was angry. Terry’s liaisons always ended the same way. At first I thought she only wanted somebody to talk to. She knew that I’d been through the same wringer two years earlier. And so we talked.

“But partway through the conversation she said, ‘You’re a friend of Arthur Ginnis, aren’t you?’ I said yes. Then she told me that Terry had some video of the justice in a restaurant. He was looking at it on the television a few days earlier when she went to his apartment to pick up the last of her things. He didn’t turn it off, but she didn’t know what it was, only that Terry seemed to be gloating. This was something you would always recognize if you were around him regularly. Then she told me he laughed and said something weird, something she didn’t understand. He said, ‘That old man’s about to find out what it’s like to be the author of the Hitler Diaries.’” She asked if I had any idea what he meant. I told her no. By then the blood in my veins had turned to ice.

“With everything that had happened, with Arthur dead, I’d forgotten entirely about the letter. Margaret never knew about it, nor did Aranda. I hadn’t thought about Terry in months. Suddenly I realized that Terry knew the letter was a hoax and that he was getting ready to go public. What seemed so easy in the islands six weeks earlier was now a nightmare, and there was no one I could share it with.”

The reason she now unburdens herself becomes clear. Trisha Scott has been trapped in a psychic isolation cell of horrors for almost a year, without a soul to share her tortured thoughts with.

“I couldn’t go to Terry and tell him that Arthur was dead. He wouldn’t care. Terry would simply have a second scandal to take to the bank. If I did nothing and he went public with the letter and what he knew about it, every reporter in the Western Hemisphere would be looking for Arthur. He’d be at the top of every headline in the States. And then I thought if I tried to put a date on the death certificate and Arthur turned up dead just as Terry was breaking the story on the letter, you’d have to hunt with dogs to find anybody in the country who didn’t believe that Arthur Ginnis had gotten caught in a scandal and committed suicide.

“What made it worse were Margaret and Aranda. They were innocents,” she says. “They followed my lead. They knew nothing about Scarborough or the letter or how Terry had died. All they were doing was buying time, doing what they thought Arthur would want them to do. If we couldn’t use Arthur’s death certificate to bail out, they would be caught in the middle of investigations and risk possible jail time for their part in concealing Arthur’s death. I had to stop Terry. I had no choice. What would you have done?” she says. “Tell me.”

“So what you’re saying is that Arthur Ginnis had to stay alive and Terry Scarborough had to die.”

There is a long pause as she stares at me across the table. Her eyes seem like empty spheres, and she looks dazed, as if she’s just caught a glimmer of the lights outside.

“I don’t know how else to say it, how to make such an utterly insane act sound rational,” she says, “but for me there really was no other way out.”

I finish my drink, and I get up from the table. I don’t say good-bye. I don’t say a word. I just walk toward the door. Outside, the light bars are flashing on three D.C. Metropolitan Police cars. Two uniformed cops and a plainclothes detective are walking this way. Trisha Scott will have a long night of questions ahead of her, and a great many days to think about what she has done.