The Pelican Brief (7 page)

Voyles watched the President. “Court opened Monday, as you know, and the maniacs have been in town for a few days. For the past two weeks, we’ve been monitoring various movements. We know of at
least eleven members of the Underground Army who’ve been in the D.C. area for a week. We questioned a couple today, and released them. We know the group has the capability, and the desire. It’s our strongest possibility, for now. Could change tomorrow.”

Coal was not impressed. The Underground Army was on everyone’s list.

“I’ve heard of them,” the President said stupidly.

“Oh yes. They’re becoming quite popular. We believe they killed a trial judge in Texas. Can’t prove it, though. They’re very proficient with explosives. We suspect them in at least a hundred bombings of abortion clinics, ACLU offices, porno houses, gay clubs, all over the country. They’re just the people who would hate Rosenberg and Jensen.”

“Other suspects?” Coal asked.

“There’s an Aryan group called White Resistance that we’ve been watching for two years. It operates out of Idaho and Oregon. The leader gave a speech in West Virginia last week, and has been in the area for a few days. He was spotted Monday in the demonstration outside the Supreme Court. We’ll try to talk to him tomorrow.”

“But are these people professional assassins?” Coal asked.

“They don’t advertise, you understand. I doubt if any group performed the actual killings. They just hired the assassins and provided the legwork.”

“So who’re the assassins?” the President asked.

“We may never know, frankly.”

The President stood and stretched his legs. Another hard day at the office. He smiled down at
Voyles across the desk. “You have a difficult task.” It was the grandfather’s voice, filled with warmth and understanding. “I don’t envy you. If possible, I would like a two-page typewritten double-spaced report by 5 P.M. each day, seven days a week, on the progress of the investigation. If something breaks, I expect you to call me immediately.”

Voyles nodded but did not speak.

“I’m having a press conference in the morning at nine. I would like for you to be here.”

Voyles nodded but did not speak. Seconds passed and no one spoke. Voyles stood noisily and tied the strap around the trench coat. “Oh well, we’ll be going. You’ve got the Ethiopians and all.” He handed the ballistics and autopsy reports to Coal, knowing the President would never read them.

“Thanks for coming, gentlemen,” the President said warmly. Coal closed the door behind them, and the President grabbed the putter. “I’m not eating with the Ethiopians,” he said, staring at the carpet and a yellow ball.

“I know it. I’ve already sent your apologies. This is a great hour of crisis, Mr. President, and you are expected to be here in this office surrounded by your advisers, hard at work.”

He putted, and the ball rolled perfectly into the cup. “I want to talk to Horton. These nominations must be perfect.”

“He’s sent a short list of ten. Looks pretty good.”

“I want young conservative white men opposed to abortion, pornography, queers, gun control, racial quotas, all that crap.” He missed a putt, and kicked off his loafers. “I want judges who hate dope and
criminals and are enthusiastic about the death penalty. Understand?”

Coal was on the phone, punching numbers and nodding at his boss. He would select the nominees, then convince the President.

________

K. O. Lewis sat with the Director in the back of the quiet limousine as it left the White House and crawled through rush-hour traffic. Voyles had nothing to say. So far, in the early hours of the tragedy, the press had been brutal. The buzzards were circling. No less than three congressional subcommittees had already announced hearings and investigations into the deaths. And the bodies were still warm. The politicians were giddy and wrestling for the spotlight. One outrageous statement fueled another. Senator Larkin from Ohio hated Voyles, and Voyles hated Senator Larkin from Ohio, and the senator had called a press conference three hours earlier and announced his subcommittee would immediately begin investigating the FBI’s protection of the two dead justices. But Larkin had a girlfriend, a rather young one, and the FBI had some photographs, and Voyles was confident the investigation could be delayed.

“How’s the President?” Lewis finally asked.

“Which one?”

“Not Coal. The other one.”

“Swell. Just swell. He’s awfully tore up about Rosenberg, though.”

“I bet.”

They rode in silence in the direction of the Hoover Building. It would be a long night.

“We’ve got a new suspect,” Lewis finally said.

“Do tell.”

“A man named Nelson Muncie.”

Voyles slowly shook his head. “Never heard of him.”

“Neither have I. It’s a long story.”

“Gimme the short version.”

“Muncie is a very wealthy industrialist from Florida. Sixteen years ago his niece was raped and murdered by an Afro-American named Buck Tyrone. The little girl was twelve. Very, very brutal rape and murder. I’ll spare you the details. Muncie has no children, and idolized his niece. Tyrone was tried in Orlando, and given the death penalty. He was guarded heavily because there were a bunch of threats. Some Jewish lawyers in a big New York firm filed all sorts of appeals, and in 1984 the case arrives at the Supreme Court. You guessed it: Rosenberg falls in love with Tyrone and concocts this ridiculous Fifth Amendment self-incrimination argument to exclude a confession the punk gave a week after he was arrested. An eight-page confession that he, Tyrone, wrote himself. No confession, no case. Rosenberg writes a convoluted five-to-four opinion overturning the conviction. An extremely controversial decision. Tyrone goes free. Then, two years later he disappears and has not been seen since. Rumor has it Muncie paid to have Tyrone castrated, mutilated, and fed to the sharks. Just a rumor, say the Florida authorities. Then in 1989, Tyrone’s main lawyer on the case, man named Kaplan, is gunned down by an apparent mugger outside his apartment in Manhattan. What a coincidence.”

“Who tipped you?”

“Florida called two hours ago. They’re convinced Muncie paid a bunch of money to eliminate both Tyrone and his lawyer. They just can’t prove it. They’ve got a reluctant, un identified informant who says he knows Muncie and feeds them a little info. He says Muncie has been talking for years about eliminating Rosenberg. They think he went a little over the edge when his niece was murdered.”

“How much money has he got?”

“Enough. Millions. No one is sure. He’s very secretive. Florida is convinced he’s capable.”

“Let’s check it out. Sounds interesting.”

“I’ll get on it tonight. Are you sure you want three hundred agents on this case?”

Voyles lit a cigar and cracked his window. “Yeah, maybe four hundred. We need to crack this baby before the press eats us alive.”

“It won’t be easy. Except for the slugs and the rope, these guys left nothing.”

Voyles blew smoke out the window. “I know. It’s almost too clean.”

7
________

THE CHIEF slouched behind his desk with a loosened tie and a haggard look. Around the room, three of his brethren and a half-dozen clerks sat and talked in subdued tones. The shock and fatigue were evident. Jason Kline, Rosenberg’s senior clerk, looked especially hard-hit. He sat on a small sofa and stared blankly at the floor while Justice Archibald Manning, now the senior Justice, talked of protocol and funerals. Jensen’s mother wanted a small, private Episcopal service Friday in Providence. Rosenberg’s son, a lawyer, had delivered to Runyan a list of instructions the Justice had prepared after his second stroke in which he wanted to be cremated after a nonmilitary ceremony and his ashes dropped over the Sioux Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Though Rosenberg was Jewish, he had abandoned the religion and claimed to be agnostic. He wanted to be buried with the Indians. Runyan thought that was appropriate, but did not say so. In the outer office, six FBI agents sipped coffee and whispered nervously. There had been more threats during the day, several coming within hours of the President’s
early morning address. It was dark now, almost time to escort the remaining justices home. Each had four agents as bodyguards.

Justice Andrew McDowell, at sixty-one now the youngest member of the Court, stood in the window, smoking his pipe and watching traffic. If Jensen had a friend on the Court, it was McDowell. Fletcher Coal had informed Runyan that the President would not only attend Jensen’s service but wanted to deliver a eulogy. No one in the inner office wanted the President to say a word. The Chief had asked McDowell to prepare a few words. A shy man who avoided speeches, McDowell twirled his bow tie and tried to picture his friend in the balcony with a rope around his neck. It was too awful to think about. A Justice of the Supreme Court, one of his distinguished brethren, one of the nine, hiding in such a place watching those movies and being exposed in such a ghastly manner. What a tragic embarrassment. He thought of himself standing before the crowd in the church and looking at Jensen’s mother and family, and knowing that every thought would be on the Montrose Theatre. They would ask each other in whispered voices, “Did you know he was gay?” McDowell, for one, did not know, nor did he suspect. Nor did he want to say anything at the funeral.

Justice Ben Thurow, age sixty-eight, was not as concerned about burying the dead as he was about catching the killers. He had been a federal prosecutor in Minnesota, and his theory grouped the suspects into two classes: those acting out of hatred and revenge, and those seeking to affect future decisions. He had instructed his clerks to begin the research.

Thurow was pacing around the room. “We have twenty-seven clerks and seven justices,” he said to the group but to no one in particular. “It’s obvious we won’t get much work done for the next couple of weeks, and all close decisions must wait until we have a full bench. That could take months. I suggest we put our clerks to work trying to solve the killings.”

“We’re not police,” Manning said patiently.

“Can we at least wait until after the burials before we start playing Dick Tracy?” McDowell said without turning from the window.

Thurow ignored them, as usual. “I’ll direct the research. Loan me your clerks for two weeks, and I think we can put together a short list of solid suspects.”

“The FBI is very capable, Ben,” the Chief said. “They haven’t asked for our help.”

“I’d rather not discuss the FBI,” Thurow said. “We can mope around here in official mourning for two weeks, or we can go to work and find these bastards.”

“What makes you so sure you can solve this?” Manning asked.

“I’m not sure I can, but I think it’s worth a try. Our brethren were murdered for a reason, and that reason is directly related to a case or an issue already decided or now pending before this Court. If it’s retribution, then our task is almost impossible. Hell, everybody hates us for one reason or another. But if it’s not revenge or hatred, then perhaps someone wanted a different Court for a future decision. That’s what’s intriguing. Who would kill Abe and Glenn because of how they might vote on a case this year, next year, or
five years from now? I want the clerks to pull up every case now pending in the eleven circuits below.”

Justice McDowell shook his head. “Come on, Ben. That’s over five thousand cases, a small fraction of which will eventually end up here. It’s a wild-goose chase.”

Manning was equally unimpressed. “Listen, fellas. I served with Abe Rosenberg for thirty-one years, and I often thought of shooting him myself. But I loved him like a brother. His liberal ideas were accepted in the sixties and seventies, but grew old in the eighties, and are now resented in the nineties. He became a symbol for everything that’s wrong in this country. He has been killed, I believe, by one of these radical right-wing hate groups, and we can research cases till hell freezes over and not find anything. It’s retribution, Ben. Pure and simple.”

“And Glenn?” Thurow asked.

“Evidently our friend had some strange proclivities. Word must have spread, and he was an easy target for such groups. They hate homosexuals, Ben.”

Ben was still pacing, still ignoring. “They hate all of us, and if they killed out of hatred the cops’ll catch them. Maybe. But what if they killed to manipulate this Court? What if some group seized this moment of unrest and violence to eliminate two of us, and thus realign the Court? I think it’s very possible.”

The Chief cleared his throat. “And I think we’ll do nothing until after they are buried, or scattered. I’m not saying no, Ben, just wait a few days. Let the dust settle. The rest of us are still in shock.”

Thurow excused himself and left the room. His bodyguards followed him down the hall.

Justice Manning stood with his cane and addressed the Chief. “I will not make it to Providence. I hate flying, and I hate funerals. I’ll be having one myself before long, and I do not enjoy the reminder. I’ll send my sympathies to the family. When you see them, please apologize for me. I’m a very old man.” He left with a clerk.

“I think Justice Thurow has a point,” said Jason Kline. “We at least need to review the pending cases and those likely to arrive here from the lower circuits. It’s a long shot, but we may stumble across something.”

“I agree,” said the Chief. “It’s just a bit premature, don’t you think?”

“Yes, but I’d like to get started anyway.”

“No. Wait till Monday, and I’ll assign you to Thurow.”

Kline shrugged and excused himself. Two clerks followed him to Rosenberg’s office, where they sat in the darkness and sipped the last of Abe’s brandy.

________

In a cluttered study carrel on the fifth level of the law library, between the racks of thick, seldom-used law books, Darby Shaw scanned a printout of the Supreme Court’s docket. She had been through it twice, and though it was loaded with controversy, she found nothing that interested her.
Dumond
was causing riots. There was a child pornography case from New Jersey, a sodomy case from Kentucky, a dozen death penalty appeals, a dozen assorted civil rights cases, and the usual array of tax, zoning, Indian, and antitrust cases. From the computer she had pulled
summaries of each, then reviewed them twice. She compiled a neat list of possible suspects, but they would be obvious to everyone. The list was now in the garbage.