Watergate (23 page)

Sixty other people were flying to Chicago with Dorothy, and from her seat in first class she noticed a couple of them reading about Howard and the Plumbers in this morning’s
Washington Post
. Forgoing any conversation with her seatmate, she fiddled with her diamond solitaire, which had come from Howard’s mother, and which she’d worn through all the years of their marriage. Today she was also sporting a charm bracelet, with little dangling boys’ and girls’ heads, one for each of her children, as well as a few carved nuggets representing some of Howard’s old postings: Mount Fuji for their days in Japan; the Fountain of the Athletes in
Montevideo for their too-brief time in Uruguay. Would there soon be a charm for the Windy City?

She completed a tactile inventory of her jewelry by fingering the big cameo locket hiding the key. She thought of the money that would be waiting for her back in Washington along with the little jade brooch she’d left behind. She had already decided how to divide it up, and she would not tell Howard the figures. The Hunts would keep one hundred and eighty thousand dollars for themselves; they had risked and lost more than anyone else, and if any of the Cubans, even Bernie and Clarita, complained
—tough
. Getting this money had been Dorothy’s doing, and its distribution would be her decision. She had been managing things for months and might have to manage them for years beyond the trial.

Ever since talking to Colson, her husband had worried about being followed. Chuck had suggested as much over the phone, and after their conversation Howard had begun to assume that anyone he saw lurking was a low-level agent from Langley and not just some reporter from the
Post
. His old employer, he now felt sure, was keeping tabs on him. For all she knew, he was right; the possibility had started her worrying about McCord, Liddy’s choice to perform the wiretapping, another retired CIA man whose scattershot résumé, a series of implausible covers, gave Dorothy the creeps. His whole manner never added up—part preacher, part village idiot, part eccentric professor.

The plane was coming in through a peculiar mid-afternoon fog. Dorothy checked her watch, already set to central time, and saw that it was 2:26 p.m.; outside the window it looked more like night. She searched for lights and shapes below, hoping to feel a tug from them, a sensation that she was being drawn in by her new home. She twisted the diamond ring and reviewed her resolves: she would make the deal with her cousin’s husband; she and Howard would get past the trial; with the money in the locker they would get past the bills. And compensation from the White House—“compensation” was exactly the right word—wouldn’t stop even then.

All summer she’d assumed that Howard’s leverage would end with Nixon’s reelection. But as November approached she had realized the timidity of her reasoning. Nixon might be done with the voters, but not necessarily with the courts, or even Congress. Her few moments of conversation with LaRue on election night—
I’ve made a note of what you
just told me
—had convinced her that she was right to start thinking bigger. She had been able to sense the power she held from the nervousness in his voice at the other end of the phone line.

She closed her eyes now and rested her head against the back of the seat, enjoying the descent toward a new world and life, where she and her husband would be secretly rewarded for all the dangers they’d endured these past twenty years. Dealing with Mr. Rivers and LaRue might be an odd way to collect at last, but collect she would. As the plane drew closer to its destination, she felt almost as she had on that morning more than twenty years ago when she and Howard, laughing in their white convertible, pulled away for the last time from that awful Mexican apartment over the whorehouse.

Now, finally, they were above the airport, and getting close to the ground. She could see a nearby schoolyard full of children and had time to wonder how the teachers got anything done with what must be the constant jet noise. But the question was driven from her mind by a more urgent one:
Where was the runway?
The plane made a sudden, sickening turn, as if the pilot were afraid of the schoolchildren and needed to flee them. Seconds later it was over the rooftops of some houses, barely clearing them in its last moments of flight. In her own last seconds of consciousness—amidst an explosion of blue and orange flames that fused her locket forever shut—Dorothy realized that she was in someone’s living room.

At first LaRue thought it was film of a riot: the noise and the Chicago Fire Department hoses brought ’68 to mind. But then the TV announcer explained that this had been United Airlines Flight 553.

There was no mention of Mrs. Howard Hunt, only of a Negro congressman who had also been on the plane.

As it sank in, nausea and dread took possession of LaRue, as if he might be listening to the description of an “accident” that was really something else. He looked toward the telephone, certain that Mitchell or Magruder or Dean would now call him. But they didn’t, and as he continued staring at the silent phone, amidst the noise of the early-evening news, the smell of his pipe began to sicken him. He took it out
of his mouth and whacked its contents into an ashtray, then put his head between his knees, as if he were getting airsick on a plane that was still aloft. His mind went to all the things he didn’t fully know or understand: to Liddy, to the CIA, to whatever dark sludge the Plumbers may have been working to keep inside the administration’s pipes.

He got himself a glass of water, then poured it down the drain without taking a sip. The sight of a bourbon bottle on the kitchen counter made him vomit into the sink. With enormous effort he picked up his keys, shut off the television, and went down to the garage.

Planes coming into National flew so low over the Watergate that the huge, swirling complex might as well be those little houses in Chicago. He never really got used to it, and now, as he made the five-minute drive to the airport, the noise of the low-flying jets pulled him out of his skin. Once at National, he sat in the parking lot for ten minutes, composing himself, watching the news crews and their vans, there to film the family members of passengers who’d been on United 553. LaRue himself could spot them running into the terminal to demand any available seat to Chicago.

At last he got out of the car and entered the building, trying to look calm as he approached the locker-rentals counter. He told the attendant that he was Harry Johnson and that this morning he’d put his things in J20; he remembered the number because he’d gotten married to his wife, Joanne, twenty years ago this month. And he was damned if he hadn’t gone and lost the key sometime later in the day.

While he spun this tale, he thanked God that he had been the one to pay for the locker and to get a receipt; he just prayed that the alias he was remembering had been what he’d actually used this morning.

The attendant didn’t even bother checking one slip of paper against the other. He just reached up to the pegboard and took down a duplicate key to number J20. “Happens all the time,” he said.

LaRue retrieved Dorothy Hunt’s jade brooch and the two hundred and eighty thousand dollars—“one helluva lot of cabbage,” Tony Ulasewicz would have said. He then exited one door of the terminal, while Howard Hunt, his face as white as his raincoat, entered through another.

Rose Woods revised the invitation list for the last of the holiday parties, a New Year’s week reception. She decided to add a few names from far down the staff roster of the National Security Council. It might be their final shot at a White House shindig, since rumors of Kissinger’s resignation were swirling. Six days ago the peace talks had collapsed, and Henry had come home empty-handed to a president who told him to stop being brilliant and start being effective. Rose had heard the remark with her own ears.

Along with the invitations, she had on her desk, courtesy of Dwight Chapin, a memo titled “Four Truman Death Hypotheticals”: scheduling scenarios for each of the next several weeks, during any of which Harry Truman might die. It was the fashion for everyone to admire Truman now—there were people here in the White House who saw the same toughness and tenacity in both him and Richard Nixon—but to Rose the foul-mouthed thirty-third president remained a nasty character, the same breed of cat as Helen Gahagan Douglas and Stevenson and all the rest.

Six weeks after the election, a damper had fallen over the White House, and nobody seemed able to remove it. The president, when he was around at all, couldn’t keep from limping, though he made an agonized effort to hide this from reporters. The doctors had concluded that the problem wasn’t his old phlebitis but a bone in his foot that he’d splintered months ago during a spill at Camp David—where he continued to spend most of his time. Having lost any remaining patience with the enemy, the president had yesterday—high time, too, thought Rose—begun carpet-bombing North Vietnam. Within hours everyone in the Mansion and EOB had started hearing the loud, slow thump of a bass drum in Lafayette Park, somebody’s idea of a protest against
the assault, performed by a steady relay of long-haired demonstrators. It was beyond Rose’s comprehension how they remained immune to arrest. Her own nerves had started to shred, and she knew that Pat would never be able to sleep with it going on.

Rose felt relieved not to be working on the inaugural. Magruder was in charge of it, and the whole operation had moved out to Fort McNair. In fact, she’d seen Mr. Junior Executive only once since the election, when he’d breezed through the West Wing, tan as a coconut from ten days in the Bahamas, telling everybody about the two hundred thousand “honorary invitations”—whatever the hell
that
meant—his committee was sending out.

As she went about keeping the Christmas-party list to a manageable number, Rose took a certain comfort in how even Magruder seemed infected by the current gloom. It now looked as if during the second term he might have to settle for running the bicentennial under Agnew, since all the undersecretary jobs he hankered for required Senate confirmation. Nobody was going to send Magruder’s name—or Dean’s, or Chapin’s—up to the Hill for any of those positions, not when hearings would allow the Democrats to ask any Watergate question they liked.

All of a sudden HRH was darkening her door.

“Did you authorize flowers for Mrs. Hunt’s funeral?”

“I did,” Rose replied, stiffly.

“Why?”

“Because Howard Hunt had been a White House employee, that’s why. It’s what we do when there’s a death in anyone’s family.”

Dorothy Hunt had been buried out in Potomac, not far from her house. The
Post
had tailed the funeral procession and reported in its smartass way that one of the vehicles carried a “Re-Elect the President” bumper sticker. And now here was Haldeman telling her that the paper had just followed up with a call about the White House’s little floral tribute, which would probably get a snide mention in their next Watergate story.

“You should deviate from the usual procedures when there are special circumstances,” said Haldeman.

“I thought the circumstances were
very
special in this instance. The man’s wife burned up in a plane crash.”

Haldeman turned and left her office. Rose went back to the invitation list, so angry she thought she might burst a blood vessel. The root cause of her feeling was not Mrs. Hunt’s death but Don Carnevale’s. He had passed away two weeks before, at the age of sixty-three, from a heart attack he suffered behind his desk at Harry Winston in New York. Had there been flowers or a word of sympathy for her? Only from Pat and the girls, a little bouquet delivered to her apartment, its card commemorating “Uncle Don,” who’d overseen the design of Julie’s and Tricia’s wedding rings. According to the
Post
, Don had “remained a bachelor.” The picture they ran with the obituary showed him dancing with “the president’s secretary, Miss Rose Mary Woods,” and Bob Haldeman had surely seen it. But not one daisy had appeared on her desk. Maybe HRH thought the “usual procedures” required her to order flowers for herself.

Rose closed her eyes and rubbed her temples and thought about how rotten the past few weeks had been. She wished that, instead of those bogus assassination warnings, Jeane Dixon had provided advance word of the actual calamities that had been in store; and yet, what good would knowing have done?

Then, all at once, at the sound of an old lady’s voice, her eyelids sprang open. It was Mrs. Longworth, who had decided to saunter through the West Wing on her way to dinner in the Residence. “I thought I would check on how the place is looking!” she informed the Marine escorting her. “My father had it built, you know. Just like the Panama Canal.”

There were twelve people at two tables, six around each. They’d put Alice between the president and Julie, and more or less across from Kissinger and Anne Armstrong, the wealthy Vassar-educated rancher’s wife who was the president’s newest advisor, with Cabinet rank. Admiral Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had looked scared of Mrs. L when introduced to her during cocktails, and he’d been glad to find himself assigned to the other table, over which Mrs. Nixon presided.