Watergate (35 page)

Fred LaRue was lighting his pipe on the balcony when Clarine Lander tapped her very large sapphire ring against its sliding glass door.

LaRue couldn’t understand why she still wore the ring now that she’d separated from her second husband, but Clarine’s summons was so urgent—three more hard taps of the sapphire—that there was no time to think about the matter. The glass would soon be scratched if he didn’t get back inside.

“You need to see this,” said Clarine, her voice much calmer than her signal had been. She gestured toward the television.

Martha Mitchell filled the screen. Her hair was in a wild ponytail, an instant’s gathering of yellow straw, and her sunglasses half-covered a face she’d not bothered to make up. She stood, LaRue realized, by the Fifth Avenue sidewalk canopy he’d looked down onto two months before.

“Who do you think Mr. Mitchell has been
protecting
?” Martha shouted at the reporters. “Mr.
President
, that’s who! Mr. Mitchell and I went to Washington to
help
this country. We didn’t make one
iota
of profit from anything! Where do you think all this
originated
? Do you think my husband is that
stupid
?” The breathlessness of the tirade, spreading out over the whole NBC network, allowed no moment for reporters to answer the questions she was pelting them with.

“You can place
all
the blame right where it belongs—on
Mr. President
and his White House!”

“Dear God,” murmured LaRue.

Clarine, lying once more on the bed where they’d spent most of the afternoon, lit a cigarette and laughed her low, growling laugh.

“Is this live?” LaRue asked her.

“ ‘Live’? She’s the only one in your whole criminal caboodle who is. I just love her to death.”

LaRue imagined Mitchell, ten stories above his wife, listening helplessly as she reached her crescendo: “My husband tells me that if anything happens to the president this country will fall apart. Well, it would be a darned sight better for Mr. President to
resign
than for him to get
impeached!
”

LaRue’s chin sank to his chest. “Turn it off, Larrie.” He walked back to the sliding glass door. Out on the balcony again, he looked in the direction of John and Martha’s old apartment, where he’d so often headed for dinner at just this time of evening.

Mitchell had to be past his limit now. No amount of leftover love for his crazy belle could let him stand for this, unless he’d slipped farther down into the bottle than Martha herself. And why shouldn’t he? Eight days ago he’d been indicted for something that didn’t even cover Watergate: his supposed attempt to block an investigation into the two hundred thousand dollars that weird Bob Vesco, from whatever country he was hiding out in, had contributed to the Old Man.

“I’m going to make you a drink,” Clarine called.

LaRue came back inside and watched her move from the unmade bed to the little kitchen bar. As she plunged some tongs into the ice bucket, he regarded the black hair falling past her shoulders, almost halfway toward the skirt she’d just put back on; the garment was so short it could scarcely be called a skirt at all. He made himself remember the way she’d looked fifteen years ago at her receptionist’s desk in Jackson, with a cardigan sweater over her shirtwaist dress. He felt himself aroused by the tangle of the old memory and the present sight.

She was here every few evenings, and sometimes, like today, for the morning and afternoon as well. She appeared to be her own law at the DNC, which had recently departed the Watergate for cheaper premises across town: the burglars had made the complex so famous that rents were being jacked up for all the offices and retailers. As it was, Clarine would soon be leaving the National Committee altogether. The McGovernites who’d led the party to defeat were being replaced by moderate types not at all to her liking. So she would be “going away”—her words—saying goodbye to her job and the District as she’d said goodbye to her second husband. She didn’t say where she was going, and LaRue had yet to ask her destination, fearing such a simple question
might put a match to the atmosphere inside the apartment, which for the past four weeks he’d been breathing like pure oxygen.

If he didn’t have a morning appointment with his lawyer or the prosecutors, and if Clarine weren’t still here, he’d head off to the CRP, where even now, however ridiculously, he remained on the staff roster. He’d putter around with what those in the office called, even more ridiculously, “loose ends,” as if they were on top of instead of beneath things. From time to time he’d even have to deal with the Democrats’ civil suit, flipping through documents that contained the name of Clarine Lander on lists of employees whose rights had been violated by the burglars.

As Larrie now threw lime wedges into the cocktails, LaRue thought of all the things that might have set Martha off today. On top of the Vesco indictment, there had been this morning’s Ervin Committee testimony by Jim McCord, a man she had liked. There was also the deposition Martha had just finished giving in the civil suit.

“She’d been drying out a couple of weeks ago,” LaRue explained to Clarine as they both sat down. “But she went right back to pills and all the rest the day she got home.”

“Well,” said Clarine, poking at her lime wedge with a long, clear-polished fingernail, “one more piece of the world’s now gone officially upside down. Martha is out of love with ‘Mr. President.’ ” She drank the first full inch of her gin and tonic. “I’ll tell you what’s also seriously upside down. This whole investigation. As soon as you boys started turnin’ yourselves in, all those overeducated sleuths got so enthralled by the cover-up that they stopped investigating the crime itself. By which I mean what went on down there.” She pointed vaguely in the direction of the Democrats’ old offices. “They seem to have lost interest in why your pals broke in there in the first place.”

She appeared to be starting a serious conversation, maybe the one she’d come to have with him on April 16, under the umbrella. But twenty minutes after she reentered his existence they’d wound up here in bed, alive to things that had happened eleven years, not eleven months, before. And now that she at last seemed ready to rekindle the initial conversation, he felt like a green piece of wood that couldn’t take the flame.

“Martha’s right about money,” he said. “Money may have been my whole part in it, but you can’t name me one other political scandal where nobody had money as his motive, at least at the start.” He was practically quoting a column, by one of the Alsop brothers, from which he’d taken comfort.

“That makes you boys worse, not better,” said Clarine, annoyed that the lime wedge was now too far down the glass to be stabbed with her fingernail. “You-all were interested in nothin’ but power. In tyranny.” Forgoing the lime, she picked up a Subpoena Duces Tecum—the prosecutors’ latest request for documents—from the coffee table. She played with it absently, as if it were a coaster. Then, seeing LaRue’s hangdog expression, she looked at him more sympathetically.

“Hound,” she finally asked, using an old nickname, “do you remember the envelope?”

“I do,” said LaRue, who knew she wasn’t talking about any of the hush money he had spent the past year collecting and distributing. She was talking about the envelope that had come to the law office in Jackson fifteen years ago, the one containing a report from the Canadian investigators on what had happened in the duck blind where Daddy died. As soon as she’d shown him the unopened envelope, twenty-two-year-old Larrie had written “MOOT” straight across it. Money had already been paid to a person who’d been able to get things called off, and the secret report had been sent merely on what today would be called “an FYI basis.” They’d even returned Daddy’s bird gun, now mounted on the wall not ten feet away! He and Larrie, already involved, had never opened the envelope, preferring not to know whatever forensic truths it contained. But they had decided she would keep it. Possessing it gave her a kind of power over him, one that both of them enjoyed her having. She became the guardian of his most awful secret, without either one of them knowing exactly what it was.

LaRue now tried to smile. “One day early last year I was up in Eastland’s office and your old friend Betty Boyd started joking about ‘Clarine’s mementos’—all the photographs and Cracker Jack prizes, all the ‘little boxes and envelopes’ you kept stuffed in your bottom drawer back when you worked with her.”

He looked at Clarine, and she looked back at him. “Yes, it was there.
With all those other things.” She had never kept it in any of the homes she’d shared with a man.

“The trinkets and tokens of my successors,” said LaRue.

Clarine laughed and sipped, and then just looked with mild interest toward the glass door.

LaRue had for weeks been piecing together her last decade, assembling a timeline as if he were one of the prosecutors, albeit without subpoena power or even the right to ask questions. He knew that after bolting Eastland’s office for the Mississippi Freedom Democrats, she’d gone to work for SNCC, staying until the blacks more or less threw out the whites from the organization. She’d even had a black boyfriend during this period between her two husbands, one a lawyer and the other a professor, both of them Jews—all of this before ’69, when she came to the DNC. By that point Humphrey had lost to the Old Man and she could foresee the rise of the party’s lefties.

As he sat here now and watched her heart-shaped face—its widow’s peak dipping and rising ever so slightly as she munched a peanut—LaRue thought of all the times he thought he’d seen her these last few years: in a wire-service photo of some May Day protest against the war; in a wide-angle TV shot of the floor demonstration for McGovern in Miami; and in the distance, with his own eyes, as he watched a gaggle of women’s libbers tote a bedsheet banner past the EOB.

“You never did open it, did you?” he asked. “The envelope.”

“No, I didn’t.”

He now felt certain that this was what she’d come to talk about last month. At the moment he could see the same look she’d had in April, under the umbrella. She was edging up to the subject, as if newly urged toward it by Martha’s crazy performance, and as if his old secret might somehow be connected to Watergate itself. But now that she looked ready to speak, he feared her words would put a sudden end to the past month’s idyll.

Over the past four weeks, in the midst of all else, he had told Larrie much of what he’d done in connection with the cover-up, notwithstanding his occasional suspicion that she’d planted herself here as an agent of the DNC. But what would be the point of that—or of his being reticent? The prosecutors already knew the lion’s share of what he’d told her. In
return, of course, she had told him approximately nothing, about herself or anything else. But he liked the imbalance, the way it added to the power she retained through holding on to that envelope.

He looked now at her big sapphire ring, knowing he would never have her fully or for long, wondering if a Jewish doctor would be next.

On impulse, he went over to the top desk drawer and pulled out Dorothy Hunt’s jade pin. The airport encounter was the only thing he had told to Clarine but
not
the prosecutors. And now he felt the urge to place this piece of jewelry, a macabre tribute, atop his revelation.

“Hunt’s wife put this in the locker with the money. She said she felt overdressed. Like I told you, she was trying to rattle me and I couldn’t make her out. Is it worth a lot?” He handed the pin to Clarine.

“Maybe more than you think,” she said.

“Keep it.”

Clarine looked more thoughtful than startled. “Why not give it to the prosecutors?” she asked. “Isn’t it evidence?”

“There’s enough evidence already,” said LaRue, even more softly than usual. He thought he could continue to keep the airport meeting from Silbert’s men: all the money in the locker had eventually found its way to the burglars, so there seemed no need for the prosecutors to find out about its brief layover. There was also, of course, no practical reason why LaRue, having told them everything else, shouldn’t tell them about this as well. But some piece of him rebelled against being written into the story of Dorothy Hunt’s incineration.

“I suppose this really belongs to Howard Hunt,” said Clarine, declining to put on the jade pin. She just fingered it, the way she had the subpoena, while LaRue once again tried to reassure himself that not even Dorothy’s husband knew of the meeting at National.

“Maybe it’s only fair that you have it,” said Clarine. “Because I think he may have something of yours.” She put the pin on the coffee table.

LaRue laughed. “You mean all the money I funneled his way? Big lot o’ good it wound up doing anybody.”

“I don’t mean the money.”

LaRue blinked a couple of times and exhaled. He realized she had finally gotten to whatever she’d come here about last month.

“I don’t have the envelope anymore,” said Clarine.