Murder Keeps A Secret Page 16

  “I hope this is helpful, Mr. Frost.”

  “I honestly can’t say at this point but I hope so, too,” Frost said. “By the way, do you know what exactly is in the case files that you do have?”

  “Yes. Each file contains a printed copy of the opinion or opinions in the case, the manuscript of Ainslee’s opinion, if he wrote one, and proofs of all the drafts of opinions that he wrote or that were circulated to him. Slip opinions, I think they call them. Also any memos or correspondence sent around to the other Justices, and all the memos and correspondence he received from them. Plus any materials his clerks may have prepared.”

  “I see. That’s very helpful, Miss Wyecliffe.”

  “I’m very happy to oblige, Mr. Frost.”

  Frost put the sheet of paper on which he had written the three case names in his pocket and set out immediately for his office. Could these missing case files offer up a clue that would lead to the solution of David Rowan’s murder? Instinctively, he felt that they could, and he was impatient at a longer than usual delay on the subway.

  At Chase & Ward, Frost went directly to the library. He had not used the Supreme Court Reporters in several years and was apprehensive that they might have been replaced by the new electronic research services and been destroyed. If so, he would be in trouble, as he was not about to learn how to use the LEXIS system.

  His worries turned out to be ill-founded and, with a minimum of searching, he found the volumes for the Court’s 1972–73 term. He took the books to a desk in the crowded library—the firm really did have to move to new quarters, he told himself—and began reading at once. He was oblivious to the stares of the young lawyers around him. Library research was most often done by the very youngest associates, many of whom did not recognize the former Executive Partner of Chase & Ward by sight.

  Frost also noticed the profusion of “no smoking” signs in the library, a drastic change from his own early days when nervous cigarette smoking, or a cigar after dinner before an all-night siege with the books, had been almost essential to legal research.

  United States v. Rodriguez turned out to be a criminal search-and-seizure case, raising the question whether a search by Federal immigration officers in El Paso, Texas, violated the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment prohibition against unlawful searches and seizures.

  The hapless Rodriguez’s story, even in the dry prose of the opinions, read like an afternoon soap opera. Returning with two friends from an evening’s drinking in an El Paso bar, he had been stopped by the border patrol, authorized by an Act of Congress to stop and search automobiles within seventy-five miles of the Mexican border in a quest to find illegal immigrants. Rodriguez and his party were, in fact, legal residents of El Paso, possessed of the coveted green cards that made them legitimate, if not all-American native, inhabitants of the border city.

  But in the course of things, the curious border patrolmen found an enormous stash of marijuana in the trunk of Rodriguez’s car. So he was arrested on, and later convicted of, a Federal charge of possessing drugs.

  Rodriguez’s legal aid lawyers had made a persuasive case that the search of the man’s battered old Buick had been illegal: he had not consented to the search; the immigration agents had no search warrant; and there had not been any “probable cause” to suspect that the trunk of Rodriguez’s car was stuffed with pot. The border patrol’s only justification was that they had carte blanche, within the seventy-five-mile zone delineated by the Congress, to make warrantless searches.

  A five-to-four majority of the Court upheld the lower court’s dismissal of the charges against Rodriguez. He was undoubtedly guilty, but Justice Ainslee, writing for the majority, threw out his conviction. The failure of the border patrolmen—who weren’t commissioned to pursue drug offenses—to obtain a search warrant fatally infected the proceedings in the trial court. Absent “probable cause” for a search, or a search warrant issued by a judge, a man’s home was his castle, and so was his Buick.

  No clues there, thought Reuben, who then located Cleveland School District v. Henshaw. This turned out to be one of a series of thorny cases—Frost remembered reading about it at the time—implementing Brown v. Board of Education, the epic 1954 case in which the Supreme Court had outlawed racial segregation in America’s schools. The opinions in the case—a majority opinion, two concurrences and two dissents—took up one hundred pages in the Reporter, and wrestled with the question of whether segregation in Cleveland’s schools had been de jure, that is, as a result of unconstitutional actions by the city’s board of education and zoning authorities, or de facto, as a result merely of residential living patterns or other neutral factors not manipulated by the city. Frost grew impatient as he read the Justices’ attempts to characterize the patent racial segregation in the Cleveland schools. Did it matter to the black child, he thought, whether the segregation to which he was subject was, in lawyer-talk, de jure or de facto? If one agreed that segregation was harmful, shouldn’t the courts try to weed it out without regard to such legal niceties?

  It was clear, reading the lengthy opinions, that a majority of the Supreme Court had not reached Frost’s practical conclusion. There had been blatant segregation, fully supported by the local government, in certain Cleveland districts, with both black and white children moved about to create virtually all-black and all-white schools. But in other local areas within Cleveland, it appeared that segregation had arisen unassisted by any improper action of the local authorities.

  It was a tricky case, though Frost was impatient with the painful exposition of the tricks and the intellectual wrestling with the de jure—de facto distinction. But in the end, a bare majority of the Court found that a desegregation plan for the entire city, including the “innocent” areas where segregation had spawned without governmental assistance (“it just growed like Topsy,” Reuben thought bitterly), was not justified—assuming that the “innocent” areas, on remand of the case back to the District Court, could defend their behavior under guidelines set down in the opinion. Great work for lawyers, Reuben muttered to himself, envisioning the prolonged litigation that surely followed the remand.

  Mr. Justice Ainslee did not write in Cleveland, but joined in one of the dissents that would have upheld the city-wide desegregation plan.

  Again no clues, Frost thought, with a sense of despair. What could David Rowan’s death possibly have to do with a Buick full of dope in Texas or black school children in Ohio? Discouraged, he turned to Carrymore v. United States. The plaintiff, one Marjorie Carrymore, a woman sergeant in the United States Army, had sued the Federal Government alleging discrimination because of the different criteria applied to award dependency allowances to male and female military personnel. Male personnel, she alleged, automatically received such allowances when they married. But women in the military could only claim them if their husbands were actually dependent on their wives for support.

  Again, the disputatious Court divided five-to-four, finding in favor of Sergeant Carrymore under the particular facts of her case and the Army regulations she was challenging. But Reuben found fascinating and compelling a concurring opinion by Ainslee saying that it was time for the Court to stop dealing with sex discrimination on a piecemeal basis, and to recognize that such discrimination was as reprehensible to the American Constitution as racial bias. Frost was struck by the man’s eloquence—and his anticipation of the feminist arguments that had come to be accepted years after the late Justice had written.

  But what could the case mean in the context of the death of Ainslee’s biographer? He was discouraged; the Court opinions told him that Ainslee was indeed a thoughtful and articulate liberal, but they simply did not yield up any useful leads.

  Dutifully Frost returned the Reporters to their shelves and went to his office, finding there only an assortment of junk mail, gratis copies of the latest legal gossip papers—a proliferating new phenomenon he despised—and what seemed like an unending series of department store bills.

 
; On an impulse, he called Frank Norton, who came at once to his office.

  “Frank, you know all about the Supreme Court. I need your help,” Frost said as his young former partner sat down on the sofa in his office. “Close the door,” he added as a precaution, though his library searches had not produced any secrets for him to tell.

  “I learned this morning that there were three files of Garrett Ainslee’s papers that were missing when they got back down to East Jesus, or West Jesus or wherever that college is that keeps them. All dealing with Supreme Court cases, all from the nineteen seventy-two term. I’ve just spent two hours reading them in that storeroom your firm calls a library, and they don’t mean a thing to me.”

  Frost summarized the three cases and Norton agreed that he, too, could not make any pattern out of them.

  “I’m convinced those files are important, Frank. Somebody stole them at the same time that David was killed—I’m sure of it. But what on earth does a Chicano dope peddler, the Cleveland school board, and a disgruntled lady sergeant have to do with David—or Ainslee?”

  “I can’t help you, Reuben. I draw a blank. Except, didn’t you say that the cases were all decided during the same term?”

  “Yes. So what?”

  “Could that point to one of Ainslee’s clerks? They change every year, you know. Maybe those files had something in them damaging to one of his clerks.”

  “That hadn’t occurred to me. Now that you mention it, the mother hen who looks after the papers told me this morning that the case files usually do include memos by the clerks.”

  “That’s all I can think of, Reuben. Who were Ainslee’s clerks in nineteen seventy-two?”

  “I don’t know. How do you find out?”

  “That’s easy. Call the Office of the Clerk of the Supreme Court. You want me to do that, give him a call?”

  “Frank, you’re a sweetheart. Would you?”

  “No problem. I’ll do it right now.”

  Norton left, and Frost drummed his fingers on his desk as he waited for a response. Norton had had a good idea. But would it produce anything? Given the way things had been going, probably not.

  Norton was back in minutes.

  “I don’t know if this helps, Reuben, but Garrett Ainslee had three clerks in nineteen seventy-two: a woman named Sarah Blake, who’s now in the Solicitor General’s office; a man named Sheldon Gibbs, who’s in private practice in Denver; and Wheeler Edmunds, senior Senator from the great State of Michigan and candidate for the Presidency of the United States.”

  “Oh, Lord,” said Frost, his mind already reeling from the implications of the explosive byte of information his young colleague had given him.

  20

  Fundraiser

  Frost left the Chase & Ward offices and walked with determination to the Brooklyn Bridge stop on the Lexington Avenue subway. Almost a half century ago, he had learned that taking an express from Bowling Green, near his firm’s offices, put him on a crowded train, and one he would have to leave at Forty-second Street in any event to get the local to his neighborhood. The walk was a strenuous one, but there was a great deal to be said for getting on the local at Brooklyn Bridge. The train began there, and one could always get a seat.

  Today, the walk was therapeutic. He ignored the shills, passing out leaflets for discount video equipment and designer eyeglasses, and the aggressive panhandlers. He was totally preoccupied with the horrid thought that a leading candidate for the Presidency of the country was somehow, in ways not understood, linked to David Rowan’s murder.

  When he got home, he went immediately to the library, where Cynthia collected the couple’s innumerable invitations to Manhattan social events, great and small. He was certain that he and Cynthia had been invited to a high-priced fundraising party for Wheeler Edmunds. And, sure enough, he found a card created by a well-known, voguish graphics designer (linking Wheeler Edmund’s initials, “W.E.,” to the grand statement that “W.E. ARE GOING TO CHANGE AMERICA”).

  The invitation was for the next night, Tuesday, at six o’clock. It was from Lowell Oatsman, a preeminent Wall Street investment banker whose fortune rested on extraordinary fees for putting corporate mergers and leveraged buyouts (as they called them downtown) in place, but whose quasi-intellectual reputation rested on in terrorem articles in The New Republic and other journals about the misallocation of the nation’s capital resources (such as the unseemly rush of the major banks to use their loan funds to bankroll Oatsman-sponsored takeovers) and his one-stop-short-of-obsequious support of liberal Democratic candidates for higher office.

  Oatsman had egregious ambition. His Wall Street colleagues, most of them far more conservative than he, viewed his political activities benignly, although there was little question that if the Democrats won that year—especially if Edmunds were the winning candidate—Oatsman would be the Secretary of the Treasury or, very possibly, the nation’s central banker as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. (Or, at the barest minimum, a vocal occupant of the powerless and ineffectual job of Secretary of Commerce.)

  By the time Cynthia Frost got home, her husband was stewing about the Oatsman invitation. The ante was $1,000 a person, the maximum contribution an individual could make to a candidate under Federal law.

  “I think we’d better go to this, Cynthia,” Reuben declared. He then explained why, on the basis of his discovery earlier in the day about Edmunds’s uncomfortable link to Ainslee, and hence to David Rowan.

  “You were hesitant the other night,” she said, “but I didn’t throw the invitation away because you didn’t absolutely rule it out. You did say you admired Edmunds.”

  “Yes, yes, I do. He’s slightly too left wing for me, but at least he’s articulate. And he keeps both his mouth and his pants zipped up, which one comes to admire in politics more and more.”

  “Then let’s go. The Oatsman apartment’s such a laugh, anyway.”

  “It’s a lot of money. Two thousand dollars. I suppose that’s a cheap price to pay if somehow, somehow, it helps unravel the mystery of David’s killing. But can we still get in? It’s awfully late to respond.”

  “Reuben, dear, take it from an old foundation money-grubber—your Morgan Guaranty check for two thousand dollars will be welcome. And if you take a shoe and sock off, Wheeler Edmunds will lick your foot.”

  “Call them up, Cynthia. We’ll be there.”

  Frost had been to the Oatsman duplex twice before, each time at large dinners served at the two long tables (ever so much resembling, despite all the trappings, the bleak refectory boards in the Princeton dining halls of Reuben’s youth) arranged side by side in the banker’s mirrored dining room.

  On both of those occasions, Frost had been solemnly ushered by Lowell Oatsman into an enormous room adjoining the dining room, which contained a single gray-colored leather chair in the center. The gray of the chair matched flannel-covered gray walls, and a gray pile rug. On each of three walls—the fourth was taken up by a window with a panoramic view of Central Park—was a large Julian Schnabel painting.

  “The holy-of-holies,” Reuben had muttered to Cynthia the first time he saw it. And, indeed, Oatsman had solemnly explained that the single chair was to allow a solitary visitor to remain quiet to meditate—Oatsman’s word—amid the oversize Schnabels.

  When the Frosts arrived at the Oatsman party for Edmunds, the double doors to the “meditation room” were closed; politics was politics and art was art. The living room, vast as it was, was packed to overflowing. Thin, agile-hipped waiters from one of the trendy catering services made their way through the crowd, offering drinks. Frost surveyed the claustrophobic scene with amusement, despite his dark thoughts about Edmunds and Rowan.

  The crowd was “mixed,” he concluded: real estate developers—none quite as grand as Elliott Reuff—and Wall Street investment bankers, many of whom Frost had at least met; Arthur Mattison, the all-purpose critic of the New York Press (my God, has he gone from theater and ballet to politics? Frost t
hought); a News gossip columnist and assorted editors from the weekly magazines, and a deceptively innocent looking young subversive from the naughty new monthly, Spy; Anita Stebbins, the toast of Broadway for three successive seasons (although her current vehicle had just closed); Cindy Walsh, a sexy redhead who had had a short, but prominent, movie career that Ms. Stebbins much envied; Harvey Seaver, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for playwriting in 1964 and done little but serve on various peace committees since. And then the politicians—a former Kennedy cabinet officer; an ex-Mayor, forever tainted as a spendthrift and one of the causes of the city’s fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s; a former Lieutenant Governor of New York, unremembered after service in one of the country’s truly useless positions; a woman who had had a stormy career as the head of the city’s Civil Rights Commission (even threatening the all-male hegemony of Frost’s beloved Gotham Club); and a brown-suited gent or two whom Frost knew, from past meetings, to be city judges, probably hoping that Edmunds could offer them deliverance through appointments to the more prestigious Federal bench.

  There was an air of excitement about the party; this was no political duty dance, for which chits had been called in to produce a crowd. The Times’s Sunday writer had been correct—the signs suggested that Edmunds was about to score an important primary victory. And the guests might just be brushing shoulders—even conversing with—the next President of the United States.

  The host, whom Cynthia had once unkindly observed resembled a hyperactive chipmunk, moved with physical difficulty but psychological ease through the diverse crowd assembled in his living room. Reuben was making pleasantries with Oatsman when Cynthia jabbed him discreetly but decisively in the ribs. Frost turned to her and Oatsman continued on his rounds.

  “What’s the matter?” Reuben asked.

  “There’s someone here you should meet,” his wife replied. “Over there.” She gestured toward a tall man in a rumpled brown suit leaning against the wall at the side of the room talking with an attractive young girl sporting a large “EDMUNDS” button. Like many tall men, he had a pronounced stoop, now magnified by his efforts to pay attention to the diminutive campaign aide.