Murder Keeps A Secret Read online

  “Yes.”

  “Just two more things. There is a police officer standing by to go to Washington tonight with the idea of looking over the telephone logs of your office first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “For what purpose, for God’s sake?”

  “To trace any calls to Rowan or Jenkins.”

  “Is that part of the bargain?”

  “It’s part of the bargain. Will you arrange the necessary clearances so that the police don’t have to get a subpoena?”

  “This is all outrageous.”

  “Senator, words like reprehensible and outrageous aren’t helpful just now. I’ve tried to lay the alternatives out for you in the way that would inconvenience you the least. Shall we meet here at nine-thirty?”

  “As I said, I have no choice.”

  “You have a busy evening ahead. I trust it will be so busy that you won’t feel the need to call Richard Taylor before he gets here tomorrow morning.”

  Wheeler Edmunds did not protest.

  “Good night, Senator. Go back to campaigning,” Frost said. He rose to leave, grasping the unused buzzer in his pocket.

  26

  Confrontation: II

  Bautista, a second detective, a medical technician and Frost went to the fourteenth floor of the Waldorf Towers the next morning, well before nine-thirty. Bautista and the other detective showed their badges to the Secret Service agent standing outside the suite where Frost had met Edmunds the day before.

  He told Bautista that he was expected, but that the candidate was in conference at that moment with his aide, Richard Taylor, and had asked not to be disturbed.

  “He must have taken the seven o’clock shuttle, not the eight,” Frost said.

  “They’re probably in there cooking up a story,” Bautista added. “Do you think we should go in?”

  Frost nodded toward the two Secret Service agents flanking the door of the suite. “I think we’d better wait. Besides, if any damage has been done, it’s probably been done already.”

  “I was afraid of something like this,” Bautista said.

  Five minutes later, the door to the suite opened and Edmunds looked out.

  “Ah, gentlemen you’re here,” he said, coming out and shaking hands perfunctorily with the group. “Richard is ready to talk to you. Under all the circumstances, I’d prefer that you talk in the room down the hall. It would be just as well not to arrest him in my suite.”

  Frost looked at Bautista. The atmosphere had certainly changed from the skepticism of the previous evening; now the focus was on the mechanics of an arrest.

  Edmunds went back into the suite, reemerging almost at once with Taylor at his side. Both men looked terrible; it was evident they had been crying. Taylor’s face, once pink-cheeked and youthful, was now a sallow, ravaged mask.

  The Senator instructed one of the Secret Service operatives to take the group to Room 3106. Then he turned to Taylor and the two men embraced. “You’re very brave, Richard. Very brave. God bless you,” Frost heard Edmunds tell the younger man in a barely audible voice.

  The procession made its way to the living room of the suite down the hall.

  “Welcome to my home away from home, gentlemen,” Taylor said.

  “Sit down, Mr. Taylor,” Bautista shot back, ignoring the man’s weak attempt at humor.

  Bautista sat in a chair opposite Taylor, leaving Frost to take a third seat between them. The other detective and the technician sat down discreetly on the other side of the large room.

  “Mr. Taylor, I guess you know why we are here,” Bautista said.

  “Yes.”

  “I am in charge of the investigation of the murders of David Rowan and Horace Jenkins. You are a suspect in the case and I want to ask you some questions. But before I do, you should know that you are entitled to have a lawyer present if you so desire.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Taylor replied.

  “Nonetheless, I want to read you your rights in this regard,” Bautista said. He took from his pocket the card containing the prescribed Constitutional ritual and read it to Taylor in a deliberate, businesslike voice. Taylor still declined his right to counsel.

  “Mr. Taylor, we also want to get from you a blood sample and a skin sample. A medical technician is here to perform the procedure. You can agree to it voluntarily or we can wait here while the ADA in charge of the case gets a court order. It’s entirely up to you.”

  “A court order won’t be necessary,” Taylor said. “Neither will the tests. I killed David Rowan and Horace Jenkins.”

  “Do you wish to make a statement?” Bautista asked coolly in the face of Taylor’s bald admission.

  “Yes, I’m willing to do that.”

  “Can I talk to Mr. Frost for a minute?” Bautista asked. The two of them went out into the hall.

  “Reuben, I don’t know what the hell to do. He wants to confess, I’m sure of it. Standard operating procedure says I should get a camera crew in here—just like with Alan. But my side-kick’s got a tape recorder, and I’m tempted to go with that.”

  “I agree. Can you imagine a police videotape crew getting through the network cameras downstairs? There’d be a riot. Besides, he’s clearly confessed to Edmunds already, which it will be hard for Edmunds to deny. And the blood and skin samples, when they’re taken, are pretty good evidence. Go with the tape recorder. But I’d ask him again about getting a lawyer.”

  Bautista followed Frost’s advice. Once again Taylor gave permission and again denied the need for counsel, Bautista motioned to his colleague, who loaded a portable tape recorder and put it on the coffee table in front of Taylor, who watched the process impassively.

  “I don’t know where to begin,” Taylor said. He paused, and then the words came tumbling out without hostility or defensiveness; it was as if he were relieved to be telling his story.

  “Maybe I should start in Detroit in nineteen seventy-six. Wheeler Edmunds was running for District Attorney in Detroit that year. I was a senior at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, and volunteered to work in his campaign. Pretty soon I had all but quit college to work for him almost full-time.

  “I became part of his inner circle. Sometimes we would talk through the night about politics. It was exciting to watch him develop his views. He’d always been a Democrat, but his parents, and especially his father, had brought him up with some pretty narrow ideas, about blacks, and law-and-order, and all the social issues. His exposure to Justice Ainslee had started to change that and, when he returned to Detroit to practice law, he realized that his father’s hidebound ideas didn’t have much relevance in a faltering inner city like Detroit.

  “Senator Edmunds won that campaign. I stayed in touch with him until I went off to Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, the following fall. While I was at Oxford, we corresponded about every conceivable subject, but mostly politics. We were an ocean apart, but that correspondence brought us even closer. Just at the time I finished Oxford two years later, the Governor appointed him to a vacancy in the U.S. Senate. He asked me if I would come to Washington with him, as his administrative assistant. I accepted without any question, and I’ve been working for him ever since. He’s the only employer I’ve ever had. And the only real father and real friend I’ve ever had, even though he’s only ten years older than I am. We took on Washington and the Senate together. It was exciting and, for me, more fascinating than any marriage, or children or private-sector career could ever be.

  “I don’t need to tell you that the Senator was marked as a comer from the time he entered the Senate. Why not? He was the most thoughtful and exciting liberal since Adlai Stevenson, or maybe even Franklin Roosevelt himself. Hell, ten years ago, when he hadn’t been in Washington very long, he would go to parties and half-drunk hostesses would come up to him and call him ‘Mr. President.’ Everything seemed possible, and I was ready to go the distance with him.

  “Nobody was surprised when the Senator announced his candidacy last fall. They expected
it. And his campaign got off to a good start, with some powerful endorsements and successful fund-raising. Can somebody give me a cigarette, by the way? I’ve given it up, but …” His voice trailed off.

  Only Bautista’s colleague had cigarettes. He came over and gave one to Taylor, who then continued his story, talking in the same cathartic vein as before.

  “As I say, everything was going well in the campaign. Then, about the first of the year, I noticed that the Senator was brooding a lot. This wasn’t like him at all. I finally asked him straight out what was wrong. That’s when he told me he was worried about some memos he’d written years before for Justice Ainslee. He’d read about Rowan becoming Ainslee’s biographer and how he would have complete access to the Justice’s papers. He was especially worried about the memos in three cases, which I think you know about.”

  “Yes, but why don’t you describe them for the record?” Bautista said. Taylor did so, then resumed his tale.

  “The Senator’s worry just wouldn’t go away. He thought Rowan’s access to the Ainslee papers was a genuine piece of bad luck. He really had changed his thinking from the time when he’d been Ainslee’s cocky young Turk, but he knew the voters would never believe that.

  “I’d read about the J. D. Salinger case, where Salinger had stopped a would-be biographer from using his letters, and suggested that the Senator talk to a lawyer. That was a terrible mistake, and I’ll always regret it. It was the beginning of the downfall. The Senator went to Fred Kincaid, a junior-grade Washington influence peddler who’d been a friend and adviser for many years. Kincaid told the Senator he didn’t have a leg to stand on under the copyright law. But he drafted a threatening letter to Rowan for the Senator to sign anyway. It didn’t say the Senator had copyright protection, but it didn’t exactly say he wasn’t protected, either. And it threw around a lot of legal jargon about the ‘right to privacy.’ Kincaid said Rowan was probably ‘just another academic’ who would be intimidated, or else so flattered at the attention from a Presidential candidate that something could be worked out.

  “This was disastrous advice. To put it bluntly, Rowan told the Senator to go straight to hell. In a very bitter telephone call. So the letter failed. And, what was worse, it called Rowan’s attention to the Senator’s memos. I learned later from Jenkins that Rowan set him to work at once to find out just what it was the Senator was coming off the ceiling about. If that damnable letter had never been sent, chances are Rowan wouldn’t have found the memos for months, or maybe even years. Certainly not until after the election.

  “The Senator continued to be worried and depressed, though he refused to talk about the Ainslee papers anymore. Something had to be done. I decided to see what I could do and set up an appointment with Rowan. We met in New York. Jenkins was there, too, in that one-room office.

  “Rowan was nervous when I saw him, but his nervousness soon turned to stubbornness and arrogance. He all but threw me out, accusing me of trying to ‘buy him off,’ though he hadn’t given me a chance to say or propose anything.

  “I was desperate. It occurred to me that maybe I could work something out with Jenkins. I contacted him and met with him several times. We talked ‘son to son.’ I was the Senator’s protégé and he was Rowan’s. Poor, lonely fag, he was pathetic, very worried about his health. I had no idea he had AIDS, though his condition got worse every time I saw him.

  “I told Jenkins that the Senator was very interested in having Rowan become a speechwriter in the campaign—and, if he won, that Rowan would become the official biographer-historian in the White House. But of course the Senator couldn’t make the offer until the matter of the memos had been resolved.”

  “Can I interrupt?” Bautista asked. “What were you proposing—that Jenkins destroy the memos, or that Rowan be bought off with a job?”

  “We never crystallized it. I hinted at both. Toward the end, I talked with Jenkins about destroying them. He never said he would do that, but he never got up and left the room either. Then he went to the hospital and that route to Rowan was closed. I visited him at Tyler just once—before the night he died, that is—and realized he didn’t have the strength to intervene with Rowan. And certainly couldn’t get out of bed to deep-six the memos.

  “I decided to make one last pass at Rowan. I made an appointment to meet him at his office—seven o’clock on March twenty-nine. Would it surprise you that I’ll never forget the time or the date? I tried to reason with him, but he got abusively angry. He said he would see to it that the Senator’s memos got circulated right away.

  “You can guess the rest. It was the end of the line. An insane madness came over me. I shoved him and he shoved back. Before I knew what happened, I knocked him out and pushed his body out the window, but not before he’d shoved me and scratched me. I grabbed the three files—I knew exactly where they were. Then I happened to spot the files containing Ainslee’s date books and grabbed them—I’d heard Rowan’s father describe the mini scandal in those books to your wife, Mr. Frost, at that dinner the night before. In my insanity, I thought that would put people off the track if they ever checked for what was missing. There was a beaten-up attaché case in the corner. I squeezed all the files and the desk calendars in there—leaving the empty files marked ‘Desk Calendars’ in the middle of the floor after I’d wiped my fingerprints off them—and ran out.”

  Taylor paused, as if the horror of that evening were coming back.

  “How did you get out of the building?” Bautista prodded.

  “No problem. I went down the fire stairs. There was no one in the lobby. I guess they’d all gone outside when they found the body. I went out the door on the Forty-fifth Street side. It wasn’t locked, but the fire alarm went off when I opened it. That scared the hell out of me, but I just kept walking to the corner of Sixth Avenue and nothing happened.

  “We were going to Chicago that night. I got a cab to LaGuardia and cleaned up the scratches on my neck pretty good in the men’s room. Then I got on the plane with my stolen papers. I was afraid airport security might see them, but of course they didn’t. The attaché case was under my seat all the way to Chicago. I left it only once—when I went to the john to throw up.

  “What about your cuts? Didn’t anyone on the plane notice them?” Bautista asked.

  “Like I said, I’d cleaned them up pretty well. And got my clothes back in order. Besides, everyone on that plane was so absorbed in replaying the day’s campaign, or so tired, they didn’t have time to see or notice anything personal.

  “We got to Chicago about midnight,” Taylor continued. “By one in the morning I’d thrown the papers I’d taken into a trash can three blocks from the Drake Hotel.

  “I’ve never been so relieved in my life as when I threw those goddam things away. It was like a great weight off my shoulders. After that, I felt pretty safe. I had no idea you’d find hard evidence against me under Rowan’s fingernails.

  “That’s where things stood when we met you, Mr. Frost, at that party last week. You started talking about Rowan’s being a speechwriter for the Senator, and I got worried. Had Jenkins told? Then I remembered my silly ploy at that dinner, when I said something about the speechwriting business to your wife and Rowan’s father. I figured I could brazen it out if you ever confronted me with that. But what about Jenkins? That was more serious. I knew he was very sick, but I was afraid he still could say dangerous things. That made me crazy again, and I went to Tyler Hospital and killed him, little realizing that he had already said enough to implicate me.

  “Any questions?” Taylor asked, spent, without a trace of defiance.

  “Just one,” Bautista said. “How much did Senator Edmunds know about what you were doing?”

  “Absolutely nothing! Nothing, I tell you! Until this morning, when we had the worst conversation of my life.”

  “What did he say to you?”

  Taylor showed emotion for the first time since he started telling his story, holding back tears. “He told me th
at if I truly loved him, I should do what I had to do, to tell the truth. Maybe I’m crazy, but I’ve just tried to do that.”

  “Mr. Taylor, we’re going to take you down to central booking. The rules say you have to be handcuffed.”

  “I guess I’m not much of a bargainer, officer,” Taylor said. “If I had been, I wouldn’t have made my statement unless you’d agreed to two things. One would be to wait until we got past the press and the crowd outside to handcuff me.”

  “That’s easy. We’ll go out through the basement. What’s the other thing?”

  “Can we keep all this quiet until after the polls close tonight?”

  Horrified as Frost had been, hearing the compassionless details of his hypothesis starkly confirmed, he couldn’t help but admire Taylor’s loyalty to Edmunds to the very end.

  “Let’s consider the bargain made,” Bautista said. “I can’t make any promises that there won’t be a leak, but we’ll do our best.” Frost thought that Bautista must share his own feelings of grudging admiration.

  “Thanks,” Richard Taylor said. “It’s the least I can do for the Senator.”

  27

  Aftermath

  Luis Bautista kept his promise, and Richard Taylor’s arrest was not disclosed until after the close of the polls on New York’s Primary Day. The announcement was too late for the newspapers, but the TV commentators repeated it again and again as they announced the election results.

  It turned out that Taylor’s gallant gesture did not matter. Wheeler Edmunds’s delegate candidates, despite all the media predictions, lost the New York primary—and decisively enough to derail his chances of becoming the Democratic nominee. The pundits, caught out wrong as they had been so many times in the 1988 campaign, attributed the loss to voter perception that Edmunds was simply too liberal a candidate.

  On Primary Day, Frost had called Harrison Rowan to tell him of Taylor’s arrest, and the circumstances leading up to it, receiving back warm and grateful, and tearful, thanks.