piece gave him no choice.
“Why are you hanging me out to dry? Why didn’t you at least \\tini me ol
this?”
The President waved around the Oval Office. “There arc- a lot ol limits
you can do in here and there are things you can’t do. One of them is to inter
fere with a criminal investigation.”
“Don’t give me that! A lot of people have-”
“Yeah, and they all paid a price for it, too.” It’s not my ass that needs to
br covered, Roger Durling didn’t say. I’m not risking mine for yours. ” You
didn’t answer my question.”
“Look, Roger!” Ed Realty snarled back. The President stopped him with
a raised hand and a quiet voice.
“Ed, I have an economy in meltdown. I have dead sailors in the Pacific
Ocean. I can’t spare the energy for this. I can’t spare the political capital. I
cun’t spare the time. Answer my question,” Durling commanded.
The Vice President flushed, his head snapping to the right before he
xpoke. “All right, I like women. I’ve never hidden that from anyone. My
wife and I have an understanding.” His head came back. “But I have never,
NEVER molested, assaulted, raped, or forced myself on anybody in my
whole fucking life. Never. I don’t have to.”
“Lisa Beringer?” Durling said, consulting his notes for the name.
“She was a sweet thing, very bright, very sincere, and she begged me
to-well, you can guess. I explained to her that I couldn’t. I was up for re-
election that year, and besides she was too young. She deserved somebody
her age to marry and give her kids and a good life. She took it hard, started
drinking-maybe something else, but I don’t think so. Anyway, one night
she headed off on the Beltway and lost it, Roger. I was there for the funeral.
I still talk with her parents. Well,” Kealty said, “not lately, I guess.”
“She left a note, a letter behind.”
“More than one.” Kealty reached into his coat pocket and handed two
envelopes over. “I’m surprised nobody noticed the date on the one the FBI
has. Ten days before her death. This one is a week later, and this one is the
day she was killed. My staff found them. I suppose Barbara Linders found
the other one. None were ever mailed. I think you’ll find some differences
between them, all three, as a matter of fact.”
‘ ‘The Linders girl says that you-”
“Drugged her?” Kealty shook his head. “You know about my drinking
problem, you knew it when you asked me in. Yeah, I’m an alcoholic, but I
had my last drink two years ago.” A crooked smile. “My sex life is even
better now. Back to Barbara. She was sick that day, the flu. She went to the
pharmacy on the Hill and got a prescription, and-”
“How do you know that?”
“Maybe I keep a diary. Maybe 1 just have a good memory. Either way, I
know the date this happened. Maybe one of my staffers checked the records
of the pharmacy, and maybe the medication she took had a label on the bot-
tle, one that says don’t drink while using these capsules. I didn’t know that,
Roger. When I have a cold-well, back then, anyway, I used brandy. Hell,”
Kealty admitted,’ ‘I used booze for a lot of things. So I gave some to her, and
she became very cooperative. A little too cooperative, I suppose, but I was
half in the bag myself, and I figured it was just my well-known charm.”
“So what are you telling me? You’re not guilty?”
“You want to say I’m an alley cat, can’t keep it zipped? Yeah, I guess so.
I’ve been to priests, to doctors, to a clinic once-covering that up was some
task. Finally I went to the head of neuroscience at Harvard Medical School.
They think there’s a part of the brain that regulates our drives, just a theory,
but a good one. It goes along with hyperactivity. I was a hyperactive child. I
still don’t ever sleep more than six hours a night. Roger, I am all those
things, but I am not a rapist.”
So there it was, Durling thought. Not a lawyer himself, he had appointed,
consulted, and heard enough of them to know what he’d been told. Kealty
could defend himself on two grounds: that the evidence against him was
more equivocal than the investigators imagined, and that it wasn’t really his
fault. The President wondered which of the defenses might be true. Neither?
One? Both?
“So what are you going to do?” he asked the Vice President, using much
the same voice he’d summoned a few hours earlier for the Ambassador from
Japan. He was increasingly sympathetic with the man sitting across from
him, in spite of himself. What if the guy really was telling the truth? How
could he know-and that was what the jury would say, after all, if it got that
far; and if a jury would think that, then what would the Judiciary hearings be
like? Kealty still had a lot of markers out on the Hill.
“Somehow I just don’t think anyone’s going to print up DURLING/KEALTY
bumper stickers this summer, right?” The question came with a smile of
sorts.
“Not if I have anything to say about it,” the President confirmed, cold
again. This wasn’t a time for humor.
“I don’t want to hurt you, Roger. I did two days ago. If you’d warned me,
I could have told you these things sooner, saved everybody a lot of time and
trouble. Including Barbara. I lost track of her. She’s very good on civil-rights
stuff, a good head on her, and a good heart. It was only that one time, you
know. And she stayed in my office afterwards,” Kealty pointed out.
“We’ve covered that, Ed. Tell me what you want.”
“I’ll go. I’ll resign. I don’t get prosecuted.”
“Not good enough,” Durling said in a neutral voice.
“Oh, I’ll admit my weaknesses. I’ll apologize to you, honorable public
servant that you are, for any harm I might have done to your presidency. My
lawyers will meet with their lawyers, and we’ll negotiate iuni|H’iisalioii. I
leave public life.”
“And if that’s not good enough?”
“It will be,” Kealty said confidently. “I can’t be tried in a court until Un-
constitutional issues are resolved. Months, Roger. All the way to summer,
probably, maybe all the way to the convention. You can’t afford that. I fig-
ure the worst-case scenario for you is, the Judiciary Committee sends the bill
of impeachment to the floor of the House, but the House doesn’t pass it, or
maybe does, narrowly, and then the Senate trial ends up with a hung jury, so
to speak. Do you have any idea how many favors I’ve done there, and in the
Senate?” Kealty shook his head. “It’s not worth the political risk to you,
and it distracts you and Congress from the business of government. You
need all the time you have. Hell, you need more than that.” Kealty stood and
headed toward the door to the President’s right, the one that was so perfectly
blended into the curved, eggshell-white walls and gold trim. He spoke his
final words without turning. “Anyway, it’s up to you now.”
It angered President Roger Durling that, in the end, the easy way out
might be the just way out, as well-but nobody would ever know. They
would only know that his final action was politically expedient in a moment
of history that demanded political expediency. An economy potentially in
ruins, a war just started-he didn’t have the time to fool with this. A young
woman had died. Others claimed to have been molested. But what if the
dead young girl had died for other reasons, and what if the others- God-
damn it, he swore in his mind. That was something for a jury to decide. But it
had to pass through three separate legal procedures before a jury could de-
cide, and then any defense lawyer with half a brain could say that a fair trial
was impossible anyway after C-SPAN had done its level best to tell the
whole world every bit of evidence, tainting everything, and denying Kealty
his constitutional right to a fair and impartial trial before disinterested jurors.
That ruling was likely enough in a Federal district court trial, and even more
so on appeal-and would gain the victims nothing. And what if the bastard
actually was, technically speaking, innocent of a crime? An open zipper, dis-
tasteful though it was, did not constitute a crime.
And neither he nor the country needed the distraction. Roger Durling
buzzed his secretary.
“Yes, Mr. President?”
“Get me the Attorney General.”
He’d been wrong, Durling thought. Sure, he could interfere with a crimi-
nal investigation. He had to. And it was easy. Damn.
26
Catch-up
“He really said that?” Ed Foley leaned forward. It was easier for Mary Pat