Capital Crimes Read Free Page B

right.”
    “So, looking at it from your point of view, and incidentally, mine, Ed Rawls performed a valuable service for his country by keeping that shit Efton out of the White House.”
    “You have a point,” Will said. “Was Rawls the one who leaked the story about Freddie and his lover later on?”
    “Yes, but he did it with a light touch, so that it could never be substantiated. Freddie denied everything, and it all went away.”
    “And what would the CIA’s position be on a pardon for Ed Rawls?”
    “Until recently, dead set against it, but that position is softening.”
    “Why?”
    “Because Ed still has friends at the Agency, and because I’m now director of Central Intelligence.”
    “So you’re sympathetic?”
    “Ed is not well. He’s had some health problems, and he’s seventy now. He still has that house on the island of Islesboro, in Maine— you remember, I went to visit him and his wife there once?”
    “Yes, vaguely.”
    “He says he wants to die there. If it were up to me, I couldn’t deny him that.”
    “Kate, I might as well pardon Aldrich Ames or that FBI agent who was selling stuff to the Russians for years and years. It would be worse than that stupid pardon that Bill Clinton granted that fugitive in Switzerland on his last day in office.”
    “Will, I can’t tell you that this is politically feasible; all I can say is that, if you felt grateful enough to Ed to pardon him, I could make it all right at the Agency. Certainly, you couldn’t do it during your first term. You could pardon him on grounds of ill health. All I ask is that you think about it. Neither of us has to mention this to anyone else.”
    “All right, I’ll think about it,” Will said.
    There was a sharp rap on the door, and Cora Parker stuck her head in. “Mr. President, CNN has something on Senator Wallace’s death,” she said. “Shall I turn it on?”
    “Please, Cora.”
    There were four television sets in the Oval Office, tuned to the three major networks and CNN. Cora switched on the CNN set.
    A reporter was standing a few yards from a rustic cabin beside a lake.“… and the senator was standing in the kitchen, only a few feet from the window.” He pointed, and the camera zoomed in on a smashed windowpane. “What has a lot of people in Washington worried is that Senator Wallace was rumored to have kept extensive files on various people in government and that the information in those files might find its way into the media. According to the rumor, only J. Edgar Hoover had more dirt on more important people. Now back to the studio.”
    “You think that’s true?” Kate asked.
    “I wouldn’t put it past Freddie,” Will said. “And next week, I’m going to give a funeral oration for a man who did everything he could to destroy my political career and my reputation.”
    “If Freddie kept files like that, who would have them?”
    “I haven’t the faintest idea,” Will said.
     
    IN CHESTER, South Carolina, Elizabeth Johnson opened a desk drawer in the den of her home and took out a key. She went down the stairs to her basement and to a pile of boxes in a corner. She moved one, exposing a small filing cabinet, the kind that holds index cards. Tentatively, she inserted the key into the little cabinet and pulled open one of the four drawers. She switched on a light, illuminating a row of precisely filed cards, all of them labeled with the neatly printed names of some of the best-known, most powerful people in the country. Freddie had always been a splendid record keeper.
    Elizabeth had meant to look through them, but instead, she stared at the cards as if they were a poisonous reptile. She closed the drawer, locked the cabinet, and went back upstairs. Instead of returning the key to the desk drawer, she went into her bedroom closet and pushed aside the clothes hanging there. She opened the wall safe that she had bought to keep the jewelry that Freddie had given her over the years, then she put the