Murder at the Watergate Read Free

They run a tight ship.”
    “Check the route in again from the entrance to the ballroom,” Swales said.
    “Okay. Think he’ll make it?”
    “Who? Make what?”
    “Straight Arrow. Think he’ll be president?”
    “Probably.” And he muttered to himself, “As long as we keep him alive.”

3
The West Building—the Watergate
    Chris Hedras was groggy, felt like roadkill.
    He’d been up all night with strategy planners for the Aprile for President committee, and had continued working throughout the morning and early afternoon. Finally, a chance for some sleep, if only a few hours.
    Although Joe Aprile had not officially declared himself a candidate, only the most naive of Washingtonians didn’t know that he intended to seek the nomination. It was never too early to put a campaign into motion, even for an undeclared candidate.
    The topic of fund-raising had dominated most of last night’s skull session. Hedras, thirty-five years old and arguably the handsomest member of the president’s inner circle
—Washingtonian Magazine
had recently crowned him that—stood in his bathroom and brought his face closer to the mirror. The dark circles under his eyes were real, as though ink had penetrated the skin from beneath. He knew when he’d accepted the president’s call to become deputy chief of staff that it would be an exhausting four years, assuming he lasted that long.
    It hadn’t been an easy decision for him to make. He’d carved a nice niche for himself in Boston’s Democratic machine, parlaying a sterling academic record at Harvard, natural charm and good looks, and his father’s few remaining contacts into positions of leadership, to the extent of even running for office himself one day, perhaps.
    It was when he accepted the post of state chair for the president’s second run for the White House that the name, face, and potential of Christopher Hedras became known outside of Massachusetts. Although no one expected the president, a Democrat, to lose in liberal Massachusetts, the margin of his victory stunned even the most jaded of political pundits. Chris Hedras was a rising star, the sort of young man this president liked to have around.
    “Deputy chief of staff? The White House?” Hedras’s girlfriend of the moment exclaimed after he’d told her of the call from Washington. They’d met for drinks at Brandy Pete’s before heading for dinner at a friend’s house.
    “
A
deputy chief of staff,” Hedras corrected. “Not
the
deputy chief. Not yet, at least.”
    “You’re going to accept?”
    “Sure. And if you treat me right, I’ll invite you to stay over in the Lincoln Bedroom. I always wanted to make it in a place like that. You know, the middle of Grand Central Station, first class on a plane, the White House.”
    She laughed, but knew he wasn’t saying it in jest. With all his education and privileged upbringing, there was a Rabelaisian streak in him that sometimes caused her discomfort. But not that night. The sexual aggressiveness hedemonstrated later, back at his Cambridge apartment, was welcome, and encouraged.
    She was one of but many young Boston women in Hedras’s life who, once he left for Washington, became just vague, pleasant memories, replaced by Washington’s glut of single women. Finding suitable female companionship was easy for Chris Hedras. It was carving out time for them that posed his biggest problem. Despite knowing what he was in for when he agreed to come to Washington, he’d never dreamed the work would be quite this relentless, this all-consuming.
    He groaned as he raised his hands high above his head and stretched. He didn’t need a lot of sleep, but two hours didn’t do it. “You need your beauty sleep, baby,” he said to his mirror image, again scrutinizing the effects a chronic lack of sleep was having on his square, planed face, topped by a shaggy helmet of black curls. Working for any president was a young man’s game, young woman’s, too, unless you were a