Murder in the White House (Capital Crimes Book 1) Read Free Page B

in eight minutes precisely if that militaristic little creep had anything to do with it, Fairbanks thought… if he left the White House before the Webster Administration left office, it would be because of Gimbel. He was an unpleasant man, invested by the President with a great deal of authority. Small, wearing an ill-fitting gray checked suit, peering aboutwith unfriendly eyes that stared through his austere steel-rimmed glasses, Gimbel orchestrated everything in the White House. In a minute he would order the steward to leave, so stopping the drinking. A few minutes later he would suggest firmly to the President that the meeting in the Oval Office should begin in three minutes if it were to begin on time. Likely, the President would accept the suggestion. Gimbel would hold open the door.
    Blaine too disliked Gimbel. Two men could hardly have been more in contrast. Blaine was a preppy, then a Yalie, and he had spent two years at Oxford. Gimbel was from Indiana and had graduated without honors from some small-town Indiana college. Blaine was a scholar of diplomatic history—had come, indeed, to the State Department from a professorship at the University of Michigan, which he had held with distinction for twenty years. Gimbel had gone from college to the Webster Corporation, first as an accountant, then as an administrator, finally as executive assistant to the President—he served Robert L. Webster in the White House almost exactly as he had served him in Detroit. Blaine had a calm, aloof panache. Gimbel was a nervous, abrasive little man.
    Blaine and Gimbel had aroused cries of cronyism early in the Webster Administration. Both of them had been personal friends of Robert and Catherine Webster for years. Catherine was a psychiatrist; and, until she moved into the White House as First Lady, she had held a professorship in psychiatric medicine at the University of Michigan. She and Blaine had taken leaves of absence from the Michigan faculty at the same time—Blaine was more of a friend of hers than of her husband, althoughWebster had retained Blaine as a consultant on foreign affairs during his senatorial campaign and again during his presidential campaign and had expressed both privately and publicly his confidence in Blaine’s judgment in matters of foreign relations. Gimbel had served the Webster family as well as the Webster Corporation in Michigan—as a babysitter sometimes, as a driver, as a runner of errands, as well as a trusted get-things-done man in the executive offices of Webster Corporation.
    “Why don’t you sit down, Lan?” the President’s daughter said to Lansard Blaine, She took hold of his arm. “I’m sure the senator will surrender you to me.”
    “Of course,” said Senator Pidgeon. He was a little drunk—on the couple of scotches he had had; that was all it ever took—and he attempted what he supposed was a courtly bow and stepped back two paces.
    Blaine allowed Lynne to lead him to a wing chair, where he sat staring into his brandy while she, standing beside the chair, firmly kneaded his shoulders. Blaine did not look up. He accepted a massage from the President’s daughter without acknowledging it.
    Lynne had a nose that turned up, a pert lively face, a lithe figure (although a little heavy in the bust). Of all the presidential family, the burden of the White House seemed heaviest on her. She seemed to labor under a sense of it: the dignity and burden of it.
    Ron Fairbanks watched her rub Blaine’s shoulders, looking curiously intent and grim. Ron sipped Irish whisky—Old Bushmills, which they had not served at the White House before Catherine Webster noticed his preference for it and ordered it. He was not jealous of Lynne’s somewhat intimate attention to the Secretary of State. He had no claim on her; and, after all, Blaine hadbeen a close friend of her family for many years before he even met her. It
did
annoy him, just the same, to see the way Blaine accepted her ministrations