the language was enough to ignite the firestorm he needed for success. But toss in Jefferson’s letter and Terry had an instant flamethrower. When Arthur dangled it, Terry did a swan dive, chasing the copy.”
“But of course you were there to stop it,” I tell her. “You convinced Scarborough he needed to authenticate the letter.”
“You bet I did. Arthur was angry. He could never forgive Terry for what he’d done to him. There’s no question he would have been chief justice but for Terry Scarborough’s lies. He’s one of the most intelligent human beings I’ve ever known. Do you think he would have even considered doing something like this five years ago, even three years ago? Never! Here’s a man with a lifelong reputation to protect, a judicial philosophy etched in law for a quarter of a century. And here he was taking a risk of immense proportions. He hated Scarborough. If you want to know what I thought, I thought Arthur was losing it. The reckless thing he was doing had all the signs of senility, and yet he seemed not to have dropped a single stitch. You bet I tried to stop it.
“Even after I convinced Terry to hold the letter and told him that he couldn’t use it without authentication, Arthur wouldn’t quit. God, that old man,” she says. “Terry wanted the original, and Arthur wouldn’t give it to him. Terry said he couldn’t convince the publisher to go forward with another book unless he produced the original of the Jefferson Letter and allowed them to authenticate it. Arthur didn’t buy it.
“He told Terry to call the publisher’s bluff. If they wouldn’t go forward based on the copy and a promise to deliver the original later, Terry should tell them he would take the project to another publisher. Given the sales of Perpetual Slaves, there’d be a bidding war for rights to the next book. When Terry thought about that, he stopped arguing. I think for a moment he might have even considered hiring Arthur to represent him.
“When Terry threatened, the publisher caved. They gave him a contract, told him where to sign, handed him a seven-figure advance, and promised to wait for the original of the Jefferson Letter that would have to be produced and authenticated before publication. They weren’t happy, but they did it. Terry was throwing parties-not that he needed the money, but the advance was twice what he thought he would get.”
“But if Ginnis knew he had to cough up the original of the letter before the book went into print, where was the downside for Scarborough? The publisher would know that the letter was a fraud before the book ever went to press,” I say.
“That’s what I’m saying. Arthur’s smart. He had already burned the original of the letter. He knew he couldn’t show it to anybody, not without revealing it as a fraud. The plan was to leak another copy of the letter to the media, with an anonymous note that Terry was doing a book and the name of the publisher-all this just about the time Terry was finishing the manuscript.
“The media would be all over the publisher, and they’d already have the contents of the letter, all the dirty little details, the bombshell of a letter, the offered deal on slavery. With all of this in the press, who needs a book?
“When the time came to produce the original, as far as Arthur was concerned, he was the original man from Mars. He knew nothing. He’d never heard of the Jefferson Letter. He didn’t know what Terry was talking about. By then the publisher-caught between the press, their inability to publish, and the suspicion that Terry had turned the media loose on them in an effort to force publication without the original letter-would have to go into court against Terry even if he was a hot property. When they found the paper trail leading back to Scarborough…”
“Zobel’s files with Scarborough’s signature on the disclaimer form.”
“You found that, too?” she says.
“Uh-huh.”
“When they found that, the U.S. Attorney would be joining the party, and Terry would be looking at both the civil and criminal sides of the same coin.”
“How did Ginnis manage to get Scarborough’s signature on that form?”
She laughs. “He not only had Terry’s signature, he also had his fingerprints all over that form. As a lawyer, Terry didn’t even belong in Arthur’s universe. But he was an author, and he had a large ego. He was used to autographing hundreds, even thousands, of books every year. It wasn’t unusual to have someone come up to him in a line during an autograph party and tell the author that he’d left his book at home. The person might have a paper bookplate to be signed that he could paste in the book later, or just a piece of paper that he could glue in. It happens often enough that writers don’t even think about it.
“Arthur waited for an autographing appearance at a bookshop in Washington. That was for the book just before Perpetual Slaves. Arthur sent over a clerk with a sheet of paper that had a penciled line where Terry was to sign. The clerk was told not to say anything about Arthur or where the request was coming from. It was some kind of a surprise. The story was simple: She owned a book and had forgotten it at home.
“The night before the autographing, Arthur printed Zobel’s disclaimer form on his home computer. All he had to do was put a copy of the form under a blank sheet of paper with a little light behind the two, and you could see where the signature went on the disclaimer form. That’s where Arthur drew the penciled line. When he got the sheet back with the signature, he pulled up the form, ran the signed sheet through the printer, and there it was, the form with the signature, all in the right place. He used gloves so his prints wouldn’t be on the form, only Scarborough’s and the clerk’s, who Arthur knew they’d never look for.
“I know what you’re thinking. How can a man who’s senile think that far ahead? What was happening in his head were all the details-the judgment needed to weigh the totality of what he was doing was gone. It’s why in the video, when Terry tried to hand him the copy of the letter, Arthur went for the bread instead. He refused to touch the paper. He didn’t want his prints on it. What he didn’t know was that Scarborough had already discovered that the letter was a fraud and that Arthur was being taped and recorded as they talked about it over the table. I don’t know how Terry found out. However he did it, the devil was getting ready to roast Arthur.”
She picks up her glass and takes a drink.
“Which brings us to the point,” I say. “When did Arthur Ginnis die?”
She looks at me over the curved edge of the glass. It’s the first hint of surprise I have seen in her eyes, as a tear forms and runs down her cheek. “You knew?”
“Process of elimination,” I tell her.
There is a long pause here as she catches her breath, a weight lifted from her shoulders. It was not Ginnis that Herman, Harry, and I saw on the steps of the hotel in Curacao that night. It was Scott dressed in his clothes and playing the part from a distance. We never got close enough to see the face. But because Aranda was there, we made the natural assumption. Our eyes saw what we wanted to see.
Without realizing that Harry and I were already in the air headed for the island, Scott, after slipping the envelope under our office door, headed for Curacao as well. She would have landed on the island the day after us, about the same time the media showed up. Scott, Aranda, and Ginnis’s wife, Margaret, must have been in a panic by then. When I cornered Aranda at the beach and he slipped away, Scott was already there, coming up with the next plan to bail them out. It would not have been hard with a few phone calls to find out where we were staying, to watch the restaurant veranda with field glasses, and to stage the performance for our benefit across the water. Even if the floating bridge hadn’t moved, Herman would never have gotten there in time. Ginnis-cum-Scott would have hopscotched down the steps, into the car, and away before Herman could have drawn within a block. It was all designed to convince us he was still alive and to discourage us from looking further, because he had escaped.
“So when did he die?” I ask.
“It was six weeks, almost to the day, before I visited Terry in that San Diego hotel room,” says Scott. “Margaret, Arthur’s wife, had called me from the islands down in Curacao. Arthur had gone swimming in the ocean. He’d had a problem. He came out of the water all right, but he didn’t feel good. There was something wrong. The clerk who was with him wanted to take him to a hospital, but Arthur refused. Margaret told me that they got him home, put him on the bed, and he lay there rambling on, mumbling that now everything he’d done was for nothing. Within minutes he was gone.”
She stops, takes a drink of water, and wipes her eyes with the cloth napkin.
“Margaret told me that nobody else knew except Aranda, his clerk. We talked about Arthur for a while. We cried. She talked about the things that were important to him in his life and the result, the effect this would have on the Court. We both knew what Arthur meant when he said it was all for nothing. He was desperate to stay on the Court until after the next election. He had talked to me about it before the surgery on his hip. It was ingrained in him, so many years and so many battles-then one appointment and it could all slip away. If he had died in a hospital or dropped dead on a crowded street, that would have been it, but instead here we were the only three people on the planet who knew he was gone.
