“Wow.” Leno turns away from his guest to look directly at the camera. “Well, you heard it here first, folks. A real bona fide murder mystery. You will keep us informed?”
“Absolutely,” says Bonguard.
Leno rises from his chair and shakes Bonguard’s hand. “We’ll have to have you back.” There are a few muddled words exchanged between the two of them. The audience begins to applaud as the screen flickers and then goes dark.
“That’s everything,” says Harry.
“What about the letter?” I ask. “It sounds like the same thing Scarborough was talking about in his speech-the promise to deliver in the next book, the fiery rhetoric of some big secret.”
“The cops don’t have it,” says Harry. “No record of it listed in any of the materials seized from the hotel room or from Scarborough’s apartment in D.C.”
“Have the cops questioned this guy Mr. Bonguard?”
“More than that,” says Harry. He flips me two pages stapled together, what appear to be photocopies of some handwritten notes. “San Diego homicide sent a detective back to interview him, and the detective took notes. They never even typed them up, just ran copies out of his notebook and threw them in the pile with the other items from our first discovery request. Obviously they must have thought that it wasn’t very important. Otherwise they would have never taken notes, or sanitized them so we wouldn’t see them.”
Interview: Date: 7-26
(V)ictim: T. Scarborough
(S)ubject: R. Bonguard
“Second page,” says Harry. He reaches across the table and points with his pen. “Right here.”
S. told detective has no idea who might have killed V. Much hate mail following book. Racial orientation. Some death threats. Most are anonymous. Talk to publisher. Check to see if suspect is on record writing. See if any e- mails.
S. mentioned letter…(J letter). Unclear. S. says J letter impetus for entire book ‘Perpetual Slaves.’ S. says J letter what prompted V. to write book in first place. S. asked if we had letter. S. no idea of location of letter, never saw it.
“Am I understanding this? Bonguard is telling them that without this letter, the J letter, Scarborough would never have written Perpetual Slaves?”
“That’s what the cop’s notes seem to say,” says Harry.
“I don’t get it. The book made a fortune. There’s nothing about any letter in it, and yet according to Bonguard the letter is what drove the book?” I look at Harry.
“And Scarborough threatens to unveil the letter in the next book. The one he’ll never write,” says Harry. “And if the cops didn’t find this letter, could be that whoever killed Scarborough took it.”
“Why didn’t we see more in the press on this following the Leno show? Bonguard talked about the letter there.”
“Because by then the cops had already arrested our man, that afternoon, as Bonguard was sitting in the studio taping the show. The arrest took the edge off of everything else. The media wasn’t interested in any sideshow. The cops had their man. That’s probably why the police never followed up on any of this. Since they didn’t find the letter on Arnsberg or in his apartment, to them it’s irrelevant,” says Harry.
Certainly it didn’t fit the theory of the state’s case. “Get everything you can on this letter, who wrote it, when, its contents. Get a copy if you can. And find out if Scarborough made any notes referencing it. We’ll need to lay a foundation if we want to get it into evidence.”
“You’re thinking what I am,” says Harry. “Historic letter, probably a collector’s item. If so, it might have been worth a bundle.”
Like every good defense lawyer, Harry is centering on plausible alternative theories for murder.
“One thing is for sure. Our guy wasn’t found with any letter when they arrested him. Fact is, I doubt if he can read,” says Harry. “We might want to talk to an expert, find out what something like that might be worth if it were sold. The letter, I mean.”
Right behind passion, money is always the easiest motive to peddle before a jury when it comes to murder.
“It’s possible. It’s also possible somebody didn’t want the letter to see the light of day, if, as they both claim, this letter is a smoking gun giving rise to slavery in the land of the free.”
“You think somebody would kill to keep from tarnishing a burnished image?” asks Harry.
“I don’t know, but I’m not closing off any avenues at the moment.”
Harry is jotting notes, a small pad on the table in front of him.
“You’d have to think that if this letter exists and if it’s that significant, there would be some reference to it in other documents,” I say.
There are voluminous treatises covering the correspondence between the framers. These include hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of footnotes, the Federalist Papers, followed by entire libraries of books written on the subject.
“Someone would have had to have mentioned it somewhere.” I am talking about the mystery letter. “Check it out. Get somebody to do some research. If not here, in D.C. Try the Library of Congress.”
“We can hire a research service, but it’s gonna cost,” says Harry. “We don’t have much to go on. No date. No author for the letter. All we know is that it dealt with slavery and cut some kind of deal. Research could take a while.”
So far we have lined up a few experts to go over the lab reports on physical evidence found at the scene. We have investigators out talking to some of Arnsberg’s friends. Except for the letter mentioned by Bonguard and the fact that Scarborough seemed to fall back more than once on the same item in his speech, there is nothing else to go on.
“I tried to call Bonguard to talk to him,” says Harry. “Left messages.”
“And?”
“He never called back.”
“In your message did you tell him what it was about?”
Harry nods. “Uh-huh. Which has me wondering if he’s willing to talk to us at all.”
With Scarborough dead, the only one who can tell us about the mystery letter is Bonguard. This suddenly pushes him to the top of the curiosity list.
“Do you want to try to call him?” says Harry.
“What good would that do? If he’s not going to talk to you, why would he talk to me?”
“Maybe you have better phone karma,” says Harry.
Harry and I talk for a while. Over all of this, the mystery letter seems to hang there like a thread, daring us to pull on it.
“You know what troubles me more than anything else?” says Harry.
“What’s that?”
“ Scarborough. For all the fiery rhetoric-call it manipulation,” he says, “still, what he said about the language and slavery, the Constitution, it was accurate, all of it. I mean, he fudged around the edges a little.”
“He did a bit more than fudge at the edges,” I say. “From my reading, slavery was the third rail of politics during the Constitutional Convention. Nobody wanted to touch it, neither pro-slave nor anti-slave. They all knew that any attempt to recognize it or abolish it would result in the new nation being stillborn. Move in either direction and half of the states would refuse to play, take their ball and go home.”
“That may account for the covert language,” says Harry. “But there’s no denying that they recognized slavery. Like it or not, Scarborough had it right. It may have been the only deal possible, but that doesn’t dry-clean it or make it any less grimy. And the fact that the words are still there, visible to the entire world, is indisputable.”
“Your point is?”
“Since none of this is new-that language has been out there for what, going on two and a half centuries?-why now? What caused Scarborough to pounce on it at this moment and in this way, unless he was spurred on by someone or some thing.”
“You’re thinking what I’m thinking-whatever it is, is in that letter.”
He nods. “If Scarborough knew what was in it, and we have to assume that he did. If he’s not going to stretch
