“Your guess would be as good as mine. Terry never said.”
“Do you have any idea as to the monetary value of this letter?” I ask.
“Umm…” He looks at me with a dull gaze as if suddenly I’ve jumped the tracks on him. He thinks for a moment. “Assuming it’s authentic, that it’s never seen the light of day, publicly at least, I have to assume that it would be worth a good deal to collectors.”
“And how do we define ‘a good deal’ in the literary antiquities market?” I ask.
Bonguard smiles at me. “I’m certainly no expert on the value of historic correspondence. But assuming all your assumptions are correct, it would go at auction, one of a kind. And if it’s as explosive as Terry suggested, my guess is it would be worth multiple millions, perhaps. I don’t know. Given a good airing with a bestselling book as Terry was intending, that would drive the price very high.”
“So that would make whoever possessed this letter quite wealthy,” I say.
“Umm…” He sips his coffee, studying me over the brim of the cup. “I know what you’re thinking,” he says. “People have killed for less. Except for one thing. If Terry was to be believed, he only had a copy of the letter. That in itself was worthless unless it could be authenticated.”
“Maybe the killer didn’t know that,” I say.
He mulls this for a moment. “That’s possible. If you can sell it to a jury.” He smiles again.
“You have no idea how Mr. Scarborough may have gotten his copy of the letter?”
He looks at his watch. “Your dozen questions are about up,” he says. “I have a meeting in a couple of minutes. I don’t know how he got his copy of the letter. He didn’t tell me.”
“Do you have any guesses?”
“It’s only conjecture,” he says. “And don’t say that it came from here, but Terry had a girlfriend. An on-again, off-again thing. I believe it was off when he was killed, since they hadn’t seen each other in a while. The woman’s name is Trisha Scott. She’s a high-powered lawyer with one of the big firms in D.C. Terry met her when she was clerking for the Supreme Court. She was just out of law school, quite a bit younger than he was. If I had to guess as to a source for the letter, I would start there.”
“Why is that?”
“Because this whole thing, the idea of writing Perpetual Slaves, seems to have had its genesis about the time that Terry picked up with Scott. That and other things,” he says.
“What other things?”
“His interest in Arthur Ginnis, the justice that Scott clerked for. Do you know him?”
“I know of him, naturally. Never met him. Supreme Court justices and lowly trial lawyers live and operate in different legal universes,” I tell him.
“Well, Ginnis isn’t exactly the sort that I would expect to take up with Terry. I know Ginnis only slightly. I’ve met him twice. No”-he thinks for a moment-“actually, it was three times. Anyway, I was introduced to him by his wife, Margaret. She’s a lovely woman. For a while she was a client. I met her in New York at a political function. She was publishing a fascinating cookbook. The woman has a positive flair for finding an unusual niche and marketing it. The Favored Dishes of the High Court-that was the name of her book. She did a sequel and went historical on the next one, Meals from Marshall to Warren. That one didn’t do as well.
“She actually got Justice Scalia to pose for the cover on the first one, smiling with a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. Do you know Scalia?”
I shake my head again.
“Actually, I don’t know him either, only by reputation. But I’m told that even if you don’t agree with him politically-And I don’t,” he says. “I’m hoping for better things following the election. Still there’s one thing that everyone agrees on. Scalia, like his politics or not, is the wit on the Court. Man has an incredible sense of humor. And sharp as a knife, if you know what I mean. Margaret’s book wasn’t The South Beach Diet, but in its market it did very well.”
And it never hurts to do business, even at the fringes, with the influential, names you can drop if you’re sniffing on the trail of a lawyer for a book deal following a hot trial, for example.
“You were talking about Justice Ginnis?”
“Oh, yes. Affable man,” he says, “engaging, politically to the left of center. But his chief claim to fame is that he can swing from the middle. I’m no Court watcher, but lawyers here in town tell me that at the moment he holds the balance of power on the Court. The word is that if you want five votes on anything controversial that’s before the Court, you will have to get Mr. Justice Ginnis.”
“Maybe Scarborough was trying to woo him politically,” I say.
Bonguard shakes his head and rises from his chair. “Terry had given up on the Court long ago. He was as far out on the left wing as you can get without falling off. There were those who knew him who would say he’d already tumbled. He was living in a fantasy world of rebellion and revolution, dreaming of impeachments that would never happen. Terry was not someone that Ginnis would take to-or for that matter would want to be seen talking with.”
“But you’re saying that they did talk.”
“Do yourself a favor and talk to Trisha Scott. I have a feeling she knows more than I do.”
The meeting is over. He ushers us toward the door, chatting sociably with Sarah, about her major in college, what she wants to do when she graduates. As we pass through the door, he shakes my hand one last time and turns to head toward the stairs. Then, as if lightning has struck him in the brain, he suddenly turns back toward me.
“Could you do me one favor?” he says. “If you find the letter, the copy or the original, could you give me a call and let me know?”
“Why is that?”
“I’m curious as to what it says. Terry would never let me look at it. I might also be interested in getting a publishing deal for the contents, perhaps in book form, maybe around the context of the trial and Terry’s death. It could be a good story. Who knows, it might even help your client.”
“If I find it, I’ll give you a call.”
The code words of slavery in the Constitution may have fired Scarborough’s rhetoric and made him rich, but his book, his smoke-belching antics on the stump, and the violence that ensued had their genesis in some other, more startling and subterranean force. And unless I miss my bet, that hidden volcano is somewhere in the pages of what Bonguard is now referring to as the Jefferson Letter.
4
At the airport, my trip from JFK in New York to Reagan International in D.C., I do the TSA drill to get through security. Partially disrobing, I take off my shoes and pull my belt from my pants as everyone in line does calisthenics with luggage in plastic boxes.
Harry has talked about forming a new airline and calling it Amistad Air. Harry’s idea is to cut through the marketing hype and achieve the ultimate goal of every American carrier: to stack human cargo on planes like cordwood, using historic schematics of old slave ships. According to Harry, if fuel prices continue to climb, they’ll be putting out oars and telling us all to pull.
In the midst of this chaos, Sarah and I part company, she on a flight home to San Diego while I head to D.C. I am chasing the grail, Bonguard’s musings that Scarborough’s mystery letter or at least some thread leading to it might be found in Washington.
I have placed three calls to the law offices of Barrett, Coal & Johnston on K Street in an effort to arrange a meeting with Trisha Scott, Scarborough’s former girlfriend. She has failed to return my calls, so I’m taking a shot that I can track her down before heading home, that maybe she will talk to me.
Time is running out on us. Next week Harry and I are in court on pretrial motions trying to keep evidence linking Carl Arnsberg to Scarborough’s murder away from the jury. Most of this is a long shot. Still, it is necessary, both for trial as well as for any appeal should he be convicted.
At trial it is the nature of the game to dot every i and cross every t. Anything omitted is conceded to the prosecution, lost to us forever. We are now less than a month from trial, and our theories of defense are thin. What
