him I would never reveal anything like that.”
“Did he? Scarborough, I mean?”
She nods. “More than once. I told him I couldn’t discuss any part of my work at the Court, and I wouldn’t. I did two years clerking for Arthur. I was getting ready to leave the Court-this was about the time that Terry was finishing up the early draft of Perpetual Slaves, the one that included the stuff from the letter. By then we weren’t living together any longer. I think Arthur was relieved, for me, if not for himself.”
“It sounds like you and Justice Ginnis are very close.”
“Friends,” she says. “No, it’s more than that. Arthur has a father complex. Almost all the clerks who’ve ever worked for him have felt this. He means well.” She pauses, smiles, and looks down at the table for a moment. “And I owe him a lot. He could have fired me. I mean, he knew that Terry was a threat to the confidentiality inside the Court. I was living with him. Other members of the Court would have either fired me or found some less-important duties for me outside their chambers. Arthur didn’t do that. He warned me. I gave him assurances, and he trusted me. I can’t explain it,” she says, “but there’s a kind of almost nuclear bond that forms from all of that.”
“And Terry Scarborough?” I ask. “How did he fit into all this?”
“In the beginning I suspect he gravitated to me because I could mingle with people Terry wanted to be seen with.”
“I think you underrate yourself,” I tell her.
“Thank you. But you have to live in this political hothouse to understand it,” she says. “It may be the power center of the world, but it’s actually a very small town. Everybody knows everybody. They attend the same receptions, do the same parties, and the press hangs out. The media make mental notes of who’s talking to whom. It was important for Terry to be seen at functions socializing with members of the Court and Court staff. You see, Terry sold himself to the national media as one of the prime legal insiders, on call twenty-four hours a day to go on the air, to be quoted in the Washington Post or the New York Times. He lived to be seen and heard.”
“And of course only a fool would fail to grasp the symbiotic relationship between face time on the tube and book sales,” I tell her.
“With Terry it was more than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“He liked being recognized at airports, in crowds. He craved it. Someone would come up to him and tell him that he looked familiar, and Terry would casually flip the celebrity over his shoulder like some people discard a cigarette butt. He would say, ‘You probably saw me on Larry King last night,’ and walk away. He loved it. They say that celebrity is its own narcotic. For Terry it was the drug of choice. I remember at one point he told me about the night he did his first appearance on cable news. All his friends called to tell him how they’d seen him on the tube. For Terry it was like doing lines of cocaine. He couldn’t get on the next show fast enough. He hired a PR firm with media connections. He told me he was paying them seven thousand dollars a month on his teaching salary, dipping into savings while he was writing his first book on spec. That was part of the problem with the relationship,” she says.
“In what way?”
She looks at me, suddenly realizing that maybe she’s already said too much. “Nothing. But you get the picture,” she says.
“So Ginnis was relieved when you broke it off?”
“Hmm?” I catch her musing, lost in thought.
“Your relationship with Scarborough.”
“Oh, absolutely. He told me I’d get over it, move on, find someone else. He was right. It was better for me, much healthier.”
“So where do you think I could find him?”
“Find who?”
“Ginnis.”
“You haven’t heard a word I’ve been saying. You’re dogged. You’re awful.” She laughs. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to contact a sitting justice of the Supreme Court? I mean, unless you’re a personal friend or a family member, it’s probably easier to get through to the Oval Office. I told you, he doesn’t know a thing about Terry’s book or the letter. You’re chasing rainbows-give it up,” she says.
“I wish I could, but there’s a man sitting in a jail cell back in San Diego, and unless I can figure out who else may have had a reason to kill Scarborough, Carl Arnsberg is looking at a possible death sentence.”
6
If you think politics is the occupational calling of the Antichrist today, you should have been around in Jefferson’s time.” Harry gestures toward the pile of paper in front of him. “This stuff gives me a whole new insight into the founding generation.”
Harry has been doing research while I was gone. Spread out on the table in our conference room are notes, stacks of photocopied pages, and computer printouts. “If they didn’t invent partisan bickering,” says Harry, “they sure as hell took it to the level of a whole new art form.
“The current crop in D.C. would have nothing on these guys,” says Harry. “Jefferson kept his own muckraker- in-chief on payroll. A guy named James Callender. Callender was a kind of one-man Defamation Incorporated. And he didn’t need a word processor. For a fee he would do a journalistic gut job on anybody you wanted. Lies passed through his quill at a rate that would make the turkey feathers wilt. What’s more troubling,” says Harry, “is that Jefferson didn’t seem to be too bothered by any of this. When it came to political enemies, he wasn’t interested in sweating the details. Paint ’em with a broad brush,” says Harry. According to my partner, the author of the Declaration of Independence followed his own creed of political warfare: defame ’em first and let posterity sort out the facts.
“What we didn’t learn in high-school history,” I tell him.
“Along with Sally Hemings, the slave bride,” says Harry. “But we’ll get to that later. The problem for us is the volume of documents.”
According to Harry, when it came to letter writing, Jefferson didn’t know when to quit. “You get different numbers when you go to different sources, but everybody seems to agree that the total is somewhere north of twenty thousand,” says Harry.
“Separate letters?” I ask.
Harry nods. “No Internet and no computer, and the man wrote letters on everything from Eskimos to enchiladas. He did have a machine to make copies so he could file them away.” Harry paws through his notes. “Ironically, it was called a polygraph.” He flips me a page across the table from one of the stacks in front of him. There’s a small picture of the device and some brief script. A machine Jefferson acquired in 1804, which was patented a year earlier. According to the article, Jefferson called it “the finest invention of the current age.”
“What’s more,” says Harry, “the authorities seem pretty certain that not all of his letters have been found or documented to date.”
“So there’s a chance there might be some authentic correspondence still floating around out there?”
“A good chance, though documenting it could prove difficult, depending on where it’s found and under what circumstances.”
“Fortunately for us, all we have to show is that the killer believed it was authentic,” I say.
“But according to what Bonguard told you, Scarborough only had a copy,” says Harry.
“True.”
Harry shakes his head. There is no seeming answer to this riddle. According to Harry, Jefferson’s papers are spread around, scattered in several different places. Most of them are in the Library of Congress. But a wild piece of correspondence that has eluded scholars all this time could be anywhere.
“Let’s start with the Library of Congress,” I tell him. “That is why you called me when I was back in D.C., right?”
“Right,” says Harry. “According to everything I can find, Jefferson’s papers with the Jefferson Library-that’s the Library of Congress-” says Harry, “include twenty-seven thousand documents. That’s correspondence, commonplace
