The Fixer
Page 54

“They won’t print anything on your word alone,” I told Henry.
“Which means,” he emphasized, “that your sister isn’t going to be the only one looking into this. Our friend at the Post is already thinking of this as his Watergate.”
Henry had a rare gift for sounding reasonable no matter what he was saying.
“If you’re done silently judging me,” Henry commented, “might I turn your attention to the information we got in exchange for what I was willing to barter?”
I pictured myself actually wringing his neck. It was therapeutic, but possibly not productive. Begrudgingly, I thought back over what Carson Dweck had told us about his source for the Pierce story.
“I’ll tell you what I told your sister,” he’d said, pointing a finger at me. “The tip came from inside the West Wing, and that’s all I’m going to say.”
Fighting back a sinking feeling in my stomach, I tried not to think about the first half of that sentence.
“Inside the West Wing.” I focused on that part, saying the words out loud. That revelation shouldn’t have been surprising. Where else would a tip about the president’s plan for nominating a Supreme Court justice have come from?
I thought he was going to tell us the tip came from William Keyes. I hadn’t even realized that was what I’d expected to find until we’d heard differently. Keyes was the one who’d attempted to coerce Ivy into supporting Pierce. He was the one who’d arranged the Camp David meeting.
“Inside the West Wing,” Henry repeated. “That means we’re talking about the president and his immediate staff.”
I was fairly certain that meant we weren’t talking about an intern.
“Even if we knew who in the West Wing had leaked the information,” Henry continued, “we couldn’t rule out the possibility that the order to leak it came from President Nolan.”
In Henry’s mind, this was damning. The president had been at Camp David with Pierce and Vivvie’s father. The president had been at the Keyes Foundation gala the night before Justice Marquette’s so-called heart attack. The president’s office had leaked a story designed to build momentum for Pierce’s nomination.
“Ivy cleared the president,” I said abruptly. Henry and I hadn’t had this conversation yet. He’d been too busy ignoring me for the past few days for me to tell him what Ivy had said. “If someone poisoned your grandfather at the gala that night, it wasn’t the president. There were cameras on him practically the whole time.”
Henry latched on to the same word in that sentence that I had. “Practically.”
I glanced over at the coffee shop. Vivvie was staring over at the two of us. Sooner or later, I’d need to fill her in on what was going on.
A second later, Vivvie’s aunt turned to look our way.
I grabbed Henry’s arm. “Look natural,” I told him, turning my head and pasting a smile on my face.
His hand curved around my shoulder in response. “I always look natural.”
We started walking. Vivvie’s aunt turned back around, but Henry didn’t drop his arm from my shoulder. “Did it ever occur to you,” he said to me, his voice low and pleasant, “that the president might not have to do his own dirty work? Even if you believe that he didn’t poison my grandfather, that doesn’t mean he didn’t have it done.”
The same logic could apply to William Keyes—or to anyone else in that photograph, or anyone else at Camp David that weekend not pictured in the photograph.
I said as much.
“Who else was there?” Henry asked me.
I didn’t know how many other people had been there—but I knew that Ivy had been. I couldn’t tell Henry that. Not with the way he felt about my sister.
“It occurs to me,” Henry said, his voice still sounding so reasonable, so calm, “that according to our dear reporter friend, your sister got to him before we did.” Henry finally dropped his arm and stopped walking. “Everything we know, she knows.”
“That’s not a bad thing,” I said, but all I could think about was Ivy telling me to trust her, Ivy telling me that the reporter wasn’t worth checking out.
“My sister is not a part of this,” I told Henry, shutting out those thoughts. “She’s on our side.”
Henry reached out for me again, his touch light against my skin. “She may be on your side,” he said quietly. “She’s not on mine.”
On the other side of the lobby, Vivvie and her aunt stood, getting ready to leave the café.
“Am I on your side?” I asked Henry. “Or am I the enemy, too?”
He’d used me to set up this meeting, and the whole time, he’d had a plan of his own. I couldn’t blame him for that. If it were my grandfather who’d been killed, I might have done the same thing.
“You aren’t the enemy,” Henry said, dropping his arm to his side once more and taking a step back. “That doesn’t mean our goals are aligned.”
CHAPTER 49
The next day was Saturday. I was still grounded—school projects aside—which apparently, in Ivy’s book, meant that my job was sitting around the house doing nothing while she was out doing who knows what. I had the vague sense that the case had taken a turn, but what that turn was, what she knew, what she was hiding—I had no idea.
I’d caught Vivvie up on what I knew. She’d caught me up on the fact that her aunt had recognized Henry but not me. Apparently, the woman had assumed that I was Henry’s girlfriend. Because that’s not disturbing.
My cell phone rang at half past three. I answered it, glad for the distraction.
“It’s your favorite person,” Asher informed me.
“No,” I said, leaning back against my headboard. “You’re not.”
“I won’t embarrass you by proving I am,” Asher replied, unfazed. “We have bigger problems.”
“Problems?” By Asher’s definition, that could mean any number of things.
“More like problem, singular,” Asher amended. “I just talked to Henry. He’s planning to go with his mother to a state dinner tonight.”
That seemed like something Henry would do. “And?”
“And,” Asher said emphatically, “Henry is planning to go with his mother to a state dinner tonight.” He paused, presumably for an audible reaction on my part.