Shadow of Power

“I don’t remember how it started, whether it was a joke or if we were serious. But that’s when we decided,” she says. “It was right there, that day on the phone. We knew that it wouldn’t be easy. We convinced ourselves that all we were doing was buying some time. I flew down to Curaçao the next day. We had the body cremated. Being on the islands turned out to be an advantage. Arthur and his wife had never been to Curaçao before. She had rented the house because their own place on St. Croix was being repaired. Nobody on Curaçao knew who he was. I won’t tell you how we did it, but we were able to secure a death certificate with the date left open.

“I think we knew from the begi

“Still, the longer we looked at the calendar, the more plausible it sounded. The media back home was already fixated on the presidential primaries. Members of the House and Senate were in election mode. By the following June, with a presidential election five months away and the Court in recess, nobody would be looking for Arthur or wondering where he was. By the time the Court reconvened, the election would be a month away. No sitting president was going to nominate a candidate to the Supreme Court and secure Senate confirmation when he’s a lame duck and the election to replace him is a month out. Not in the climate of today’s politics.” As she says this, her eyes seem to sparkle. Trisha Scott is a true believer.

“You had it all worked out.”

“I know that looking back at it, you must think we were crazy, except for one thing. We had a trump card. Without it we would never have given the idea a second thought. We told ourselves that anytime things got too hot, we could simply fill in the date on the death certificate, call the Court to send out a press release, pack up the ashes, and fly home. Who would ever know? At least that’s what we thought.”

“That’s when Scarborough and his videotape caught up with you.”

“Yes. For six weeks everything went like clockwork. If court staff called, Aranda took care of it, supposedly shuttling answers, as the justice was too tired to talk. It even worked with two members of the Court. You’d be surprised how few phone calls you get when everybody thinks you’re sick and you need your rest.

“And then it happened. Out of the blue, from a direction I never even looked. It was the morning before Terry was scheduled to appear on Leno. He had been all over the airwaves for days. It was hard to turn on the television and not see his face. I got a call from a woman I knew. She wasn’t really a friend. I would bump into her once in a while downtown shopping or jogging out on the Mall. You might say we once ran in the same circles. She was just coming to the end of a relationship with Terry, and she was angry. Terry’s liaisons always ended the same way. At first I thought she only wanted somebody to talk to. She knew that I’d been through the same wringer two years earlier. And so we talked.

“But partway through the conversation she said, ‘You’re a friend of Arthur Gi

“With everything that had happened, with Arthur dead, I’d forgotten entirely about the letter. Margaret never knew about it, nor did Aranda. I hadn’t thought about Terry in months. Suddenly I realized that Terry knew the letter was a hoax and that he was getting ready to go public. What seemed so easy in the islands six weeks earlier was now a nightmare, and there was no one I could share it with.”

The reason she now unburdens herself becomes clear. Trisha Scott has been trapped in a psychic isolation cell of horrors for almost a year, without a soul to share her tortured thoughts with.

“I couldn’t go to Terry and tell him that Arthur was dead. He wouldn’t care. Terry would simply have a second scandal to take to the bank. If I did nothing and he went public with the letter and what he knew about it, every reporter in the Western Hemisphere would be looking for Arthur. He’d be at the top of every headline in the States. And then I thought if I tried to put a date on the death certificate and Arthur turned up dead just as Terry was breaking the story on the letter, you’d have to hunt with dogs to find anybody in the country who didn’t believe that Arthur Gi

“What made it worse were Margaret and Aranda. They were i

“So what you’re saying is that Arthur Gi

There is a long pause as she stares at me across the table. Her eyes seem like empty spheres, and she looks dazed, as if she’s just caught a glimmer of the lights outside.

“I don’t know how else to say it, how to make such an utterly insane act sound rational,” she says, “but for me there really was no other way out.”

I finish my drink, and I get up from the table. I don’t say good-bye. I don’t say a word. I just walk toward the door. Outside, the light bars are flashing on three D.C. Metropolitan Police cars. Two uniformed cops and a plainclothes detective are walking this way. Trisha Scott will have a long night of questions ahead of her, and a great many days to think about what she has done.