Monument to Murder - Margaret Truman [61]
Louise turned her back on him and looked up into the gray sky. The initial raindrops of a storm that would soon become full-blown landed on her face. The wind suddenly picked up and blew Felker’s blond hair into a swirl above his head. That, coupled with a dramatic flash of lightning behind, gave him an almost messianic quality. Jeanine and Mitzi waited. Louise slowly turned and said to Felker, “You promise about the money?”
“Yes, I promise,” he said above a sharp clap of thunder.
“You give the money to my mother?”
“If that’s what you want. Ten thousand dollars will be given to her anonymously. But you have to promise that you won’t tell a soul about this. If you break that promise, you’ll wish you were back on the Savannah streets.” His tone had turned rock-hard.
Louise Watkins agreed. She would, of course, eventually tell her mother how she ended up in prison, but she would never reveal the source of the payoff. Nor would she ever know that the young woman for whom she’d sold out would one day become the first lady of the United States of America.
CHAPTER 21
Israel’s prime minister and his wife were entertained that night in the State Dining Room by the president, the first lady, and a select group of one hundred invitees. Jeanine Jamison had approached the evening without enthusiasm. She found most state dinners unbearably dull: all the pomp and circumstance with which to contend; the briefing by State on the visiting head of state and his wife to ensure that certain topics would be raised, and avoided; the forced gaiety—the pomposity of it all. She’d taken an instant dislike to the prime minister’s wife, a ravishingly beautiful brunette with an exquisite figure and lively, wide brown eyes. Jeanine never did like it when a female guest was more attractive, especially another first lady. She preferred dumpy ones or those with out-of-proportion facial features and bad teeth.
But feeling competitive with the prime minister’s wife wasn’t the primary reason that her thoughts wandered away from the here and now—to the stabbing in the parking lot at Augie’s twenty years ago, and its resolution as worked out by Mitzi Cardell’s father and his PR man, Jack Felker, in Skidaway Island State Park.
She’d forgotten about it, had managed to store that nasty recollection away in one of the many compartments that she was capable of creating, especially for unpleasant memories. But Mitzi’s lunchtime visit had been unsettling. The whole mess was now back, front and center, thanks to her childhood friend.
She wondered what her husband’s reaction would be if she confided in him after all these years of secrecy. She looked at him as he laughed at something the PM had said and decided that sharing that sordid episode from her life wasn’t worth risking his wrath. He was a man who detested anything that stood in the way of his goals; having a first lady who’d killed a man and avoided prison by a friend’s father paying off a drug-ravaged black hooker wouldn’t be taken kindly. There was a side of him, however, that might applaud how the parking lot situation had been handled. Fletcher Jamison believed that there were few problems that couldn’t be solved with sufficient money and power. There had been plenty of rumors during his ride to political power about payoffs to bury unflattering episodes from his past both as an attorney and then as governor of Georgia, and Jeanine had personal knowledge of two of them, including one that involved her.
They had occurred during his one and only term as governor.
• • •
The romance between the governor and Jeanine had its origins while he was still married to his first wife, Claire. Jeanine had landed a job as his liaison with the state legislature, a position that brought them into close and daily contact. She’d been in that office only a month when he made it plain that he found her attractive and was interested in seeing her socially. His marriage, it was said, was rocky, held together only for the sake of political propriety, which he confirmed to Jeanine the first time