The Inner Circle - Brad Meltzer [99]
“Okay,” I say. “So where’s the crime?”
“That’s the point, Beecher. There isn’t one. Griffin’s dad goes to the newspaper. He begs the cops to find his son. But the cops see it as a young man exercising his independence. And they shut the case, I’m guessing secretly thrilled that Griffin and his eight-ball friends are someone else’s problem.”
“And now, all these years later, the case is back. So for the second time—where’s the crime?”
Tot points his beard at the famous landmark all the way up on our left: the breathtaking home of President Orson Wallace. The White House.
“Don’t tell me Wallace has an eight-ball tattoo,” I say.
“Nope. Near as I can tell, Wallace was nowhere near this one.”
“So what makes you think he’s involved?”
As we pass the White House and weave down Pennsylvania Avenue and toward our building, Tot’s smile finally pokes through his beard. “Now you’re seeing the real value of an archive. History isn’t written by the winners—it’s written by everyone—it’s a jigsaw of facts from contradictory sources. But every once in a while, you unearth that one original document that no one can argue with, like an old police report filed by two beat cops twenty-six years ago.”
“Tot…”
“He was the one who gave them the info—the one eyewitness who told the cops everything he saw.”
“The President was?”
“No. I told you, Wallace was nowhere near there.” As we make a sharp right onto 7th Street and pull toward the garage, Tot picks up his photocopied sheet of paper and tosses it in my lap. It’s the first time I notice the name he’s handwritten across the bottom. “Him! He was there!”
I read the name and read it again. “Stewart Palmiotti?”
“Wallace’s personal doctor,” Tot says, hitting the brakes at the yellow antiram barrier outside the garage, just as the security guard looks up at us. “That’s who we want: the President’s oldest friend.”
63
The cemetery reminded him of his mother.
Not of her death.
When she died, she was already in her eighties. Sure, she wanted a year or two more—but not much. She always said she never wanted to be one of those old people, so when it was her time to go, she went calmly, without much argument.
No, what the cemetery reminded Dr. Palmiotti of was his mother when she was younger… when he was younger… when his grandfather died and his mom was screaming—her face in a red rage, tears and snot running down her nose as two other family members fought to restrain her—about the fact that the funeral home had neglected to shave her father’s face before putting him in his coffin.
Palmiotti had never seen such a brutal intensity in his mother. He’d never see it again. It was reserved solely for those who wronged her family.
It was a lesson Palmiotti never forgot.
Yet as he leaned into the morning cold and followed the well-paved, hilly trail into the heart of Oak Hill Cemetery, he quickly realized that this was far more than just a cemetery.
All cities have old money. Washington, D.C., has old money. But it also has old power. And Oak Hill, which was tucked into one of the toniest areas of Georgetown and extended its sprawling twenty-two acres of rolling green hills and obelisk-dotted graves deep into Rock Creek Park, was well known, especially by those who cared to know, as the resting place for that power.
Founded in 1849, when W. W. Corcoran donated the land he had bought from a great-nephew of George Washington, Oak Hill held everyone from Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie, to Secretary of War Edward Stanton, to Dean Acheson, to Washington Post publisher Philip Graham. For years, the cemetery management refused to take “new members,” but demand grew so great, they recently built double-depth crypts below the main walking paths so that D.C.’s new power families could rest side by side with the old.
Welcome to Oak Hill Cemetery,