Franklin Affair by Jim Lehrer

name. None of his homes in Philadelphia escaped the destruction of progress, so there is no shrine comparable to Washington’s Mount Vernon or Jefferson’s Monticello.
    Franklin was a superb writer, inventor, scientist, philosopher, politician, diplomat, and printer. Much is said, for instance, about the magnficient prose of Thomas Jefferson. That’s true. But let the record reflect that Franklin’s autobiography, though in the self-serving mode of the genre, is a masterpiece of the literature of its time that should be read by every American schoolchild. . . .
    In twelve hundred words of clear and direct prose more than twenty-five years ago, Morton had made the case for Ben’s rightful place in history that was only now being recognized.
    How could he improve on what Morton had written? That was a familiar and sometimes paralyzing question of self-doubt for those historians following in the wake of others who have already churned through the same seas. That was a good analogy. He scribbled it down in a notebook he had next to the computer.
    Then he caught a flicker of the familiar
Law & Order
opening on the TV set and grabbed the remote to raise the volume. The deep-voiced male announcer finished proclaiming that the criminal justice system was dependent on the police, who investigate crime, and the district attorney, who prosecutes the criminals.
    From his desk, R watched transfixed as a New York garbageman found the body of an attractive blond researcher who worked for a best-selling novelist.
    He remained seemingly frozen in place as it was revealed that she was murdered by a hitman hired by the novelist, a philandering married man. The motive: fear that the researcher was about to go public with the claim that she had not only researched, she had either written most of her boss’s latest best-selling novel herself or stolen it from other writers.
    The writer, while the jury was out deliberating his fate, killed himself by throwing himself down in front of a
New York Times
delivery truck.
    â€œSo if the press doesn’t get you one way, they get you another,” said District Attorney Adam Schiff—played by actor Steven Hill—to his prosecutor colleagues Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) and Abby Carmichael (Angie Harmon), just before the final credits rolled.
    â€¢ • •
    Three hours later, R was awakened from a dead sleep by the taste of skate-tasting secretions in his mouth.
    Soon he was wide awake. He went back to his laptop and, in less than an hour, finished his op-ed piece and then, with a push of a key on his computer, sent it off by modem directly to
The Washington Post.

FIVE

    The twelve pieces of thick yellowed paper lay on the table in front of him. Did they contain information—an indictment—that would justify looking seriously at a charge that Benjamin Franklin, one of the greatest of all Americans, was party to the murder of his son’s mother?
    R was sitting with Wes Braxton, acting director of the Eastern Pennsylvania Museum of Colonial History, in a tiny conference room on the second floor of the museum in Eastview. The building, located on the town square, had once been a small dry-goods store. The museum’s public display rooms were on the ground floor, its offices and storage facilities up here on the second.
    Wally had it right in his last letter. This was not going to be easy, R concluded, after examining and touching these dozen pages for twenty minutes.
    It was a perverse thought, but the immediate scene reminded him of his Grandmother Taylor’s at Christmastime. She would always put out a huge jigsaw puzzle—sometimes a yard square—on a table in her living room. R, then called Raymond by one and all, and the other grandchildren were to contribute time and energy to finding pieces and placing them in their proper places. The idea was to have the puzzle complete and ready for full viewing by Christmas Day. She bought a new