Grand Master by D.W. Buffa Page A

scheduled not just that day but the rest of
the week. I know Burdick well enough to know that, whatever he was
working on, he won’t give up.”

CHAPTER SIX
     
    The flight from New York arrived in Los
Angeles twenty minutes late, but Quentin Burdick had lots of time.
His appointment was not until two o’clock the next afternoon, which
meant he could spend the night in Santa Barbara and not have to
leave much before noon. After the dismal, muggy weather in New
York, the prospect of an evening walk along the Pacific had the
charm of an overdue vacation.
    Two hours after he landed, he checked into a
motel across from the beach, made a few phone calls and then,
putting on a windbreaker and a pair of sneakers, went for a stroll.
Almost painfully thin, with a narrow, angular face and quick
moving, inquisitive eyes, Quentin Burdick looked younger than his
age; but today, as he walked beneath the palm trees swaying gently
in the late day breeze, he felt older than he was. Since the moment
he heard about it, he had not been able to rid himself of the
suspicion that there was more than simple coincidence in the timing
of Robert Constable’s death. The rumor that he had not been alone,
that he had been in bed with some woman, made Burdick wonder
whether Constable’s heart attack had been self-induced, or whether,
if not quite that deliberate, the President had set out to test the
limits of his endurance, half-hoping that he would not make it.
    He had tried for months to get an interview,
but instead of a straight answer, a firm refusal which might have
seemed to confirm the President’s involvement, he had been met with
ambiguity and evasion, assurances that the President would be only
too glad to talk to him once he found the time. There had not been
much to work on in the beginning, a few anonymous sources whose
information it was impossible to confirm, a few tax returns that
raised some questions but scarcely proved anything improper, much
less criminal. He had nothing he could use, nothing to write a
story that he would want his name on or that the paper would print,
and Constable knew it. The President was too shrewd, had too much
the politician’s instinct, not to know that Burdick did not have a
story. With each new request for an interview, the excuses became
more transparent, until, quite unexpectedly, Burdick got the break
he needed. It was just a name, but it put a face, so to speak, on
what until then had been a web of possible connections that seemed
to lead in all directions and therefore led in none. The name, as
he discovered, meant everything; it meant that the President now
thought he knew a good deal more than he did.
    “Tell the President,” he had told Constable’s
chief of staff, “that the story I’m working on is about The Four
Sisters, and that I think it’s only fair that I get his side of
it.”
    An hour later Burdick got a call back. It was
not from one of the President’s assistants, it was from the
President himself. Cheerful and exuberant, he made it seem that he
had been waiting for months to see Burdick, and not the other way
round.
    “They’ve got me going from one place to
another; no time to do anything I like. Hell, yesterday I was
giving a speech in Atlanta, and tomorrow - would you believe it -
I’m on my way to Rome for one of those economic summits where all
those rich people get together and I try to tell them all the good
they should be doing with their money. Now when are we going to get
together, Quentin? What’s a good time for you?”
    Quentin Burdick stopped walking. He sat on a
bench and watched the orange red sun grow larger and larger as it
settled down on the far horizon and began slowly to dissolve in the
sea. Years before, when he lived for a while out on Long Island,
reading The Great Gatsby and wishing he could write like
Fitzgerald, he sometimes stayed up all night just to watch the sun
rise from somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic and paint the
sky a