Free Grand Master by D.W. Buffa

happen.”
    Burdick pushed aside the notebook and sat
back. He did not have a doubt that Morris was telling the truth.
“What about Constable? Was the President involved?”
    A look of cynicism and contempt shot across
Morris’ tired face. “He was never about anything except himself. I
went to him when I found out what I just told you. You know what he
told me? - That none of it mattered, that there was nothing to
worry about, that we had not done anything wrong, that no one would
ever find out.” Morris could still not quite believe it.
    “Can you imagine? In the same breath: we
haven’t done anything wrong, and no one will ever find out! Well
someone found out, didn’t they? Someone found out because my good
friend, Robert Constable, the guy I helped elect president, had to
tell his friends, and his friends made sure there was enough
evidence that when someone tipped off the FBI that I had taken a
bribe they could find the money; money, by the way, in an account
in the Cayman Islands I didn’t know I had.”
    Instead of cynicism, there was a look of
something harsher, and more unforgiving, on Frank Morris’ face, a
sense of retribution that Burdick did not understand. “They had to
shut me up,” Morris continued, the look bitter and aggrieved. “The
way to do that was to discredit me, make me out to be a liar and a
thief, someone no one could believe. And they succeeded. But they
must have had a different problem with our good friend, the
President, something they could only solve with more drastic
measures.”
    “What are you saying?” cried Burdick,
wondering if in his bitterness and rage, Morris had lost his
senses. “Constable died of a heart attack, the night before I was
supposed to see him.”
    “To talk to him about The Four Sisters?”
asked Morris with a quick, eager movement of his eyes that said he
was certain he was right.
    “That’s what I told him, but -”
    “Do you really think that was just a
coincidence? You don’t know what you’re dealing with. The Four
Sisters isn’t just a bank that moves money around in ways it
shouldn’t. Do you know anything about it? Do you know who the head
of it is?”
    “I didn’t even know what The Four Sisters
was, until you told me,” admitted Burdick.
    The door suddenly opened and the guard
appeared. Burdick had been there an hour. It was time to leave.
    “Come back tomorrow,” said Morris with new
urgency. “There are things you need to know.”

CHAPTER SEVEN
     
    Quentin Burdick checked into the first motel
he found. He went back through his notes, making sure, while
everything was fresh in his mind, that it was all there, that he
had not forgotten to make a record of the most important parts of
what Frank Morris had said. Then, when he was finished, he went
back to the beginning and from those fragmentary, short-hand notes,
wrote out in longhand a full account of what he had been told. He
had learned in his years of reporting that even the best memory
failed after a fairly short time to recall in all its nuanced
specificity the language of a conversation. This was likely to be
the biggest story of his career, and he could not afford to make a
mistake.
    Burdick worked straight through until he had
it all down on paper, not just what Frank Morris had said, but how
the once all-powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means
Committee had looked and sounded, the changes that had made him
seem at times a pale imitation of his former self. When he was
finally finished, Burdick started to turn on the television to see
what news he had missed, but then decided he was too tired to care.
He was asleep almost the moment his head hit the pillow.
    When he went back to the prison late the next
morning, he found Frank Morris more energized, more combative, as
if now that he had made his first confession, told Burdick what
really had happened, he could not wait to tell him everything.
There was something else, another, darker aspect, to the change.
Beneath