Murder at the Watergate by Margaret Truman Read Free Book Online

Aprile’s entrance into the ballroom. Annabel would be linking upwith Carole Aprile in an adjacent suite where wives readied themselves. When that plan had been announced, Annabel had commented that it sounded like an anachronistic dinner party where the men retired to a separate room for brandy and cigars while the ladies stayed at the table to discuss domestic help.
    “A civilized practice that ought to be resurrected,” Mac had replied.
    “Like foot binding and bloodletting,” Annabel said, kissing him on the cheek.
    Mac thought of again being with Annabel in a few minutes. Although they’d been together just an hour ago, the contemplation of seeing her always elevated his spirits.

8
The Ballroom—the Watergate Hotel
    Invited guests had started to arrive. A Secret Service checkpoint had been established just inside the doors leading into the hotel from the lower-level entrance. A second checkpoint at the top of the winding staircase that linked the banquet-room level with the lobby floor above was also in place. There had been a debate whether to use metal detection equipment for the affair, but the decision was made that it wasn’t necessary. The area had been “swept” three times in the previous two days, including a last-minute examination late that afternoon. Every access to the route the veep would take on his way to the ballroom was secure.
    But now that an alert had been issued, Mike Swales wished he had those metal detectors. No time to order and set them up now. Protecting the vice president would be strictly a human endeavor.
    Swales intensified his visual scrutiny of the area. He was known within the Secret Service as a belt-and-suspenders sort of agent, always looking for that extra security edge even if it meant overdoing it. Better safethan sorry. If he had his way, the president and vice president would spend their days in offices encased in bulletproof canisters. If nothing else, that would ensure that there would be no more JFK or RFK assassinations, no crackpot coming up to Reagan on a sidewalk and putting a bullet in him. No chance of something like that happening on Mike Swales’s watch.
    But this was a democracy, the most perfect form of government on earth—and the hardest to make work.
    Because Aprile was already in the hotel, there wasn’t any need to arrange for security outside the entrance doors, except for making certain that anyone pulling up in a car for valet parking had been invited—and could prove it. Aprile and his party would leave the suite and be escorted to an elevator that gave the lower floors access to the Watergate’s modern health club, complete with Olympic-size swimming pool, sauna room, exercise area, and massage facilities. Downstairs, the elevator opened onto the banquet-room level in a reception area reached through two sets of sliding glass doors from the outside. Stairs down to a door leading to an underground passage to the Kennedy Center were secured by agents placed there by Swales.
    The additional agents arrived at the Fairfax Room and were dispatched by Swales to where he wanted security beefed up. If he’d had his way, the hallway to the right of the reception area leading to the Watergate Hotel’s acclaimed restaurant, Aquarelle, would have been shut down, too. But there was a limit to how much a commercial establishment could be put out of business to satisfy security needs. Patrons of the restaurant were met at the bottom of the circular staircase from the lobby by threeagents, who guided them in the direction of the restaurant and away from the fund-raiser.
    Because he’d secured so many events at the Watergate, Swales knew the layout by heart. A hundred feet of green carpet with red roses spanned the distance from the second set of sliding glass doors to the Crescent Bar, another thirty-five feet from there to the entrance to the ballroom.
    When the vice president and his entourage walked from the health club elevator to the ballroom, they