He felt a little like a fool, waiting for someone who was already half an hour late, someone who had probably changed his mind and was not coming at all. It would have been bad enough if he was meeting him in New York, but he had come all the way to Washington to talk to the agent who had been in charge the night Robert Constable died. Richard Bauman had been reluctant even to talk to him on the phone and was on the verge of hanging up when Burdick told him that Senator Hart - “Bobby Hart” - had given him his name and suggested he ought to give him the chance to tell his side of the story before he published his account of what had happened that night in the hotel. There had been a long pause, and Burdick had the sense that Bauman wanted to talk, but that something, or someone, was holding him back. “I trusted him,” said Bauman finally. There was another, shorter, pause, tentative and full of meaning. “Do you?” Burdick immediately understood that something had happened, and that it was not what had taken place in that hotel room; it was something that had happened after that.
