The screen cut to Kay in a video clip from when she was in her late thirties. “I genuinely like people,” she said in her soft, familiar drawl. “Every soul who appears in front of me deserves my love and attention. But I know that to have real impact while I’m alive and kicking, I have to curate the souls I spend time with. Hence the parties. They’re good for me.”
The screen cut to a female columnist from the Washington Post. “Kay Willingham honestly never met a stranger,” she said. “She was giving and glamorous and passionate, and she was not afraid to show it — especially, unfortunately, when she had a few drinks in her.”
The footage cut again to Kay, older now, dressed for a ball and not quite three sheets to the wind as she smirked into the cameras, winked, and said, “This is what three political fund-raisers a night will do to a ’Bama gal, boys. Please be gentle with me. The headache I’m facing in the morning will be punishment enough.”
The screen cut back to Cooper in standup in front of the Georgetown mansion. “Long before she married J. Walter Willingham, a rising political star in her home state, Kay lived here in the nation’s capital and entertained her way to power. Her Georgetown parties were private, the conversations completely off the record. The gatherings were legendary, partly because they were safe places where people from all walks of life with radically opposing views could come together and talk frankly about the pressing issues of the day — if they could get an invitation.”
The screen jumped back to the Washington Post columnist, who was smiling. “Kay understood exclusivity and kept those parties small, forty guests tops. So people who wanted power as well as people who didn’t want to lose their power asked to come, but she’d turn them down if the space was full or if it wasn’t the right mix.”
With more video and commentary, the piece then dug into Kay’s marriage to Willingham. They were married a few months before he ran for the governorship of Alabama. Unconventional as always, Kay had refused to leave DC and move back home, and she split her time between Alabama and Washington while her husband led the state and then ran successfully for U.S. Senate.
The feed cut to Willingham with Kay six or seven years ago, sitting for a formal interview. He was smiling as he said, “Our marriage is a little unconventional, at times rocky. But it’s always worked for us.”
Kay, I noticed with twenty-twenty hindsight, seemed cool as she agreed with her husband. Not surprisingly, the story then veered ahead a few years to the ugly end of her marriage, when her drinking surged and she made wild, unsubstantiated accusations about her husband, now a vice-presidential candidate, publicly filing for divorce four and a half days before the general election.
“Willingham survived, and he and the president won the election,” Cooper said, returning to the screen. “Voters seemed to feel sympathy for him. In exit polls many of them said that they’d personally seen what drugs and alcohol had done to their own families and dismissed the things Kay had said to reporters in a drunken state.”
Cooper went on to note that shortly after the election, Kay’s mother had become terminally ill. Kay went back to Alabama and disappeared from the Washington, DC, scene. When she returned, stone-cold sober, she quietly began trying to pick up her life as a single woman.
But within a year, she was testing the social waters, appearing at a few events and parties, though still solo and sober. At one gala, she met Randall Christopher, a telegenic married African-American educator who ran an innovative school in DC and was interested in a political career.
“They evidently became lovers at some point,” Cooper said, again in standup. “They died together earlier today, shot at close range.
“So far Vice President Willingham has not spoken publicly about his ex-wife’s murder. His office did release a statement to us saying he was, quote, ‘shocked and beyond saddened by Kay’s death. My ex-wife had fought long and hard to conquer her demons and we’d made our peace with each other. She deserved a much longer life. The world would have been better for it.’ ”
CHAPTER 13
THE SEGMENT ENDED. NANA MAMA shut the TV off, but I kept staring at the screen, seeing images of Kay Willingham barefoot, laughing, and twirling away from me.
In addition to being a shrewd and skilled detective in her own right, Bree has always had an uncanny ability to read me, to sense things I might not even be consciously thinking about.
My wife tugged on my arm. “What’s going on? You couldn’t take your eyes off that story about Kay Willingham.”
“Well, I am working the case and there were things I’d never heard before.”
Bree wasn’t having it. “There’s more to it, Alex.”
I sighed, glanced at my grandmother. “There is. Clive Sparkman.”
Bree rolled her eyes. “What crackpot conspiracy theory is he pushing now?”
“He’s threatening to publish a story saying that Kay Willingham and I had an affair a long time ago.”
Bree stared at me, then burst out in nervous laughter. “You’re kidding.”
“Wish I was.”
“There’s nothing to it,” she said.
“I know.”
Nana Mama put her hands on her hips and sputtered, “This is what’s wrong these days. No one knows what’s true or not. Anything that gets thrown up there on the internet, people take as fact and gospel truth. No wonder the country’s in the state it’s in. Everyone’s hating on everyone, and nothing gets done because no one can agree on basic reality, even if you put the evidence right in front of their noses.”
Bree got angry then. “What can we do about it?”
“Until Sparkman publishes, nothing,” I said. “But I told him I had Craig Halligan on retainer if he chooses to post a libelous story.”
“Do you?”
“I met him last year and gave him a dollar in case I ever needed his services.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh.”
She gave me a hug. “You never cease to amaze me, Alex Cross.”
“Get a room, you two,” Nana Mama said. “But before you do, I need someone to set the table.”
As we did, I told Bree what Barbara Taylor had said about Randall Christopher’s wife suspecting he was having an affair.
“She mention evidence?”
“Just that they hadn’t made love in months.”
My grandmother had the oven open and was peering inside at the roast chicken. “That’s the first real sign of relationship disintegration,” she said. “If a man isn’t looking to his wife in the bedroom, he’s looking in some other bedroom.”
Both Bree and I stopped setting the table to gape at Nana Mama. We were still staring when she set the chicken on the stove and turned to us.
“What are you two looking at?” she asked.
I smiled. “Nothing, Nana. It’s just not often I hear someone in her nineties talking about that kind of thing.”
She shot me a withering look. “Shows how much you know. It’s all most eighty- and ninety-year-olds talk about because they spend so much time watching daytime television and that’s all that’s talked about on daytime TV.”