Jeannie Wakefield’s first attempt to hold her father to account came out on the anniversary of the murder, the 4th of June 1972. It appeared in the slim, doomed ‘International’ section of one of Boston’s underground papers, under the headline ‘Who Killed Dutch Harding?’
It was, she later conceded, more about herself than anyone else, and it was studded with the innocent indiscretions that all young journalists must make until they’ve lost a few friends. She was on the Crimson by then, though only in the lowliest capacity. Before taking the story to the underground paper she had been foolish enough to try it out on the great gods then in charge of the place. They had rejected it out of hand.
Her biggest mistake was to say what she thought of people. So her father was a ‘failed spy’ and Hector was a ‘recovering and sermonising alcoholic’. Her mother was a ‘deeply mendacious hysteric in deeper denial’ and Sinan’s mother was a ‘once celebrated, now forgotten chanteuse’, while Chloe’s mother ‘liked to think of herself as a bohemian but scratch the surface and what you found was a 50s housewife.’
Miss Broome (who had burst into tears of gratitude when Jeannie had tracked her down to a school in Maine) did not fare much better. She was, Jeannie wrote, a ‘would-be radical in deep denial about her lover’s subversive activities’. The murder victim’s parents, whom she’d doorstepped in Burlington, Vermont, were ‘rockjaw WASPS whose faces had frozen while they were raking leaves.’ Their sin was to say they had no son called Dutch Harding. Their denial fuelled her fire, as did the lesser obstructions thrown in her way by so many friends.
Her greatest sin was to say what she said about Chloe.
Chloe spent most of December in Holyoke Centre, and in March she once again slit her wrists. But somehow Jeannie remained convinced that she was as hell-bent on this investigation as she was. This despite the fact that Chloe tried, on several occasions, to talk Jeannie out of it.
In the article Jeannie said that she and Chloe had fallen out when she had told Chloe about meeting up with No Name. Or rather: ‘my father’s former errand boy, a veteran of the Peace Corps whose modest success as a stringer had, by his own admission, deeply compromised his honour.’
She implied that she’d set up this meeting herself. In fact, she was sitting in the Café Pamplona late one night in March when he just walked through the door. She didn’t recognise him right away – not only did he have long hair now, he also had a beard. She wasn’t even considering an article at that point. She was just trying to get to the truth. The idea of setting it down on paper was born during this conversation she had with No Name.
He told her he’d seen ‘Billie’ Broome a week or so earlier. ‘She said you were trying to get to the bottom of this murder, and perhaps trying a little too hard.’ Accustomed as she was by then to people trying to talk her out of it, she said, ‘Well, why shouldn’t I?’
His face darkened. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I think you should know this. I’ve been doing some digging myself.’
‘And?’
‘Let me put it this way. The story doesn’t hold together.’ He paused. ‘One thing is certain. Dutch Harding was what I said he was. Possibly a good deal worse. It’s pretty clear that he was not just working for your father. Does that surprise you?’
She nodded, but the cool thing sweeping through her at that moment was relief. The worse Dutch Harding turned out to be, the less she had to blame herself for fingering him. So who else was he working for?
He shook his head. ‘Can’t say. I mean that literally. I thought I was getting somewhere, but then the well dried up. You might have better luck, though. Have you managed to track down Sinan? No? How about your father, then? What’s his line? Okay,’ he’d said, upon hearing that Jeannie and her father were not speaking. ‘That I do understand. I don’t know if I’d be either if I were you. But if you ever change your mind…’
He mentioned a name – an old classmate from college who just so happened to have gone to the same prep school Dutch had attended – ‘a guy with the same politics we have’ who now worked in the underground press. When he’d heard about the murder, he’d said he’d be interesting in running a piece on it – but only if Jordan could come up with corroborating evidence about the CIA tie-in. ‘So really I’ve come to find out what you’ve been able to find out.’
Jeannie didn’t have anything of value to tell him, and she left the Café Pamplona that night feeling very young and very useless. So she was all the more surprised at Chloe’s reaction when she told her who had turned up at the Pamplona.
She became very agitated. She told Jeannie she was a fool. ‘You have to forget Dutch Harding! Forget he ever existed.’ Jeannie just couldn’t understand why she’d think that. It was rewriting history. It was wrong! So they stopped speaking. Soon there was no one to temper her obsession.
She wrote the article in May, in the white heat that should have gone into her exams. She took it to the Crimson the day after she finished, and she did not take her rejection well. It was two or three days later that she got a call from a Greg Dickson. His name sounded familiar but it was only after she put the phone down that she remembered he was the old classmate of No Name’s who now worked at the underground paper. He told Jeannie that he had ‘dropped by the Crimson the other day’ and that her ‘piece’ had fallen into his hands. Self-centred eighteen-year-old that she was, she did not think to question this story. ‘We have a lot of cleaning up to do,’ he said. ‘Your language is sophomoric, but the story speaks for itself. It touches on important themes. I’ll see what we can do.’
The final, heavily edited, version of ‘Who Killed Dutch Harding?’ began with an account of the day she’d met Sinan and went on to tell the rest of the story in the order she had discovered it. It did not mention her father by name, though any fool would have guessed they shared a surname. Although she ended with a list of unanswered questions, she made her own thinking clear. Whoever had committed this murder, it had been her father who had set it into motion.
What was her part in it? she asked in the closing paragraph. Would Dutch be alive today if she had not barged into that apartment? Was it her fault that Suna had jumped out of that window? Had she ruined Sinan’s life, too, and Haluk’s, assuming, of course, that they were even alive? Bearing in mind who she was and what she stood for, was it not a travesty for her to plead innocence?
‘WHEN INNOCENCE IS A CRIME.’ That was the headline. The piece caused a small sensation. It even got picked up as a news item in the Boston Globe: ‘Radcliffe Freshman Points the Finger at CIA Dad.’
That same morning, Greg Dickson phoned to tell Jeannie that he’d just had a call from an attorney representing ‘the family of Wilhelmina Broome.’ He wasn’t too concerned, though. It would be bad if they sued, he said, but it was all in a day’s work for the free press. The next day, he sounded more strained. He’d now heard from attorneys representing ‘the family of Amy Cabot’. The third day, he was livid. And paranoid. ‘Does the name Stephen Svabo mean anything to do?’ he asked. He had not given her two seconds to consider his question when he yelled, ‘Who exactly are you working for, you fucking bitch?’
When Jeannie’s phone rang an hour later, it was the paper’s attorney. There were now five people threatening to sue, ‘and since your interests and those of my client diverge, I would strongly advise that you retain your own counsel.’
The next time the phone rang that morning it was Jeannie’s father. ‘I understand you need some help.’