In their grief, Trapp and Nina turned to each other.
"They each loved Annabel," said Lucy, "and for a while, they confused that with thinking they loved one another."
We were in the car, driving back to the hotel.
"I was the best man at their wedding," said Arnold, "but I knew the marriage wouldn't last. Everyone put on happy faces, but it was the saddest wedding I'd ever witnessed."
They were divorced within the year. Trapp quit playing bridge and started the Yarborough Investment Group.
"It was just another game to him," said Arnold. "Except, instead of masterpoints, now he was accumulating money. You want to know what he once told me? He said he preferred masterpoints to money because masterpoints were worthless."
Twenty years later, Gloria happened to run into him at a shoe repair shop.
"I needed a strap fixed on my purse. Trapp was worth millions, but he still got his shoes resoled."
She asked him if he would like to play bridge sometime. She mentioned that there was a sectional the following weekend, and she was looking for a partner.
"His face turned white," Gloria told us. "He started trembling."
He told her no, he couldn't, then hurried out of the shop.
"But then at three o'clock in the morning my telephone rang," Gloria said. "It was Trapp. All he said was ‘I might be a little rusty.' We played a week later and had a seventy percent game."
Richard Nixon was Eisenhower's vice president. In 1960 he ran for president and lost to John F. Kennedy, and according to Arnold, most people thought that would be the last they'd ever hear of Richard M. Nixon. By 1967, Henry King, who had been in the Senate for more than a decade, was expected to be the next Republican presidential candidate.
But Nixon wasn't finished.
"I'd always hated Nixon," said Arnold. "But one thing I've got to give him credit for: he was good at destroying his enemies. And to him, Henry King was the enemy."
Nixon tried to dig up dirt on Henry King and came across all the court documents Trapp and Nina had filed. That was more than just dirt. He hit a gold mine. He initiated a well-publicized investigation into the care and treatment of the mentally ill, and into the suicide of Annabel King, his "dear friend's wife."
Rolling Brook Sanitarium was shut down, and two of the doctors went to prison.
"What about Henry King?" I asked.
"He and Nixon made some kind of secret deal," said Arnold.
Arnold didn't know what the deal was, but Henry King abruptly resigned his Senate seat and lived the rest of his life in relative seclusion. Nixon was elected president in 1968.
When Sophie King turned eighteen she changed her last name to Finnick (Annabel's maiden name) and never spoke to her father again. She never allowed him to see Toni, his only granddaughter.