Dark Horse

by Doug Richardson

  “Merle, Pearl. In the house! Let’s go,” he ordered as he found the front door handle and pushed inside. The retrievers scurried past him, certain breakfast was next on the agenda. Instead, their master locked the front door and cut a quick path into the study. He speed-dialed Fitz, who answered before the phone returned a ring signal.

  “Who is it?” asked Fitz. He was up. He was alert. And instantly suspicious.

  “Your silver bullet backfired, Fitz.”

  “Mitch?”

  “Wanna tell me what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know anything yet. I’m on the other line.”

  “It’s not even six in the Goddamn morning. You wanna tell me who you’re on the phone with?”

  “I got Hollice Waters at his house.”

  “Fitz. The guy beat her up and practically raped her. It was a cold deal. Are you telling me they got to her?”

  “I don’t know anything yet. But I got a hunch we were set up from the start. I’ll call when I know more.” Fitz hung up and left his candidate hanging. When Mitch finally hung up, he dropped back into the armchair in stunned silence. This was all so new to him. All these horrid feelings. Confusion. Frustration. Guilt. He’d never been there before. Everything for him had an answer. Action, reaction, action. It was physics. The way of his universe. But at that very moment, he was without a single, solitary move.

  “Do you know there’s a TV truck out in front of our house?”

  He swung his chair around to find Connie in a bathrobe, standing at the threshold. He lied. “No. I didn’t know.” It was a dumb lie. But all he could muster at the moment.

  “It’s six in the morning. Who were you on the phone to?”

  “Fitz. There’s a problem.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  “We don’t know yet.” The dogs were suddenly at his feet, licking the sweat from his legs. They were hungry. “Sorry, guys. Somebody forgot to feed you.” He was up on his feet, sliding past Connie and heading for the kitchen.

  Two cups of food for Merle plus a hard-boiled egg for his coat. That was his morning meal. On the other hand, Pearl had a weight problem despite her morning exercise, so she was relegated to a special diet of low-cal kibble and vitamin supplement. Mitch felt sorry for her every time he served up breakfast. Little Pearl would plow through her meal, then hover near Merle’s bowl in hopes that his good nature would spill a morsel, or that distraction would get the better of him and he’d leave his bowl altogether unprotected.

  Mitch was adding cans of water to a pitcher of frozen grapefruit juice concentrate when Connie appeared once again. This time she had the morning paper in hand. What possessed her to even look at it was beyond him.

  “Is this true?” she asked.

  He didn’t look up from what he was doing. “Is what true?”

  “Don’t play dumb. You know what I’m talking about. That’s why you were on the phone to Fitz! That’s why there’s TV people in our driveway!”

  “The fact is, I don’t know if it’s true.”

  She started reading, “’…Dutton volunteer coordinator, Murray Levy, arranged for the payment of two thousand dollars cash and transportation to New York City in exchange for filing battery and rape charges…’ ”

  “That’s what it says.”

  “Is it true, Mitchell?”

  “That she was paid? Yes. In exchange for filing the complaint? It seems that part’s up for grabs.”

  “Murray paid her off?”

  “McCann beat the shit out of her and raped her. She was afraid of her father and wanted out of Texas. A friend of the campaign helped…”

  “A friend?”

  “What? For seven months you want to know zip about the campaign,” he snapped, “and now you want details.”

  “So this means you won’t tell me. I’m too late to your party?”

  “’A friend of the campaign’ is another term they use for an NDX.”

  “What’s an NDX?”

  “Independent expenditures. Money that doesn’t come directly out of the treasure chest. The same way a university alumni association breaks the NCAA rules in its support of a sports program.”

  “So this was illegal?”

  “Not exactly. There’re a lot of gray areas in the campaign finance game.” He looked winded, as if the air had been sucked from his lungs. He leaned against the kitchen counter and finished, “As for this girl, she told Murray she’d been raped and beaten by McCann.”

  “And he told you.”

  “And Fitz and Rene. But that was before she apparently changed her story.”

  “But the payoff. This NDX. You approved it.”

  “It wasn’t a payoff!”

  “It says here that you paid her to tell lies about Shakespeare McCann. That nice funny man—”

  “Whoa! There’s nothing nice about Shakespeare McCann.”

  “You forget, Mitch. I met him. I had dinner with him. I think I could tell if he was a rapist.”

  “Take my word for it. He beat that little girl,” warned Mitch. “Now, what happened between the time she told us the story and this morning’s paper is anybody’s guess.”

  Connie crossed to the breakfast table and put down the paper. “You know something? I don’t think he’s violent at all. I think you’re afraid of him. I think you like being the front-runner and want to keep it that way.”

  He burned. It was bad enough that she didn’t believe him. She herself had seen him bloodied and bruised from one of Shakespeare’s surprise attacks. Even though he’d lied to her about what had happened, couldn’t she hear the truth in his voice now?

  “You think that’s all I care about?” he asked. “Being the front-runner?”

  “Winning, Mitch. That’s what you care about.”

  “Where’d this come from?”

  “Just because I haven’t said it before, that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

  “Me and winning?”

  “I told you I didn’t want to go to Washington. That I didn’t want to leave. But you did it anyway.”

  And she was right.

  “Listen, Connie. I don’t need this kind of crap from you right now,” he cautioned. “If you can’t be supportive, don’t talk to me.”

  “In other words, if I don’t like what I see, I can just stuff it? Is that it?”

  “It’s complicated.” Mitch crossed to the table to stir his grapefruit juice.

  “Fine then. But gimme the last word, okay?”

  “You got it, babe.” His tone was meant to cut her off, but it had no success. She just took a brave step forward.

  “I may not like the campaign,” she started, “and I may not want to go with you to Washington if you’re elected. But at least I believed in you. That you stood for something.”

  “And now you don’t? Is that it? After one newspaper article?” He picked up the paper and stuck it in her face. “You don’t even read the paper!”

  “You want to win, Mitch. That’s all you care about. No matter who you have to screw.”

  “As in Shakespeare McCann? Is that what you’re saying?” he pushed. “Well, fine. You vote for him. Wear his fuckin’ bumper sticker on your ass, for all I care.” With that, he threw the newspaper. It fluttered in sections around the kitchen.

  “I hate you!” Connie burst into tears and hurried out the door. As he stood there, flushed from anger and betrayal, he could hear her footsteps pounding as she returned to the bedroom upstairs and slammed the door so hard it shook the house.

  SEVEN

  GINA HAD been sleeping only three hours when the phone rang. “It’s me.” Code for Connie. There were tears in her girlfriend’s voice. “Did I wake you?”

  “Of course you did,” she said, fumbling with the cordless phone and reaching through the darkness for a cigarette. All the leaded curtains were drawn in a day-for-night effect “I guess I had another night with stupid.”

  More girl-code from the college days. Another night with stup
id. It was all about excessive drinking and bringing home the fabled faceless stranger. A time when unprotected sex meant a girl could get pregnant, VD, or both. And that was it

  “I’m afraid Mitch has turned into a bastard,” said Connie.

  “What kind of bastard? Not the kind I described?”

  “Did you read the paper?”

  “Puh-lease. I just woke up. Is it about politics?”

  “He cares more about it than me.”

  “Well, girl. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  “He paid this young girl to lie about the other candidate,” proclaimed Connie, as if the more she said it, the more she would believe it.

  “Shakespeare McCann? Didn’t you—”

  “Have dinner with him? Yes. And it was nice. I thought he was kinda sweet.”

  “Wake up, Connie. That’s politics. There are no nice guys.”

  “I know that. But Mitch said he was going to be different.”

  “Is he there?”

  “He just left. There were TV trucks in my driveway, G!”

  “Are they gone?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then I’m on my way over.”

  “Gina!”

  “I’m here.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know him anymore.”

  The conversation soon ended. When Gina hung up her cordless phone, the Radio Shack utility scanner signaled the call was over. The placid investigator, seated on the driver’s side of a car parked in the back alley of the cliffside estate, stopped the tape player, marked the audio-stamp onto his time log, then waited for Gina to appear in her convertible Mercedes. The investigator’s orders were to follow her, monitor and record all her cell and cordless telephone calls, and report back twice a day. At noon and midnight. It was 7:42 A.M.

  Once again the Dutton campaign team was assembled for damage control. By nine that morning, they’d met at Mitchell’s law office in an effort to avoid the phalanx of media camped outside the campaign HQ. Both Rene and Murray were instructed by Fitz to take the service elevator to the fourth floor and enter through an unmarked door that led through a small kitchenette at the back of the attorneys’ suite. When all were present, Mitch appeared, crossed silently to his desk, and sat in the two-thousand-dollar leather chair that was a gift, some time back, from an appreciative client.

  “By all rights, the lot of you should be fired,” he began.

  “Mitch. I’d just like to—”

  “Shut up, Murray. You’re on a short rope with me. This started with you and maybe that’s where it ends.”

  Rene sat coolly on the green leather sofa. Legs crossed. Immobile. The chips would fall where the chips would fall. She deserved what she got. No better, no worse. And she wouldn’t complain. Meanwhile, Fitz stood up to speak. “You’re right. By all accounts, we should be fired. We set it up. We gave bad advice and, overall, fucked up. Most of all, me. I’ll take the rap if that’s what you want”

  “I don’t know what I want. Not yet. I’ve let you carry the Goddamn ball so much lately, I wouldn’t know which way the wind was blowing with a wet hard-on stuck in the breeze.”

  “Well, that’s graphic,” teased Rene. Mitch wasn’t usually so coarse.

  As for the reference, it was what Mitch’s old Uncle J would say to confused first mates. If he hadn’t been so mad, he would’ve apologized for the off-color remark. Rene’s silent grin said it all, though. It turned her on.

  “I advised poorly,” Fitz continued. “I can only promise not to make such a mistake in the future. That’s the best I can manage at this point.”

  “At this point, I’ve got only one question,” asked Mitch. “Did he rape the girl or not?”

  “My guess is no,” said Fitz. “I got Stu Jackson all over this and I expect answers by the afternoon. It looks like a complete setup. He tied on the bait, let out some line, and we took it hook, line, and sinker.”

  “It’s Jamal La Croix all over again.”

  “Only we struck first. Same game. Different opening move.”

  “Silver bullet,” groaned Mitch. “Forty-four. Point blank.”

  “Guilty as charged. Am I fired?”

  “Not yet. First I want a damage assessment”

  That was Rene’s cue. She recrossed her legs, looked to her notes. “My best guess is a twenty-point swing at best. We lose ten. Shakespeare gains ten with your negative hiking into the mid-thirties. That will leave us with just under a nineteen-point margin. His forty-one to our fifty-nine.”

  “You’re still the front-runner,” added Fitz.

  “But we just let him into the race. That’s what you’re saying?” finished Mitch.

  “Pretty much. Yeah,” said Rene. “He’ll play the martyr all the way to November.”

  “And what about the girl? What side of the fence does she land on?”

  Fitz laughed. “Try the California side. When I talked to Hollice Waters this morning, he told me he did his whole interview with the girl in the girl’s parents’ kitchen. But when he called this morning to get a reaction from the family, figuring to run a follow-up in tomorrow’s Mirror, her mother said her daughter’s run off and called her from the airport. Seems she caught the red-eye out of town.”

  “New York?” asked Mitch.

  “Hollywood.”

  “Can you believe it?” offered Murray nervously.

  Mitch didn’t answer.

  “The sum and total is that by day’s end she’ll be yesterday’s news. I figure McCann’s story won’t stand the scrutiny of a serious investigation,” capped Fitz. “It was their dough that paid for the first-class ticket, no doubt.”

  Rene added, “McCann took his shot and scored big. But not big enough by my account I’ll remind you, Mitch, that South Texas has seen its share of dirty campaigns. And when the dust settles, it’s still going to be substance over style. I really believe that.”

  “We learned our lesson. No more funny stuff,” said Fitz. “We stick to the issues.”

  “That your way of asking if you still have a job?” said Mitch.

  “I guess so.”

  “I’ll tell you when I get back from D.C.”

  Fitz slapped his hands together. “The Congressional Candidates’ Workshop. Good deal! I was hoping you’d give that a go. There’s about fifty good Democrats there who want to throw some money at you.”

  “It’s a good time to go,” said Mitch, his voice dropping an octave as his fight with Connie crept back into his consciousness. But that was none of their damn business. “Rene. Before I go, I’m going to want to make a statement.”

  “Where and when?”

  “In time for this evening’s Breeze.”

  “I’ll get on it.”

  “And pack a bag.”

  Rene was struck. Did she hear right? “What was that, Mitch?”

  “Pack a bag. You’re coming with me,” he said, turning back to face the three of them. The implication of his demand was unmistakable and brave, considering none of them, including Rene, had heard him make such a remark before.

  “Fitz. Murray. You’ll excuse us for a moment.”

  “C’mon, Murray. We got ourselves a day’s worth of damage control to contend with.” Fitz ushered Murray from the office and shut the door as he left.

  Now that Mitch and Rene were alone, she waited a moment before speaking up. “You want to tell me what that was about?”

  “I want you to come. Simple as that.”

  “Simple as that.”

  “It’s business. You know the territory. I’m gonna need you.” He sounded cold. Zero warmth. He’d caught her totally off guard.

  “Okay,” she said. If there was subtext to his invitation, she’d have to wait. “How many days?”

  “Three, including travel.”

  Two nights, she thought. She looked for something in his eyes to tell her which way the wind was blowing.

  “I think we should prepare that statement,” he said.

 
“Okay, then. But the media’s going to want more than that. They’re going to want to ask questions.”

  “Good. I want to answer the questions. Bring ‘em on.”

  “I’ll make the calls.”

  “Everyone but Hollice Waters. You leave him to me.”

  “Here’s what I know. Jennifer O’Detts was assaulted. She was the one who pointed the finger at Shakespeare McCann, and it was through the encouragement of members of my campaign staff that she came forward and filed the rape and battery complaints.”

  Damage control.

  Mitch maintained an even strain during the course of that very long day. Over the telephone, then later on camera, he repeated himself, all variations on the same theme, and most emphatically he pushed the point with Hollice Waters.

  “Were we set up? I don’t know. Is the girl telling the truth? Well, it’s true that we arranged the money for a bus ticket to New York. But that was at her request. It was McCann who upped the ante and bought her a first-class seat to Los Angeles. You can figure that one out by yourself.”

  “Be straight with me, Mitch. Was this whole thing your idea or not?” asked Hollice from his office at the Daily Mirror. Feet up on his desk, phone at his ear, pencils in the ceiling, and puffing on that second stolen Havana cigar.

  “What can I say? This is my first race and I’m supposed to be in charge of a small army of staff and volunteers. That and keep my head above water and the issues in front of me.”

  “What you’re saying is that shit happens.”

  “Off the record?” asked Mitch. “Yeah. But it’s not that I can’t deal with the shit. It’s only when you and every other son of a journalist whips it up into a shit storm that it makes me wonder if it’s all worth it.”

  “Is it?” asked Hollice.

  “Is it worth it?”

  “Yeah.”

  Mitch thought about his answer. His voice remained cautiously distant. “Ask me in November.”

  “I will.”

  “Gotta go, Hollice. Nice talkin’ to ya.”

  Mitch returned to Flower Hill shortly before six with barely fifteen minutes to pack and start for the airport. All day he hadn’t spoken to Connie. He wasn’t in the mood for confrontation, but he most certainly could’ve done with a bit of consoling. But she wasn’t home. Had been gone all day. He guessed she was probably with Gina at some shorefront tourist bar drinking double margaritas and trashing him. Well, let ‘em, he thought.