Dark Horse

by Doug Richardson

  “What about my wife?”

  “She said Connie was upstairs sleeping. I told her the phones were out and you were trying to call. That’s when she said it.”

  “Said what?”

  “I mean, I’m only paraphrasing. But she said she wouldn’t blame Connie if she’d cut the phone wires—knowing that you’d be calling.”

  “Thanks, Murray. Looks like I worried for no reason.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Keep this to yourself. Thanks again.” Mitch hung up the phone, briefly reevaluating his panic. Connie was home, sleeping off one of her benders with the evil Gina Sweet.

  I shoulda known.

  Gina hit the road right after her short and testy talk with Murray. She’d woken at the pounding on the door, searched madly for her panties, only to find them torn and useless, answered the door, then lied about seeing Connie upstairs and sleeping. It was a reasonable assumption. Where the hell else would she be at that unholy time of day?

  Meanwhile, the continued brownnosing from Fitz materialized in the form of a helicopter ride, returning Mitch and Rene to the Island by early afternoon. When Mitch rolled up his Flower Hill drive, the Southwestern Bell Telephone truck was already parked out front.

  Having rehearsed the apology a hundred times on the return flight, he gathered himself in the car. He planned to be contrite. He planned to reach deep. And most of all, he planned to resolve the matter that day so he might get on with his work.

  So much for planning.

  He found Connie in the kitchen, cleaning up the mess from the night before. Bottles in the garbage. Twice she’d vacuumed the living room rug for leftover weed and seeds. Anything else found amongst the cushions and pillows would go down the garbage disposal. She’d made a new resolution. A candidate’s home should be clean. Who knew who might be snooping in the garbage?

  “You’re back so soon. You miss me or something?” she joked, kissing him briefly on the lips before moving quickly past him to the pantry. She wanted to appear as if she were in cleaning mode. Dusting. Dumping. Any excuse to turn her back to him. Because if he caught her eyes, he’d surely see the damage from the night before. He’d see Shakespeare.

  “I did. I missed you,” he said, looking for his moment. But she beat him to it.

  “I’m sorry about yesterday. I’ve done a lot of thinking. I decided I wasn’t fair to you. You’re working hard to try and accomplish something. And I shouldn’t question how you do it.” Mitch moved to the pantry, only to have her duck under his arm and cross to the fridge. Connie was not going let him catch even a glimpse of the agony that she was shoving deeper and deeper with every willful breath.

  He followed, trying to get in a word. “I’m the one who should be sorry.”

  “Please, Mitchell. This is my apology.” She continued, “I want you to win. I want you to do what you have to do. I want you to kick that little bastard’s butt all the way back to wherever he came from.”

  “Whoa. Wait a minute. Whatever happened to ‘that charming man’?”

  “I was mad at you. I wanted to hurt you. And it worked.” She folded herself into his arms, so close he wouldn’t be able to see the hurt.

  But could he feel it?

  “You were mad at me because I lied to you. Am I right?” Mitch was still looking for a way in so he could apologize.

  “No. I was mad at you because you were going to win.” She could feel the wreckage boiling up from inside her. She needed to hang on. Keep the tremor out of her voice.

  Calm, Connie. Calm!

  “I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry I left wimout—”

  “Please, Mitch! There’s no need. I’m ashamed of myself and I’ve been no help to you. You’re in a tough fight. I know that now.”

  He knew that Connie always made things far too easy for him, putting his needs before hers. He’d convinced himself it was her way of loving him. “Okay. I’ll stop with the apology on one condition.”

  “Okay.”

  “Why the sudden change in attitude?”

  “Like I said, your leaving gave me time to think.” Then she came as close to the truth as she could without totally breaking down. “He’s a bad man, isn’t he?”

  “That he is.”

  The voice inside her screamed, Yes, he is an evil, horrible man! He raped me just so I would tell you! Well, fuck him! I won’t give the little bastard the satisfaction!

  But Connie covered before breaking down. “I’m late, sweetie. Got my annual with Dr. Simmonds. And it’s always better to shower before he gets me in the stirrups, if you know what I mean.” It was another lie. She had already showered, scrubbing herself raw from head to toe. But the shower was the only place quiet enough for her to get away from Mitch and cry. After that, she would go see Dr. Simmonds and tell him the truth. She could trust the old gynecologist with just about any dirty secret. He was better than any shrink, priest, or lawyer.

  As she tried to escape upstairs, he stopped her with one more question. “What happened to the phone?”

  “Windy last night. I think a branch fell and pulled out the line. Should be fixed just about now.” She gave him another kiss before exiting. “I know you tried to call. But it was better that we missed. I do my best thinking when this house is quiet.”

  “I love you, Connie,” he found himself calling after her. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do,” she singsonged back, out of the kitchen and up the stairs. Once in the privacy of the master bath, she turned on the shower. What followed were shakes and a violent series of abdominal convulsions. After which she curled up on the cool tile next to the toilet and let her pain loosen a pitiful wail into a bundled towel held tightly to her face. Her muffled cries never made it past the bathroom door. For some twenty minutes she didn’t move, blowing off what emotion she could and sucking back the residual. Makeup and Visine would mask the rest.

  And Mitch will never know.

  Downstairs, the dogs were scratching at the back door. Mitch loosened his tie and let them in. As he opened the door they jumped all over him, doused him with wet, hairy kisses.

  “All done,” said the young telephone repairman. “Just need to check out the handset inside here.”

  Mitch let the fellow pass by. “You think maybe I oughta get those trees trimmed?”

  “Hell no. The trees are fine. Looks like somebody just reached up and gave it a good yank. But I already said that to Mrs. Dutton.”

  Momentarily dumbstruck, he tried to recall Connie’s explanation about the tree branch. Did he hear right? “Cut? Excuse me, you said somebody pulled this down?”

  “What I said.” The repairman picked up the kitchen line, got a dial tone, and nodded. “Nice neighborhood up here. Don’t see much of that kinda stuff unless somebody was trying to disable the alarm. Should get yourself some steel conduit and run that phone line underground. Could do it for you this weekend if you like.”

  “Yeah. Sure. You got a card?”

  “I’ll just call you. Telephone company, ya know? We got yer number,” said the repairman with a wink. “I must say, Mr. Dutton. I still ain’t figured out who to vote for yet.”

  Mitch shook the repairman’s outstretched hand and plastered on his candidate’s smile. “Shaking me down for a vote in exchange for fixing my phone line?”

  “Well, I ain’t fixed that other guy’s phone line. I figure it this way. You want the job. I want the job. That’s politics, ain’t it? A little give and take?”

  “Something like that. I’ll call…Wait. You’ll call. Just let my wife know you’re coming round.”

  Cut phone line? And Connie’s lie. What really happened last night?

  The repairman gone, Mitch looked to the dogs, circling and sniffing the new smells on his trouser legs. They would surely have been in the house last night. They knew the truth and remembered how it all smelled. If only they could tell him about the funny weed brought in by the night visitor. The kind man who smelled of sweat a
nd cologne, who fed them raw meat and petted them kindly with his odd-feeling rubber gloves.

  The dogs remembered Murray at the door and the foul, angry breath of Gina Sweet. Later, relegated to the backyard, they remembered dancing around the flames as Connie soaked the bedroom sheets in kerosene and lit a match to them. The burning had filled the air with smoke and ash. What smells they were. Right for dogs. But awful for Connie, whose salty tears were so tasty to the animals. Both Merle and Pearl got their last licks in just before the phone man arrived.

  If only they could talk.

  TEN

  FOR a month that began with eleven straight days of rain, August looked as if it was going to end up a scorcher like July. As a promotion, FM radio station Hot Hits 98 was cooking eggs on a specially poured concrete sidewalk, serving them up any way you liked ‘em. Scrambled, over easy, and with grits. Across the street, the free ice cream served daily at the Shakespeare McCann headquarters was an ever-popular Cathedral treat. As its own sort of promotion, it was cheap. In addition to those “McCann of the People” napkins, they’d added red-white-and-blue-wrapped waffle cones. The flavor was always vanilla, imported at a bargain from Costa Rica.

  Shakespeare was spending less than a nickel a scoop to buy those smiles out on the sunbaked sidewalk. A nickel a scoop that might someday return $5, $10, or $50 donations to his campaign.

  But the smiles were few and far between inside McCann headquarters. On top of the daily tirades Shakespeare was accustomed to performing in front of the staff, the shit had been flowing downhill for the past week. From Shakespeare to Marshall Lambeer, then with a Reagan-like trickle effect, the building began to reek. It began with the news that the Democratic National Committee was committing a half million dollars to the Dutton camp, with half the cash targeting the Republican candidate with a “Who’s Shakespeare?” media campaign scheduled to hit by the last week of August.

  Then there was the bad news of the day. A camera crew from Channel 13 had appeared outside the ice cream stand, asking the happy recipients just how they felt about eating ice cream from Central America wrapped in red, white, and blue waffle cones. The Shakespeare campaign had been busted for going cheap on the ice cream and not buying American. The news piece would hit by five. More camera crews from other stations were expected.

  In one of his hourly closed-door sessions with Shakespeare, Marshall wanted to pull the ice cream. Have the candidate publicly put the blame on some faceless campaign staffer and, within twenty-four hours, replace the cold stuff with some low-budget American brand. Shakespeare was more interested in the leak. “We wanna know who leaked it! And we want his head on my desk by six!”

  “It coulda been anyone. It might not have even been in-house. The FEC requires us to report all expenditures. All it would take is an opp-research team and a little legwork—”

  “Dutton? You saying the opposition did this?”

  “I’m saying it doesn’t matter. We fix it and move on. That’s politics.” Marshall knew he was dealing with a neophyte, who at one moment seemed to know close to nothing about politics, then at other times, saw the campaign as if it were through a crystal ball. A Machiavellian kind of genius, at his heart neither Republican nor Democrat. He was his own brand of politics. The dangerous kind. A man who had more than once put fear in Marshall’s heart should he ever consider leaving the fold.

  The biggest problem was, Marshall still didn’t know what motivated the guy. But at five thousand a week, he tried not to care.

  “You know what this says?” Shakespeare pointed at the bulletin board, filled with those three-by-five cards. He’d shuffle them daily, then lay them out as if he were reading tarot. “This says we should be ten points off the pace by now. Closing the gap. But we’re how many points behind now?”

  “You’re sixteen,” said Marshall.

  “We’re sixteen,” corrected Shakespeare, who wanted everything concerning his campaign couched in collective terms. He wanted fingerprints on everything.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. But now we got us a new negative. Because some dumb ass leaked this ice cream bullshit to the TV.”

  The contempt Marshall felt for this man was overwhelming. He thought, You’re the dumb ass. You wanted to go cheap on the ice cream. You get what you deserve.

  Instead, he was more diplomatic. “You want a sacrifice. Fine. I’ll find you someone to sacrifice.”

  “I want the SOB that betrayed us,” barked Shakespeare.

  “Done.” Marshall even made a note so his boss would see that he’d taken the command seriously, scrawling it all onto a legal pad. He then cleared his throat. “Speaking of negatives, this is just the beginning. Dutton’s preparing to hit us with those ‘Who’s Shakespeare McCann?’ spots in a week. I would expect them to follow with a request for a debate. Now, it’s my recommendation that we hit him spot for spot with negatives in the order of his leftleaning policies. Especially his anti-death-penalty stance.”

  “I’ll debate. But on our terms,” groused Shakespeare. “Now, what about these commercials?”

  “There’s the issue of money. We can’t afford it. With only ‘official support’ from the Republican State and National Committees—”

  “Don’t you worry about money. It’ll come during the Ail-American Ice Cream Road Show. We’re gonna take it to the people.”

  But Marshall didn’t figure Shakespeare’s planned bus and ice cream truck show to raise more than twenty-five thousand dollars. Tops. And they were up against two hundred fifty thousand in negative spot-spending. If there was more money coming in, Marshall would need to know about it. The Federal Elections Commission’s reporting requirements were complicated and needed daily attention.

  “I’ve had an interesting financing offer,” said Marshall.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “The CBC.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Conservative Business Consortium. They want to make your campaign—”

  “It’s our campaign, Marshall,” corrected Shakespeare.

  “They want to loan us one hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Do I have to pay it back?”

  “Not entirely. First, you must request the loan. After they meet the requirements as a lender, we can collect the dough. Spend it as we please. Pay it back…whenever.”

  “And the catch is?”

  “Whatever your imagination can conjure.”

  Shakespeare didn’t need time to think about it. “Good. Let’s do it.”

  “I’ll tell them.”

  “Now, Shoop de Jarnot,” said Shakespeare in one of his patented non sequiturs.

  “Excuse me?” asked Marshall. He didn’t think he’d heard right.

  “That’s the name of the Creole nigger that Dutton’s secretly written some death penalty appeal for.” Shakespeare pointed to the card on the bulletin board that represented Shoop de Jarnot. Marshall couldn’t make out the scribbling.

  “What about him?”

  “You work on those anti-death-penalty commercials. But leave this one fellah outta the mixture. We got us some other plans for him.”

  “Leave him alone,” noted Marshall. “Done.” He was out of his chair and headed for the door.

  “As for who I am?” added Shakespeare, responding to the forthcoming Dutton spot campaign. “I am what I say I am. Understood?”

  “So you are,” said Marshall in a way that should’ve followed with a bow. He made a fast exit, leaving the little man and his damned colored cards on the other side of the door.

  Oh, but the cards had such meaning for Shakespeare. Something useful he’d learned from the old days and the place where time stood still unless a man made a stand and knocked time off its Goddamn feet. Management was the key. Mastering the inner universe. Mastering came only with a plan. For that, a visual aid was required. Each architect’s step of the plan built from singular sheets of starched toilet paper, each pasted on the wall using tired chewing gum. T
hat was the first plan ever.

  The plan born before a man could afford a bulletin board, colored cards, and brushed-metal push pins. Each little sheet of tissue, pasted upon a slab of vertical concrete, had a purpose that organized the mind and kept a man from certain madness. Kept him on that straight-andnarrow path that would lead to a future without pain or punishment.

  All he had to do was stick to the plan.

  But plans go wrong. And part of Shakespeare’s blueprint was that Connie would confess to her husband about the rape. Such a violation would surely rip a massive, spewing hole inside the front-runner’s facade. An open sore at which Shakespeare could prod and poke at will. Yet, ten days after the dreadful act, he had heard nothing. Not a peep from one of his many spies.

  Could she have liked it? Hardly. But could she have hated her cheating husband so much that she wouldn’t have told him? Not likely. If she hated him, she would’ve told him out of pure spite!

  Answer: She loves him too much to hurt him.

  Shakespeare tasted blood! He’d miscalculated. The more he thought about missing the mark, the more his insides wept. It left a sour taste in his gullet that made him spit red into his linen handkerchief every time he coughed.

  The voice cast a reminder. Change the plan. Move the cards. Play your game and win the war. That’s it. Put the bastard’s neck into the noose and kick out the chair!

  The certain meltdown that was in store for Connie never seemed to materialize. At least, not in August. The fragile wife was far stronger than her husband, or anybody, might ever have imagined.

  The key was Gina.

  It’d been two entire weeks since they had talked. Gina had called and called, but Connie couldn’t look in the face of anything that might remind her of that awful night.

  Gina showed concern by showing up at the house. Connie answered the door, dressed in nothing more than a T-shirt and bathrobe. At first sight, she wanted to kick the door shut in Gina’s face. But the Elavil had kicked in and she was feeling hospitable.