by Ed Gorman
The fucker. I was against mandatory sentencing in most applications. But his answer had been much more dynamic and dramatic than Warren’s.
And so it went.
The military, foreign policy, tax cuts, sex education classes in public schools, the influence of big business on Congress—you’re always waiting for one of the journalists to lay your client out with a question so unexpected that you see, depending on how he answers it, a career hanging in the balance.
In the first twenty of fifty-five minutes, nothing extraordinary was asked or answered. They both were being given time to settle in, get more comfortable, so that as the hour progressed, they’d be better prepared to start laying the heavy-duty accusations and smears on their opponent.
The audience had been instructed not to applaud, so the candidates’ voices were clear and distinct in the auditorium. The twenty-minute mark was reached, several more familiar questions asked, several more familiar responses given. Lake, a five-ten former Purdue running back and, unlike Warren, a very physical man, writhed under the constraints of politeness. His consultants had told him, as I’d told Warren, to start doing the drive-by shooting just about now. Lake was ready to blow up an orphanage if need be. All I could hope for was that his “opposition research” people hadn’t come up with anything we didn’t already know about.
Then I noticed Warren weaving as he stood at the lectern. At first I assumed his back was sore from standing so rigidly and he was just trying to loosen up when the camera was off him. But very soon not only was the weaving more pronounced, so was the way his head was angling to the right. He seemed groggy, like a prizefighter suddenly stunned by a punch from nowhere. He’d been hurt and maybe badly.
I don’t know if I was the first to notice it or simply the first to make note of it out loud. The swaying got more pronounced. Whispers from the audience. Now he wasn’t merely placing his hands on either side of the lectern—he appeared to be gripping it desperately in an attempt to stay upright. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was drunk.
“Something’s wrong,” I muttered to Kate.
And then another problem: He started slurring his words. Now he not only appeared drunk, he sounded it, too.
“What the hell’s wrong with him?” Laura said.
“Shit,” Billy said.
“Dev, you’ve got to do something,” Kate said. And then she shook her elegant head and said, “Sorry. That was stupid. There isn’t anything any one of us can do.”
By now the entire audience was aware of Warren’s problems. Not only was there whispering, there were also sniggers and the occasional outright laugh. Everybody was remembering the way he’d stumbled on his way to the lectern.
Lake started glancing over at Nichols with a kind of gentlemanly concern. He was playing it just right. Not scorn, not mocking, but alarmed that there might be something wrong with Nichols. What a good and decent man this Lake is, you hear Mom and Pop at home saying. He looks like he’s genuinely concerned. No need for his consultant to pop a cyanide capsule in his mouth.
Stage left I could see the hostess appear for a closer look at Warren. Her body language said that she was as worried as we were. She glanced at the journalists.
“Senator,” the Chicago newspaperman said, “when you first ran for this seat four years ago, you promised the voters that you would make certain that funding for special-needs students would be doubled if not tripled. But in fact in the projected presidential budget, it’s been cut by twenty-five percent. Is that a major disappointment to you? And if so, what do you plan to do about it?”
There are moments in prizefights when you see that one man has no idea where he is or maybe even who he is. That was Warren at this point. His head was rolling around on his shoulders cartoon-style, his eyes were fighting to stay open, and one of his hands slid off the edge of the lectern so that he seemed to lose balance.
“Did he have a stroke maybe?” Laura said. I think we were all wondering the same thing.
The woman from the university reappeared and rushed over to him. And just in time. He seemed ready to collapse.
And here came the cavalry.
Lake quickly crossed the distance between lecterns and got his arm around Warren, lowering him gently to the floor. The consultant part of me thought: This’ll be on the Internet within fifteen minutes. And it’ll generate thousands and thousands of hits within the first hour it appears.
Lake played doctor, checking Warren’s pulse, neck and wrist, putting an ear to Warren’s heart, feeling Warren’s forehead, apparently for fever.
People in the audience were standing now, trying to see what was going on up onstage. The monitors had been killed. There was no more laughter; instead, fear filled both sides of the theater. Death is something we all have in common. And right now everybody in the audience was terrified by its sudden dominion. Maybe he wasn’t drunk, after all. Maybe he’d really had a heart attack.
Lake had never had a better moment. Even I had to approve of the way he whipped off his suit coat and balled it up to serve as a pillow for Warren’s head. Even I had to approve of the way he gently raised Warren’s arm for a second time and checked for a pulse again. Even I had to approve of the way he got Warren’s shirt open and tossed away the necktie.
But my admiration was short-lived. I couldn’t afford it. The man on the floor was my client. And no matter what it was that had felled him, the heretofore mad-dog opponent had gone out there tonight an also-ran and come back a star.
I tried to estimate in my rattled way how many points in the polls he was picking up. Two? Three? God, could he pick up five? And then when I saw what he was about to do, I had to wonder if he could possibly pick up seven.
Because he was about to perform—right on TV, right in everybody’s home, right in front of God—CPR on Senator Warren Nichols.
No, he’s not some full-mooner lunatic. He’s a strong and compassionate man we can trust and have confidence in. No, I don’t agree with some of his positions, but that doesn’t matter when I’ve just seen what he’s made of. He’s the kind of guy you’d want for your next-door neighbor.
The only thing we were spared was the CPR. By then a real live doctor had run up the four steps on the west side of the stage and was tending to Warren. Was that a brief hint of disappointment on Lake’s face?
Probably.
CHAPTER 5
Ambulance.
Teresa Nichols rushed backstage from the audience, joining Kate, Laura, Gabe, and Billy as they stood next to the techs loading the gurney bearing the senator into the rear of the vehicle. Red emergency lights gleaming, stink of medicines from inside the ambulance, exhaust pipe propelling snowflakes into the darkness. Nose-freezing temperature. Winds that had already knocked down a lot of freestanding signage. Sand trucks now joining snowplows.
From what I could see when I got out there, Warren was either asleep or comatose. He showed few signs of life.
Teresa Nichols, a shining blonde who vaguely resembled an older Kate in certain ways, huddled under her fashionable blue winter coat and said, “I want to go with him.”
The female driver nodded. “Sure thing, Mrs. Nichols. Let me help you up here.”
Teresa glimpsed me over her shoulder. “I have your cell number, Dev. I’ll keep you informed from the hospital. I know you’ll be busy here.” Then she disappeared inside.
Kate, Laura, Gabe, and Billy escaped. I made a couple phone calls on my cell. By the time I reached the hall, a small lynch mob of reporters had gathered. They wouldn’t bother to find Kate when I was at hand. I put up my hands as if surrendering and let their questions rip and tear and rend me with their imbecility. It wouldn’t do any good to point out that they’d seen exactly what I had and thus knew exactly as much as I did. They insisted that I knew something I didn’t.
“Have you been keeping any of the senator’s health secrets from the public?”
“No.”
“Does the senator like to take a drink
once in a while?”
“That’s not the question you’re asking. You want to know if the senator has a problem with alcohol. The answer is no. And I’ll save you some time—he doesn’t have a problem with any kind of drug dependency. Period.”
“Did you see him before the debate tonight?”
“Yes. And he acted fine.”
“Do you have any idea what happened to him?”
“None.”
“Would you agree that Congressman Lake showed people that he’s not the crackpot your campaign has implied?”
“‘Crackpot’ is your term, not ours. We’ve had and will continue to have disagreements over policy with Congressman Lake, but right here and now I want to thank him for all he did for Senator Nichols tonight. It shows that he’s a man of great character.”
I wanted to puke, of course. But that probably wouldn’t have looked good to the folks at home.
Finally, the police got there and broke it up. This press conference, that was up to us. But it would have to be in another part of the building. For now, move along.
Twenty minutes later I was standing outside the back door of the auditorium letting the cold and the snow have at me. Once again the elements revived me. So much had happened in so little time that I hadn’t had the chance to sort through it. The cyanide capsule was sounding better all the time.
The doc from the audience had been under the impression that the senator had suffered a stroke or heart attack. That was his first judgment. But as his examination continued he said he wasn’t sure. He obviously regretted his first assessment. He’d not only looked foolish, he might even have left himself open to some kind of lawsuit. I felt sorry for him.
I thought through his second judgment, that he was no longer sure. But if it hadn’t been a heart attack or stroke, what had it been? An aneurysm? I wasn’t a doctor, I didn’t even play one on TV. So my speculation was useless.
But being the cynic I am, my thoughts shifted from medicine back to politics. Not much doubt about who’d looked best tonight. There would be worry and sympathy for Nichols—despite the closeness of the race, he was a respected man in Illinois—but it would be Jim Lake who got the coveted John Wayne Award for the evening. The manly way he’d strode across the stage to grab Warren and keep him from toppling. The heroic way he’d helped the incapacitated man to the floor. And then—the sonofabitch—the way he’d returned to the stage (the cameras on him of course) and said, “I think we need to say a prayer here for a very good man we all have a lot of respect for. This isn’t a time for politics, this is a time for joining together in asking God to spare the life of a true patriot and an honest politician.”
The Internet. The cable nets. All the major newspapers. Slots very near the top on the evening news. And editorials across the land commending Congressman Jim Lake—who was happy to let pollution, global warming, racial discrimination, hate crimes against gays, ridiculous bank loan rates, and much more prosper on and on indefinitely—for being an example of what Jefferson and John Adams and whatever other boozers had in mind when they first got together to write the Constitution.
Tonight, a star was born. Phony as hell, most likely, but tricked up as it was, it had played beautifully for the camera.
Then I looked at it the way an army intelligence officer would in gathering facts for a report. Had it all been coincidence? If the audience doc wasn’t sure it had been a heart attack or stroke, what had it been? What if what we saw onstage hadn’t been an accident? This was politics, after all, and in the era of Karl Rove, just about anything you could get away with was the order of the day. (And the Clinton machine of personal destruction had been a good warm-up act to Rove.) So you had motive—to sideline your opponent and make it look accidental. And who stood to gain? Why, the John Wayne Award winner himself, Jim Lake.
Image: Warren in the dressing room making a face when he swallowed the Pepsi. He’d complained that it tasted bad.
Image: The young makeup woman dabbing makeup on Warren’s cheeks, his glass of Pepsi very near her elbow.
Image: Chic Kate saying, “God, I hope he doesn’t fuck it up tonight.”
Behind me, her voice ragged with the cold and snow, Laura said, “We’re going back inside, Dev. It’s too cold out here.”
Laura said to Billy, “People survive heart attacks all the time, Billy.”
But something about the heart attack scenario bothered me. Bothered me a lot.
CHAPTER 6
I’d asked Billy, Kate, Gabe, and Laura to wait in the hall while I worked alone in the makeup room. Occupational paranoia had set in. You couldn’t trust anybody, not even your closest staff members. They were privy to everything—our stands on issues, our media buys, our schedule, who we had waiting in the wings to endorse us, how the money flow was going, and, most important of all, if there was some whisper of scandal we were trying to cover up. And each of them had had the opportunity to be in here alone earlier in the evening. I wanted to check things out myself. But my search was a waste of time.
When I came out of the dressing room, I said, “Did any of you happen to catch the last name of the makeup woman?”
They each took a turn at saying no.
“Which of you got to the room first?”
Billy shrugged. “I guess I did. Why?”
“Was she there when you got there?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Are you going to tell us what’s going on, Dev?”
“Who was there, Billy?”
“Just her. The senator got there a few minutes later.”
“How did she introduce herself to you?”
“Just said she was the makeup lady.”
“Nothing else?”
He paused. “Uh, let’s see … Oh, she said she was a big fan of the senator’s and that she’d voted for him before and wanted to vote for him this time, too.”
“And nothing else? You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“We should be going to the hospital,” Kate said.
“Good idea. You folks get over there. I’ll be about twenty minutes or so behind you.”
“I wish you’d tell us what’s going on,” Kate said. “Obviously you suspect something.”
“I don’t want to say anything until I’ve got a little more information.”
One of the crew members walked halfway down the hall and said, “There are two detectives out here who’d like to talk to you.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Kate, why don’t you talk to them?”
“They’ll want to know about today. How he was acting and everything. You saw him a lot more than I did.”
“I need to talk to somebody else. You saw what I saw. You saw more, in fact, since you were in the makeup room longer. And you’re the campaign manager. You’re the public face. And Laura’s the communications director.”
“We’re going to lose this argument, Kate. We may as well give in.”
“Thanks for speaking up for me, Laura. We all want to get to the hospital as soon as possible. Teresa has my cell number. You heard her. She’ll keep in touch.”
“Yeah,” Billy said, “but that doesn’t mean that you’ll tell us anything she said.”
“Let’s get going,” I said.
I walked to the opposite end of the hall and took a short staircase down to the main floor. I was looking for the woman who’d seemed to be in charge of the event. I remembered seeing a line of glassed-in offices to the right of the stage.
She was on the phone when I walked in. She was saying, with strained patience, “I don’t know anything more than I’ve told you. I don’t want to be quoted as saying it was a stroke or heart attack, because I don’t know for sure what it was.” She signaled for me to take a chair in front of her desk. “Of course he wasn’t drunk.” Pause. “Everybody saw what happened onstage. He obviously had some kind of medical problem that I can’t speak to. If you want that kind of information, you should call the hospital.” Pause. “It’s not m
y problem that the hospital won’t release information. He’s probably only been there for ten minutes or so. Now, I’m really busy, all right?”
As she hung up, she said, “God. I’m beginning to wonder if the idea of a free press isn’t better in theory than in practice.” Then she laughed. “Don’t quote me on that. I’m all for a free press, of course. It’s just when they start moving in on you—”
Her oblong name plaque on the desk read PAULINE DOYLE. She was probably forty or so, a few pounds overweight, with wonderful little teeth that gleamed when her full lips parted. In her dramatic dark blue dress with a slash of lighter blue stretching from the left shoulder to the right hip, she was definitely in the desirable category.
After I introduced myself, she said, “Any word on the senator?”
“Not yet.”
“I couldn’t believe it. No matter how you prepare for these things, you never quite know how to respond.”
“You can’t prepare for anything like this. I just hope he’s all right.”
“Would you like some coffee?” she asked, inclining her head in the direction of a Mr. Coffee.
“No, thanks. I just wanted to ask you about the makeup woman we used.”
“Oh, yes. Megan, uh, Caine.”
“Do you use her regularly here?”
“I guess I’m confused about that.”
“Oh? Why?”
“First of all, I’d never heard of her before. But second, somebody in your office called me yesterday and said that you wanted your own makeup person and that this Megan Caine would be here tonight promptly at six-thirty.”
“Does that happen very often? That people bring their own makeup person?”
“Depends. Some do, some don’t. I wouldn’t say it’s common, but it’s not unusual, either.”
“And my office called.”
She leaned toward me, her eyes apprehensive. “I hope I didn’t do anything wrong.”