by Ed Gorman
Item: Greaves hired a hacker to obtain the private medical records of an opponent. The senatorial candidate had suffered a severe breakdown following the death of his younger brother in a boating accident. This had been back in the Vietnam era. According to Greaves, the candidate used his brother’s death and his own depression (which included shock treatments) to get out of being drafted, “the way too many rich boys were able to avoid that terrible war.” The candidate broke down one night at a press conference trying to explain what the loss of his brother had meant to him. The raw emotional display helped lose him the election. Too unstable.
Probably the most explosive charge Greaves had ever concocted dealt with a congressman who’d developed a rare blood disease and lost thirty pounds in a five-month period. Sounds like AIDS to me, the flyers said.
And the push calls, too, those phone calls that start out by claiming they’re doing an independent survey and need only about sixty seconds of your time. In this case the second or third question of four was: Would you vote for a congressman if you knew he had contracted the AIDS virus? Hundreds of these calls were made in the final two weeks of that election cycle. And they worked perfectly.
Make no mistake. Neither side can claim virtue. Just about any election you can point to is dirty on both sides in some way, from teenagers tearing down the yard signs of your opponent to shouting down the man or woman who is trying to speak to a crowd. It’s a matter of degree. Both sides, at the congressional level all the way up to the White House, have their election assassins. And both sides have done a lot of sleazy and unforgivable things to the election process. But only one side ever fielded anybody like R. D. Greaves.
“I’m going to be closing up pretty quick here,” the bartender said after walking to the front window and taking a look at the parking lot. “Doesn’t show any signs of letting up.”
“Give me one more while I visit the john.”
“Sure thing.”
And when I got back, he was there. R. D. Greaves himself. Sitting at the far end of the bar where the black gentleman had been.
He didn’t recognize me. I took my seat and started working on my fresh drink. During my brief sojourn in the john, the other customers had left. Now it was just the three of us.
The bartender looked confused. He must have thought that I’d be sitting up close to Greaves, since I’d told him we were old friends. He finally said, as he wiped out a glass with a towel he should have tossed about twenty glasses ago, “R.D., man down there’s been asking about you.”
I suppose the bartender thought that this introduction would end in some kind of beer commercial backslapping by two big manly men. Hey, shit, I didn’t recognize you! How the hell you been, man? Let’s us have a brewski!
But all that happened was that Greaves turned a bit on his stool and glared down the bar at me and said, “Is that right? He tell you why he’s been asking about me?”
Greaves and I are both shaggy mastodons. Six-four or thereabouts, noses broken a few times by those snobs who found us less than charming, waistlines that had to be carefully watched, and the ready anger that shrinks would probably call paranoia. He wasn’t physically afraid of me and I wasn’t physically afraid of him. The bartender clearly sensed this and as a result started looking nervous.
“So why’re you asking the barkeep so many questions?”
“I thought maybe he could tell me if you were really as big a prick as people say you are.”
Now in your standard cop or cowboy movie, those would be fightin’ words. The stuntmen would double the actors and a furniture-bustin’ brawl would ensue. But this, alas, was reality, and men our age and our size had to be careful about brawls. Even in your early forties, you didn’t recover from physical violence the way you once might have.
He laughed. Or rather, bellowed. “Hell, yes, I’m a big prick. Probably more than you even heard. So who the fuck are you?”
“Campaign consultant to Senator Nichols.”
All he said was, “Figures.” Then he turned around and faced the mirror again. He shoved his empty glass at the bartender. “Hit me again, Mike.”
I slid off my stool and slowly made my way up the bar. Mike looked to be quietly hyperventilating.
“I suppose you heard about tonight. The debate?”
He didn’t turn to look at me. “Was there a debate tonight? Guess I didn’t hear about it.”
“Somebody put something in my client’s drink. Something that made him so groggy he passed out onstage.”
“Man, sounds like I missed something. Maybe I can pick it up on a news show. That’d be some footage I’d bet.”
“Sounds like something Jim Lake would hire somebody to do.”
He angled around to face me. “I don’t know anybody who’d do anything like that, Sport. We all have too much respect for our system of government. The whole election process is a sacred right. A lot of people have fought and died for it.”
I didn’t do it. Somebody else did. Somebody who looked an awful lot like me. I just stood back and watched as this doppelganger smashed a right hand into the side of Greaves’s head. Hard enough to knock him off his stool and onto the floor, where he cracked his head on landing.
Mike pulled a sawed-off from behind the bar and started shouting at me. “You freeze right where you are, mister! I ain’t putting up with this kind of shit from anybody!”
Carefully keeping both barrels pointed in my direction, Mike came out from around the bar to see how Greaves was doing.
Greaves was doing just fine. Picking himself up, straightening his clothes, touching his fingers tentatively to the spot where my fist had collided with his face.
“You want me to call the cops, Mr. Greaves?”
“Hell no, Mike. I was actually going to look this creep up anyway. He just saved me some time is all.” He lifted his drink, draining it, “C’mon, creep, I’ll buy you some food.”
So that was how I met the one, the only, R. D. Greaves.
“You know, Leno and Letterman are always making jokes about Denny’s, but I like this place. The food’s good and pretty cheap. I’ve never found anything in my food. You know, a finger or anything like that. And the booths are comfortable. You take Burger King, those are the most uncomfortable fucking booths I’ve ever sat in. You ever eat at Burger King?”
“Not unless my kidnappers forced me to.”
He was shoveling ketchup-drenched french fries into his mouth one by bloody one as he talked. He had red streaks across his upper lip and on the left side of his mouth.
“So how’d you ever get into the political racket?”
“My father was a congressman. He got tired of seeing people like you working for people in Congress.”
He winked at me. It was obscene. “Not to brag, but there’s never been and never will be anybody ‘like me.’ Look it up. Nobody’s got my track record.”
“I’ll bet your mother’s proud of you.”
“As a matter of fact, she’s very proud of me. Brags about me to everybody in the old neighborhood.”
“Figures.”
He seemed to bring me into focus for the first time. He had the kind of Gene Hackman looks that could turn easily into good guy or bad guy. “You’re a sanctimonious bastard.”
“One of my many failings.” And it was.
He ate some more french fries. He’d obliterated his cheeseburger in four Olympian bites. I was almost afraid to see what he’d do to the three-scoop chocolate sundae he’d ordered right along with his meal. It had been sitting here long enough to melt. “So you think I did in Nichols tonight, huh?”
“Pretty sure you did.”
“What makes you think so?”
“(A) It’s your MO. You get creative when you’re down this close to Election Day. (B) The woman who actually dropped the drug in the drink gave a phony name and lied about being part of the Nichols campaign.”
He snorted. Now he had ketchup all over his fingers, too. “You think a grand
jury would buy that?”
“Probably not.”
“But you’re gonna go ahead and try to nail me for it anyway, right?”
“Don’t have time. Maybe after the election. Sooner if I can find the woman.”
He held a single french fry that drooped under the weight of the ketchup. Then he opened wide as if I were his dentist and shoved it into the darkness between his teeth. “It’s funny, I don’t even know who she is, never met her, never saw her, but I’ve got this feeling about her. Sort of a psychic kind of thing.”
“Sure. Psychic kind of thing.”
“I just have this feeling she got on a plane right after this thing at the auditorium tonight—she got on this plane and flew bye-bye. If she’s any kind of pro, that is.”
He was having some fun with me. Scatting. Seeming to pretend he knew something about the drugging while denying it when asked directly. He was good at confusing you.
“You think so, huh?” I said.
“I know so.”
“Funny, I had the impression she was local talent.”
“You never heard of local talent flying away somewhere till things cool off?”
“More coffee?” the waitress said.
We both said no but Greaves pointed to his sundae. “I didn’t get to this as fast as I thought. How about throwing this one away—or giving it to somebody in the kitchen—and getting me a new one. I’ll pay for it of course.” He patted her hip. “Or you can eat it for yourself, darling.”
She smiled. “I think I’ll take you up on that. It looks good.”
When she was gone, he said, “Nice ass but no tits.”
“She should be killed for not measuring up to your high standards.”
His last french fry got swished around through a large dollop of ketchup remaining on the platter. “You’re an owly son of a bitch.”
“The nuns always told me that, too.”
“You went to Catholic school?”
“Yeah.”
“Hey, so did I. But then one day it hit me.”
“What hit you?”
“All this God shit. It’s all a crock. When we die, we die. Same as when you see a dog or a cat that’s been run over by a car. It’s all they get and that’s all we get, too.”
“So why follow the rules when this is it right here on earth, right?”
“You’re getting sanctimonious again but, yeah, that’s right. I mean, what the fuck, may as well enjoy ourselves. You only go around once in life.”
“That’s a line from a beer commercial.”
He winked at me again. “I take my wisdom where I find it, Sport.”
The waitress brought his sundae. She stood away from him this time. She didn’t want to be patted again. She dropped the check on the table and left.
He laughed. “Don’t think I’ll be waking up with her in the morning.” He then proceeded to demolish his sundae in six skilled attacks. He had whipped cream on the tip of his nose. I didn’t tell him. I liked him better as a clown. He made a big “Aaaaahhhh!” sound as if he’d just finished a feast so impossibly wonderful, complete words couldn’t describe it. He crossed his eyes and peered down his nose. “Hey, I got something on my nose?”
“Yeah. Whipped cream.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Guess I didn’t notice.”
“You are some kind of asshole, Sport.” He napkined off the whipped cream and then sat back in the booth, spreading his arms out on either side. Something had changed in the eyes. They appeared to be a much deeper brown, almost black. And the jaw muscles were bunched now. This was the political assassin I’d heard about.
“Sport, you got much bigger problems than what happened tonight.”
“I do, huh?”
“Yeah, you do. And you’re sitting there thinking you’re such a superior shit—smarter than me, slicker than me, marginally better-looking than me—the kind of guy who gets invited to all the parties with the pretty people. The ones who hire me but don’t want me around afterward. You know, I’ve never been invited to a single inaugural ball? Or to a single congressman’s office. Or to a single governor’s mansion. And it was me who helped put most of these motherfuckers where they are today.”
I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure what to say. His cold anger had the force of a punch.
“But I’m getting off the subject here. We were talking about you.”
“Right. And that I’ve got a much bigger problem than what happened tonight.”
He went right at it. “I have a videotape of your senator fucking the brains out of a hotel maid. Nobody knows I have it.”
My response was lame and we both knew it. “The kind of technology today, you can fake anything.”
“I hired the girl myself and now she’s my witness. So don’t give me any bullshit about the tape being fake. You know I’ve got the real deal.”
“If you’ve got it, why not give it to Lake and let him leak it to the press?”
He tapped his right temple. “You really are a babe in the woods, Sport. I give it to Lake, he just considers it part of my job. He might give me a little bonus or something. I did this on my own time. I want a big payday. So I’m offering it to you first.”
“How much is this big payday you want?”
The smile was novel length. He had dreamed of saying these three words all his life. “One million bucks.” And then he said, “By noon, day after tomorrow.”
CHAPTER 9
“You don’t look so hot,” Billy said the next morning when he found me in the coffee shop.
“Thanks. I needed to hear that.”
As he opened his menu, he said, “What’s that bruise on the side of your head?”
“I slipped and fell last night in the snow. A lot of people slipped and fell in the snow last night, Billy. It’s no big deal.”
I’d slipped and fallen in the snow after R. D. Greaves had punched me from behind as I was getting into my car. He not only wanted a million dollars, he also wanted revenge for me knocking him off his stool in the Parrot Cage.
“How we going to handle this, you know yet?”
I ate the last bite of my cheese omelet and said, “I need to get with Kate and Laura. If you mean are we going to charge Lake with putting something in Warren’s Diet Pepsi, I don’t know. This is the last thing you folks ever want to hear, but I want to see some overnight polling, see how people view Warren. That debate probably had a very big audience. Haven’t seen any figures yet. But that would be my guess.”
“I guess I don’t understand. If Lake did it—”
Waitress. Billy was in a decisive mood this morning. “What’d you have, Dev?”
“Cheese omelet, orange juice, unbuttered toast, and coffee.”
“Same except butter the toast.”
When she went away, he said, “But we know Lake did it.”
“We don’t know. We think we know. There’s a difference. Our only lead is that makeup woman, and the only thing I’ve been told about her is that she shops at Daily Double Discount.”
“Never heard of it. And I grew up here.”
“I’ve never heard of it, either. And I don’t even know if it’s a true lead. One of the college kids working backstage told me she saw a Daily Double Discount sack in the woman’s front seat.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“Maybe and maybe not. What if she’d borrowed the car or stolen it? And even if it was her sack, why would anybody at the store remember her? Presumably they’ve got a lot of customers or they wouldn’t stay open long in the discount business.”
“Oh, yeah, I see. But I still don’t see why we can’t call a press conference and sort of imply that Lake hired somebody to take down the senator last night.”
Waitress with Billy’s coffee.
“Because you can never be sure where an accusation like that will lead. It might look like desperation on our part.”
“But we’re ahead in the polls.”
>
“We were ahead in the polls as of last night when Warren walked out onstage. I’m not sure where we stand this morning, though. And again, you and I are sure Lake is behind it all. But we don’t have proof. And without it, it could all backfire on us very quickly. These are the three most dangerous weeks in a tight campaign.”
“That’s for sure.”
“So what I’m going to recommend to Warren and Kate is that we hold a press conference sometime today when Warren is up to it and all we say is that Warren ingested some kind of contaminated food or drink last night. We’ll have one of the hospital docs standing next to him when we say this.”
“What if the press wants to know more?”
“We’ll just say that we need to have more lab tests done before we can say for sure what it was he took into his system last night.”
“You know they’re going to be all over this story. He used to have a woman problem, but way back when, he had a drinking problem, too.”
“Not much of one. He got into a couple of fights when he was in the National Guard. That’s not much of a drinking problem.”
“Yeah, but he was arrested once for public intoxication.”
I’d thought the same thing during my long and sleepless night in bed. But by dawn I’d dismissed the “drinking problem” angle. The public-intox arrest was made when he and four other recent college grads set up their garage band out on the lawn of a vacated manse in the Gold Coast area. The movers and shakers of such a neighborhood were not at all amused by being awakened at four-thirty A.M. But he was twenty-one at the time and, as seen through the voters’ eyes, who among us wouldn’t want to cost those rich, selfish bastards some sleep? I still couldn’t see the “drinking problem” angle that worried Billy.
“The staff’s over at headquarters this morning,” I said. “As soon as I finish up here, I’ll be going over there.”
“They did a great job on the streets during the night,” Billy said. “At least we can get around everywhere this morning. Most of the snow is already melting. No Michael Bilandic moment.”
Bilandic had been a briefly popular mayor who’d lost all his support when he failed to deal competently with a snow emergency. His administration’s response was so lame that he lost to the then-unknown Jane Byrne in the mayoral primary.