by Ed Gorman
“When a little dolly like her walks in? C’mon, not even a pious bastard like you could resist.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“I wish you’d make me feel a little better about all this, Dev. It wouldn’t hurt you to tell me this is going to work out all right.”
I couldn’t help myself. As much as I’d come to despise him, I felt sorry for him for just a millisecond here. “Warren, you’re so used to people propping you up, it’s sort of humorous. They forgive you everything and when you’re down they pump you back up with bullshit. And that goes triple for when you and the rest of them are in session. You people in Washington are the most spoiled, pampered, self-important group anywhere in the world. And it just keeps on getting worse. You vote yourself more and more privileges every term. And that goes for both sides as always. So when you’re faced with a serious crisis that you just happened to cause yourself—you just assume that somebody on your staff can make it all better. Well, I’m going to tell you that maybe this will come out all right and maybe it won’t.”
“But you said—”
“I said I think he’ll go for the three hundred thousand. But what if he doesn’t? I could kill him and take the tape. You want me to kill him for you, Warren?”
“C’mon. That’s crazy. That’s what I meant about your dark side.”
I leaned back in the booth. Stared right at him. “You love your Senate seat so much, Warren, that if it came right down to it—if the only way you could keep it was to have me kill Greaves for you—”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m not being ridiculous. Maybe in the end you wouldn’t be able to give me the order to off him. But I’ll bet you’d have to think about it for a long time. And there’re a lot of others in Congress just like you. It’s just unthinkable that you’d give up power, isn’t it?”
“I don’t like you anymore, Dev. I really don’t.”
“Right now,” I said, sliding out of the booth, “I could give a shit, Warren.”
CHAPTER 12
Dinner that night was a rare delicacy known as a cheese-and-onion pizza that Laura and I shared as we discussed our next media buy. An internal poll had come in late this afternoon that I was seeing for the first time at headquarters. Our interpretation of it was that we were losing whatever gains we’d made downstate, which is more conservative than most people realize. We’d never planned on winning that area of the state, but we had to get a minimum of twenty percent of it to offset any sudden surge by Lake. One of our own pollsters faxed us an internal poll he’d conducted late yesterday. It showed that downstate we were running sixteen percent, down three since Lake had started playing Doc Savage. We’d been at twenty-one a week ago.
“I’d say it’s time to unload number four on them. The nuke.”
I’d said this with an air of bravado as a joke. Laura had been anxious to drop the most negative commercial we’d ever done. The one that pointed out that if you were an average citizen, it didn’t make any sense to vote for Lake.
But she didn’t return my smile. Her brown eyes were fixed on a spot slightly to the right of me. She was gazing off into the middle distance, distracted by something that had been bothering her even before I’d walked in here twenty minutes earlier.
“The nuke, Laura. The one you’ve been waiting for.”
“Oh, that’ll be great,” she said, forcing her attention back to me. The delicate bones of her face were as refined as ever. But in the eyes and in the voice there was a hint of agitation she was having a hard time controlling. “The big one.”
“We’ve got plenty of money. We can saturate the whole area. We can force him to answer us point for point.”
But she was staring off again. The temptation was to say something to her, but I decided to turn around and work on the computer for a while.
I called up the copy for the nuke spot. It was simple, and every charge it made was true. Each accusation was based on Lake’s voting record.
Ask Jim Lake why he voted against
HEALTH CARE (for those who can’t afford it)
EXTENDED UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE
TAX PENALTIES FOR COMPANIES OFFSHORE
STUDENT LOAN INTEREST REFORM
CAPS ON LOBBYIST SPENDING
MORE CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT ON GOVERNMENT SPENDING
Ask Jim Lake. You won’t believe what he’s got to say.
Negative advertising has a bad name. A good deal of it is deceitful and excessive. But used properly, it’s the best way to give the public an indication of what your opponent truly believes. This spot was aimed, as most negative ads are, at independent voters who might have started leaning toward Lake. We hoped we were raising at least one issue that would give each voter pause. A saturation campaign was our best hope of achieving that.
At first I didn’t want to believe what I was hearing. The campaign was getting difficult enough. But when it didn’t stop, I had no choice except to admit what I was hearing and then turn around and face it.
Laura, dutiful Laura, always reliable communications director Laura, was holding a Kleenex up to her eyes dabbing the tears gleaming down her cheeks. Her nose was red. The hand that held the tissue was trembling.
“Can I help, Laura?”
She shook her head and started crying again, snuffling into the Kleenex. I shoved the box of tissues closer to her. “Probably time to change that one, Laura.”
She laughed raggedly, pitched the used tissue into the wastebasket, and then plucked a fresh one from the box.
“You don’t think it’d help to talk about it?”
She shook her head again.
“Somebody sick in your family? Something like that?”
“I really can’t talk about it, Dev,” she managed to say.
“There’s a bottle of bourbon in that desk over there. Would you like a shot of it?”
Another shake of the head.
And then she was on her feet, gathering up her coat and purse, clutching them to her as if she were afraid I’d take them away from her. “I just don’t know how much longer I can do this,” she said.
What the hell was “this”?
“You mean this job? Is that what you’re saying, Laura?”
“I’m sorry, Dev. I really have to go. I wouldn’t be able to concentrate tonight, anyway. I’ll be here bright and early in the morning. I promise. But now—”
She stumbled as she walked to the door. I was afraid she was going to fall over. But she righted herself at the last moment. “I always told you I was a clumsy oaf.”
“And I always told you you were crazy.”
“I’m sorry to do this to you, Dev.”
“Well, you’re obviously in no shape to work, so don’t worry about it. I just wish you’d let me help you with it, whatever it is.”
“Sometimes you can be so sweet, Dev. We all appreciate it.”
And then she was just footsteps heard out front in the public section of headquarters. She took the side door out so she wouldn’t have to face the volunteers who’d been working late as the campaign hurried to Election Day.
Not a clue. “I don’t know if I can do this much longer, Dev.” Buy media? Sit in the same room with me? Associate with political people? Face an unhappy life every morning when she got up?
I wasn’t worried about her as an employee. She was damned good, but so were others we could sign on quickly. I was worried about her as a friend. I’d never thought of her as being especially vulnerable. She liked to be tough to the point that it was sometimes comical. To see her break this way was shocking.
Fluffy scrambled eggs, warm toast with peach jam, two strips of crisp bacon, and a cup of rich, good coffee. Breakfast next morning.
I’d spent a half hour in the hotel gym. I needed to be as focused as possible for my confrontation with Greaves. He’d find out too late that I’d tape-recorded everything he’d said to me during our upcoming exchange at noon. Then I’d have a bartering tool as well. He might be able to sink
the campaign with his video of Warren, but I’d be able to put him in prison for several years for extortion.
He’d come at me, of course, and I wanted to be sure I could take him out fast and sure. I even spent twenty minutes on the punching bag.
Now, after a shower and a change of clothes, I was enjoying my breakfast. Enjoying it right up to the point where one of the city’s more prominent Lake supporters suggested in an op-ed piece that officials had conspired to cover up Warren’s real problem at the debate the other night, that he’d been drunk.
The op-ed went on to remind voters that not that long ago there were many rumors about Warren in Washington. His girl chasing was one, but so was his excessive drinking.
Had police and hospital officials floated the “sedative” story to cover up his drinking? Nichols was, it went on, a powerful sitting senator and had enough influence to ask them to cover for him.
The charge was ridiculous—maybe you could get cops to cover up a story; hospital officials would never go along with it—but it sounded more convincing than our true story of something being put in his Diet Pepsi and vague hints of a conspiracy.
The lynch mob that listened to talk radio would be sexually excited by an allegation like this. By midafternoon they’d have painted Warren not only as a drunken philanderer but as a terrorist spy as well.
“I want to know what you and my husband are keeping from me.”
I raised my head from the op-ed page, happy that somebody had distracted me, and saw a familiar and alluring face across the booth from me. Teresa Nichols was wearing a red ski sweater, her lustrous blond hair pulled back in a pert ponytail. Only the anxiety in her gleaming eyes spoiled the magazine-ad glamour of her patrician face.
“And good morning to you, Teresa.”
She smiled. “I’m sorry. I should at least have said hello, shouldn’t I? It’s just I know he’s hiding something. And since he doesn’t have any secrets from you—”
“I’m not sure that’s true, Teresa.”
She had coffee only. Black. When we were alone, the hotel coffee shop starting to fill up with the last rush of the morning, she said, “He’s been so distracted the last few days, it’s like he isn’t even there. And last night I was sure something was wrong.”
“What happened last night?”
“Nightmares. He never has nightmares unless something terrible is wrong. He woke up twice shouting and covered in sweat.”
“A lot of things could cause nightmares. It doesn’t have to be a deep dark secret.”
“How about a three A.M. phone call?”
“Now you might be on to something. Any idea who called?”
“No. It came on his cell. He grabbed it and took it down the hall in the den so I couldn’t hear it.”
“You didn’t hear any of it?”
“He muttered a curse word when he answered it in our bedroom. I didn’t hear any of the rest of it.”
Now she had me curious, too. There was the possibility that the phone call had nothing to do with Greaves and his videotape. But three A.M.—it was difficult to believe that the call wasn’t about the tape. There were always sudden campaign problems. But a three A.M. call made it unlikely that an aide had phoned him. He or she would have waited till morning.
“He said you’re going to get together about ten at headquarters.”
“That’s the plan.”
“Please do me a favor and see what you can find out. Tell him you had breakfast with me and that I was very concerned.”
She still had a good wife’s faith that her husband would tell the truth to a close friend and thus, eventually, to her. But Warren was a man of a thousand secrets. I knew only a few of them. I was assuming that this was about the tape. But possibly there was another secret I knew nothing about, something even more dire than R. D. Greaves’s tape.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
She settled back into the booth, a shiny, fine, middle-aged woman I’d had innumerable fantasies about over the years. She was just so damned clean and sleek.
“I see you’re reading that stupid op-ed.”
“The one where he’s an opium smoker and a pedophile?”
“I wish it was funny, Dev. But I know a certain percentage of people will believe it. He really has changed, Dev. No more chasing around. I’m sure of that.”
“Truth doesn’t matter to these people, Teresa.” And it doesn’t matter all that much to your husband, either.
“God knows Warren isn’t perfect. But nobody is. For all his faults he’s been a very good senator.”
“Yes, he has.”
“And I still think Jim Lake was behind putting something in his soda the other night.”
“Maybe so.”
She made a fist with her tiny hand. “Oh, this op-ed just makes me so mad, Dev.”
She left the booth as quickly as she’d appeared in it. “I’m meeting Kate for coffee at Starbucks down the street. She’s taking her morning break in about ten minutes.”
Mention of Kate made me think of another staffer, Laura. And her strange breakdown last night. Another secret I didn’t know anything about? What had upset her so much that she couldn’t stop herself from breaking down in front of me?
“Nice that you and Kate get along so well.”
“God, people keep saying that. I guess they expect a catfight or something. But Kate’s been working with us for six years now. We’ve always been good friends.” She glanced at the slender gold watch on her left wrist. “Need to go, Dev. But please try and find out what’s bothering him so much, will you?”
“I sure will, Teresa. You just relax and have a good time with Kate.”
She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek, the touch of her lips and her perfume arousing me instantly.
I had more coffee and tried not to look at the op-ed page again. But of course I did. Maybe I could get the full-mooner who’d written this in a death cage match. We’d raise money for charity and I’d get to kill him legally.
I was about to leave the booth myself when I looked up from my newspaper and saw a familiar dark face. Detective Sayers.
He slid in across from me. “Sun’s out. Glad to see it. You look tired, by the way.”
“I wouldn’t know why. I’m just rereading the op-ed that says my client is a sleazy bum.”
Sayers brushed his chin with a large hand. “And that’s not the only problem you have.”
I didn’t say anything until after he’d ordered coffee and a bagel for himself. “So you brought me more bad news?”
“Not ‘brought you.’ You already had it. You’re too smart not to have figured it out.”
“I’m not sure what we’re talking about here.”
“We’re talking about your man passing out onstage the other night. We’re talking about who put the stuff in his drink. And we’re talking about it probably being an inside job.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning somebody on your own staff.”
I settled back. Whatever energy I’d managed to scrounge up at the gym was waning now. The weariness was back. Not only somebody on our own staff—what about the makeup woman?
“There were a lot of people backstage from four-thirty on. We canvassed everybody. Nobody reported seeing anybody who didn’t belong there.”
He hadn’t taken off his tan Burberry. His brown fedora sat on the edge of the table. “I’d like you to be my point man on the inside.”
“I believe that’s called ‘ratting people out.’”
“TV talk. You need to know who you’re dealing with and so do I. We want the same thing. The bad guy.”
I couldn’t disagree. Whoever had given Warren the drug deserved to be identified and punished. “I’m not going to name any names until I’m positive.”
“Fair enough. I’ve got three other cases I’m working on. I’ll let you figure out who we’re talking about here and then I’ll take over when it’s appropriate.”
“This won’t be f
un.”
“You’re friends with all of them?”
“We don’t hang out together. Not that type of friends. But when you work as closely with people as I do—you want to see them happy. And succeed. You don’t like to think of them as some kind of twisted nut jobs.”
He smiled with big white teeth. “You should have my job. You get used to twisted nut jobs real fast.”
Somebody at headquarters had blown up the op-ed piece to five times its normal size and made obscene comments in the margins. This would have to come down before a visiting reporter saw it. In the old days, Kennedy’s babes and Nixon’s innumerable lapses into insanity would never have been reported. (Thanks to Dr. Henry Strangelove Kissinger, we knew that Nixon prayed in his final days in office and urged Strangelove to do likewise; but why would Strangelove pray—when he was God himself?)
When I walked into the office and closed the door, Warren was swallowing two pills from a small brown prescription bottle. Because we were pros we’d moved past our bitter exchange yesterday. Nothing more needed to be said.
“Xanax.”
“I thought they made you a little fuzzy.”
“Maybe I need to be a little fuzzy.”
“According to the schedule you’ve got four different stops today.”
“Maybe you’d rather I come apart when I’m speaking to people.”
“Pull a Jimmy Swaggart. There’s still time to train that lower lip of yours to quiver the way his did. And then you can start sobbing and go into ‘I have sinned.’”
He fixed me with an angry stare. He was lousy at self-pity, as most arrogant people are. “You don’t give a shit about me personally, do you, Dev?”
I’d been wrong. He was back in his self-pity mode and seemed to have forgotten every single angry word I’d laid on him. He had the enviable ability of forgetting anything too painful to remember.
I gave him the short version. “I give a shit about what you believe politically. You want to accomplish the same things legislatively that I do. In your own patrician way you give a shit about the masses. And so do I, being one of them. But you personally? You told me a lot of lies to get me on board this time, the biggest one being that you were leaving the women alone. And that may not be all of it. I just had coffee with Teresa. She thinks you’re hiding some other deep dark secret.”