by Ed Gorman
“Oh, God, she’s been on my case since she got here the night of the debate. She’s so fucking paranoid.”
“Gosh, I wonder why.”
“You a marriage counselor now, are you, Dev? That’d be funny for a guy who hasn’t had anything but one-night stands for three years.”
“I guess I’m being sanctimonious again, huh?”
“You want to know who called at three A.M.? It was Greaves. He just wanted to make sure I’d be ready with the money. Sweet, huh? Three A.M.”
“I’m sorry that happened to you, Warren. But we both know he’s a creep.”
I went over and got some coffee.
“You read that op-ed piece?”
“Yeah.”
“Damage?”
“You’re doing the radio interview in two hours. Dispute every point in the op-ed. Put it right up his ass.”
“This is raw meat for those talk-radio bastards.”
“Nothing new there. They already hated you. What I want to see is how much mileage Lake gets from the mainstream press. That’s what we have to watch out for.”
Once I was seated, he went over and got coffee for himself. He was careful about how he talked now. “I had this place swept again at seven this morning, but I’m still nervous about talking.”
“Don’t blame you.”
He nodded to a brown leather valise on the table with the fax. He gave me a thumbs-up. Three hundred K.
“I’m still a little worried about afterward, Dev.”
“So am I.” I changed the subject quickly. In case the room was still bugged, I didn’t want to say anything incriminating. “Laura’s having some personal problems.”
He seemed surprised. “That’s very interesting, but what the hell does it have to do with anything this morning?”
It wasn’t the sort of thing I’d usually discuss on the morning I was going to drop off better than a quarter million dollars in cash to a blackmailer, but at least it got us talking about something other than the brown valise and the possibility that Greaves was going to keep on blackmailing us. I’d already ingested half a roll of Turns.
“Thought I’d mention it. I don’t see her around this morning.”
“She’s under a lot of stress. She’s a good woman. She’ll pull out if it, Dev. And now can we talk about something else? Did anything good happen for our campaign today?”
But I wasn’t up for making him feel better. Screw him.
“You go over your notes for the radio interview?”
“Three times. This Mindy Thomas, she’s friendly to us, right?”
“She was last time around. Hard to believe she’d go for Lake, though she didn’t go for our governor candidate last time.”
“He was about as appealing as diarrhea.”
“Be sure and mention that on the air.”
He laughed. “I can’t help it. Even when I’m pissed at you, I laugh at your stupid sarcasm.”
“Oh, I forgot. You want to be universally loved.”
“Am I that bad?”
“How many times have you studied yourself in the mirror today?” His Washington staffers told me he kept a mirror the size of a hardback book in his office drawer. Every major politician is a megalomaniac. There are no exceptions, not even the ones who look like parrots and advocate executing abortion doctors. Maybe they are megalomaniacs in particular. But so are the warm and fuzzy ones that everybody likes because they’re for “the little guy,” a bit of praise that stretches back to at least FDR, who saw just about everybody in America as his personal servant.
“Guess I’ll go to the john,” he said abruptly. He picked up the new Time. “Are we in here this week?”
“Yeah, you’re on the cover and half the magazine is your biography.”
“Someday that’ll be the truth, Dev. You wait and see.”
“You’ll have to share it with Genghis Khan.”
“I’m a lot better looking than he was,” Warren said, trundling off.
CHAPTER 13
Laura got in around ten-thirty. I had the valise with the money pushed under my desk. I was trying to concentrate on a couple of niche print ads—one to labor; one to suburban women—that needed to be FedExed by late this afternoon. Either the copy was perfecto or I was so distracted I couldn’t read English. I signed my name and initials in big looping letters. I even put an exclamation point on them, making the copywriters’ day.
She didn’t say anything. Despite the swank blue dress and the swank moussed hair, the dark circles under her eyes and the heavy, anxious sighs betrayed her agitation and sorrow. Sort of like me in the first months following my divorce.
I spoke first. “Mind if I ask how you’re doing?”
“How the fuck you think I’m doing?”
“I guess that kind of answers it.”
She sat at her desk, sipping coffee and checking her e-mails. I took a couple of inconsequential phone calls.
When I hung up, she said, “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Can I be patronizing and say that I’ve hung from that cross you’re on now?”
“Your divorce?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought I was tougher than this.”
“We all think we’re tougher than this. Even professional wrestlers think they’re tougher than this.”
She giggled. “That was exactly the right thing to say. You are so weird sometimes, Dev, and it’s almost always funny.”
“I never told you I was a professional wrestler?”
“Billy used to brag about how you were a college boxer. And you were in the army, too?”
“Yeah. Did he add that I got my nose broken twice and had to be taken to the hospital once with a concussion?”
“Nah. He didn’t tell me that. Makes a better story without it.”
Then she took a deep breath and sighed it out. “For about forty-two seconds there you had me in a good mood. I think that’s my record for the last twenty-four hours.”
“I went as long as fifty-two seconds in the first month after I got dumped.”
“Now I have a goal to shoot for. And please don’t tell me that I’m going to feel better real, real, real soon. The next fucking person who says that to me is going to get their car blown up.”
“I always figured you for a terrorist.”
“Didn’t you hate all the advice people gave you?”
“I wore those earplugs they wear on aircraft carriers.” And I damned near had, too. Admit that you’ve got a broken heart and suddenly everybody you know turns into a grief counselor. I’m not even sure they mean well. It’s a power position, and any number of them, it seemed to me, enjoyed being condescending.
“Tell me to focus.”
“Focus, Laura.”
“I’ve got so much to do.”
“Focus or I’ll beat the crap out of you. I was a boxer, remember.”
“Yeah, but you got your nose broken twice.”
“And don’t forget the concussion. But I could still whip you.”
“That did it. You scared me straight. Now I’m one hundred percent concentration.”
“Good. So now you’ll shut up so I can concentrate.”
“You sure put in long days,” Laura said.
“The burdens of a role model.”
“I’m going to the little girls’ room and cry my eyes out.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Take plenty of Kleenex.”
“Won’t need it. Plenty of toilet paper there.”
“Ah.”
“I actually thought of calling you in the middle of the night.”
“You know, I still don’t know exactly what you’re talking about here.”
“Someday I’ll be able to tell you.”
“Call me anytime you want to, Laura. You know that.”
She put her hand in mine. “I really did think I was tougher than this.”
“Read Hemingway. He knew we were all cowar
ds in all respects.”
“Maybe I’ll give him a try.”
I was just settling in with my computer when Billy came into the office. “Good morning.” He probably wasn’t going to feel that way when I gave him some bad news. Billy hated to travel.
“We’re having problems in Galesburg,” I said. “Our man there had a heart attack, as you know. That was four days ago. In the interim the place has gone totally to shit. I need you to fly there and see if you can get things straightened out. You can be back on a late plane. We already bought you your ticket. You leave in two hours.”
“Aw, shit, Dev. I’ve got things going on here.”
“I’m sorry, Billy. You’re good at this and you know it. All you have to do is figure out a new organizational chart. The woman who’s number two is afraid to make any changes. You know, she’ll hurt people’s feelings and all that. So you be the bad guy for her.”
“Hell, I could do that over the phone.”
“Yeah, I suppose you could. But I’d rather you go there personally. Make it a little more official.”
“Shit.”
“I think you said that already.”
The sun had turned Chicago into its usual road race. The streets were reasonably clear, tires could get traction, everybody was late or thought they were, and ordinarily calm, respectable drivers had suddenly begun trying out for the Daytona 500.
And what was Chicago without its sirens? Police, ambulance, firefighters. All day, all night in some sections of the city. By the time I reached Greaves’s hotel, I’d been slowed down by two fire trucks and an ambulance.
I knew this was the beginning of Greaves feeding off Warren. Right now I didn’t care. Even if we got a monthlong respite from his greediness, it would be enough to work our way back up in the polls and have a good chance of winning by two or three points. It might not be the win we’d hoped for. But it would be a win. And while I didn’t have much respect for him as a man, Warren and I did share the same view of what had to be done in this grotesquely unjust society the rich and shameless had turned it into since the early 1980s—Bush, Clinton, Bush—time for a serious new start. The only time I’d felt any support for Clinton after the first term was when the other side had tried to impeach him, talk radio’s wet dream. I’d be afraid to impeach just about anybody. Once that door is opened, we’ll become Italy within ten years, insurrections a monthly occurrence in the legislature.
The new siren wasn’t any different from the ones I’d just passed. Not until I got within two blocks of Greaves’s hotel did I see that his block had been cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape and that an ambulance and two police cars were standing in front of the hotel itself.
I knew then. I could have been wrong, of course. But I didn’t think so. A man like Greaves lives the kind of life that was once said of the animal kingdom—short, nasty, and brutish.
I wish I could say something noble here. For whom the bell tolls and all that sort of bullshit. But Greaves was a predator, and we’ve got far too many of them in our society.
I found a parking spot a block and a half away and walked over to the crime scene. I’ve gotten to know a number of cops over the years. We’ve hired some of them to supply security for our various functions. We pay well. And over the years they become sergeants and then detectives. And we can call on them for information.
I didn’t see a single cop I knew in front of the hotel. The first two print reporters were there by now, too. TV couldn’t be far behind. “Hey!” one of the onlookers called. “Who says you can go up there?” And the woman he was with complained, “Who does he think he is?”
I was going to tell her I was Clark Kent, but she probably wouldn’t know who that was.
I walked up to a uniformed woman and said, “My sister’s staying here. I hadn’t heard from her in a couple of days and—”
“Nothing to worry about, sir. This was a man.”
I moved as close as I could get to the ambulance and still be on the public side of the crime scene tape. They brought him down on a gurney. Fortunately, there was enough wind to pick up the sheet over his face. I got a millisecond glimpse of him. It was Greaves all right.
A headache started over my right eye. Stress. Wouldn’t last long. But for the moment it forced me to close my eyes.
My knees are always the first thing to shake when I lose control for a while. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s some kind of memory from my boxing days. My legs were my weakest point. Four, five rounds and they’d start to go on me. That accounted for the concussion that time. I started to fall into him and he did what any boxer would try to do, take my head off. All thanks to my legs. I walked, wobbly, away from the crime scene.
No problem now worrying if Greaves would take the three hundred thousand.
Now we had much bigger problems.
Who had the tape that he was going to sell us?
CHAPTER 14
The smells of corned beef, pizza, burgers with lots of onions—staff and volunteers were eating a late lunch when I got back to headquarters. None of them paid much attention to me. Maybe I didn’t look as mean as I thought. I wanted to smash somebody up, exactly who or why I wasn’t sure. Maybe I wanted to smash myself up. Maybe I’d mishandled this whole Greaves thing. We never like to think that we ourselves screwed something up, but this time maybe it really was me.
Laura was typing rapidly on her computer. Kate and Teresa judged as Warren held up various neckties for them to inspect. Gabe was reading a reference book that had to weigh fifty pounds.
“Tell him to keep the one he’s wearing,” Teresa said of Warren’s tie.
“These others are god-awful,” Kate said.
“This tie gives me bad vibes,” Warren said.
“And he makes fun of astrology,” Teresa said. “Bad vibes.”
Warren knew the significance of me being back here with the valise still in my hand. He was the one who should be Clark Kent now. His eyes could penetrate the leather and tell which it held—the money or the tape.
“You up for a good Italian meatball sandwich?” Warren said to me. I could gauge his anxiety by him suggesting Italian. All the Turns he took a day even for bland food—Italian food meant he was desperate to get out of here. “We can just walk a block over. Won’t need any guards or anything.” Teresa was adamant about keeping his protection. He hated people hovering. It gets tiresome. You have to watch what you say. Bodyguards sell a lot of material to gossip columns.
“Sounds good. Lots of fat and cholesterol and maybe spill some of that sauce on me. What more could a guy ask for?”
Kate laughed. “When you first came in here, I thought you were in a real bad mood. But now that you’re cracking jokes, I know I was wrong.”
Fooled them again.
“You’ve got to talk to the veterans’ group in two hours,” Laura reminded him.
“We’ll be gone thirty, forty minutes at the most. Dev here will see to it that I’m on time.”
“How was the radio interview?”
“One of His Majesty’s finest hours,” Teresa said. “Right, Kate?”
“We were like schoolgirls,” she said, sliding her arm around Teresa’s shoulder, “actually swooning, he was so good.”
“He got through the questions about the debate very well and right up at the top. He spent the rest of the time contrasting his record with Lake’s. You could tell the host was impressed. Off the air she said that he was much better on radio than Lake. She said Lake was too strident for radio. That he came over better on TV, where you could see him, and that helped cut down on what he sounds like.”
“Too bad it isn’t the other way around,” Warren said. “TV is where the big numbers are. A lot more people watch TV than listen to radio at any time.”
Kate said, “Never try to flatter our senator here. He reacts very badly.”
“Thirty or forty minutes or we’ll come and get you, right, Kate?”
“Absolutely.”
Te
n steps from headquarters, Warren said, “Well, did you get it?”
“No, but Greaves did.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means somebody killed him in his hotel room.”
He stopped walking. Stood on the sidewalk, paralyzed. All but the eyes that frogged out a bit. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Just what I said. Now get a grip, Warren. We’re out in public, remember?”
“Somebody fucking murdered him?”
“That’s right.”
“And we don’t know who has the tape now?”
“We don’t know one way or the other. Given Greaves’s background, we can’t be sure that this had anything to do with the tape. There were probably several other people who had reasons to kill him.”
Once we were seated in the restaurant, speaking in lower voices, and after he’d waved to everybody who recognized him and a few who hadn’t, he said, “What the hell are we going to do now? What if Lake has it?”
“I need to find the makeup woman. See what she knows. Maybe she worked with Greaves.”
“And how do you plan to do that, for God’s sake?”
“I’ve seen her. I know who I’m looking for, anyway. There’s at least a chance that she lives somewhere in the neighborhood I was in.”
“Where would you even start?”
“Beauty shops, bars, dry cleaners. Everywhere.”
“I don’t like this.” Petulant.
“Gosh, I’m sorry this is difficult for you, Warren. Myself, I’m having a great time.”
“Don’t mock me.”
“Then quit feeling sorry for yourself.”
“And don’t give me any ‘wages of sin’ bullshit.”
“That’s your trouble, Warren. You think it is bullshit. But it isn’t. You do something you shouldn’t, you always run the risk of getting nailed. It’s pretty simple.”
“Thank you, Professor.” Then: “We have to get that tape.”