by Ed Gorman
“I know, Warren. But you’re forgetting the other possibility.”
“I won’t be able to eat anything now anyway. Tell me.”
“Maybe the killer couldn’t find the tape in Greaves’s hotel room.”
“So it’s still there.”
“So it’s still there or the police got luckier than the killer and found it.”
“The police.” He’d spoken sharply. We both looked around to see if anybody was listening. The Italian music—Dean Martin, of course—covered a lot of sins. And we had a lot of sins to cover. “The police? And what would they do with it?”
“Hard to say. I don’t know what the protocol is here. Who they turn it over to. Probably the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office.”
“Then what?”
“Then I don’t know. Like I said. But the big thing right now is to find the makeup woman.”
“You have her name?”
“Not really. She made it up. But I may be getting a lead from this store I checked with. I’m pretty sure I’ve got the right neighborhood for her anyway.”
Warren visibly relaxed. “I’m glad you’re handling this, Dev. Sorry I came unglued there.”
“We just have to be careful here, Warren. We could create even more problems for ourselves if we do anything rash.”
“Is there any way the police can link us to Greaves?”
“Depends on what he left behind. Did he keep notes? What’s on his computer? Did he have an appointment book? The paper trail’s going to figure in here. Not just for us but for the killer, too. The luckiest break we could have is if the paper trail leads the police to the right person right away.”
We both passed on the wine. Coffee was what we needed.
He finally did eat his sandwich. I was hungry. I would have eaten half of his if he’d decided to leave it.
“You need to clear your head as much as possible now. And to calm down. No more Xanax, though. You need all the energy you can get. You did well on the radio interview. That’s got a big metro audience. That’ll help. Probably the interview’ll get covered by TV and newspapers. So we’re starting back the right way. We’ve still got the edge in the polls. We can build on that. Heroes don’t last long. The press’ll now be looking for some way to prove he isn’t a hero. This is the fun part for them. Knocking somebody down they enshrined as nobility. Plus, when people start to think about it, what the hell did he do, anyway? He was courteous at best. He walked across the stage and gave you a little assistance. Most people, man or woman, would do that. So what? We’ve got his record to shoot down and we’re doing it with our ads and with you on the stump. Once we get this tape thing under control—and I’m hoping that that’ll be very quickly—we’ll be able to relax a little. But for right now you have to do the old Bill Clinton bit of compartmentalizing. You need to look stronger and tougher than ever, Warren. You need to go out there and start talking about the way we’ve become such an elitist society. That’s your strongest theme. And you’ve got the voting record to back it up.”
He smiled. “I take it that was an official political consultant pep talk?”
But I didn’t smile in return. “I’m just doing my job, Warren.”
CHAPTER 15
I saw a documentary on a political campaign that mentioned everybody, including part-time volunteers, but never said anything about the scheduler. While it may not sound like a difficult job, it is. You not only have to decide—usually with the campaign manager’s input—where the candidate will be in the next forty-eight to fifty-six hours, you have to be ready to make abrupt changes if the waters get dangerous.
Miriam Dobbs is a quiet grandmother who came out of the AFL-CIO political wing back when Walter Reuther was still running things. Ike and Jack Kennedy were presidents then, Elvis was in the army, and a tubby little man named Khrushchev was our country’s main nemesis.
That Miriam was a black woman made her success even more remarkable. She’s the best scheduler I’ve ever worked with. She pays attention to the news. She senses when one event will have to be bumped in favor of another. Today she was working out of our office across town, so we did our work by phone.
“I’m assuming we want max audience to show him off. Strong, sturdy, using his sleeve instead of a tissue when he sneezes.”
She also makes jokes.
“I kind of like the sleeve thing. Distinguishes him from the rest of the pack.”
“I thought he pretty much did that by eating with his hands.”
“You may have a point there, Miriam.”
After a few more gags, we settled into a review of the substitutes she’d come up with. All of them were excellent. All of them would attract the press. The previous appointments had been small towns reached by private plane. We could reschedule those for later. For now the city was where he needed to be.
“There’s also a chance I can get him a good TV interview.”
“Wow. How’d you swing that?”
“My son is a news producer.”
“Nepotism, eh?”
“That sounds dirty.”
“When will we know?”
“I’m hoping by late this afternoon.”
“Let me know, will you?”
“Always.”
My last call from the office was to a friend of mine at one of the big political action committees. PACs have an unseemly reputation, but there are PACs and there are PACs. This one was sponsored by a group of wealthy men who also happened to be hunters. While I’m not much for killing innocent animals, these people were at least enlightened enough to understand the connection between the environment and their favorite sport. We needed some extra money not only for downstate TV but for some massive radio buys the last week before the election.
I sweet-talked my contact there, a soft-spoken young woman named Heather whom I’d dated a few times in Washington. She’d decided that since I was still so hung up on my marriage, being with me was “like being with my brother.” She probably wasn’t far wrong.
“You’re sounding a lot better these days, Dev.”
“Feeling better.”
“Good.” She hesitated. “Now I’m the brokenhearted one.”
“What’s his name? Consider him rubbed out.”
“I committed the single girl’s ultimate sin.”
“Married?”
“Not only married, three kids, too. I really felt like a home wrecker. I kept trying to break it off with him. I really did feel grubby about the whole thing. Finally he broke it off with me. He had the decency to feel guilty about what he was doing to his family. But I still haven’t been able to get over him.”
“I’m sorry, Heather.”
“Well, my luck’s bound to change. I’m sure I’ll meet a closeted gay guy in the next week or so.”
“There you go.”
“Or a wanted fugitive. And speaking of wanted—”
“You could be a disc jockey with segues like that.”
“—you of course want money.”
“Lots of it and fast.”
“What the hell happened to your man the other night?”
“Somebody probably dropped a sedative in his drink.”
“Most likely one of the ladies he’s been seeing on the side all these years.”
“You’re too cynical.”
“You really don’t believe he’s changed, do you?”
“Hope springs eternal.”
“So how much are we talking here, Dev?”
So I told her how much we were talking and I thought she might hang up on me. Luckily all she did was laugh and say, “It’s a good thing we’ve got the same ideas politically.”
“Yes,” I said, “isn’t it, though?”
CHAPTER 16
I was a suburban kid who grabbed every chance possible to get into the city. My main parental warnings fit into two categories: “strangers” and “neighborhoods.” They weren’t mutually exclusive, but the former could be anywhere and the la
tter you had to be lured into. I was on such guard against strangers that I didn’t even trust police officers. I’d learned from many science fiction movies that even city officials could be aliens in disguise, which, when you think about it, just may be true.
On the days I took the bus in, I didn’t see much in the way of neighborhoods. The route was a three-lane nonstop jaunt that wasn’t even long enough to make you sleepy, the way bus trips always seemed to make me. Going in on the train, though, you got to see or at least glimpse a variety of neighborhoods. The rough ones always fascinated me. After all the warnings I’d gotten about them, they held a real interest for me. Scary, for sure. But also intriguing. What were the people like there? If I went in, could I get out alive? And—this was at the age of peak romantic notions—would I find my true love there and then carry her off to the land of three-car families and season tickets for all the Illini football and basketball games?
By now, though, my interest in poor neighborhoods had been trumped by reality. Working for various pols over the years, I’d spent many nights walking streets controlled by gangs and watching the sad, weary working poor try to stave off not only hunger but despair as well. They would listen to us but they wouldn’t believe us. You can only hold out hope so many times.
And now, just as the sun began to slant downward in the cloudy sky, I was back in a place where most of the cars had taped windows and wired-shut doors and at least one tire that was nearly flat. Businesses had barred windows. The houses weren’t much better. Taped windows, sagging doors, frost-staved sidewalks.
I passed three straight blocks of tiny shops so dusty and old they resembled something out of Dickens. Some of them didn’t even identify what they had to offer. I counted four astrology readers on my way in. The taverns were narrow, dark except for the neon signage above the doors and just starting to fill up for the night, men from nearby factories entering in small and hearty groups.
Not even spreading dusk hid the wasteland here. Not even the deepest shadows could lie about the conditions of the houses, the stores, the people. I found the address I was looking for, thanks to the woman from Daily Double Discount. She’d given me the name of a Beth Wells. I slid into an open space along the curb, three car lengths down from where the two-story white house with the slanting side steps sat. I waited twenty minutes before I went up. If she came out I planned to follow her.
While I waited, I saw one of those heartbreaks you want to look away from as soon as you see it—an enormous woman in a cheap gray Goodwill coat came up the sidewalk toward my car, her limp so pronounced that she lurched violently to the left every time she stepped down on her right foot. She must have been three hundred pounds plus and even in the waning light her face showed the claw marks of a vicious skin disease. She kept her eyes downcast. Eye contact for her would be deadly. She wouldn’t want to see people smirking or making disgusted faces at the sight of her. You try to think of lives like hers and they’re incomprehensible. All the pain; life as the alien, the outcast. I wished I still believed in praying. It was all I could think of to offer her.
By this time of day, NPR was doing lighter stuff, which generally didn’t interest me. The jazz station I listened to was doing Dixieland, which didn’t interest me, either. I took these two omens as my call to action.
I’d brought along my Glock. I wasn’t sure why. Security blanket I suppose.
Since the address listed ended in 1/2, I interpreted that as being the upstairs apartment. The wooden stairs were just beginning to gleam with frost as I made my way up them. I listened for any kind of sound. Nothing, neither downstairs nor up. No lights, either. Maybe Beth Wells wasn’t home. I’d decided against calling her in advance. Didn’t want to give her the chance to run away.
At the top of the stairs a voice. Then the door opened. I automatically touched the Glock in my overcoat pocket. And then one of those surprises that is so startling your first impression is that you’re hallucinating. This can’t possibly be. But it is.
He saw me now, too. But I already had the Glock pointed right at his chest. “Back inside.”
“What the fuck is the gun for?” He couldn’t decide whether to be scared or angry. He was a bit of both.
“Back inside, you bastard. I’ll be asking the questions. Not you.”
“What’s wrong, Billy?” a female voice from inside said.
“Shit,” Billy said, “I can’t believe this.”
I marched him back inside. I kept the gun in sight.
The makeup woman said, “Oh God. It’s that guy from the other night.”
“My boss,” Billy said glumly, talking like a ten-year-old who’s been caught stealing apples. “This is so totally fucked I can’t believe it.”
“Turn on a light,” I said.
“God, please put that gun away. I had to live like this all my life with my father. He was always pulling guns on somebody.”
“Lights,” I repeated as I slammed the door shut behind me.
She clicked on a table lamp, bathing a sorry room of secondhand furniture in dusty gold. One of the end tables was missing a leg and supported by a stack of paperbacks. The couch was so swaybacked that a pair of throw pillows had been placed in the middle of it. Otherwise the sitter would sink out of sight forever. The wallpaper was stained grotesquely in the way of an X ray showing large patches of terminal cancer. Welcome home.
“Both of you on the couch.”
“Don’t I get to talk?” Billy whined.
“No. Now both of you on that couch.”
“Or what? You’ll kill us?” the Wells woman said. “I’m so damned sick of all you bullies.” But she went over and sat on her side of the couch as Billy sat on his. Nobody wanted to sit in the middle.
I took the overstuffed chair with the ripped arm. Stuffing the color of urine climbed out of the tear. I opened my coat, set the Glock on the good arm of the chair, and said, “You talk first, Billy. How do you know this woman and what’re you doing here?”
“You’re going to fire me for sure.”
Sometimes his naïveté gave me a migraine. He seemed to live in this dreamworld where no matter how badly you fucked up, people just slapped you on the back and said, “Just try and do better next time, Billy old salt, old pal, okay?”
“You’re already fired.”
Even for somebody who was an old master at looking miserable, Billy gave me a peek at a terror I never want to experience for myself. His dreamworld had gone into nova at last.
“She’s my friend.”
“I’m his lover. He’s just afraid to say it. And he doesn’t have to tell you anything.”
“The way you didn’t have to tell us anything when you dropped that sedative into the senator’s glass the other night?”
“Oh God. I should’ve known you’d accuse me of that. As soon as I heard it on the news, I said to Billy they’d try and put that on me.” The shy, quiet girl who’d applied Warren’s makeup was now street voluble and street tough. “I didn’t have a damned thing to do with it and neither did Billy. Or my father, for that matter. And I never stick up for my father. You can ask Billy if you don’t believe me.”
“Who’s this father you keep talking about?” I said.
“I guess I should tell you now, Dev. Her father is R. D. Greaves.”
“Oh, man, what the hell is going on here, Billy?”
“It’s not as bad as it sounds, Dev. I promise.”
Beth Wells rubbed her fingers against her thumb. “Money. That’s the only thing we were trying to get. I’m a beautician and I do makeup on the side. Billy helps me get hired for political things. He was just afraid of what you’d say if you knew who my father was, so we used a fake name and Billy pretended not to know me.”
“Good old Billy.”
“It’s the truth, Dev. Neither of us had anything to do with putting anything in Nichols’s glass. I swear.”
“It’s the truth,” she said.
“You called Pauline Doyle at the
auditorium and set it all up for Beth,” I said to Billy.
“I thought it was pretty harmless.”
“How long have you two been going out?” I said.
Their gazes met briefly. Billy said, “Since the last election. Her dad approached me back then. He wanted me to spy for him, spy on Warren, I mean. But I wouldn’t do it. That’s how I met Beth.”
What I was thinking about now was the videotape. If my contact with the police had gotten the correct information, no videotape had been found among Greaves’s belongings. Did these two know about the tape?
Beth brought me a glass half full of bourbon with ice cubes. I don’t know what I expected, but the glass was clean and it came complete with a cocktail napkin. I’d marked her as being as uncivilized as her old man, but it wasn’t a good fit. If her story was true, the worst thing she’d done was have Billy get her makeup jobs for politicians.
I could try to be coy or subtle, but I wasn’t in the mood. “Your father contacted me about a videotape.”
“What videotape?” she said.
“Please. I’ve had enough of your bullshit. You know what videotape.”
Long, ragged sigh. “First you accuse me of putting whatever it was in Nichols’s drink. And now you’re accusing me of knowing something about a videotape.”
“R.D. never told us much, Dev. He really didn’t. And I mean about anything. He didn’t trust us, I guess.”
I didn’t want to believe him. But I did.
Billy put a hand on her knee to comfort her.
She slid her hand over his. “He didn’t trust anybody. He was even like that with my mom. After she died, I didn’t want to live there without her. She was my best friend.” Bitterness came into her voice. “He was drunk at her funeral. Made an ass of himself.”
“But you kept up your relationship anyway?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, sounding both bitter and oddly wistful. “And you know what? If you asked me why, I couldn’t tell you. I suppose because he was father and I was daughter and I just followed the script. I just played out the role. Thank God I met Billy.”