by John Luciew
It took a long time and a lot of alcohol for me to finally bury those questions. I thought I had buried them good and deep. Deep enough so that they’d never find me again.
But more than two decades later, they were coming back.
It was all coming back.
Chapter 50
It was snowing the day Clayton Stanhope killed himself. That I do recall. It was either January or February. I can’t remember which. The exact date was just another of the things I had blocked out. But the year… The year was 1980.
The Capitol pressroom was packed. Everyone was there for this one -- reporters, photographers, TV. This was going to be the grand spectacle. The day the disgraced politician-turned convicted felon finally came clean. It was a day for mea culpas and resignations. It was the day that Stanhope would have to swallow his vow, made early in the scandal and repeated often, that he’d never resign. It was time for him to be proven wrong, and for the press -- for me -- to be proven right.
It was hot in that room. I remember that, too. Those old boilers at the Capitol really churned out the heat. They could never properly regulate the temperature in the cavernous Capitol. Workers in one wing would be suffering from frostbite, while those in another section would be sweating in a sauna. Sometimes, it got so hot, staffers threw open their office windows in the dead of winter. So much for the energy conservation movement.
There were no windows in the pressroom, and we were all roasting that day. The pack was restless. The extreme heat only worsened our mood. What’s more, Stan was late. He was making us wait. It was just another thing we’d take out on him when we hurled our questions and fried his ass. We’d make him pay, all right.
* * *
Stanhope finally arrived. He was alone. No aides, no staff. Just Stan with his briefcase, walking to the podium in front of the pressroom.
He rested his briefcase on a table beside the lectern. I remember it looking pretty tattered. The leather was old and dry, and the edges of the case were badly scuffed. Stan opened it and removed his speech. But he never closed the lid. I thought nothing of this at the time. I had no idea there could be something else inside.
Stanhope’s speech was terrible, absolutely nothing that the media pack wanted to hear. It was long and rambling. It was angry, accusing and defiant. Worst of all, it was ungraceful.
The media would tolerate protestations of innocence before and during a trial. But not after so convincing a guilty verdict. Appeals were okay, as long as they stuck to narrow points of law and subtle nuisances of the judicial process. But Stanhope was making broad claims of innocence. The disgraced Democrat was hurling accusations at everyone from the U.S. Attorney General to the Republican governor. He was heaping guilt upon a broken criminal justice system that coerced corrupt businessmen to concoct stories that brought down a powerful politician -- all in return for kid-glove treatment and abbreviated sentences. Worst of all, Stan was pointing a finger at the media that had accused him.
In short, Clayton Stanhope was finding fault with everyone but himself. And that just wouldn’t do. The press had gathered to cover a corrupt politician receiving his long overdue comeuppance. This was the time for tearful apologies to cheated constituents and the public Stanhope knowingly deceived. It was a moment to humbly beg forgiveness for breaking the sacred bonds of the public trust. The pack wanted -- needed -- to see him crack. It wanted to record every last sniveling sob when he broke down.
But Clayton Stanhope wasn’t playing along. Instead, he forced the pack to sit through a long-winded, self-serving diatribe in a stifling pressroom. He made the media remain mute as he threw accusations back in their faces -- my face. But we’d get our turn soon enough. Eventually, he’d have to finish. Then we’d aim our questions at him like automatic gunfire. We’d rip into him with the facts. We’d tear him down with the truth. And we’d pry an apology out of him, one way or another.
Or would we?
“For the petty among you, this will be proof of my guilt,” Clayton Stanhope was saying. His fleshy face was flushed red and he was sweating profusely. As soon as he wiped his brow with a soggy handkerchief, more shiny beads would run down from underneath his receding hairline. His entire face seemed to glare in the harsh TV lights.
“For those who only see the obvious, this will be the sensational end of a sensational story. For you, it will silence questions and bury facts. But for the people who want to find the truth. For those who want to tell the real story, a story even bigger than what will happen today, this will be just the beginning. It will be seen as pure gesture. A cry for true justice. A plea of hope for a future in which this can never, ever happen again to an innocent man.”
I must have been looking at my notebook at the time. Perhaps, I was writing something down. Or maybe I just couldn’t watch this pathetic exercise anymore. Whatever the case, I had missed something. Because the next thing I knew, people in the press pool were yelling.
“No, Stan, no! Don’t do it!”
Some reporters were even leaving their seats, beginning to back away. A TV reporter fell over a chair. Another blow-dried TV bimbo, wobbly on her high heels, sprang up to flee.
Then I saw Brandon O’Connell moving up from my right. He was the only journalist going in the opposite direction -- toward Stanhope. O’Connell’s big, bulky camera was heaped on his shoulders. It was rolling, and it was trained on Stanhope.
I looked to the podium, but all I could see was the gun. It was small and compact, yet powerful-looking. It was Stan’s prized Webley revolver.
He’d show it to anyone who came to his office. The artifact dated to 1887 but still worked like a Swiss watch. That’s what he always said.
“It still fires a big wad of lead,” he’d say. “The bullets don’t travel real fast, and the gun’s not all that accurate. But the .455 Webley Mark I is a real man-stopper.”
I had those words a dozen times, back when Stan and I were on better terms and I wasn’t writing stories accusing him of taking bribes and kickbacks. But the gun had looked so much smaller then, safe and non-threatening under glass in Stan’s office. Now that it was in Stan’s sweaty palm, the revolver appeared downright lethal. Stan waved it in the air and held out his other hand for people to stop, just stop.
“You don’t want to leave,” he shouted. “Not yet.”
* * *
The barrel of the gun looked at me. Its opening seemed so big, like a yawning mouth or a black, lifeless eye. If Clayton Stanhope was about to start firing rounds at his accusers, I was sure I’d be first. I was right up front. I hadn’t moved. And my byline had started it all.
Then Stan moved the gun until it was level with his chest, the barrel pointing at the ceiling.
“I stand before you an innocent man prepared to make a statement,” he said.
The sweat was just pouring off him now. His eyes were wild as they darted around the room. He was watching to make sure his words were being recorded. But he also was checking for anyone who’d try to stop him.
“It’s the most powerful statement I can make.” His voice wavered, but his gun hand was steady. “At long last, I can really speak out.”
Stanhope seemed to break with himself then. His inner-self became detached from the crazed man brandishing a gun in the middle of a press conference. His demeanor lost the jittery nervousness that had animated his every word and gesture throughout his rambling speech. He became calm. Even his breathing seemed easier, no longer rushed and windy, like before.
What happened next was one, fluid motion taking place in a haze of disbelief. Stanhope kept his eyes locked on the cameras as he moved the gun’s barrel into his mouth. Without so much as a blink, he squeezed the trigger, sending that large, lead bullet through his brain.
His head jerked back and there was a spray of red. His body crashed down on its buttocks. It was as if Stan had attempted to sit down and someone had pulled away the chair. His torso fell backwards, his back ending up propped against an old oak desk. In
that position, his body was seated upright, his head leaning forward and blood pouring from his nose and mouth.
It was as if someone had turned on a faucet inside Stan’s head. His white shirt was a river of red. A pool of it grew ever larger on the wood floor in front of him.
Stan’s eyes remained open. His mouth was a glistening, red “O.” And the expression on his face was morbidly comic.
The oak-paneled room still seemed to be ringing with the sound of the shot. The smell of cordite lingered in the hot, languid air. I heard the whirl of Brandon O’Connell’s camera. He kept rolling even as Clayton Stanhope’s life’s blood spewed from his mouth.
Then someone yelled, “Call an ambulance.” But there was no sense of urgency in the man’s voice. It was as if the command were merely perfunctory. Just something that should be said in such situations.
Everyone in that room knew Clayton Stanhope was beyond the help of any ambulance, any doctor, any hospital. He was dead. And I, as much as anyone or anything else, had killed him.
At least Stan had kept his vow. He never did resign.
Chapter 51
Dusk was falling as Buzz drove us to my house, where I would unearth my files in the Clayton Stanhope case. Our mission was slowed by a traffic jam on Second Street. A car trying to make a sharp turn on the slippery roadway had taken out a utility pole and an electric transformer. Seeking to avoid the tie-up, Buzz cut the wrong-way down a one-way alley, finally reaching my place on Cumberland Street.
We entered, and I flicked on the light. Nothing happened. I looked out at the dark houses across the street. “Electric’s out,” I said.
“Got flashlights?” Buzz asked.
“I don’t know where Maggie keeps them.”
Buzz turned for the door. “I have some in the car.”
He returned with two long, metal flashlights, and we headed for the basement.
The cellar was dank and musty. Buzz and I swept the flashlights across the cluttered room. The beams illuminated dust particles settling in the air. The place was a depressing repository for Maggie’s many purchases over the years. All those items that once struck Mother’s fancy had ended up down here, discarded and abandoned. It was a sad museum of where our money had gone. The items collected dust, just as the debt they generated still compounded interest.
In the far corner, beyond the hulking, inefficient furnace, was the old television box where I’d buried my career. At the very bottom was the story that both minted me a rising star at the Capitol, then brought it all crashing down.
I shined my flashlight to our destination. “Over there,” I said. “Just be careful. Watch your step.”
“Got enough shit down here, Tellis?”
“Talk to my mother.”
The old TV box contained various momentos from my decades in journalism. There were plaques and framed certificates commemorating the honors and awards I had won in my early, ambitious days. There were yellowing copies of old front pages with my byline beneath bold, important headlines. And at the very bottom, there were the many files on Clayton Stanhope. They chronicled his life, his purported crimes and his untimely death. I began paging through the musty records.
“So all five of you covered the Stanhope story?” Buzz said. “You, Dykstra, Bressenhan, Moore and O’Connell?”
“Uh-ha. Just about every reporter working in the Capitol back then covered it, one way or another.”
“Yeah, but why target the five of you?”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “O’Connell’s easy. He videotaped the whole thing. He was the only one who got footage of the entire suicide, from start to finish. He said later that he never even thought about stopping. Said he was waiting for Stan to cry, to break down. That was the money shot. It’s what we were all waiting for.”
“Only Stanhope had other ideas,” Buzz put in.
I nodded. “O’Connell earned a measure of macabre notoriety for his tape. Seems fans really liked it when O’Connell zoomed in on Stan’s face right after the shooting and the blood’s streaming out of his nose and mouth. In cyberspace, Stan’s known as everyone’s favorite blood-gushing suicide victim. They give him kudos for being memorable, all courtesy of O’Connell’s camera work.”
I fingered through another thick folder from the past.
“Bressenhan’s another one that’s pretty easy to figure,” I continued. “After the suicide, Stanhope received a tremendous amount of public sympathy and support. There was a backlash against the U.S. Attorney, the federal prosecutors, not to mention the press. Up in Coudersport, Stanhope’s hometown, they held a day honoring the guy and the whole town turned out. They were even talking about erecting a statue of the guy, for crissakes. Meanwhile, Stanhope’s attorney was pressing his appeal, even though his client’s dead and the whole case is moot. Even the governor, who hated Stan’s guts, was talking about what a tragic loss it was. Everyone’s turning tail, right? But amid all this hand-wringing and second-guessing and fitting Stanhope for sainthood, Bressenhan writes this column, a real hard-edged screed. I mean, he lays into everybody. He asks what the hell’s going on. Where’s everyone’s spine? Bressenhan even takes the widow to task for her eulogy that practically nominated Stan for sainthood. He lays it out that this guy was a criminal who subjected us all -- his loved ones and his accusers, alike -- to one last ghastly, hostile act. His suicide. And here we all are, letting him get away with it. Making him out to be some martyr. A misunderstood hero. When all this guy really was, was a corrupt politician who stole from us, then made us all suffer by watching his last brutal, despicable act. It was a brilliant piece of writing. And it really turned the tide. People took a second look at what was going on. The federal judge slammed the door on the appeal. And Stan’s death became little more than a grisly footnote in Pennsylvania political history.”
I rifled through more old papers.
“And the others?” Buzz asked.
“Eddie Moore covered the appeals process. The case had some real momentum there for a while. Stanhope’s lawyer was really pressing it, like I said. The lawyer seemed to have a real shot of getting the judge to vacate the verdict, clearing Stan’s name. But after Bressenhan’s column, the judge finally sobered up and declared the whole case moot. He ruled that Stanhope waived his right to appeal when he pulled the trigger and blew his brains out. So Eddie Moore, he just leaves it at that. He coulda kept the drumbeat going if he wanted. But he let it rest. The story just sort of died. Stan didn’t get his final wish for justice. Guess you could say he died in vain.”
“Least he got out of going to prison for the rest of his life,” Buzz pointed out. “I still say he got the better end of the deal. What about Dykstra?”
I looked up from the box. Buzz was holding up a flashlight so I could see the box’s contents. He moved the beam to my face. “Hey, put that down.” I held out a hand to block the glare.
“Sorry. Anything yet?”
“Lots a shit. Just not the will.”
“Looks like your filing system’s worse than mine.”
“Guess I never thought I’d be going through this stuff again. Don’t even know why I kept it, really.”
Buzz shrugged. “Maybe deep down, you knew it wasn’t over. So why Dykstra?”
“He was a little harder to figure. He was just starting out in the business. Back then, his byline had no sway. He was stringing for a chain of small papers, weeklies mostly. Then I remembered that one of his papers was up in Wellsboro. You’ll remember that Gov. Lester Mackey also hailed from Wellsboro.”
“And the governor hated Stanhope,” Buzz put in.
I nodded. “Lots of people say it was Mackey who blocked Stanhope’s family from collecting on his state pension. Between his time in the state House and Senate, and his one-and-a-half terms as treasurer, Stan had twenty-plus years in. The lump sum pay out on his pension would have been close to a million, even back then. And Stanhope’s crafty lawyer had a good shot at parsing the law once a
gain. The state statutes are pretty clear. A public official forfeits his pension upon being convicted or pleading guilty to any crime related to his office. But the lawyer argued that Stanhope was never really convicted since he was never sentenced. He claimed the jury’s verdict was merely an expression of opinion that was never legally acted upon, since Stanhope wasn’t sentenced. Never mind that it was Stanhope’s own suicide that prevented this from happening, the lawyer maintained his client was never judged guilty by the court. It was a technicality, sure. But if the pension board bought it, Stanhope’s family would have gotten the money. Word was, Mackey called in a few favors to make sure the pension vote went his way. And the Wellsboro paper was right on board supporting the hometown governor. None other than Wayne Dykstra wrote the story about how Stanhope and his lawyers were trying to cheat the people once again. First the bribes and the kickbacks, and now the foul-smelling play to have a convicted felon collect on a million-dollar pension. By the time Dykstra was done, you’d of thought Stanhope’s family was trying to rob the state. The pension board’s final vote wasn’t even close. No money.”
I returned my attention to the box.
“And you?” Buzz asked. “You started it all, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I started it. And now someone else is trying to finish it. We have to find out who.”
Just then, I pulled a yellowed copy of Clayton Stanhope’s last will and testament from the box and held it up to the light.
“Maybe this will help,” I said.
The document was thick with the stilted language of the law. Lots of whereases and wherefores. But my eyes kept scanning page after page, and my finger ran down the long columns listing the items Stanhope bequeathed to his loved ones. Eventually, it stopped on an item listed as, “Webley Mark I .455 Revolver.”