Red White and Black and Blue

by Richard Stevenson

  "None that I noticed."

  "Very nice work on somebody's part."

  "Louderbush doesn't know who did it. This appalling packet was sent to him anonymously. Or so he claims. He could be lying. He's an experienced liar."

  "This other hodge-podge of stuff—people you misrepresented yourself to in person supposedly. Can't you backtrack and find out who they talked to about you? It obviously wasn't law enforcement, or you would have heard 207

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  from the feds by now, or at a minimum the attorney general's folks. Impersonating a BBC representative—that's a good one. I'll have to remember that. Can you do Telemundo?"

  "I plan to backtrack, yes, and find out what I can. But now my cover is blown with these people—or some of them. It's hard to tell how many of my misdeeds were gleaned from the hacked phone calls and how many from interviewees ratting me out."

  "Meanwhile, how can I be of assistance?"

  "Can you hack into Louderbush's phone calls?"

  "I can try. It may depend on which phone company he uses."

  "I want to know who he's talked to in the past week and, if possible, what was said."

  "Who he talked to, sure. Otherwise I can only get you voice mails. If you're talking about the next two weeks, I can maybe do better."

  "Do what you can. Thank you."

  A loud bang rattled the house, and then we heard a low whoosh.

  "What's that?"

  "The guy next door works on motor bikes in his yard. I hope he's all right."

  We looked out the window, and the motorbike repairman was fine—and trotting through an open gate and out toward the street.

  I followed Bud down the stairs and out the front door. My car was ablaze, the flames rising high and licking the lower branches of a handsome maple tree, with oily black smoke 208

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  billowing and a frightful stench spreading across the neighborhood.

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  Chapter Twenty-four

  The fire department found it puzzling. They doubted my story about having not tended to a fuel leak, although one fireman complained that Toyota wasn't the brand it once was.

  Anyway, one fireman said, the blaze seemed to have originated in the rear of the car near the gas tank. Two cops came by, acting mildly interested, and when the opinionated fireman told them it looked to him as if it could have been arson, one of the cops said to me, "Do you have any outstanding gambling debts, sir?"

  I called a cab to take me downtown, where I rented another car. Bud had outfitted me with a fresh cell phone, having transferred the memory from my old one. The account holder on the new phone was his cousin Ephram. Bud kept the old phone and said he wanted to run some tests on it.

  I assumed I was being watched—by multiple parties?—but I barged right into McCloskey campaign headquarters, Mr.

  Nonchalant. The multicultural young Phi Beta Kappas in the outer office didn't gasp or even look up, and I could see Dunphy in his office behind his desk.

  "Holy shit, Strachey. Get in here and shut the door."

  "Have you talked to McCloskey about what happened?"

  "He wasn't stunned to hear about it. He had some choice descriptions of you. Loose cannon. Royal fuck up. Goddamn blithering gay caballero. Those are the appellations that are repeatable."

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  "I'm no longer an example of a bygone piece of colorfully beloved Americana?"

  "He didn't mention that this time."

  "Who does he think is behind this?"

  "Merle Ostwind."

  "That nice Republican country club lady? Come on."

  "Not her personally. People who want her elected. Karl Rove? Rupert Murdoch?"

  "So, this is all to protect Louderbush and keep him in the race. Then he trounces Shy in the primary and the freaked-out, mild-mannered New York electorate falls in behind Merle in the general. We're back to that scenario?"

  "Did we ever leave it? If so, I missed that."

  "How adept is Mrs. Ostwind with a gasoline-soaked rag and a match? Somebody just blew up my car."

  He sat up. "No."

  "Over in Pine Hills."

  "Jesus, were you in it?"

  "Do I look charred?"

  "Oh my God. Are the cops on it?"

  "Not in any serious way. Anyway, your name never came up. Or McCloskey's."

  "I don't know what to say. God, I'm so sorry, Don. But I don't get it. If you've already been knocked out of the game by Louderbush's despicable blackmail, why would anybody do such a thing? Could it be something else you're involved in?"

  "I think not something else, no. I assume it's the Serbians again. Whoever they are."

  "More Serbians. Jesus."

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  "So, am I still on your payroll?"

  "I was going to bring that up. Yes and no. Shy thinks we need to put a bit of distance between you and the campaign.

  All this impersonating a federal agent crap and the rest of it has given us all the heebie-jeebies. On the other hand, the senator doesn't want you turning into some embittered ex-employee going off half-cocked. Showing up on 60 Minutes with a paper bag over your head and describing Shy and me as a reeking cesspool of political corruption, et cetera, et cetera. Also, Shy feels that you're the one who enabled Louderbush to blackmail us in the first place, and he'd like to give you the opportunity to get right with the Lord by blackmailing—I use that term facetiously, of course—by blackmailing Louderbush right back. If you can manage it this time."

  "Isn't that how this all started out?"

  "Blackmail isn't the word I would actually have used for threatening to expose a man's sadistic criminal activities. I'd call it law enforcement by other means. Karmic retribution?

  And of course it's all been in the interest of the higher cause of saving New York State from a bunch of Republican idiots."

  "The only way out of this that I can think of is, I take the incriminating material I have on Louderbush and find somebody else to confirm it independently—a Times reporter?

  The National Inquirer?—and then step aside. Louderbush will blame me, of course, and McCloskey will have to disown me—

  your spokesperson will say I approached you guys with this odiferous stuff and you all told me to take a hike."

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  "I couldn't have put it more succinctly. This is exactly the approach we were going to suggest. Indirection. And publicly we disown you as seedy PI scum."

  "Plus, all the risk will be mine."

  "But you'll still be paid. Though from a special fund—an investigative journalism fund set up by a few of Shy's supporters."

  "Oh, it's journalism now."

  "Will the muck you've raked get in the papers? I should certainly hope so."

  I thought, I'm in over my head. It had been a sense of liberal civic duty along with outrage over Louderbush's cruelty along with morbid curiosity along with the need to make a buck along with a comically exaggerated sense of self-importance that had gotten me mixed up in this sociopolitical-twisted-personality phantasmagoria in the first place. But there was still so much I didn't understand about any of it, and it all felt so fraught—would my next car explode with me inside it?—that I considered for about thirty seconds saying to hell with the whole thing.

  Then it hit me that that's exactly what somebody wanted me to do at this point: quit. It felt all of a sudden that from the very beginning, I had reacted exactly the way somebody had wanted me to. The more I got roughed up—but never seriously injured—the m
ore determined I had become, and that suited somebody just fine. Under the guise of warning me off, somebody who knew who I was, was egging me on.

  Somebody wanted an impasse between the McCloskey and Louderbush campaigns—but an impasse that could collapse at 213

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  some third party's whim. A couple of carefully placed phone calls to reporters on spying, dirty tricks and corruption at the McCloskey campaign, along with a couple of carefully placed phone calls to other reporters on Greg Stiver's suicide and Kenyon Louderbush's involvement in it, would tip the election instantly to Merle Ostwind and the Republicans. It was all about timing.

  So partly out of political loyalty, and partly out of a sense of injured pride and the need to get even, and partly out of a need to understand a set of circumstances that I knew was ultimately understandable, and partly out of the conviction that this unknown mendacious third party might also be neutralized or even exposed and sent to jail alongside Bud Giannopolous and me, I decided to stay in it. I now knew that all I had to do was look back at the way I had been manipulated and follow the motives.

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  Chapter Twenty-five

  "What phone are you calling from?" Timmy said. "I almost didn't answer the call."

  "My phone was hacked. That's how my movements were being monitored. I'd tell you or other people where I was or where I was going, and then when I got somewhere I was kept under surveillance—or beat up or my tires slashed. I'm using another phone somebody lent me. So make a note of the number."

  "That's appalling. Is Louderbush behind it? I thought this was the big day. When you met him and convinced him to drop out of the race."

  "I'm at the house. The confrontation with Louderbush didn't go well. What happened was, I tried to blackmail him—

  I'm using the term in the jocular sense the campaign likes to employ—and he blackmailed me right back. Louderbush and his little wifey."

  "What? He threatened to expose you as a homosexual?

  How are you blackmailable?"

  "He knew about Bud."

  He collected his thoughts. "Well. Mister penitentiary-bound Giannopolous."

  "Somebody tipped Louderbush off. Though tipped off may be too limited a term." I described the packet of materials that had been shoved through Louderbush's mail slot. "This stuff was dropped off at his house in Kurtzburg anonymously—or so Louderbush said. We know he lies 215

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  through his teeth. He told me some wild story about being present when Stiver went off the roof at SUNY, and it was all just an accident, and now the assemblyman has put his unfortunate habits behind him, and we should all just leave him alone."

  "Good grief. And his wife was there when he told you this story?"

  "She was aiming a microphone at me apparently. All I had with me was a lethal weapon."

  "Good for you for not using it."

  "So, now I'm semidetached from the campaign and reduced to trying to find somebody else who's unblackmailable to drive Louderbush out of the governor's race, and I have to save my own ass to the extent that I am able. Also, somebody set my car on fire."

  "But not your hair."

  "I'm serious. The car was parked in front of Bud's place in Pine Hills, and while I was inside the Toyota went up in flames."

  I could hear his head wagging. "You should quit."

  "Nope."

  "I'm frightened."

  "So am I."

  "This can't be the Republicans. It's somebody worse. The mob."

  "Not likely, but it could be some Gordon Liddy type on the fringes of the party. A psychotic true believer. If so, it's a psychotic true believer with resources. But I've got resources, too. I've got the goods on Louderbush, and I've got Bud."

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  "Oh, wonderful."

  I told Timmy I'd be in touch but that I might be spending another night away from home.

  "How's your ear doing? And your hickey?"

  "My ear just itches a little, and my hickey is now a pale aquamarine, barely disfiguring at all. When this is over, I want a fresh one, though not from the Serbians."

  "I'm sure you'll be able to find someone in the federal pen at Danbury who can fix you up."

  * * * *

  I called my car insurance company and gave them the info on where the Toyota had been hauled off to. They would receive the police report, and I hoped they didn't deny me coverage on the grounds that my car had been destroyed on account of my unpaid gambling debts. I got Bud on the phone he gave me, which presumably was secure. "Everything okay in Pine Hills?"

  "I have Ephram and a few colleagues in the trade out here, and we're doing some security work on my systems. I got seriously hacked, and now walls are going up. It won't happen again. One of Ephram's more butch pals is down front keeping an eye on the front door. I'm cool. I'm also making some discreet inquiries as to who among the fraternity might have been working on the other side in this—whoever the other side turns out to be."

  "That's exactly what I need to know. Who the other side is."

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  "Let me get back to you on that. We're all dying of curiosity."

  I tracked down Frogman Ying at the state assembly taxation committee.

  "Don Strachey here. We talked the other day about the Greg Stiver memorial scholarship fund?"

  "Yeah. How you doing?"

  "Just checking—did anybody else contact you about the fund? There seems to be some contact-list overlap."

  "Yeah, somebody did. But I said I'd already talked to you."

  "Do you remember who called?"

  "Jim Jameson? Or John?"

  "Right, right. We'll get this straightened out. Sorry to have troubled you."

  "No problem."

  I skipped Millicent Blessing at SUNY; she was probably still waiting for the BBC America crew to show up.

  Melanie Fravel at HCCC answered her own phone.

  "Hi, Ms. Fravel. It's agent Don Strachey. I was in your office yesterday morning about the case involving misuse of assemblymen's names?"

  "Oh, sure. How are you today, Mr. Strachey?"

  "I'm well, thank you. And you?"

  "I'm super. But I hate this cold weather in June."

  "Well, that's the Northeast for you. But if you don't like the weather, wait a day and it'll change."

  She chuckled. "What can I do for you?"

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  had visited you previously about the same case I'm working on. I'm curious. Has he by chance been in contact with you since I came by yesterday?"

  "Funny you should ask. Mr. Jameson hasn't, but another man was here yesterday afternoon only a couple of hours after you left. He was asking the same questions about the same situation, and he was asking about you. He seemed to know you."

  "Hm. What was his name?"

  "Robert Smith."

  "That sounds phony to me."

  "Well, that's what I thought. I have to say, I was suspicious. He said he worked for the federal government, but his badge didn't look anything like yours. And he just didn't inspire the same kind of trust that you do."

  "Can you describe this man?"

  "He could have been Mr. Jameson's cousin. Very sort of Slavic and quite big."

  "Another Serb war criminal?"

  She laughed. "Those are your words, not mine."

  "But well turned out for a Balkan thug?"

  "Well, yes. In a Paulie Walnuts sort
of way."

  "Sorry to have troubled you again. I'm going to get this straightened out if it kills me."

  "I hope you don't have to go that far, ha ha."

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  Chapter Twenty-six

  A mutual friend gave me the name of a lean and hungry able reporter at the Times Union. It wasn't time for any of that yet, but I knew it had to be soon. I was running out of ears, cars, etc.

  I spent the afternoon checking back with people. Janie Insinger and Virgil Jackman were both in good shape, and the McCloskey campaign had pulled back their security for the time being. Neither objected to this; Insinger said Anthony had been doing a running mocking commentary on her relationship with Kevin, and she was "like, getting sick and tired of both of them."

  Dunphy gave me the information on who my new paymaster would be: something called the Fund for Restoring Ethics in Journalism.

  I said, "Is that a joke?"

  He laughed. "Of course it is."

  I made a number of calls in which I impersonated a Louderbush staffer—in for a dime, in for a dollar—and tried to find out if the assemblyman had intervened on behalf of other young male job seekers. "Hello, yes, I'm just following up on Assemblyman Kenyon Louderbush's endorsement of a faculty position applicant at your institution some years ago. The assemblyman wishes to know if everything worked out to the college's satisfaction.... The applicants name? I don't seem to have it here. Oh it was, uh...." I couldn't say it was that 220

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  handsome young fellow with the cracked ribs, so nobody had a clue as to what I was talking about.

  Then Giannopolous called. "I got hold of something you wanted. Louderbush's cell phone contacts over the past two weeks."