Red White and Black and Blue

by Richard Stevenson

  Red White and Black and Blue

  by Richard Stevenson

  Mendelssohn and some Monk. It'll be good for my ear and for my soul to think about anything besides this disgusting case for several hours."

  "Do you want me to come along? I'll be out of the office in an hour."

  "No, I won't be back till tomorrow afternoon, so you might as well hold down the legislative fort and do everything you can to keep the state budget from getting passed for another day."

  "I'll do my level best."

  "But it's safe to go back to the house now. The Serbians are off the case. I talked to Sam Krupa."

  "You actually talked with him? Was it like talking to Richard Nixon himself?"

  "Krupa is less verbose than Nixon and, so far, less obscene. But we'll see how long that lasts. I'm meeting him tomorrow in New York, and he's not going to be happy with my proposal."

  Timmy went back to work, and before I climbed into the rental car again, I phoned my friend at APD. I told him it would be a good idea to get out the files on the Greg Stiver suicide, because I thought the department would soon be reopening the case.

  * * * *

  "Where's your wife?" I asked Louderbush. "She might want to be recording this." "My wife is at Pizza Hut with my daughter Heather's soccer team following their game, which is where I should be and 247

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  where I would certainly prefer to be. I'll be talking things over with Deidre later this evening. Even though the packet you or one of your agents dropped off was addressed to me, she went ahead and opened it and examined its contents before I arrived home."

  "I'll bet you're in Dutch now."

  "In what?"

  "You don't know that colloquialism? She gets the picture that your years of savagery are now known far and wide, and she's ripshit."

  We were seated in Louderbush's district office, a room on the second floor of an old business block on Kurtzburg's Main Street. He was behind his desk, and I was in the constituent's chair facing him. There were the obligatory photos on the wall, framed and signed, with Louderbush and George Pataki, Louderbush and Pat Boone, Louderbush and Sarah Palin. On his desk was a framed family photographic group portrait, tinted.

  "Yes, Deidre is going to need reassurance," he said.

  "Although surely this Krupa character isn't going public with this tired old gossip about me pre-Greg Stiver. It looks as though you've got enough on Krupa and the way he operates—like some scumbag Mafioso—to shut him up."

  "I think so. Though the way we're headed here, it looks as though all three of the gubernatorial candidates are going to have to drop out of the race. Each of you has enough crud on the other two to force everybody out."

  "Well," Louderbush said with a funny look, "everybody or nobody. Since no one of us can put his or her opposition 248

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  research to use without being exposed as one thing or another by both other camps, in a sense we're all back to square one. And that's good. No one will be waging a campaign of personal destruction. The campaign can just be about the issues."

  I sighed and said, "Well, in your case, Mr. Louderbush, it isn't as simple as that."

  He saw it coming and reddened. "Not simple? How so?"

  "I've met Trey Bigelow, and I know about Scott Hemmerer."

  He had the humanity to look cornered. "I... I..."

  "How many others have there been?"

  He thought about that. "No others," he mouthed barely audibly with no conviction at all.

  "And it gets worse," I said.

  He waited.

  "Insurance fraud. Bigelow's health insurance."

  His liar's instincts kicked in. "Well, I'll have to look into that. I hope Trey didn't misunderstand something I said and come up with some fake insurance card or anything like that."

  "He said you gave it to him."

  "Oh no. That kid is so, so troubled. Troubled and treacherous, I now see."

  "How about Hemmerer? I understand he's in the hospital with broken bones."

  He slumped. "Bone. Just one. His ulna, I believe. Scott doesn't look all that fragile. He's actually kind of a rough little bugger. He and Trey must have concocted some insurance 249

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  scam using my name and my state policy. You really have to wonder who's victimizing whom here, wouldn't you say?"

  "Trey Bigelow told me that you got drunk one night and told him you had pushed Greg Stiver off the roof at SUNY.

  You were enraged because Greg told you he'd had enough of you and the beatings, and he was going to break off the relationship. You killed Greg, and you told Trey if he left you, you'd kill him, too."

  Louderbush stood up. He shook his head. He sat down again with a thud. After a moment, he opened a desk drawer, and I pulled my Smith & Wesson out of the shoulder bag and raised it, barrel in the air. But what Louderbush lifted out of the drawer was not a weapon, just a bottle of Cutty Sark.

  "I wasn't able to quit drinking, either," he muttered. He retrieved a plastic cup from a nearby shelf and poured himself a generous half cup. "Care for a shot, Donald?"

  "No."

  He had a healthy snort and then ruminated for a minute or so.

  "You have no proof," he said finally. "Just the word of that fucked up little fairy."

  "Of the murder, no, there's no smoking gun. But the insurance fraud is going to sink your political career. I've already passed that part of it to an investigative reporter. And she'll undoubtedly dredge up most of the rest—the young men, the beatings, the hypocrisy."

  He smirked. "Oh, do you think I've been hypocritical? I've supported civil unions, hate crime laws, equal rights for gays in every case except gay marriage. The marriage thing is 250

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  simply not politically tenable in this district. As far as I'm personally concerned, if homosexuals want to attempt to set up housekeeping and mate like real men and real women, that's up to them."

  "You don't seem to include yourself in the category of homosexual."

  "Of course I don't. Homosexuals are weak. Homosexuals are sick. Homosexuals are people who like to have their teeth kicked out. Do I look like one of those people? Could anybody possibly mistake me for such pathetic scum?"

  He finished off the Cutty Sark in the cup and poured himself another half cup.

  "As I understand it, Mr. Louderbush, you had sex with your male partners before you beat them. You seem actually to be of two minds about homosexuality."

  "If any of these trash you've been talking to asserted that I myself have ever been anally penetrated, they are lying or delusional."

  "No one went into particulars. I didn't ask. I didn't really want to know."

  "So, leave me with just this one shred of self-respect, will you, please?"

  He poured himself another drink, although this time he nearly missed the cup and splashed whiskey on some documents on his desk. He was getting as drunk as he could as fast as he could. Was he then going to kiss me? Punch me in the face?

  I said, "I'm going to go after you on the Stiver death.

  There's a witness who saw two people on the Quad Four roof 251

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  before Greg fell. And if you went into a drunken rage and admitted to Trey Bigelow that you shoved Greg over the edge, you might have admitted the same thing—bragged about it—to other men under similar circumstances. If so, I'm going to find these men and depose them and they are going to form a queue outside the Albany DA's office. You killed a decent, screwed up young gay man with his life ahead of him, and you're not going to get away with it."

  Louderbush stood up and shook his head again over and over. He looked down at the family photo on his
desk, and he began to snuffle. Suddenly he croaked out, "I'm sorry, Deidre, I'm so sorry!"

  He sat down again with a thunk—seemed to collapse into his chair—but before I realized what he was up to, he was up again, fast, turned, and flung open a window behind him and dove into the cool evening air.

  I raced out of the office and down the stairs to Main Street. Cars had stopped, and a few passers-by had already gathered to gawk and exclaim into their cell phones. Heaped on the sidewalk, Louderbush was breathing well enough, but he was still weeping, from physical and all kinds of other deeper pain. One arm was twisted weirdly, and one leg was ominously misshapen, too.

  * * * *

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  Red White and Black and Blue

  by Richard Stevenson

  Chapter Thirty

  Just after two in the morning, I checked into a motel off the Thruway, near Kingston. I was spent, and I was still mad.

  Louderbush had tried to tell the cops I'd pushed him out the window, but three teenagers down on the street had seen him dive out on his own. Also, the cops could smell the whiskey on his breath, and the hospital he was hauled off to would undoubtedly verify that the assemblyman had been inebriated when he fell or jumped from his office window. I told the police I had been interviewing Louderbush for an article in Le Monde when he began acting strangely and then plunged out the window. One cop said, "Some people can't hold their liquor."

  I was back on the road by eight Thursday morning, and just after nine WCBS news radio reported that gubernatorial candidate Kenyon Louderbush was in an upstate hospital recovering from injuries suffered in a fall the night before. No details were yet available, WCBS said, but "unconfirmed reports" had the assemblyman tumbling from a second-story window.

  In another hour I was creeping down FDR Drive in the all-day, all-night rush-hour traffic. I swung off the FDR at ten past ten and found a parking garage on 58th. I told the attendant I'd just be a few hours.

  It was a perfectly lovely June morning in Manhattan. I arrived at the small leafy park at the end of well-appointed 57th Street early and sat on a bench enjoying the view over 253

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  the East River and, beyond that, of ever up-and-coming Queens. I watched the traffic shoving itself across the waltzing tangle of girders of the 59th Street Bridge. Nearby, a couple of moms kept one eye on their Blackberries and another on their tots in the play area, and a woman with what might have been a small squash racket in her hair led around the park a dog that looked like a giraffe wearing a grass skirt.

  Sam Krupa ambled in right on time and sat down next to me.

  "You're the only person in the park seedy-looking enough to be a private detective. You're Strachey?"

  "Yep, I am. And you're the only person in the park sneaky-looking enough to have worked for Nixon's political operation.

  You're Krupa."

  "Sneaky-looking? Nobody except John Ehrlichman ever told me to my face that I looked the part. And that's when I was oh so much younger and oh so much meaner than I am now. I find it hard to believe that anybody would look at Sam Krupa today with Maalox stains on my tie and my cashmere Depends down below and consider me anything but a harmless old pisher, a fucking nobody."

  "That's what I mean by sneaky. Mr. Krupa, you're still somebody. I mean, are you ever. Don't forget, I've seen the e-mails of your conversations with Stanley Weaver and Jay Goshen. And look at this ear of mine that's practically falling off. Hey, fella, you did that. You're...what? In your eighties?

  And when the masters of the universe want the body politic rearranged to their liking, who do they turn to? Sam Krupa.

  Maybe you pee in your pants nowadays—I'll take you at your 254

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  word on that—but you still have the brass and the cojones and the cunning and the ruthlessness to get the filthiest of the filthy political jobs done. So, you aren't going to try to tell me you've mellowed now, are you?"

  He had a surprisingly bland and inexpressive face, and the benign pale eyes gave away nothing. His epiglottis jumped around, though, even when he wasn't speaking, and it seem to be telegraphing something that might have been useful to understand for anybody knowledgeable enough to decode its machinations. I didn't know about his diapers, but otherwise he was dressed like a billion dollars, or at least like a client and probably social friend of a billion dollars, or ten.

  He gargled out what might have been a chuckle. "No, I'm more worn out than I used to be, but I'm no mellower. I still like to kick the bad guys in the balls. Or the side of the head in your case. That's rare for me, though. Always has been, getting physical. I generally aim not for the solar plexus, but for the psyche, the emotional weak spot, the reputation."

  "Like with Eliot Spitzer?"

  He nodded, and the Adam's apple bobbed and weaved.

  "Oh, yeah, those stories."

  "Somebody had to orchestrate his downfall."

  A quizzical look. "Eliot didn't orchestrate it himself? That's how I understood it to happen."

  "He didn't request sleazy PIs like me to follow him around and examine hotel linen with microscopes, and then tip off prosecutors and reporters. Somebody—a particular individual—arranged for those lurid aspects of Spitzer's spectacular ruination."

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  Krupa folded his pink hands over his beautifully tailored little belly. "Yeah, if only I still had the moxie for a move like that. Oh boy." He wasn't about to admit anything to some Albany pol's valet.

  "This time it's not working," I said. "The Serbians were a bad mistake. You thought I was crude and you hired crude people to deal with me, and you got caught at it. And while you've got hacker Todd on your payroll, other people can play that game, too."

  A tight smile. "I wrote the book on political hardball, and now other people have read it. Shouldn't I be collecting royalties?"

  One of the moms had vacated her bench and led her little girl out onto Sutton Place. She was replaced by a middle-age black woman pushing a small white child in a stroller.

  "Where," I asked, "did you get your information about me and how I could be expected to react to the rough stuff? A lot of people in Albany know that about me, I guess."

  He seemed to take pleasure in looking me in the eye and telling me, "A PI here in the city who's much like yourself talked to people in Albany. I'm not sure who they were. But it did come back to me that Shy McCloskey knew what was going on, and he approved. He didn't want you wandering away or getting discouraged. Until, of course, he did. After you became more of a liability than a help, he had a couple of suggestions we gratefully accepted. Shy didn't want anybody to break your legs or what have you. Like a lot of liberals, he's a pacifist. But I'm told he said, why doesn't somebody just blow up Strachey's car? Then maybe you'd go away."

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  How much of this garish scenario was true? I supposed some of it was. Would I ever know for sure how it really happened? Possibly. Did it matter if I knew the truth? With the way things were about to go, not much.

  I said, "I suppose you've heard about Louderbush."

  "That you pushed him out a second-story window last night? I gave you more credit than that. I pegged you for a true professional who'd send him over Niagara Falls with a bag of bricks. Metaphorically speaking, of course."

  "That's in the works. Louderbush is effectively out of the race."

  "There'll be a withdrawal announcement later today, I'm told. Off to Betty Ford to deal with his alcoholism, sorry to disappoint his admirers, full support of his loving family—the whole bag of shtick. Not that you don't have other plans for him, which I'm sure you do."

  "You bet."

  "Bye-bye, Kenyon."

  "And
that leaves McCloskey and Ostwind to duke it out."

  "That seems to be the case. Except, of course, you've got all manner of goddamned crap on us, and we've got all manner of goddamned crap on you. I'm assuming you're here to offer terms for a ceasefire. Am I right? We won't deploy our crap if you don't deploy yours."

  "That's one of the possibilities, but it's not my plan A."

  " Your plan A?" The epiglottis did a merry dance. "Shy McCloskey has entrusted his political future to some shit-ass Albany PI with pizza stains on his jeans and one ear hanging off? I'm as amused as I am amazed."

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  "Why would you be? Merle Ostwind has apparently entrusted her political future and the immediate future of the Republican Party in New York State to a partisan hack from the Nixon era whose only goal is to protect the assets of a class of billionaires with the morals of a pack of hyenas. Or are you not actually here to speak for the Ostwind campaign?"

  "Partisan hack? I take myself far more seriously than that.

  And you should, too, Mister PI Strachey."

  "I'm aware of what the stakes are in all this."

  "Oh, I don't think you do realize. Not at all. To you, it's just about issues or gay marriage or some other sideshow bunch of baloney. To me, it's about the power and the glory and the survival of the United States of America."

  "Glorious banks. Glorious stockbrokers. Glorious hedge fund managers. Why do I have this nagging feeling that that's not what Jefferson and Madison had in mind?"

  A dry chuckle. "Well, I can't argue with a sentimentalist.

  So, what is your Plan A, may I ask? Where do we go from here?"

  "Mr. Krupa, here's the deal," I said. "What I'd like to propose—but I'm not going to—is this: both sides dump all the garbage they've got on the other side in reporters' laps—

  the newspapers would be ecstatic—and let the public make up its mind which political operation is the more revolting. Is it Shy and his seedy characters like myself and Bud Giannopoulis hacking people's phone calls and e-mails and impersonating federal agents? Or is it Todd and your Serbians and no doubt countless others doing the same type of 258