Dev Conrad - 03 - Blindside

by Ed Gorman

  Since I’d pretty much passed myself off as a coworker of Nolan’s, the graying doctor’s face tightened in confusion and then suspicion. He wasn’t up for a war. ‘Maybe you’d better leave, Mr Conrad. I appreciate your help.’

  ‘I want to know everything he told you.’

  Even crazed Bryn was an appealing sight in her soft white sweater and jeans, her hair in one of those perfect chignons that upper-class women wear as badges of honor. But crazed she was. Did she really think I would’ve said, ‘You know, Doc, Nolan’s wife was humping the shit out of his best friend.’ Damned unlikely.

  There was nothing to say. I left. I used my cell phone to call Ward’s father and got an answering machine. I left a message and told him to call me no matter what time it was.

  After fifteen minutes in the cove with Lucy and Kathy, I took the elevator to the ground floor. The cafeteria was closed but there were, mercifully, two pots of free coffee. Neither Kathy nor Lucy had wanted any. As I rode back upstairs on the elevator, a cup of coffee in my hand, I started worrying about how we needed to play all this to the press.

  Reporters would soon find out that Nolan had been the disguised man asking the question about prostitutes. They would also soon find out that Nolan hadn’t been at work. Campaigns break people; they’d be wondering where he’d been. I’ve come close myself at times. The days and nights become one and they become endless. You are in a war and the enemy never stops firing. You are constantly backing and filling. And then securing enough ammunition to attack on your own so that the other side spends its time backing and filling.

  When I got to the cove I found Lucy quietly crying and Kathy noshing on one fingernail. I was left with no real idea of what was going on. A private detective had videotaped material destructive to both Ward and Burkhart. Mrs Burkhart and David Nolan had conspired and paid to have it done. The private detective died unexpectedly. Nolan raced to Chicago and found the material he wanted and brought it back here. The idea was to blackmail both candidates. Vengeance on the part of both Mrs Burkhart and David Nolan. And then Jim Waters had stolen the DVD and was going to blackmail them himself. Then Waters was murdered. But who murdered him, and why?

  ‘I wonder what’s taking so long,’ Lucy said.

  ‘You heard what the doctor said, Lucy.’ Kathy laid a sisterly hand on Lucy’s arm. ‘This could take hours.’

  Lucy’s blue eyes shimmered with tears. ‘There’s a chapel on the ground floor. I’ve been to Mass there sometimes. I think I’ll go downstairs and light a candle for him.’

  After she lifted her purse and got to her feet, her gaze came to me and rested there for a time. As if she was trying to deduce something. I couldn’t tell what her eyes were saying. Maybe she was angry; maybe she thought, as I had, that if I hadn’t been chasing Nolan he wouldn’t be on the operating table right now.

  But then her mouth broke into a quick, shy smile and she turned and headed for the elevator.

  Kathy and I sat there without saying anything for a time. The unseen shoes of nurses squeaked down hallways somewhere on this floor. Faint conversations could be heard up at the nurse’s desk. Elevator doors opened without dispatching anybody, then closed.

  Kathy said, ‘You notice he’s not here.’

  ‘Ward?’

  ‘Yes. He’s somewhere with a bimbo and after he’s done he’ll sit up all night trying to figure out how to play this to the press.’

  ‘I was doing that myself.’

  ‘That’s your job. Besides, you haven’t hurt David the way he has. David’s sort of old-fashioned in a nice way. He and Ward would always have it out when Ward started sleeping with staffers. David really hated that.’

  ‘I hadn’t heard about that.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Jeff is compelled to try and get every female staffer into bed. He got me as far as his motel room when we were on the road one night, but I sobered up before we could do the deed. He wouldn’t speak to me for a week or so afterward. The worst part was when one or two of the younger ones fell in love with him. They’d end up crying on David’s shoulder. He didn’t know how to handle it. Who would?’

  I was beginning to understand the breadth of the problem of handling Jeff Ward. So many ways he could be brought down. ‘At least his opening remarks tonight were really strong. Waters could really write.’

  ‘He could before Jeff tried to fire him. Lucy saved him. She started writing all his stuff for him. Turned out she was better at it than Jimmy was. Jeff didn’t know about it.’

  ‘Jimmy seemed bitter when I talked to him.’

  ‘He was. Every time we’d have a conference and Ward would compliment him on how good something was, Jimmy’d look at me. He knew that I knew, that Lucy had confided in me. Plus he resented her for sleeping with Ward.’

  ‘Lucy did?’

  ‘Yes, she used to call me up nights. She was always crying. They’d been sleeping together for a few months before I knew anything about it. She actually asked me if I thought he’d leave his wife for her. I’ve got a little sister who’s naive like that. I wanted to cry myself when she talked that way. I imagine Jimmy did, too. He and Lucy had gone out for so long they’d been talking about moving in together. Then she was in Washington for a couple of weeks and she came back and she was all starry-eyed.’

  Starry-eyed, I thought. What a terrible way to feel when you’re in the clutches of somebody like Jeff Ward. But then I started thinking about Lucy and Jim Waters. If they were intimate then she’d probably known about the DVDs and if she hated Ward for dumping her…

  In my army days I saw a lot of bases and a lot of chapels. Every so often I’d park my lapsed Catholic ass in a small chapel – never a church – and just sit in a pew for fifteen or twenty minutes. I liked the theatricality of Catholicism. The red and green and gold votive lights and the deep dancing shadows they cast on the walls. I liked it especially when the scent of incense was still on the air.

  Now I thought about Erin and how much I loved her and how frightened I was for her. A schoolboy Our Father found its way to my lips.

  At this hour Lucy was alone in the chapel. It was short and narrow. All the lights had been shut off but the doors remained open. There was a single line of pews. She sat in the front row.

  I took a seat in the pew behind her. It was so dark in here the altar was lost in all but rough outline.

  We sat in the sad silence for several minutes. The only sound was that of her occasional sighs. She cleared her throat before she spoke. She didn’t turn around. ‘Any more news on David?’

  ‘Sorry. You know as much as I do.’

  ‘Poor David. He got drunk one night and told me what Jeff and his wife had done.’

  ‘Is that when you knew Jeff wasn’t going to marry you?’

  Her head tilted downward. ‘I guess Kathy told you. It just makes me feel stupid is all, what I did.’

  ‘I’m sorry you were hurt, Lucy.’

  ‘I’m thirty-four years old. Jimmy laughed at me when I told him we were breaking up because of Jeff. He said he knew he was nerdy but at least he wasn’t naive the way I was. I shouldn’t ever have left him.’

  ‘But you went back to him. And he told you about the DVD he’d stolen from David.’ A conjecture, but a reasonable one.

  ‘Jim was going to blackmail them. He wanted me to help him and then we’d run away and get married. He was in love with me; we’d been sleeping together for a long time. I wasn’t sure if I loved him but I liked the idea of getting back at Jeff. But he wouldn’t do it. He got scared. All his big talk and his big plans, but when it came right down to it he wouldn’t do it. He just kept saying we’d go to prison. He got real paranoid. He even managed to get a gun somewhere and kept it in his car.’ I thought of the .38 bullets I’d found in one of his bureau drawers; now I knew where he’d kept the gun. But the police hadn’t found it in his car.

  ‘You wrote his speeches for him.’

  ‘He had some kind of block. He wrote a couple of bad ones and Jef
f started riding him. And that intimidated him. He couldn’t write anymore. I didn’t want to see him get fired. Is that how you figured out how I knew about the DVD?’

  ‘When I found out I started thinking maybe there was a connection. If you were close enough to know about his block, you’d probably be close enough to know about the DVD.’

  After a time, she said, ‘When I was little and my parents got into their fights I’d always run down to the church and sit in the chapel. They had terrible fights. I got so I’d be afraid to go home. But sitting in the chapel with just the candles always helped me. Like nothing could touch me as long as I was there.’ Then: ‘I leaked a lot of stuff to the Burkhart campaign. I really wanted to hurt Jeff. Now I wish I hadn’t done that.’

  So I finally had my spy.

  ‘I hate to say anything at a time like this, Dev – I mean poor David’s being operated on and here I’m worrying about myself – but do you think I’m in any legal trouble?’

  ‘Not if nobody ever finds out. Just about every campaign has a leaker once in a while. You should be fine.’

  ‘But I still feel guilty anyway. I wish I’d been nicer to Jim, too, and I wish I’d never known anything about that DVD. I think I really would’ve gone through with it.’

  ‘Maybe not. Maybe at the last minute you would’ve changed your mind.’

  ‘But I was really tempted.’

  ‘We’re all tempted to do all kinds of things. But we don’t do them. That’s what matters.’

  I put my hand on her shoulder. ‘C’mon, I’ll walk you back to see Kathy. She’s probably worried about you.’

  ‘Sometimes this is all like a dream,’ she said, then stood up and carefully made her way out of the pew. She made a quick sign of the cross, then turned to me and said, ‘Even if we win, I’m going to quit. I can’t take any more of him, Dev. I really can’t.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  In my hotel room I checked my messages and drank a beer. The wind smashed invisible fists against the windows. For a time I thought about Erin, about how much I’d been in love with her and how, as I’d learned talking to her again, at least some of those feelings remained. Her dying seemed impossible. Not in this time continuum, not in this universe. She was too fiercely alive to ever not exist in earthly form. Then I thought of our daughter and what she was going through now. The same fears I had.

  The surgeon had told us that David’s surgery had gone well. The evaluation would continue tomorrow with a neurologist brought in. I’d said my goodnights and come back here.

  I needed to change the subject. Jenny’s cell phone rang several times before she answered. The clamor made me hold the phone away from my ear. Banging band, shouts, laughter, cries.

  No point in trying to recreate the conversation. It was interrupted several times, once by somebody apparently trying to grope her. I had to repeat four times exactly what I wanted her to do. She finally seemed to grasp what I was saying and began to sound suspicious. Or maybe not. Maybe I was imagining it. Hard to say. She was in a club not far from my hotel. But she agreed. Half an hour. The bar downstairs.

  The place was crowded. Another convention, this one of certified public accountants, began in the morning and the early arrivals had decided to throw back a few in the quiet, respectable way one would hope CPAs would conduct themselves. No one had barfed on the bar yet or goosed a waitress or thrown a punch. That might come later, but looking around it seemed unlikely. These guys didn’t even raise their voices when they drank. These people were downright un-American. Or maybe it was simply the fact that a good number of the CPAs were women, almost always a civilizing factor except on the dimmest of American Express cowboys.

  She was twenty minutes late. The male CPAs paused in their quiet conversations to note the fact that a fetching young woman had entered their purview. She’d given up on Goth and now wore an expensive black coat and black heels. She began to take her coat off before she reached my booth, revealing a smart black dress. I wondered if Armani had a line of mourning clothes.

  Only the hair and face were the same, a hint of fashionable street girl and Eastern college coed. The only difference now was the lack of luster in the dark eyes and the grave gray circles beneath them. Her sigh sounded weary when she collapsed into the booth across from me. ‘God, thanks for calling. I just couldn’t seem to leave that place. I hadn’t been there in a long time and all these creeps I used to hang with wouldn’t leave me alone.’

  A waitress appeared. I asked for another Scotch and water. I expected underage Jenny to order Perrier or the like but she said, ‘A glass of merlot, please.’

  The woman, at least as weary as Jenny, glanced at me. I shrugged. ‘I’ll have to see some ID, miss.’

  ‘Oh, sure.’ And from within a shiny black purse slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes, Jenny’s hand secured a red wallet. She flipped it open and offered it up. The waitress’s eyes went from the ID to Jenny and back again. She returned the wallet with a ‘Thank you, miss.’ She took one more look at me, knowing she’d been bullshitted.

  ‘How much did that cost you?’

  ‘It’s a pretty good one. Two hundred and fifty. I haven’t been turned down yet.’ Jenny should have been sounding boastful, insolent, but not tonight. And it was just then that I noticed she’d started biting her lower lip; I also noticed the quick look of apprehension now filling the eyes.

  She knew why I’d asked her to come over here.

  ‘I miss Jim. I even called his number a couple of times today just to hear it ring. Isn’t that crazy? I’m glad they haven’t disconnected it yet.’

  ‘We all do stupid things when we’re suffering. Right after my dad died I used to put on one of his sweaters and pair of shoes and walk around in them all day.’

  ‘That’s pretty sad.’

  ‘I suppose, but at the time it was comforting.’

  The waitress was back with our drinks. As she set Jenny’s drink down, she said, ‘Honey, whatever you paid for that ID, you spent too much. But this is the only drink you’re going to get from me tonight, okay?’

  After she was gone, Jenny said, ‘They never hassle me about it at clubs.’

  ‘They may have paid off the cops and don’t have to worry about it.’

  ‘You’re always so cynical.’

  ‘Practical. That’s how a lot of clubs operate, otherwise they’d be out of business.’

  ‘I thought I looked older, anyway.’

  ‘Not tonight you don’t. You look exhausted – and scared.’

  The last word jolted her. She had been about to raise her glass of merlot but then stopped. ‘I don’t know what I’d be scared about.’

  ‘Sure you do.’

  She gripped her drink hard enough to whiten her knuckles. ‘If you keep looking at me that way I probably will be scared. Are you drunk or something? The only reason I came here was because I thought you’d make me feel better.’

  ‘I’m trying to help you, Jenny. I called our old friend Pierce earlier and he told me something about the night before Waters died.’ I’d had to promise to mail him a hundred-dollar bill in the morning.

  ‘You believe anything that creep has to say? You know what kind of pervert he is.’

  ‘Yeah, I do. I’m not saying he’s a wonderful guy but I believe what he told me.’

  ‘Can’t we talk about something else? I just want to relax. This hasn’t been an easy time for me.’

  ‘Pierce said that the night before Waters was murdered, you and Jim had an argument so loud the other tenants called Pierce and complained. But you told me you hadn’t seen Waters for two days before he died.’

  ‘Did you ever think maybe I forgot? I’m not exactly thinking straight these days, you know?’

  The Jenny I’d first met in Waters’ apartment wouldn’t have whined like this. She would’ve insulted me and smirked. But this was a whipped nineteen-year-old who seemed to have no serious defenses.

  ‘Listen to me, Jenny. I know you killed him
. You may not have wanted to, but there was the gun in his car and you knew about it. You’ll feel better if you tell me about it.’

  ‘God, I can’t believe you’re saying this. Of course I didn’t kill him. I loved him.’

  ‘But he loved Lucy and you knew it. And you’re a woman who gets her way.’

  ‘Oh, I see, I’m some spoiled rich bitch who killed some comic book nerd because he was in love with somebody else. I know what this sounds like but I’m going to say it anyway. I loved him but I always felt I was doing him a favor. I’m not beautiful but I’m pretty good-looking, or at least a lot better-looking than the girls he would’ve been able to get. And he knew it. I scared him. He was afraid I’d dump him, that’s the only reason he started seeing that Lucy. I could’ve had him back any time I wanted him.’ The energy her bragging took impressed me. She was rallying now, the little girl lost behind her mask of arrogance. But it was over quickly enough. ‘I thought you liked me.’

  ‘I do. That’s why I’m trying to help you.’

  ‘By getting me to admit that I killed Jimmy? That’s a real big help.’

  ‘By telling the truth. Maybe one of you got that .38 from his glove compartment and then something happened that neither of you meant to happen. Maybe he was threatening you with it to leave him alone – or maybe you were threatening him with it to take you back.’

  It might have been a gag in a magic act, the way she produced her cell phone. It wasn’t there and then it was there. Where the hell had it come from?

  ‘I want to call my father.’

  ‘You’re not going to talk to me anymore?’

  ‘Not when you talk crazy like this.’

  ‘You know I’m not talking crazy. I don’t believe you killed him intentionally. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt.’