The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear

by Stuart Stevens

  “My position is clear. We cannot sacrifice American values to protect American values. We must defend both.”

  Sandra Juarez jumped in with a follow-up. “Yes, but polls show overwhelming support for the steps Governor George is calling for.”

  “I know the governor’s position,” Hilda Smith interrupted, and her eyes narrowed slightly, her face visibly tightening. “And he is entitled to it. His freedom of speech is protected by the real Bill of Rights, the same Bill of Rights that he seems determined to undermine—”

  “That Sandra bitch doesn’t look so bad,” Tyler said. “I mean, for an old woman.”

  Lisa Henderson stepped forward and took Hilda Smith by the arm. “The vice president is here on personal business. This is not a press conference. Thank you.” She pulled gently on Hilda’s elbow.

  “Why are you refusing to answer the question?” Sandra Juarez demanded.

  The vice president started to turn and follow Lisa, ignoring the shouted questions. But then she stopped, face flushed, eyes flashing.

  “I came here to visit a friend who was wounded in this futile attempt to disrupt our democratic process. The very notion that anyone could even consider holding a press conference in front of a hospital to score political points is barbaric.” She pointed a finger at Armstrong George, who had placidly watched it all unfold. “Ask that man how he could do such a thing.”

  She turned, shaking off Lisa’s hand on her elbow, and disappeared angrily in a scrum of Secret Service agents into the hospital. Her husband followed.

  “God.” I sighed. “That was horrible. ‘Futile attempt to disrupt our democratic process’? This is a convention, not democracy.” I turned around to look at Tyler. “Don’t you think that was horrible?”

  “Depends,” Tyler grunted.

  “Yeah?” I was suddenly hopeful. Maybe I was being too critical. Maybe it wasn’t that bad.

  “If you were for Armstrong George, it was a hell of a thing.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Tyler shrugged. He got up and teetered for a moment on his bad leg. “You ever get to know that son of his?” Tyler asked me.

  I couldn’t get the image of Hilda’s startled look out of my head. “Somerfield? No, not really. Why?” Tyler followed me out of his office and back into the club.

  “He seems to love to get in all the shots.” Tyler slapped me on the back as we moved through the dance floor. “Buck up, Buckaroo.” There seemed to be beautiful women everywhere. How did Tyler get used to this? “She’s weak, admit it. Not just a woman but a weak woman.”

  “Thanks for reminding me. Great.”

  Tyler shrugged. “I’m just a dumb ex-skinhead who manages a tittie bar out here on Airline Highway and has a little muscle-for-hire business on the side. You can’t expect me to understand anything very deep. But you always did think you were smarter than any of us.”

  “Paul told me the same thing,” I admitted. Tyler was smiling. I couldn’t tell if he was smiling at me or at the dancers who swarmed around us, teasing like younger sisters.

  “Look out, girls, here we come. Hey,” Tyler said to one stunning brunette who towered over him, “have a drink. Have a couple of drinks, I get better looking.”

  “Oh, I love you, Tyler, just like you are,” she said, reaching out to brush her hand over his scarred face. For a moment they made a striking tableau, the showgirl beauty and the guy who looked like he’d been dragged behind a car through flames.

  “It’s not such a bad job,” Tyler said to me at the door. “I get by.”

  “You want to come down to the convention, let me know, I’ll get you a floor pass.”

  We looked at each other for a moment, then both laughed.

  “Yeah, right.” Tyler laughed. “Great fucking idea. Maybe I’ll give the keynote or something. ‘My Life as a Misunderstood, Half-Fried Skinhead.’ It’ll bring down the house. I have a dream,” he suddenly shouted. “A dream of quality strippers for all mankind.”

  On the way back to the Windsor Court, just as I turned on Camp, past the waiting homeless sprawled on the sidewalk in front of the Presbyterian Mission, I spotted Tobias Green walking toward his storefront office. I tried to duck, but that’s hard when driving, and Tobias spotted me, and motioned frantically for me to stop. He was so thin and frail he looked like a black scarecrow flapping in the breeze. Except this was August in New Orleans in the hottest summer in a hundred years and there was no wind. I kept driving.

  —

  I got back to the Windsor Court a little after noon. They were waiting for me in Hilda’s suite, Lisa Henderson not even trying to hide that she was furious and Quentin looking remote and calm, like he always did. They had been texting and calling me for the last hour and a half. Lisa made that point as soon as I walked into the room. Hilda was meeting with delegates and wasn’t there, which was a mild blessing.

  “Where have you been?” Lisa demanded.

  “At a strip club, actually. How was the hospital?”

  “You don’t know?” she said, eyes widening, then saw my look. “Of course you know. Funny,” she snapped. “Very funny. That man Armstrong George should be shot.”

  It made sense that Lisa would blame that little horror show on Armstrong George and not Hilda. That was her greatest weakness as a handler. She was too close to Hilda. She’d made the fatal mistake of falling in love with the meat.

  “So you’ve seen it?” Quentin Smith asked. He pointed to the television, where Hilda’s disastrous hospital appearance was playing silently. He was calm, but then he always was, a low southern voice, steady, not particularly friendly or inviting but not openly hostile, either. A voice in control.

  There was Hilda Smith stepping out of her town car and the rush of the reporters. She looked terrible, first startled, then angry. We watched in silence. It was almost pornographic, a political snuff film, horrifying, riveting.

  “Any idea how Armstrong George knew to be at the hospital?” I asked. But I had the awful feeling I knew: Sandra Juarez would have tipped him off so she could have a more dramatic moment. She had probably told them not to tell any other reporters, but they had turned around and screwed her just like she had screwed me. It was all so perfect and predictable. And it was all my damn fault.

  “George was holding a press conference in front of the hospital, attacking Hilda for opposing the national death penalty in his New Bill of Rights, when Hilda showed up,” Lisa said. “He even brought that little shit of a son with him. I hate that twerp.”

  “Why didn’t our advance warn us that George was there?” I asked, more to myself than them.

  “So this is my fucking fault!” Lisa erupted.

  “No,” I said, and the sincerity of my reply seemed to surprise her. She stopped.

  “We didn’t send advance. Hilda wanted it to be personal.” Had Eddie Basha known about the visit, he would have sent advance anyway. But I didn’t tell Eddie and no one else did either. My little game playing had come close to blowing the campaign. Quentin Smith looked at me as if expecting an answer or explanation. His face was worn with long days outside in the winter. He had blond hair, going gray at the temples, and dark eyes. He was a handsome man.

  “We got ambushed,” I said, shrugging.

  “Ambushed or set up?” Lisa Henderson spat out. “Armstrong George had to know we were planning to go by the hospital. Had to.”

  She was right, of course. But there was no way I could come clean. “Why?” I asked.

  Lisa sputtered. “Why? Why? He was waiting for us, that’s why.”

  “He was there,” I said, “yes. But that doesn’t mean anything. He didn’t have to know Hilda was going to the hospital. It’s not such an odd thing for him, holding a press conference at the hospital. This bombing was what he needed. It’s a natural for him.” It sounded good enough that for a moment I wondered if maybe that was actually what had happened. Maybe Sandra hadn’t tipped him off. But I knew. She had to have.

  “It does seem…o
dd,” Quentin Smith spoke up. “To be there at the right time, at the right entrance.” He shrugged.

  “The front door?” I responded sharply, then regretted it. I was crazy to spar with Hilda Smith’s husband. It was the first rule of consulting: never, ever cross the candidate’s spouse. It was always a loser. And though Quentin Smith hung in the background and was rarely seen in public with his wife, he was still a powerful force, a guy who was used to getting his way. It was his money that had guaranteed Hilda Smith’s election as governor, as much as Lisa Henderson and all the Hilda Smith acolytes liked to think otherwise.

  “Sandra Juarez was the worst,” Lisa blurted, then looked at me accusingly.

  Quentin Smith raised an eyebrow.

  I started to say something, then stopped. I wasn’t going to give her that satisfaction.

  “There’s one other thing,” Quentin Smith said finally, after exchanging a look with Lisa.

  “Yes?”

  “The FBI wants to talk to you,” Quentin Smith said.

  —

  They were waiting on the ground floor of the Windsor Court. It was a windowless room that had been taken over by the Secret Service as their command post three weeks before the convention began.

  Ernie Hawkins was hovering outside the presidential suite to lead me to where the FBI was waiting. There was something reassuring about seeing Ernie, but he only grunted in response when I asked him what the hell was going on. Then a gaggle of delegates and a couple of reporters packed into the elevator and immediately pounced with the usual mixture of advice, criticism, and requests for floor passes. Jammed up near the ceiling of the elevator, the six-five Hawkins watched it with a fixed expression that seemed halfway between disgust and amusement.

  “Listen up, J.D.”—a delegate stuck his flushed face inches from mine—“when you needed us we were there, and goddamn it, we need you now. My daughter has been working her ass off for Hilda and that prick Basha won’t even give her a floor pass for one damn evening! For this I raised your ass over fifty thousand? You and I go way back, J.D., and let me tell you, on a strictly personal level, this bothers me no small amount.”

  I couldn’t remember ever seeing the man before in my life.

  “Your daughter is…?”

  “Ricki Simmons. Junior at Stanford.”

  “Right,” I nodded, and found myself wondering if she was good-looking. I’d have to ask Ginny. She might know her. I took a card out of the pocket of my tired sport coat and jotted down her name. “Where’s she staying?”

  Ernie Hawkins looked down at me and winked. He got the joke. The elevator stopped on the lobby floor and everybody got out. Ernie put a key into the control panel and took the elevator down a floor to the basement. This was where the Secret Service had set up one of their command centers. I’d been down here once before, when Ernie and our advance staffer who worked most closely with the Service gave us a walk-through of the hotel set-up. At the end of the long, dim corridor was a secure room they had set up as the emergency fallback in case there was some kind of threat and they were unable to get the VP out. The Secret Service’s first response was always to get the “protectee” out of the area as fast as possible. In any motorcade of black SUVs, a couple of them were filled with a tactical response team, a Service unit that had the job of fighting off any threat and staying behind while the lead agents extricated whomever they were guarding.

  But there was always a fallback plan in case they couldn’t get out. At every stop of anyone high up on the food chain of protection—and a VP was almost as high as it got—a location was picked to use and defend until it was possible to leave. Everybody called it “the Alamo,” as in, “Where’s the Alamo going to be?” The Alamo at the Windsor Court was down the hall, where an agent with an automatic weapon stood almost casually by the door. I nodded, and he waved back.

  Ernie led me inside to one of the command rooms. There was the usual line of radios charging and locked gun racks with automatic weapons and maps of New Orleans on the walls. It smelled like bad coffee and Chinese food. A short man built like a fireplug stepped forward. I’d never seen him before. His black hair was longish in the back, his face framed by sideburns that swept past his ears, pointing to his small mouth. “Joey Francis,” he introduced himself. “I’m the bomb guy.”

  I nodded. There were a couple of other men in the room, one black, one white, both muscular and staring down at their phones. They were doing what you do when you want to listen but don’t want to look like you want to listen. There were metal chairs and desks in the room, and Ernie sat down on the edge of a long table.

  “I was one of these kids, always knew where the best illegal fireworks stands were.” The guy with the Elvis sideburns was talking to me. He had a funny half smile, like he knew some secret that amused him no end. “Loved that shit. M-80s. Cherry bombs. Made my first pipe bomb when I was nine. A piece of lead pipe stuffed with Red Dot shotgun powder, candlewick for a fuse. Tossed it into a gutter on our street, and when it blew it caught the methane gas and every manhole cover up and down the block blew up in the air like big dimes being flipped. That was it. I was hooked.”

  “Quentin”—I stopped, correcting myself—“Mr. Smith said the FBI wanted to talk to me. But you’re with the Service?”

  I saw the black man in the back shake his head slightly, as if this amused him.

  “Nope,” Joey Francis said, putting out his hand. “I work for a living, so that means I’m with the FBI.”

  “Funny,” the white man in the back said, “very funny.” He looked up at me from his phone and shook his head. This didn’t seem to bother Joey Francis.

  “I wanted to ask you, J.D., you have any idea who might have wanted to kill the vice president’s delegates?”

  The question didn’t make sense to me. “Don’t you think if whoever did this was trying to kill a bunch of delegates, they’d be dead? This was psychological warfare, right? Scare people. Freak ’em out.”

  He shook his head as if humoring me. “Fine. I’ll rephrase. Do you know anyone who would want to frighten the vice president’s delegates?”

  “We do that all the time to keep them in line. I have a whole staff dedicated to scaring delegates.”

  He stared at me.

  “You’re wondering how I got this job?” I said. “Either that or why I’m being an asshole.”

  “Both.”

  “I win elections. Beyond that, I have no socially redeeming purpose.”

  “Which means that if you lose—”

  “I’m a loser, yep.”

  “Good to know. Is there some kind of master list of delegates and who they are supporting? Can anybody get that?”

  “No offense, but doesn’t the FBI know these things?” My phone was vibrating constantly. I had already wasted half the day with my brothers, and being in this dark basement talking to a bureaucrat was suddenly seeming like an immense waste of time. I thought I heard one of the two guys in the back chuckle.

  “If you could get us a list, I’d like to match it against the one we have. And a list of where they are staying.”

  “Sure. We have everything from their cell phones and email to underwear sizes. No problem.”

  Joey Francis nodded and looked a little surprised that I was agreeing so easily. But what did I care?

  “Another question,” he said. It drove me crazy when people announced that they were about to say something instead of just saying it. It was a favorite rhetorical device of bureaucrats, as if they were afraid they wouldn’t be understood without a preamble. “Do you think your brother is dangerous?”

  I stared at him. A little river of sweat was starting to run down my back. It was hot down here. The builders had not wasted money on air conditioning for the basement. “Paul?” I asked.

  I could feel my phone vibrating. Why couldn’t people just leave me alone for five minutes? Then I wondered if the president had finally gone ahead with his delayed address and I wanted to get out of this roo
m in a hurry.

  Joey Francis was just smiling at me. I hated how this made me feel, defensive and off-balance. I wasn’t used to this. I was the guy who prided myself on making others feel defensive. I had made a lot of money advising clients how never to be on the defensive. I stepped in closer to Francis.

  “What are you trying to say, Mr. Francis?”

  “You have a reputation of a guy who will do anything to win. You have a brother—half brother—who is—”

  “Crazy,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Extreme. It was suggested that we talk to you about him.”

  “Suggested? By whom?” He just stared at me. “Look, let me explain something about politics. What happened last night was a goddamn disaster for my campaign. Yes, I’m a guy who will do anything to win. I’m that obsessive guy who cares about nothing in the world but my campaign. Would I blow up the other guy’s delegates if I could get away with it? Hell, I’d burn their houses down, kill their spawn, and sow their fields with salt. I’d drop uranium isotopes in their drinking water. I’d do anything possible to help my candidate win. But this bombing was terrible for us.”

  He let me finish, not changing his expression. “Sounds good,” he said, then held out his hand. “Thanks for coming by.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  I left, with a quick nod to Ernie Hawkins.

  —

  In the hallway, I realized my heart was pounding and I’d broken out in flop sweat. I was getting into a service elevator near the kitchen, my standard way of avoiding the crowd in the Windsor Court lobby, when the black agent who had been in the command center stepped into the elevator.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” he said.