She was where I expected her to be: outside by the marsh that had come to define her life and life’s work. When she and her mother and baby Tyler moved into the house, it was on the outskirts of town, by a beautiful marsh. She finished high school with a GED and commuted to LSU while her mother took care of Tyler. She fell in love with a drummer for a band that toured for a while and came back home when her mother was diagnosed with cancer. Bad cancer, ovarian, stage four. She didn’t last long and that left Renee, now all of twenty, with not-a-baby-anymore Tyler. She did a little of this and a little of that until a local fertilizer plant wanted to expand near the house. It was a big, ugly thing spewing all kinds of dubious toxins, and the more enlightened locals united to block it. Four years later, the fertilizer plant was history and Renee had found her calling: she was an environmental activist. In a place like New Iberia, in the petrochemical corridor of south Louisiana, there was always a cause looking to be championed. It was against this perpetual do-goodism that Tyler, no doubt, had rebelled, fleeing to the army, his strange skinhead world, his strip club and security businesses. She had won awards and testified in Baton Rouge a dozen times, gone to D.C. to lobby Congress. It didn’t hurt that she was beautiful and had a charm that I still remembered from when I was a kid.
Renee had contacted me a few times over the years for help on one cause or another. I had tried to open this door, or connect her to that person, and maybe I had helped, but there was always this awkward moment when it came time to describe how I knew Renee Hutchinson. I’d just say, “She’s a friend of the family,” and it always came with that rush of shame.
I was staring out the windshield of the awful toy car lost in the past when there was a tapping on the passenger window. Renee was smiling, her face sweaty, garden shears in one ungloved hand. She was still beautiful.
We sat out on her back porch overlooking the marsh and drank ice tea. “If you want sweet tea, I hope you brought it, since I don’t mess with sugar,” she said, with that same smile that was still so charming. And then she laughed when I pulled out a couple of packets stolen from the Windsor Court. I was planning to work around to Tyler slowly, as if I were just dropping by to see her, but of course she was too smart for that.
“What did he do?” she asked, before I could begin with my little charade. I started to protest but she just shook her head. “It’s one of the busiest days of your life and you drive your cute ass out here to see Renee because you are being a good person and miss her? I love you, J.D., but that’s bullshit and we both know it. You’re here about Tyler. I knew that as soon as I saw you pull up in that silly car. What are you doing in that thing, anyway? It’s what I’d drive.”
“GM gave it to the convention to use.”
“Is it really as bad as everybody says?”
“Horrible. It shakes over sixty-five.”
“So what did he do?” she asked again, with a sigh.
“I don’t know. I’m just trying to find him.”
“He’s not at that horrible club? He almost lives there.”
“No. He left. Where does he live, anyway?” It just occurred to me that Walter should have tracked down where he lived. What kind of cop was he, anyway? And what did it say about me that I hadn’t asked him to check?
“I saw him at the club,” I said. She tilted her head when I said that, surprised. “But when I went back, he was gone.” I shrugged. “I don’t know where he lives or his cell.”
She nodded. “What’s going on, J.D.? Why in the world are you trying to reach Tyler now?”
I had thought about this on the drive and had worked out what I would say. It was along the lines of “I heard he might be in trouble and want to help.” But then I thought about how terrible I’d feel if I ended up being another Callahan lying to her. So I told her everything. Every bit of it. When I finished, she got up, came back with more tea, and sat back down.
“I wanted him to do more therapy, after the accident,” she said. “But he said it made him feel like a coward.”
“A coward.”
“The sessions were mostly combat veterans and he was just a guy who was in an accident. He said he felt like a fake soldier. ‘A fucking fake soldier,’ is how he put it. That club.” She sort of shuddered.
We sat there for a while, listening to the marsh. I’d put my phone on vibrate and I could feel it going crazy, call after call. Renee got up and came back with an address and a telephone number. “That’s the last I had,” she said. “I think it’s still good.”
I stood up and she hugged me and I’d have given anything to have willed away all the pain my father and the world had brought down on her. “Be safe,” she whispered, and kissed me lightly on the cheek. “Be safe, J.D.” She felt my phone vibrating and laughed. “You better go. I bet the whole world is looking for you.”
I laughed and pulled away. “I hate my life,” I said, and I don’t think I’d ever meant anything more.
“Sometimes we do,” she said, “but it’s all we’ve got.”
On the way out, I ducked into the bathroom. It was off her bedroom and filled with pictures of Tyler: baby Tyler, grade-school Tyler, Tyler in Little League, Tyler in the junior high band, Tyler playing guitar in his first rock-and-roll band, Tyler in the military with a few of his buddies. Most of the photos were from before his accident. He had looked so handsome in his uniform. There was one of him and a bunch of buddies when they had finished basic training, laughing it up, proud as can be. I stared at the handsome, unscarred face and wondered if he had any idea then of what the future held, if maybe underneath all that exploding joy there wasn’t just a trace of sadness that hinted at the knowledge that this might be his peak. I looked at the crowd with him. And then I saw him: he was three down from Tyler in a row of sweaty guys in gray T-shirts. It took me a moment to be sure, but there wasn’t any doubt. It was Somerfield George. I took the picture.
—
I followed Ginny as we worked our way through the double levels of security toward the area of the convention floor reserved for the press and campaign trailers. Everywhere you looked there were SWAT team members, FBI, Secret Service, with more automatic weapons than an Arizona gun show. It felt like we were entering a high-tech concentration camp.
“Jesus Christ,” I mumbled, looking around. “This is an Armstrong George wet dream. Forget about closing up the borders, let’s just start right here at the convention.”
“It gets worse inside,” Ginny hissed. “They even strip-searched a couple of alternate delegates.”
“Ours? They strip-searched our goddamn delegates?”
Ginny shrugged. “Alternates.”
About a third of the Superdome floor had been curtained off for the press and campaign trailers. Thick cables snaked across the floor in an electronic maze. This had been one of my longtime concerns, that someone—Armstrong George or someone from the press—would drop a tap into one of the cables from the Hilda Smith trailer. I hated the idea that my cables might be running over Armstrong George’s cables or CNN’s cables.
Everybody thought I was crazy paranoid, and of course they were right. Right now I would have killed for convention spying to be the biggest problem I had. Instead I had one crazy brother beating up on me to extort money for his greater political good, another running a strip club, doing his skinhead thing, with maybe a little bombing on the side, an ex-girlfriend reporter who was on the loose, another reporter who I was crazy enough to sleep with and who now was learning everything about our little family house of horrors—these were real problems.
The Hilda Smith command trailer was a double-wide construction site trailer packed with radios, television monitors, and computers. Eddie Basha was sitting at a computer terminal. “Take a look,” he said right away, passing me a delegate list, then resumed screaming into an iPhone. His olive skin gleamed with a slick layer of sweat even though the trailer’s air conditioner was turned to morgue level.
But I was watching the image of Armstrong Geor
ge on the dozen television screens packed into the trailer. He was standing in front of the entrance to Mardi Gras World. The charred bus had been hauled away. As always, his son, Somerfield, was just behind him. I stared at him, wondering: Do you know where Tyler is? Is Tyler with you? Did you get Tyler to plant those bombs? I turned the sound up.
“The terrible tragedy that occurred here last night is simply more evidence that the social fabric of America is tattered and torn. We cannot let the lawless few continue to rip apart the threads of decency and shared purpose that bind this great nation together. Just yesterday, the president of the United States agreed with me as he called for these criminals to pay the ultimate price.”
“What a pompous asshole,” Eddie said to the screen, meaning Armstrong George, then resumed his harangue into the phone. “You tell your governor that win or lose, Hilda Smith still has six months to go as the second most powerful person in this goddamn country, and there’s a certain investigation by the NCAA into some very suspect recruitment practices of that shit-kicking university your governor loves so much, and if it goes the wrong way, she’ll have the United States Congress looking into it and he’ll be a hundred and one before his team is done being investigated….Am I getting through here, Artie?”
Eddie looked up and shrugged and bore down on the phone. “Well, if you haven’t heard about the investigation, that only proves how fucking serious it is. They always keep the serious stuff really quiet, and you know it. We’re not talking about a slap on the wrist here, Artie. We’re talking the big bullet. Death penalty. No play for years. Disband, got it? Now can we talk about these delegates?”
I wanted to reach through the television and throttle Armstrong George. What made it worse was that I knew just how reasonable and reassuring he appeared. The bombings were like star witnesses that George was putting on the stand to make his case that America needed “serious action for serious times.” And if, God forbid, it turned out that my own brother was involved, it would not only kill Hilda Smith, it would also make J. D. Callahan once again the guy everybody in America could laugh at. This would make getting dumped by Sandra Juarez and walking off Meet the Press look like a mild social faux pas.
I tried to tell myself that it was insane to think that Tyler might have been involved with the bombings. The problem was that it did make some terrible sense. Look at the facts: Tyler had been a skinhead, a group hardly noted for their racial tolerance. He loved explosives and guns—just look at what a blown-up mess he was. He loved Armstrong George, and the son of a bitch had been friends with Somerfield George in the army—something he had never told me about. Why hadn’t he told me when I saw him?
Eddie ended his call and stretched. “Where the hell you been?” he demanded. “I’m so goddamn pissed off I was hoping you did get blown up.”
“NCAA?” I shot back. “That’s a new one. Excellent.”
Eddie allowed himself a slight smile. “What would they do if their football program went belly up? Spend all their time screwing their sisters?”
“I hope you put it to them just like that.”
“It’s not a time for subtlety. We’ve got squirrelly delegates all over the place.” He pointed to the list of delegates in my hand. There were twenty-three names. “We’re moving these to uncommitted.”
Oh, shit. My heart started racing. Every delegate on the list had been listed as a solid Hilda Smith delegate just twelve hours earlier.
“This is death,” I said simply. “Does anybody know this?”
Eddie shrugged. “I’m going by what our whips are telling us for every state. But you know how it is. Every news organization in the world is polling these delegations. Somebody’s going to break a story that our people are going soft. And then…”
“The dam bursts. Jesus.”
From the television monitor, I heard her voice: strong, level, a touch cutting. God, I knew that voice so well.
“Governor Armstrong,” Sandra Juarez shouted, “can you say categorically that your campaign had nothing to do with the recent phone calls attacking Vice President Smith?”
“Yes, I can.” He answered the question head-on, without a trace of defensiveness. It was a pro’s response.
“Can you explain, then,” Sandra Juarez continued, “why it is that the questions for the phone calls were written on stationery of your own Colorado Republican Party?”
Sandra was standing to the side of the half circle of reporters surrounding George. She was so short that she was almost covered by her colleagues. But her voice rang loud and her hand shot up, brandishing a piece of paper.
“No, I have no idea,” Governor George replied, still calm.
“Are you saying that you are unaware of any connection between your campaign and the Colorado Republican Party and these phone calls?”
“Yes.”
Behind George, his aides stirred nervously. Off to the side, alone, as always, his son stared hard at Sandra, as if he might intimidate her into withdrawing the question. Good luck with that, asshole. Other reporters joined in, shouting follow-up questions. Paul Hendricks was the loudest, clearly outraged that Sandra Juarez had hijacked his story. A George press flack stepped forward, cutting off the questions. I felt a tingle of hope return. Maybe this could still work. God bless Sandra, the evil bitch.
“Here’s the draft resolution,” Eddie Basha said, pushing a piece of paper into my hands. The resolution read just like we had discussed, a straightforward denunciation of the bombings.
“But it’s still all about defense. I hate fucking defense. All this does is maybe stop us from losing before we get started. That’s it.”
“We need defense,” Eddie answered tiredly. “That’s the point. Right now, she’s our best offense.” He pointed to the television, where Sandra was still working over Armstrong George. “God help us.”
“This is what we do,” I said, startling Eddie. “We get this resolution passed. Then we follow it up right away with another, condemning the politics of personal destruction. We draft some kind of bullshit code of political ethics and we make a motion for it to be included in the party platform.”
“I like that,” Eddie said immediately. “Try to pump these phone calls up into a bigger deal.”
A large man in a dark suit burst into the trailer. He was overweight, with a broad, bright red face.
“Governor Kowalski,” I said, holding out my hand and trying to look pleased.
The man waved a piece of paper like a sword. “This your idea of a goddamn joke, Callahan? You want me to introduce this resolution? Then what do you want? Me to get down on my knees and kiss Armstrong George’s ass on national television?”
“What don’t you like about it?” I asked evenly.
“Like? Like? What’s to goddamn like? Are we going to fight this guy or roll over and play dead?”
I tried to explain what passed for our strategy: play defense on the first resolution, then introduce a second one about the politics of personal destruction that would make Armstrong George look bad.
The governor of Illinois’s broad Polish face looked as if it were about to explode. “Well, let me tell you something, I’ve been running for office since you were stuffing envelopes, and you win elections by going out and kicking the other guy in the nuts, not standing around with your hands over your crotch so you won’t get hurt when the other son of a bitch kicks you in the balls. You getting my message here, Callahan?”
“Governor, we think that if we can get George on the defensive on this push poll stuff, we can begin to turn this onto character and principle. Tomorrow morning, the vice president is planning a major speech that will directly challenge everything that Armstrong George stands for. We are going to clean his clock, Governor, trust me.”
Lisa Henderson appeared at the door, looking annoyed as always. It was getting crowded. “Am I interrupting an important meeting, Governor?” she asked, clearly irritated that something, anything, was happening and she had not figured out how
to make it about her.
“Lisa,” Governor Kowalski said, “Callahan here was just telling me that the vice president plans a major speech tomorrow. It’s about goddamn time.”
Lisa stared at me furiously.
“And,” the governor continued, “I want you to know and I want the vice president to know that I think this resolution you want me to introduce is a piece of shit. You got it? I’ll do it, because I ain’t running this railroad, and I’ll force my people in line, because that’s how we do things where I grew up, but Jesus fucking Christ, it’s time we started busting some ass and quit apologizing. And this other little thing, this ‘campaign code of ethics,’ I guess it won’t hurt, but for heaven’s sake, what the fuck are we doing showing up at a gunfight with a knife?”
Lisa looked once more at me as I bent my head slightly. Go with me on this, I was desperately trying to plead with her. Just go with me.
“We appreciate your help, Governor,” Lisa finally said with a sigh. “We wouldn’t be here without you, and when Hilda Smith is president, we won’t forget.”
“You’re goddamn right you won’t forget, because I’ll be in your face every fucking day.” He laughed and left the trailer.
“What have you done this time, Callahan?” Lisa turned on me with fury. “I just saw this resolution and I think you’ve lost your mind. Our delegates will never go along with this. It’s an endorsement of Armstrong George. And who the hell are you to think you can do this without the approval of the vice president?”
I went through the strategy once again. When Lisa heard the idea of the campaign ethics resolution, she brightened. “Well, that I do like. These phone calls are unbelievably vicious. This is a huge issue, much bigger than anything else. I just know it. People are outraged.”
Walter Robinson stuck his large head inside the trailer.
“Walter,” I said, “this is Lisa Henderson. The vice president’s chief of staff. Lisa, this is Walter Robinson, the New Orleans Police Department officer who has been very helpful. He liaises with the FBI.”
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