Red White and Black and Blue ds-12

by Richard Stevenson

  "Tom Dunphy said it was for family and professional reasons."

  "That's right. My parents would shit burritos if I did anything to mess up Kenyon Louderbush's chance to win the election. They think he's Jesus Walks on Water, and they don't know about the gay stuff or any of that. Also, at work it would not be appreciated if I got into some political thing.

  That is strictly, like, no way."

  "Where do you work, Janie?"

  "Walmart. I'm an assistant shift supervisor. I keep the associates happy and productive."

  "I see."

  We were seated in a booth at the bar at the Outback Steakhouse not far from the Wolf Road Denny's where I had my late lunch with Virgil Jackman. Insinger had gotten off 35

  Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson work at four, and she was sipping some wacky concoction: half a tumbler of Red Bull, a shot of rum, and a cocktail onion bobbing in it. I was nursing a Sam Adams and eating too many peanuts coated with corn syrup shellac.

  It was hard to imagine Insinger supervising the impoverished geezers and laid-off math teachers at Walmart who wandered the aisles hanging red sale tags of $7.99 on garments sewn on the outskirts of Kunming for twenty-five cents each. With her croaky voice and cuzes and was likes, Insinger seemed like an implausible boss lady at a company famed for both cracking the whip and inspiring near-religious awe in its employees. Her deficiencies may have been compensated for to some extent by her appearance. Insinger was a knockout, both svelte and sweetly busty, with a pert nose, large hazel eyes and a lower lip the size of a kielbasa.

  She was done up in the tart-wear that the young routinely leave home in now, making little distinction between going to work and attending a backroom sex club. It had been a while since I had generated a physical response to a body of the opposite sex, but there was something about Insinger's appearance and her perfume-peony bloom? — that combined to have me shifting in my seat. Until, that is, she opened her mouth again.

  "So I was like, hey, if I can't personally screw over this dickhead senator and keep my job, I can at least make sure somebody else does it. After all, the guy's practically a murderer. Don't you agree?"

  "In a sense, yes, if what you say is true. What is it exactly that you are saying? What did you see and hear that led you to make this accusation?"

  She hesitated. "First, I have to ask you something."

  "Okay."

  "Are you, like, recording this conversation?"

  "No, I'm not."

  "I'm only asking because my boss says to be careful about that type of situation. You can never be sure, she says. You should always just figure that somebody might be wearing a wire."

  "Your boss at Walmart told you this? Or do you also work for the Central Intelligence Agency?"

  "No, of course not. But it could be the government or some lawyer who's gonna sue the company."

  I said, "Even if I was recording our conversation, might that not actually be helpful to you? In case there's any confusion later on about what you said to me."

  Insinger slurped up some of her scarlet refreshment and glanced around the room. No one was seated nearby, and the few people in other booths and at the bar seemed to be taking no notice of us.

  "It's just that…this whole thing is making me kind of nervous. Oh, I know, I know. This was my idea. I was the one who called up. But, like, this guy is a senator. Those people do not appreciate getting screwed over."

  "Assemblymen don't have their own militias or goon squads. I wouldn't worry about that."

  "No, I mean they can just pick up the phone. And then all of a sudden your income tax is overdue or your car insurance is no good. I know a girl who crossed this dude who works for the Albany water department, and now she gets speeding tickets all the time."

  "It's up to you whether or not you want to go ahead with this, Janie. I've already got Virgil's version of events. It would be helpful, though, if you would just confirm or maybe add something to what I've already been told. I understand that you and Virgil were Greg Stiver's neighbors on Allen Street."

  She nodded.

  "And you knew Greg casually?"

  "Yeah."

  "You rode out to SUNY with him twice a week?"

  "Yeah. But wait a minute. I have to ask you something."

  "Go ahead."

  "Did Virgil badmouth me?"

  "No, he spoke of you with tender affection."

  She laughed. "You're a freakin' liar."

  "Okay. He said you left him for a woman, and that you were a lot of trouble."

  "I did not leave him for a woman. I left him because he was always trying to get another guy into bed with us. I did it one time, and then I got creeped out. I think Virgil has some issues he hasn't worked out. Anyway, Lori Wroble is my friend, not my girlfriend."

  "Either would be okay in my book."

  "I've tried gay sex, sure, but something was definitely missing. Not with Lori, I don't mean. I prefer guys, and I 38

  Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson started to wonder if maybe Virgil does too. God, should I be mentioning this?"

  "Up to you. But I'm mainly interested in Greg Stiver and his relationship with Kenyon Louderbush."

  She rolled her eyes. "Now Greg, that poor guy was totally gay. What I didn't get was, a guy that attractive, why didn't he have a nice boyfriend his own age, somebody who treated him with respect? Greg was kind of straight-I don't mean sexually-but very sort of… serious. He was very political.

  Very conservative. He had a lot to say about that stuff if you gave him half a chance. Sometimes in the car I would just, like, tune out. It was blabbedy-blah, blabbedy-blah. Bush was driving the country into an economic ditch. Bush was! And Bush was a Republican! I hate to think what Greg would say about Obama. Oh my God."

  "Apparently it was Louderbush's and Greg's politics that were part of the attraction the two had for each other. Was that your impression?"

  "I guess so. Why else would Greg get involved with an older man? Especially a guy who was married with kids? But it was also, like, low self-esteem. Greg told us about how his dad used to beat on him when he was a kid. And when Mr.

  Louderbush pounded him around, this was just what he was used to and even had it coming. It was really sad. Greg was one mixed-up puppy."

  I asked Insinger about the pattern of abuse as she had heard it through the walls of her adjoining apartment and as Greg had described it to her and Jackman.

  "It was always kind of late," she said. "Virgil and I would be studying or chilling out or whatever, and we'd hear them going at it. Yelling and banging around and breaking stuff.

  Sometimes we talked about going over or even calling the cops. We waited, though-we decided to mind our own business-and then we asked Greg about it one day, and at first he said oh no, nothing was going on, don't get your thong in an uproar. Then later he finally did admit they were fighting, but he told us to never mind, he would be okay. He was afraid of getting Louderbush in trouble, I could tell."

  "Afraid?"

  "Well, yeah. I mean, Louderbush was this extremely successful big hotshot. If Greg ruined his life or told his wife or put it on Facebook or something, who knows what might happen?"

  "Did he say Louderbush threatened him?"

  Insinger picked up a shiny peanut and popped it into her mouth. "No. He never said that straight out." She glanced around the bar, and so did I. Nobody was within earshot of us, and nobody seemed to be paying us any attention.

  "When the two men were yelling at each other, were you ever able to make out anything anyone said?"

  "Hmm. One time somebody screamed, 'You can eat shit!' I think it was Louderbush. It was a lot of that kind of drunk yelling. They'd get liquored up and start in. I have to say, I'm a little surprised Greg didn't defend himself more. Senator Louderbush was big and strong, Greg said, but he was older, too. Virgil asked Greg one time if he ever hit Louderbush back, and Greg just said no, it was a sin to hit a Republican.

&
nbsp; He was being funny, but I think he really was, like, kind of scared to get in this guy's face. Maybe he'd get Greg kicked out of SUNY or his degree would be a blank sheet of paper or something."

  "Did Greg ever talk about taking his own life?"

  Insinger grew thoughtful. "I don't know."

  "I mean to you or Virgil."

  "Sometimes he said he was worn out."

  "Uh-huh."

  "He'd be really, really tired, and he'd have this kind of what's-the-use? attitude. But then a couple of days later he'd be, like, oh-fine. Right before he died, Greg was really down in one of his moods. A total mope-head. But that was mainly because he got turned down by two colleges for teaching jobs. One in Connecticut, one out near Rochester, which was his first choice. He didn't know what he was going to do after he got his master's, and he had these huge student loans. I was a senior then, and I knew how he felt, though this was before Obama fucked up the economy, and five years ago there were still jobs in retailing, thank God. Virgil and I both got jobs right after we graduated and got into management career tracks. Today we'd both be, like, out selling our butts on a street corner in Arbor Hill."

  "Assemblyman Louderbush represents a district near Rochester. Was Greg hoping to live near him?"

  "Oh. He didn't say. But he wouldn't have said anything.

  Not to Virgil and me. He knew we disapproved and that we thought the relationship was self-destructive for Greg."

  I said, "I understand you saw the suicide note."

  "Yeah. It was so sad. I cried. Even Virgil teared up. Mrs.

  Pensivy cried her heart out."

  "The landlady."

  "She lived next door, but she let us in before the cops came. Somebody called her who she knew at SUNY."

  "And the note said-what was it?"

  "'I hurt too much.' So sad, so sad."

  "And you recognized Greg's handwriting?"

  "Yeah."

  "Where had you seen his handwriting before?"

  "Oh, hmm. I guess when he taped a note to our door about rides or whatever."

  "What became of the suicide note?"

  "The cops took it, I guess."

  "How can you be sure that Greg's suicide was directly related to Kenyon Louderbush? It's plain that he was a source of stress and confusion and pain in Greg's life. But it also sounds as if Greg thought that the relationship had some kind of future. Greg's attempt to move to Louderbush's assembly district is an indication of that. You and Virgil told the McCloskey campaign that you thought Louderbush drove Greg to suicide. Wasn't that the term you both used?"

  "Yeah."

  "How could you be so certain?"

  "Well, jeez. I mean, like, if you were involved with a person who was giving you a black eye once or twice a week and making your lip hang off and bleed all over, and you just couldn't help yourself and get away, and you didn't know any other way out, wouldn't you think about just ending it all?

  When life is a living hell, and the person who is making it that way won't back off, it's just what people do sometimes."

  "But is that 'driving' someone to suicide? It's not clear-cut.

  There are alternatives."

  "Well, it's clear enough cut to me. What do you want, for me to draw you a freakin' diagram?"

  Chapter Four

  I thought Jackman and Insinger both might have been right that in a real enough sense Assemblyman Louderbush

  "drove" Greg Stiver to suicide. At a minimum, Louderbush preyed on Stiver's vulnerabilities, cruelly manipulated him psychologically, and treated him sadistically-and illegally. If Jackman's and Insinger's description of events was accurate, Louderbush was a man of despicable character who was unfit for public office, even in a country with traditionally low standards of electability. While the American electorate was often at home with officials who had some outsider-y rough edges-rampant infidelity, expense-account ambiguity, a DUI or two-violently unstable men ordinarily did not receive a pass from voters.

  And yet the situation remained murky. While Virgil Jackman was willing to sign an affidavit attesting to Louderbush's physical abuse and said he would "go on Liz Bishop"-a Schenectady TV news anchor-if asked to do so, Insinger said she wanted her name kept out of it. Her parents would not want her in the public eye in a matter of such heated controversy, and neither would Walmart.

  From the Outback parking lot, I phoned Dunphy.

  "Tom, this may take some time. I'm going to need more to go on than what Jackman and Insinger are offering. They're both credible enough for our purposes, but Insinger doesn't want her name used, and Jackman's family has union ties his dad was an IUE shop steward-and that'll have the 44

  Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson

  Louderbush people yelling foul. I'd like to keep digging and see if I can come up with some other people who will corroborate Insinger's and Jackman's allegations and are willing to do it publicly."

  "Go for it. I told Shy that you were on Louderbush's case, and he is positively thrilled that you're taking this on."

  "Good."

  "He is so disgusted by the abuse story and the suicide of a gay young man that he asked if it might be possible to have Louderbush prosecuted. I'm not sure what the statute of limitations would be on that, but I'm going to have our legal guys and gals look into it."

  "If it's all true, sure."

  "Just work fast. It's three months till the primary, and we're all strapped to the ass of a charging rhinoceros. Our TV ad campaign for the primary launches just after the Fourth of July, and it would be just loverly if we could scrap all that and husband our ever-too-meager resources for the general. Get Louderbush the fuck out of the way, and we can save a pile of dough and sail past Merle into the governor's mansion. Think you can do it, Don? From what I've heard about you, I'm betting you can."

  Dunphy liked to lay it on. "If I can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars in television ad buys," I said, "maybe I should be working on a percentage basis. Twenty-five percent of whatever you would have spent."

  His breathy pause suggested he thought I was serious.

  "That would possibly be against the law, but I'm sure a bonus 45

  Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson above and beyond your reasonable fee might be doable.

  Maybe five K. Or something in that neighborhood."

  "Thanks, but let's see what I come up with."

  "Of course."

  It occurred to me that Dunphy might be recording our conversation. This would have been illegal in itself since Dunphy had not informed me he was doing so. But he had never met me before that day, and he probably didn't fully trust Myron Lipschutz and whoever else in the party had recommended me.

  I said, "Assuming I get the goods on Louderbush's rotten behavior and then you go the media-leak route as opposed to the privately-confront-Louderbush route, I want this to be air-tight. Even cable news will be wary of a story as incendiary as this, so it's essential, I think, that I find more witnesses willing to go public with what they know. In the Spitzer case, how was the initial leak handled?"

  Dunphy hesitated and seemed to be choosing his words carefully, and now I was convinced that our conversation was going straight into a recorder. "Nobody knows for sure exactly how it was done. The guys at the Times and the Post who broke the story aren't talking as to who their sources were.

  But the assumption is that private investigators hired by Sam Krupa, the old GOP dirty tricks guy, followed the gov when he walked into post offices to buy untraceable money orders to pay off his K-an-hour gal-pals. Other operatives bribed hotel workers. They had names and places and dates, and they checked this stuff against the governor's official schedule, and it all jibed. Then they found a prosecutor in Miami who was 46

  Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson eager to make history by busting one of the entrepreneurial gals and offering her a deal if she named the governor. Then Krupa leaked word of the official investigation, and the caped cru
sader's cook was goosed."

  "But there's no official investigation of Louderbush underway," I said. "So the witnesses we offer up have to be a hundred percent credible, and the more of them there are, the better."

  "I agree."

  "So who hired Sam Krupa to bring down Spitzer? The Wall Street guys he'd gone after as AG?"

  "That's the common assumption. Nobody is admitting to it.

  The big bank guys hated him to the depths of their tainted souls. Spitzer inspired such rage in the financial community that any number of those people would have done just about anything to bring about his comeuppance. In the end-an end that gathered itself soon after he took office and then fell upon the governor with the speed of light-in the end, his enemies didn't need hit men or sabotage or the political equivalent of tactical nuclear weapons to finish him off. It was death by floozy, that most commonplace of downfalls. Who would have thought? Who in hell would have thought?"

  "It's a compelling enough story," I said, "but it has something the Louderbush situation lacks so far, and that is direct participants in the misdeeds of the accused who are willing to offer first-hand testimony. Some of Spitzer's call girls and their employers talked in the end, but Greg Stiver is dead and unable to do that. So you'll need more to go on, and that's my job at this point."

  "It is indeed."

  "I'm going to work on this because (a) you are paying me, but also because (b) Louderbush's crime is far worse than Eliot Spitzer's. Hubris and a wayward dick are serious misdemeanors in a political context, but assault is just plain rotten and indefensible. Especially when it's an older person beating on a young and vulnerable person over a period of time. If Louderbush did what Jackman and Insinger claim he did, even if it didn't lead directly to Stiver's suicide, he should be run out of office and maybe, if it's not too late, into jail."