Red White and Black and Blue ds-12

by Richard Stevenson

  "You know, of course, that Louderbush is now running for governor in the Democratic primary."

  "Oh yes. I know that. Who doesn't? And it occurs to me that that's the reason you're here. Am I right, Donald?"

  "You are. Kenyon Louderbush is not morally fit for the governorship. He's not fit for the State Assembly either, but if all the assemblymen unfit to serve suddenly vacated the Capitol, it would be a thinly populated institution."

  She gave me an I-should-have-seen-this-coming look. "So, which side are you digging up dirt for? McCloskey, I'll bet."

  "Does that matter? What counts is that Louderbush is forced out of the race and never gets to be governor."

  "You know, after Greg died I almost went to the police about Kenyon. I truly believed that Greg's death was legally a form of manslaughter. That Kenyon had somehow driven Greg to take his own life. But I was so upset over the whole depressing mess that I was just paralyzed for a while. I stayed out of school for two terrible weeks and barely got out of bed. The only reason I eventually got my act together was, I was terrified I'd be fired. And with all my student loans I just couldn't afford to lose my job here. Also, I missed my kids. So I came back to school and just concentrated on saving my teaching career. And time went by, and I got distracted by one thing or another, and I never did turn Kenyon in. But I felt I had to do something. So instead I wrote Kenyon a letter."

  "What did you say in the letter?"

  "I told him he was cruel and heartless and psychologically disturbed, and that I blamed him for Greg's death, and I knew that someday his bad karma would catch up with him and he would pay for all the suffering and pain he had caused."

  "You sent this letter to Louderbush's office?"

  "Yes, I did. I didn't care who saw it."

  "Did he reply?"

  She shook her head and laughed once. "Well, I think he did."

  "What do you mean?"

  "It wasn't until about a month later that I received a plain envelope at my apartment mailbox with no return address.

  Inside the envelope was a one-page letter that had been typed on a word processor and wasn't signed. The writer was careful not to reveal anything about his identity, but it was obviously from Kenyon. He said I didn't understand his relationship with Greg, and if I did I would not be so judgmental. He said he and Greg had loved and needed each other, and they had been planning to find a way to control their own worst impulses-that was the term he used-and make a life together. I thought, a life together? The man was delusional. He was married with children and was a family-values conservative in the Legislature. He might have convinced Greg that they had some kind of future, and he might even have believed it himself at some level. But I thought it was a sick joke."

  "Did you tell him that?"

  "No. I was thoroughly disgusted, and I just decided to move on. I have to say, I rarely thought of Kenyon until I saw that he was running for governor. That's when it all came flooding back-Greg and Kenyon and the violence and the suicide-and I was sick in my soul all over again. I thought, I can't let this go. I have to do something. So I called the Republicans and told them about Greg and about Kenyon."

  "You called the Ostwind campaign? When was this?"

  "Back in January, right after New Year's. It never occurred to me that they wouldn't take me seriously, but that's exactly what happened. A woman called me-Meg-something-and 90

  Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson she said it wasn't right for the campaign to be prying into their opponents' personal lives. She asked me what proof I had of an abusive relationship. I said I believed what Greg had told me, but on top of that I only had the typed letter from Kenyon that wasn't signed and could have been written by anybody. When I told her this, she said I had better forget the whole thing. She said it was hearsay. That was her word: hearsay."

  "Legally, that's true. But you weren't initiating a legal proceeding."

  "No, I was trying to stop a total asshole from becoming governor of New York."

  "That's exactly what I'm trying to do."

  "It really upset me that the Ostwind people didn't get what I was saying. I mean, I'm a Republican and I want Merle Ostwind to win. I was trying to help, for fuck's sake."

  "Yes, you were."

  "Well, anyway, I guess this proves that you aren't working for the Ostwind campaign. You don't represent some belated attempt to take my information seriously."

  "No, that's not what I'm doing here."

  Now she looked even more troubled. "So I guess that means you are working for Shy McCloskey. You're trying to get the goods on Kenyon and hurt him politically."

  "You could draw that conclusion, Jennifer. By a process of elimination."

  She shook her head. "Oh crap. This puts me in a real bind.

  Of course I want to stop Kenyon from getting elected. But I don't really know how helpful I can be to you, because certainly don't want to see Shy McCloskey win the election.

  He's way too liberal. McCloskey is in the pocket of the unions.

  That includes the AFT, which protects lazy, ineffective teachers who should have been canned years ago but are still ruining children's lives because liberals like Shy McCloskey are too cowardly to face reality and are too beholden financially to the unions. Greg explained to me years ago how all that worked, and since then I've added to my knowledge of liberalism's failures with what I've seen with my own eyes."

  This was not what I had tracked Jennifer Stiver down to hear her say. "But don't you think Greg would want Kenyon Louderbush stopped from being elected governor?"

  She got teary-eyed again and sniffled. "Yes. Yes and no.

  No and yes. I know Greg was very, very hurt by his masochistic relationship with Kenyon. But would he have wanted Kenyon to become governor of New York? In all honesty, I'd have to say I'm not really sure he wouldn't have."

  Chapter Ten

  All four tires on the Toyota had been slashed. There was no other damage to the car. What was done would have been carried out discreetly, what with teachers and other staff moving about in the school parking lot while I was inside being both helped and hindered by Jennifer Stiver.

  I knew that the tire job had been done by the Serbians and not by sixth-graders who go around saying fuck-because a handwritten note had been stuck under my windshield wiper. It read This is your second and final warning.

  Okay, so they had followed me? I was certainly unaware of any tail when I left the house in the morning and when I was cruising around the all-but-deserted SUNY parking lot next to Paul Podolski's office building. I'd stopped for lunch at the Gateway diner on Central Avenue, and I guessed they might have spotted me there and followed me to Rotterdam. But were they staking out all the upper Hudson Valley lunch spots in case I got hungry? Hardly. Who had I told that I was seeing Podolski and then Jennifer Stiver? Timmy and…Bud?

  Bud was on the good guy's side, I was certain, or at least on the team that was paying his fat fee. Computer hackers operated outside the law, but they had their own rigid code of ethics, like Good Housekeeping and the Tupac Amaru.

  I looked at the note again. This was my second and final warning, but my final warning before what?

  I phoned a Triple A garage in Schenectady, explained that my tires had been vandalized and I would need a car carrier, not just a tow, and also a lift and a rental car. They said forty-five minutes.

  One by one, two women and two men walked out of the school while I waited, took note of my flat tires, and asked me what had happened. I said, "My ex-girlfriend is pissed off.

  I suppose she has her reasons." Each of these people peered at my car and at my bandaged ear and at my giant hickey, and then nodded, walked on and drove away.

  Jennifer Stiver soon appeared, but she was busy talking on her cell phone and got into a red Dodge Neon parked nearer the school building and drove off without noticing me.

  I phoned Timmy at work and explained my situation, leaving out the part about the final warning note.r />
  "Oh, good grief. Do you want me to come out and pick you up?"

  "No need. I'll get a rental car. Anyhow, it might be good to have an anonymous car for a day or two. I'm also thinking of staying in a hotel overnight. I can't figure out how these people seem to know where I am all the time."

  "Could they have hidden an electronic tracker somewhere in your car?"

  "This is looming as a possibility. I've checked the car for explosives but not for a tracker. After I get the car back, I'll ask the campaign's security people to take a look. Dunphy uses Clean-Tech, and I know they're good. If there's anything to be found, they'll find it. Meanwhile, I should be as elusive as possible for a while."

  "You actually checked the car for explosives? I thought you said these people weren't trying to kill you, just to warn you off."

  "That's true. I'm just being overdramatic. Anyway, they somehow seem to know that I'm still working on getting the goods on Kenyon Louderbush, and they badly want me to stop. This only confirms that Louderbush is a despicable human being who must never be elected governor."

  "Any idea yet who they are? I assume it's the actual Louderbush campaign."

  "Maybe. Though it could be out-of-control Tea Partiers or other right-wing fringe types who are doing bad things on Louderbush's behalf without him or his campaign people knowing exactly what's going on. So if anything leaks out Louderbush will have plausible deniability."

  "It sounds like the Nixon White House."

  "You don't have to go that far back. Don't forget Cheney and Rove and the Valerie Plame CIA outing. I doubt Bush himself ever knew."

  "Was Jennifer Stiver helpful at all? What was she like?"

  "She was helpful in the sense that she confirmed that her brother was a tortured soul who had been taken advantage of by a sadistic creep. And she doesn't seem to doubt that Greg took his own life. She was unhelpful in the sense that, like her brother, she's a conservative Republican and she wants Merle Ostwind to win the governor's race, and she's unwilling to do anything that might get Shy McCloskey elected. Ms. Stiver doesn't like liberals."

  "You didn't wave your ACLU card in her face, I take it."

  "I didn't need to. I'm working for the McCloskey campaign, and that's bad enough. I tried to leave the impression that I'm merely mercenary, figuring that as a good Republican she would approve of that. But now she apparently just thinks of me as unprincipled. So I don't know how much use Jennifer's going to be in exposing Louderbush."

  "What a rat's nest you've stepped in. Any second thoughts about getting involved in this?"

  "No. The one thing that's clear to me is, Louderbush is a rat who has to be kept out of the governor's mansion.

  Anything else that's ambiguous here pales in comparison to the importance of driving Louderbush out of the race for governor."

  "Are you convinced that Louderbush actually drove Greg Stiver to kill himself, as his neighbors think happened?"

  "Yes and no. No and yes. I have no clear idea what happened. And neither, really, does anybody else that I've talked to so far. But I'm a long way from finished. It looks, in fact, as if I'm just getting started. Anyway, the primary is still three months away."

  "I thought Dunphy wanted answers next Tuesday at the latest, and last Tuesday would be even better."

  "Yes, but he also wants me to get this right. The worst thing that could happen to McCloskey is if we're somehow all wrong about Louderbush and his relationship with Greg Stiver, and the whole reeking mess suddenly blows up in McCloskey's face. That could create a big sympathy vote for Louderbush, and then both McCloskey and Ostwind would be screwed."

  "That borders on plausible."

  "I'm not sure I'll be home for dinner. I may go lie down somewhere. I'm still sore all over and the ear is still throbbing. Should it still be doing that?"

  "I think so. Body parts that have been partially detached are going to hurt for a while. I do wish, Don, that you could just let this thing go at least for a few days while you heal.

  Really."

  "I won't be doing anything too strenuous, not to worry.

  There are a few more people I need to talk to, and I'm guessing those contacts will lead to others and with luck a clearer picture will emerge. Or it won't emerge, and then the hell with our pals the Democrats."

  "All that will be just as true two or three days from now when you're not feeling so wounded and drained."

  "Noted."

  He knew when he had made his point with me and I had considered it and I was jolly well going to do as I jolly well pleased. He recited an obscure Buddhist good-luck mantra he had picked up on our trip to Thailand a few years earlier.

  Then he called me a few names in Sanskrit and rang off.

  Triple A hadn't shown up yet, so I called Bud Giannopolous.

  "Can you get into a life insurance company's policyholder records?"

  "Sure."

  "Greg Stiver had a fifty-thousand-dollar policy that Shenango Life apparently weaseled out of honoring. Stiver's sister Jennifer was to have been the beneficiary. I need to know if in fact it really happened that way. And I need to know if Shenengo's investigator concurred with the police finding of suicide, or if he or she had any other ideas, and if so what they were. And of course I'd like to know whether or not Kenyon Louderbush figured anywhere in the company's report."

  "Okay."

  "You'll call me?"

  "Later tonight."

  I retrieved the bag with the Smith amp; Wesson from the trunk of my disabled car and stretched out on the grass while a few stragglers made their way out of the elementary school and into their cars and out onto the street. I studied the warning note left by the Serbians. It had been hand-lettered with a felt pen on a piece of ordinary copying paper.

  Fingerprints? In case the FBI was later involved in the case, pending my gangland-related demise, I placed the note under the front passenger seat of the car, taking care to handle it only by its edges.

  The Triple A guy was bug-eyed at the sight of my car with its four flats.

  "Who did it?"

  "My ex-girlfriend, I think."

  "Holy shit. Did you call the cops?"

  "No, that would really set her off. I just have to face the fact that the relationship is over."

  The guy used a winch to drag the car up a ramp onto his flatbed truck.

  I said, "Won't this hurt the wheels?"

  "It might."

  I got to sit high up next to the driver for the ride into Schenectady.

  "It looks like your ex-girlfriend went to work on you, too," the Triple A guy said.

  "You noticed."

  "You must be glad to be rid of her."

  "Tell me about it."

  I picked up a Hyundai at the rental agency across the street from the garage. My car would be ready to drive in the morning, but I told the garage, "Just hang onto it."

  I needed my laptop, so I drove into Albany and found a parking spot on Dove Street only a block from the house.

  Timmy was not yet home from work. I checked the fax machine, and there was the five-page police report on Greg Stiver's death my friend at APD had promised to send me. I folded it and stuffed it into the shoulder bag with my gun. I packed an overnight bag and left with it, the shoulder bag, and my laptop.

  I went out the back door, down the steps, across our tiny urban patch of scraggly lawn, and up onto the wooden crate that had housed some statuary we had had shipped back from Thailand. I climbed over the fence into the backyard that abutted Timmy's and mine. I knocked on the kitchen door of Dot and Edith, a lesbian couple I had helped out some years earlier when they lived on a farm and who were now quite old. Dot led me through the house and out her front door.

  She was used to this; I'd done it a number of times.

  The rental car was as I'd left it. There seemed to be no need to check it for explosives. Though when I turned the key in the ignition, I held my breath for just an instant, and I could feel my heart thudding.

&nb
sp; Chapter Eleven

  I phoned Tom Dunphy and told him I was staying at the Crowne Plaza and that if he looked out his office window up State Street he might see me waving at him from mine.

  "The Super 8 was fully booked? What are you doing putting up at the Crowne Plaza on the campaign's meager dime? Christ Almighty."

  "This place is convenient to your office. Basically I'm hiding out. Those assholes slashed my tires, and they warned me again to back off." I described my visits with Paul Podolski and Jennifer Stiver and then the vandalism.

  "How the hell do they know where you are all the time? I don't get that."

  "I don't either. I would like my car checked for a tracking device or for listening devices as soon as I get it back, probably tomorrow. I'm driving a rental car that's parked in the hotel garage. If they track me here, I'm going to be very weirded out."

  "So Stiver's sister isn't going to be much help exposing Louderbush? That's a shame."

  "She actually seems to think her brother might have wanted Louderbush to become governor."

  "That's sick."

  "Or something. It does complicate our strategy here. Of course, we don't know what Greg Stiver would have wanted.

  To the extent that he confided in anybody at all, he seemed 101

  Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson to leave different impressions with different people and even to tell entirely different stories."

  "But it sounds as if you're making headway. Building a narrative."

  "A narrative? Yeah, if you consider Naked Lunch a narrative. This is just a lot of ugly confusion and atmospherics and impressions."