Flashpoint (22 page)

‘And you can prove all this?'

‘Yeah, I can.' I wasn't happy about the irony of having Howie Ruskin save our ass. The strange bedfellows cliché had never been more apt. I took a few more hits of the chill, clean Midwestern air and then said, ‘You'll be surprised.'

‘You trying to talk me out of serving this search warrant?'

‘Not at all. Right now at least three or four people in a city of your size are committing felonies of one kind or another. If you'd rather waste your time hounding an innocent man, be my guest.'

‘C'mon,' he smiled, nodding to the front door, ‘let's go waste some time.' Halfway up the stairs, he said, ‘Every political op I've ever met is a bullshit artist. I thought maybe you were different. But you're all alike. And you get paid so much money for it. That's the part that amazes me.'

‘Hell, if you want more money move to Chicago. I know cops there who make a couple hundred grand a year and they don't have to report any of it to the IRS.'

‘To protect and serve,' he said and knocked on the door.

Mrs Weiderman answered, looked first at him and then at me. She didn't need to be told that something serious was going on here.

Farnsworth had his ID ready. Her eyes went from it to me. Beseeching me.
I don't know what's going on, Dev. But you need to protect us. These are the people I love. This is the only family I have left. They took me in when I lost everything. Please help us.

But there was nothing I could say or do.

‘We'd like to speak to the senator alone if we could, please.'

‘Dev,' her eyes on me, ‘do you know what's going on here?' Accusation.

‘It'll be all right, Mrs Weiderman.'

‘Do you know how much this family has been through in the past day and a half?'

‘He's innocent, Mrs Weiderman. You and I know that. And Detective Farnsworth here will know it very soon now. I'll have a surprise for him. The best thing we can do now is cooperate.'

She wore a dark blue dress with an old-fashioned white embroidered collar and a large ivory brooch in the center. She touched the brooch now as if it was the only source of salvation she knew of. ‘I still don't know why you'd help him make everybody here even more miserable, Dev.' Then to Farnsworth, ‘Follow me, please.'

The den was sunny and smelled comfortably of Robert's pipe tobacco. Just as she was about to leave us, Mrs Weiderman said, ‘I should have more sympathy – I consider myself a Christian – but I know she was a whore and meant to destroy the senator. I don't see why you'd waste any time trying to figure out who killed her, Detective Farnsworth. The world is better off just forgetting all about her.'

After the door was closed, Farnsworth said, ‘She might be worth looking into. Motive and opportunity. And means.'

‘Forget her, Farnsworth. Forget everybody in this house.'

‘Oh, yeah? You really believe that?'

I didn't but I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of telling him so. And I didn't have to worry about that anyway because Robert came bursting through the door with his face and eyes burning. I'd seen him handle himself in a few situations where the hecklers got threatening. The way he came at Farnsworth I wondered if he might shove him or something.

‘You could have called first, Farnsworth. And you could have saved yourself a trip. I just heard that story about what Tracy Cabot said – or supposedly said – to that hotel clerk. She made it up. She was framing me for the press. I would've denied it the same way I'm denying it now and you wouldn't have had to come all the way out here.' He was seething but restraining himself. The way his facial muscles bunched I could see how much physical and psychic energy the restraint was costing him.

‘I'm not here for that, Senator,' Farnsworth said and slipped the search warrant from the inner pocket of his sport jacket. He handed it over.

Robert accepted it, but before he opened it he looked at me. Confused, angry. As if I was responsible somehow. The same way Mrs Weiderman had looked at me.

‘What the hell's this?'

‘A search warrant.'

‘Are you serious?'

‘I'm afraid I am serious.'

As I reached for my cell phone – in the Old West it would have been a six-shooter – I said, ‘I'll call Ben.'

‘Don't bother. He's on his way out here. He heard the desk clerk story and said he was on his way. What the hell are you looking for?'

‘I'm afraid I can't tell you that right now; we'll talk about that a little bit later.'

‘Are you hearing this, Dev? Are you hearing this bullshit?'

‘Let them look, Senator.' In public he was always Senator. ‘They won't find anything.'

‘Senator,' Farnsworth said, ‘listen to Conrad here. And for what it's worth, I hope we don't find what we're looking for. Nothing would make me happier than if this turns out to be a wild-goose chase.'

But Robert wasn't having any of that. ‘Well, isn't that nice? It'd make you happy if I turned out to be innocent?' Then, ‘Where the hell is Ben when you need him?'

Farnsworth said, ‘I'll wait in my car. I have some things I need to work on anyway. I'm sorry about the intrusion, Senator.'

‘Sure you are.'

Farnsworth nodded and left.

‘Just dandy,' Robert said when the den door had been closed.

‘You need to stay calm.'

‘All the money I pay you, you can't come up with something better than that? I'm sick of hearing it.'

‘I hate saying it and you hate hearing it, but it's the truth. This is probably nothing more than a fishing expedition. Hammell is squeezing you, hoping for a confession.'

‘Well, he's sure as hell not getting one.'

‘You're innocent. Of course he's not getting one.'

The word ‘innocent' had its desired effect. Robert took a deep breath, shoved his hands in his pockets and said, ‘I am innocent. I get so worked up I actually forget that sometimes.' Then, ‘You really think this is a fishing expedition?'

‘Yeah, I really do.'

‘You learning anything?'

‘I think I was about to when I heard about the hotel clerk and came out here. Ruskin and his girlfriend are still in my room and he's eager to talk. He wants FBI protection. I have a Bureau friend in Chicago. As soon as Ruskin starts telling me things I'll bring him in.'

He went around and sat behind his desk. ‘You want to hear something stupid?'

‘The stupider the better.'

That old Robert buddy-boy smile. It made both of us feel better. ‘You're so full of shit sometimes, Conrad.'

‘You're not the first person to tell me that, you know. I seem to recall a few thousand other people saying it before you did.'

‘I had this dream last night that I was re-elected. You think there's any way that's still possible?'

‘If we can wrap all this up fast enough.'

‘You know, Elise is into astrology and all that bullshit. Always has been. I don't kid her about it. Or religion. They comfort her. But maybe she's on to something. She always tells me that sometimes dreams show you the future.'

Right now I didn't give a damn about him being foolish. The law was still after us – it was about to enter his house, in fact – but if it gave him a brief respite from what he'd been facing, fine.

‘You think maybe I should go to the front door and be cooperative?'

‘Good idea. That'll surprise them in a good way.'

Before we could say anything else the door was thrown open by a tornado in the form of Ben, who didn't enter the room – he invaded it.

‘I want to see this search warrant.'

‘Farnsworth is outside in his car,' I said.

‘On his phone.'

‘Oh.'

Ben was in a white button-down shirt, dark gray suit pants and a black cashmere winter coat. ‘Farnsworth didn't ask you any questions, did he, Senator?'

‘No, and if he had I wouldn't have been stupid enough to answer them.'

‘Good, good.'

Mrs Weiderman appeared in the doorway bearing one of the family's coffee mugs. She called Ben's name. ‘Oh, thank you so much, Mrs Weiderman. I tell you, come to Chicago and I'll set you up in business. I mean that. I don't know what you do to coffee but yours tastes better than any other coffee I've ever had.'

For just a few movie frames there Mrs Weiderman was a seventeen-year-old receiving a compliment from a boy she liked. Shy but eye-shiningly happy.

She closed the door behind her. As the den mother she knew when all doors were to be left open and when they were to be closed.

‘What do we know about this hotel clerk?' Ben said.

Robert said, ‘Tracy called me from the cabin. She told me she'd changed hotel rooms because she was having some trouble.'

‘What kind of trouble?' I said.

‘She didn't say. Maybe with Ruskin. I heard her talking to him on her cell phone one night and she was really pissed about something. Maybe about his girlfriend. They hated each other.'

‘This is when we need you to speak up, Senator,' Ben said. ‘We'll do it late in the afternoon so we get plenty of play as breaking news. Unless the police find something here – and I'm sure they won't – all you're guilty of at worst is cheating on your wife.'

‘Ben. I explained – to
both
of you – that we didn't actually have sex.'

An exasperated glance at me from Ben. To Robert, ‘Do you want to get into your inability to have an erection that night? You probably would have had sex if you could have.'

‘You're making an assumption that isn't necessarily true,' Robert said.

‘It doesn't matter, does it, Dev? Tell him.'

‘Robert, later on we can go into all the details if you want to. Right now we have to stay on one message. You didn't kill her. You didn't threaten her, either. If she was afraid of somebody the night she asked the desk clerk for help, it wasn't you. You didn't see her that night and you swear to it.'

‘Who the hell is going to believe anything I say?' Robert broke into one of his circular paces. The den was wide enough to give him some room. Sometimes he talked more to himself than to us. ‘You see these guys on TV denying everything and you know they're guilty. They just make it worse for themselves. Then the comedians pick it up and you're really finished.'

‘Then all we – all
you
do – is make your denial. I'm sure Dev can write something dignified that people will listen to seriously. You're a serious man, Senator. Even your enemies say that. Nobody has ever questioned your intelligence or your integrity.'

If Ben kept pushing we'd soon enough be watching Robert ascend into heaven and sit at the right hand of God. Robert's last election had gotten so dirty on both sides that both candidates came away roughed up. It became known that Robert had made close to half a million on a couple of sweetheart deals that only US senators hear about and that – whispered but never exactly proved – he'd had an affair that his distressed wife had heard about. There'd also been the guy who gave a TV interview about the time Robert had been so drunk he hadn't been able to drive his car out of an overnight parking lot where the guy worked. He'd been so drunk, in fact, that he fell out of the driver's seat and spent the night on the asphalt next to his car sleeping it off. Fortunately he'd been twenty-four at the time. The follies of youth.

‘I need to get this set up,' Ben said. ‘Can you write something while you're here?'

‘Sure,' I said. ‘But I want input from both of you.'

‘If I don't like it, I won't say it. You two understand that, don't you?'

‘Sure,' Ben said.

‘Of course,' I said.

A good time was had by all.

If you're looking for help in writing for your candidate, just remember there is a political cliché for every situation.

In a political world of verbal excess and ten lies per minute, simple heartfelt sincerity gets lost. In fact, it looks suspicious. In Robert's case just saying that he was innocent would make him look as if he was hiding something.
He knows he's guilty, that's why he couldn't even come up with a defense.
So as I sat down to write I had to look up on my imaginary shelf of political clichés to find one that might work.

I ran a number of them through and settled on the old ‘political enemies' routine. Yes, the one and only Dick Nixon (or Nick Dixon as Eisenhower once allegedly called him by mistake). Yes, Bill Clinton, feeling his own pain after being outed for his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, used it too. But we had a specific person with a specific political hit woman background to point to. And point to it we would – though carefully; people tend to dislike you when you suggest that the still-warm corpse might be less than perfect when upright and ambulatory.

In the rush to find Robert guilty only one reporter (that I had been able to find online) had spent any serious time writing about Tracy Cabot's background. It was known that she was a political operative sometimes associated with Ruskin, but nobody had fed Ruskin to the public. There was a connection we could explore. Briefly. I wanted to keep everything under ninety seconds max. Plenty of time for claiming innocence, citing concern for family, thanking voters for their outpouring of support (he must have received at least one email cheering him on) and then offering condolences to the Cabot family over the untimely death of their ‘troubled daughter who had been led into a dangerous lifestyle by people who had no concern for her well-being.' She wouldn't have been a treacherous whore if only she'd continued to hang with those two girls who became nuns.

Fire away, Empire News channel!

Three hours and two deliveries of sandwiches and coffee by Mrs Weiderman later, I had my draft and asked Mrs Weiderman if she would please round up Robert and Ben.