Lucky Bastard (28 page)

At first, Morgan's periodic reports on Jack's private life were reassuring. He seemed to spend almost all his free time within a circle of about a dozen young professional males, doctors and lawyers, bankers and stockbrokers, executives and entrepreneurs. All were close to local politicians, all were Ohio-born; many, like Jack, had gone east to college and flirted with mock revolution and value-free fornication. None had served in Vietnam. Now that the war was over they had put revolution behind them and were devoting themselves to the accumulation of wealth. Danny was not a member.

They got together for a roundtable lunch at a downtown restaurant every day that they could make it, played racquet games with one another, met for a low-stakes poker game every second Thursday. They pooled their money to buy blocks of season tickets to the Cincinnati Bengals and Cincinnati Reds games, attending in groups of five according to a schedule decided by lot. They stayed overnight in Cincinnati if it was a night game. Their good-fellowship was a continuation of fraternity life, but with even greater exclusivity and secrecy. No one but the members, only twenty in number, and their wives even knew that the group had a name and dues, an oath and rules. They called themselves the Gruesome. Their ironic motto was Omertà: the silence of brotherhood.

Most, like Jack, were married to wives who were also members of the professional caste, so they had time on their hands. Four times a year, rotating houses, they got together as couples—bring-your-own-bottle barbecues and tag football in summer, Ohio State football games and tailgate parties in fall, potluck dinners and card games in winter. At these two-gender parties men talked to men in one room, women to women in another. Pot was smoked, the joint passing from hand to hand round a circle, and a great deal of white wine and beer was consumed. Jack, living as a celibate as far as Morgan could discover, seemed content, even glowing. This in itself was a cause for suspicion.

Morgan, playing the role of naïve pilgrim from the East, questioned the other wives about the real purposes of the Gruesome.

“It's Tom Sawyer's gang,” one therapist-wife explained. “They look at centerfolds and drink beer and chew steaks and holler hoo-hah, but they're always in a group. It's when a man's alone with no witnesses that you'd better start worrying.”

Morgan was not so sure. Gradually she had come to suspect the Gruesome, to believe that its outward camaraderie was a cover for hidden purposes—another of Jack's bewildering diversions designed to get him what he wanted behind a screen of coconspirators. These friends of Jack had lived through the sexual revolution, the drug culture, the whole hedonistic street fair of the sixties. Every one of them had lied systematically to the United States government as a means of evading the draft and was proud of it. Why should anyone trust them now?

Reporting all this to me, Morgan said that she was deeply worried. “Character does not change,” she explained. “Jack is a sex maniac for the first twenty-five years of his life and then becomes a monk? I don't think so.”

“And if he's satisfying his needs in secret like half the husbands in America,” I asked, “what then?”

“
You
ask
me
that question? It means he's vulnerable to influence, to blackmail, to control by others, and the operation is vulnerable to penetration. That's what it means. That's what Peter wanted above all to avoid.”

The Gruesome also meant, if Morgan was right, that Jack was setting up his own networks, binding other men to him, building private loyalties, moving up on the basis of his own talents. Likewise what Peter wanted to happen.

I said, “On this, watch and wait. Let it develop.”

“Is that wise?”

“Wiser,” I said mildly, “than smothering the Gruesome in its cradle and having Jack replace it with something we don't know about and therefore have no hope of controlling.”

This was a first principle of our craft: Better the enemy you know than the one you do not know exists. Morgan understood the reference.

“Very well,” she said. But she was not happy.

This conversation took place in the Keystone Motel, beside a secondary road off the Pennsylvania Turnpike. We met in such places as opportunity offered. Her business with her splinter groups often took her to Washington, the Mecca of activists. As a demonstration of virtuous poverty she always drove to the capital in her Volkswagen bus and stayed overnight with a co-believer, usually in a sleeping bag on the floor of a cluttered, triple-locked flat on Capitol Hill or some other benighted neighborhood of Washington. On the way down or the way back we would rendezvous in Maryland or Pennsylvania or West Virginia, checking into separate motels in adjoining towns to avoid the giveaway of parking my nondescript, little-gray-man's car and Morgan's rolling billboard of McGovernism side by side in a motel lot.

I was not surprised by her fixation on Jack's sex life or by the way in which she rationalized her conflicted emotions as professional vigilance. Just as a real wife will regard adultery as a menace to the marriage, a destroyer of trust, a threat to the financial and social safety that are her rights, so did Morgan regard Jack's hidden sex life—whose existence she could not prove—as a danger to the operation. And the operation was everything to her.

She told me this over and over. For all the subliminal reasons just stated, I believed her. But I also thought that Peter had made a great mistake in not providing for Morgan's sexual needs, and a worse one in supposing that we, or anyone except the late Greta Fürst, could keep up with Jack's. Those who do not marry for desire will fear desire as an enemy. If that is not a Russian proverb, it ought to be.

For the moment, there was nothing to be done about this, but as I observed Morgan's agitated state, which so closely resembled that of a neglected and suspicious wife, I knew that the error must somehow be corrected. That would take time. Not to mention the most sensitive approaches to Peter. Meanwhile the best course for Morgan was to push onward along the path of her suspicions. Even if this Gruesome was not the adulterers' workshop Morgan thought it was, it was worth looking into. Besides, her suspicions were taking up too much of her time and energy. I sought, therefore, to channel them.

“I see your point,” I said, after listening to her report. “We can't have Jack belonging to a secret society, compartmenting himself from us. Look into this more deeply. Bring me a list of names of Gruesome members with the usual biographical details and personality sketches, credit ratings, debts, habits, addictions, allegiances, anything that might be buried in the past. Photographs.”

Most of this information would be easy enough for Morgan to obtain. Her business gave her access to credit ratings, academic records, applications with their recommendations and evaluations, goods purchased, magazines subscribed to, insurance policies and medical records pertinent thereto. Police records, court records, licenses, were all public records. The life history of every American is thrown, bit by bit, into this great whirlpool of information. The process is disjointed, inadvertent, but most secret police agencies elsewhere in the world would salivate over such a treasury of disjointed gossip from which they could assemble the scarecrows so dear to their imaginations. She could take snapshots at the next barbecue. Still, it was a daunting assignment for a busy person.

“There are twenty members of the Gruesome, Dmitri,” Morgan said. “And just one me.”

“And twenty wives,” I replied. “Some of the other girls must share your doubts. Make friends with a suspicious wife, strengthen the suspicion, and you're halfway home.”

“That will take time. I haven't made an effort with the women.”

“Then make one. Go slowly; stay in character. Some of your clients must know some of the Gruesomes and their wives. Mine every source. I'm prepared to be patient. This is important, not just for the present but for the future.”

There was a touch of exaggeration in this, but basically, as always, I was telling Morgan the truth. Her demeanor changed. Now she was alert, professional, with a head full of schemes. She had been given permission to do what she wanted to do—ferret out that which she already knew in her heart must surely exist, evidence of Jack's shenanigans. This would keep her busy and happy for months. And who knew? It might produce something useful; the friends Jack was making now would, like Danny, be with him for the remainder of his life.

But at bottom it was only jujitsu, a trick of balance, a way of seizing control of Morgan's emotional momentum and propelling her in the direction in which she wanted to go. It was clear that she was inexorably becoming what she was pretending to be, a wife. Even after the metamorphosis she would still be a fanatic. And for that condition there was no remedy in Peter's philosophy—or yet discovered in the history of the world.

2
Jack, an early riser, was always the first to arrive at work, and on the morning after my meeting with Morgan, while she was driving westward in her Volkswagen toward Columbus, he arrived at Miller & Adams to find a young woman waiting for him in front of the locked office door. She was a little too plump for her best dress and there were fresh signs of motherhood on her person—a yellowish stain on the shoulder of her peach-colored jacket, the sweetish aroma of regurgitated milk. But behind all this, as in a yearbook photo, Jack visualized the small-town beauty she must have been not so long ago.

She smiled, the American curtsy, and said, “Are you Attorney John Fitzgerald Adams?”

Jack had started using all three of his names as soon as he entered practice, but in private he was the same informal Ohioan as before. “I'm Jack Adams,” he said with a brief grin.

“I recognize you from TV,” said the young woman. “I'm Mrs. Phil Gallagher. Teresa.”

“Ah,” said Jack.

Phil Gallagher, a police lieutenant, had been arrested the night before by his own men, who had discovered him in the backseat of his cruiser with a fifteen-year-old girl in his lap. The cruiser was parked in a secluded spot. The girl was naked. The media had taken pictures of the arrest.

Teresa Gallagher said, “You've seen the news this morning?”

“I have,” Jack said, “and I'm sorry for your trouble.”

“Thanks,” Teresa said. “Can we talk?”

He unlocked the door and showed her into his office, arranged by Morgan to impress clients like Mrs. Gallagher: Harvard diploma, handsome old desk that might be mistaken for an heirloom, well-worn leather furniture, oriental throw rugs, soft-focus picture of a most photogenic Morgan, reproduction of a Matthew Brady portrait of Abraham Lincoln, group portrait of the
Harvard Law Review
staff with Jack front and center, framed replica of the Bill of Rights, campus towers in the single window. This client was slightly ill at ease, alone with a strange man in a deserted office suite. Jack put the desk between them and left the door open.

“If you've seen the news,” said Teresa, “I guess I don't have to describe the problem to you, thanks to those sons of bitches.”

Nodding as if he, too, knew the sons of bitches well, Jack said, “Have you talked to Phil since he was arrested?”

“Finally, over the phone about an hour ago. I called before when he didn't come home at the usual time. They said they had him in a cell, that was it.”

“They wouldn't let you speak to him?”

“They said he was too doped up to talk. That's when I knew what was happening. The bastards had got to him, just like they always said they would,” she replied.

“Who exactly are the bastards?”

“The wops and the dirty cops, who else?”

“I understand,” Jack said. “But, Teresa, let's not use those words again. Even between ourselves.”

“Whatever you say, but that's who it is,” Teresa said. “And what Phil told me was, he doesn't have a chance.”

Jack looked at her for a long moment, and then he said, “We'll see about that.”

Teresa never forgot these words, spoken with an easy confidence that reassured her to the heart. In years to come she would quote them to the world in many interviews and campaign ads. “And after he told me that,” she would go on, “Jack Adams put his arm around me like a brother and gave me that wonderful smile, and I knew that there was hope.” And then she would go on to say that Jack's words and the way he said them made her think that he had been just waiting for the chance to save her innocent husband from life in prison and their children from a lifetime of poverty and shame.

In a way Jack had been doing exactly that, because as soon as he heard about the Gallagher case on the morning news he realized that it was the chance of a lifetime. It was the breakthrough case he needed. It would make his name, provide him with an image, give him an issue that would leapfrog him into public office. If he could win Gallagher's acquittal, and he was sure he could.

The facts were stark. When the arresting officers arrived on the scene, they found Gallagher with his pants around his ankles. He was out of his mind after taking LSD, and more LSD of a particularly potent variety was found in the pocket of his uniform. His service revolver lay on the floor of the cruiser. The girl said she had been raped and sodomized at gunpoint by Gallagher after he arrested her on a dark road for driving without a license. Footage of the terrified girl being placed in an ambulance and of the stupefied lieutenant, babbling and thrashing in the throes of his bad LSD trip, being handcuffed by his own men had been the lead story on the morning news.

In Jack's office, Teresa Gallagher said, “They did it up brown. I told Phil they'd get him sooner or later. You can't fight city hall.”

Several years before, as an idealistic young patrolman just out of college, Phil Gallagher had spied on corrupt cops by pretending to be one of them. He had provided evidence to a grand jury that led to the indictment and conviction of several policemen on charges of consorting with and accepting what amounted to a salary from a local Mafia figure called Fats Corso.