The Next President (9 page)

“It’s Vandy and DeVito a woman informed her.

“Where’s Paul?” Jenny asked, still moving.

Paul Gilmartin was the state campaign manager and the boss of the California office.

“Paul’s kid fell off his skateboard. He had to go to the hospital to be with him,” came a voice as she hurried down the hallway.

Jenny threw open the door to Vandy’s office and the uproar got really loud.

“Stop!” Jenny bellowed.

DeVito leaning on his knuckles, had his very red face thrust over Vandy’s desk. Vandy was seated behind the desk and held a letter opener in her fist.

Both of them turned to look at Jenny, who at that moment was more royally pissed than either of them.

“Sit down, Special Agent,” Jenny ordered DeVito

Nobody was going to bully any woman in the campaign while Jenny ran things. DeVito glared at her a good long moment. But he knew who was in charge of the political side of the campaign, and he knew he was really no longer the head of the protection detail. So he drew himself upright and then took one ofVandv’s two guest chairs.

“You can put the letter opener down now, Vandy,” Jenny said.

She let it drop on her desk. Jenny took a seat in the other guest chair.

“We’re going to talk now,” Jenny instructed them, “and there will be no resumption of any shouting. Do you both understand that?”

Vandy gave an angry nod; DeVito was barely perceptible.

Jenny said, “All right, Special Agent, we’ll start with you ” She held up a hand to forestall a protest from Vandy.

“In twenty-five words or less, what’s the problem?”

“She’s trying to interfere with my job,” DeVito grumbled through clenched teeth.

“Vandy, your turn. Follow the agent’s example and get straight to the point.”

“I caught him going through my desk,” Vandy hissed.

“She slammed the drawer on my hand,” DeVito accused, the heat reentering his voice.

“And I’ll do it again if you ever ” “Stop!” Jenny commanded.

“Special Agent, why were you going through Vandy’s desk in the first place?”

“After…” DeVito looked like he wanted to spit blood.

“After the attempt in Chicago, every contact by an outsider with this campaign should be given at least a cursory examination.”

“He wanted to look in Marva Weisman’s handbag,” Vandy said deadpan.

“I get one of the biggest stars ever to give a private performance that will be a feature story from coast to coast and raise at least a million dollars for the campaign, and he wants to make sure she’s not packing heat.”

Jenny looked at DeVito in disbelief. The stubbornness written across the man’s face was almost tangible. He clearly believed he was in the right.

“Did you really think that was necessary?” Jenny asked quietly.

“I want to check everybody who comes in contact with this campaign,” DeVito asserted.

Jenny remembered that terrible day just over a week ago when she had wanted this man’s hide, not just his job, because he obviously hadn’t checked everyone and everything that could hurt Del, because her candidate had almost died as a result of that failure. In his place now, she might feel the same way he did. But in her place, she knew that sound judgment was called for by everyone involved in the campaign.

“Were you going through Vandy’s desk to find something relating to Ms.

Weisman?”

DeVito shook his head.

Vandy was only too happy to tell Jenny what DeVito had wanted. To snoop on another person who only wanted to help the campaign. She filled in the details.

“This Mr. Cade simply wrote a check to our national committee for ten thousand dollars and then went on his way?” Jenny asked.

“Yes.”

“Did he do anything suspicious?”

“No. In fact, he declined my offer to attend Marva’s performance—where I told him Del would be present—for an additional fifteen thousand dollars.”

“Maybe he couldn’t afford it,” DeVito sneered.

Vandy’s jaw muscles bulged. She ratted out DeVito rude remark to J. D. Cade about his lack of a manicure.

Jenny shook her head.

“That was uncalled-for, Special Agent. You will write a note of apology to Mr. Cade that the campaign will deliver to him. You will

also apologize right now to Ms. Ellison for attempting to rifle her desk and for trying to intimidate her with your abusive behavior.”

DeVito eyes bulged and he looked like he was about to go off again, but Jenny wasn’t finished with him. She continued in a voice of bedrock certainty, “You will do both of these things or after today you will no longer be a part of this campaign.”

“I don’t work for you, lady,” DeVito snarled.

“Last chance, Special Agent,” Jenny said, reaching for Vandy’s phone.

“Do as I say and do it now or you won’t be working for anybody.”

DeVito apologized, probably at the cost of a year off his life, his voice pitched to the sort of subsonic rumble that usually precedes an earthquake of large magnitude. Vandy started to say she couldn’t hear him, but Jenny held up her hand.

“Thank you, Special Agent. Ms. Ellison accepts your apology. Don’t forget your note to Mr. Cade. You can make it brief. But make sure it includes the words “I’m sorry.”

” DeVito got up and left without acknowledging Jenny’s last command, but he didn’t slam the door behind him.

“You think he’ll do it? Apologize to Mr. Cade?” Vandy asked.

“He better.”

Vandy waited a moment to make sure DeVito wasn’t about to come storming back in and then took a manila folder out of her desk and placed it in front of Jenny. She said, “That’s why I slammed the drawer on that jerk’s hand. I didn’t want him to find that.”

Jenny flipped open the folder and saw an eight-by-ten black-and-white photo of a handsome man in a dark suit.

“Who’s that?” Jenny asked.

By way of response, Vandy slid the first photo aside to reveal a second one:

Marva Weisman. Jenny recognized her… and now she realized that the background behind both people was the bullpen area of the campaign office.

Jenny looked back to the first photo.

“Is he the man who—” “J. D. Cade.” Vandy nodded.

DeVito set up a hidden camera?” Jenny asked.

“The staffers in the bullpen area complained that it was getting stuffy out there. When the building maintenance guy came, he took off the vent cover and found the camera. By pure luck, I was passing by. I grabbed the camera right out of the guy’s hand before anyone else could see what it was. The maintenance guy didn’t seem to speak much English, but he nodded when I pressed my finger to my lips. So we can

hope he doesn’t go to the tabloids and we don’t see any “Rawley Spies on Own Office’ stories. A friend made the prints for me privately. Those are the only ones, and here is the disc from the camera.”

Vandy dropped it on the photo of the diva.

“Maybe we could do a promotion.

Make a donation, get a free mug shot. You think it would work?”

Jenny sighed.

“Thanks for handling this so discreetly, Vandy.”

“You’re welcome.”

Jenny looked at the first photo again.

“Nice-looking man, Mr. Cade.”

Vandy frowned. She didn’t want Jenny poaching on her territory. So she changed the subject.

“Somebody ought to throw a net over that DeVito

“I hope that’s what I just did,” Jenny replied.

“But I’ll talk to Del about him.”

“I think you better.”

Fuck them, DeVito thought. Fuck them both.

He walked out of the campaign office, his vision consciously reduced to a narrow tunnel. If he saw anybody looking at him with a smirk or with pity, he’d shoot them. He reached the elevator bank outside the office and jabbed the call button hard enough to crack the plastic. Then he fumed at the wait for the elevator to arrive.

He should have quit. After what happened in Chicago, he should have just quit and accepted the shame he deserved. But when he’d heard the senator insisted he be given a second chance, he’d bitten down on the opportunity like a starving dog on a bone. He’d thought—however long the odds—here was his chance for redemption.

Yeah, right.

They’d sent him ahead to check out the campaign office in L.A. Make sure nobody had planted a bomb and there was no anarchist with pinwheel eyes licking envelopes for the cause. And the thing was, the office staffers had treated him decently, even though they knew he was the fuck-up who almost let Orpheus get killed. They answered every last question he put to them without blinking. They understood he was only doing what was necessary.

But the big shots who brought in the mega bucks around them he was expected to bow and scrape and turn a blind eye. Even that wiseass who’d chipped in a lousy ten grand … he was supposed to get a note of apology.

Well, DeVito felt a terrible cramp coming on in his writing hand. Not so bad he couldn’t pull a trigger, but much too painful to hold a pen.

That slick fucker J. D. Cade would play pinochle with the Pope before he’d hear Dante DeVito tell him he was sorry. What he would do for Cade was check him out, the way he should be checking everybody out. That redheaded bitch had slammed her desk drawer on his hand, but not before DeVito had seen Cade’s personal check with his Santa Barbara address and the name of his bank.

That was enough to get him started. And if Jenny Crenshaw cost him his job about it, he didn’t care anymore. The elevator finally came, and it was the same car that show biz bitch had used yesterday. He thought he could smell the scent of her perfume lingering in the air.

Fuck her, too.

Evan Cade wanted to learn more about the Cade-McCray feud, so that evening, with the first touch of autumnal coolness in the air, he drove down Route 51 to visit his father’s cousin Ben in the little town of Anna. The two men sat on Ben’s screened-in front porch.

Cousin Ben had the typical Cade lankiness, but he was several inches shorter than Evan, and with a full head of dark hair and an unlined face, he looked more like he was approaching forty than fifty. He told Evan the decades-old story of the assault he’d suffered. Alvy McCray had long since moldered in his grave, but Ben Cade’s emotions still ran high.

“I was planning to kill Alvy even after your daddy bashed that sonofabitch with your grandpa’s old army .45. Hating Alvy and thinking about what I was going to do to him got me started on healing, and with my skull fractured in three places from the beating he gave me, there was some question whether I’d heal at all.”

“How did you know what my dad did to Alvy?”

“He came to the hospital and told me. He thought it would cheer me up.”

“Did it?”

“Yes. But it didn’t stop me from planning to kill that bastard.”

“Did you tell my dad that?”

Ben Cade nodded.

“He said the way Alvy was going, he’d be dead before I got out of the hospital. Sure enough, he was right. Fucker flipped his truck and killed himself. Damn shame about that deer, though.”

That was the second reference Evan had heard to the misfortune of the deer. He took it as a measure of how the Cades valued wildlife far more than McCrays.

“Did you feel … I don’t know, disappointed, maybe, that Dad left for California while Alvy was still around to make trouble?”

Ben looked off through the screen. Insects were flitting about the yellow porch lights that were just starting to take hold against the deepening night.

Finally Ben Cade looked back at his young kinsman.

“I was more than just disappointed. I was mad. I was counting on J. D. to help me steady my rifle when the time came to shoot Alvy.” His expression softened.

“Try as I might, though, I couldn’t convince myself that J. D. had left because he was scared. Your daddy was always a real easygoing guy, you might even say gentle, but I never saw him afraid of one thing in his life.”

“Neither have I,” Evan agreed. Unless it was of someone hurting me, he thought.

Ben laughed at some private thought.

“What?” Evan asked.

“I’m almost ashamed to admit this, but after Alvy died my anger turned to relief. I’d been spared becoming a killer, and that started me thinking that somehow your daddy had done that for me. Spared me and saved our whole family from having the feud start all over again.”

“But how could he have done that? He was gone; Alvy died after his truck hit the deer.”

Ben looked at Evan closely, as if taking his measure. He was just about to speak when his wife, Marie, called him to take a phone call inside. When he came back, he poked his head out the porch door and looked up the street.

Then he returned to his seat.

He told Evan, “It was just a thought, that’s all. That your daddy had fixed Alvy.”

Evan nodded… but he had the distinct feeling that Ben had been about to give him a completely different explanation. He felt cheated. As if he’d missed out on learning a closely guarded family secret. One that concerned his father.

Ben put a hand on Evan’s leg.

“That was a neighbor who called just now.

He said there’s a pickup truck with Kentucky plates parked up the block, and the fella inside is looking this way.”

Evan considered the possibilities.

“A McCray?”

“Maybe the two of us should go find out.”

Evan thought a moment, then replied, “I’ll go.”

“Okay,” Ben conceded.

“You go … and I’ll keep an eye on you.”

Evan walked up to the pickup truck. It was a dark blue Ford. The license plate holder said it came from a dealership in Paducah. The guy behind the wheel looked to be in his early thirties. He had sandy hair done in a buzz cut

and pale gray eyes. He wore a raspberry Izod polo shirt that was filled to the bursting point with muscle.

“Kind of a preppy look for a pickup truck, don’t you think?” Evan asked.

The guy looked back at Evan, studying his face.

“My wife buys my clothes for me.”

“Does a nice job, too. Was there something you wanted to talk to me about?”

“You’re Evan Cade?”

Evan nodded.

“I’m Blair McCray.” He showed Evan a badge from the Paducah Police Department.