Troubled Waters (16 page)

“It was a nice hot crowd,” the candidate said. He lifted his open soda can to his forehead and rolled its coolness across his skin. “I thought I had good connect, especially with that guy whose mother had her Medicare cut.” He inclined his head in the direction of the dartboard. “Reagan keeps up this shit, he'll be a one-termer. You heard it here first, Tark. We win in '84 if we—”

“The Jan thing's gonna fucking kill us,” Paul Tarkanian cut in. He sat in a swivel chair, his feet propped on a desk top. The Jan thing was not in fact the most important problem on his mind, but it had to be dealt with before he could address the really pressing issue of his life: where to get the money he desperately needed to pay a gambling debt.

He leaned forward in the battered swivel chair that came from his great-uncle Elia's secondhand furniture store on Cherry Street. “I was born in this town; I grew up working the precincts, getting out the vote. I know how these people think. And they don't want a dope-smoking ex-hippie representing them in Congress.”

John Wesley Tannock sat on the leather couch, his tie loosened and his top shirt button undone. For a moment Tarky considered going for a camera and shooting a picture of his candidate at rest. Sitting there on the couch, at ease, drinking soda from a can, Wes resembled the young John Lindsay, the young John Kennedy. It could be a winning photo, blown up and pasted on every lamppost in town. But not if the Jan thing exploded in their faces.

“Depends on how we spin it, Tark. We let the other side define me that way, then, yeah, we're dead. But we aren't just going to sit here and take it. We've got to go proactive on this.”

“Yeah?” Tarky replied. He shifted the unlit cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “And just how do you plan to do that? How do you plan to explain to the voters that once upon a time, when we were young and dumb, we got busted for trying to poison the entire Lucas County Fair with a canister of deadly poison?”

Wes gave his old friend a smile the voters would never see. It was a smile of pure mischief, of joke-playing glee. “Easy,” he replied, “we tell them we didn't know the canister was loaded.”

Tarky snorted. “It's only a matter of time, John Wesley,” he pointed out. “Some enterprising journalist, inspired by
All the President's Men
, is going to run a complete check on Jan Gebhardt and is going to find out that you and she were arrested together in 1969. The fact that the charges were dropped will have absolutely no meaning as far as the voters are concerned. You will be tried and convicted in the court of public opinion of being a bomb-throwing radical who can't be trusted no matter how short you wear your hair now.” It was almost working; the demand made by Al Czik, Detroit loan shark, that his debt be repaid by midnight was almost receding from Tarky's mind as he addressed himself to the problem of Jan.

“You forget, old buddy, a lot of people had long hair and love beads. We're baby-boomers and we outnumber everyone else on the planet.” Wes smiled his baby-kissing smile, the one that had young female voters lining up to volunteer at his headquarters. “Besides, campaigns in this state don't really start until after Labor Day, and by that time, this story'll be as dead as yesterday's mackerel.”

Tark shook his head and took the unlit cigar out of his mouth. “Ex-hippies are schizoid when it comes to voting,” he said with a sigh. “They don't support their own. It's like they're all ashamed of what they did back then, don't want to be—”

“Ashamed?” Wes's voice rose; his face reddened. “What the fuck is there to be ashamed of? Should we be ashamed of trying to end a stupid war, of working to end poverty? Should we be ashamed of helping migrant farmworkers? Should we be ashamed of going a little crazy when a child was seriously injured in the fields?”

“It's a nice speech, Wes,” Tark said, “but I think we're better off playing down the whole thing. All it's going to do is get us off-message. Our line is: Nobody got hurt, nothing really happened, it was a long time ago, you've had nothing whatsoever to do with Jan Gebhardt since then. No reason in the world for you to be connected with her now just because you worked together one summer a long time ago.”

“I've been thinking.” The candidate's photogenic gray eyes fixed Tarkanian with Jerry Brown intensity. Tarky sat up in his chair; Wes thinking was always something he had to watch out for.

“Jan's not the only one who got arrested,” Wes said. A glimmer in his gray eyes told Tarky the riddle was his to solve.

Tark the Shark gave a quick nod as the penny dropped. He'd have thought of it himself if he hadn't been rattled by the call from Czik.

“You want to put Ron Jameson out in front instead of Jan,” he said. “Play the cripple card for all it's worth. He's a disabled vet to boot. Patriotic citizens who may have gone a little over the line, but are good people at heart. Throw in the priest for good measure. Lotta Catholics in this town.”

Tarky stroked his chin with the same gesture he'd once used to caress his beard. God, he'd loved that beard. It made him look like a cross between an Armenian high priest and a wild mountain man.

But, like the beard, Wes's analysis was of the past, not the present. “I don't care how many priests declare their churches a sanctuary, Wes, the voters in this district are conservative Democrats.” He pointed the dead cigar at the smiling face on the dartboard. “And I wouldn't underestimate Reagan, either. You were damned lucky to get this seat two years ago with him beating Carter; I wouldn't count on lightning striking twice.”

The cigar made its way back into his mouth; he chewed on the end, shifted it to the other side of his lips, and went on, “So liberation theology as preached by Father Jerry Kujawa isn't going to fly in Toledo. You need to get as far away from Jan and Ron as possible. You need to—”

The phone rang. Tarky picked it up on the first ring and barked his name into the reciever.

It was Czik. The last man on earth he wanted to talk to with his candidate in the room. “I'll call you back later,” he said, and slammed the phone down. He'd pay for that rudeness, but right now it was more important to conceal the identity of the caller from Wes Tannock.

Too late. Wes caught the implication; who else would his campaign manager dare to hang up on?

“How much?” Wes's voice was harsh, a lawyer cross-examining a hostile witness.

“What do you mean, how much?”

“Which word didn't you understand, Tark? How”—Wes spaced the words with insulting slowness—“much? How much do you owe Czik this time?”

“Wes, it wasn't—”

“Oh, yes it was. You need money to pay off the sharks and you owe the sharks because you put a bundle on one more losing horse, losing team, losing whatever.” The florid face was bright red and the slender finger pointed straight into Tarky's face. “I told you last time, one more phone call from a loanshark and I find myself a new campaign manager. One who doesn't know where all the racecourses and poker games are.”

“Wes, I'll clear this up. It's no big deal. I'll—”

“No big deal. My closest aide is paying off illegal gambling debts and it's no big deal.” He lifted his hand to his forehead and wiped away sweat. “Okay. You get the fuck out of this mess, and then we'll talk. I don't want to dump you, Tark. You're the best campaign manager I've ever seen. But I can't afford you anymore.”

After Wes left for his luncheon at the Toledo Club, Tarky sat at his desk, chewing his unlit cigar and seething with rage. How dare Wes Tannock, the pretty boy, the Face, talk to him like that?

He'd grown up political, stuffing envelopes at Democratic party headquarters with his father and three uncles while other boys were hitting home runs. To little Paulie Tarkanian, Election Day
was
the home run. He loved the cigar smell of party HQ—lavishly contributed to by all four adult Tarkanians—and the razzle-dazzle of rallies. He loved canvassing voters, that most boring of political tasks. Behind every door he knocked on lay a secret, and it was his dearest wish to unlock those secrets and use them to get his candidate elected.

When the sixties hit northwest Ohio, Tarky was a first-year law student. He'd turned his finely calibrated sense of the possible from traditional precinct politics to the War on Poverty, working for the local migrant farmworkers' union, the Farm Labor Action Coalition. He'd started with rallies, at which maybe twenty migrants would show up. By the end of the summer, he had organized a full-blown strike that paralyzed the tomato season and brought growers to the bargaining table. He'd helped create a real union where there had been only hopes and dreams before.

And he'd met John Wesley Tannock, fellow law student and Perfect Candidate.

God, Wes had been perfect then. So eager to learn. So ready to listen to Tarky's superior wisdom.

It wasn't that Wes couldn't think; he'd graduated sixth in his law school class (to Tarky's third). It was that he didn't have to think all the time. He was able to let someone else think for him, able to trust.

Which was fine with Tarky so long as the person Wes trusted was him. But now there was someone else influencing Tannock. Tarky knew it with the same intuitive certainty that tells a wife her husband is cheating.

Who the hell had Wes gotten in bed with?

Tarky sighed and closed his eyes. In a strongbox at the First Federal Savings and Loan on Summit Street, just three blocks away, there was a plastic bag. A bag containing one hemostat-turned-roach-clip, with a blackened end that spoke of hundreds of marijuana cigarettes burned to the nub. A hemostat Paul Tarkanian had plucked from Kenny Gebhardt's dead hand.

Divorce insurance. In case Wes had no intention of paying alimony.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

There's nothing like attempted murder to wake you up. I scrambled out of bed and ran next door without putting on shoes. I knocked loudly, hoping I wouldn't wake the other motel guests. When Zack answered, I told him as much as I knew, becoming aware as I spoke just how little that was.

It took Zack fifteen minutes to get Ron out of bed and strapped into the chair. He handed me the keys to the van. I drove while he pulled off Ron's pajama top and put a shirt on him.

We sped down the freeway; I got off at the exit for the hospital and drove at top speed down the side street that led to the emergency room entrance. I raced inside while Zack extricated Ron from the van.

I walked up to a man in a tan uniform with the star-badge of a state trooper. “I'm here about Jan Gebhardt,” I said. “How is she? What happened?”

“I can't tell you that, ma'am. You'll have to wait for the doctor.”

“The guy on the phone said she'd been attacked. How? When?”

Zack pushed the chair through the sliding glass doors. The trooper stared; apparently he hadn't been prepared for Ron to be a quadriplegic.

A nurse stepped out from a set of double doors. “Can we see her?” Ron asked. He leaned forward in the chair, seeming to strain at his bonds. But that was impossible; he had no muscle control below his midchest.

“Miss Gebhardt is in intensive care,” the nurse replied, her tone sympathetic but professionally cool. “Immediate family only, I'm afraid.”

“I am her immediate family,” Ron insisted. “I'm her husband.”

I stared at my brother open-mouthed. Being at a loss for words is unusual for me, but there was so much I wanted to say that I found myself unable to say anthing at all.
When?
was one of the questions I'd have liked to ask.
Why didn't you tell me?
also came to mind. And finally:
Do Mom and Dad know?

Why was the last question suddenly the most important?
Did you distrust everybody in your life, or just me?
Am I the only one in the family you kept in the dark?

But events were moving too fast. The nurse said, “In that case, I'll have Dr. Singh come in and give you the prognosis.” She turned and walked away on soundless white shoes.

Dr. Singh was a small, bearded man with walnut-colored skin, a white turban, and a slight singsong accent. He said Jan was in a coma and that he had no idea when or even if she might regain consciousness.

“It is not looking good at this moment,” the doctor said. “She is only at number four on the Glasgow coma scale, which means she is in a severe coma. She may not awaken, and if she does, she may suffer serious brain damage.”

“Does she need surgery?” Ron asked.

“We are taking a CAT scan to determine that,” Dr. Singh replied. “The great danger at this stage is internal pressure from bleeding and cerebral fluid. We will monitor her constantly and operate if we must.”

“Can I see her?”

“As soon as she is finished with the scan and we have her stabilized, you may enter the room for a maximum of ten minutes. Then you must let her rest.”

Dr. Singh murmured something about time being the great healer. I wanted to tell him to drop the Deepak Chopra act, but Ron and Zack nodded as if he'd said something profound.

I tried in vain to take it all in. Three days ago, I had no idea whether Jan Gebhardt was alive or dead. Then she reappeared, turned herself in, and claimed she'd been betrayed and set up in 1982. Now she was near death and married to my brother.

“When?” I asked, turning to him. “When did you marry her?”

“Summer of '82. Father Jerry.”

The doctor left and the state trooper approached, notebook and pen in hand. “You two were with the victim earlier this evening, is that right?”

I nodded. “We came to see her at Our Lady of Guadalupe.”

“And who else was present on this occasion?”

My lawyer antennae went up. Jan might be a victim, but she was also a defendant, and so was Ron. I didn't want to risk saying anything that could jeopardize his position.