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Authors: Ed Gorman

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BOOK: Sleeping Dogs
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The smells of corned beef, pizza, burgers with lots of onions—staff and volunteers were eating a late lunch when I got back to headquarters. None of them paid much attention to me. Maybe I didn't look as mean as I thought. I wanted to smash somebody up, exactly who or why I wasn't sure. Maybe I wanted to smash myself up. Maybe I'd mishandled this whole Greaves thing. We never like to think that we ourselves screwed something up, but this time maybe it really was me.
Laura was typing rapidly on her computer. Kate and Teresa judged as Warren held up various neckties for them to inspect. Gabe was reading a reference book that had to weigh fifty pounds.
“Tell him to keep the one he's wearing,” Teresa said of Warren's tie.
“These others are god-awful,” Kate said.
“This tie gives me bad vibes,” Warren said.
“And he makes fun of astrology,” Teresa said. “Bad vibes.”
Warren knew the significance of me being back here with the valise still in my hand. He was the one who should be Clark Kent now. His
eyes could penetrate the leather and tell which it held—the money or the tape.
“You up for a good Italian meatball sandwich?” Warren said to me. I could gauge his anxiety by him suggesting Italian. All the Turns he took a day even for bland food—Italian food meant he was desperate to get out of here. “We can just walk a block over. Won't need any guards or anything.” Teresa was adamant about keeping his protection. He hated people hovering. It gets tiresome. You have to watch what you say. Bodyguards sell a lot of material to gossip columns.
“Sounds good. Lots of fat and cholesterol and maybe spill some of that sauce on me. What more could a guy ask for?”
Kate laughed. “When you first came in here, I thought you were in a real bad mood. But now that you're cracking jokes, I know I was wrong.”
Fooled them again.
“You've got to talk to the veterans' group in two hours,” Laura reminded him.
“We'll be gone thirty, forty minutes at the most. Dev here will see to it that I'm on time.”
“How was the radio interview?”
“One of His Majesty's finest hours,” Teresa said. “Right, Kate?”
“We were like schoolgirls,” she said, sliding her arm around Teresa's shoulder, “actually swooning, he was so good.”
“He got through the questions about the debate very well and right up at the top. He spent the rest of the time contrasting his record with Lake's. You could tell the host was impressed. Off the air she said that he was much better on radio than Lake. She said Lake was too strident for radio. That he came over better on TV, where you could see him, and that helped cut down on what he sounds like.”
“Too bad it isn't the other way around,” Warren said. “TV is where the big numbers are. A lot more people watch TV than listen to radio at any time.”
Kate said, “Never try to flatter our senator here. He reacts very badly.”
“Thirty or forty minutes or we'll come and get you, right, Kate?”
“Absolutely.”
Ten steps from headquarters, Warren said, “Well, did you get it?”
“No, but Greaves did.”
“What's that supposed to mean?”
“It means somebody killed him in his hotel room.”
He stopped walking. Stood on the sidewalk, paralyzed. All but the eyes that frogged out a bit. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Just what I said. Now get a grip, Warren. We're out in public, remember?”
“Somebody fucking murdered him?”
“That's right.”
“And we don't know who has the tape now?”
“We don't know one way or the other. Given Greaves's background, we can't be sure that this had anything to do with the tape. There were probably several other people who had reasons to kill him.”
Once we were seated in the restaurant, speaking in lower voices, and after he'd waved to everybody who recognized him and a few who hadn't, he said, “What the hell are we going to do now? What if Lake has it?”
“I need to find the makeup woman. See what she knows. Maybe she worked with Greaves.”
“And how do you plan to do that, for God's sake?”
“I've seen her. I know who I'm looking for, anyway. There's at least a chance that she lives somewhere in the neighborhood I was in.”
“Where would you even start?”
“Beauty shops, bars, dry cleaners. Everywhere.”
“I don't like this.” Petulant.
“Gosh, I'm sorry this is difficult for you, Warren. Myself, I'm having a great time.”
“Don't mock me.”
“Then quit feeling sorry for yourself.”
“And don't give me any ‘wages of sin' bullshit.”
“That's your trouble, Warren. You think it is bullshit. But it isn't. You do something you shouldn't, you always run the risk of getting nailed. It's pretty simple.”
“Thank you, Professor.” Then: “We have to get that tape.”
“I know, Warren. But you're forgetting the other possibility.”
“I won't be able to eat anything now anyway. Tell me.”
“Maybe the killer couldn't find the tape in Greaves's hotel room.”
“So it's still there.”
“So it's still there or the police got luckier than the killer and found it.”
“The police.” He'd spoken sharply. We both looked around to see if anybody was listening. The Italian music—Dean Martin, of course—covered a lot of sins. And we had a lot of sins to cover. “The police? And what would they do with it?”
“Hard to say. I don't know what the protocol is here. Who they turn it over to. Probably the Cook County State's Attorney's Office.”
“Then what?”
“Then I don't know. Like I said. But the big thing right now is to find the makeup woman.”
“You have her name?”
“Not really. She made it up. But I may be getting a lead from this store I checked with. I'm pretty sure I've got the right neighborhood for her anyway.”
Warren visibly relaxed. “I'm glad you're handling this, Dev. Sorry I came unglued there.”
“We just have to be careful here, Warren. We could create even more problems for ourselves if we do anything rash.”
“Is there any way the police can link us to Greaves?”
“Depends on what he left behind. Did he keep notes? What's on his
computer? Did he have an appointment book? The paper trail's going to figure in here. Not just for us but for the killer, too. The luckiest break we could have is if the paper trail leads the police to the right person right away.”
We both passed on the wine. Coffee was what we needed.
He finally did eat his sandwich. I was hungry. I would have eaten half of his if he'd decided to leave it.
“You need to clear your head as much as possible now. And to calm down. No more Xanax, though. You need all the energy you can get. You did well on the radio interview. That's got a big metro audience. That'll help. Probably the interview'll get covered by TV and newspapers. So we're starting back the right way. We've still got the edge in the polls. We can build on that. Heroes don't last long. The press'll now be looking for some way to prove he
isn't
a hero. This is the fun part for them. Knocking somebody down they enshrined as nobility. Plus, when people start to think about it, what the hell did he do, anyway? He was courteous at best. He walked across the stage and gave you a little assistance. Most people, man or woman, would do that. So what? We've got his record to shoot down and we're doing it with our ads and with you on the stump. Once we get this tape thing under control—and I'm hoping that that'll be very quickly—we'll be able to relax a little. But for right now you have to do the old Bill Clinton bit of compartmentalizing. You need to look stronger and tougher than ever, Warren. You need to go out there and start talking about the way we've become such an elitist society. That's your strongest theme. And you've got the voting record to back it up.”
He smiled. “I take it that was an official political consultant pep talk?”
But I didn't smile in return. “I'm just doing my job, Warren.”
I saw a documentary on a political campaign that mentioned everybody, including part-time volunteers, but never said anything about the scheduler. While it may not sound like a difficult job, it is. You not only have to decide—usually with the campaign manager's input—where the candidate will be in the next forty-eight to fifty-six hours, you have to be ready to make abrupt changes if the waters get dangerous.
Miriam Dobbs is a quiet grandmother who came out of the AFL-CIO political wing back when Walter Reuther was still running things. Ike and Jack Kennedy were presidents then, Elvis was in the army, and a tubby little man named Khrushchev was our country's main nemesis.
That Miriam was a black woman made her success even more remarkable. She's the best scheduler I've ever worked with. She pays attention to the news. She senses when one event will have to be bumped
in favor of another. Today she was working out of our office across town, so we did our work by phone.
“I'm assuming we want max audience to show him off. Strong, sturdy, using his sleeve instead of a tissue when he sneezes.”
She also makes jokes.
“I kind of like the sleeve thing. Distinguishes him from the rest of the pack.”
“I thought he pretty much did that by eating with his hands.”
“You may have a point there, Miriam.”
After a few more gags, we settled into a review of the substitutes she'd come up with. All of them were excellent. All of them would attract the press. The previous appointments had been small towns reached by private plane. We could reschedule those for later. For now the city was where he needed to be.
“There's also a chance I can get him a good TV interview.”
“Wow. How'd you swing that?”
“My son is a news producer.”
“Nepotism, eh?”
“That sounds dirty.”
“When will we know?”
“I'm hoping by late this afternoon.”
“Let me know, will you?”
“Always.”
 
 
 
M
y last call from the office was to a friend of mine at one of the big political action committees. PACs have an unseemly reputation, but there are PACs and there are PACs. This one was sponsored by a group of wealthy men who also happened to be hunters. While I'm not much for killing innocent animals, these people were at least enlightened enough to understand the connection between the environment
and their favorite sport. We needed some extra money not only for downstate TV but for some massive radio buys the last week before the election.
I sweet-talked my contact there, a soft-spoken young woman named Heather whom I'd dated a few times in Washington. She'd decided that since I was still so hung up on my marriage, being with me was “like being with my brother.” She probably wasn't far wrong.
“You're sounding a lot better these days, Dev.”
“Feeling better.”
“Good.” She hesitated. “Now I'm the brokenhearted one.”
“What's his name? Consider him rubbed out.”
“I committed the single girl's ultimate sin.”
“Married?”
“Not only married, three kids, too. I really felt like a home wrecker. I kept trying to break it off with him. I really did feel grubby about the whole thing. Finally he broke it off with me. He had the decency to feel guilty about what he was doing to his family. But I still haven't been able to get over him.”
“I'm sorry, Heather.”
“Well, my luck's bound to change. I'm sure I'll meet a closeted gay guy in the next week or so.”
“There you go.”
“Or a wanted fugitive. And speaking of wanted—”
“You could be a disc jockey with segues like that.”
“—you of course want money.”
“Lots of it and fast.”
“What the hell happened to your man the other night?”
“Somebody probably dropped a sedative in his drink.”
“Most likely one of the ladies he's been seeing on the side all these years.”
“You're too cynical.”
“You really don't believe he's changed, do you?”
“Hope springs eternal.”
“So how much are we talking here, Dev?”
So I told her how much we were talking and I thought she might hang up on me. Luckily all she did was laugh and say, “It's a good thing we've got the same ideas politically.”
“Yes,” I said, “isn't it, though?”

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