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Authors: Ed Gorman

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BOOK: Sleeping Dogs
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Kate hadn't been exaggerating about the press. I had to push, shove, even kidney punch my way through the pack to get to the ER registration desk, where a surly nurse said, after I'd introduced myself, “You better be who you say you are. Two of them—” Her eyes took in the phalanx of reporters, videocams, recorders, and still cameras that I'd just escaped. The only thing that stopped them from overrunning and sacking the ER was the lone and nervous-looking uniformed security guard. “Two of them tried to pass themselves off as interns. They were so stupid they couldn't answer the first question I asked them.”
Now I understood why she was so surly. The press can be a juggernaut that can unhinge the strongest of people. They'd descended on this poor woman and undone her. Her face gleamed with sweat and her gaze was jittery and bitter.
Billy rescued me. He'd wandered here from somewhere down the hall. When he saw me he came over. The nurse looked relieved. “So he is who he says he is?”
“Yes. He sure is.” Billy looked at the press mob now calling his name. They knew who he was. I guess they thought he was going to say,
Aw, let them come back and hang with the senator awhile.
Instead, he said to the nurse, “You'll have nightmares for six months about this.”
She managed a smile. “This isn't quite as bad as when that alderman got shot. But close.”
As we walked down the corridor to the room where Warren was, the hospital smells began to bring out my Irish fatalism. Irishmen (I wonder about Irish
women)
have two obsessions, sex and death, and not necessarily in that order. Maybe it's because we spring from the loins of certifiable maniacs, the Celts, those merry fellows who painted themselves with blood before charging naked into battle. Their war cries, this being documented by historical accounts, were said to be so terrifying that the Celts could take villages without lifting a sword. Their screams alone sent villagers running into the forest.
The hospital smells didn't create images of the Celts, but they did create images of what lay behind all those ER curtains. And the sounds augmented the aromas. The little girl whose temperature had soared to a dangerous number, crying out now in sweaty delirium, and her tormented parents standing next to her gurney, imploring the young ER doc to save her. The old man lifting spidery fingers to receive the hand of his middle-aged daughter, who knew he would never leave the hospital alive. The teenage boy sobbing through the fog of drugs and drink, not knowing yet that his reckless driving had killed his best friend.
Sharp stench of meds. Muffled words of nurses. The stray cry, piercing as a bullet. The quick ratcheting clamor of curtains being ripped back along metal rods.
Two security guards stood outside Warren's door. They'd already dealt with Billy, so all they did was nod as we went into the room.
Warren lay, eyes closed, pale and damp on a gurney. He was hooked up to two different monitors that beeped quietly and frequently. His wife, Teresa, leaned over the bed, gently touching the back of her hand
to his cheek. On the other side stood Kate and Laura. Kate's lips moved in silent prayer. Gabe sat alone in a corner, his eyes downcast.
When Teresa saw me, she offered me her free hand. I took it and moved closer to her. “So far the tests they've given him don't indicate a heart attack or a stroke. They're doing more tests. But one of the older doctors stopped in and asked if he'd been throwing up. Which Warren did twice in the ambulance.”
A young doc came into the room just then. Indian, almost delicate, pretty. She walked toward Teresa. I stood aside. She introduced herself as Dr. Ajeet.
“I consulted with two other doctors, Mrs. Nichols. They wanted to know what he's had to eat in the last eight hours. We've already got the blood we need for a test. It's in the lab now.”
“I'm afraid I wouldn't know, Doctor. Kate might know.”
Kate raised her head as if scanning the ceiling. “Let's see—we had lunch brought in to campaign headquarters from a deli down the block. He either had corned beef or ham on rye.”
“He had one of those energy drinks around four o'clock,” Billy said. “I was alone with him going over a speech for tomorrow.”
“He guns Diet Pepsi all day,” Laura said. “It's pretty much a joke with the staff that when the senator dies, he wants heaven to be one big vending machine with Diet Pepsi in every slot.” She was smiling until she realized the implications of what she'd said. “Oh, God, I'm sorry, Teresa.”
“Oh, c'mon, Laura, I know you didn't mean anything by that,” she said, looking down fondly at the face of her husband. Teresa was one of those trophy wives who'd surprised everybody by being a woman of intelligence and compassion. And a valuable political asset. The men of Washington wanted to jump her and their wives wanted to count her as a friend.
“I'm wondering about the Pepsi that tasted funny,” I said. “Right before the debate.”
“So am I,” Kate said.
We told Dr. Ajeet about the incident that Warren had put down to melted ice.
“That's very interesting,” the doctor said. “We're already working on the possibility that he ingested something harmful in his food or drink. But we're considering many possibilities. From what we can see so far, Senator Nichols is in a deep sleep. His vitals are all normal.”
“He's asleep?” Laura said.
“Yes. The same kind of sleep you'd get if you took too many sleeping pills. Not enough to kill you or do any permanent damage—hopefully not anyway—but enough to put you to sleep for a long time and then to wake up with a pretty bad hangover.” She turned to Teresa. “Remember, when we first examined him, Mrs. Nichols, we were able to get him to open his eyes and talk a little. That's certainly something we can do with cardiac patients, too. But it's also symptomatic in some cases of drug overdoses.”
“Then he'll be all right?” Teresa said, hope making her voice sound much younger, stronger.
“Well, we're more confident now that that's what we're dealing with, anyway,” the doctor said. “We still want to run some more cardiac tests on him, but at this point I think we're going to be able to eliminate cardio pretty soon now.”
Billy said, “He's snoring!”
And so he was.
We all fixed our eyes on Warren's face. The waxen look was receding. The eyelids fluttered, though they remained closed. And through his lips came a wet nasal blast that was almost violent. He was a master snorer, no doubt about it.
“Oh, thank God,” Teresa said, clutching my hand again.
At this point I assumed that Warren was going to be all right, so my mind shifted back to the mysterious makeup woman. And to a man named R. D. Greaves, the dirty-tricks man Jim Lake had employed in
all three of his congressional elections. And had most likely employed for this one, too. Tampering with the drink sounded like something Greaves would do. Lake was, after all, running behind with only three weeks to go.
“Are you leaving, Dev?” Teresa said. She seemed frightened by the possibility.
“I'm afraid I have to, Teresa. There's a lot to handle now.”
“Me, too,” Laura said. “I need to go out there and face down that pack of jackals. Kate had her turn, now it's mine.”
“You want me to write something for you?” Billy said.
“Thanks, Billy. But I'm going to give them so little information we won't need to write it down.” A sly smile as she said this.
“I'll stay with Teresa,” Kate said. The two women had always been friendly, something you don't always see in political relationships. The wife threatened by the beautiful staffer. The staffer gloating over the long hours she got to spend with the candidate alone. But these two women actually hung out together, with Teresa, who could not have children, even frequently babysitting Kate's daughter.
“So you won't need me?” Kate said.
“No. But maybe R. D. Greaves will.”
She knew what I meant by that. Billy and Laura were already walking through the door and hadn't heard me. Gabe stood up, silent as usual.
“Oh, yes,” Kate said. “I hope you can find him and pay him a visit.”
Teresa wasn't paying us any attention. She was too busy touching Warren's face with her hand.
“I'll call you later,” I said to Kate and then went looking for Greaves, though I didn't get far. In my search for a side exit door, not wanting the press to see me leave, I was approached by a long, lean black man in a tan Burberry and a brown snap-brim fedora. He approached me with his ID in hand and a large public smile in place.
“Detective Richard Sayers. And I believe you're Dev Conrad.”
“That's right.”
“I just missed you over at the auditorium. I talked to the campaign manager, Kate. Very nice, bright lady. But I wanted to talk to you, too. See if you had any ideas.”
“I'm not sure what you mean.” But I did know what he meant. He wanted my opinion. He obviously knew there was a possibility that Warren had been drugged.
“I'm looking to see if there's any criminal angle here. Maybe the senator had a heart attack or a stroke or an aneurysm. But then there's the possibility that a bad guy slipped something into his drink. That would make this a criminal act. A lot of people thought he was drunk. I imagine that's just what the bad guy
wanted
them to think. If there was a bad guy.”
“I can't disagree with you there.”
He studied me with dark eyes that held no compassion for anybody unfortunate enough to belong to the human species. “You're a little rattled right now. And I don't blame you. But we need to have a sit-down and very soon. You know everybody who was in that makeup room tonight.”
“I don't like the sound of that. You mean that bad guy is one of the staffers?”
“I'm not saying that. Not yet, anyway. But that's as good a place to start as any.” He smiled with those big white perfect teeth. “I'll be seeing you around. You probably need to relax a little right now.”
He nodded and walked past me, toward the front of the hospital.
“Freshen that up for you, friend?” the bartender asked.
“Please,” I said.
As he mixed me another scotch and soda, he said, “Hope you don't have far to go tonight. That damned snow doesn't want to quit. I told the wife I might wind up staying here. We've got a cot in the back. Of course she thinks I'm hitting on the two waitresses.” He was sixtyish, balding, and saddled with the kind of smile that would remind younger women of uncles and granddads. I doubted his wife had too much to worry about.
The Parrot Cage lounge sat across the street from a new three-story hotel, a hotel that offered suites pretty much like small apartments for travelers who planned to be in the city awhile. I was here because two of the newspapermen I'd called said that, so far as they knew, Greaves was staying at the hotel and doing a lot of his drinking at the Parrot Cage. I knew he had an apartment somewhere in the city but was told that when he wanted to celebrate something, he took a hotel room for
a week or two. I'd checked the hotel. Not there. I was hoping he would end up here for a couple of quick ones before he went across the street to get into his jammies for the night.
“Well, I'm going to stick around for a little while longer, anyway. Hoping to run into an old friend of mine. Man name of Greaves.”
The bartender's face cracked wide open with a grandpop smile. “R.D.? He's some character, isn't he?”
“Oh, you know him?”
“Well, not know him, know him. But he's been coming in here the last three weeks. He likes it when the gal comes in to play the piano onstage. Always giving her money to play songs he can sing along with. He's got a hell of a good voice, you know that?”
“No. I guess I didn't.”
The stage was not much bigger than a walk-in closet, and even that space was halved by the shiny new electric piano. The bar was on the west wall, small tables on the left. There were only three other customers, a black man in a gray suit five stools away from me and a thirtyish couple who laughed a lot. It was a middle-class bar for salespeople who traveled and imbibed. I couldn't find a single physical reference to parrots. Maybe the urinals were shaped like them.
“Plus he'll buy two, three rounds a night for people. Usually scores with the ladies, too. Of course, they're not the little chickadees we'd all like to score with. He gets the middle-aged ones. But nice middle-aged if you know what I mean.”
The black gentleman raised his empty glass. The bartender went to fill it.
A good singing voice, rounds for everybody, a better class of women in his lonely bed. This was unfortunate information to have because it gave R.D., the prick, a humanity I didn't think he deserved.
Where did you start with R.D.? There were some who insisted that he didn't exist. The reasoning went that nobody that corrupt and mercenary could possibly avoid prison as long as R.D. had. Then there
were those who half-believed that R.D. was some kind of supernatural force. Nobody human could be as devious, as ruthless, as merciless as R.D. Just wasn't possible, the human genome being what it was. He had to be some kind of satanic being.
Item: Two election cycles back, Greaves paid sixty elderly black people to help pass out flyers that claimed that the sitting candidate had once been arrested for beating a black man so severely the man had been in the hospital for three weeks. Greaves had one of his techies Photoshop an arrest warrant that detailed the charge. He repeated this in four different cities and towns in the congressional district. This, along with equally dishonest direct mail pieces and truly inflammatory radio spots, helped suppress the black vote and contributed significantly to the incumbent's loss.
Item: The somewhat mannish wife of a sitting governor became the focal point of flyers that claimed that, as a NOW member, she saw nothing wrong with lesbians being gym teachers and touching girls and even watching them shower. The wife was Photoshopped holding hands with another unidentified woman. This was another candidate who lost his seat partly due to Greaves's cunning. His wife, heterosexual from all accounts, was said to still be suffering from acute depression, blaming herself for her husband's loss.
Item: Greaves hired a hacker to obtain the private medical records of an opponent. The senatorial candidate had suffered a severe breakdown following the death of his younger brother in a boating accident. This had been back in the Vietnam era. According to Greaves, the candidate used his brother's death and his own depression (which included shock treatments) to get out of being drafted, “the way too many rich boys were able to avoid that terrible war.” The candidate broke down one night at a press conference trying to explain what the loss of his brother had meant to him. The raw emotional display helped lose him the election. Too unstable.
Probably the most explosive charge Greaves had ever concocted
dealt with a congressman who'd developed a rare blood disease and lost thirty pounds in a five-month period. Sounds like AIDS to me, the flyers said.
And the push calls, too, those phone calls that start out by claiming they're doing an independent survey and need only about sixty seconds of your time. In this case the second or third question of four was: Would you vote for a congressman if you knew he had contracted the AIDS virus? Hundreds of these calls were made in the final two weeks of that election cycle. And they worked perfectly.
Make no mistake. Neither side can claim virtue. Just about any election you can point to is dirty on both sides in some way, from teenagers tearing down the yard signs of your opponent to shouting down the man or woman who is trying to speak to a crowd. It's a matter of degree. Both sides, at the congressional level all the way up to the White House, have their election assassins. And both sides have done a lot of sleazy and unforgivable things to the election process. But only one side ever fielded anybody like R. D. Greaves.
“I'm going to be closing up pretty quick here,” the bartender said after walking to the front window and taking a look at the parking lot. “Doesn't show any signs of letting up.”
“Give me one more while I visit the john.”
“Sure thing.”
And when I got back, he was there. R. D. Greaves himself. Sitting at the far end of the bar where the black gentleman had been.
He didn't recognize me. I took my seat and started working on my fresh drink. During my brief sojourn in the john, the other customers had left. Now it was just the three of us.
The bartender looked confused. He must have thought that I'd be sitting up close to Greaves, since I'd told him we were old friends. He finally said, as he wiped out a glass with a towel he should have tossed about twenty glasses ago, “R.D., man down there's been asking about you.”
I suppose the bartender thought that this introduction would end in some kind of beer commercial backslapping by two big manly men.
Hey, shit, I didn't recognize you! How the hell you been, man? Let's us have a brewski!
But all that happened was that Greaves turned a bit on his stool and glared down the bar at me and said, “Is that right? He tell you
why
he's been asking about me?”
Greaves and I are both shaggy mastodons. Six-four or thereabouts, noses broken a few times by those snobs who found us less than charming, waistlines that had to be carefully watched, and the ready anger that shrinks would probably call paranoia. He wasn't physically afraid of me and I wasn't physically afraid of him. The bartender clearly sensed this and as a result started looking nervous.
“So why're you asking the barkeep so many questions?”
“I thought maybe he could tell me if you were really as big a prick as people say you are.”
Now in your standard cop or cowboy movie, those would be fightin' words. The stuntmen would double the actors and a furniture-bustin' brawl would ensue. But this, alas, was reality, and men our age and our size had to be careful about brawls. Even in your early forties, you didn't recover from physical violence the way you once might have.
He laughed. Or rather, bellowed. “Hell, yes, I'm a big prick. Probably more than you even heard. So who the fuck are you?”
“Campaign consultant to Senator Nichols.”
All he said was, “Figures.” Then he turned around and faced the mirror again. He shoved his empty glass at the bartender. “Hit me again, Mike.”
I slid off my stool and slowly made my way up the bar. Mike looked to be quietly hyperventilating.
“I suppose you heard about tonight. The debate?”
He didn't turn to look at me. “Was there a debate tonight? Guess I didn't hear about it.”
“Somebody put something in my client's drink. Something that made him so groggy he passed out onstage.”
“Man, sounds like I missed something. Maybe I can pick it up on a news show. That'd be some footage I'd bet.”
“Sounds like something Jim Lake would hire somebody to do.”
He angled around to face me. “I don't know anybody who'd do anything like that, Sport. We all have too much respect for our system of government. The whole election process is a sacred right. A lot of people have fought and died for it.”
I didn't do it. Somebody else did. Somebody who looked an awful lot like me. I just stood back and watched as this doppelganger smashed a right hand into the side of Greaves's head. Hard enough to knock him off his stool and onto the floor, where he cracked his head on landing.
Mike pulled a sawed-off from behind the bar and started shouting at me. “You freeze right where you are, mister! I ain't putting up with this kind of shit from anybody!”
Carefully keeping both barrels pointed in my direction, Mike came out from around the bar to see how Greaves was doing.
Greaves was doing just fine. Picking himself up, straightening his clothes, touching his fingers tentatively to the spot where my fist had collided with his face.
“You want me to call the cops, Mr. Greaves?”
“Hell no, Mike. I was actually going to look this creep up anyway. He just saved me some time is all.” He lifted his drink, draining it, “C'mon, creep, I'll buy you some food.”
So that was how I met the one, the only, R. D. Greaves.
 
 
 
“
Y
ou know, Leno and Letterman are always making jokes about Denny's, but I like this place. The food's good and pretty cheap. I've never found anything in my food. You know, a finger or anything
like that. And the booths are comfortable. You take Burger King, those are the most uncomfortable fucking booths I've ever sat in. You ever eat at Burger King?”
“Not unless my kidnappers forced me to.”
He was shoveling ketchup-drenched french fries into his mouth one by bloody one as he talked. He had red streaks across his upper lip and on the left side of his mouth.
“So how'd you ever get into the political racket?”
“My father was a congressman. He got tired of seeing people like you working for people in Congress.”
He winked at me. It was obscene. “Not to brag, but there's never been and never will be anybody ‘like me.' Look it up. Nobody's got my track record.”
“I'll bet your mother's proud of you.”
“As a matter of fact, she's very proud of me. Brags about me to everybody in the old neighborhood.”
“Figures.”
He seemed to bring me into focus for the first time. He had the kind of Gene Hackman looks that could turn easily into good guy or bad guy. “You're a sanctimonious bastard.”
“One of my many failings.” And it was.
He ate some more french fries. He'd obliterated his cheeseburger in four Olympian bites. I was almost afraid to see what he'd do to the three-scoop chocolate sundae he'd ordered right along with his meal. It had been sitting here long enough to melt. “So you think I did in Nichols tonight, huh?”
BOOK: Sleeping Dogs
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