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Authors: Ed Gorman

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BOOK: Sleeping Dogs
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When I got back to headquarters, I found Teresa Nichols, Kate, Laura, Gabe, and Billy sitting in Warren's office drinking coffee and looking glum. They were like seven-year-olds who'd just been told they couldn't go outside and play in the tornado.
Billy said, “Have you heard the radio in the last five minutes?”
“I just listen to the oldies station. The eighties was my decade. You know, when I was still innocent.”
Laura dredged up a smile. “You were never innocent, Dev.”
“All right, but I was at least
semi
-innocent.”
“That I can live with.”
“I'm afraid to ask, but what was on the radio?”
“Oh, Dev,” Teresa said. “It was awful.”
“Okay, which one of you is going to give me the first clue?”
“They didn't spend much time on Senator Nichols at all,” Kate said. “Most of it was about how heroic and manly and family values Jim Lake looked walking across the stage last night to help his opponent.”
“They of course mentioned that he led us in prayer?”
“Of course, Dev. They mentioned that twice, in fact.”
Billy said, “They even mentioned the American flag he had stuck up his ass. Forgive my crudity, Teresa.”
“Be my guest,” Teresa said.
“God, can you imagine what the overnight polling is going to look like?” Laura said.
“Where's Warren?” I asked.
Laura said, “I got him another big radio interview.”
They were all here. “He's down there alone?”
“I thought I'd leave pretty soon.”
“You leave right now,” I snapped at Laura. “Dammit, you're communications director, remember? Get going.”
“There's no need for that, Dev,” Teresa said. “I was planning on going with her. Sometimes you treat my husband like a helpless child.”
“No offense, Teresa, but sometimes he
is
a helpless child. He gets overwhelmed and says the wrong thing. That's why he's hired all of us here. To save him.”
She decided to let me live. She sighed and said, “I suppose Dev's right, Laura. We'd better get down there.”
“It's only ten minutes on the Dan Ryan,” Billy said helpfully.
Before the door closed, and spoken so loudly that I couldn't possibly miss it, Laura said, “I see Dev's on the rag again.” And Teresa laughed, of course.
“You could have handled that a little better, Bunny,” Kate said, standing up and walking over to get her coat from the rack. Bunny was her nickname for me. I'd never understood why exactly.
“I suppose I could have.”
“Technically, you were right. I don't know what the hell Laura was thinking. She said she'd meet him at the studio. But I was starting to wonder when she was going to leave. But still—we don't need the stress of you losing your temper.”
“You can't see it, but I'm actually groveling, Kate. I'll apologize to Laura first chance I get. And was the radio really that bad?”
“I've monitored five different stations,” Billy said. “Every one of them leads with how noble Lake was before they even mention the senator's name. And since the senator is now up and around, the rest of the time is spent on how voters may now take a fresh look at Jim Lake, who the Nichols campaign and a lot of newspapers have tended to turn into a nut job who's in the pocket of every crooked corporation in the United States.”
“The poor baby,” Kate said as she left.
Gabe, pouring himself some coffee, said, “This too shall pass, Dev.”
“I wish I could believe that.”
“Look who we're dealing with here,” Gabe went on. “The guy who said that any Catholic who votes Democrat should be excommunicated.”
“Lake took it back.”
“But it shows that he'll self-destruct. He probably would've done it at the debate the other night if somebody hadn't fixed Warren's Diet Pepsi.”
“Maybe Gabe's right, Dev. Lake does tend to self-destruct.”
“Yeah, Billy, and maybe Warren can fly without needing a plane.”
“Lake always ends up saying the wrong thing,” Gabe said.
“Will you guarantee that in writing?”
He appreciated the humor. “Sure. If I don't have to sign my real name.”
 
 
 
T
hat afternoon, despite being pretty much drained from last night, I played handball for an hour. I was hoping to find a pickup opponent in the gym somewhere in the age range of eighty to ninety or who was legally blind. Unfortunately, the only guy I could
find was about twenty-five and looked as if he bench-pressed Buicks to impress his girlfriends.
He did me the favor of reviving me. I forgot everything but the game. If I hadn't paid attention, he would have literally run over me. He saw what we were doing as mortal combat. He was a video-game star come to psychotic life. I don't think he chuckled the word “pussy” more than four or five times when I missed plays. I was about fifteen years and many muscle groups older than he was. Afterward he congratulated me in the manner of an invading general patting the loser on the back. “You gave it your best, man.” I wondered how many times I could hit him in the face before he broke me in half. Well, “Pussy” was at least better than “Pops.”
After showering, I found a deli that served Heineken and had myself a corned beef sandwich. I was playing hooky and I knew it. But finally the work ethic snuck up on me and dragged me back to headquarters. The press was gone. Phones, faxes, copiers, deliveries, minor crises—we were back to serious work again. And people of all ages, colors, religions, and degrees of power dreams ran about the place like the Japanese in those old Mothra monster movies cable can buy for cheap on Halloween.
“I think you need a cup of coffee,” I said when I walked into the office in the back. Warren was alone, staring off with a frown making him look older than he was.
“I need a lot more than that, Dev. Friend of mine says the
Trib
is going to run a big piece on Jim Lake tomorrow. Family, friends, the whole nine yards. He's our new hero.” He snorted and shook his head. “Let us now all bow our heads and pray. Shit, if I'da known it was that simple I woulda brought some holy water along and blessed everybody in the audience. I was an altar boy, you know—and, no, I didn't get buggered by a priest. You can't say you were an altar boy anymore without somebody asking if some priest slipped you the sausage.”
“Elegantly put. Now, c'mon. We're going down the street for coffee.”
When the waitress brought us our Danish along with our coffee, Warren said, “So you saw the video?”
“I saw the video.” We had to speak much more softly this afternoon. The place was only half full. Words carried.
“It's legit?”
I nodded. “I'm done the day after the election.”
I took some pleasure in his startled reaction. “What the hell's this all about?”
“Just what I said it was about. I'm quitting the day after the election. Win or lose.”
“I see. You're getting sanctimonious on me. Thanks a lot. My ass is on the line here and you're leaving.”
“Not till it's over.”
“This is really bullshit, Dev.”
“You lied to me. When I signed on, I said no lies.”
“Well, you sleep around as much as I do and—” He stopped. “Before you give me a sermon, Monsignor Dev, let me correct that statement. When you sleep around as much as I
used to
—”
“It's all bullshit, Warren.”
“What is?”
“You've never stopped sleeping around. You've just figured out a way to hide it better.”
“Here comes the sanctimony.”
“The tape is for real. And so is his demand.”
“He wants a million in hundred-dollar bills. We're taking him the three hundred thousand. Right?”
“Right.”
“What if he wants more?”
“He won't.”
“But what if he
does?”
“Don't worry. I can handle it. As much as I don't want to.”
“And here I thought people in Congress were sleazy. This Greaves is something else, isn't he?”
“Both sides have got people like him.”
“Oh, I forgot what you always say. That it's a matter of degrees. Well, thank God we don't have anybody as bad as Greaves.”
“I need to know when the money will be ready.”
“Tomorrow morning. I should be in the office by ten o'clock.”
“Fine.”
“Just don't do anything crazy, Dev. Sometimes you worry me. You've got a dark side, my friend. You need to watch yourself.”
“Do something crazy like sleep around on camera when I'm up for reelection, you mean?”
“I was hungover. I've told you that. Different men react to being hungover in different ways. I always get this incredible hard-on.”
“You could always abuse yourself.”
“When a little dolly like her walks in? C'mon, not even a pious bastard like you could resist.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“I wish you'd make me feel a little better about all this, Dev. It wouldn't hurt you to tell me this is going to work out all right.”
I couldn't help myself. As much as I'd come to despise him, I felt sorry for him for just a millisecond here. “Warren, you're so used to people propping you up, it's sort of humorous. They forgive you everything and when you're down they pump you back up with bullshit. And that goes triple for when you and the rest of them are in session. You people in Washington are the most spoiled, pampered, self-important group anywhere in the world. And it just keeps on getting worse. You vote yourself more and more privileges every term. And that goes for both sides as always. So when you're faced with a serious crisis that you just happened to cause yourself—you just assume that
somebody on your staff can make it all better. Well, I'm going to tell you that maybe this will come out all right and maybe it won't.”
“But you said—”
“I said I
think
he'll go for the three hundred thousand. But what if he doesn't? I could kill him and take the tape. You want me to kill him for you, Warren?”
“C'mon. That's crazy. That's what I meant about your dark side.”
I leaned back in the booth. Stared right at him. “You love your Senate seat so much, Warren, that if it came right down to it—if the only way you could keep it was to have me kill Greaves for you—”
“Don't be ridiculous.”
“I'm not being ridiculous. Maybe in the end you wouldn't be able to give me the order to off him. But I'll bet you'd have to think about it for a long time. And there're a lot of others in Congress just like you. It's just unthinkable that you'd give up power, isn't it?”
“I don't like you anymore, Dev. I really don't.”
“Right now,” I said, sliding out of the booth, “I could give a shit, Warren.”
Dinner that night was a rare delicacy known as a cheese-and-onion pizza that Laura and I shared as we discussed our next media buy. An internal poll had come in late this afternoon that I was seeing for the first time at headquarters. Our interpretation of it was that we were losing whatever gains we'd made downstate, which is more conservative than most people realize. We'd never planned on winning that area of the state, but we had to get a minimum of twenty percent of it to offset any sudden surge by Lake. One of our own pollsters faxed us an internal poll he'd conducted late yesterday. It showed that downstate we were running sixteen percent, down three since Lake had started playing Doc Savage. We'd been at twenty-one a week ago.
“I'd say it's time to unload number four on them. The nuke.”
I'd said this with an air of bravado as a joke. Laura had been anxious to drop the most negative commercial we'd ever done. The one that pointed out that if you were an average citizen, it didn't make any sense to vote for Lake.
But she didn't return my smile. Her brown eyes were fixed on a spot slightly to the right of me. She was gazing off into the middle distance, distracted by something that had been bothering her even before I'd walked in here twenty minutes earlier.
“The nuke, Laura. The one you've been waiting for.”
“Oh, that'll be great,” she said, forcing her attention back to me. The delicate bones of her face were as refined as ever. But in the eyes and in the voice there was a hint of agitation she was having a hard time controlling. “The big one.”
“We've got plenty of money. We can saturate the whole area. We can force him to answer us point for point.”
But she was staring off again. The temptation was to say something to her, but I decided to turn around and work on the computer for a while.
I called up the copy for the nuke spot. It was simple, and every charge it made was true. Each accusation was based on Lake's voting record.
Ask Jim Lake why he voted against
HEALTH CARE (for those who can't afford it)
EXTENDED UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE
TAX PENALTIES FOR COMPANIES OFFSHORE
STUDENT LOAN INTEREST REFORM
CAPS ON LOBBYIST SPENDING
MORE CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT ON GOVERNMENT SPENDING
Ask Jim Lake. You won't believe what he's got to say.
Negative advertising has a bad name. A good deal of it is deceitful and excessive. But used properly, it's the best way to give the public an indication of what your opponent truly believes. This spot was aimed, as most negative ads are, at independent voters who might have started
leaning toward Lake. We hoped we were raising at least one issue that would give each voter pause. A saturation campaign was our best hope of achieving that.
 
 
 
A
t first I didn't want to believe what I was hearing. The campaign was getting difficult enough. But when it didn't stop, I had no choice except to admit what I was hearing and then turn around and face it.
Laura, dutiful Laura, always reliable communications director Laura, was holding a Kleenex up to her eyes dabbing the tears gleaming down her cheeks. Her nose was red. The hand that held the tissue was trembling.
“Can I help, Laura?”
She shook her head and started crying again, snuffling into the Kleenex. I shoved the box of tissues closer to her. “Probably time to change that one, Laura.”
She laughed raggedly, pitched the used tissue into the wastebasket, and then plucked a fresh one from the box.
“You don't think it'd help to talk about it?”
She shook her head again.
“Somebody sick in your family? Something like that?”
“I really can't talk about it, Dev,” she managed to say.
“There's a bottle of bourbon in that desk over there. Would you like a shot of it?”
Another shake of the head.
And then she was on her feet, gathering up her coat and purse, clutching them to her as if she were afraid I'd take them away from her. “I just don't know how much longer I can do this,” she said.
What the hell was “this”?
“You mean this job? Is that what you're saying, Laura?”
“I'm sorry, Dev. I really have to go. I wouldn't be able to concentrate tonight, anyway. I'll be here bright and early in the morning. I promise. But now—”
She stumbled as she walked to the door. I was afraid she was going to fall over. But she righted herself at the last moment. “I always told you I was a clumsy oaf.”
“And I always told you you were crazy.”
“I'm sorry to do this to you, Dev.”
“Well, you're obviously in no shape to work, so don't worry about it. I just wish you'd let me help you with it, whatever it is.”
“Sometimes you can be so sweet, Dev. We all appreciate it.”
And then she was just footsteps heard out front in the public section of headquarters. She took the side door out so she wouldn't have to face the volunteers who'd been working late as the campaign hurried to Election Day.
Not a clue. “I don't know if I can do this much longer, Dev.” Buy media? Sit in the same room with me? Associate with political people? Face an unhappy life every morning when she got up?
I wasn't worried about her as an employee. She was damned good, but so were others we could sign on quickly. I was worried about her as a friend. I'd never thought of her as being especially vulnerable. She liked to be tough to the point that it was sometimes comical. To see her break this way was shocking.
 
 
 
F
luffy scrambled eggs, warm toast with peach jam, two strips of crisp bacon, and a cup of rich, good coffee. Breakfast next morning.
I'd spent a half hour in the hotel gym. I needed to be as focused as possible for my confrontation with Greaves. He'd find out too late that
I'd tape-recorded everything he'd said to me during our upcoming exchange at noon. Then I'd have a bartering tool as well. He might be able to sink the campaign with his video of Warren, but I'd be able to put him in prison for several years for extortion.
He'd come at me, of course, and I wanted to be sure I could take him out fast and sure. I even spent twenty minutes on the punching bag.
Now, after a shower and a change of clothes, I was enjoying my breakfast. Enjoying it right up to the point where one of the city's more prominent Lake supporters suggested in an op-ed piece that officials had conspired to cover up Warren's real problem at the debate the other night, that he'd been drunk.
The op-ed went on to remind voters that not that long ago there were many rumors about Warren in Washington. His girl chasing was one, but so was his excessive drinking.
Had police and hospital officials floated the “sedative” story to cover up his drinking? Nichols was, it went on, a powerful sitting senator and had enough influence to ask them to cover for him.
The charge was ridiculous—maybe you could get cops to cover up a story; hospital officials would never go along with it—but it sounded more convincing than our true story of something being put in his Diet Pepsi and vague hints of a conspiracy.
The lynch mob that listened to talk radio would be sexually excited by an allegation like this. By midafternoon they'd have painted Warren not only as a drunken philanderer but as a terrorist spy as well.
“I want to know what you and my husband are keeping from me.”
I raised my head from the op-ed page, happy that somebody had distracted me, and saw a familiar and alluring face across the booth from me. Teresa Nichols was wearing a red ski sweater, her lustrous blond hair pulled back in a pert ponytail. Only the anxiety in her gleaming eyes spoiled the magazine-ad glamour of her patrician face.
“And good morning to you, Teresa.”
She smiled. “I'm sorry. I should at least have said hello, shouldn't I? It's just I know he's hiding something. And since he doesn't have any secrets from you—”
“I'm not sure that's true, Teresa.”
She had coffee only. Black. When we were alone, the hotel coffee shop starting to fill up with the last rush of the morning, she said, “He's been so distracted the last few days, it's like he isn't even there. And last night I was sure something was wrong.”
“What happened last night?”
“Nightmares. He never has nightmares unless something terrible is wrong. He woke up twice shouting and covered in sweat.”
“A lot of things could cause nightmares. It doesn't have to be a deep dark secret.”
“How about a three A.M. phone call?”
“Now you might be on to something. Any idea who called?”
“No. It came on his cell. He grabbed it and took it down the hall in the den so I couldn't hear it.”
“You didn't hear any of it?”
“He muttered a curse word when he answered it in our bedroom. I didn't hear any of the rest of it.”
Now she had me curious, too. There was the possibility that the phone call had nothing to do with Greaves and his videotape. But three A.M.—it was difficult to believe that the call wasn't about the tape. There were always sudden campaign problems. But a three A.M. call made it unlikely that an aide had phoned him. He or she would have waited till morning.
“He said you're going to get together about ten at headquarters.”
“That's the plan.”
“Please do me a favor and see what you can find out. Tell him you had breakfast with me and that I was very concerned.”
She still had a good wife's faith that her husband would tell the
truth to a close friend and thus, eventually, to her. But Warren was a man of a thousand secrets. I knew only a few of them. I was assuming that this was about the tape. But possibly there was another secret I knew nothing about, something even more dire than R. D. Greaves's tape.
“I'll see what I can do.”
She settled back into the booth, a shiny, fine, middle-aged woman I'd had innumerable fantasies about over the years. She was just so damned
clean
and sleek.
“I see you're reading that stupid op-ed.”
“The one where he's an opium smoker and a pedophile?”
“I wish it
was
funny, Dev. But I know a certain percentage of people will believe it. He really has changed, Dev. No more chasing around. I'm sure of that.”
“Truth doesn't matter to these people, Teresa.” And it doesn't matter all that much to your husband, either.
“God knows Warren isn't perfect. But nobody is. For all his faults he's been a very good senator.”
“Yes, he has.”
“And I still think Jim Lake was behind putting something in his soda the other night.”
“Maybe so.”
She made a fist with her tiny hand. “Oh, this op-ed just makes me so mad, Dev.”
She left the booth as quickly as she'd appeared in it. “I'm meeting Kate for coffee at Starbucks down the street. She's taking her morning break in about ten minutes.”
Mention of Kate made me think of another staffer, Laura. And her strange breakdown last night. Another secret I didn't know anything about? What had upset her so much that she couldn't stop herself from breaking down in front of me?
“Nice that you and Kate get along so well.”
“God, people keep saying that. I guess they expect a catfight or something. But Kate's been working with us for six years now. We've always been good friends.” She glanced at the slender gold watch on her left wrist. “Need to go, Dev. But please try and find out what's bothering him so much, will you?”
“I sure will, Teresa. You just relax and have a good time with Kate.”
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