Stranglehold (7 page)

“How do we get backstage?”

“C'mon. I'll show you. I know a way without going through the ballroom.”

The kitchen resembled a war zone. Shouting, bellowing. Men and women in various uniforms cooking, carrying trays, filling glasses, opening ovens, preparing salads, sampling soups, the enemy being a collective appetite that had to be fed and satisfied.

A door in the far wall led to three steps that ended on the cusp of backstage. Black Velvet Elvis was just starting on a Fats Domino song in front of the curtain. I looked for press. The only people I saw had big plastic badges strung over their necks. They were with the campaign. But even so they weren't paid staff. I didn't trust them.

There were stand-up microphones, flats, long tables, chairs. Probably most of the business here would be conventions and conferences.

I said hello to a number of people as we walked slowly toward two doors near the back. One door read
Stage Crew
and the other said
Private
. Kristin knocked on the latter one. It was one of those apologetic little knocks.

She didn't get any answer.

I put my ear to the door, listened. What I heard was the wrong kind of silence.

“She's gone.”

“What? No way, Dev.”

It was my turn to knock. No surprise, no response.

I put my hand on the doorknob, twisted it, and pushed into the room. A long metal coatrack on wheels, two comfortable armchairs, a long dressing table with the standard bulbs around the circular mirror. The lights were off. The dressing room was empty.

“Oh, shit,” Kristin said behind me.

I didn't see anybody backstage. Black Velvet Elvis was now on to Buddy Holly. Kristin had followed me out of the dressing room. She was on her cell phone asking Ben if Susan was by chance in the lobby. “He'll go check. And I'll go out front and keep looking.”

At times like these, even though you like to think of yourself as a rational, sensible being, all the end-game fantasies start preying on your mind. Where was Susan? Maybe she was preparing her resignation speech, trying to beat the press to the revelation it would soon be sharing with the world. Might as well get it over with. Maybe sitting in a nearby bar right now scratching out her speech on note cards—she did everything on note cards—preparing herself for one final news release.

She came from the west end of the stage. I got on my cell and let Ben and Kristin know I'd found her. She was small against the back of the looming curtains. She had her head down, didn't see me until she was ten yards away. She looked composed but pale. “I suppose you were looking for me, Dev. And I suppose Kristin told you I wouldn't let her into the dressing room. That was silly. I owe her an apology.” The smile was faked but fetching. “I just went out for some air and I didn't want company.”

I watched her carefully. Anxiety played in the gray gaze, but she managed to give the impression she was in control of herself.

“We just wanted to be sure you were all right.”

She laughed. “I have one mother already, isn't that enough?”

I walked with her to the dressing room. The door was still open. She walked inside and started to close it. Black Velvet Elvis had stopped playing. Somebody was addressing the audience. Telling jokes that weren't getting great responses.

I got as far as saying, “Susan, we really need to—”

“I'll see you in a little while, Dev,” she said. And closed the door.

I went back to the ballroom and grabbed myself a scotch on the rocks. Kristin took my hand and led me around to meet numerous people. This was a good time for socializing. People were drinking but not yet drunk.
The band started playing again, this time a series of Stones songs. An elderly man in a gold lamé evening jacket took Kristin to the dance floor and started bumping and grinding as she pretended not to notice. Every once in a while, though, she'd look over at me and smile and give me a helpless little shrug. If this guy got any more enthusiastic he was going to end up in traction. Then I saw her frown suddenly and I wondered why.

As soon as I sensed somebody stepping up on my right side I knew what had caused Kristin to frown. Greg Larson had invaded our fund-raiser.

Like his partner Monica Davies, Larson had come out of the entertainment business. He'd started life as a studio publicist but found gossip to be more fun and much more profitable. He wrote a syndicated column known for its nastiness and was frequently seen on talk shows with updates on anything that involved stars and scandals. He'd married three different aging stars and had managed to cadge a fair amount of change from each divorce. Eight years ago he'd turned his love of gossip toward politics and set up his own opposition research firm. He had connections all over the world and this made him especially valuable to politicians. He hired the usual suspects to do the grunt work of sifting through newspapers and other documents to dig up their kind of scandals while he practiced the kind of assaults that divorce detectives once did.

There was a senatorial reelection campaign two years ago. A friend of mine was working with an Iraqi vet named Bill Potter who'd lost both of his legs in Baghdad. Potter was ahead in the campaign until his opponent signed on with Larson. Larson did his usual job. Potter's father was a college professor who'd written a number of antiwar pieces. Potter's brother was gay. And Larson dug up a high-school photo of Potter grinning and smoking a joint and giving somebody the finger. Then he discovered that he had been treated for post-traumatic stress syndrome after his second tour in Iraq. Larson came up with a commercial he called “Family Values”—Potter's family—a pinko father, a queer brother, and a dope-smoking smart-ass who couldn't handle a couple of tours in
Iraq without needing some psychological help. So he'd lost a couple of legs—he was still a whiner and a candy ass. It was ugly and it worked. Larson's man had started twenty points behind and ended up winning by nine points.

“Nice crowd.”

“It was till you got here, Larson.”

“Aw, still bitter about that commercial, are you?”

Larson had the look of a Wall Street CEO, one whose fleshy body needed a lot more time in the gym and a lot less time at the table. But he had the hard good looks and the silver-gray hair that kept him dominant even in the company of younger men—younger men more ruthless than he was.

“Heard you were in town and just thought I'd stop by to say hello.”

In idle moments I'd had many daydreams of smashing his face in. Back when I was in army intelligence and investigating the sins of various officers I frequently met Larson's type. They were usually West Pointers and they were convinced of their superiority based on little more than that they knew the secret handshake of that institution. Their weapon was the sneer. To question them was to challenge them as they had not been challenged since they'd graduated. They would always bring up West Point at the first opportunity and commiserate with me because I'd never had the privilege of attending there myself. Putting me in my place, of course. I'd had a lot of daydreams of smashing them in the face, too.

“You always wear a dinner jacket?”

“Believe it or not, I've got a dinner party to go to tonight. It'll be a little higher class than this, Conrad, but I have to admit I haven't seen any of your guests eating with their hands yet. So I'm impressed.”

He hadn't stopped just to say hello. We'd had too many near fistfights for him to be comfortable. One night in Chicago I'd gone so far as to throw him up against a wall. We had both been pretty drunk. Both staffs had jumped between us, stopping the fun.

“You haven't seen Monica around here tonight, have you?”

“Monica? What the hell would she be doing here?”

For once he'd dropped his drollery. “There's something going on. I don't know what it is yet, but it's got me worried.”

“Why would I care what happens to you and Monica?”

The smirk was back. “Because, old boy, your people may be involved in it, too.”

But I was sick of him now and his game, whatever it was.

“Hold this,” I said, pushing my empty glass into his hand and walking away quickly. It is small victories like this that make life worthwhile.

Around ten o'clock, after the dinner and the speeches, the band started playing again and Kristin forced me onto the dance floor. For fast songs I have invented a series of miniature movements that to the casual eye seem to be what you could call dancing. But if you look carefully you'll see that I'm actually standing in one place and cleverly using elbows and hips to fool any dance critics who might be looking on.

“C'mon, Dev, move around a little. Look at me.”

I was looking at her, which was a pleasure. That cap of gorgeous red hair and the slash of grin and the lithe body moving sinuously to the music. Since I'm neither pretty nor sinuous, I kept on dancing the only way I knew how. Stiff middle-aged white man gets his groove on.

Neither of us could go for much longer than thirty seconds without looking to the center of the floor where Susan was dancing. A long line of men had queued up to be the congresswoman's brief partner. Each of them got about a fourth of the song. She could really dance. Apparently, all her nights in clubs had taught her well. The TV people loved it. So did the guests with digital cameras. As long as we could see her, we were happy. She wasn't going to wander off without giving me the talk I deserved, as to just what the hell was going on.

Susan had competition in the form of her stepmother. Natalie had an even longer line of beaus, and where Susan was dancing just for fun, Natalie was putting on a show. In her mauve cocktail dress, her dark hair and makeup flawless, she was one of those absolutely perfect middle-aged women gerontologists are awed by. She was here to show the younger ones how to do it.

The few times she and Wyatt danced together, the cameras rushed to make the moment immortal. They danced to the slower songs and with such grace I wondered if they hadn't taken ballroom lessons together; their steps and their physical attitude had that kind of drama and poise.

Natalie was no doubt pleased to see that the cameras had now shifted in her direction. She wouldn't get as much screen time as her stepdaughter, but at least she'd be on the tube.

When they finished dancing, Wyatt Byrnes stepped aside so that a group of women could surround Natalie and gush. Byrnes's gaze met mine and he walked over.

“Enjoying yourself, Dev?”

“Do I look as uncomfortable as you do?”

“You noticed, eh?” He laughed. “I like dancing with Natalie. That's the fun part. On one of the cruises we took we got into ballroom dancing.”

“What's not the fun part?”

He leaned in and said softly, “The people. I'm not much for parties and things like that. I'd rather be home with a beer, watching Western movies. My father read them and watched them all the time. Westerns, I mean. I guess I picked it up from him.”

The rich man with the taste of the common man. Hard to know if it was genuine. Political spouses and important relatives are trained to be good copy. When the press comes around, have a good story for them. And make that story something the largest number of people can identify with. And make it an “Aw” story, as in “Aw, that's so nice he's just a
regular guy.” You have to be careful of “Aw” stories because they can get out of control fast and sound contrived and unctuous. For instance, never have your guy say that his lifelong ambition is to work in a leper colony.

“For what it's worth, Dev, I think you people are doing a good job for Susan. I know that Natalie can get a little testy now and then, but when we're alone she admits that you're doing everything you can. The problem is Susan.”

On the edge of the dance floor Natalie stood with her admirers. When she was a little girl she'd probably dreamed of being popular in this way, show-biz popular. But now she'd begun looking around, her smiles stage tricks and her attention wandering.

“I think she's looking for me,” Byrnes said. “I need to go and rescue her. Nice to see you, Dev.”

I had a fresh drink and listened to the band for a time. They did a pair of Stones covers that were especially good. Then I needed a break. I was on my way to the men's room when my cell phone bleated. I stopped and answered it.

“Mr. Conrad?”

“Yes.”

“This is Tommy Nickels.” Whoever he was—and I didn't have a clue—he was excited about something. “From the hotel? You said to call you?”

“Oh, right, Tommy.”

“Something happened in her room. I was carrying bags past her room and I heard her arguing with somebody. I couldn't stop because I was loaded down and this guy was in a hurry to get into his room. I had to spend a few minutes before I got him all set up. Then I got back to the Davies woman's door and there wasn't any sound.”

“Maybe the other person left. Was it a man, by the way?”

“Oh, yeah, definitely a man.”

I wasn't sure why he had called. Did he think this kind of information would get him more money?

“There was a security man up here checking on something, Mr. Conrad. So just for the hell of it I had him knock on her door and see if everything was all right. I mean she and the guy were really arguing when I heard them. He knocked, but he didn't get any answer. I wanted him to let me in, but he wouldn't do it until he got the night manager's approval. Which he ended up getting. And that was when he found her.”

Somebody would have to teach Tommy how to write a news story. The lead was always the most important part and it was now obvious what that lead was going to be.

“Is she dead, Tommy?”

“Yeah. Whoever nailed her got her with this small brass statue we have in some of the rooms. Like I said, it's small, but if you use it like a weapon, it'll get the job done for you. So is this worth another twenty?”