The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear (14 page)

“Another question,” he said. It drove me crazy when people announced that they were about to say something instead of just saying it. It was a favorite rhetorical device of bureaucrats, as if they were afraid they wouldn't be understood without a preamble. “Do you think your brother is dangerous?”

I stared at him. A little river of sweat was starting to run down my back. It was hot down here. The builders had not wasted money on air conditioning for the basement. “Paul?” I asked.

I could feel my phone vibrating. Why couldn't people just leave me alone for five minutes? Then I wondered if the president had finally gone ahead with his delayed address and I wanted to get out of this room in a hurry.

Joey Francis was just smiling at me. I hated how this made me feel, defensive and off-balance. I wasn't used to this. I was the guy who prided myself on making others feel defensive. I had made a lot of money advising clients how never to be on the defensive. I stepped in closer to Francis.

“What are you trying to say, Mr. Francis?”

“You have a reputation of a guy who will do anything to win. You have a brother—half brother—who is—”

“Crazy,” I said.

He shrugged. “Extreme. It was suggested that we talk to you about him.”

“Suggested? By whom?” He just stared at me. “Look, let me explain something about politics. What happened last night was a goddamn disaster for my campaign. Yes, I'm a guy who
will
do anything to win. I'm that obsessive guy who cares about nothing in the world but my campaign. Would I blow up the other guy's delegates if I could get away with it? Hell, I'd burn their houses down, kill their spawn, and sow their fields with salt. I'd drop uranium isotopes in their drinking water. I'd do anything possible to help my candidate win. But this bombing was terrible for us.”

He let me finish, not changing his expression. “Sounds good,” he said, then held out his hand. “Thanks for coming by.”

“That's it?”

“That's it.”

I left, with a quick nod to Ernie Hawkins.

In the hallway, I realized my heart was pounding and I'd broken out in flop sweat. I was getting into a service elevator near the kitchen, my standard way of avoiding the crowd in the Windsor Court lobby, when the black agent who had been in the command center stepped into the elevator.

“You don't remember me, do you?” he said.

“You were the guy in the room who pretended not to be listening to that Joey guy give me a hard time. So, yeah, I remember you.”

“Your brother's right, you know.”

Boom. There it was again.
My brother?

“He says you're one smart smartass. But come on, you don't remember me at all?” He took a key out of his pocket and locked the elevator to keep it from moving. “Old Indian trick,” he said.

I stared at him. I'd slept less than two hours the night before, not more than four or five hours every night for the past month. All the faces of all the people I'd met during the campaign swirled before me. I tried to focus. There was something familiar about the guy.

“You see,” the black man said with a smile, “it's what I always told your brother. The big slow white boys are heroes for life and us fast nee-gros are invisible. He's lumbering up and down the field like a truck and I'm a ninja night warrior. Invisible. Deadly.”

It was quite a little speech. I stared, feeling the grip on my arm relax. Then the man broke into a deep, loud laugh. “Ninja,” he said, chuckling at his own language. “I like that.”

Suddenly a face and name swam out of my subconscious. “Robinson,” I said. “Walter Robinson.”

“Hallelujah,” the man said. “Praise the Lord. His children have wandered in the wilderness long enough.”

“You were great,” I said, actually excited now. “The fastest guy I ever saw.” Walter Robinson had played with my brother at LSU. He had been a tremendous defensive back until something had happened. “You got hurt, right? Your knee?”

He nodded. “Bad ACL, bad doctor. Bad redo. Zip, it's over.”

“Man, you were fantastic.”

“Your brother wasn't bad. But you know why he got all the glory?”

“Did it have something to do with winning the Heisman?”

He shook his head. “You are confusing the effect with the cause. It was Title Seven in reverse.”

“Title Seven?”

“Quotas. Reverse discrimination. Call it what you will. Your brother was a freak—”

“Still is,” I agreed.

“He was a freak because he was WHITE! And a RUNNING BACK! Nobody could believe it. And a decent running back, at that.”

“Walter,” I asked with a sigh, “why are we having this conversation? You followed me in here for a reason.” I held up my phone. I couldn't count the number of text messages and emails that had come in during the last forty-five minutes. “Are you with the Secret Service now?”

“A cop. And because I am such a charming son of a bitch and because I am a former football great—your momentary lapse of recall being the exception—and because I am a black man in a city that likes to call itself black and because the big boys in the department do not believe I am dealing drugs or killing people on the side for extra cash, they have made me the NOPD designated liaison with the Secret Service–FBI total federal goat rope during this little celebration of democracy.”

“So can you tell me what was going on with that guy? Why did he really want to see me?”

Walter Robinson grinned. “It was all about Joey Francis proving that he wasn't going to be intimidated by anybody, even the vice president's own campaign manager. This is his town, not some Washington big shot's.”

“That's crazy.”

Walter Robinson leaned in intently. For a terrible moment, I thought he was going to kiss me. Instinctively, I pulled back.

“Can I trust you?” he finally asked.

“Trust?” I asked. “Trust?”

Walter Robinson nodded. “You and me.”

“God, no,” I shot back instantly. “Of course not.”

Walter Robinson kept staring.

“Trust?” I repeated. “Like you were going to share something with me and I was supposed to value this something and then somehow take that something into consideration?” Walter Robinson shrugged. “No way. Not going to happen. All I care about is one simple thing: in seventy-two hours Hilda Smith is going to have more delegates voting for her than that psychotic asshole Armstrong George. That's it. Period. That's my sad little mission. And I am taking on no passengers or excess baggage. So anyone would have to be out of their mind to trust me unless that trust helped me get what I need to get done.”

“I think I'm not hearing the truth,” Walter Robinson said. “I think there's one thing you care more about than Hilda Smith getting those delegates to vote for her.”

“Yeah?” Suddenly I wanted out of the suffocating elevator in the worst way. I was sick to death of this man leaning into my face. “Well, let me tell you something: if somebody told me that I had a choice between a cure for cancer and electing Hilda Smith, I'd laugh out loud, the choice would be so easy. And that's the God's honest truth,” and while I said it, I knew that it was the truth. There was a time when such a realization might have troubled me in some deep way, but I'd reached a point in the campaign—and my life—when I just didn't care.

“I still think there is one thing you care about more than this election,” Walter Robinson repeated.

“Am I being kidnapped?” I asked, and reached for the control panel. His hand shot out and stopped me.

“You care about you,” Walter Robinson said in a quiet but menacing voice.

I paused for a moment, then burst out laughing.

“Well, earth to Walter, come in. Of course I care more about myself. I'm a political consultant, for crying out loud, not a missionary. I'd get run out of the damn consultants' union if it didn't put me numero uno. So what?”

“So, can I trust you if it's in your best interest?”

I put a hand on Walter Robinson's shoulder. It felt like a warm piece of iron. Paul might be melting a little around the edges since his playing days, but Walter was still doing something right. “Walter, you can always trust me to put my interests first. Of that you can be sure. Now can I please get the fuck out of this elevator before I lose my goddamn mind?”

“I've got a letter from the bomber,” Walter Robinson finally said. “It talks about your girl.”

“My girl?” My heart started to race. “Sandra? The bomber talks about Sandra?”

He frowned. “Who the fuck is Sandra? Your girl. Hilda, the vice president.” Walter smiled a little. “It seems our boy don't like your girl too much.”

EDDIE BASHA GRABBED ME
as soon as I stepped out of the service elevator.

Walter Robinson smiled at Eddie and waved, just before the elevator doors closed. “Who the hell is that?” Eddie demanded. “Is he with the FBI? And what's this shit about you getting interviewed by the FBI, anyway?” Eddie insisted, not waiting for my answer.

“How the hell do you know about that?”

He looked at me with a smirk. I didn't like this look. It made me feel like he knew something I didn't know, and I was supposed to know everything. That was my job.

We were standing in the hall of the Windsor Court, on the floor completely taken over by Hilda Smith staffers. We had compressed an entire campaign into this floor and the trailers over at the Superdome. One room was devoted to nothing but the tracking, care, and feeding of delegates. Another room was filled with the finance staff, who were consumed with making sure the heavy-hitter donors felt special while also setting up fundraisers for the general election. I loved that group. They were a combination of boiler-room hustlers and special forces, incredibly driven and focused. Most of them were in their twenties, and there wasn't one of them who, if not already rich, wasn't sure to be absurdly so. Next to them was speechwriting. The two groups eyed each other with bemused suspicion. While the finance staff was banging the phones and making side bets on how much they could raise, the speechwriters would wander the halls in a daze, chewing on pencils and looking like every lost grad student who hadn't slept in months. The advance staff was next to the speechwriters. They were the guys and girls who prided themselves on always making events look good. They were famously arrogant and known for partying hard after an event they had spent days putting together. I'd bailed out more than one from jail. Then there was the legal department, a small law firm that handled everything the campaign touched. It was a strange, highly functional family that was brought together not by idealism or ideology so much as a burning desire to win. And now we were close. Very, very close.

Eddie steered me away from a passing intern. She was pretty. As political director, Eddie Basha had made sure that every female intern was a looker. This did not go unnoticed or unappreciated by women like Kim Grunfeld and Lisa Henderson. They went out of their way to make life miserable for the young women.

“Come on, Tommy Singh has got numbers for us.”

Eddie pulled me into his room, just down the hall from the war room. Tommy Singh was sitting on the bed studying numbers on his phone. He was always studying numbers on his phone. If he died tomorrow, they would erect a statue of him peering at numbers on his phone.

“This bombing is bad for us. Very bad,” Singh pronounced.

“This is news?” I asked.

Eddie spoke up. “Don't try to be sincere. Listen up, Tommy did a poll on the bombing.”

“This is the poll we agreed you were not going to do, right, Singh?”

“That would be correct, yes.”

“Jesus Christ,” I erupted. “Have you lost your goddamn mind?”

“I will not charge the campaign,” Tommy Singh insisted. “I would never do that, J.D.”

“That's not the point. If it gets out that we are polling—”

“But you aren't. I am,” Singh insisted.

“Oh, that will help. Everybody will buy that. The campaign didn't poll, just the pollster. Oh, that's just great. And by the way, if you paid for the poll, then we're violating federal election law and we're all going to jail.”

“Armstrong George wants to abolish the FEC,” Singh said.

“He also supports torture, so he's probably cool if I waterboard you.”

This seemed to confuse him. He shrugged and started to read from his poll. “ ‘Does the recent bombing at the Republican National Convention make you more or less likely to support stronger measures to protect against crime and terrorism, including wiretaps, detention without bail, etc.?' ” Singh looked up. “More likely: seventy-eight percent.”

“So?” I asked. “Did you poll whether or not blowing up Armstrong George made you more likely or less likely—”

“I'm thinking you shouldn't keep joking about that stuff,” Eddie sighed.

“I can continue,” Singh insisted hopefully. He was like every pollster. Nobody ever paid any attention to him except when he was reading numbers. So he liked to read numbers. A lot. Slowly.

“But the bottom line,” Eddie said, “is that Tommy's numbers make it clear that as long as everybody is focused on the bombing, we are screwed. Now, here's my latest state-by-state breakdown of delegates.”

Eddie laid a printed chart on the bed. It was a list of every delegate and their likely voting status. For the next hour, we debated each delegate, all 2,242 of them and another 2,180 alternates. What would it take to crack each Armstrong George delegate? Was it hopeless, possible, likely? For each Hilda Smith delegate, we tried to imagine if we were working for Armstrong George, what we would do to get one of the Smith delegates to flip. As VP, Hilda Smith had certain toys we'd already used to scarf a few of George's delegates. We invited a half-dozen from California to ride with her on Air Force Two from LA to San Francisco in May, and four of the six had flipped. Nobody seemed to care about visiting the vice president's residence on Wisconsin, but we'd been able to give a handful of delegates special tours of the White House when the president was at Camp David, followed up with a lunch in the White House Mess. The White House Mess seemed to always really get them, despite the mediocre food. Then some of George's big donors who were also heavy hitters for the president had heard about it and leaned on the president to cut us off.

We went through the database on each delegate. Some stuff was routine: lawyer, involved in environmental causes, married, lost lots of money in the big crash. Lots of it. Some was dark, closet stuff and it was creepy that we even knew about it: what websites a delegate liked to frequent late at night, what sexual harassment lawsuits had been settled out of court, who spent too much time and money in Vegas. But tantalizing as the personal stuff was, it was always hard to find a way to use it. Like a nuke: great to have, hard to use without blowing yourself up.

After an hour, we had evaluated every delegate and narrowed the universe to just thirty-seven delegates we thought might be likely to switch. But of those thirty-seven, only eleven were Armstrong George delegates that might possibly switch to Hilda Smith. That left twenty-six delegates who were technically committed to Smith but were likely to switch to Armstrong George if it looked like he was going to win.

“This is not good,” Tommy Singh observed in his annoying, neutral tone.

“Thanks, Tommy,” I grumbled. I was still pissed at him for going ahead with the survey.

“We will lose unless something changes,” Singh continued, undeterred. “That is clear.”

A long silence ensued.

“We can shake it up,” I said. I wasn't sure if I believed it at all, but I needed to be cheered up, and if nobody else was going to do it, I would have to try it myself.

“How?” Eddie asked.

“I've got some ideas,” I insisted. It annoyed me how skeptical they looked. “What ever happened to believing in your campaign manager to work miracles?” I chided them.

“I believe in delegate counts,” Tommy Singh said dryly. But he said everything dryly.

They waited for me to continue. When I didn't, Eddie just said, “Well, good. Because otherwise, I think we are fucked pretty.”

“We keep these numbers to ourselves, right?” I looked at each of them hard. “The world thinks this is a three- or four-vote deal. If it gets out how soft our numbers really are, this whole thing could collapse on us.”

“J.D.,” Tommy Singh said in his flat, unemotional voice, “it is time for rabbits out of hats. These numbers are not encouraging.”

“Thanks, Tommy, I'll try to get serious about this now. I promise.”

I turned and left.

I met them at a coffee shop on St. Charles just up from Lee Circle. Big brother Paul and Walter Robinson were sitting in the middle of the empty shop when I walked in.

Walter tapped his watch. “You're late.”

“You guys,” I grumbled, “don't have much to do. I do.”

“Ungrateful, I'd call him,” Paul said. “Downright ungrateful.”

The coffee shop was bland and hip, with prices that were high for New Orleans. “Nobody ever comes here,” Walter explained. “It's owned by a guy who has some clubs in the Quarter and he uses it to wash money he takes under the table at the clubs.”

“Glad you're right on top of it,” I said.

Walter shrugged. “He's useful. A lot of people come in those clubs and he helps us out.”

Sitting at the table with the two large men, I felt like I was back at the kitchen table when I was a teenager, Paul and his oversized football buddies dominating everything. All that was missing was my loony dad pouring bourbon for everyone, probably wearing his naval flight helmet.

“Can we talk about this letter?” I couldn't stop thinking about that delegate count. We were losing, that was clear. The only good thing was that nobody had realized it yet. But they would. I had to change the dynamic while it was still possible. “It came to me. The guy must have seen my name in the paper or me on television or something. Maybe he knows me. Hell if I know. Can I see it?”

Walter stared hard at me with an impressive ferocity. It was his best game face from the Tiger Stadium days and I had to admit it was an intimidating sight. “So here's the deal,” he said. “I've kept the letter tight.”

“Tight?” I asked.

“Just me and a couple of my guys. I haven't given it to Joey Francis.”

“You're kidding me? You and a couple of NOPD blues are sitting on a letter from a guy who is scaring the crap out of the convention? And, more importantly, is hurting my chances to elect my candidate?”

Paul smiled. “Glad you got your priorities straight.” He held up a coffee cup in salute. “Walter doesn't trust the FBI, and Walter, well”—he hesitated and looked over at Walter, who nodded—“Walter is like us. He has some dreams.”

“Dreams?” I said.

“Needs,” Walter said.

The two of them were looking at each other and smiling. “Oh my God, you want to be the hero and bust this thing, right? That's why you haven't turned over the letter. You want this to be the Walter Robinson show?”

“Well, I—” Walter said.

“Exactly,” Paul said.

“Good God. Isn't that illegal?” I asked.

“You remember that black stripper who got sliced and diced and used as crab bait?” Walter asked, leaning toward me.

“That was a movie, right?”

“Exactly!” Walter shouted. “That was my case. But the FBI took it over as a federal investigation. Hate crime, like that made a difference. They got all the glory. I'm not letting that happen again.”

“What do you want?”

“I'll tell you what I want. I want to be on ESPN.”

“ESPN?”

“You know how they always have guys who were the shit in college in the booth to talk trash about the game? I want to be one of those guys.”

“You don't want to be on CNN or NBC? You're a serious guy now, Walter. This thing breaks, you got some big-time respect coming.”

“CN fucking N? NBC? Are you out of your mind? Nobody in my world watches the news. We watch sports, man! What kind of people do you think we are? If I can break this thing, get some attention, I figure I can parlay this on ESPN. But I want you to help.” He leaned in close again. He liked to do that. “Can you promise me you'll help?”

“Sorry, sorry. Got it. Sure. I'll do everything I can to get you on ESPN.” He stared at me like he was deciding exactly where to put the bullet. “I'll get the vice president to make some calls. We'll be all over this.”