“Jesus!” whistled Brewster. He looked around the room. The three locals all nodded their remembrance of it. Miller looked a bit horrified. McRiley rubbed his jaw for a moment, and then took over. “Okay, let me ask a few questions. Did you own the gun legally?”
I shrugged. “It was my.45 from when I was in the Army. The cops didn’t bitch about it and the Army never came looking for it,” I answered.
“Hmmm, interesting. Where were you when you shot him?”
“We were in my house. In my kitchen, actually, maybe six or seven feet apart. It was all fully investigated by the cops,” I said.
John interjected, saying, “It was really obvious what had happened, and Carl wasn’t even brought up before a grand jury. It was simply dismissed as self defense.”
McRiley waved this off, and kept asking me questions. “Were you ever arrested and charged with anything, even if the charges were later dropped?”
“Never. I’ve never been arrested for anything. I mean, they handcuffed me and took me to the station, but once there, I was questioned and released and sent home again.” Technically true though I have seen the insides of more than my fair share of police stations. “There was this one time in college when some buddies and I got busted for falling asleep on the beach in Florida. Does that count?”
“You fell asleep on the beach?” asked Brewster incredulously.
“Yeah,” I said with a shrug. “You know, a summer road trip? Anyway, we all fell asleep one night on the beach, and a couple of cops rousted us for their nightly quota and threw us in a holding cell for the night. We paid a fine and got the hell out of Dodge. You can’t tell me that disqualifies somebody for Congress. That was in college for Christ’s sake! We were 18!”
“No, but I wouldn’t brag about it, either,” he answered. I just shrugged. I hadn’t thought about it in years.
“I remember it now,” tossed in Destrier. “It made all the papers and the TV stations. Big story at the time, you know, Cain and Abel, that sort of thing, but it all went away years ago. There wasn’t a crime, and not even a scandal, really. Your mom didn’t handle it well, as I recall.”
I shook my head. “She spent a week ranting about me, and then ended up hospitalized. My parents ended up suing each other and me, and it all got tossed out of court. My sister moved out of state to get away from it all.”
McRiley listened a bit more, while Miller looked like he had just swallowed a healthy heaping spoonful of sewage. I was guessing that he had bought the general version of my bio without looking any deeper. Now he was looking at a disaster in the making. It was McRiley who spoke up. “Well, it’s an issue, alright, but not insurmountable. It all depends on how we play it.”
“How we play it?” I asked.
He nodded. “You flip it around. You didn’t kill your brother, you defended your wife and child and upheld the sanctity of the Second Amendment.” Most of the others were slowly nodding their heads. Brewster continued, “Normally I’d say to release this early on, but not this time. Let Stewart release it. The smart trick would be to sit on it until right before the election and then dump it before you can react. This is too juicy. Somebody will dump it early on. That allows us plenty of time to defuse it. What’s your mother going to do about this?”
“Shit. She’ll go nuts again.”
“Bad?”
I stood up and paced around the room. This mercenary little bastard was going to use my whack job mother to deflect the grief from me. ‘No wonder his brother was nuts! Look at his Mom!’ What a clusterfuck! Did I owe them anything, though? They had made this life a living hell for years. “Hell! I don’t know. She might not say anything. The only things she hates worse than me are Catholics and Democrats! That’s why she had me disowned. Marilyn is a Catholic and a Democrat. I might as well have married the bride of Frankenstein as far as my parents are concerned. She’ll freak if she thinks that running me down is helping Andy Stewart.”
“Christ, Carl, I never even thought of that!” admitted John.
“Are you serious?” exclaimed Jack.
John shrugged. “It wasn’t the Cleavers. Carl moved out when he was sixteen, and not a moment too soon, either. Still, being reminded he killed her beloved Hamilton might push her over the edge, and she’ll decide to speak out to the reporters. You know they’re going to track her down, Carl.”
“I’m sure. Based on what happened the last time, if she says anything, she’ll go off the wall and blame me for everything up to and including the fall of western civilization. And then she’ll have another meltdown, quite probably on camera, and get carted off to Sheppard Pratt for another vacation. I just don’t know,” I admitted.
Brew pushed some more. “What about your father?”
“Oh, that’s easy. The first reporter to get in his face is going to get punched in the nose. It happened the last time, too. Probably on camera, too.”
“And your sister?”
I shook my head. “It’s not an issue. She changed her name and moved to Minnesota. She hasn’t been home in years. I’ve tried to throw off anybody curious by saying she was in California.” She was still a nurse at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and had married a Minnesota State police officer and they had a couple of kids, as well as one of his own from a previous marriage. She didn’t know it, but I had the security company keep track of her and give me an update every few months.
McRiley grimaced. “That was a mistake. Stewart’s people will track her down in about ten minutes.”
I stared at him for a second. “How? I thought that was why you changed your name, to separate yourself from your past?”
The lawyers in the room all rolled their eyes. “Forget it. They’ll track her old credit cards, her nursing license, even her name change paperwork. Wait until they trot her out on camera. What will she say?” said Destrier.
“I don’t know,” I said with a sigh. “I’ll have to talk to her. I haven’t talked to her since she left.”
“Is there anything good to all this?” asked Miller, the guy from the RNC.
“Absolutely!” answered Brew. “This plays out on several levels. You have the defending his family part that I mentioned earlier, along with the Second Amendment issues. When his family goes bonkers, we play up his ability to overcome his background, how Carl has risen to each new height. It plays to the need to build a story. Everybody already knows the Andy Stewart story. Now we can play a new one for our guy.”
We broke for lunch at that point, by which I meant that we sent out for sandwiches and stayed in my office. I insisted that we not talk business over lunch. That made for a quick lunch, though, since everybody wanted to start grilling me about my bio. These guys were prepared, too. In addition to the Fortune article, they had a copy of the bio we had originally prepared for the SEC and a copy of my Army service record. I was also told to sign a few releases, in order to obtain copies of my school and college transcripts.
There is no goodness to be found in any modern candidate for office, only varying degrees of badness. Jesus Christ could not be found good enough. (’Whipping the moneylenders from then Temple? That’s civil disobedience! You’re increasing regulation on small businessmen! You know, the job creators!’)
We started right at the beginning. “Tell us about this fight you had when you were thirteen,” demanded Miller. I shrugged and explained what had happened. Everybody but John had questions. What happened to the three boys? What are their names? Where are they now? Have you heard from them again? What other fights did I get into? With who? What happened to them afterwards? Were there any witnesses? (No idea. I don’t remember. No clue. Not since that day — it was twenty years ago!..)