It was colder than I would have liked. I’d been hoping for five, six hundred people. We’d gotten four at most. Thirty-five degrees is a little chilly for many people.
The setting was a large city park with a bandstand. When Jess appeared that was where she’d be when she addressed the crowd.
I counted eighteen uniforms from three different groups. Local, state and a security firm Ted had personally hired. They split up, checking out the crowd, the wooded area and the area near the parking lot. A lean, mean man in a tan uniform and a heavy vest stood on the bandstand, carefully surveying the crowd and the wooded area to the left. Though the AK-47 was the weapon of choice these days, his was an M-16. A bit old-fashioned, but God help you if you ever caught a bullet from one.
There were fifteen minutes to go before Jess appeared.
A nice-looking young black TV reporter and her heavyset white cameraman knew who I was and trapped me between a wedge of crowd and the left side of the bandstand.
‘Susan Harrison, Channel 4, Mr Conrad.’
I knew who she was. She’d been assigned to Jess since the staged shooting scenario had surfaced. She was one of those reporters who was a master at sounding friendly and accusatory at the same time. There’s a special place in hell for these people.
With the camera rolling, she said, ‘Everybody’s asking if the congresswoman is nervous about coming here tonight. Who would know better than her campaign manager, Dev Conrad?’
‘We’re all a little on edge, Susan. I think that’s only natural.’
‘Some people say she has nothing to be nervous about if the shooting the other night was staged.’
‘Well, some people think the earth is flat. That theory has yet to be proved.’
‘One of your volunteers has been arrested for staging it.’
‘He’s been arrested but that doesn’t mean he’s done it.’
‘Are you saying he’s innocent?’
‘Yes, that’s what I’m saying.’
She couldn’t keep the pleasure out of her appealing gaze. She’d gotten exactly the kind of sound bite that would play well at ten o’clock. She’d forced the campaign on the defensive. When you did that you always made the target sound guilty.
‘Well, I join everybody here and at home, Mr Conrad, in hoping that there are no problems for the congresswoman tonight and that everything goes smoothly, whether the other night was staged or not.’
If I’d known where her car was I would have torched it.
For the past twenty minutes Abby had been working the crowd, trying to get them to volunteer for knocking on doors and working the phones at campaign headquarters. She wore a cheery red coat, cut quite fine, and looked damned appealing in it.
Now she stood next to me, the carnal scent of her perfume mixing with the silver of her breath.
‘Well, if they actually come through, I got eight phone people and nine door knockers.’
‘I’d say that’s a very good night.’
‘If they come through. That’s always the problem.’
The brass band came from nowhere. Six older gents in heavy winter jackets and straw hats climbed the bandstand steps and played a Dixieland piece that cleaned your ears. The noise and the cold brought back memories of high-school football games on Friday nights. Ever the athlete, I sat in the stands and smoked Winstons. The music was welcome, giving the freezing crowd new energy.
I heard sudden noise behind me. A small caravan had pulled into the parking lot. Jess had arrived, escorted by three police cars with flashing red lights painting the surroundings.
The officers brought her to the bandstand in a formal way the other side would make fun of. She was lost inside six bear-sized police officers. They marched her to the bandstand and up the steps. The lean, mean sharpshooter with the M-16 managed to look even leaner and meaner.
A man was testing the stand-up microphone. It screeched a few times but the sound was mostly lost in the music of the brass band.
Jess waved and smiled. She wore a severely tailored dark blue coat. She always worried about looking too good — as did every campaign runner she’d ever had — so tonight she’d gone easy on the makeup. The face was a little wan and the dark lines under the eyes suggested concern. I wondered if they were real or if Ted had convinced his makeup person to put them on. Whichever, they were a nice touch.
Now both the band and the applause battled the air for dominance.
I saw the cheeks of women and a few men that glistened with tears.
I saw hands holding up the kind of lighted candles people use at rock concerts.
I saw a huge sign unfurl that read: JESS BRADSHAW FOR PRESIDENT!
She modestly waved for all the celebrating to stop. And then she began.
She did not play to the other night at first. She relied on a version of her stump speech. The issues we faced, the way she wanted to help lead the country, the terrible ways Dorsey wanted to change America. It was her version of a State of the Union address and like that increasingly hollow speech it was contrived for audience participation. Every fourth line got applause. The newsbites would show the genuine enthusiasm she inspired. Not that there weren’t a few boos from a small group at the back. A new sign had appeared in their midst: WE WANT OUR COUNTRY BACK, BRADSHAW. At least they weren’t waving any guns. Small mercies in this era of a Supreme Court bent on turning us into Beirut.
The sudden silence from Jess certainly got everybody’s attention. She spent a few seconds shifting positions slightly, then turned her head so she could clear her throat.
‘I’m sure you’ve been waiting for me to speak to the accusation that the shots fired at me the other night were part of some conspiracy to win this election. I think that those of you who’ve followed my time in the State House and later in the United States Congress trust me enough to know that I would never under any circumstances be part of anything so deceitful. I know I’m in a tough race — the toughest of my career as a public servant.’
The applause was loud enough to sway trees and crack windows.
But she waved it down. ‘I really appreciate your support and faith in me. But this is difficult — painful — for me to talk about, so I’d really appreciate it if you’d just let me finish.’
She paused once again.
‘One of my volunteers has been arrested for setting up the shooting. The police claim that they found the rifle in the trunk of his car. I don’t know Cory Tucker well but the people in my campaign who do assure me that he’s a very intelligent, honest, hardworking young man who’d never do anything like this.
‘The important word in what I just said is “intelligent.” If you were to fake a shooting like this you would have to be very stupid to think you’d get away with it. Law enforcement would see through it pretty quickly, and they have.’
These would be, as she’d told me when I suggested admitting that the assassination attempt had been, in fact, contrived, the most difficult words to speak. Wouldn’t admitting that the incident had been a fraud simply sound like a confession?
‘What I’m saying is that somebody did stage this assassination attempt and staged it in such a way that it would clearly be exposed as a fake — and then planted the rifle in Cory Tucker’s trunk so it would appear that we concocted the whole thing ourselves.’
This time she did not try to stop the applause.
I knew how afraid she was now. I was anxious myself. Those who’d doubted us would cry that we’d come up with this pathetic spy-novel conspiracy story to save ourselves now that everybody knew we were liars. Dorsey would use Showalter to discredit Jess’s words and I doubted that more than one or two on the task force would speak up on her behalf. But I’d also suggested one more thing to say.