Or I should say I found Rose Mary amusing until I got the digital recorder back to my office after Showalter took his own life and Detective Wade went into the hospital with a serious wound between his shoulder and his heart, leaving me with the recorder overnight.
I was still working in my office when the staff started trooping in with coffee and questions about the shootout at the church. Because I was exhausted I didn’t realize that their questions would be joined by dozens and dozens more when the press started questioning me during the next three days, right up to the night of the final debate.
I had transferred the recording to my computer and gone to work on it. A good deal of it was Dave’s rambling about the ‘New America’ he and his cohorts were going to found. It was only toward the end that he spent a drunken, rambling eight minutes talking about Showalter and his group. The chief had indeed run his old scam. His group — and Dave named all the men involved — had robbed four banks for him out of state and turned the funds over to him for safekeeping. There was plenty on the tape to convict the cops who’d been in the group. His remorse for being part of the staged shooting came at the very end. And then he revealed who’d helped him with the staged shooting. I just sat there, stunned. At first I tried to reject the name on the tape, but why would Dave have lied? This was a name that would destroy a number of people. It was there that I went all Rose Mary Woods. I edited it out entirely and permanently.
When Abby came in I told her about the recording and asked her to deliver the copy I’d made to Wade’s office. Then we devised between us how the contents of the recording, which had four references to the friendship between Showalter and Dorsey, would be leaked to the press in time for the debate tonight.
Before I left the office I checked on the condition of both Karen Foster, who was conscious now, and Matt Wade, who had just talked to the press from his hospital bed. The mayor had been there and had referred to him as ‘Police Chief Wade’ several times.
I hung out the DO NOT DISTURB sign and crashed for seven straight hours.
The press was up for a lynching that night.
They had tightened the noose but not dropped the trapdoor with Jess about the staged shooting. Frustrated that they hadn’t gotten a clean kill with her they were — God bless ’em — going to take out their fury on Dorsey.
In between questions about the economy, pay for teachers, prayer in school, foreign policy and economic recovery, the four press representatives pounded him with inquisitional queries about his relationship with Showalter. Abby had leaked just the right allegations so it would be easy to assume that Showalter had been behind the fake shooting. Among many, many other high crimes.
Dorsey stammered, sputtered, exploded and sweated. By the end of the debate he looked like he’d just run through a car wash. He would not shake hands with Jess afterward, at which time his handlers probably raced to the nearest bar. Not what you’d call a wise choice on Dorsey’s part.
I had to wonder if he’d provide the press with a second suicide.
The next night there were two stretch limos in front of Jess’s magnificent home.
One belonged to our governor and the other to our senator. When I say ‘our,’ I mean our party.
There was a six-piece band, bright, quick alcohol bearers to make sure your intake would set records, a male television personality from Chicago who had been famous when I was a kid, at least three unattached thirty-something women who took at least a vague shine to me because I, too, was unattached, and all our office staff.
I gave up counting the number of toasts that were made when we sat around a mahogany table long enough to land a jet fighter on. Even Cory Tucker, sitting next to his very attractive girlfriend, made a toast. This was the pre-victory victory party, but after our campaign had been absolved of all suspicion in the staged shooting incident, plus Dorsey’s psycho performance last night, the only thing that could stop us from winning was if either Jess or Ted admitted to keeping small children caged in the basement.
Just before the food came — catered seafood, chicken, pork and beef entrées, and damned good at that — Ted pinged his glass with his fork and stood up. Then he reached down and took Jess’s hand.
To the assembled, he said, ‘Some of you may have heard the dirty rumor that the love of my life and I are getting a divorce. Speaking for both of us, I can tell you that’s a filthy lie!’
There was applause, tears and more applause. They would return to their God-given right as a Washington power couple.
I drank with Katherine, then with one of the unescorted women, then decided that if I could sneak out of here sober enough I could go back to my hotel room and call my daughter. And then I could get up with no hangover in the morning and spend three or four hours in Karen’s hospital room since she was conscious now.
Mike Edelstein halted the band mid-tune to lead those sober enough to hoist their glasses in what had to be the hundredth toast. It was while I was supporting my glass in the air that I saw my person of interest slip out to the small patio. Hoping we’d be alone, I followed.
The big prairie moon lent the patio a proper mood of melancholy. Just right for what I was about to say.
‘Oh, Dev. I didn’t hear you come out here.’
‘I just needed to talk to you a little bit.’
He had good radar. That handsome Bradshaw face of his clenched and then he turned his back to me. Two hundred yards or so away from here you could see the river. It was moonlit and tranquil, and on the far shore you could see a few campfires despite the chill. ‘I guess you figured it out, huh?’
‘Yeah.’
He faced me again. ‘But the news makes it sound as if Showalter was behind it.’
‘That was my intention.’
‘But why? I’m the guilty one.’
‘I’m hoping you have a reason for doing it that’s so good I won’t feel guilty about covering for you.’
‘God, this is when I really need a drink.’
‘Don’t even joke about that, Joel.’ Given his history of alcoholism I was afraid he might be half-serious.
‘I wish I at least had a smoke.’ He folded his hands and stared down at them. He didn’t speak for a time.
Far downriver, I could hear motorboats.
‘What did it was how they treated Katherine when she was sick. They let the public know about it because it was good press — the poor congresswoman and all that bullshit — but if it hadn’t been for Nan and me, Katherine would’ve been alone most of the time.’ He took his hands apart, then raised his head. ‘They just got worse and worse and worse over the years. With her, I mean. There’s no room for anybody but them. For Katherine’s sake I decided to take away the only thing that mattered to them.’
‘Her Congressional seat.’
‘Yes.’
‘You hired Dave Fletcher to do the fake shooting, knowing that the press would know it was a fake almost immediately.’
‘And she’d lose. And both Jess and my dear brother wouldn’t be the superstars they think they are. God, what a word. “Superstars.” It almost gags me to say it. But that’s how they look at themselves.’
‘A lot of them do.’
‘“A lot of them?”’
‘Politicians. And it’s both sides of the aisle. They become megalomaniacs.’
The smile was bleak. ‘I guess you’d know. You’ve worked with enough of them.’
‘As long as they generally vote the right way. That’s all I ask for. As people — well, you can go into a factory or supermarket and pick twenty people at random and you’ll find twenty better people than you’ll find at random in Congress.’