‘She didn’t say. Maybe with Ruskin. I heard her talking to him on her cell phone one night and she was really pissed about something. Maybe about his girlfriend. They hated each other.’
‘This is when we need you to speak up, Senator,’ Ben said. ‘We’ll do it late in the afternoon so we get plenty of play as breaking news. Unless the police find something here — and I’m sure they won’t — all you’re guilty of at worst is cheating on your wife.’
‘Ben. I explained — to both of you — that we didn’t actually have sex.’
An exasperated glance at me from Ben. To Robert, ‘Do you want to get into your inability to have an erection that night? You probably would have had sex if you could have.’
‘You’re making an assumption that isn’t necessarily true,’ Robert said.
‘It doesn’t matter, does it, Dev? Tell him.’
‘Robert, later on we can go into all the details if you want to. Right now we have to stay on one message. You didn’t kill her. You didn’t threaten her, either. If she was afraid of somebody the night she asked the desk clerk for help, it wasn’t you. You didn’t see her that night and you swear to it.’
‘Who the hell is going to believe anything I say?’ Robert broke into one of his circular paces. The den was wide enough to give him some room. Sometimes he talked more to himself than to us. ‘You see these guys on TV denying everything and you know they’re guilty. They just make it worse for themselves. Then the comedians pick it up and you’re really finished.’
‘Then all we — all you do — is make your denial. I’m sure Dev can write something dignified that people will listen to seriously. You’re a serious man, Senator. Even your enemies say that. Nobody has ever questioned your intelligence or your integrity.’
If Ben kept pushing we’d soon enough be watching Robert ascend into heaven and sit at the right hand of God. Robert’s last election had gotten so dirty on both sides that both candidates came away roughed up. It became known that Robert had made close to half a million on a couple of sweetheart deals that only US senators hear about and that — whispered but never exactly proved — he’d had an affair that his distressed wife had heard about. There’d also been the guy who gave a TV interview about the time Robert had been so drunk he hadn’t been able to drive his car out of an overnight parking lot where the guy worked. He’d been so drunk, in fact, that he fell out of the driver’s seat and spent the night on the asphalt next to his car sleeping it off. Fortunately he’d been twenty-four at the time. The follies of youth.
‘I need to get this set up,’ Ben said. ‘Can you write something while you’re here?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘But I want input from both of you.’
‘If I don’t like it, I won’t say it. You two understand that, don’t you?’
‘Sure,’ Ben said.
‘Of course,’ I said.
A good time was had by all.
If you’re looking for help in writing for your candidate, just remember there is a political cliché for every situation.
In a political world of verbal excess and ten lies per minute, simple heartfelt sincerity gets lost. In fact, it looks suspicious. In Robert’s case just saying that he was innocent would make him look as if he was hiding something. He knows he’s guilty, that’s why he couldn’t even come up with a defense. So as I sat down to write I had to look up on my imaginary shelf of political clichés to find one that might work.
I ran a number of them through and settled on the old ‘political enemies’ routine. Yes, the one and only Dick Nixon (or Nick Dixon as Eisenhower once allegedly called him by mistake). Yes, Bill Clinton, feeling his own pain after being outed for his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, used it too. But we had a specific person with a specific political hit woman background to point to. And point to it we would — though carefully; people tend to dislike you when you suggest that the still-warm corpse might be less than perfect when upright and ambulatory.
In the rush to find Robert guilty only one reporter (that I had been able to find online) had spent any serious time writing about Tracy Cabot’s background. It was known that she was a political operative sometimes associated with Ruskin, but nobody had fed Ruskin to the public. There was a connection we could explore. Briefly. I wanted to keep everything under ninety seconds max. Plenty of time for claiming innocence, citing concern for family, thanking voters for their outpouring of support (he must have received at least one email cheering him on) and then offering condolences to the Cabot family over the untimely death of their ‘troubled daughter who had been led into a dangerous lifestyle by people who had no concern for her well-being.’ She wouldn’t have been a treacherous whore if only she’d continued to hang with those two girls who became nuns.
Fire away, Empire News channel!
Three hours and two deliveries of sandwiches and coffee by Mrs Weiderman later, I had my draft and asked Mrs Weiderman if she would please round up Robert and Ben.
‘They’re playing blackjack in the kitchen. Ben has lost two hundred dollars.’
Blackjack was Robert’s favorite card game. When there were two players you changed dealers every ten hands. I’d lost maybe a couple of grand to him over the years.
Ben saw me when I was one footstep inside the kitchen and roared: ‘You got it? Is it finished? C’mon, get over here!’
‘I got to remember to bring the tranquilizer gun I used on that bear that time,’ I said, walking to the nook.
‘Very funny,’ he said.
I’d printed three copies so we could all peruse my brilliance at the same time.
As they started to read, Ben said, ‘I’m not crazy about the first sentence.’
‘I don’t like the second one much better,’ Robert said.
Nothing new here, not with these two. They couldn’t get their engines started without grinding you up a little at the start, then they generally settled down and got serious. I’ve never known what they expected to find in the first five hundred words. Opening remarks that surpassed the Gettysburg Address?
I sat next to Robert. Mrs Weiderman slipped me a cup of her elixir-like coffee and I sat there quietly waiting for them to read it through a couple of times. I watched a squirrel next to a tree digging up some goodies to store for impending winter. He or she was putting in an honest day’s work the way all of nature’s animals do except the human animal. While a good share of humanity works hard with its hands and minds in clean, productive and honest ways, there is another segment, growing larger every year, that sits behind desks and contrives ways to bamboozle and coerce all those whose work is clean and productive into submission.
Ben said, ‘I like it. A few tweaks but I like it.’
Robert said, ‘I like it, too. A few tweaks but nothing serious. I knew you’d come through for us, Dev. You always do.’
Ben said, ‘Now we head to Channel Four. We’re way behind schedule. We can still hit the network news.’ He was out of the booth and going somewhere. When he hit the door he said, ‘I left my coat in the den. C’mon, you two. Hurry up.’
‘Shit,’ Robert said, ‘I’d better run an electric razor over my face again.’
‘Bring it along. You can do it in the car.’
‘I’ll grab a shirt and tie and jacket and be ready in two minutes.’
‘I really appreciate the job you did, Dev. I really do.’
I followed him out of the kitchen. I went to the hallway and he went to the den.
I was just taking my jacket down from the coat tree when my cell phone rang.
The voice on the other end stabbed into my ear with three words: ‘They’re gone, Dev.’
Not panic, not hysteria. But stunned disbelief.
‘Who’s gone?’
‘Ruskin and Sarah,’ Jane said. ‘They drugged Guild’s coffee with something so he’d pass out and then they picked up all their things and ran out. Guild just called me now when he woke up. I want to get him to the ER to make sure he’s all right since we don’t know what they put in him.’
‘Does he remember what time it was when he passed out?’
‘The last thing he remembers it was an hour and ten minutes ago.’
‘What was going on then?’
‘He said that everything had gone fine until this Michael Hawkins showed up and started asking Ruskin some questions. Guild said that Hawkins asked him to leave so that he could interview Ruskin and Sarah but that he didn’t want to leave until he’d talked to you. He finally agreed to wait in the hall for twenty minutes.’
‘And then what?’
‘Hawkins came out exactly twenty minutes later and thanked him, and then rolled his eyes and made a joke about Ruskin and Sarah. Something about how he hoped his own kids never turned out like them. Then he apologized for leaning on Guild in the first place. The trouble came when he went back inside.’
Robert and Ben walked quickly toward me. Seeing me on my cell phone, Ben shot his right sleeve and pointed to his watch. He then stepped past me and opened the door and the two of them went through it. I followed them, still on the phone.
Jane continued her story. ‘When he got inside he needed to visit the bathroom. When he came out he said Ruskin and Sarah had a cup of coffee ready for him. He thanked them. As he drank it he started noticing how agitated both of them looked. He said Ruskin was up and wearing shoes. His Glock was jammed down the front of his pants. He asked them if something was wrong. Sarah blurted out that they didn’t want to talk to any federal agent you hadn’t approved of in advance. They didn’t trust anybody.’
By now we were outside. Robert was getting into Ben’s bronze rental Buick. Ben shouted to me, ‘See you at Channel Four!’
I waved back.
‘Guild said he tried to calm them down but that they acted “crazy.” His word. He said whatever they’d put in his coffee hit him around this time. He was kind of woozy for a few minutes and then he passed out entirely. That was when they escaped. He’s really embarrassed, Dev. He plans to apologize as soon as he sees you. He says he should’ve been suspicious when she had a cup of coffee ready to hand him right away since he sensed that they were acting strange. He couldn’t see why they were so agitated when it had been clear that Hawkins had just been interviewing them the way any kind of government investigator would have. He said their paranoia should have alerted him.’
‘Tell him he doesn’t have anything to apologize for. We’re dealing with two very unstable people here. Now I need to find them all over again before they do something really stupid. The idea of Ruskin toting that Glock around bothers me more than anything.’
‘Isn’t his arm broken? How could he shoot?’
‘Unfortunately his “shooting arm,” as he calls it, is fine. But right now I need to go. Robert’s going to make a statement on TV.’
‘I’ll be watching. Be sure to call me when you get a chance.’
‘I will. It helps me just to hear your voice.’
‘You say the nicest things.’
‘Come to think of it, I do, don’t I?’