Farger picked up the papers, read them quickly, double-checked the signatures, then looked up at Remo with renewed respect.
‘How’d you do it?’ he asked.
‘We reasoned together. Teri still here?’
‘Inside,’ Farger said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Busy as a beaver.’
Teri Walker sat behind a large metal desk, its top festooned with pads, pencils, paper, sketches. She wore large, owlish dark-framed eyeglasses, pushed up on top of her head and she smiled at Remo as he came in the door.
‘I met the candidate,’ she said. ‘You know we’re going to win?’
‘All that confidence from one meeting with the candidate? What did he say?’
‘He said I had beautiful ears.’
‘Ears?’
‘Ears. And he said if I’d run away on his houseboat with him, he’d retire from public life and spend the rest of his days showering my feet with catfish.’
‘That’s truly touching,’ Remo said. ‘And that proves we’re going to win the election?’
‘Don’t you see, Remo, I believed him. That’s what we’ve got with our candidate. Believability. And he’s….well, nice is the only word for it. So our advertising is going to be all about that—a nice, sweet guy that you can believe. Studies show that in politics, the voter, taken as a group overall and not subdivided into its minor ethnic or socio-economic components, well, that average voter wants…’
‘Sure,’ Remo said. ‘When do we start our commercials, our advertising?’
‘Well, we don’t have time to do anything really fancy with either. But mother is flying down two staff people. We’re going to go with just one TV commercial for the whole campaign. That starts tomorrow. Absolute saturation. The newspaper ads start the next day. How much do we have to spend, by the way?’
Remo said, ‘I’ll send over a couple of hundred thousand. When that’s done, ask for more.’
She looked at him quizzically but approvingly. ‘When you go, you go,’ she said.
‘Anything for honest government,’ Remo said.
‘Is it your money?’ she asked—just a little too casually, Remo noted.
‘Of course,’ Remo said. ‘Who’d give me money to spend on Mac Polaney? Only somebody as nutty as Mac himself and people that nutty aren’t rich, or if they are, all their money is tied up in hospitals for homeless cats.’
‘There’s a logical nonsequitur there, but I can’t figure it out,’ she said.
‘Don’t try. If I were logical, do you think I’d be financing Mac’s campaign? Where is the next mayor, by the way?’
‘Oh, he went back to his boat. He’s repairing some rods for the annual catfish contest next week.’
‘Next week? It’s not on election day, is it?’
‘I don’t think so. Why?’
‘If it is, Mac might not even get his own vote,’ Remo said.
She smiled, slightly patronizing, as if she were able to read depths in Mac Polaney’s soul that eluded a crass beast like Remo, and went back to work. Remo watched her for awhile, grew bored and left.
Farger still sat at the front desk, but he had an unhappy look on his face. Remo did not know whether that was because the three so-called secretaries had left for the day, or because tragedy had befallen the campaign. So he asked.
‘We got trouble,’ Farger said. ‘The paper won’t use these endorsements.’
‘Why not?’
Farger ran his fingertips together indicating money. ‘The same reason the paper only used one line about me becoming Polaney’s campaign manager. Me… who is front page news around the country. It’s the political reporter. Tom Burns. He’s on Cartwright’s pad. His wife’s a no-show crossing guard and he’s a no-show truant officer.’
‘No-show?’
‘Yeah. He gets the paycheck but doesn’t show up for work. Anyway, the little bastard told me the endorsements weren’t news. He forgets that last week, when the same people endorsed Cartwright, they were front page news.’ He slammed a pencil down on his desk. ‘If we can’t get the endorsements in, how are we going to create any movement?’
‘We’ll get them in,’ Remo said.
He found Tom Burns in a cocktail lounge around the corner from the editorial officers of the Miami Beach Dispatch, the city’s biggest and most influential paper.
Burns was a little man with graying hair that he touched up to keep black. Thick horn-rimmed glasses covered his vague-looking eyes. He wore cuffed pants and a jacket with frayed sleeves. Although the bar was crowded, he sat by himself, and Remo knew enough about reporters to know that if Burns had been even bearable, he would have had a crowd of publicity-seekers around him, particularly in the middle of an election campaign.
So much for Burns’ personality.
He was drinking Harvey’s Bristol Cream on the rocks. He couldn’t drink either.
Remo slid into a stool at his left, and said politely, ‘Mr. Burns?’
‘Yes,’ Burns said, coldly, distantly.
‘My name is Harold Smith. I’m with a special Senate Committee investigating coercion of the free press. Do you have a minute?’
‘I suppose so,’ Burns said laconically, trying to mask his pleasure about being asked for his opinion on encroachment on news gathering, the right of a reporter to conceal his sources, the necessity of protecting the First Amendment. But how could he say all that in a minute?
He turned out to have more than a minute, and he didn’t talk at all. He only listened. He listened as the man explained that the Senate was interested in cases where politicians had tried ‘to buy’ members of the press, in order to insure favourable news coverage. ‘Do you know, Mr. Burns, that there are newspapermen who not only have themselves but their relatives on public payrolls, drawing salaries without doing work?’ This Harold Smith seemed horrified at the thought. Burns learned that Mr. Harold Smith was tracking down just such a reporter in the Miami Beach area, and Mr. Harold Smith was going to subpoena that reporter to testify before a public Senate hearing in Washington, D.C., and maybe, even, indict him. No, Mr. Burns it would not be difficult to find him, because all Mr. Harold Smith had to do was to read the local press and find out which reporter is not giving fair coverage to the opponents of the incumbent. That would be the right reporter.
Oh, Mr. Burns had to go? Oh, he had to write several stories about new endorsements of Mr. Mac Polaney? Oh, tell it like it is, had always been his motto?
Well, that’s really wonderful, Mr. Burns. More reporters should be like you. That was Mr. Harold Smith’s feeling. He looked forward to reading Mr. Burns’ wonderful coverage of Mr. Mac Polaney for the remainder of the campaign.
Burns left without leaving a tip for the bartender. Remo shovelled a five dollar bill onto the bar. That was the cheapest he’d gotten off in anything he’d done in this campaign.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The newspaper the next morning had headlined the defections from Cartwright’s camp to Mac Polaney. Under Burns’ by-line, the story said that what appeared to have been merely a coronation ceremony for the incumbent mayor might now grow into a horse race.
Another story quoted Gartwright in another attack on the federal government, for trying to interfere with the municipal election. Cartwright said that ‘vast sums’ of money had been shipped from Washington for use by his opponents, in an effort to beat him because he would not be Washington’s toady. From the start, Cartwright said, with the infamous League Papers, it was apparent that Washington was trying to dictate to Miami Beach its choice of a mayor.
Another story on Page One was datelined Washington. It quoted the President’s press secretary as saying that a full investigation was underway into the League papers, and that a report should be on the President’s desk when he returned from his Summit meeting next week. The story cheered Remo; it meant he had a few more days in which to bail out CURE.