"I'm Don Strachey."
"Kenyon Louderbush. This is my wife Deidre."
"Hello," she said, barely audible.
He was tense enough, but she was clenched all over and looked as if it was all she could do to contain her rage. He was tall and broad, an aging but still formidable right tackle.
He had a big jaw and big hands and wore gentlemanly specs, his only visible concession to the passage of time. She was good-sized, too, stocky as opposed to stout, also a onetime athlete maybe. She had a round pretty face with a minimum of makeup and some big but not comically big hair tinted auburn and recently styled. Both of the Louderbushes wore the kinds of conservatively presentable outfits you'd expect a state assemblyman and his spouse to turn up in at a Rotary Club dinner back in his district. One of my thoughts was, am I underdressed for this occasion?
We arrayed ourselves around a coffee table where the hotel had thought to provide some fresh gladiola that were tall enough to obstruct Mrs. Louderbush's view of me. Without a word, she got up and transferred the vase to an out of the way end table. There were nuts and wrapped hard candies too, but nobody reached for any. There weren't of course any ashtrays.
"This is going to be painful for all of us," Louderbush said,
"so let's get it over with."
Painful for all of us? "Sure," I said.
"I called you, Mr. Strachey, because I've had reports coming in that you are on my case for some immoral things I did many years ago."
"Five years ago is not many years ago," I corrected him.
"No, not to you it isn't. But to me five years ago is another lifetime."
"Well, you did what you did. Repeatedly over a number of years apparently."
"I can't deny that. I'm not here to deny anything. I'm here to…try to get you to understand what some of the consequences will be if you and Shy McCloskey make my sins of the past a campaign issue."
"Consequences for whom?"
"I'll get to that. Primarily for my family." Mrs. Louderbush tightened up even more and was glaring up a storm. She had set down a shoulder bag that was even bigger than mine both rested on the end table separated by the gladiola-and I hoped she didn't also have a weapon in hers.
"Deidre and I have three teenage children," Louderbush went on. "This is an extremely vulnerable age. Teenagers are so sensitive, so easily hurt and confused. They need their parents. They need to be able to look up to their parents."
"No, I'd hate to see any young people get hurt. I mean, any more than have been injured already."
Mrs. Louderbush looked at her husband and started to say something, but he shook his head. "You're going to be merciless with me," he said, "and I understand why. Believe me, I do. I've been in counseling since Greg Stiver's death, and I can tell you that nobody is as angry at me as I am at myself."
"Good."
"I don't think I need to relate to you the whole dreary story of my upbringing and my life with my violent father and my being raped by my uncle Alan when I was twelve and all the rest of an incredibly sordid tale. But my young life made me a psychological cripple of the worst kind, the kind of man who preys on younger men who have been made vulnerable by family traumas of their own. I can't justify anything I have done. I can only explain. And I can say over and over and over again that I am so, so, so sorry for all the pain I inflicted, and I can honestly declare that I am beyond all of that horror. And, yes. It was Greg Stiver's death that forced me to confront my demons and my anger-management problems and to seek help and to promise myself and my wife that I would never enter into one of these sick relationships ever again. I also quit drinking, which had been a factor in my behavior."
Mrs. Louderbush said levelly, "It's true. It's all over."
"You knew about it?"
"Of course not!"
"No, no," Louderbush said. "I was a sneak. I was a liar and a sneak."
Now she was nodding angrily.
"It wasn't the illicit relationships that Deidre found out about. I have to say I covered my tracks too well to get 192
Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson caught at any of that. No, it was the therapy twice a week in Rochester. I was so faithful about my appointments that I began making up stories about my unexplained absences from my district office and from home. After a while, Deidre confronted me. What she thought was, I was having an affair."
"With a woman," she said coldly. "I'm a nurse, and you wouldn't think I'd be quite so naive."
"When did you find out about your husband's physically abusive relationships with young men?" I asked her. I wanted to make certain we were all talking about the same thing here.
"In January. The first thing I did was tell Kenyon I still loved him and I was not going to break up our family. The second thing I did was go out and get an HIV test.
Fortunately, it was negative."
"This past January? Wasn't that when you announced you were running for governor, Assemblyman?"
"That was something of a coincidence and something of a not-exactly-a-coincidence. In any case, I planned on informing Deidre of my problematical past. I chose to tell her because she deserved to know-and just in case during the gubernatorial campaign certain types turned up."
"Gotcha. Certain types like me."
"Exactly."
"And by then you must have had your Serbians standing by to deal with any such crude interference with your plans, no?"
"Serbians?"
"I call them that. The goons that you-or more likely low-lifes on your staff-employed to try to intimidate me. My health insurance covers my damaged ear. Otherwise I'd send your campaign the hospital bill."
He stiffened. "That's ridiculous."
Mrs. Louderbush looked even madder.
"Mr. Louderbush, if you don't know this, you should. Since I've been investigating your ugly past, I've been beaten and my car has been vandalized. My movements have been monitored as if I was a sex offender wearing an ankle bracelet. Which strikes me as hugely ironic, now that I think about it."
Louderbush winced. "No. None of that is any responsibility of mine. Not this time. I'm sure in your line of work you've made one hell of a lot of enemies. Maybe you should go over your professional digging-up-dirt-on-people files to see who else doesn't like you and what you're doing. As for me and any Serbians, so-called, I'm not that ruthless and I'm not that well-organized."
"You have a history of both."
"Can you show me any evidence you have connecting me to any such BS? I have a lot to atone for, but having my political opponents' henchmen attacked is not one of them.
You're just way off the mark on this one, my friend."
I knew it was possible he really had been told nothing of the ugly stuff being done on his behalf. Rogue staffers could be behind it, or even fringe Tea Partiers who wanted Louderbush elected and were operating independently. But with his record as an accomplished liar, it was impossible to 194
Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson know which. I was certain, though, that whoever had been all over me for days and was determined to scare me off had been operating at a level of sophistication beyond the normal means of Second Amendment loonies and anti-tax hysterics in Minute Man costumes.
I said, "Whatever you know or don't know about the way I've been roughed up, Mr. Louderbush, the basic facts here are indisputable. You did a lot of bad stuff that's cruel and illegal and disgusting, and if the electorate found out about it, they would say no to your candidacy. Some would congratulate you on getting a grip and halting your destructive practices, and they would wish you well in your future private life. But most would not want to take a chance on you as governor. I know I don't. What you did to Greg Stiver is unforgiveable. If the voters knew about it, most of them would not forgive you either."