“Because if the story gets out about blackmail, you’re out of business whether you had anything to do with it or not.”
“You don’t have to sound so goddamn happy.”
I pushed my plate away and then pushed my chair back.
“Where the hell are you going?”
“I have work to do.”
“I tell you all this and you just get up and leave without saying anything?”
“Looks that way, doesn’t it?”
I threw down a ten for the tip and left the Governor’s Room. The old fart in all the framed photographs and paintings looked crabbier than ever.
Chapter 14
The Cooper estate stretched across a sprawling piece of land that was partly forest and partly field inhabited by the massive stone Tudor-style great house and the lesser servants’ quarters and the stables where the horses were kept. Senator Cooper had bred and raised trotters. The white fences were stark in the bright afternoon. I pulled up on the circular drive and parked in front of the place. I stood for a moment watching a man walking a horse in from the field to the stables. There was something timeless about it, like a French pastoral painting. The door had a leaded-window insert and was made of half-timber paneling. I had the feeling a tonsured monk might open it.
A friendly woman in a russet-colored dress greeted me. The white hair framed a handsome face that had likely persevered seventy-some years in this vale of tears. “Yes, may I help you, sir?”
“My name is Dev Conrad. I need to see Mrs. Cooper.”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Conrad. Please come in. My name is Winnie Masters. I’m Mrs. Cooper’s secretary.”
My feet echoed on a gleaming dark floor as she led me through an entry hall that was probably as big as the tiny house where my ex-wife and I spent our first two years. This house felt like a museum, and I didn’t like it at all. As we moved down a hall I began to notice an endless number of framed photographs on the walls. The late senator and Natalie in meet-and-greets with everybody from Bill Clinton to Nelson Mandela to Bono.
As we continued our trek I noticed a formal dining room to the left. There was enough room for a good share of the United Nations to eat there. Winnie Masters finally stopped when we reached another Tudor door. This one hadn’t required three trees to build, but it still had the sturdy and somewhat forbidding air of all such doors. Winnie opened it, then stood aside while I walked into a timbered den filled with icons of many different eras. The enormous floor-to-ceiling bookcases contrasted with the largest plasma screen I’d ever seen. The snapping flames in the brick fireplace seemed out of place in a room where a dozen theater seats were set in front of a movie screen partially covered with a curtain. There was a dry bar in a far corner. Before she directed me to a deep leather chair, Winnie Masters produced a quaint little coffee cup and said, “Do you take anything in your coffee, Mr. Conrad?”
“No, thanks.”
Cup and saucer in my hand, my weight sinking into the luxury of the leather chair, I sat back and gawked around.
“This was the senator’s favorite room.”
“I’ll bet.”
“The rolltop desk over there came from one of Jack Kennedy’s homes. The senator worked in the White House when President Kennedy was in office. I don’t think he ever got over what happened that day in Dallas. Mrs. Cooper has told me that he still had nightmares about it right up to the time of his own death. He was very proud that he was able to get that desk.”
“I’m sure he was.”
“I never knew Senator Cooper, of course; I only came here after he died to help sort through his papers. Then Mrs. Cooper asked me to stay on, and it’s been quite interesting. After my own husband died, I thought my life was over. But working here — well, as I say, it’s quite interesting.”
I wondered how much she knew about any of it. If you want to know the skinny on a hospital, ask a nurse; if you want to know the secrets of a corporation, ask the executive secretary; if you want to know anything about a sociopathic former starlet, do you talk to her factotum?
“Have you seen Susan today?”
I liked the way she handled it: “Now please, Mr. Conrad, you don’t expect to get me in the middle of all this, do you?”
“I thought I’d give it a try.” I liked her smile and I liked her.
“You know what a spear carrier is in theater?”
“Sure.”
“That’s what I am in this household. I deliver messages. I don’t interpret them and I don’t enhance them in any way. I like it here because it’s interesting and because I have a very nice room on the third floor. I don’t want to leave.”
“So you can’t be bribed?”
“Not unless you’re willing to pay for all seven of my grandchildren’s college educations.” The blue eyes held intelligent amusement. “Now, why don’t I go and see if Natalie’s busy?”
I always look over the books in libraries, private or public. There was one section that was essentially Americana. The novels ran to Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald — novelists he might have read when he was in college back in the fifties. There was also a good deal of nonfiction, notably books by Saul Alinsky, the Chicago man who taught poor people how to organize and challenge those who held them down. He was a true champion of the downtrodden. His life was threatened many times by those who claimed he was a communist, but he continued on anyway. His books inspired millions of young people. I took down a copy of Reveille for Radicals and turned back the cover.
For my favorite wild-eyed radical
From his loving wife Patricia
They’d been married twenty years before her heart finally gave out. From all I’d read about the couple Patricia was as progressive as her husband. She’d been a sociology student at Alinsky’s alma mater, the University of Chicago, and had met her husband when they’d both been marching to protest a particularly usurious loan company that exploited poor blacks. She’d come from money and prominence but had betrayed her class, as it was often put in those days. She’d worked hard to get her husband elected, first to the House and then to the Senate. The Washington gentry hadn’t liked her. Too liberal. But then, so was her husband.
Then she died, and after two years of loneliness he met Natalie, and while she hadn’t changed him radically at first, he soon enough became unrecognizable to his old friends. He became interested in becoming wealthy, and if you can’t become wealthy holding a Senate seat, then you are incompetent beyond repair. I believe the term is “license to steal” and that applies to both sides. Natalie was his unindicted co-conspirator. She was the darling of the lobbyists; she understood how secret deals were made to fill the coffers. I tried to imagine Natalie reading Saul Alinsky. I couldn’t help myself. I laughed out loud.
“Do you talk to yourself, too?” Natalie had come in.
As I put the book back on the shelf, I said, “Yes, I do, and I find myself pretty damned interesting.”
“I checked with Ben. That one radio interview still hasn’t been rescheduled. You’re supposed to do what I tell you to.”
I turned to her and said, “Supposedly you hired us because we know more about campaigning than you do.”
“We’ll see how you feel when I stop payment on the very large check Winnie mailed to your firm today.”
By now she was inside the room. At first she’d been addressing me from the doorway as if getting closer might cause her to be ill. She wore silver lamé lounging pajamas — trashy chic. She carried a martini in her left hand and a good deal of malice in her eyes. “I want you to leave.”