I couldn't believe I was doing this, but I put my hand gently on his exposed neck. His skin was warmer than I expected, and still soft. I took a guess that he had been killed in the last few hours.
His wallet lay haphazardly, opened in the tub beside him, some of the contents spilled around his legs and midsection as if someone had rifled through it before throwing it back at him. I snatched up a few pieces of paper and cards-the stub of a bus ticket from Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, to Washington, dated two weeks before, a number for a local social services agency, an address in Silver Spring with the underlined word, "Rent." No names, no identification.
I grabbed another handful of papers and sifted through them, tossing them back into the tub when I determined their uselessness. The last slip sent a chill up my spine. It was a torn sheet of lined paper, and on it were my own work and home telephone numbers, without any name, and, curiously, the main switchboard number to the Record in Boston.
Without regards to the possible criminal repercussions of stealing evidence in a murder investigation, I shoved the paper into my pocket and made my way for the door.
In the hallway, I walked as quietly as I could, creeping down the stairs and toward the front door. I stopped suddenly in the middle of the living room, a vague thought suddenly crystallizing in my brain. I whirled around, walked back into the kitchen, and saw what I had thought I remembered: a telephone answering machine on the counter.
I pressed a button that said "Greeting," and recognized immediately a voice that haunted me to my soul. "You've reached 282-4572. Please leave a message."
It was the voice of my anonymous source, Paul Stemple. Now he, too, was dead.
Once outside, I bolted up the street toward Massachusetts Avenue. I stopped at a pay telephone, called 911, and in the most casual voice I could summon, informed the dispatcher of a possible homicide at 898 C
Street in Southeast. I hung up, found a nearby ATM machine, and withdrew $500, the maximum it would allow. As I flagged a cab, two police cruisers raced past, their lights flashing but their sirens silent. I felt as if I had just gotten away with something, but with what, I didn't yet know.
Regardless of what I looked like, the front desk clerk at the very proper Jefferson Hotel would have treated me with a sense of suspicion, given the hour, which was 4:00 A.m." and the fact that I wasn't carrying any luggage. When he took into account my appearance, which was even more disheveled than before, he called for security, and a nice guard stood politely nearby as I tried to arrange for a room.
"Name, please?" the clerk asked.
"Bird. Lawrence Bird." Bird succeeds Havlicek. It's a Boston thing.
"What sort of credit card will you be using, Mr. Bird?"
"I'm not. I'd like to pay with cash." I pulled the thick wad of new bills from my pocket and put them on the counter.
"Certainly. You have some form of identification?"
"I don't. I was just in a car accident, and I lost my wallet."
"Of course."
He typed on his computer keyboard and gazed thoughtfully at the screen while rubbing his chin.
"Unfortunately Mr." um, Bird, we don't have any availability right now." He said this while looking at his computer. His eyes shifted toward me, and he added brightly, "I'm very sorry."
"Look," I said. "I'm hurt. I'm exhausted. I'm desperate. I have the money right here to pay for a room. I'll check out by eleven in the morning. I will take absolutely any room you have."
I pulled two twenty-dollar bills from the pile, pushed them toward him, and added, "I'll take anything."
He typed for another moment, rubbed his chin a little more, and said,
"Oh, good. It seems there's a king bedroom available on the fourth floor that I didn't see." As he spoke, he reached out, gently fingered the $40, and placed it in his shirt pocket.
He printed out a registration form, asked me to sign it, required an upfront payment of $300 and asked, "Will you be needing help with any luggage?"
"All set," I said, smiling without cheer.
Once in the room, I called Martin and told him where I was and my assumed name. Within ten minutes, I was fast asleep.
twenty
I awoke four hours later thinking thoughts that were way too complex.
Foremost among them were the images of Samantha Stevens meeting me at the airport, Samantha Stevens alone knowing that my car was at Kinkead's, Samantha Stevens jumping in a taxicab before I could even offer her a ride home. She was the only person in any way connected to the assassination attempt or the resulting investigation who had monitored my whereabouts in the hours before the explosion. Not good.
I thought of my anonymous source, the grotesque way in which he was forced to die, all because of his mission of truth. I felt as if I had known him, even if we had never actually met. And now he was gone, and with him so much of the information I so desperately needed, now more than ever.
Of course I thought of Havlicek, fighting for the story right to the end, happy with his lot in life, confident that things would always get better, that the truth just lay a day or two away. I questioned whether I could push onward in this story without him or whether it was time to abandon my efforts, then dismissed that latter thought as unworthy of another second's consideration.
Then I thought of Kent Drinker, so desperate for the last week-plus to learn the identity and location of the person who had called me in the hospital that first day. And a few hours ago, I found that person murdered, just after someone had failed to murder me.
It's a different Tony Clawson. And it's his background that's so interesting and so potentially devastating, especially to my agency.
I played Drinker's strange words out in my mind as I showered and readied for the day. I was exhausted. My head hurt from the cut, my ribs throbbed from last week's shooting. My life had become a life-or-death obstacle course, and right now, I was racing down the homestretch, toward the hopeful confluence of Election Day and some truthful answers about this assassination attempt.
Pink and powdered, I sat down in the fluffy terrycloth robe-had no fresh clothes-and called downstairs for a laptop computer with Internet access. A few minutes later, a solicitous bellman delivered it to my door.
I settled in at the computer to conduct a cyberspace manhunt. First I checked Social Security Administration records, on-line, for all Tony Clawsons in the country in the last twenty years. For each one I found, I checked for current telephone numbers. If they didn't have a phone number, I checked for death records. If they didn't have a phone number or a death record, I checked for a credit report to see if there was recent activity. It was a frustrating, tedious endeavor, the type of pick-and-shovel work that outsiders assume we layabout reporters have someone else on staff to do.
On about the fifteenth Tony Clawson, this one out in the suburbs of Chicago, I could find nothing-no death record, no phone number, no credit activity. I checked for marriage records. Nothing. I checked, most interestingly, for a birth record, and again, nothing.
I went deeper into his Social Security history and saw that he hadn't been assigned a Social Security number until 1979, when he was listed as forty years old. That was unusual, though not definitive. With every stroke of the key, I learned more, and as I learned more, my pulse quickened to the point of excitement. Clawson, my computer told me, began paying into the system in 1979, and continued for nine years.