Standing here on the Boston Fish Pier at high noon on election eve, I mused that you know people, but you don't really know them. You know them now, so you think you've known them always, as if everyone follows the same cookie-cutter path in life from young adulthood on to marriage, parenthood, or whatever. In fact, what you see or even imagine is little more than an outline, a silhouette, and perhaps a deceiving one at that. What you don't see is the text and the texture, the private drama that makes up a human life.
I was both stunned and spellbound. I didn't say anything-one, because I couldn't, and two, because I didn't want Gus to stop. Never interrupt the steady flow of crucial information to hear yourself speak.
Gus took the silent bait. "Black didn't give me up, and I owed him for that. But Black didn't give me up for a simple reason. Had he given me up, I would have made a pretty damned good government witness. I couldn't have been involved in the shooting. I didn't mastermind the thing. I was just a grunt driving a car, trying to make some dough to keep my legs from getting busted. Had I been a federal witness, Black would have gone to jail."
He paused only long enough to look me hard in the eye and catch his own breath. This whole thing seemed to be like penance for Gus. I suspect he regarded me as some sort of keeper of the truth, being in the newspaper business and all, and here he was letting the truth be known for the first time, so many years after the fact.
"So I owe something to your father. He was a shift supervisor at the Record, and he got me a job when I needed it most. And I owe something to Mr. Stemple, and here I am taking care of two debts by trying to help you." A pause, accompanied by a watchful gaze over my face, then,
"Does this make sense?"
"It does, yeah, if I knew what it is you were trying to help me with.
I don't mean to beat a dead horse, but one of the two reporters on this story was killed. And the other one, me, despite all your attempts to help, has more questions than answers. I know Curtis Black is involved. I know he tried to assassinate the president of the United States. But I don't know why, and I don't have proof. In other words, so many days and so much tragedy, and I can't even get a news story out of this. So nothing personal, Gus, but you haven't done a whole lot by me yet, not, at least, as much as you probably intended."
Gus looked at me in a curious way, speaking, it seemed, without talking.
"You have it partly right," he said.
I whirled toward him and asked, pointedly, "What do you mean by that?"
He fell mute. I softened my tone. "Gus, you want to help. I trust you on that. So help me. No more hoops. No more hurdles. No more being cryptic. Help me."
There was more than a hint of desperation in my voice, but at this point, so what? Gus stood up a little straighter, though his leg was still bent in that familiar way it always is.
He said, "You know Curtis Black went into the witness protection program, right? We've established that."
I nodded.
"So he gets a new identity. I don't know what happened to him in the program. I heard he vanished-abandoned his new, government-issued identity and got a third identity on his own."
This coincided with the government records that I had seen the previous morning, which showed that Clawson vanished in 1988.
Gus continued. "So he's running around, and no one knows who he is: not the government who gave him a free ride on a felony murder offense, not the guys he betrayed and put away for the rest of their lives.
"No one knows who he is," Gus continued. "No one knows where he is."
I asked finally, "So then why does Curtis Black take a shot at the president?"
Gus looked at me long and hard, leaving the sensation that he was looking through me, into my mind, willing information to me.
"He doesn't," Gus said, still staring at me. Abruptly he turned around, opened his car door, reached beneath his seat, and pulled out a copy of that morning's Boston Record. He shut the door and held out the front page in front of me.
I looked at a pair of side-by-side colorful photographs taking up much of the top half of the page. The first one was of Senator Stanny Nichols working a ropeline at an event in Los Angeles, leaning over the yellow tape, both his hands stretched out for the thronging crowd of Democratic supporters to shake. The second one, right beside it, was of President Clayton Hutchins standing behind a podium on the tarmac of the Milwaukee airport, a lineup of fully uniformed policemen standing behind him in an anticrime event, and behind them the distant outline of Air Force One.
Gus pointed slowly at Hutchins, his finger lingering on his face for a few seconds. He looked me in the eye and slowly, somberly, said,
"That's Curtis Black."
And just like that, so many pieces fall into so many empty places, a picture suddenly emerging from all the disparate parts, though it didn't yet become entirely clear. I stared at the photograph, then at Gus.
"He's had some cosmetic work done," he said. "He's worked on his speech patterns, his Boston accent. But it's him. We knew it was him, but we couldn't be sure, so from prison, Paul sent a message to him when he was vice president, through a brother-in-law who was a big fund-raiser. The message said simply, "Paul Stemple knows and needs to be pardoned." And lo and behold, he was."
My head was swimming, my hands visibly shaking, my voice weak from mental exhaustion.
I asked, "So if Black is the president, not the would-be assassin, and all the other men in the gang are dead or in jail, then who shot at Black, and why?"
Before he could open his mouth to answer, I felt another piece of this nearly completed puzzle jamming into place. No one shot at Hutchins.
Someone shot at me. I was the first man struck. Drinker was right when he floated that theory, though for all the wrong reasons. I was the intended victim of someone who was trying to maintain Hutchins's secret.
Gus said, "We can't prove it, but my belief is that it was you they were gunning for, not Hutchins. From what I've heard inside the Record, you were nosing around on this pardon early on, and they must have been trying to get you out of the way. Someone was. I just don't know who."
There was a long silence between us. The chill breeze continued to rustle through my suitcoat, though I didn't actually feel cold. Planes continued to rumble overhead, though I didn't hear a sound.
"Why didn't you just tell me all this to begin with?" I asked, a dose of aggravation seeping into my voice. "We could have avoided a lot of tragedy."
Gus shook his head slowly and looked down at the ground, then back up at me. "I think I have a pretty good idea about how you work. God knows, I've been watching you since you were greener than a meadow.
I've known you a long time, Jack. If I just gave you what I had, anonymously, you would have dismissed me as some sort of crackpot and never checked the information. If I had come to you on the record, I would have destroyed my entire life. My wife doesn't know about this armored car heist. My daughters, they don't know about this armored car heist. You're the best reporter I know. I wanted you to figure this out on your own, without my direct involvement, and come to the answers yourself. It almost worked."
I said, "So you won't go on the record? I need you on the record on this."
Gus shook his head slowly. He said, "I just can't. I busted my hump to recover from where I was. I've made a life for myself. I'm happy.
My wife is happy. I can't destroy all that now."