Authors: Ed Gorman

Tags: #Mystery

Sleeping Dogs (9 page)

BOOK: Sleeping Dogs

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She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek, the touch of her lips and her perfume arousing me instantly.

I had more coffee and tried not to look at the op-ed page again. But of course I did. Maybe I could get the full-mooner who'd written this in a death cage match. We'd raise money for charity and I'd get to kill him legally.

I was about to leave the booth myself when I looked up from my newspaper and saw a familiar dark face. Detective Sayers.

He slid in across from me. “Sun's out. Glad to see it. You look tired, by the way.”

“I wouldn't know why. I'm just rereading the op-ed that says my client is a sleazy bum.”

Sayers brushed his chin with a large hand. “And that's not the only problem you have.”

I didn't say anything until after he'd ordered coffee and a bagel for himself. “So you brought me more bad news?”

“Not âbrought you.' You already had it. You're too smart not to have figured it out.”

“I'm not sure what we're talking about here.”

“We're talking about your man passing out onstage the other night. We're talking about who put the stuff in his drink. And we're talking about it probably being an inside job.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning somebody on your own staff.”

I settled back. Whatever energy I'd managed to scrounge up at the
gym was waning now. The weariness was back. Not only somebody on our own staffâwhat about the makeup woman?

“There were a lot of people backstage from four-thirty on. We canvassed everybody. Nobody reported seeing anybody who didn't belong there.”

He hadn't taken off his tan Burberry. His brown fedora sat on the edge of the table. “I'd like you to be my point man on the inside.”

“I believe that's called âratting people out.'”

“TV talk. You need to know who you're dealing with and so do I. We want the same thing. The bad guy.”

I couldn't disagree. Whoever had given Warren the drug deserved to be identified and punished. “I'm not going to name any names until I'm positive.”

“Fair enough. I've got three other cases I'm working on. I'll let you figure out who we're talking about here and then I'll take over when it's appropriate.”

“This won't be fun.”

“You're friends with all of them?”

“We don't hang out together. Not that type of friends. But when you work as closely with people as I doâyou want to see them happy. And succeed. You don't like to think of them as some kind of twisted nut jobs.”

He smiled with big white teeth. “You should have my job. You get used to twisted nut jobs real fast.”

S
omebody at headquarters had blown up the op-ed piece to five times its normal size and made obscene comments in the margins. This would have to come down before a visiting reporter saw it. In the old days, Kennedy's babes and Nixon's innumerable lapses into insanity
would never have been reported. (Thanks to Dr. Henry Strangelove Kissinger, we knew that Nixon prayed in his final days in office and urged Strangelove to do likewise; but why would Strangelove prayâwhen he was God himself?)

When I walked into the office and closed the door, Warren was swallowing two pills from a small brown prescription bottle. Because we were pros we'd moved past our bitter exchange yesterday. Nothing more needed to be said.

“Xanax.”

“I thought they made you a little fuzzy.”

“Maybe I need to be a little fuzzy.”

“According to the schedule you've got four different stops today.”

“Maybe you'd rather I come apart when I'm speaking to people.”

“Pull a Jimmy Swaggart. There's still time to train that lower lip of yours to quiver the way his did. And then you can start sobbing and go into âI have sinned.'”

He fixed me with an angry stare. He was lousy at self-pity, as most arrogant people are. “You don't give a shit about me personally, do you, Dev?”

I'd been wrong. He was back in his self-pity mode and seemed to have forgotten every single angry word I'd laid on him. He had the enviable ability of forgetting anything too painful to remember.

I gave him the short version. “I give a shit about what you believe politically. You want to accomplish the same things legislatively that I do. In your own patrician way you give a shit about the masses. And so do I, being one of them. But you personally? You told me a lot of lies to get me on board this time, the biggest one being that you were leaving the women alone. And that may not be all of it. I just had coffee with Teresa. She thinks you're hiding some other deep dark secret.”

“Oh, God, she's been on my case since she got here the night of the debate. She's so fucking paranoid.”

“Gosh, I wonder why.”

“You a marriage counselor now, are you, Dev? That'd be funny for a guy who hasn't had anything but one-night stands for three years.”

“I guess I'm being sanctimonious again, huh?”

“You want to know who called at three A.M.? It was Greaves. He just wanted to make sure I'd be ready with the money. Sweet, huh? Three A.M.”

“I'm sorry that happened to you, Warren. But we both know he's a creep.”

I went over and got some coffee.

“You read that op-ed piece?”

“Yeah.”

“Damage?”

“You're doing the radio interview in two hours. Dispute every point in the op-ed. Put it right up his ass.”

“This is raw meat for those talk-radio bastards.”

“Nothing new there. They already hated you. What I want to see is how much mileage Lake gets from the mainstream press. That's what we have to watch out for.”

Once I was seated, he went over and got coffee for himself. He was careful about how he talked now. “I had this place swept again at seven this morning, but I'm still nervous about talking.”

“Don't blame you.”

He nodded to a brown leather valise on the table with the fax. He gave me a thumbs-up. Three hundred K.

“I'm still a little worried about afterward, Dev.”

“So am I.” I changed the subject quickly. In case the room was still bugged, I didn't want to say anything incriminating. “Laura's having some personal problems.”

He seemed surprised. “That's very interesting, but what the hell does it have to do with anything this morning?”

It wasn't the sort of thing I'd usually discuss on the morning I was going to drop off better than a quarter million dollars in cash to a blackmailer, but at least it got us talking about something other than the brown valise and the possibility that Greaves was going to keep on blackmailing us. I'd already ingested half a roll of Turns.

“Thought I'd mention it. I don't see her around this morning.”

“She's under a lot of stress. She's a good woman. She'll pull out if it, Dev. And now can we talk about something else? Did anything good happen for our campaign today?”

But I wasn't up for making him feel better. Screw him.

“You go over your notes for the radio interview?”

“Three times. This Mindy Thomas, she's friendly to us, right?”

“She was last time around. Hard to believe she'd go for Lake, though she didn't go for our governor candidate last time.”

“He was about as appealing as diarrhea.”

“Be sure and mention that on the air.”

He laughed. “I can't help it. Even when I'm pissed at you, I laugh at your stupid sarcasm.”

“Oh, I forgot. You want to be universally loved.”

“Am I that bad?”

“How many times have you studied yourself in the mirror today?” His Washington staffers told me he kept a mirror the size of a hardback book in his office drawer. Every major politician is a megalomaniac. There are no exceptions, not even the ones who look like parrots and advocate executing abortion doctors. Maybe they are megalomaniacs in particular. But so are the warm and fuzzy ones that everybody likes because they're for “the little guy,” a bit of praise that stretches back to at least FDR, who saw just about everybody in America as his personal servant.

“Guess I'll go to the john,” he said abruptly. He picked up the new
Time
. “Are we in here this week?”

“Yeah, you're on the cover and half the magazine is your biography.”

“Someday that'll be the truth, Dev. You wait and see.”

“You'll have to share it with Genghis Khan.”

“I'm a lot better looking than he was,” Warren said, trundling off.

CHAPTER 13

Laura got in around ten-thirty. I had the valise with the money pushed under my desk. I was trying to concentrate on a couple of niche print adsâone to labor; one to suburban womenâthat needed to be FedExed by late this afternoon. Either the copy was perfecto or I was so distracted I couldn't read English. I signed my name and initials in big looping letters. I even put an exclamation point on them, making the copywriters' day.

She didn't say anything. Despite the swank blue dress and the swank moussed hair, the dark circles under her eyes and the heavy, anxious sighs betrayed her agitation and sorrow. Sort of like me in the first months following my divorce.

I spoke first. “Mind if I ask how you're doing?”

“How the fuck you think I'm doing?”

“I guess that kind of answers it.”

She sat at her desk, sipping coffee and checking her e-mails. I took a couple of inconsequential phone calls.

When I hung up, she said, “I shouldn't have said that.”

“Can I be patronizing and say that I've hung from that cross you're on now?”

“Your divorce?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought I was tougher than this.”

“We all think we're tougher than this. Even professional wrestlers think they're tougher than this.”

She giggled. “That was exactly the right thing to say. You are so weird sometimes, Dev, and it's almost always funny.”

“I never told you I was a professional wrestler?”

“Billy used to brag about how you were a college boxer. And you were in the army, too?”

“Yeah. Did he add that I got my nose broken twice and had to be taken to the hospital once with a concussion?”

“Nah. He didn't tell me that. Makes a better story without it.”

Then she took a deep breath and sighed it out. “For about forty-two seconds there you had me in a good mood. I think that's my record for the last twenty-four hours.”

“I went as long as fifty-two seconds in the first month after I got dumped.”

“Now I have a goal to shoot for. And please don't tell me that I'm going to feel better real, real,
real
soon. The next fucking person who says that to me is going to get their car blown up.”

“I always figured you for a terrorist.”

“Didn't you hate all the advice people gave you?”

“I wore those earplugs they wear on aircraft carriers.” And I damned near had, too. Admit that you've got a broken heart and suddenly everybody you know turns into a grief counselor. I'm not even sure they mean well. It's a power position, and any number of them, it seemed to me, enjoyed being condescending.

“Tell me to focus.”

“Focus, Laura.”

“I've got so much to do.”

“Focus or I'll beat the crap out of you. I was a boxer, remember.”

“Yeah, but you got your nose broken twice.”

“And don't forget the concussion. But I could still whip you.”

“That did it. You scared me straight. Now I'm one hundred percent concentration.”

“Good. So now you'll shut up so
I
can concentrate.”

“You sure put in long days,” Laura said.

“The burdens of a role model.”

“I'm going to the little girls' room and cry my eyes out.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Take plenty of Kleenex.”

“Won't need it. Plenty of toilet paper there.”

“Ah.”

“I actually thought of calling you in the middle of the night.”

“You know, I still don't know exactly what you're talking about here.”

“Someday I'll be able to tell you.”

“Call me anytime you want to, Laura. You know that.”

She put her hand in mine. “I really did think I was tougher than this.”

“Read Hemingway. He knew we were all cowards in all respects.”

“Maybe I'll give him a try.”

I was just settling in with my computer when Billy came into the office. “Good morning.” He probably wasn't going to feel that way when I gave him some bad news. Billy hated to travel.

“We're having problems in Galesburg,” I said. “Our man there had a heart attack, as you know. That was four days ago. In the interim the place has gone totally to shit. I need you to fly there and see if you can get things straightened out. You can be back on a late plane. We already bought you your ticket. You leave in two hours.”

“Aw, shit, Dev. I've got things going on here.”

“I'm sorry, Billy. You're good at this and you know it. All you have to do is figure out a new organizational chart. The woman who's number two is afraid to make any changes. You know, she'll hurt people's feelings and all that. So you be the bad guy for her.”

“Hell, I could do that over the phone.”

“Yeah, I suppose you could. But I'd rather you go there personally. Make it a little more official.”

“Shit.”

“I think you said that already.”

T
he sun had turned Chicago into its usual road race. The streets were reasonably clear, tires could get traction, everybody was late or thought they were, and ordinarily calm, respectable drivers had suddenly begun trying out for the Daytona 500.

And what was Chicago without its sirens? Police, ambulance, firefighters. All day, all night in some sections of the city. By the time I reached Greaves's hotel, I'd been slowed down by two fire trucks and an ambulance.

I knew this was the beginning of Greaves feeding off Warren. Right now I didn't care. Even if we got a monthlong respite from his greediness, it would be enough to work our way back up in the polls and have a good chance of winning by two or three points. It might not be the win we'd hoped for. But it would be a win. And while I didn't have much respect for him as a man, Warren and I did share the same view of what had to be done in this grotesquely unjust society the rich and shameless had turned it into since the early 1980sâBush, Clinton, Bushâtime for a serious new start. The only time I'd felt any support for Clinton after the first term was when the other side had tried to impeach him, talk radio's wet dream. I'd be afraid to impeach just
about anybody. Once that door is opened, we'll become Italy within ten years, insurrections a monthly occurrence in the legislature.

The new siren wasn't any different from the ones I'd just passed. Not until I got within two blocks of Greaves's hotel did I see that his block had been cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape and that an ambulance and two police cars were standing in front of the hotel itself.

I knew then. I could have been wrong, of course. But I didn't think so. A man like Greaves lives the kind of life that was once said of the animal kingdomâshort, nasty, and brutish.

I wish I could say something noble here. For whom the bell tolls and all that sort of bullshit. But Greaves was a predator, and we've got far too many of them in our society.

I found a parking spot a block and a half away and walked over to the crime scene. I've gotten to know a number of cops over the years. We've hired some of them to supply security for our various functions. We pay well. And over the years they become sergeants and then detectives. And we can call on them for information.

I didn't see a single cop I knew in front of the hotel. The first two print reporters were there by now, too. TV couldn't be far behind. “Hey!” one of the onlookers called. “Who says you can go up there?” And the woman he was with complained, “Who does he think he is?”

I was going to tell her I was Clark Kent, but she probably wouldn't know who that was.

I walked up to a uniformed woman and said, “My sister's staying here. I hadn't heard from her in a couple of days andâ”

“Nothing to worry about, sir. This was a man.”

I moved as close as I could get to the ambulance and still be on the public side of the crime scene tape. They brought him down on a gurney. Fortunately, there was enough wind to pick up the sheet over his face. I got a millisecond glimpse of him. It was Greaves all right.

A headache started over my right eye. Stress. Wouldn't last long. But for the moment it forced me to close my eyes.

My knees are always the first thing to shake when I lose control for a while. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's some kind of memory from my boxing days. My legs were my weakest point. Four, five rounds and they'd start to go on me. That accounted for the concussion that time. I started to fall into him and he did what any boxer would try to do, take my head off. All thanks to my legs. I walked, wobbly, away from the crime scene.

No problem now worrying if Greaves would take the three hundred thousand.

Now we had much bigger problems.

Who had the tape that he was going to sell us?

BOOK: Sleeping Dogs

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