Sleeping Dogs Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Epigraph

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  Also by

  Copyright Page

  To Kevin and Kate McCarthy

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Julie Hyzy for her help with the Chicago material.

  And, as always, thanks to Linda Siebels for her tireless work on my manuscript.

  Every morning, to earn my bread,

  I go to the market where lies are bought.

  Hopefully

  I take up my place among the sellers.

  —BERTOLT BRECHT

  Politics is a form of high entertainment and low comedy. It has everything. It’s melodramatic, it’s sinister and it has wonderful villains.

  —RICHARD CONDON

  CHAPTER 1

  That morning two things happened right away. Chicago had a freak October snowstorm, and Phil Wylie, the man I’d replaced, was in the news. He’d committed suicide the night before.

  The staffers up front were gathered in small groups. This was the headquarters for Reelect Senator Nichols, usually a busy and happy place.

  It was obvious that Wylie had had a lot of friends here. The mourning, among men and women alike, charged the air with grief.

  The staffers closest to the senator had joined him along with Mayor Daley for a breakfast saluting five men and women who’d once been drug addicts but who had managed to go three years without hitting up. Noble as it was, this kind of tribute always strikes me as cynical. This is exactly the kind of presentation politicians, even the good ones, choose for photo ops, as if it were something they did that lent these people the courage and determination they needed to handle their new lives so well.

  I was happy to be here, in the private office reserved for the chief staffers. I was the paid bogeyman, as the media had come to privately call all political consultants. That is one reason we stay away from cameras and microphones. Our presence just reminds reporters of how much campaign cash flows to various kinds of advisers, gurus, visionaries, and snake charmers. We’ve come a long way from Abe Lincoln, who wrote his own speeches on the backs of envelopes, no doubt about that.

  I read the Trib and the Sun-Times on my computer. I also checked the log to see if we’d been mentioned on any of the local or regional TV or radio newscasts the previous evening. We had, but it was routine stuff—as were the mentions in the newspapers—so I went right on to see how the fund-raising was going.

  The race was tightening. Jim Lake, our opponent, had once been dismissed as a histrionic nut job. But apparently he’d gone to sanity school recently. He’d gone more mainstream lately—he no longer demanded that teachers carry guns in inner-city schools—and that had no doubt helped him. But more than anything, he was a powerful presence on the stump and on TV He was a damned good speaker. Senator Nichols, for all that I believed in his politics if not in him personally, was an efficient but uninspiring politician. It was a problem for us. Phil Wylie had handled Nichols’s two congressional campaigns as well as his first senatorial one. I still had no real idea why they’d split so bitterly six months earlier. That was when my own consultant firm had been brought in.

  I was just finishing up my third cup of coffee for the morning—thank God for McDonald’s drive-thru—when Doris Baines, one of the local staffers who’d been with Warren since the days when he was an alderman here in Chicago, drifted back and said, “I wish you could have known him. Phil Wylie, I mean. He was one of the nicest, sweetest people I’ve ever known.” Her nose and eyes were red. She tamped them occasionally with a Kleenex. “Everybody loved him.”

  She wanted to talk. I pushed back from my desk. “Anybody have any idea why he might have killed himself?”

  She shook her head obstinately. “That’s the thing. We kept in touch—everybody here with him, I mean. Every few weeks we’d have dinner with him. He had a lot of friends—especially girlfriends—but lately he’d seemed pretty lonely. He had so much—he was so good-looking and so wealthy and he was always in the society pages for being at this gallery opening or this opera—” She started crying again. “But I guess it wasn’t enough.”

  “I’m sorry I never got a chance to know him.”

  She started picking at her hands. Then smiled bitterly. “I remember what we all thought of him when Warren first brought him on. We thought he was this spoiled rich man. He drove a Maserati in those days and sometimes a Town Car would bring him to work. Those were in his drinking days. But once he got serious about working here, all that went away. He was just like the rest of us then—”

  “With the exception of several million dollars.”

  A teary laugh. “Well, I guess you could say that. But you know what I mean. He worked harder than anybody else. He really believed in Warren.”

  “I don’t think I ever got that story straight. Why’d he quit the campaign, anyway?”

  Working her Kleenex around her eyes again. “You know, I’ve never been sure. The official reason was that they’d disagreed on some political issue. But they’d disagreed so many times before—they’d really argue. I have two brothers and they were like that growing up. Argue all the time. But there was never any doubt about how much they loved each other. And Warren and Phil were like that. So I’m not sure we ever got the straight story. All that mattered was that Phil was gone. Everybody always turned to him. He was like our older brother. He always knew what to do.”

  “Nobody tried to patch things up between them?”

  “Teresa did. She’d gone to college with Phil back east. They were great friends. In fact, Phil introduced her to Warren one summer when they were all home from college. That’s how far back they went.”

  Teresa was the senator’s wife. Unlike many spouses of important people, she was not one who envied her mate the spotlight. An elegant woman who was nimble in public as well, she was much better on the stump than Warren. And there was a sweetness about her that I always drew on when the day had gone on too long or too angrily. A good woman.

  “He was a lot like you, Dev. Sort of a disillusioned idealist. He still wanted to believe that people would come to their senses and do the right thing. Even the bastards, if you just fought them hard enough.”

  Kenny Lane, another staffer, knocked on the window that let us look over the entire front part of the onetime supermarket that was our official campaign headquarters. He waved for Doris to come out.

  “Well, I need to get to it. We’ll all be a little slow this morning, Dev. It’s really a blow.”

  By now, and even though I’d never spoken to the guy, I was starting to get a little dejected about his death, too.

  CHAPTER 2

  I put a gleaming silver fork into my rich red spaghetti. After my first bite, I hoisted my scotch and soda and said, “Raeburn, we’re going to kick Lake’s ass around the block tonight.”

  “My poor deluded friend. You’ll be ge
tting thirty sessions of electroshock after tonight. You’ll be desperate to forget how bad old Nichols does. Did I ever tell you that he once put an entire stadium to sleep?”

  “Uh-huh. Will these shock treatments come before or after your man withdraws from the race?”

  “And why would he withdraw?”

  “Because he can’t take the shame of being on the stage with a man as superior as Nichols.”

  The place was the Italian Village in the Loop. My lunch buddy was Tom Raeburn, campaign manager for Jim Lake, our opponent. In high school we’d played basketball against each other. Only six months ago we had met up again when Raeburn, then a lobbyist for electric companies, had resigned his post to take on Lake’s campaign.

  Give Raeburn five thousand dollars to buy himself a custom-tailored suit and then watch the magical transformation that takes place. The moment Raeburn puts the suit on, it looks like something he bought at Sears for a hundred dollars. He’s got the magic touch in reverse. He looks sweaty, disheveled, even a bit of a hayseed. Hard to imagine him in a room of sleek, gold-cuff-linked, tough-ass lobbyists trying to figure out how to slip the party in power a couple of mil under the table in the next year or so.

  But I’ve always wondered if the seemingly guileless blue eyes, the almost juvenile way he laughs and tells jokes, and those moments when he just doesn’t seem to understand something that’s obvious to everybody else—I’ve always wondered if that’s not part of a minutely constructed persona meant to deceive people into thinking that here’s a rube they can run over at will.

  Maybe the joke’s on us.

  “So how do you like living in a hotel, Dev?”

  “I miss not having my books and my CDs, but other than that, it’s not bad at all. Room service up until midnight. Maid makes my bed every morning and cleans up really well. I don’t have to live in my usual hovel.”

  “And speaking of hovels, my friend, our internals are looking mighty good. While yours are more hovel-like.”

  “Hovel-like?”

  “I don’t suppose your internal polls show you how badly you’re slipping, do they?” He said this ostensibly as a joke, but we both knew better.

  “Shows us holding steady. Six, seven points.”

  “I have to remind you what that lead was less than a month ago?”

  “That’s because you muzzled your man. He hasn’t mentioned being abducted by aliens lately. He was bound to pick up.”

  “I admit he can get a little out there once in a while, but at least he only takes his pee-pee out to screw his wife and to piss. He doesn’t cast his seed over half the country.”

  “Warren’s changed.”

  “Sure he has.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I know you are and that’s what’s so sad. You can’t admit to yourself that he’s a serial fornicator. Does the name Bill Clinton sound familiar? You know, if Nichols could’ve kept his dick in his pants, he might have been your presidential nominee four years ago.”

  There was no disputing it. Despite the fact that he wasn’t a great speaker, Warren Nichols was both handsome and imposing on the stump and in front of the camera. He had a manly charm that women loved and men were able to accept. Plus, he had, or so I believed anyway, a true sympathy for the people our system had long ago tossed aside. He’d come from great wealth, but his mother had managed to give him a social conscience. The summer right before the last national nominating convention, the two leading candidates had had the same number of delegates pledged to them. Warren was considered the alternative to both of them should the convention deadlock. But forty-eight hours after the press dubbed him a serious spoiler, his own chances were spoiled when a sixth-grade teacher’s husband came forward and said that Warren had slept with his wife and that he had subsequently divorced her. Warren was lucky to be elected to his Senate seat. His presidential dreams were over.

  “People change.”

  “You know, I believe that, Dev. I really do. I have a brother who used to have the worst temper I ever saw. His wife told him to do something about it or she’d leave him. He started seeing a counselor. He isn’t perfect but he’s cut it back sixty, seventy percent. People do change. I just don’t happen to think Nichols has.”

  “You’re ruining my lunch.”

  He smiled at me. “You think I spoiled this meal, wait’ll you try to eat breakfast tomorrow morning. Lake’s going to do so well tonight, you won’t be able to eat for days.”

  CHAPTER 3

  I’d spent most of the afternoon in meetings. I needed to be alone. The light flurries that had swept into Chicago via Lake Michigan in the morning were now, by seven o’clock, heavy and relentless.

  I was enjoying a one-person pizza and a beer in the parking lot of Wellington University, the Chicago college that tries hard to live down its previous rep for dumb rich kids drinking their way through four years of sex and mayhem. New dean, many new associate profs, several new endowments, and a public relations woman who was so good I was thinking of offering her a job in my political consulting firm.

  I’d left the army after eight years of serving in the intelligence section, where I’d basically been a gumshoe reporting on suspicious people who seemed to have undue interest in various domestic military installations. Because my father had been a four-term congressman before his death, and because I had an uncle in the consulting business, I signed on as a copartner in a political shop. In four years we’d won five seats, two in the Senate and three in the House. We were attracting national notice these days.

  Even back in my army days, I’d learned that if you wanted to be left absolutely alone, turn off your cell, park your car in the center of a huge empty lot, and enjoy your solitude.

  I sat in my car in the parking lot near the building where tonight’s televised debate would be held. Right now, with an hour to go before the stage was lit and the candidates took their places, the lot was almost completely empty except for a truck moving back and forth, with a rack of evil yellow headlights shining on its roof and a snowplow on its front.

  Warren’s campaign manager, Kate Bishop, had called earlier and said that there was something she wanted to tell me tonight. I was of course curious.

  As the truck scraped the snow away, I reached over and took the small silver flask from the glove compartment. I’d been needing a lot more of this stuff lately.

  Eventually the plow deserted this particular lot and I was left in the darkness, two drinks down and with the kind of pinpoint headache just above my right eye I always get when I have this kind of anxiety. Performance anxiety—Warren’s performance tonight. It needed to be good.

  I put the flask back in the glove compartment, I shut off the engine, I slid out of the car, locked the door, and stood for a minute, letting the snowflakes snap at my face like so many mosquitoes. The cold air redeemed me, chased a lot of my fear and most of my headache away. I felt one of those movie bursts of confidence where the hero shakes his fist at the heavens and shouts in triumph. Warren was going to kick Congressman Jim Lake’s ass tonight in the debate. For one wonderful moment I was sure of it. Absolutely sure of it.

  Backstage was crowded with technicians, makeup people, and the staffers who’d come with the three newspeople who’d ask questions in the final segment. All of them on the move at one time. We’d been in the auditorium twice in the past thirty-six hours. I’d wanted Warren to get used to the feel of the stage, to his physical relationship to the seats where the audience would sit.

  Lake was a crooked bastard and the errand boy for every mercenary corporation in the state, but he had the kind of table-pounding, self-righteous, easy-solution bravado that, kept under control, came off well on the tube. A man who knew his own mindlessness, as one pundit had recently noted. And Warren was going to expose all that tonight. The overnights would show that we’d picked up a few points.

  Yesterday afternoon we’d spent two hours here, just Nichols and myself, going over the points that would most likely
be raised in the debate. Instead of nerves, I noticed a kind of distracted quality in both his eye contact and his delivery. As if his mind was on something else.

  A scent of sandalwood. A gentle hand on my arm. A whisper in my ear: “If I wasn’t so beautiful, I just might let you sleep with me.”

  I kissed Kate Bishop on the cheek. She hadn’t been kidding about her beauty. Hitchcock’s gleaming blonde, that Grace Kelly upper-crust attitude that just missed arrogance. Tonight she wore a black sheath. Her golden hair was drawn back into a chignon. She was the world’s most elegant single mom. She had a three-year-old daughter whom she kept under a nanny’s lock and key. She’d been with Warren one term in Congress and during his first term in the Senate.

  We were buffeted, jostled, bumped by streams of people rushing to get everything ready in the remaining forty-two minutes before airtime.

  She was knocked against me. My arm went automatically around her waist to steady her and draw her near.

  “Well, I guess we’ve both had our thrill for the evening,” she laughed. “I’m going through the vapors right now.”

  “Me, too.” Then, “So what were you going to tell me tonight?”

  She put her soft lips to my ear, the scent of sandalwood arousing me not only to lust but to a strange kind of melancholy, and whispered, “I’m getting worried about Laura. The last couple days I caught her in the ladies’ room really crying.”

  “Got any idea what’s wrong?”

  “No. But I think we both better keep an eye on her.”

  Then she took my hand and said, “Let’s go see the lord and master.”

  Senator Warren Douglas Nichols had what looked like a lobster bib stuffed in his shirt collar. It was a piece of crinkly paper fitted so that none of the makeup being applied would get on his clothes.

  His eyes were closed as the young makeup woman finished dabbing around his cheeks and eyebrows. He was a trim, good-looking man of fifty-six with the kind of Harvard virility Jack and Bobby Kennedy had. He was old Illinois money, the kind that made his great-grandfather a close friend of the most prominent men of his time, including the Wrigleys, the McCormicks, and the Searses.