Sleeping Dogs Page 6

  “Warren’s got three stops on his schedule today. He’s going to keep every one of them.”

  “You really think he’s strong enough, Dev?”

  “He doesn’t have any choice. We need to show that he’s strong and can bounce back right away. That’s another reason I don’t want to make any accusations. It’s more important to show that he’s in charge of the situation than to put blame on somebody. They thought they could queer his drink and put him on his back for several days? Not our man. He’s hitting the bricks the very next day. That’s the signal we have to send.”

  Billy giggled. “It’s like you’re playing with toy soldiers, man. All you consultants are like that.”

  “That isn’t a compliment. Not to me, anyway.”

  “But it’s true.”

  “We want to win, Billy. And part of the reason we want to win is because we believe in what a given candidate stands for. I know that sounds like bullshit, but it isn’t. I get pitched all the time by candidates I have no faith in and I say no. Elect these guys and they’ll be in the pockets of every big-money lobby in Washington. Nobody’s pure, Billy, but there are degrees of dirty. Our man Warren is pretty clean, considering.”

  Billy was smirking now. “Wow, I’m surprised. You actually do give a shit.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “sometimes I even surprise myself.”

  I first started working in local politics when I was a sophomore in college. I did so for a simple reason. The pol I volunteered to help had some really fine-looking college girls working out of his campaign headquarters. I was hoping to get laid. While that didn’t happen, my fascination with the political world took serious and lasting hold, mostly because of my father then being in Congress. I admired the pol I worked for because, even though he was a machine man, he didn’t hesitate to veer from the party line when he felt it necessary. Pretty damned cool, I thought. And so did a lot of others. He got elected. And he singled me out for some suggestions I’d made to one of his paid staffers.

  My reward was that I became a paid staffer when he was up again two years later. I did my work after my college day at Northwestern was done. Where before I’d done mostly phone answering, Xerox copying, pizza getting, and so on, this time I worked under the campaign manager, who was in charge of the finance director, the field director, the communications director, the scheduler, and the consultants. That summer I worked full-time, and it was better than a graduate program in politics. I learned the game and the game’s most important rule: The first thing a pol generally does when he or she takes a mortal hit from the opponent is to fire the campaign manager. Announce that he or she is really sorry that such a mistake could happen (some real PR screwup most often) and that the campaign manager has been canned and a new one is on board and a fresh start begins right now. Campaign managers are well aware that they can and will be dumped at any moment when necessary. That’s why they’re paid well.

  The second most important rule: Stay out of all the palace intrigue you find in campaign headquarters. There are endless rivalries for the candidate’s approval and face time, hurt feelings, jealousies, even plots to get others fired. Human nature. The smart pol operative—which I already knew I wanted to be—keeps as far away from these follies as he can.

  The Senator Nichols campaign headquarters was the standard battle zone you found everywhere with three weeks to go. Phones, faxes, copying machines, TV sets, cell phones, and iPods created a relentless electronic annoyance that you either adapted to or fled from. Some people can’t handle it and quit. There were too many people despite the spacious floor plan of what had once been a supermarket. That was because the press was here today, en masse it appeared. They knew that Warren was in his office in the back of the headquarters. They were waiting to attack him.

  I got myself a cup of coffee and headed back there, smiling, nodding, waving to people who smiled, nodded, and waved to me. The younger ones didn’t much like me. Their poly sci profs had warned them about political consultants. People like me, they said, were responsible for candidates being prepackaged and bland and focus-grouped and polled to death. And unwilling to take any kind of stand that polls indicated might not be popular. And worst of all, their finale went, in the old days consultant services at least ended when the pol went to Washington. But now many pols kept their consultants on the payroll and wouldn’t cast a ballot in the House or Senate unless the consultant approved it.

  It always surprised people when I said that I generally agreed with these objections. And that I was guilty of some of those sins myself. What I didn’t say was that the average consultant was much smarter than the average candidate.

  “I think Dev’s right,” Senator Nichols said half an hour later, after Kate and Laura had argued that we should at least hint that we believed Congressman Lake was behind last night’s incident. He looked better than I’d expected he would and his voice was strong and persuasive.”Number one, we don’t have any hard evidence. And number two, we don’t know where an accusation like that would lead. Like Dev said, it might take over the whole election. The Chicago TV boys wouldn’t let go of it. And the cable news people would go after it twenty-four/seven. Our message would get lost in all the drama. We don’t even know where we stand today. I’m like Dev. I want to see some polling from last night before I do anything except stick my head out and say that I’m feeling fine, thank you very much.”

  Billy frowned. “Polls.”

  “Polls help pay your fee, Billy,” Warren said gently. The top campaign slots offered some very attractive salaries. “And speaking of which, Kate tells me that we can expect a lot more money from the national party committee because of last night. They’ll be getting it to us right away. They’ve suggested that we need two new thirty-second spots that show me strong and vital.”

  “I wrote them in the middle of the night,” I said. “I have a production company scouting indoor tracks, handball courts, places like that. We can cheat a lot of the shots.” I smiled. “You won’t have to run more than fifteen yards, but we can make it look like you’re doing a marathon.”

  Everybody smiled at that one.

  Warren clapped his hands together. That always signified that we were done. “So if that’s it, I’ll let you all get back to work and I’ll do the same here myself. I need to make some calls. And then about twenty minutes from now I’ll go out there and face the jackals.”

  “You’d better,” I said, “before they start bringing in blankets for the night. They might not want to leave.”

  Kate, Laura, Gabe, and Billy all said good-bye. Warren was expecting me to leave, too. He seemed surprised when I said, “There’s a coffee shop down the street. It’ll be busy right now, perfect for talking in private because everybody else’ll be talking, too.”

  I tried to sound amiable but he caught the tension in my voice. “I have this place swept three times a week.”

  “I’d still feel better about us having coffee down the street.” No matter how often you sweep an office, there’s always the possibility that some new electronic spying gadget won’t show up on your radar. If this office was bugged, all kinds of information would now be in Lake’s hands. But nothing about blackmail and hotel maids.

  “You’re the boss,” Nichols said. He tried to keep it light whenever he said that, but there was an edge of bitterness to it. We slipped out the back way and took the scenic route down the alley.

  Back booth. Place packed. Poor waitresses frantic.

  I said, “Hotel maid. Married man who happens to be a United States senator. Sound familiar?”

  At first he didn’t seem to understand. But then every feature on his face was suddenly dragged down as if by gravity.

  “I thought you gave that shit up, Warren.”

  He made a fist. “That was a slip.”

  “Some slip.”

  “How the hell did you hear about it?”

  “Courtesy of R. D. Greaves. He wants one million dollars cash for the video he has.�
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  “Are you fucking crazy?”

  “He says you come from big money. As you do.”

  “Not that kind of money.”

  “We pay for our sins, Warren.”

  Waitress. All either of us wanted was coffee. There’s something about blackmail that curbs the appetite. We gave her our order then resumed talking.

  “God, last night and now this? R. D. Greaves is scum. He must’ve planted a camera in there.”

  “Yeah. He did. And the girl was a plant. He has the tape, Warren. Adultery. Sleazy video.”

  “One million bucks. That bastard. I really think I’m going to start hyperventilating. No shit.”

  “Warren, we have to face this.”

  “I can’t believe this.” He shook his head three or four times. A fine sheen of sweat covered his face. “Have you seen the video?”

  “No. But I will before we arrange for the money.”

  “How will you contact him?”

  “He’ll call me. He doesn’t have any reason to hide.”

  “There’s no way I can come up with a million. No way at all. Getting that much would cause so much suspicion we’d have the feds on us. And anyway, that kind of money is invested. Nobody would have it laying around in currency.”

  “He’s given us till tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Well, I won’t do it. I’d rather resign my office.”

  “No, you wouldn’t.”

  “Shit.” Then, “You’re right. No, I wouldn’t.”

  I said, “There’s another angle here.”

  He smiled sadly. “With you there’s always another angle. You work like a confidence man sometimes, Dev. Nobody knows quite what’s going on except you.”

  “You’d know the same thing if you thought about it.”

  He shrugged. “Probably not. You’ve got street smarts, I don’t. There’s a downside to growing up privileged. You don’t know jack shit about the real world.”

  The waitress gave us more coffee.

  “I can tell I’m not going to like this,” Warren said.

  “You’re right. You’re not going to like this.”

  “You can be a real prick sometimes.”

  He’d spoken too loudly. The crowd had thinned considerably now that it was pushing nine o’clock. You could hear actual words instead of just noise. A couple of men in blue real-estate blazers looked over at us. They were surprised to see their senator. He usually had a bodyguard with him. Right now he was just another guy.

  In a stage whisper, he said, “You can be a real prick sometimes, you know that?”

  “Here’s the other angle. It’s called honesty. When I signed on with you, one of the first things we discussed were all the rumors about you chasing women around. You said you’d given it up. Bopping a maid doesn’t sound like you were telling the truth.”

  “She was the only one.”

  “Bullshit.”

  He really hated me at that moment. Senators don’t get pushed around the way regular folks do. Many of the laws that apply to us don’t apply to them. And they don’t take kindly to regular folk challenging them.

  “The truth, Warren. I have to know what might be coming at us sometime. You know, like Clinton’s ‘bimbo eruptions.’”

  He sat back and for a long moment closed his eyes. He wasn’t a drama queen, so this kind of behavior told me that he had some serious fessing up to do.

  “Six or seven others,” he said when he returned to earth.

  “In what period of time?”

  “The last year, say.”

  “All one-night stands?”

  “All but one. A stewardess. We got together three times.”

  “All in Washington?”

  “No. All here. In Chicago. I have a small apartment absolutely nobody but me knows about.”

  “You said the last year. How about the last two years? How many would that be?”

  “Probably about the same number. Six, seven a year.”

  “So we’re talking twelve to fourteen potential scandals.”

  “They won’t talk. Hell, a few of them are married. They sure aren’t going to risk their family life.”

  “How many are married?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “How many?”

  “Shit, I don’t know. Say, uh, four.”

  “Four from twelve leaves eight. Eight potential bimbo eruptions.”

  “They haven’t said anything so far.”

  “So far. But three weeks is a long, long time. And maybe one or two of them are mad because they wanted more than a one-night stand. It’s not very often that a woman gets to sleep with a real senator. But you blew her off. So every time she sees your face on TV she gets mad and hurt and vengeful. Most women just ride with it. They don’t want to humiliate themselves by getting caught up in a scandal. But there’s always one who’s like all those people you see on trash TV. ‘Sure I’m having sex with my mother, but I’m on TV and that’s all that matters.’ Maybe one of these eight women you feel so confident about, Warren—maybe at this very moment she’s picking up the phone and calling Lake headquarters and saying that she’s got a piece of information that’s so hot she’ll only talk to Lake himself. Remember Paula Jones, Warren?”

  “You’re scaring the hell out of me, Dev. And I mean that.”

  “Well, you’re scaring the hell out of me, too. Right now I want to punch your face in.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “Oh, don’t cheese this up with remorse, Warren,. You lied to me and now we’re all in trouble.”

  “Well, excuse me for saying I’m sorry. I guess that’s a no-no with big bad Dev, huh?”

  “We’ve got Greaves—or rather he’s got us—and we’ve got to explain to the press about last night, and we’ve got a campaign to run. If we’ve got time to squeeze it in between everything else, that is. And then on top of it all we’ve got maybe one or two women who just might like to see you take a real hard fall.”

  By this time he was pale and sweaty and a familiar tic had started working on his left eye. The tic usually appeared when stress reached overload proportions for him. He was suffering and I was happy to see it. He’d lied to his wife, to his staff, and to me. Laura had told me soon after I’d signed on that he’d gathered them all together one day and told them in a very formal way, “I am changing my lifestyle. I want to become an adult instead of this compulsive teenager I’ve been all my life.” He didn’t have to elaborate. He didn’t have to say that heretofore he couldn’t seem to keep it in his pants. They knew what he was talking about.

  “So now what, Dev?”

  “Now we just go on and do our jobs and hope for the best. I want to see Greaves’s video, and then I want to see if I can find that makeup woman.”

  “She doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “Sure she does. If she’ll admit that Greaves or somebody else from the Lake camp hired her, we can coast the rest of the way home. We’ll wind up with a ten-point lead.”

  “But what about the tape?”

  “Separate issue. I’ll look at it and tell you if I think it’s been altered in any way.”

  “But I’ll never be able to come up with a million dollars.”

  “You won’t have to. Get me three hundred thousand in cash. I’ll bring that to him when we make the swap. He’ll piss and moan, but the sight of all that green—he’ll come around.”

  “God, I hope you’re right.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I hope I’m right, too.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Daily Double Discount was located in what had once been a two-story concrete block building belonging to the YMCA. The neighborhood had gotten too rough for the Y folks, so they’d sought safer digs.

  The interior had the eternal smell of Salvation Army and Goodwill stores, that faint whiff of the grave that is actually an amalgam of fabrics, mustiness, and the inexplicable scent of decay.

  The merchandise was thrown on long folding
tables and displayed as was. No racks, no hangers, not even any signs directing you to clothes, housewares, appliances, and so on. I assumed the second floor was more of the same. I browsed the shirts while I waited for the two women up front wearing matching DDD blouses to finish talking to a customer.

  Every shirt I picked up had some small thing wrong with it. A pocket had been stitched wrong. One sleeve was a few inches shorter than the other. Color was faded here and there. These kinds of factory rejects could be bought for a fraction of regular wholesale price and sold cheap. I wandered back to housewares and found that all the boxes the irons and mixers and lamps came in were pretty badly banged up. Some of the boxes were crushed, some were so worn on the edges that only the cardboard base was left. Presumably the appliances worked.

  A Christian radio station filled the tinny speakers stationed on walls throughout the store. It used to be said that the devil got all the good music. These days it was the reverse. Christian music could claim lots of stars who were talented musicians and singers. My problem was the lyrics. I’d once heard a song where a young woman sang to Jesus as if he were her lover. It made me very uncomfortable. Hey, Jesus, let’s get it on, dude.

  The people were heartbreaking to watch. No matter how low the prices were, they were still too much for many of the customers, those being members of America’s first official underclass—black, white, brown, red, physically challenged, mentally challenged, druggies, winos, the perpetually underemployed, people so old they didn’t have to die to become ghosts, people possessed of rashes, scars, boils, walleyes, black teeth, yellow teeth, no teeth, the crippled, the insane, the grotesquely fat, the junkie thin—all these being things that a good job with a good health plan could cope with if not resolve, except for the junkies and the insane. Many of these minds would be focused on survival basics—what kind of grub they could scrounge up for dinner tonight. And the place was packed with them.