Another Dead Republican (25 page)

“He was shot with a Colt Mustang Pocketlight .380 gun. Do you know anything about that?”

“That fool brought guns to work all the time. He loved the new concealed weapons law in this state. If he could have brought in a concealed tank, he would have. They say these gun people are over-compensating for a lack in the sexual department, well, Edgar needed to compensate a tank’s worth.”

“Can I talk to any of the other paid staff or volunteers?”

“It was a miracle you got me. Be glad you got that much.”

“And you don’t know what Zachary Ross knew?”

“No. Try his boyfriend and his mother. Sometimes he left stuff at both places. Zach was really organized and paranoid.”

“Could anybody else have known he was a spy?”

“I don’t know. That’s what scares me. Someone could know I’m talking to you.”

“How?”

“Who knows? If the Grums aren’t all powerful, and they probably aren’t, the Ducharmés probably are.”

THIRTY-NINE

Friday 2:00 P.M.

Next on our list was the boyfriend of the reporter Zachary Ross. I contacted Frank Smith. Bowers answered and said we could meet the reporter’s lover, Jordan Labrinski, at a Starbucks on the north side of Milwaukee near the University of Wisconsin campus.

The day had become overcast, cool, and humid. If it was winter, you’d know a snowstorm was coming. If it was summer, you’d know that strong storms would be in the forecast. For spring, it could be either, or just a placid calm atmosphere of waiting for the sun to warm the Earth into summer.

Labrinski sat at a table in a corner far from others who had their laptops open and coffee ready. I wondered sometimes what the ratio was between coffee spills and laptops destroyed in these shops. Labrinski’s long legs encased in skinny jeans were spread wide. He had dark black hair cut short and wore black horn-rimmed glasses. He recognized Scott more than me. He stood and we shook hands. I said, “We’re so sorry for your loss.”

His eyes teared up. Scott offered to buy coffee for all of us. He got in line. I reached for some napkins from the condiments cart and handed them to Labrinski.

He muttered, “Thanks.”

When we’d all been served, Labrinski said, “Frank Smith called. I know who you guys are. I never thought I’d meet Scott Carpenter. You’re a hero.”

Scott blushed, sipped coffee, and said, “Thanks.”

I waited a beat then said, “We were hoping to find out about Zachary. Maybe it would help us figure this whole thing out.”

“Frank said you wanted to find out who killed Edgar Grum and Zachary, and expose the whole stealing the election electronically criminal stuff.”

“It all seems to be tied together, but we thought you might know something about what Zachary knew.”

He sighed, sipped some coffee, dabbed at his eyes. “Zachary was a saint.” He didn’t seem to mean this as a joke.

“How so?” Scott asked.

Labrinski leaned forward and said, “He always had to be political, always rushed off to the latest good cause. If a whale got stranded in Alaska, he was off to rescue it. If a dolphin got a cold in the Pacific, if an elephant had a hangnail in the middle of the jungle, whatever the cause, he had to be there. If a tree needed to be hugged, they called Zachary. You know what it’s like being married to a saint?”

Scott was a good man, and I loved him, but neither he nor I would be up for sainthood any time soon.

Labrinski rushed on, “Don’t get me wrong, I loved him. He was kind and considerate and thoughtful. He went out of his way for me. And I was into some of his causes. The gay rights ones anyway.”

Scott asked, “How long had you been together?”

“Six years. We fell in love senior year of high school. We went to college here, me at Marquette, him at UW Milwaukee. We had an apartment together. I was a musician. He was a waiter at a bunch of different places.” He waxed nostalgic for several minutes. The memories brought smiles to his lips and more tears to his eyes. He finished, “We graduated. He wanted to make a difference in the world, not get a job in some Silicon Valley cubicle. He got a job as a stringer for the paper out in Harrison County. And then he got involved in that damn campaign. I was all for it at first. I wanted to be part of bringing those goddamn homophobic pricks to their knees.” He shook his head.

I asked, “What happened?”

“Over time Zachary got more and more tense. I’d never seen him like that. His hands shook. He was paranoid, thought someone was following him.”

“Did he tell you what was wrong?”

“I asked him about it. I think he was frightened. Turns out he was right. He should have been.” Tears began to flow. “The police claimed it was an accident! An accident! You don’t fall from a bridge and it be an accident. You either jump or you get pushed, and Zachary was not suicidal. He never said the word suicide in all the years we were together. We never discussed it. If he thought about it, he never brought it up, never, not once.” More tears.

I got another supply of napkins from the dispenser. He blew his nose, got himself under control. I said, “We can stop if you want.”

“No,” he said. He was fierce and angry. “I want to know who did this. I want to find out what the hell’s was going on. Someone killed him.” He took great gasping breaths. Scott eased closer to him and put his hand on his arm.

“Are you sure this is okay?” Scott asked.

Jordan nodded but his tears still fell. The people in the Starbucks were beginning to notice. One of the baristas came over and asked if he could help. Jordan shook his head no. He said, “These guys are friends. I’ll be all right.”

It took a few minutes but Jordan pulled himself together. “Thank you,” he whispered to Scott.

I stood up. “We should go.”

“No, please, stay. I needed to do that. Thank you.” He patted Scott’s arm. “I want to try and get through this. I want to help.”

I looked at Scott. He nodded. I sat back down.

Jordan blew his nose several times and tossed the used tissues in a small trash can next to the chair. He pulled in several deep breaths. He leaned against Scott as he spoke to me. “I have no proof that someone killed him. How is anyone going to get that kind of proof against the Ducharmés? Not against that kind of money. You can buy a lot of silence and a lot of death with that kind of cash.”

I said, “Maybe if we start more simply.”

Jordan looked at me.

“Did Zachary leave any clue about what he did every day in the recall campaign?”

“He was the assistant to Edgar Grum. He worked directly for him.”

“Did he say what his job required?”

“He said he was kind of a babysitter. Edgar Grum was the idiot relative in that group, at least that’s how Zachary described him.”

“What idiot things did Edgar do?”

He gave us a convoluted list of Edgar bragging and being chastised by his mother, father, and oldest brother and other higher up campaign functionaries. “He would rail against them and threaten to get even with them. Right to their face, but as far as I know, he never did anything like that. At least Zachary never said so. He also was convinced that something really crooked was going on in the campaign. He never said what.”

“No hint?” Scott asked. “Criminal mishandling of campaign contributions? Electronic computer stuff?”

“He just said he was suspicious about all of them, but he needed to get proof, but he must not have found it, or if he did he never said. He was suspicious of all of them, especially the Ducharmés. He said that kind of money was totally corrupting.”

“Is there any way to know what he was doing that last night, why he was on that bridge?”

“He always kept a record. He always took notes. The answer might be in them.”

“Can we see them?”

“I can’t find them.”

“Pardon?”

“He was very organized. Every day after work he’d go to a coffee shop a few blocks from the office and go over his notes, make additions and corrections. When he got home, he’d transcribe them first thing to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. He kept them on his iPad. I can’t find it.”

“Why was he so meticulous?” Scott asked.

“He said a good reporter always checked his notes after every interview, after every event. It was good discipline.”

“Maybe the killer stole the device or threw it off the bridge with him?”

Jordan sniffed and wiped at his eyes with a tissue. “He also e-mailed the notes to himself frequently while he was writing.”

I knew writers who saved materials to their computers, to back up drives, made hard copies of it, and sent it to themselves as e-mails - at least four systems of backups, paranoid maybe, but you were unlikely to ever lose anything.

I said, “If he e-mailed it to himself, maybe we can retrieve that. Can you get into his e-mail account?”

“I don’t know his password.”

“Maybe we can try, or we can find a computer expert to give it a shot.”

His place was two blocks away so we walked over.

At the first corner, Scott looked back over his right shoulder and stared.

“What?” I asked.

He shook his head. A chill wind had sprung up and the temperature had dropped. Jordan’s apartment was half of the upstairs of an old home. At the door I saw that the wood around the doorknob had recently been replaced. I pointed to it, “You had a problem lately?”

“Somebody broke in a few days after Zachary died. They left a mess, but I didn’t find anything missing.”

It had a bathroom, living room/kitchen, and one bedroom. The couch was a garage sale reject. The one easy chair sagged in the middle. There was no television. A few torn rock posters featuring bands I never heard of adorned the walls. No dirty dishes in the sink. Navy blue dish towels hung neatly. The floor was waxed.

A third of the bedroom had a desk with a computer where the three of us gathered. On the floor of the bedroom, I saw dirty socks, discarded underwear, waded up shirts and jeans, and several pairs of shoes. The bed was unmade.

We scrunched around the computer monitor. Jordan clicked over to Zachary’s e-mail provider. The cursor blipped on the password box.

We tried as many variations we could think of: his birthday, 1,2,3,4,5, the most common sequence used as a password, his name backwards and forwards, his middle name both ways, his brothers and sisters names, birth date, Jordan’s name and birth date in numerous combinations. And other statistically probable sequences. Nothing. And that was just to get into the e-mail in case there might have been anything in it.

“You know his dog’s names when he was a kid?” I asked.

“I don’t know if he had a dog.”

“Who he worked with, friends, enemies?”

Jordan sat down on the bed. He looked from one to the other of us. “I don’t have a clue, and this is kind of fruitless. Do you really think they might have killed him? For a campaign? For politics?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

He gave us Zachary Ross’s mother’s address.

As we walked to the car, Scott said, “Another break in. They are certainly looking for something.”

“You looked back at that first corner.”

He shrugged. “For a minute I thought maybe we were being followed. I checked at each corner, but I didn’t see anyone, but then we didn’t walk far.”

I looked out at the cool, cloudy day. “I haven’t noticed anyone.” I was tired so I gave him the keys. He started the car and turned the heater on.

He said, “I was probably wrong. I haven’t seen anyone since that SUV this morning. I don’t want to get as crazy paranoid as the rest of them.”

“And they are crazy paranoid about something which fits the Grum family profile. I’m worried about the Ducharmés. They could afford an army of rotten people and lethal guns.” I tapped the dashboard. “We’ll have to keep more careful watch. We’ve got other questions. Why is Ross’s iPad missing? Is that what people have been looking for? And if whoever ‘they’ is have it, are they now done looking?”