Dead Heat (7 page)

“Faking incidents for publicity purposes may not be on the statute books but—”

Eichenhorn's face reddened like an embarrassed adolescent's. “Forget it,” he said. “I want Donagher to blitz this election. I want a landslide. He takes over sixty-five percent of the vote here in Massachusetts and Donagher's on his way to the White House. I'd do just about anything to ensure that he wins big. That's my job. But I'm no dope. I'm no prankster. I'm not about to try some absolutely harebrained stunt like shooting bullets into a crowd—”

“You wanted to see if they were real bullets, didn't you?”

“Yes.”

“Because you suspected somebody of pulling a stunt. Who?”

The campaign manager pressed his thin lips together, stared blankly at the window as if he could see beyond the closed curtains. “I don't suspect anyone,” he said. “I went because I'm having a hard time convincing myself that this business is real, that whoever wrote those letters means what he says. I thought maybe if I saw it for myself, saw real bulletholes, I might be able to believe it.”

“Believe it. They're real.”

“Donagher's leading in all the preelection polls. He doesn't need any cheap stupid stunts. This is the worst kind of thing that could happen, especially now, before the race. Kooks encourage each other. Some misfit reads about somebody taking a potshot at a senator and heads over to his local gun shop. It makes me sick.…”

Spraggue studied the campaign manager's face, let his eyes fall to the man's lap, noticed his white-knuckled hands, nails bitten to the quick.

“Take a look at the letters?” Collatos said to break the uncomfortable silence.

“That was the deal. A look. Anything I find, I give you. Gratis.”

Collatos grinned. “And that should keep Menlo away from your door.”

EIGHT

Donagher's death threats were no hastily scribbled scratches penciled on the backs of discarded envelopes; they were works of craftsmanship.

Collatos presented him with a battered shoebox containing the poison pen's collected works. Murray hadn't lingered; he had appointments booked on top of appointments, for himself and for the senator, coordinating the loyal troops with the election looming near. He'd shaken Spraggue's hand in parting and floored him by asking whether he had any intention of ever running for political office.

“You'd be great,” he'd said earnestly. “That old New England background. The money wouldn't hurt. Good image. Be sure to contact me if you—”

“It wouldn't bother you if I were a fascist?”

“Are you?”

“A communist? A Democrat? A Republican?”

“The only labels I care about are
winner
and
loser
,” Donagher's campaign manager had said with no hint of a smile to soften the brutal formula into a joke. Then he'd glanced at his watch, frowned, and left the room, slamming the door with unnecessary force behind him.

“Fingerprints?” Spraggue asked, setting the shoe-box down on the desk in the small alcove near the fireplace.

“I checked them,” Collatos said. “The cops checked them. Negative.”

“The cops? I thought—”

“Yesterday. We had to show them yesterday, after the sniping. I insisted on it. Donagher's practically not speaking to me. Says I scared his wife.”

Scared
. The pastel woman hadn't looked frightened of anything beyond discovery of her clandestine exit, Spraggue thought.

“The police made copies,” Collatos said.

“Okay. Now leave me alone with them.”

Collatos had obediently disappeared, and Spraggue had enjoyed his absence.

Each note had been constructed by cutting separate words out of newspapers, lining them up precisely across the diagonal of an eight by eleven sheet of heavy cream-colored bond, fastening them in place with liberal dollops of rubber cement. None was signed, but the method itself was a signature of sorts. All had been created by the same hand.

The choicer obscenities were inked in; the
Globe
and the
Herald
declined to print such words, generally substituting a welter of dots, dashes, and exclamation points. Here, the anonymous correspondent had shown a curious blend of careful planning and lack of foresight. He'd printed his obscenities in squared-off block letters, using a ruled line to keep his remarks straight, painstakingly erasing the line afterward. But he'd obviously cemented his newsprint words into place before adding the obscenities; the last few letters of
motherfucker
were jammed into their allotted space. The rest of the document was meticulously neat, if not overwhelmingly original.

Words cut out of newspapers … untraceable. A million papers sold daily in the metro Boston area. Of course, a real nut might just keep the paper as a souvenir; if the cops happened to ring the right doorbell, the one-in-a-million doorbell, there the evidence would sit, in plain sight. Fat chance. Spraggue concentrated on the printing.

Printing was harder to identify than typing. If the messages had been typed, he could have come up with the make of the machine, with some guess about the proficiency of the typist. But printing, especially this squared-off block printing … Hell, nobody wrote like that normally. It wasn't the elongated style of a draftsman's hand. It was similar in all the notes, so identical that Spraggue wondered if all six notes had been prepared at one time, mailed separately.

No misspelling. No fingerprints. No return address.

Moreover, no personal knowledge of Donagher. The notes screamed about political issues, the tired battles fought in the newspapers for years: abortion, busing, school funding, property taxes. They pushed the ordinary buttons, sang the usual songs. They were unique only in their vehemence, their obscenity, their ultimate threat.

“So?” Collatos said hopefully when he reentered the room half an hour later.

“Written by a retired schoolteacher with a slight limp and a passion for chocolate-covered raisins.”

“Come on.”

“The only remarkable thing about these masterpieces is the amount of time they represent. You ever sit down with the morning paper and try to compose a note out of the front page? Look how meticulously the damn words have been snipped out: careful little cuts with a sharp scissors. Whoever it is has a good eye. He, or she, left a similar border around all the words, except where he, or she, had to amputate a large word to make a smaller one.”

“Huh?”

Spraggue's finger jabbed at the sample he held up. “Look at the word
die
in this one. Chopped off right after the
e
. It's the first part of
diet
or
dietician
or
diethylbarbituric
for all I know. It's about the only shortcut our correspondent took.”

“A crazy shut-in with nothing better to do?”

“Got me. The thing is that the time taken doesn't square with the message delivered. If somebody out there is really gunning for Donagher—and this kind of note says serious—you'd think there would be a personal grudge. But there's nothing like that. None of the ‘I know what you did with my wife' stuff that ought to be here.”

“What about political assassination? It could be some jerk who's aching to off somebody in the public eye. Get his name in the papers like John Hinckley or what's-his-name Chapman.”

“Did they write notes?”

“No,” Collatos said reluctantly.

“Right. They left journals, but they gave no warning. If these were written by somebody seeking publicity, why didn't he send them to the newspapers, especially after Donagher ignored the first ones?”

“I don't know.”

“These letters have nothing to do with the shooting at the reservoir. That's my gut reaction, Collatos. The two don't mix. Look at these things; they're political documents. They could have been put together just because the right words happened to be available in the morning paper. Look at this one on abortion:

THE KILLING OF THE UNBORN IS MURDER!
DEATH TO THE GODDAM SENATOR WHO SUPPORTS THE GODDAM ABORTIONISTS WITH TAX DOLLARS!

All the words could have come from one article. The
goddams
were added later. Somebody stuck in nasty words to make the notes seem fierce. Well, they'd have to be a whole lot fiercer to alarm me. Nobody's going to shoot Donagher because property taxes are too high. Or they happen to disagree with his position on capital punishment—”

“That doesn't get me very far.”

“What did you expect? Let me see the envelopes.”

Spraggue said this last bit as if he were relenting, giving in to Collatos' urging. That was acting. He wanted to see the envelopes. He was hooked.

They broke the pattern. They were typewritten. Each one on a different typewriter.

“Whoever it is,” Spraggue said, eyebrow arched, “works in an office large enough to have five typewriters.”

“Six,” said Collatos. “Six notes, six envelopes. And all different.”

“You only gave me five.”

“Dammit.” Collatos counted the sheaf of envelopes twice, searched the floor, peered under chairs and sofa. “There were six of them when I gave them to the police to copy—”

“All with the same address. The cops probably thought they wouldn't do any harm by helping themselves—”

“They never do,” Collatos muttered.

“So speaks an ex-member of the force.”

“Who'll deny it if he's ever quoted,” finished Collatos. “What do you think of the envelopes?”

“More of the same. Too clever, too complicated. Who's going to bother to use five typewriters?”

“Six.”

“Six. And your phantom letter writer is either an indifferent typist or a bad typist trying hard or a good typist faking it. That covers the population, doesn't it?”

“Helpful.”

“When did they first start coming?”

“About a month, five weeks back. One a week, always on Wednesday. Two this week.”

“So whose typewriter have you checked?” Spraggue asked. “Donagher's? That guy, Murray, probably has one. What about Donagher's wife? And he's got a teenaged kid—”

“Come on—”

“Come on, yourself. You're not dim. Who'd you check?”

“Everybody in the house,” Collatos admitted sheepishly. “Murray, Lila—that's Mrs. D—Donagher, both his Washington office and here, and I like the guy. I even tried to get into Bartolo's headquarters, see if—”

“You try City Hall yet? The State House?”

“I'd like to.”

“Pete, I think it's pretty hopeless from that angle. Too many typewriters in the hands of too many creeps.”

“So what do you think I should do?”

“Stop worrying. Donagher was probably right when he said the sniping was a random incident. Even if it wasn't, he might not have been the target. Maybe that hairy Vietnam vet is screwing his neighbor's wife. Maybe one of your ex-cop buddies is after you.”

“I wasn't there. I was talking with you, remember? Isn't there any angle I can take off on? I'm going crazy doing nothing.”

“Just stick with Donagher until the election and—”

“And?”

“Nothing. No rabbits out of my hat.”

“If anything else should come to you—”

“Sure. And in the meantime, maybe you could talk Donagher out of running the marathon.”

“Yeah,” Collatos said gloomily. “And maybe I could talk him out of breathing.”

“The cops provide good security the day of the race. Thousands of them line the course. They've had celebrity runners before. Cabinet members, movie stars …”

“Think about it, Spraggue. If somebody wants to kill Donagher, what an opportunity …”

“If Donagher were going to be the front-runner, yes. Then I'd make damn sure I had somebody covering the rooftops along the route. A sniper could take down the front-runner anytime, maybe even the guy coming in second or third. Where do you figure Donagher's going to wind up?”

“Hell, he'll be damned pleased to hit the top hundred. He hasn't run seriously in five years. And back when he came in second, in '62, two hours and twenty-three minutes took home the laurel wreath. The women are running that now.”

“Then I'd tell Donagher not to tie a helium baloon to his wrist, not to wear a bright red campaign poster on his chest. Put him in with a bunch of other guys in running shorts and I doubt our sniper could single out a senator in the midst of ten thousand runners.”

“You think so?”

“I do.”

“I talked to the cops and they're going to put some sharpshooters on the roofs, starting in Cleveland Circle. Cops and crowds are so thick after that … It's before—”

“The spectators are jammed in all along the route.”

“You going to be there?”

The elaborate casualness of the question set off warning bells. “Why?”

“I've been checking the route and I was wondering …”

Spraggue sighed. “What?”

“The top of Heartbreak Hill. If I were a sniper, that's where I'd pick.”

“Why?”

“There's that moment when the runners come up the hill; they're silhouetted against the background one by one. And Boston College has all those towers around …”

“You want me to watch the race from Heartbreak Hill?”

“Would you?”

“You want me to be your water boy?”

“Nah. The senator has gofers stationed all along the roads for that. Just be there, Spraggue, Okay?”

They shook hands on the deal.

NINE

Kathleen, alas, after that missed connection on Friday night, had definitely lost interest. By Sunday's
As You Like It
matinee, Spraggue had married her twenty-seven times on stage—and still no consummation. He had to admit he was losing interest himself. He found Kathleen more charming as Celia than as Kathleen, wished the attractive dark-haired actress playing Rosalind looked a little less like Kate Holloway, or, alternately, that she were not married.