Grass Roots (39 page)

“In fact, I see that you are retired from the Atlanta police force, which means you have no jurisdiction anywhere at all.”

“I’m a licensed private investigator,” Keane said, offering his Pi’s ID.

Allgood looked carefully at the card.

“Michael Keane,” he said, mostly to himself.

“Well, Mr. Keane, I’m happy to cooperate. I just like to know who I’m talking to.” He handed everything back to Keane and turned to the photograph.

“Well,” he said, “this fellow could certainly benefit from cosmetic surgery. Look at those ears! Although this is not a profile, I suspect his nose could be improved, too.” He sighed audibly.

“But I’ve never seen him before; certainly, I’ve never treated him.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Keane said, turning to go.

“I see you have your own operating room here in your office.

Isn’t that unusual?”

“It’s increasingly usual,” Allgood replied, stepping from behind the desk to usher Keane toward the door.

“It saves a lot of my time, not having to schedule at a hospital for most procedures. Not to mention the time used by traveling back and forth.” He shook Keane’s hand again.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help. Good day.” He turned and walked back into the office. Immediately, he went to his desk and, as Keane looked back, he scribbled something on a pad.

Keane followed the nurse back to the reception room, thanked her, received a chilly smile, and left. As he got into his car, the adrenaline was humming in his veins.

“Jackpot!” he said to himself. His every instinct told him so. He wouldn’t be visiting any more doctors’ offices. In his notebook, he wrote the name of the doctor, Leonard Allgood, and of his nurse, Suzy Adams. It was a perfect setup here, all self-contained. No awkward questions at a hospital, no patient records outside the doctor’s office.

And he had learned something else. Ferkerson had not only new ears, but a new nose. No more beak; something nice and straight. And a mustache. A description was coming together.

As Keane drove away from the doctor’s office, something pricked at his consciousness, and it took him a moment to figure out what it was.

Allgood had seen his private investigator’s ID, taken a good look at it, and that ID contained his home address. And when Keane had left Allgood’s office, the doctor had been writing down something.

Keane drove into the parking lot of the mall beside the doctor’s office and parked. He sat in the car, looking at the medical building, thinking, putting it together in his mind. Nearly an hour passed, but Keane was not bored.

He stared at the doctor’s office, a couple of hundred yards away, and thought. He also took note of who came to the doctor’s office through a pair of field glasses. Suddenly, he saw someone he knew.

As Keane watched through the binoculars, a black Jeep Cherokee pulled into the parking lot of the doctor’s office, and a man, impressive in his bearing even at that distance, got out. The gray hair, the black eyebrows, the erect posture identified him immediately. Colonel J. E. B. Stuart Willingham was in the office for less than ten minutes before he exited and drove away.

Finally, Keane thought, something was starting to come together. He had names and faces, some of them well known. He didn’t have anything that could put anybody in jail, and he didn’t have Ferkerson yet, but at least he finally had something. He pulled out of the parking lot and carefully began to follow the black Cherokee.

In his excitement, Keane forgot that they had something, too. They had his name and address.

As the campaign continued. Will descended, physically and mentally, into a soft, fuzzy rut. He was rarely depressed and never exhilarated.

He measured the time in terms of his schedule for the day, rarely thinking beyond the night’s sleep, which he relished. Each day, he shook dozens, sometimes hundreds, of hands, and listened to many expressions of good wishes and a few expressions of extremely ill wishes. Each day, he saw a group of people, sometimes a large group, carrying signs questioning his patriotism, his devotion to “family values,” whatever that meant, and his masculinity. At each town meeting, there were hostile and well-prepared questions, which he met with equally hostile and well-prepared answers.

Finally, mid-way through October, he arrived at a community hall in Waycross, in the deep southern part of the state, and there were no placards to greet him. Inside, there were serious questions, but none that seemed prepared, and none with the raw hostility that had met him so far.

“They weren’t there tonight,” he said to Tom.

“I think it’s over,” Tom said.

“Our polling has shown that, in the beginning, the technique had some effect, but we’ve been getting local TV play wherever we’ve been, mostly answering those questions. We haven’t caught up with it in the polling yet, but my guess is, their polls show it’s no longer working.”

“I am a little disappointed,” Will laughed.

“Those questions had become a part of the routine, and I think I had begun to look forward to answering them.”

“I can live without them,” Tom said.

“One thing our polling is showing is that we’re gaining in small towns and rural areas. That’s where the connection with Senator Carr helps most, I think, and I suspect that those people have found the opposition’s picketing unfair. We’re gaining less in the rub urbs but we’re coming up overall in our polls.

“I think we’re being helped, too, by Calhoun’s heavy use of staged five-minute TV question-and-answer sessions and very few public appearances that aren’t completely contrived and controlled. What we’re doing is much more spontaneous and, I think, real.

“My great worry is that we don’t have time to catch Calhoun. I think, the way we’re going, we’re going to peak about a week after the election.”

“We’ve got to accelerate the process, then,” Will said.

“The only way we can do that is with TV money, and we don’t have it.

Something else that bothers me is that we’ve still got the trial to look forward to. That’s going to bring a halt to daytime campaigning, and we’ll have to spend the evenings near enough to the Greenville courthouse to keep from exhausting you with late-night travel.”

“I appreciate that. I’ve been re-familiarizing myself with the case, going over the prosecution evidence and Charlene Joiner’s deposition, but I’m afraid it remains fragmented in my mind. There’s just too much else going on.

Can you schedule me to have a completely free day at home the Sunday before the trial opens?”

“Sure we can. It’s not going to do the campaign any good if you do badly at the trial.”

“I guess not,” Will said ruefully.

“The trouble is, it’s not going to do me all that much good if I do well. I mean, if I do a really great job and get Moody off, who am I going to please?

“Accused Murderer Goes Free’ is not a great headline for us.”

“Listen, Will, the worst thing you can do for yourself is to start worrying about how the trial is going to affect your chances for the Senate. You just give the case your best effort, and let me worry about what gets said in the press.”

“Then there’s my debate with Doctor Don. I didn’t do all that well against MacK Dean, you know. How am I going to do against a so-called master of the medium?”

“You did better than you thought, remember? Anyway, I’ve got some ideas about that,” Tom said.

“I think we’ll want to take a different approach in this debate. Let me work on it some more, and we’ll talk about it later.”

Will laughed.

“Later will be soon enough for me.” for three days, Mickey Keane followed Willingham.

He was there when the man got up in the morning;

he put the man to bed at night. He pulled his car into the trees in the wooded area that surrounded Willingham’s house and found a good place up a rise, where he could see the black Cherokee come and go.

Keane wanted badly to tap the man’s phone, but he was afraid he might not be good enough to avoid a security device, and a sticker on the Colonel’s mailbox said he had one installed.

Willingham’s rounds were disappointing. He went, twice, to meetings at the Holy Hill Church, and he did some light shopping here and there, but mostly, he stayed home. Nobody came to see him, and nobody called at the house except Sears Carpet Cleaners and Federal Express.

Keane began to think again about trying to tap the phone.

On the third night, Willingham went to bed early. All the lights in the house were out by ten-thirty, and Keane called it a day. He stopped on the way home, as he often did, at Manny Pearl’s office for a chat.

“You think Willingham’s behind all this?” Manny Pearl asked him.

“Who knows? I certainly can’t prove it. I can’t prove anything—that Ferkerson got his face reshuffled at Dr. Allgood’s, that the nurse, Adams, recognized the photograph, that Willingham’s arrival at Allgood’s office was connected with my visit. But it all kind of comes together, you know?

I just hope that eventually Willingham will lead me to Ferkerson.”

“What about the doctor or the nurse?” Manny asked.

“Maybe you should follow one of them.”

“I think Ferkerson’s finished with them. He got his ear job and split, that’s what I think. Give me a week on Willingham, and if I don’t get anything, I’ll try the doctor.”

Keane talked a little more with Manny, then went home.

As he walked into his apartment, the phone was ringing, the number that had been advertised in the search for Ferkerson. It had been a while since it had rung, and, on impulse, Mickey picked it up before the answering machine kicked in.

“Hello.”

“Hello,” a woman’s voice said. Low, husky—familiar, somehow.

“Is this Michael Keane?”

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“You want Harold Ferkerson, I’ll give him to you,” the woman said.

“I want the reward,” she added.

“I want him, and if you give him to me, you’ll get the reward,” Keane replied.

“Now, let’s start with your name.

I’ll have to know who to give the reward to, won’t I?”

“Call me Jill,” the woman said.

“If my information’s good, that will be our code word, okay?”

“Okay, Jill it is. Now, where’s Ferkerson?”

“We’ll have to meet and talk about this. I’m going to need protection.”

“When I find Ferkerson, he’ll never breathe free air again. You won’t have to worry about him.”

“You don’t think he’s alone in all this, do you?” she said.

“Alone in what?” Keane asked.

“There’s more than the dirty bookstore, you know.”

“Tell me,” Keane said.

“Show me you know something.”

“There’s the abortion mill and Winslow,” she said.

Hair stood up on the back of Keane’s neck. This woman might have guessed about the clinic—that had been all over TV and the papers—but there hadn’t been a word said about the possibility of Winslow’s death being anything but a heart attack.

“Where can we meet?” Keane asked, trying to keep the excitement out of his voice.

“Take 85 North,” she said, “get off at the Lenox Road exit, turn left on Lenox. After a couple of miles there’s a restaurant called Houston’s, right across from the Lenox Square shopping mall. I’m there now. Fifteen minutes?”

“Okay, fifteen minutes. What do you look like?”

“I’ll find you. Don’t be late, or I’ll leave.” She hung up.

This didn’t sound like a setup, not in such a public place. Keane knew Houston’s; it attracted everybody: families, yuppies—and it was always packed. He ran for his car; using the expressway at this time of night, it would take him just the fifteen minutes she had given him.

Eight minutes later, he was on 85 North, doing seventy.

There was almost no traffic. He got off at the Buford Highway exit, onto a spur that had once been the old interstate.

The Lenox Road exit branched off to the left from the spur. He had just taken the left fork for the exit and was about to pass under a bridge when he looked in the rearview mirror and noticed the van, moving up fast behind him, a lone driver.

It was odd that the van was speeding up, just at the moment it should have been slowing for the traffic light ahead. The van pulled around him to pass.

“You nut,” Keane said to himself.

“Can’t you see the light is red?”

The van came even with his car, and he looked toward the driver. All he saw was dark glasses and a mustache before the van smashed into the left side of his car.

Keane screamed at the van and slammed on his brakes, trying to stay in the road. The brakes held for an instant, then the pedal went almost to the floor, practically useless;

the power brakes had gone, and the mechanical brakes that were left weren’t doing much. Keane hauled hard on the steering wheel, trying to keep to the left, to stay on the road, but the car’s progress to the right was inexorable. The van probably weighed a half a ton more than his car. Then Keane saw the bridge abutment coming at him.

“Goddamn you, Ferkerson, you son of a bitch!!!”

Keane screamed, then the car struck the sheer face of the mountain of concrete, and all the lights went out. mickey Keane woke to the sound of groaning machinery and tearing metal.

“For Christ’s sake, take it easy with that thing, or you’ll tear him wide open!” somebody yelled.

That was the moment when Keane knew he was not in hell, or even purgatory; they wouldn’t be so worried about him in either place. There was not much pain, but he seemed to be having some trouble taking a deep breath.

“It’s going to be like taking a sardine out of a bent can, getting him out of there,” a voice said.

“We don’t know what internal injuries he’s got, so we’ve got to move him an inch at a time, okay? And let me get a collar on him first.”

Keane felt something firm go around his neck, then an arm went around his waist.

“Watch it!” somebody yelled.

“I don’t know how else to do this,” another voice said.

“It’s hard to tell where he ends and the metal starts.”

Keane felt the arm tugging at him, and there was movement.

Then there was pain—sharp, penetrating, complete pain. He screamed, and that hurt, too.