Sleeping Dogs (2 page)

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Authors: Ed Gorman

Tags: #Mystery

BOOK: Sleeping Dogs
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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.
 
 
 
B
ackstage 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.”
 
 
 
S
enator 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.
“It'd help if you sat still,” the makeup woman said gently. She was very young, very slender, pretty in a wan, wounded sort of way, a bit nervous and uncertain of herself when she had to give Warren an order. She wore an emerald-green sweater that set off her dark hair perfectly. And dark jeans that showed her slender body to be rich with soft curves.
Billy Hannigan, our chief speechwriter, and Laura Wu, our communications director, sat in canvas-backed director's chairs talking to Warren as we came in. Billy was one of the best speechwriters I'd ever worked with. He'd been able to give Warren a voice he'd never had before, a way of improving the presentation by choosing simpler and stronger words for Warren to speak. He was invaluable. And you could send him out to fix problems in the field.
Warren faked a frown and said in a mock unhappy voice, and more
to himself than to us, “They're supposed to be calming me down, but all they're doing is making me more nervous. And now she wants me to sit still.”
“We told him no sex jokes onstage tonight,” Billy said. A black Irishman of twenty-seven, Billy was a Rutgers man and proud of it, as you could tell by all the T-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, and scarves he wore bearing the Rutgers logo.
“We also told him not to refer to Lake as ‘my asshole opponent' for the first five minutes,” Laura joked. She was a slender Asian beauty, usually confined in designer suits. She'd done undergraduate work at Dartmouth and graduate work at George Washington. Laura and Billy were both critical to the success Nichols had had in his first term.
Nichols raised a glass of Diet Pepsi to his lips, forcing the makeup woman to take a step back. Apparently she didn't want to get drenched if he got too wild with his drink. I wondered what she'd say to her friends about
us.
Probably that we were a bunch of overpaid wusses. And she wouldn't be wrong.
“Never get between him and his Diet Pepsi,” Kate said.
Warren puckered his lips. Made a face. “The ice cubes have all melted down in this glass. Tastes like hell.”
“See all the traumas he faces every day?” Laura said to the makeup woman.
Gabe Colby came in just then. Gabe was the policy wonk and second-best speechwriter we had. Given the long graying hair he wore in a ponytail, the collarless shirts, and the vests and the jeans that were his daily attire, you might guess correctly that he longed for the days of takin' it to the streets. He was one of those men of the sixties generation who believed that they'd never had a fair chance of turning our government into a utopia of acid with Jimi Hendrix images plastered on public buildings. He always smelled of cigarettes and sweat. It was easy to dismiss him as an angry, aging hippie, but the sorrow in his dark eyes was too vivid for tossing him overboard that way. I had no
idea what the source of his grief was, only that it was a terrible burden for him.
“Hey, Gabe,” Billy said. “Ready to see Lake get his ass kicked around the block tonight?”
Gabe wasn't a cheerleader. He just shrugged and said, “Sure hope so.”
Kate and Laura patted him. One on the back, one on the arm. You couldn't watch him without wanting to help him in some way. But he sure was up on the issues. He could probably give Google a good run.
Warren set the glass down on the table next to him, then assessed himself in the large round mirror that road show actors made themselves up in. “God, I'm looking old. That's another thing that bothers me. Lake's ten years younger.”
“Yes,” Kate said, “but you're thirty years smarter. Once he gets off the subject of his support for the NRA, the antigay groups, and the talk-radio fascists, he won't have much to say.”
“Do you suppose he'll be wearing his Nazi armband tonight?” Billy quipped.
“The senator here still won't go for my idea,” I said. “When he walks out he breaks into a rap song and then lights up a joint. Get the eighteen- to thirty-five-year-olds.”
“Hey, that'd be great,” Laura said. “And every time he looks at Lake, he says, ‘Hey, you my bitch.”'
Nichols smiled. “I appreciate you people trying to cheer me up, but I have to admit I'm scared as hell. I just wish I was a better speaker.”
“You don't have to go out there and wave the flag, Warren,” I said. “Just be yourself. You've got a good record, we're ahead in the run-up to the election, and Lake always overplays everything. That's why he scares so many people.”
He sighed, waving his hand to silence me. “Lake's gotten better on the stump. You can't deny that.” His gaze touched on every one of us.
“None of you will say it, but that's what's going on here. Even if we're ahead, I have to be damned good tonight.”
“You've got to forget everything but the debate tonight, Warren,” Kate said. “We didn't have this conversation. Nothing negative even entered your mind tonight. You're a handsome, articulate, manly, caring person who has a genuine need to help people who need help. And you know what's in this country's best interests and aren't afraid to stand up and say it. That's what you've got to remember tonight.”
A sad smile. “I wish I could send you out there, Kate. You made me want to stand up and salute just then.”
“All done,” the makeup woman said.
“I should've introduced you,” Nichols said. “This is Megan Caine, everybody. Billy tells me Megan is a registered member of our party and does work on commercials.”
“Megan, you tell him he's going to do a great job tonight,” Kate said.
Megan looked surprised that she'd been brought into the conversation. She even seemed a bit embarrassed. “Well,
I'm
sure going to vote for him. I don't trust Lake at all.”
“That's what we need to hear,” Billy said.
Megan opened her makeup kit and put away the pieces she'd needed to get Nichols ready for the lights and camera. “Well,” she said, still sounding a little embarrassed, “good night, everybody.”
We all said our good-byes as we watched her leave the small room, closing the door quietly behind her.

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