by Stuart Woods
“Maybe as few as three points, depending on the margin of error,” Mallet said, trying to put the best face on it. “Something that particularly bothers me, though, is that only fifteen percent are undecided; that’s a very small percentage this early in the race. It means that, if the election had been held on Friday, you would have needed more than eighty percent of the undecideds to win, whereas Calhoun would only have needed less than a third of them.”
“I don’t believe it,” Kitty said.
“I’m sorry,” Mallet replied, “I’ve been over everything twice, and my people tell me that the tone of the interviews backs this projection.” He shrugged. “I know it’s not good news, but you’re paying me for the truth.”
“Sure, Moss,” Will said. “The results are not your fault. At least we have some idea of where we stand.”
“Where did we do well and badly?” Tom asked.
Mallet looked at his figures again. “Best inside the Atlanta city limits and in cities of more than a hundred thousand around the state—Savannah, Augusta, Columbus, like that. Worst in smaller cities and towns and in that part of greater Atlanta outside the perimeter—Marietta and Cobb County, Lawrenceville and Gwinnett County. It’s a kind of Republican doughnut around Atlanta—generally, the urban suburbs that the writer, Calvin Trillin, likes to call the ‘ruburbs.’ ”
Billy laughed. “The ruburbs; I like that.”
“Is there any other good news in all this?” Will asked.
“Well, blacks don’t like or trust Calhoun; you’re getting more than eighty percent there; that’s better than you were doing with blacks against Mack Dean. I think you certainly want to get the best possible voter turnout in black communities. And, of course, you’ll get the gay vote. None of them is going to vote for Calhoun after yesterday. I don’t have to take a poll to tell you that.”
“Yeah,” Tom said, “and if we try to hold so much as a single fundraiser among the gays, Calhoun will fall on us like a ton of bricks from a great height.”
Will took a deep breath. “I’ve got some more bad news, I’m afraid. I was saving this until last, hoping for something better early in the meeting.”
“What now?” Kitty moaned.
“You know Judge Boggs, the judge in the Larry Moody murder case?” He took a piece of paper from his briefcase. “This morning, I got a letter from Judge Boggs. He’s had a break in his court calendar; he’s scheduled the trial for a Monday morning in late October, eight days before the election.”
“I don’t believe it,” Tom sputtered. “The son of a bitch can’t get away with that!”
“Oh, yes, he can,” Billy said. “And there’s not a goddamned thing Will can do about it.”
“Refuse to try the case!” Kitty said.
“If Will does that, the Judge will throw him in jail for contempt,” Billy said. “He can’t campaign in jail.” He paused. “What we’ve got here, I think, is a judge who’s a born-again Republican. I think that, ever since Will announced for the race, Boggs has been laying for him, and he just took his best shot.”
The group sat in dejected silence for a few moments. Finally, Kitty spoke up. “Oh, I forgot,” she said listlessly. “I had some news, too. I got a call this morning from Calhoun’s campaign manager. He’s challenged us to a television debate.”
Will looked up. “Just one?”
“Just one.”
Will managed a laugh. “Thank God for small favors.”
5
The pickets showed up almost immediately, GOD DESTROYED SODOM AND GOMORRAH, one placard read. KEEP HOMOSEXUALS OUT OF OUR GOVERNMENT, another said. Will had to walk past them to get into one of a series of “town meetings” he was conducting around the state, meetings where he spoke, then answered questions from the audience. These had been Tom’s idea, and they were showing Will to good advantage, answering the questions of ordinary citizens. They were also picking up a lot of local television time. In every audience, Tom had placed one or two supporters, who would ask questions Will particularly wanted to answer in that area. These were secondary, though; Will saw the greatest advantage of the meetings in his responses to difficult, even unfriendly, questions and it was these that got local television news play.
Will had finished his stump speech in the Savannah meeting and was beginning to take questions from the floor. He was relieved to see that the people carrying the placards had not come inside.
A woman in the front row stood up. “Mr. Lee,” she said, “I can’t help but get the impression that you have not been candid in your responses about the homosexual issue.” This was a bad start; it supposed there was a homosexual issue. “Perhaps it would be better if you’d just get it all out in the open and tell us how long your affair with Jack Buchanan went on, and if you have had other homosexual affairs.”
There was a gasp from the audience that, fortunately, covered the gasp from Will. He glanced at a TV camera and saw the red light was on.
Will knew he had to attack. “Madam,” he said sternly, “what you have just said is a lie, and I have come to this hall tonight to answer honest questions, not to respond to lies.”
“Answer the question!” a man shouted from the back of the room, and other voices murmured the demand.
Will turned to the woman in the front row, who was still standing. “Perhaps you’ll tell us your name,” he said.
“My name is Margaret Thurmond. I am a schoolteacher, and I went to college with Millie Buchanan, Jack Buchanan’s widow, and I notice that Millie has not exactly come to your defense in all this.”
“Millie Buchanan is a shocked and grieved widow, who is trying to raise her children without a husband. I haven’t asked for her help. You are repeating vicious gossip which has no basis in fact, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“Answer the question!” the man in the back of the room repeated.
“What question?” Will demanded. “I haven’t heard a question, not from her, not from you. If you want to ask a question, ask it!”
“Are you a queer?” the man shouted.
“No,” Will replied, “are you?”
“Hell, no!” the man shouted back.
“Well, I can see that you don’t like answering false accusations any better than I do,” Will said.
Mercifully, there was laughter from some of the audience, and a few applauded.
“And now that we’ve settled the question of sexual orientation—mine and yours—maybe we can get down to the serious business of this meeting.”
One of Tom’s plants was on his feet, and Will called immediately for the man’s question. The moment had passed, and he tried to shake it off.
*
Later, in the car, Kitty said, “I talked with the reporter covering the meeting and asked her to run the whole exchange; she said she’d try. What bothers me is that the words ‘homosexual’ and ‘queer’ got used several times. A lot of people who see the report will hear those words and forget about what was said.”
“I checked up on the schoolteacher,” Tom said. “She did go to college with Millie Buchanan, or, at least, at the same time, but, you notice, she didn’t say she’d actually spoken with Millie. What’s more important is that she teaches at one of those so-called Christian academies that were set up by right-wingers so their kids wouldn’t have to go to school with blacks. This whole thing smells like a setup to me, though I don’t guess we can prove it.”
“I wish there were some way to deal with this question once and for all; just get it out of the way.”
“I’m afraid there’s no way to do that, short of you going out and molesting a few women. If we bring it up, then it makes us look defensive. I think it’s better to deal with it as it comes, just as you did tonight. That was good, the way you turned it around on the guy, then made them laugh. Maybe we need to work on some other responses, if it’s going to keep coming up.”
“That’s a depressing thought,” Will said.
“Tom’s right,” Kitty
said. “There’s just no other way to deal with it. Shit, why couldn’t you be divorced, like everybody else?”
6
It was desperation, as much as anything else, that gave Mickey Keane the idea. He had just run dry. Then he thought about the mustache. If the second jogger had been Perkerson, then the mustache meant that Perkerson was trying to change his appearance, which made a lot of sense for two reasons: first, Perkerson was a distinctive-looking man, with his barn-door ears and his prominent nose; second, in spite of this distinctive appearance, there had not been a single verifiable sighting of Perkerson since he had gone to ground, and yet, as the shootings at the abortion clinic indicated, he could be out there and working.
Keane had never dealt with a single case where a perpetrator had had his appearance surgically altered to avoid capture; that was the stuff of movies, he reckoned. Still, it could not be discounted as a possibility, and, since he had no other leads to follow, this seemed his best chance. He sat down and thought about it.
If the cops had been doing this, they would have canvassed every cosmetic surgeon in Greater Atlanta, if necessary, but Keane was one man, and he had to play the odds. He got out the Yellow Pages. Eliminate all the doctors in the city of Atlanta proper, for a start; they were the society guys, who worked out of Piedmont and Northside Hospitals. Eliminate the south side of the city, because that was mostly black. Perkerson wouldn’t go to a black doctor. Decatur and the northeast suburbs were solid middle-class sorts of places; check that last. Marietta would be a good place to start.
Marietta was an affluent suburb to the northwest of the city. It was white and seemed to be trying to stay that way: in a referendum, the residents had voted not to join the city bus system, and they didn’t want rapid transit, either, the theory being that blacks would be attracted to Marietta by the existence of a rapid-transit system. The district had been represented for years by a congressman who was on the distant fringes of the right. Gun stores abounded in the city; submachine guns were manufactured there, and you could go out to a commercial firing range and rent them by the hour. It was a post-redneck, lower-end yuppie sort of a place, it seemed to Keane, and the place to start, he reckoned.
Since Marietta was, legally, not part of Greater Atlanta, Keane had not spent much time there, so he needed a map. There were eighteen cosmetic surgeons listed in the Yellow Pages; he would hit each one. He spent a day working his way through half his list, and he discovered that all doctors’ offices had something in common: each had a nurse or receptionist behind a sliding-glass partition. Not once did he encounter a receptionist sitting at a desk in a reception room. Further, he found that each doctor’s office had in common, apart from the aging magazines, a clipboard with a pencil attached by a piece of string for the patient to list his name, address, and phone number. Surely, he thought, most of the patients had visited the office before. Why did they have to write down an address and phone number repeatedly?
The second morning of his search, he very nearly didn’t go out at all. Maybe he had lost his patience since leaving the force, but he found it extremely boring to face the same blank stares and bored reactions in office after office. Finally, though, after the caffeine of a second cup of strong coffee had found its way to the right places, he got into his car and drove to Marietta to visit the second half of his list. The first office he visited was different. The office was a freestanding one near a shopping mall, and it seemed quite large for the office of a single doctor, but there was only one name on the plaque: Leonard Allgood, M.D. Inside, there were only a few general-interest magazines; in addition to Architectural Digest and U.S. News and World Report, there were several gun magazines. There was even a copy of Soldier of Fortune, and there were political magazines that Keane had never heard of. One he noticed, in particular, while he waited for the receptionist to return to her empty cubicle, was something called On Guard, subtitled The Journal of Americans for a Strong Defense, and its editor and publisher was Colonel J. E. B. Stuart Willingham, USMC (retired). Before he had a chance to read any of it, the receptionist returned.
Keane flashed his badge. “Good morning,” he said, producing a brown envelope. “I wonder if you could take a look at this photograph and tell me if the man has been a patient here during the past few weeks or month.”
The woman, who was dressed in a nurse’s uniform, displayed the momentary uneasiness which Keane had seen in hundreds of ordinary citizens, who, unexpectedly, had a policeman’s badge thrust at them. A plastic placard pinned to her uniform said she was Suzy Adams, nurse-anesthetist. She was fortyish, fairly good-looking, with particularly handsome breasts.
“Sure,” she said, although her cheerfulness sounded a little forced.
Keane removed the photograph from the envelope and, without taking his eyes from her face, showed it to her. There was a tiny widening of the eyes, an almost imperceptible flaring of the nostrils, and, a moment later, a deep intake of air.
“I’ve never seen him before,” she said earnestly, shaking her head. She rose from her chair. “Let me see if the doctor recognizes him.”
Keane had not released his hold on the photograph, and he did not now. “I’d like to meet the doctor,” he said pleasantly, “if he has just a moment.”
“I’ll see,” she said, and disappeared through a door.
In the minute she was gone, three women, one wearing bandages, came into the office and signed the log. First patients of the day, he reckoned.
The nurse reappeared and opened a door to meet him. “The doctor has just a minute before he starts seeing patients,” she said. “Follow me.”
She proceeded down a rather long hall, and along the way, Keane was able to peek into a number of examining rooms. The doctor must really stack them in here, he thought. Then he stopped before an open door. Beyond it was what looked like a small but very well-equipped operating room.
The nurse looked back. “This way,” she said with some irritation.
Keane followed her into a large, expensively furnished office. A smallish man, dressed in a white coat, stood and shook Keane’s hand. “I’m Dr. Allgood,” he said. “I only have a moment; how can I help you?”
Keane didn’t flash the badge again. “I won’t take up much of your time, Doctor. I’m conducting an investigation, and I wonder if you’d look at this photograph and tell me if you have ever seen this man before—particularly, if he has sought treatment from you.”
The doctor ignored the photograph. “May I see your identification, please?”
“Of course,” Keane said, producing the little wallet with the badge and ID card.
Allgood did something no one had ever done to Keane before. He reached out and took the wallet from his hand.
Keane was slightly startled and surprised by his own reaction to having the wallet outside his possession, even for a moment.
“I see you’re from the Atlanta department,” the doctor said. “Which means you have no jurisdiction here.”
“I don’t need jurisdiction to ask a few questions,” Keane replied.
“Oh, I believe the proper procedure would be for you to go to the Marietta Police Department and have a local officer accompany you.” The doctor glanced at the ID card again. “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 h
ave 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 note book, 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. Perkerson 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.
