Dark Horse

by Doug Richardson

  “Dem Supreme Court judges. How dey gonna look at de Creole man?”

  “They’re not gonna look at you. They’re going to listen to the lawyers and read.”

  Read, they would, but within the brief would be a carrot. Mitch had already worked out a plea agreement with the New Orleans DA. Shoop would plea to first-degree murder and live out the rest of his days in a Louisiana prison. Time to think about what he’d done. Time to live.

  “You gonna win an’ be one a dem political fellers?” Shoop asked, leading to his next point. “Yeah. I had me an uncle dat was in the Loosiana State House. Man, dat mister walked himself a crooked road. Make my doin’s look like Sunday school. Whooeee.”

  “Well, maybe there’s a few of us that think we can make a difference.”

  “Dat be the truth or is dat some of dem campaign fixin’s?”

  “What do you think? If you were gonna vote, who’d you pick?”

  Shoop gave Mitch a hopeful smile. People needed hope, Mitch had learned. They needed to know that tomorrow was going to be better than today, for themselves and for their children. It was that hope they would entrust to Mitch by casting a vote. Not altogether different from Shoop’s hope that Mitch would succeed with the writ.

  “Just got a few papers for you to sign.” Mitch fanned the papers out in front of Shoop. “These will waive your right to appeal the verdict. It’s risky, but it signals the court that should they go simply for the change of venue, you’re willing to do the life term in Louisiana.”

  He handed Shoop the felt pen provided by the guard. Shoop signed them, but held them back from Mitch. “Gotta promise me somethin’.”

  “Sure. Anything,” said Mitch, feeling his remark sounded more like that of a politician than an attorney.

  “This ting don’ fly and dey go ahead, you know? And kill me like dey’s plannin’?”

  “Not gonna happen. You’re going back to Louisiana. You gotta believe that.”

  “But if I don’t. And I die like some say I should. You gotta promise me you’ll see my way back home. My momma will be comin’ to da funeral. I want you tah say you look me in dee eye and I told ya tah say tah her that I loved my momma. More den God, even.”

  “It’s not gonna happen.”

  “Den you so sure, you make dee promise.”

  “I promise,” said Mitch. “Now can I have those papers?”

  Shoop handed them over, obviously pleased with his negotiating abilities. “You easy, you know.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” Mitch said warmly, shaking his client’s hand good-bye.

  “I be right here,” was Shoop’s cryptic retort, arms crossed with an ever-so-big grin. He obviously wasn’t going anywhere.

  All the Cathedral news stations ran segments on the Hammond funeral, with similar images and sound bites, sandwiched in between national news of the labor secretary’s dubious tax difficulties and local sports scores. But cable Channel 44 thought they might sell some cheap commercial time by rerunning the whole taped processional during the dinner hour. Mitch watched it with his feet up in the den.

  “Damn,” said Mitch aloud. “Go back, go back!” commanding the TV camera to reverse direction on the processional. He had seen something. A familiar face. “C’mon. Go back!”

  Eventually the TV camera reversed direction, panning the walking processional once again. Mitch was on his feet, his eyes on fire.

  Shaking hands with the mourning crowd, chitchatting away with the other marchers, and not sparing a solitary watt of that practiced, salesman’s smile, was Shakespeare McCann. In the flesh. He was wearing another button-down shirt, blue tie, and a black jacket, in Mitch Dutton’s place, his face stuck on the TV screen for all to admire and wonder, “Who’s the charming fellah with the unmistakable smile?”

  That chill again—it shot through Mitchell’s spine as if his eyes were a direct link to the electrical impulses in his motor memory. His fists clenched with the rage that had been building minute by minute ever since that evil day. Shakespeare McCann had suddenly come to represent a dent in the armor of Mitchell’s manhood. And yet, watching the televised parade, he felt, once again, that he was impotendy standing by.

  Diving for the cordless phone, he dialed Fitz. It rang only once before, almost telepathically, Fitz picked up. “The sonofabitch is on the goddamn TV. He’s in the funeral procession. In my place!” shouted Mitch over the phone.

  “Who’s on TV?” Fitz could barely hear Mitch over the lousy cordless reception.

  “Don’t you get it? That was the fucking plan all along. Get me out of Hurricane’s shadow so the symbolic fucking torch would be passed to him!”

  “McCann?”

  “Yes! Channel Forty-four. They’re rerunning the processional.”

  He waited for Fitz to switch on his TV. In moments he was back on the line.

  “Now, let’s not give the little prick too much credit. Just calm your damn self,” cautioned Fitz. “It’s only a funeral. It’s only cable. And the most the nightlies will give it is ninety seconds. Anyway, he’s obviously getting advice from somewhere. Lemme find out who and see what we’re up against.”

  “You do that.” Mitch’s fear of the unknown had become powerful, the aching bruises on his face an omen of what might be ahead.

  “Once we get a bead on this piece-of-shit candidate, we’ll step on him like the little bug he is,” returned Fitz over the phone. “Just take yourself a breather and don’t bust any stitches.”

  Mitchell tossed the phone into the couch cushions, whirling back to the TV only to find his vision interrupted by Connie standing in his way. “What was that about?” she asked.

  Taking a moment to compose himself, he answered with the grit still in his voice. “Nothing.”

  “Mitch. You were practically screaming. I could hear you all the way into the basement.”

  Mitch forced himself to calm. He didn’t want to talk about it with her. Not with Connie. When it had come time to confess, he’d told her the lie along with everybody else. He didn’t want her to know how he’d gotten the shit kicked out of him. And he certainly didn’t want Gina to know.

  “Politics, hon,” he assured her. “Just silly old politics.”

  “Your face is red.”

  “It is? I’m sorry.”

  “What are you sorry about? You didn’t do anything to me.”

  “I’m sorry I yelled.”

  “Are you all right?” She cupped his face. Kissed his stitches. She’d been nursing him all week. Treasuring the time alone with him.

  “I’m fine. It was just Fitz. I got mad.”

  “Wanna talk about it?”

  “No.”

  “You want dinner?”

  “Fine.” Subject closed, he prayed.

  “Okay. Dinner.” She headed back toward the kitchen.

  Then Mitch called after her. “I’m sorry.”

  Connie stopped and shrugged again. “What for?”

  “For everything.”

  Fitz was right on top of it. The next morning he had the door to his office shut with only Rene alongside to lend a hand. It was time to find out just who this Shakespeare McCann really was before he was allowed to define himself to the media and the public.

  Stu Jackson ran an opposition research team called Source Finders, Inc. Private Investigators for political hire. Fitz had Stu on the phone at his in-home office over in nearby Jennings.

  “Shakespeare McCann,” mused Stu Jackson. “Heard his name around, but nothin’ else along with it. So the Republicans are gonna run him?”

  “Didn’t have a choice,” answered Fitz. “Our initial research tells us he cut up just enough of the South County pie that they had to run him.”

  “I’ll check around.” Stu stopped asking questions and was in lockstep with Fitz. “Got a girlie up in Houston that lets me run TRWs on just about anybody I please. We’ll get that ol’ recta-scope working on this Shakespeare fellah. Find out what all matters.”

  “Talk to
ya.” Fitz hung up the phone and turned to Rene. “Who do we know on the other side who can give us some real dope?”

  “There’s a couple of professional turncoats who owe me favors. I’ll make some calls and see. But it’s gotta be an outside fax line,” she said, already on her feet and headed for the door.

  “We don’t need the whole shebang. Just who he’s got in his back pocket, if anybody. I wanna know if this guy’s for real or just a one-trick pony.”

  She returned to her office—temporary digs in a nomadic trade. Hastily personalized. The tattered Kandinsky poster that followed her everywhere. Cappuccino machine. Boombox. She began making calls. She knew plenty of players who knew plenty more players. All of them in politics. Somewhere along the way those relationships crossed party lines to make new connections where information could be funneled. Loyalties be damned. Everybody in the game liked to talk. All anybody needed to know was which buttons to push. Rene had them all listed on her PowerBook.

  “Freddy,” she cooed into the phone. “How ya doin’?”

  “Fine, fine. What’s the trick to beatin’ that Texas heat?” answered back Freddy.

  “Hair spray,” she fired back. “How’s the Cape?”

  “I can think of tougher places to sit out an election year.” Freddy was a fellow media consultant for a Detroit candidate that had gotten creamed in the primary. So far he hadn’t hooked up with another crew. “Hey. I saw your old man in the airport”

  “Nantucket-bound, I’m sure. He wasn’t wearing those ugly red pants, was he?” she asked, referring to the strange custom of summer natives wearing a muted pinkish color known only as “Nantucket Red.”

  “I remember he looked good.”

  “Quadruple bypasses can do that for you.”

  “Still kicking ass, huh?”

  “And then some,” she said, referring to her indestructible father, Marv Craven, an old-league corporate lobbyist with more connections than Delta Airlines.

  “Mom?”

  “Same as always.”

  “Sorry. And your sisters?”

  “Still married. But between bottles and babies, they’re still greasing those hallowed Jackson halls with the best politics money can buy,” she said, semiproud of her pro forma political family. Rene was the breakout child, picking the uneven, gypsy life of campaign work over a settled, fixed-income existence working over the same old State House hacks.

  She switched subjects. “Any prospects for November?”

  “Not yet. Got anything for me down thataway?”

  “Willing to work for free?”

  “That tight, huh?”

  “We’re hoping to get the party to kick in something. But that won’t happen until July, so…”

  “So what can I do for you?”

  “I need information.”

  “Who’s the victim?”

  “It’s our opposition. His name is Shakespeare McCann.”

  “You gotta be kidding me. A candidate named Shakespeare McCann?”

  “Colorful folks down here.”

  “What do you need?”

  Rene found herself smiling. That’s all she needed to hear.

  Fitz would say, in political races, as in so many other endeavors, information is power. An organization’s ability to quickly amass potent information is critical to its operational success or failure. The enemy would need to be assessed. No matter how large or small the threat. And on a cool, gray afternoon, under the live oaks and white flowering dogwoods of Mitch Dutton’s backyard, Mitch, Fitz, Rene, and Murray sat poolside in comfortable lawn furniture and appraised the competition. Rosa, the Dutton household maid, served flavored iced tea, coffee, and scones baked from Connie’s grandmother’s historic, butter-based recipe.

  “No, thank you,” said Rene when she heard the list of ingredients. But Fitz and Murray were both game.

  “Where’s the missus?” asked Fitz.

  “It’s subscription time at the station,” he answered, referring to one of Connie’s charitable pastimes, the local public radio station, KLUD.

  “These are phenomenal,” said Murray of the scones.

  “Clog your arteries,” said Rene.

  “I’m young. I’m dumb. This is my time to be reckless,” fired back Murray.

  “Eat now, pay later.” She smiled. “See you at your local coronary care unit.”

  “Leave him be,” said Mitch, wanting to get on with the work. “So who is he?” The question referred to Shakespeare McCann.

  “A nobody,” answered Fitz. He flipped through Stu Jackson’s opp-research report. “Owns a chain of print shops. Then there’s that photography stuff that we know about. What else? Gives to the church, but doesn’t attend. Rents his house. Neighbors don’t see him much and, for the most part, don’t seem to care. We’re still clueless on much of anything else other than what’s been filed with the local and federal election commissions.”

  “What about a criminal record?” asked Mitch.

  It was Murray’s turn. “Not under Shakespeare McCann. We tapped sources at the local PD. I even got a college pal at the DOJ to do a run through the FBI computers. Not even a traffic ticket.”

  Rene cooled her mouth with an ice cube, wondering how long she could keep the item against her trademark tongue before it numbed her mute. She was sitting next to Mitch, at the edge of the lounge. Long legs crossed. So far, Fitz was the only one who was sneaking looks at the spectacular gams.

  “I think he’s even more of a nobody than we anticipated,” she volunteered. “I think he got lucky with those fifteen points he took off Hammond. And I also think that jumping you in the alley was the most creative thing he’s got in his little bag of tricks.”

  Jumping me in the alley?

  Mitch swiveled a nasty look toward Fitz. He told. Nobody else could’ve.

  Fitz was ready. “They’re part of the team, pal. Had to know what you were up against.”

  “It’s okay, Mitch,” added Murray with an understanding nod. “Secret’s safe with me.”

  Rene noted Mitch looked like he’d been sneak-attacked. She put a comforting hand on his knee. “And nobody talks about it again after today. Am I right?”

  “God’s truth,” volunteered Fitz, mixing his oath with a Boy Scout salute. “Murr?”

  “The candidate was assaulted by an unknown assailant.”

  “Just stop it,” barked Mitch, burying his shame and changing gears again. “Sum and total, we don’t know shit about McCann.” It was the lack of information on McCann that scared him.

  “It’s early yet,” said Fitz. “Campaigns tend to strip the veneer off a fellah. Give it a little time. Until then, we’ll steer clear.”

  “Treat him as if he doesn’t exist,” voiced Rene.

  “Hell. He’s such a nobody, I bet the Republicans don’t give him a stinkin’ dime,” added Murray.

  Mitch laughed to himself. Murray. Twenty-some years old and he already knows the Texas Republican party strategy better than the Republicans themselves.

  Lip service, he told himself. They didn’t know a damn thing and that was that. “We stay the course. And I continue to define the debate.”

  “What debate? Other than the one stunt, he’s a blip on the radar,” said Fitz.

  “The public debate. The issues. What I got in this for,” corrected Mitch. “I didn’t decide to run just so I could sling mud with old Hurricane or trade fists with the likes of McCann.”

  The high ground.

  “All I’m saying is that I’m not worried about McCann,” countered Fitz. “You’re in. All we gotta do is, like you say, stay the course. Come November, you’re a congressman.”

  “Don’t bet the farm,” finished Mitch. “He’s Texas-smart. And that obviously counts for somethin’.”

  Texas-smart. The kind of fellah who seemed to know which way the coin would fall on a toss and bet against the Cowboys whenever he felt lucky. The description fit when the image of Shakespeare McCann came to mind. It fit like a
glove.

  SEVEN

  “SHIT!” HOLLICE Waters slammed the phone back into the cradle. Since early May he’d been trying to get in touch with Shakespeare McCann, but the numbers he’d been given had never panned out. Phones would either turn up disconnected or would ring endlessly without an answer. And now as the Memorial Day holiday approached the intrepid reporter was starting to believe the rumors: Shakespeare McCann was nothing more than a local crackerjack who caught a minor fifteen-point wave in the primary. Luck, and luck alone, had dropped him into the big race. The new candidate had probably seen the insurmountable campaign before him and had either dropped out or been paid off by his own party not to embarrass them. When Hollice had moved on to another tack with his campaign coverage, Shakespeare found him.

  “It’s time we talked, don’tcha think?” Shakespeare announced. As for his absence, he merely answered, “Was putting together my campaign staff. Didn’t figure I was in the horse race till weeks ago. You know how it goes.”

  Hollice knew as much, yet said nothing. Instead he dutifully took down the directions to Shakespeare’s office in nearby Cathedral City. It promised to be the candidate’s first official interview. With luck, Hollice could stretch it into two columns.

  Shakespeare McCann’s center of campaign operations was a single-room walk-up with an empty secretarial space. Faux brick veneer and wood-grain paneling. Shakespeare greeted Hollice at the door, apologizing for stinky wet carpet from the air conditioner leakage, then retreated behind a barren, mesalike desktop with a high-powered PC to his right with multiple modem cables snaking into brand-new wall jacks.

  “That’s a helluva computer setup,” remarked Hollice. “Looks like you’re connected.”