Even the damn hot weather made great hay for the cameras: “Sure, if I could fix it, I would. But the fellah who’s smart enough to control the weather? I figure he’ll have done messed up the last safe topic of polite conversation.”
Finally, from somewhere in the swelling crowd, someone began chanting, “SPEECH, SPEECH, SPEECH!”
The chant caught hold long enough for the candidate to hold his arms out wide. “Nope. No more talkin’ today. I’ll be dishin’ out plenty of the meatier stuff in good time. Today’s just a little somethin’ for your sweet tooth,” teased Shakespeare. “Now, who wants more?”
It was enough to draw spontaneous applause. Meanwhile, the man who’d called for a speech, starting the chant, escaped the crush and moved around behind the ice cream truck to wait the scene out.
The man was Marshall Lambeer, George “Hurricane” Hammond’s former campaign consultant. An expensive pro. He was charging Shakespeare five thousand a week for his services.
“Somebody get out and chum the crowd,” ordered Marshall to a gaggle of paid volunteers. Chumming. The practice of bucketing out loads of campaign buttons and bumper stickers to cheering masses. “Let’s go, let’s go!”
Along for a ride on the Shakespeare McCann gravy train were more from Hammond’s campaign committee. Bob Owens in charge of press relations. Shirley Rosen-sweig handled polling and research. They were followed by more pros who followed the Republican party’s promissory note as it was FedExed from Dallas to Shakespeare’s Cathedral City office. Barney Cropper was media consultant. And along with him he brought Candy Mishner, who, on the heels of a recent fiasco with the Christian Channel, would be in charge of fund-raising.
From across the street, watching the scene through his usual cynical perspective, was the one and only Hollice Waters. In his shirt and tie and trademark baseball cap, he leaned against a lamppost and watched with unrestrained awe.
He recognized most of the faces in the background as former and recently unemployed staffers from Hurricane’s campaign. “All the best talent the Republican party could buy,” he would write in his follow-up column to his initial McCann interview.
NINE
IF ICE cream was the tonic to tame the overheated locals, alcohol was the buffer against the monthlong crush of tourists who sought the Island’s famed beaches and bars. With eighteen miles of beaches, Cathedral had it all. Deep sea fishing. Surfing. Seaside cabanas. And miles of newly poured cement for the building wave of in-line skaters. A Zamboni couldn’t have cut slicker sidewalks. In swimsuits and Winnebagos armed with Coppertone and bug repellant, the summer vacationers poured in from the north to dip themselves in the water, baptizing another summer season with daily doses of hot dogs and saltwater taffy.
And in a state whose oil revenues had all but dried up—and which supported an ever-increasing influx of illegal immigrants to the welfare rolls—the July deposits to the South County coffers were crucial. So the welcome sign was out with a gentle plea: Bring money to spend.
Spend, they did, packing hotels and motels all up and down the interstate and Gulf highways. Folks from all walks of life were there to walk barefoot on the beaches or stroll along the Strand. Finally, as the sun would set, casting its long shadows across the Gulf, crowds would gather nightly at the seashore to drink, dance, or simply stare out at the twinkling lights of the pleasure boats that dotted the bay.
As tradition would have it, the most spectacular of those boats belonged to a Texas media zillionaire named Vidor Kingman, owner of five television and nine radio stations broadcasting statewide. And he was expanding. For sixteen summers he’d been anchoring his boats off Cathedral Island for the month of July, doing business from the foredeck and fishing off the stern. No boat was bigger than Kingman’s. He liked it that way.
As coincidence would have it, July had been the favorite summer month for old Hurricane to make his nonelection-year appearances. Most of them on Kingman’s boat. The old man was fond of saying, “If Kingman’s big boats were hats, he’d wear ‘em.”
But Hammond was dead. Now Kingman was looking to throw his weight toward a winner.
Enter Rene Craven.
The door was wide open and Rene wasn’t shy about walking through it, even if it appeared that she’d be dancing topside on a freshly dug grave. Such was politics. And the never-married Kingman was known to have a keen eye for women. At an Austin charity ball for a local university, she arranged to be seated at the table next to Kingman’s with the back of her gilded chair pushed against his. It took barely ten minutes before he’d made the first move, and the rest was up to her.
Before she left, a casual dinner was to be arranged on Kingman’s anchored cruiser for a July weekend. Rene would gladly be his date. The candidate, of course, would be accompanied by his wife.
“It’s just a dress,” Connie said aloud to herself. But well within earshot of Mitch.
“Whatever you wear, honey, I’m sure it’ll knock ‘em dead,” he called from the bathroom.
But she’d fretted for days over the right dress, misreading her husband’s anxiety over Vidor Kingman’s dinner invitation and concluding that it was an important evening. She was trying hard to be as close to the perfect wife as possible. If she only knew he didn’t want or need the perfect wife.
He wanted her not to go.
Since the kiss, Mitch and Rene hadn’t spoken about anything personal. It was left unsaid, but hardly forgotten, buried in a shallow grave inside the candidate’s nervous sexual psyche. The thought of Connie and Rene seated across from each other at a dinner table gave Mitch the kind of pause that would burn a hole in most men’s stomachs.
He chose to simply focus on the task at hand. Bagging the elephant.
“I’m having second thoughts,” said Connie.
“What’s that?” He couldn’t hear her over his electric shaver.
“I’m having second thoughts,” she said louder.
About the evening, he thought. Thank God. If she decided not to go, he could dodge that most certain emotional bullet.
“About the dress,” she said, framing herself in the bathroom doorway.
The morning of the fateful dinner, she had still been without a suitable evening dress. She and Gina had shuttled to visit a Dallas couturier who thought he had the perfect combination of gown and gangplank—a shimmering strapless number that would disappear in the dinner candlelight, yet still stay afloat upon her small bosom as she stepped from the shore craft to the steps that would lead sharply to the main deck. “Smashing,” said the couturier, his faux British accent sounding like a sales pitch.
“That King-man is gonna eat you for dinner in that dress, darlin’,” said Gina, her tiny butt cozied into a slipcovered chair in the couturier’s private salon.
“It’s not him I want to feed,” said Connie, turning one way and then the other in the mirror. “I’ve got competition.”
“Who?”
“You haven’t seen her. But it’s Mitchell’s publicist.” She mouthed the word in the mirror. Wow. “You don’t think I need more up here?” she asked, referring to her breasts. Lately she’d been wondering if she should’ve gotten breast implants when Gina had, only months before the FDA banned the use of silicone.
“It’s made for you, honey,” Gina added. “Little tits ‘n’ all.”
“Elegante,” drawled the couturier, switching to a faux Parisian accent.
“How much?” Connie said, nervously watching herself in the mirror.
How much indeed.
That’s exactly what Mitch asked when he saw her stalled in the bathroom doorway.
“Just tell me you like it,” she worried.
“I’m sorry, honey. You look phenomenal.” He stepped up and kissed her. “The dress doesn’t look half-bad either.”
She knuckle-punched him on the arm, and he responded with the requisite “Ouch.” He was trying to keep it all fun and games between them. A little love and a lot of sleight of hand might keep the e
vening afloat and the hole from burning through his stomach lining.
“Not the red tie. That’s the candidate’s tie,” advised the missus. She went into the closet and returned with a festive Nicole Miller tie. She laid it out against his shirt. “That’s the one. It says the candidate wants to have fun.”
Mitch turned to the mirror to get a look at the tie against himself. “This guy Kingman. He and Hammond were way up each other’s asses. I think I should go more conservative.”
“This guy is the immortal bachelor. At least that’s what Gina says. If he’d been married just once, then I’d say he was conservative.”
Ah, the world according to Connie. Sometimes her philosophy was dead-on in its simplicity, he thought A brief reminder of why he really loved her. She was real. Leave it to Connie to cut through the bullshit and double talk. The sky is blue, the grass is green, and the flowers in the backyard are the color of the rainbow. That was Connie’s world and she was sticking to it, God bless her.
“And I’m your husband,” he added to the list, the words shocking him as they came from his mouth.
“That you are, so you do as I say. Wear the tie,” she said, tying the knot for him as he faced the mirror, finishing it off with a kiss to his neck. “You need a haircut.”
“Naw. I’m just trying to court the sixties vote,” he joked. And that was the end of the brief banter. Soon after, they were downstairs locking the dogs inside the house and on their way in Mitchell’s sedan.
The short drive to the shore-boat landing was longer than expected. The tourist traffic had jammed the Island both coming and going. Mitchell, never one to enjoy stalled traffic, nervously spun the AM radio dial looking for some interesting talk.
“Why don’t you find some music,” pleaded Connie. “It’s a beautiful night. It might ease those ants you got in your pants.”
Ignoring her, he stalled on a weather report that told of the impending doom expected in the eastern part of the Gulf near Cuba. A whimper of a hurricane named Howard had swung west and was bearing down on the already beleaguered island. It was a cue for Mitch to roll down the window and inhale the damp air.
A good sailor can smell a hurricane from a thousand miles, Uncle J used to say.
Hurricane Howard, by Mitchell’s calculation, was maybe thirteen hundred miles away. Still, as he drew the warm air through his nostrils, he wondered if he could actually smell the storm. If he could sense a shifting wind.
At the shore-craft landing, a cigarette speedboat with DARLING stenciled on the stern waited for the Duttons. The yacht called Deandra, named after Kingman’s mother, was anchored barely a quarter mile offshore. The white lights outlining its profile aptly foretold that it was indeed the biggest vessel, short of a commercial ship, in the harbor. Blue-black sky overhead. The mainland beyond, a flattened shadow trimmed in the yellow lamps of Harbor Road. Connie pulled tight to Mitch as if to warm herself, even though the evening temperature was well into the eighties. Then, as if the thought had popped into her head for the very first time, she said, “Now that I think of it, I’ve never actually met Rene.”
“Rene?” was all he could think to respond.
“Rene Craven? Is that her name? Your press person,” she explained. “I mean, I know Fitz. Murray, I’ve met a bunch. But Rene, I’ve seen her. I just realized that we hadn’t really met.”
“I thought the two of you had spoken the night of the primary.”
“We missed each other.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I hope that doesn’t make you uncomfortable tonight.”
“It doesn’t matter. Just as long as she’s not as drop-dead gorgeous as she looked from afar, I won’t have a jealous bone.” It was clearly needling and nothing more. She poked his ribs to remind him so. Still, it was like a knife in his kidney and she was twisting it for effect The guilt in him raged, flushing his face. Thank God for the darkness.
If she knew he’d kissed her, she’d break into a million pieces, thought Mitch. What a prick he was.
And in that brief moment, during those last hundred yards from the speedboat to the yacht, he found himself shamed and vowing to purge his mind of the kiss. Simple as that. He could quit wanting her just the way he had quit smoking some eighteen years ago. One day he had just decided, and had stopped smoking by the power of his own sheer will. He would reach down deep and do it again, removing the bullet from the chamber, and never play Russian roulette again.
Then again, in another remote corner of his conscience, he thought this sudden compulsion utterly ridiculous. The evening ahead would probably go swimmingly. Rene was a pro. She and Connie would dish and life would go on as it had, unfettered and without need of a rearview mirror. Still, his palms were damp. And for a man who wasn’t inclined to nervous behavior, he considered it a cryptic premonition of danger ahead, and once again repeated to himself the vow. His marriage was too important.
Connie was too important.
A pudgy second mate was at the ship’s gangway to tie up the cigarette boat and assist the passengers onto Deandra. “Do I look okay?” asked Connie, mostly to get him to look at her one more time.
“You look heavenly,” he assured her. With that, they started up the ramp.
Topside they encountered a tall, imposing figure on the first deck. Lanky, L.B.J. features. F.D.R. round glasses. “You must be the candidate,” boomed Vidor Kingman, his voice resounding in a Texas twang.
“Mitchell Dutton.” He outstretched his hand cheerfully to meet his host’s. “And this is my wife, Connie.”
“So pleased to meet y’all,” said Vidor, shaking Mitchell’s hand and giving an imaginary tip of the hat to Connie. “And you know my fiancée, Rene Craven?”
Connie bit. “Your fiancée? Mitch, you didn’t tell me!”
“That’s because he’s joking,” whispered Mitchell.
“And most certainly, I wish I wasn’t,” said Vidor. “Hell, I’m thinking of running for office just so I can give her a job in the office next to mine.”
Suffice it to say, this was Rene’s introduction to Connie. She appeared at Vidor’s side in her usual Armani über suit, but stripped of a blouse and brassiere for a spectacular evening effect. But it was Rene’s eyes that caught Mitch off guard. Gone was her normal behavior of detached ease. Her posture, vocal inflection, everything, spoke of impropriety. She should, thought Mitch, stick out her hand to Connie and make an introduction. Instead, it was Connie with an ever-so-polite “Hello there. I’m Connie Dutton. I don’t think we’ve met.”
“No, we haven’t. I’m Rene,” returned the media consultant, her long red nails accepting Connie’s sudden and confident handshake. Then, stepping closer to Mitch and Connie, she said in a hushed phrasing, “You’ll forgive my manners. This is a terribly awkward moment.”
Mitch found his larynx constricting.
What the fuck is she doing?
For the five months he’d known Rene, there’d been nary a wrong tenor in her silky voice. Not a forgotten social grace or a trick she’d missed. And in the days since the kiss, he had marveled at her effortless swagger of indifference, knowing the peril of a misstep in their mutual attraction—something she was all too careful to avoid. But now it was all he could do not to reach across and clasp her throat, just so she’d know what he felt like at that very delicate moment.
“We have ourselves a fifth wheel,” breathed Rene.
“Why, yessir we do,” snapped Vidor. “Y’all have met, I think, the other candidate, Shakespeare McCann?”
With a genial “Howdy,” Shakespeare McCann appeared, crossing from the opposite railing, a bottle of Dr. Pepper in hand and a smug grin on his face. “Forgive me, I’m sorry. I was just wrapped up in all them pretty-colored lights on the water. Like Christmas in July. Hi there, how are ya? Shakes McCann.” He crossed and took Connie’s hand. “Pleased to meetcha, ma’am.” Then he turned to Mitch. “Your wife’s a first-class beauty, Counselor.”
Connie might’ve blushed, but
the blood that rose in Mitch colored him red, his face bloomed in an instant flush of anger. He looked to Rene. “I thought we were four.”
“Don’t look at me. I’m no party crasher,” Shakespeare was quick to respond, laying his hand out for Mitch to grasp in a sort of challenge. “Mr. Dutton. I must say I’m so sorry about your accident. Crime is a perilous problem.”
“Accident?” asked Vidor.
“The mugging,” answered Shakespeare. “Terrible thing. You know, it was all over the TV.”
“Hell, I own TV. Don’t mean I watch that crap,” howled Vidor with Shakespeare right alongside him.
Rene was speechless. Kingman had clearly sandbagged her with all the sweet talk and supposed interest in giving an audience to Mitch and his political leanings. Now her momentary loss of joie de vivre had suddenly placed the weight of the situation squarely on Mitchell’s shoulders. As the blood in his face cooled, he drew his sights down upon Shakespeare. His dormant school-yard hackles obscured behind those fine features, his hand outstretched toward the enemy in a cordial gesture. Suddenly Shakespeare looked his size. Smaller than Mitch and, in his eyes, a mutant. With that in mind and possibly a slight adrenaline push, he took hold of Shakespeare’s hand and squeezed it like a vise.
“Owweeee!” feigned Shakespeare at the handshake. A disingenuous squeak. “I guess you’ve recovered from your accident, all right.”
“After I’m down in the first round, I like to come out swinging,” added Mitch. “Something my old man taught me.”
“Sounds like you ‘n’ me had the same daddy,” howled Shakespeare, drawing three of the fivesome into his ring of laughter. Mitch smiled falsely.
“Hows about a drink, Candidate Dutton?” offered Vidor. “And something for you, Mrs. Dutton?”
“Connie,” she insisted. “And I’ll have a champagne cocktail if you’re so inclined.”
“I am so, madame.” Vidor snapped his fingers twice without taking his eyes off her. Then to Mitch, “And you, sir?”
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