Dark Horse

by Doug Richardson

  “Marshall,” interrupted Shakespeare, swinging his stare to his cards. “We didn’t have the picture. And if we did, does it make Dutton’s lie any better?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’ve been in this business too long. Anything else?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Hear what he has to say, then tell ‘em what I said directly.”

  Marshall stood at the threshold another beat before turning to exit.

  “Oh, Marshall?” called the boss. “You think Dutton loves his wife?”

  “I…I wouldn’t know,” he answered, returning to the threshold.

  “Find out. And shut the door.”

  The door latched closed. Afterward Marshall hustled right back to his office and the blinking phone line where he’d left Fitz on hold. “Fitz, ol’ friend. How ya doin’?”

  The faked photo was front page on Sunday and Monday in both Cathedral’s newspapers. It also led the evening newscasts. Candidate Dutton, shaking hands with local enemy numero uno. Proof positive of the he. And even though news editors and directors had been informed Saturday of the fraud, the picture was too hot. The story, too juicy. The denial would have to wait until Monday, when die maligned candidate, Mitch Dutton, stood before a crush of cameras and swinging boom mikes. He held up both pictures for all to see, the original and the fake, and from both Rene’s and Fitz’s perspectives, sounded too damn controlled and lawyerly in his indignation. The hurt and anger from Saturday’s fax attack had been buried too deep for the candidate to ever retrieve it.

  The retracted story was on Tuesday’s Mirror’s page six, below the fold.

  “I’m sorry to call you at home, Mitch.”

  “Who is this?”

  “William Ziegler,” said the Republican Central Committee chair from his own home telephone.

  They’d met only once before, Mitch and Zig, at a charity auction in Dallas where they’d bid against each other over a football signed by Cowboy great Roger Staubach. Both lost out. Afterward they’d shared a friendly word or two, and that was that.

  “It’s not too late to talk, is it?” asked Zig.

  Ten-thirty and Mitch was finishing up his daily reading. “It’s okay. What can I do for you?”

  “What I have to say is off the record,” said Zig. “Are you talking on a hard line?”

  “Yes,” answered Mitch.

  “Good,” said Zig. His voice was low and even, speaking from a deep reserve inside his soul. “If you repeat what I say to you, I’ll deny every word.”

  “I’m primarily a corporate lawyer,” said Mitch. “I have more secrets to keep than I’d like to admit.”

  “I’ll take that to mean we understand each other.”

  “It won’t go past me.”

  “Politics aside, man to man,” stated Zig. “Your opponent, Shakespeare McCann…”

  “Yes?”

  “Just watch your back. That’s all.”

  “You know something I don’t know?”

  “I think he’s dangerous.”

  “And you gave him seventy-five thousand dollars,” Mitch found himself saying.

  “Something I’ll always regret. But I’ll learn to live with that.”

  “I hope so.”

  There was an awkward silence. Through the phone, Mitch could hear the swirling of ice in a tumbler.

  “That’s about all,” said Zig.

  “I appreciate your call.”

  “Think nothing of it.” He hung up.

  A good two hours passed before Mitch packed it in for the night. Between the phone call and David Letterman’s first guest, he had replayed the cryptic conversation with Zig over and over in his mind. The message. The motivation. No matter which way Mitch processed it, he got the same answer from every angle.

  The high ground is crumbling.

  THREE

  IN AUGUST the rain crashed into Cathedral Island with five straight days of thundershowers to wipe the streets clean and leave the Island with a sweet ocean smell that many hoped would erase the sweltering hell that had been July. As the cooler temperatures prevailed, Charlie Flores hoped so would cooler heads. As editor-in-chief at the Daily Mirror, he’d watched as July practically cooked his precious Island to a crisp. Tourism was down. Crime was up. And the local cops were threatening to strike over the issue of summer uniforms.

  It would’ve been a banner month for most newspaper editors, with plenty of news from which to pick and choose. But for fifty-four-year-old Charlie, who liked to tell his interns that he’d already had his heart attack, he preferred a targeted approach to news gathering. Instead of the news coming to him, he’d rather send his crew out to get the news. “Beat the bushes,” he’d say. “Come back only when you have something. Until then, stay out of my hair.”

  “So is he in the race or not?” Charlie asked Hollice, nudging the reporter’s feet off his desk and replacing them with a stack of Cuban cigars. Cohibas, Romeo y Juliets, and Partagas.

  “Havanas?” asked Hollice.

  “A gift from my brother-in-law,” confirmed Charlie. The cigars were his last vice in a life dictated by the laws of Pritikin and Covert Bailey. “So is it a horse race or not?”

  “Depends on how you look at it.”

  “Just gimme the spin. Granny’s gonna be askin’.”

  Granny, otherwise known as Granthum Baxter, publisher of the Daily Mirror. Eighty-eight years old, like clockwork he’d fly for quarterly visits from his house in the Grand Caymans to get the grislies on his newspaper business.

  “McCann’s up twenty-five points from nothin’. But then you can also say he’s thirty points down when you put his numbers against Dutton’s.”

  “So we can go with the dark-horse story. Candidate with momentum and all that.”

  “Or with the dead-horse story. Candidate throws rocks, hits a few targets, but nobody really knows what he stands for. He’s stuck in the gate. All he’s really done is up Dutton’s negatives and, in doing so, built up his own dubious reputation.”

  “I like the dark-horse story better.”

  “Obviously.”

  “When we had Dutton versus Hammond, that was going to be our tack.”

  “And I was ready.”

  Damn right he was ready. The story would’ve been a doozy, too. Hollice had already finished the Mitch Dutton profile. He’d had it filed since high school. Everything since had just been basic follow-up work.

  MR. CLEAN VS. MR. MEAN.

  That was the banner headline that Hollice had hoped the Daily Mirror would have run as a postprimary piece under the Hollice Waters byline. It would have included photos of Mitch and Hurricane Hammond pasted on either side of the story, facing off in obvious opposition. The tenor of the story was to have been Hollice’s perspective on Mitchell’s Neverland Politics versus Hurricane’s Washington Wrestling Match. It would have been certain to raise eyebrows in both camps and set the standard for each man’s reputation.

  Of course, Hollice had planned to follow with those rumored allegations of Mitchell’s personal improprieties, i.e., the candidate’s matriculations into social groups on the political fringe, including some leftist academics whose writings bordered on what Hollice thought he’d label neocommunism—this in a state where the Red Threat was still associated with the likes of Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of President Kennedy. Then there would have been the rumors of Mitchell’s affair with one or even numerous campaign staffers, allegations that were hard to substantiate, yet impossible to deny without a considerable tarnishing effect.

  And Mitch would be Mr. Clean no more.

  Not that Hollice would have been one-sided about any of this. He’d planned similar trashing of the incumbent candidate, whose list of actual and factual indiscretions was a mile long and wide enough for ten newspapers. Hollice had planned to keep up with this planned pumpkin-smashing all the way to Halloween and thereafter.

  Enter Shakespeare McCann. A man, so much as Hollice could discover, wit
hout a past. A man who (if anyone was to believe his press kit) sprang from the ground to act as duelist’s second for George Hammond like an orphan weed amongst the scrub. A man Hammond never knew. A man nobody seemingly ever knew before 1982. At least, nobody living.

  “You think McCann can win?” asked Charlie.

  “I’ve seen stranger things,” said Hollice, snitching a Diet Coke from Charlie’s personal refrigerator. A perk of the position, Charlie’s little icebox was famous inside the Cathedral Daily Mirror. Located underneath the second-floor window, it also made a fine stool for Hollice to seat himself while he popped open the soda and guzzled. “One thing for sure, Dutton’s a wimp. McCann’s not. And November’s still a ways off.”

  “How about another profile on the both of them?”

  “There’s my problem. McCann’s all about what he says. Not who he is.”

  “Then find out.”

  “Easier said than done.”

  “Why not go at it through the Dallas connection? Republicans gotta know something. I mean, Zig Ziegler and the rest of those Dallas boys wouldn’t go throwin’ so much good money after bad.”

  “Listen to me, Charlie,” said Hollice. “So far, I can’t find a living soul who knew McCann before eighty-one. And those that are alive and talking refer to McCann as if he’s the holder of the Holy Grail. Now, name me anybody you’ve ever met who fits that description.”

  “He’s obviously hiding something.”

  “No shit.”

  “Look harder. That way, when we find out something, you can run this fellah’s laundry up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes. Until then, let’s lay some more hot coals for the front-runner.”

  “So what? When he goes to cool his feet we can see if he walks on water?” joked Hollice.

  “Just keep a stash of life preservers nearby. When it comes time for Granny to give an endorsement, I don’t want to see any floating bodies,” said Charlie, amused with his own metaphor. After which he broke open one of those cigar boxes, snipped a double corona, and lit up without offering so much as a taste to Hollice.

  Stu Jackson would’ve joked that he’d never actually seen a metaphor, but he’d seen plenty of floating bodies in his forty-eight years. Working for the DEA, he’d seen more real bodies wash up on the Gulf beaches than there were cousins in the Klan. Colombians. Bolivians. Mexicans. It was his job to ID the Juan Does of the Texas drug war. That was the beginning of his pedigree as a private investigator, later starting the opposition research business as a sideline. So successful were Stu and his team at digging up the DNA on Republican candidates, he’d gone full-time by the mid-eighties, turning the PI gig into an afterthought, and opposition research into a valuable tool for the Texas Democratic party.

  “So let’s get on with it,” said Mitch. He’d decided it was time somebody found out the who, what, and where about Shakespeare McCann.

  Laconic in just about every aspect of his manner, Stu opened a file folder. His long black fingers sifting through notes and printouts while everyone else waited around the conference table in the Dutton campaign office. Mitch, Fitz, Rene, and Murray. But instead of coming up with a dossier on the opposition, Stu found what he was looking for and laid it out in the middle of the table. It was a check.

  “What’s that?” asked Fitz.

  “Your money back.”

  “What for?”

  “Doin’ a crappy job for you.”

  “It’s been two months,” said Fitz. “You could’ve said you weren’t up for the job.”

  “Oh, I was up for it. And I did what I could in the time I was given,” answered Stu, his voice as lazy as his languid looks. “But I’ve dug up body parts with longer histories than Shakespeare McCann.”

  Mitch picked up the check for fifteen thousand dollars. A lot of money, he thought. In his law practice, he’d worked with plenty of private investigators. They did the real dirty work that was later turned into a legal judgment. But hiring a PI to look into the political opposition’s past? Fitz reminded Mitch that paying Stu Jackson was a legitimate campaign expense, commonplace in modern campaigns. A necessity.

  “I can give y’all another month, if you like. On the house,” continued Stu. “Maybe I’ll find some buried leader and reel in somethin’ you can hang a hat on.”

  “Jesus H. Christ. What’s he hiding?” asked Fitz.

  “It’s gotta be bad, whatever it is,” added Murray.

  “Oh, it’s bad, all right. Nobody erases half their life for no reason at all,” said Stu. “And it’ll catch him someday. Bite him in the ass. Always does.”

  “Sure. Look what it did for Clinton,” said Rene with her trademark cynicism.

  The candidate had been quiet throughout. Looking at the check. At Stu.

  “Sorry.” The investigator shrugged.

  “Just give us what you got,” said Mitch, sliding the check back over to him. “We’ll see if there’s any more later.”

  “Good enough.” Stu smiled, appreciating Mitch’s trust and patience. He filed the check back into his folder and turned back to page one. “Okay. Shakespeare McCann. Both parents deceased. Foster parents deceased. Aunts and uncles unknown. Schools listed in McCann’s bio were either burnt down or came under a wrecking ball. Found a strip mall where one of ‘em once stood.

  “Military history,” Stu went on. “Field mechanic, marines, Philippines. That’s in the bio, too. Now, we got the Marine Corps to acknowledge Shakespeare’s fulfillment of duty during that period in history, but they’ve been slow in finding a file on Motor Pool Sergeant McCann, and have yet to make available a copy to Hollice Waters, who’s applied for the documents through the Freedom of Information Act.”

  “He applied? You didn’t?” asked Fitz.

  “Got a little girlie in his office doing duty for me. She’ll fax me when it comes in,” said Stu. “From there it gets vague again. His bio glosses over the two decades after his military service. Soonest we come back into contact with him is when he’d apprenticed as a print shop monkey somewhere in 1980.”

  While Stu talked, Mitch browsed the printed version of the report. Most of it, he knew. Toward the end of that print shop job, Shakespeare claimed to have found the religion of Jesus Christ while stamping out the weekly liturgy for the First Presbyterian Church of Cathedral City.

  The Power of God is to what Shakespeare attributed his rise from ink meister to entrepreneur. Through the church and the business connections that followed, he’d opened his own print shop and copy center. Soon there was a small chain of Shakespeare’s Quick Copy shops, totaling four in all. Two in Cathedral City. One in nearby Meyers and another up in Houston. It didn’t take much legwork for Stu Jackson to recognize that where there was a Presbyterian church, one of Shakespeare McCann’s Quick Copy shops would be nearby. From interviews with various parishioners, Stu garnered that Shakespeare McCann would manage his Sundays around his print shops, giving himself over to each church only once per month, and leaving the rare fifth Sunday for fishing.

  Good business, Mitch thought. Smart.

  “The rest is still up for grabs,” said Stu. “I’ve run him through databases from here to Hanoi. It comes up zip.”

  “Shakespeare McCann comes up zip,” confirmed Mitch.

  “There you go. But if there was an alias? Well, then he could be anybody from anywhere.”

  “Social Security?” asked Rene.

  “He was born Shakespeare McCann. In South County.” Stu shrugged back at her.

  “TRW?” asked Fitz.

  “That’s where we started. He’s got a good credit history after eighty-two, but no credit history before that.”

  “FBI?” pushed Rene.

  “Get me some fingerprints, I can call in a favor. No guarantee of results. In the meantime, we ran his picture through as many computer identi-kits as I could get my hands on. Nothin’ there yet.”

  Reading further from the report, Mitch noted that Shake-speare’s flock was rock solid on the candidate
. Stu’s “girlie” had lifted transcripts from audiotaped interviews Hollice had made with early supporters. “God’s example” were words often used. “He’s been a savior,” said a crippled man whose wheelchair had been maliciously crunched by an errant teenager in a four-by-four pickup. Instead of calling the police, a bystander named Shakespeare McCann had volunteered his print shop to manufacture some thousand posters that were hung on lampposts and telephone poles. It had taken only days for somebody to recognize the boy’s truck from the description on the posted sheet. A day later the boy had turned himself in to the police, offering restitution to the crippled man for repairs to the wheelchair.

  “Courageous,” said another parishioner, a single woman with two children whose husband had up and vanished without a trace, leaving them penniless with a mortgage to pay. With the help of fellow church members, Shakespeare had organized a dragnet to run down the deadbeat father who’d absconded all the way to Montana. Described by the couple as a “miracle,” the man eventually returned and, with his wife, sought the counseling of a minister in the salvation of their marriage.

  There were pages more. A man who’d lost his job due to false charges of theft. An elderly woman whose Social Security checks were being stolen and cashed by an evil nephew. A young hooligan with a drug habit who found work and training inside one of the candidate’s print shops. All ages and colors and genders.

  Mitch spoke up. “The big question is, why doesn’t anybody seem to care that this man’s a total mystery? Where’s the press? I mean, my life’s an open book. Part of the public record. Him? He’s a ghost.”

  “Voters don’t care so much anymore as to who you are or where you’ve been,” said Rene, hosing Mitch off with the political ice water. “Voters only care what you’re gonna do for them.”

  “Or if you’ve had a criminal record,” chimed Murray.

  “And that depends on the crime,” finished Fitz.

  Mitch stood and tossed the report into the center of the table. “So let’s make an issue of it. Who’s Shakespeare McCann?”