The Incumbent

by Brian McGrory

  "Anyone here?" I called out again. Nothing.

  I stepped into the main room, felt through the shadows for a few long moments for another switch, and flicked one on. An old, dirty chandelier lit up, and I stood bolt upright in shock and fear. Spread out before me was the living room, ransacked from one end to the other.

  Right next to me, a desk drawer had been pulled out and thrown to the floor, its contents-some matches, loose change, and assorted papers-tossed about on a threadbare rug. The cushions of the old, ragged couch had been pulled off and cut open. A small television was smashed on a floor next to its stand. Yellowing shades covered the windows.

  My eyes sprinted around the room in search of a person or a body. "God fucking dammit," I said under my breath. I still hadn't moved from where I was standing. Sweat rolled down my face.

  "Paul, come on out!" I hollered. My own voice, bouncing off the bare walls, frightened me even more. My mind kept flashing back to the image of Havlicek's mangled ear.

  Gingerly I walked through the wreckage of the living room, peering along the floor for any scrap of paper or envelope that might carry someone's name, that someone preferably being Paul Stemple. I saw nothing of any use. Carrying the plunger with both hands, ready to swing, I walked into the back of the house, into the kitchen and turned on an overhead fluorescent lamp with a dangling string. Same drill, same bolt of fear. Cabinet doors were flung open, drawers thrown on the floor, a few dishes broken on the scratched Formica countertops.

  About a dozen roaches sprinted across the floor to escape the light.

  All the closet doors were open, which was good, because it meant I didn't have to go through the dramatics of going through them.

  I walked back out into the living room, thinking it was high time to get the flying fuck out. But I couldn't help let my eyes wander up the wooden staircase in the far corner of the room to the dark expanse above. I walked slowly toward the steps and stood silently at the foot.

  I pushed a switch on the wall, and an overhead light shone on the second floor landing.

  "I'm armed," I yelled, the toilet plunger still in my hands.

  I started up the stairs, each one creaking louder than the one before.

  I had no idea what to expect. I didn't even know what I wanted to find. Nothing, perhaps? I just knew I had to go up, to press ahead, to scour every possible corner for any clue as to what had gone so tragically wrong.

  On the top stair, the silence was broken by a blur of activity.

  Something flashed across the scratched wooden floors. I raised the plunger out before me, ready to take a swing at whatever demonic figure was coming my way. My heart nearly came through my chest. I looked down in time to see an immense rat race by my feet into a darkened room and God only knows where from there. I gripped the railing in a combination of relief and for balance. I shook my head and tried to smile at my situation, but couldn't.

  That's when I looked closer at the floor in front of me and saw bloody animal tracks where the rat had just run. He was either bleeding himself or had just stepped in blood. I looked warily, ominously, at the open door from where he had come.

  And that's where I headed. I had neither a viable weapon nor a logical choice. I stepped around the railing and down the short hallway, calling out, "I have a fucking gun, and I'll blow your fucking brains out. Come out now."

  Nothing.

  From my vantage in the hallway, I could see it was the bathroom. I reached hesitantly inside the door, found a light switch, and flipped it on. A pair of rats came scampering through my legs, causing me to nearly vomit. My eyes raced from the toilet to the sink to a pair of soiled towels unceremoniously flung onto the floor. That's when I looked into the bathtub and saw the lifeless form of a human being, facedown in a fetal position, as if in self-defense. In my entire life, I'd never seen a single dead person before, funerals aside. Now I'd seen two in a night.

  As I inched toward the tub, another rat leaped out, propelling itself through the air and then scurrying past me. At this point, I didn't really care. As I got closer, I saw that the body was of a white-haired man, wearing a gray sweatshirt, a pair of old khaki pants, and worn white sneakers. I'm no medical examiner, but from the two holes above his left ear, it appeared he had been shot a couple of times in the head. Blood had flowed down the side of his face and formed a puddle in the tub.

  I couldn't believe I was doing this, but I put my hand gently on his exposed neck. His skin was warmer than I expected, and still soft. I took a guess that he had been killed in the last few hours.

  His wallet lay haphazardly, opened in the tub beside him, some of the contents spilled around his legs and midsection as if someone had rifled through it before throwing it back at him. I snatched up a few pieces of paper and cards-the stub of a bus ticket from Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, to Washington, dated two weeks before, a number for a local social services agency, an address in Silver Spring with the underlined word, "Rent." No names, no identification.

  I grabbed another handful of papers and sifted through them, tossing them back into the tub when I determined their uselessness. The last slip sent a chill up my spine. It was a torn sheet of lined paper, and on it were my own work and home telephone numbers, without any name, and, curiously, the main switchboard number to the Record in Boston.

  Without regards to the possible criminal repercussions of stealing evidence in a murder investigation, I shoved the paper into my pocket and made my way for the door.

  In the hallway, I walked as quietly as I could, creeping down the stairs and toward the front door. I stopped suddenly in the middle of the living room, a vague thought suddenly crystallizing in my brain. I whirled around, walked back into the kitchen, and saw what I had thought I remembered: a telephone answering machine on the counter.

  I pressed a button that said "Greeting," and recognized immediately a voice that haunted me to my soul. "You've reached 282-4572. Please leave a message."

  It was the voice of my anonymous source, Paul Stemple. Now he, too, was dead.

  Once outside, I bolted up the street toward Massachusetts Avenue. I stopped at a pay telephone, called 911, and in the most casual voice I could summon, informed the dispatcher of a possible homicide at 898 C

  Street in Southeast. I hung up, found a nearby ATM machine, and withdrew $500, the maximum it would allow. As I flagged a cab, two police cruisers raced past, their lights flashing but their sirens silent. I felt as if I had just gotten away with something, but with what, I didn't yet know.

  Regardless of what I looked like, the front desk clerk at the very proper Jefferson Hotel would have treated me with a sense of suspicion, given the hour, which was 4:00 A.m." and the fact that I wasn't carrying any luggage. When he took into account my appearance, which was even more disheveled than before, he called for security, and a nice guard stood politely nearby as I tried to arrange for a room.

  "Name, please?" the clerk asked.

  "Bird. Lawrence Bird." Bird succeeds Havlicek. It's a Boston thing.

  "What sort of credit card will you be using, Mr. Bird?"

  "I'm not. I'd like to pay with cash." I pulled the thick wad of new bills from my pocket and put them on the counter.

  "Certainly. You have some form of identification?"

  "I don't. I was just in a car accident, and I lost my wallet."

  "Of course."

  He typed on his computer keyboard and gazed thoughtfully at the screen while rubbing his chin.

  "Unfortunately Mr." um, Bird, we don't have any availability right now." He said this while looking at his computer. His eyes shifted toward me, and he added brightly, "I'm very sorry."

  "Look," I said. "I'm hurt. I'm exhausted. I'm desperate. I have the money right here to pay for a room. I'll check out by eleven in the morning. I will take absolutely any room you have."

  I pulled two twenty-dollar bills from the pile, pushed them toward him, and added, "I'll take anything."

  He typed for another moment, rubbed
his chin a little more, and said,

  "Oh, good. It seems there's a king bedroom available on the fourth floor that I didn't see." As he spoke, he reached out, gently fingered the $40, and placed it in his shirt pocket.

  He printed out a registration form, asked me to sign it, required an upfront payment of $300 and asked, "Will you be needing help with any luggage?"

  "All set," I said, smiling without cheer.

  Once in the room, I called Martin and told him where I was and my assumed name. Within ten minutes, I was fast asleep.

  twenty

  I awoke four hours later thinking thoughts that were way too complex.

  Foremost among them were the images of Samantha Stevens meeting me at the airport, Samantha Stevens alone knowing that my car was at Kinkead's, Samantha Stevens jumping in a taxicab before I could even offer her a ride home. She was the only person in any way connected to the assassination attempt or the resulting investigation who had monitored my whereabouts in the hours before the explosion. Not good.

  I thought of my anonymous source, the grotesque way in which he was forced to die, all because of his mission of truth. I felt as if I had known him, even if we had never actually met. And now he was gone, and with him so much of the information I so desperately needed, now more than ever.

  Of course I thought of Havlicek, fighting for the story right to the end, happy with his lot in life, confident that things would always get better, that the truth just lay a day or two away. I questioned whether I could push onward in this story without him or whether it was time to abandon my efforts, then dismissed that latter thought as unworthy of another second's consideration.

  Then I thought of Kent Drinker, so desperate for the last week-plus to learn the identity and location of the person who had called me in the hospital that first day. And a few hours ago, I found that person murdered, just after someone had failed to murder me.

  It's a different Tony Clawson. And it's his background that's so interesting and so potentially devastating, especially to my agency.

  I played Drinker's strange words out in my mind as I showered and readied for the day. I was exhausted. My head hurt from the cut, my ribs throbbed from last week's shooting. My life had become a life-or-death obstacle course, and right now, I was racing down the homestretch, toward the hopeful confluence of Election Day and some truthful answers about this assassination attempt.

  Pink and powdered, I sat down in the fluffy terrycloth robe-had no fresh clothes-and called downstairs for a laptop computer with Internet access. A few minutes later, a solicitous bellman delivered it to my door.

  I settled in at the computer to conduct a cyberspace manhunt. First I checked Social Security Administration records, on-line, for all Tony Clawsons in the country in the last twenty years. For each one I found, I checked for current telephone numbers. If they didn't have a phone number, I checked for death records. If they didn't have a phone number or a death record, I checked for a credit report to see if there was recent activity. It was a frustrating, tedious endeavor, the type of pick-and-shovel work that outsiders assume we layabout reporters have someone else on staff to do.

  On about the fifteenth Tony Clawson, this one out in the suburbs of Chicago, I could find nothing-no death record, no phone number, no credit activity. I checked for marriage records. Nothing. I checked, most interestingly, for a birth record, and again, nothing.

  I went deeper into his Social Security history and saw that he hadn't been assigned a Social Security number until 1979, when he was listed as forty years old. That was unusual, though not definitive. With every stroke of the key, I learned more, and as I learned more, my pulse quickened to the point of excitement. Clawson, my computer told me, began paying into the system in 1979, and continued for nine years.

  Sometime in late 1988, he had abruptly stopped paying in.

  More keystrokes, more information. Social Security never paid out a death benefit to any Clawson survivors. Clawson didn't appear to have been drawing unemployment payments. There was no mortgage information, no credit activity, nothing. In 1988 Tony Clawson of Rosemont, Illinois, ceased to exist.

  This was, of course, interesting because in 1979 Curtis Black had ceased to exist, the year Tony Clawson took shape. Best as I could tell, I felt fairly certain that Curtis Black became Tony Clawson in the witness protection program in 1979, and these records seemed to bear that out. Interesting, though, that Clawson himself then disappeared from sight in 1988. Drinker had implied in my dog park that it was this Clawson who had resurfaced out at Congressional with a gun and a mission. The cryptic words of Diego Rodriguez popped into my mind. Sometimes people change, and it's tough to keep up with them.

  So this is what he meant. But one question still lingered, one very important question: Why?

  I was still stuck in the realm of supposition, trying to peer over the wall into the world of actual facts, but with little luck. My gut feeling told me that the truth behind the assassination attempt would say something about this president, something we didn't already know, something he didn't want us to know. I now had just one day to get that into the newspaper, and I was starting to realize what an impossible feat that would be. Maybe Havlicek and I could do it together. But not me alone. Not alone.

  The ringing phone crashed through my thoughts.

  "I've got two engineers in the lobby," Martin told me, skipping anything in the way of an introduction. "They're going to set up separate phone and fax lines in your room that match your office phone, so you'll get all incoming calls. The phones will also be untraceable, so you can make calls.

  "I've also got a pair of security guards standing by the elevator and the stairway on your floor, so no one will have access to your room.

  I've put down an untraceable credit card to hold your room for as long as you need it."

  Hats off to Martin. He was bringing order to chaos, and he didn't even question the rack rate.

  "Now tell me what you know. What the hell is going on here?"

  "Are you on a secure line?" I asked.

  "Affirmative," he said, starting to talk like he really was in a movie.

  "I've had the office phones swept for bugs every day for the last week."

  So I walked him through the bombing scene and aftermath. I told him about making a tentative match between Clawson and Black on the computer. I finished with the part about finding Stemple dead in his bathtub and hearing his voice-the voice of my secret informant-greet callers on his answering tape.

  "Jesus Christ," he said. "Havlicek's dead. You're in grave danger, and we don't even have a publishable story explaining why."

  Someone knocked at my door. "Hold on a second," I told Martin.

  I yelled out, "Who's there?"

  "Phone engineers."

  I opened it with the safety chain still fastened like they do in the movies and said, "You have ID?" The first man showed me a badge, and I let him in.

  As they set up a telephone and fax, I asked Martin, "Did we get news of the explosion into the final edition?"

  "No," he said. "It happened too late. We led with election stuff-the candidates making contrasting proposals on gun control. We had a poll on the front showing Hutchins up six points, just beyond the margin of error."

  He paused, then added, "The FBI has called this morning, looking for you. They want to question you about last night. They said you left the scene of the bombing, and they were unable to find you."

  Damned right I left the scene. My mind flashed again to Stevens at Kinkead's, to Drinker's inquisition about my source, and then to Stemple in the bathtub. "No way," I said.

  "I already told them that," Martin replied. "I told them it was our responsibility now to assure your safety. They said something about filing criminal charges against you and me for suppressing evidence. I told them to go right ahead."

  Give Martin credit. He was as far afield as a Washington bureau chief could be from the typical rigors of Supreme Court decisions, Senate committ
ee votes, and election maneuverings. But here he was, handling it like a white-collar Clint Eastwood.

  "I need some new clothes," I said.

  "I'll be there within an hour," Martin said. "I just have to make sure I'm not followed. Stay put until then."

  He hung up, the engineers left, and my office line immediately started ringing with requests for interviews, which I didn't grant.

  My first call was to Stevens, and was something of a test. When she picked up the phone, I blurted out, "You'll live with Havlicek's blood on your soul for the rest of your life." I hung up before she could reply. It felt good, even if it didn't accomplish anything.

  My next call was to Drinker. I took a softer, more pragmatic tack, recalling that he had been seeking to be my new ally. I also didn't want to give up the fact that I knew Stemple was dead. I assumed that he did.

  "I'm sorry about your colleague," he said. "That's just awful. We have some agents here who are looking to collect some information from you."

  "I'll get around to that," I said. "First, though, let me run something past you. It's my understanding that Tony Clawson used to go under the name of Curtis Black. Curtis Black used to be an armored car robber in Massachusetts, before he entered the federal witness protection program in the late 1970's. Is this something you can guide me on?"

  There was a lengthy silence between us, except for the occasional sound of him snapping his tongue in that bothersome way that some people do.

  In a very careful, measured tone, he said, "If this is what your information is telling you, I am unable to dispute what you've found."

  I rolled my eyes to myself at his lapse into officialese. "Look, I need more than that right now. I need confidence that I'm doing the right thing. What you're saying, or the way you're saying it, doesn't help me get this into print."

  Another long silence, though no tongue snapping.

  Then, carefully, Drinker said, "If this is what you've found, then you understand the embarrassment of this agency. You understand why the director wanted to offer up a different photo of Tony Clawson as the suspect, to be honest yet vague at the same time. You understand that it wouldn't reflect well on the FBI to have a former federal witness who lived for a while with a government subsidy and government protection then become an attempted assassin, rather than spend a lengthy stretch of time in jail."