Gospel

by Sydney Bauer

  ‘I understand how inappropriate this is and I know I am in no position to ask you any favours. But I have a proposition for you and, if you are still the same man I knew twelve years ago, then I believe you will, at the very least, listen to what I have to say.’

  David said nothing, just took a sip of his beer.

  ‘I want you to represent my husband.’ There, she said it, straight out.

  David almost choked on his drink, banging the base of his almost empty Heineken down on the stained walnut table.

  ‘You what? You can’t be serious.’

  ‘Serious,’ she laughed. ‘I am not a lot of things David, but if there was one thing I am right now it is serious.’ Karin took a deep breath before going on, knowing this was her one and only shot.

  ‘Stuart is innocent, David. He did not kill Tom Bradshaw. He is being framed, which means the real killer is running free. You are the only man I know who has even the slightest chance of winning this, DC.’ She saw him flinch at the use of the nickname. It had just slipped out, force of habit.

  ‘You’re a good lawyer, David, I saw what you did with the Martin trial. I’ve read the stories, I’ve heard the news reports, I’ve kept track. I know how crazy this sounds but I am asking you . . . I am begging you, to at least consider what I have to say. For, if you don’t, an innocent man will be sentenced to death and I will have to live with that for the rest of my life.’

  ‘Croker?’ asked Joe as he pulled up a stool opposite the middle-aged detective whose somewhat slumped physique and relaxed but furtive eyes smelled ‘cop’.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ said the large detective standing to extend his right arm.

  Mannix shook the man’s hand and noticed Croker was big, but certainly not what you would call ‘soft’. He may be carrying a few extra pounds, thought Joe, but his guess was this guy could probably give chase with the best of them.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ said Croker.

  ‘Forget it. I needed a change of scenery and this place is as good as any,’ said Joe, gesturing at the tropical paraphernalia on the walls of the somewhat run-down pub.

  ‘This guy Mal from the Islands?’

  ‘Nah. That’s him behind the bar,’ said Croker pointing to a thin man of Indian appearance serving vodka jelly shots to two young women. ‘He’s from New Delhi. Never set foot in Hawaii. The locals seem to like it though,’ he said, pointing to the girls.

  ‘Nothing like an Indian in a loud shirt with a ukulele over his shoulder,’ said Joe.

  ‘Good point,’ answered Croker.

  They sat there for a few minutes, making more of the same cop to cop banter before Croker broached the subject they were both here to discuss.

  ‘So here’s the thing,’ said Croker finishing his first Coors and signalling to Mal for two more. ‘This woman is mad as a hatter, completely loco, or at least that’s how she appears at first. But spend enough time with her and she starts making sense – and the “sense” I’m talking about makes for an even wilder story.’

  ‘You check her out?’ asked Joe.

  ‘Sure, she’s clean as a whistle – Mrs Typical Aspiring Upper Middle Class LA, at least on the surface. In fact the whole Walker family history seems like a stereotypical profile for middle American normalcy.’ Croker went on to tell Joe about the family’s scant personal backgrounds. ‘But dig a little deeper and things get murky, and I’m talkin’ dark as mud dirty with plenty of unanswered questions attached. I’m no psychologist but blind Freddie could tell this lady is terrified. I get the feeling she . . .’ Croker hesitated then, taking Joe in, as if not sure what he was about to say was safe, or maybe he just didn’t want to sound like an idiot in front of a respected fellow detective he had just dragged from one side of the country to the other.

  ‘Look,’ said Mannix, picking up on Croker’s discomfort. ‘I know you just met me but something tells me this Rita Walker isn’t the only one you’ve checked out over the past couple of days. So you know I’m straight up, and I’m guessing you also know I wouldn’t be here unless I thought that you had something important to say.’

  Croker said nothing, but Joe picked up a slight nod of his head.

  ‘There isn’t any point in two pieces to a puzzle being on opposite coasts of the country,’ Joe went on. ‘What you got may not mean shit without what I got and vice versa.’

  Croker accepted his second beer and took a few sips before responding. ‘All right, Joe. Why don’t I start from the beginning. And then, we’ll take it from there.’

  Croker began by telling Mannix about the bizarre recent events involving Rita Walker and her family. He told him about her husband, Kevin – a white, middle class IRS clerk found murdered in South Central, his throat cut like a sacrificial lamb, his watch missing, the contents of his wallet drained but his expensive hand luggage intact along with a single white rose for the wife and thirty quarters in his right hip pocket.

  He told him he believed Rita Walker anticipated his ‘death knock’ – that her psychotic reaction was more out of expectation than shock, and that her biblical ravings, which at first seemed maniacal, would later start to take shape in the form of a conspiratorial mantra.

  Then there was the car accident, the death of her son Chase who Rita insisted was named Gavin, the lack of drugs in Rita’s system, the repeated references to the Bible and her claims that she knew who murdered the late Vice President.

  He finished with the visit from the ‘cousin’, and a new series of investigations he had made over the past few days.

  ‘So I pull in some favours,’ said Croker. ‘I got a bud from the accident squad to work overtime assessing Walker’s car. The Volvo was a mess but my guy is good. He says he’s sure the brake fluid had been drained before the crash, and not as a result of it.

  ‘I also got a friend in scientific to re-check Rita’s tox screen, broadening the tests beyond the usual candy of choice. All the expected stuff turns up negative, just like the first test. But they did find a new narcotic in her system. Hydrogen cyanide.’

  ‘What?’ said Joe. ‘Then why is she . . . ?’

  ‘Still breathing?’ finished Croker. ‘Just lucky is my guess. The levels were too low. The screen showed minimal trace elements of the drug – almost negligible.’

  Croker paused there, and Mannix sensed the LA detective was giving him the opportunity to interrupt with further questions. But Joe knew this was a story better told ‘clean’. Croker was on to something, and he wanted to hear it all before he decided what to ask and how to ask it.

  ‘Anyways,’ Croker went on, ‘after Rita’s visit from the so-called “cousin”, she told one of the nurses he had been messing with her equipment. The nurse told me and I got the idea to check her IV. Sure enough, the lab guys found traces of cyanide in her old drip.

  ‘Bottom line, this “cousin” came back to finish the job. The husband is sliced from ear to ear, her son pulverised in a sabotaged car and Rita is the only remaining “problem”. Rita just got lucky the nurse changed her IV before the poison could do any major damage.’

  Croker stopped there, taking a much needed drink, Joe allowing him to take his time.

  ‘The thing is,’ he said, wiping the small trace of froth from his top lip with the back of his large weathered hand, ‘injecting that cyanide in a crowded ward in a busy city hospital with plenty of potential witnesses is some gutsy murdering. This “cousin” has some nerve, no doubt about that. But my guess is, our guy, or whoever was dishing out his orders, was racing against the clock. He needed to take her out before she could wake from sedation – before she would start up with the whole Bible bullshit all over again and eventually find someone who would listen.’

  Croker then told Mannix how he had had Rita Walker moved, quietly, late at night, to a secluded private hospital in the Hollywood Hills. The hospital was more specifically a hospice for the dying run by the Sisters of Mercy – a place Croker had fortunately, and unfortunately, become familiar with last year d
uring the gruelling final months of his wife’s life.

  ‘The nuns are good people. I got to know them pretty well when, well, they were good to me so I’ve been good to them, and now they’re being good to Rita Walker. I’ve called a few retired buddies who are more than happy to play security guard at least for the short term, but eventually we’ll have to move her to a safe house depending on what she knows, or more specifically what she is willing to tell us.’

  Croker lifted his eyes from his dwindling beer as he said this and Joe knew he was checking if, after hearing the whole story, Detective Mannix was ‘still on board’.

  ‘You want me to come with you,’ said Joe at last. ‘To try to find out what this woman is hiding, why there’s a contract on her life, and how the hell it ties in with the death of the second most powerful man in the country.’

  ‘Well, I figured that . . .’

  ‘How soon can you set it up?’

  ‘Already did. Tomorrow morning at eight.’

  ‘All right Detective Croker,’ said Mannix, downing the rest of his drink. ‘Show me to the closest hotel so I can get some sleep. Something tells me tomorrow is going to be a very long day.’

  26

  It was a fact, Maxine Bryant knew, that after the front page, and the section covering sports, the most read section of a newspaper was the gossip column. Of course few liked to admit they enjoyed a daily dose of dirt with their doughnuts, but there was a lot to be said for the concept of ‘guilty pleasures’, especially in the lives of the nine-to-fivers who would grab a little spice any way they could take it.

  The White House Chief of Staff put down the early edition of the New York Post and took a sip of her chamomile tea. Her normally tidy desk was now covered in newspapers from all over the country and, she had to admit, it felt good, familiar, and in this morning’s case, victorious.

  Maxine Beaulieu had learnt the power of prattle from a very early age. She started her career as a cadet journalist on a small Indiana daily known as the Fayette Gazette and, thanks to her quick realisation that scandal was hot, soon surpassed every working hack in the small but competitive office. She was barely out of high school, studying journalism with a major in politics at the University of Indianapolis, and working a part-time shift on the Gazette when she started a column known as ‘Guess Who, Don’t Sue’.

  At first her editor was sceptical that she would find enough interesting scuttle-butt to fill a paragraph let alone a whole column. But Maxine was one of those girls people found it hard to say ‘no’ to – in fact, most folks found it hard to object to anything young Maxine Beaulieu proposed, including sharing their confidences, confiding their secrets and agreeing to go ‘on the record’ as ‘reliable sources’ in a series of daily exposés that soon became the talk of the County. In other words, Maxine soon learned that a carefully worded whisper could create a tidal wave of change if placed in the right column, read by the right people and repeated often enough to make a difference.

  She knew it then and she knew it now.

  Nothing had changed.

  Of course, Connersville, Indiana was a long time ago, before the award-winning Time Life reports from Sarajevo, Timor, Kuwait, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iran and other newsworthy locales, and before falling for the much older Devon Lloyd Bryant, the then US Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates.

  When her husband retired they moved to New Hampshire where Maxine gave birth to Melissa and, after her husband’s untimely death, fast-tracked her own carefully constructed political career from Governor to US Chief of Staff, and hopefully beyond. But if Maxine had learned one age-old axiom that had stood her well through her entire journey it was to ‘respect the basics’. She took comfort in knowing that after all these years some things never changed and more specifically on this particular occasion, that ‘gossip still kicked ass’.

  And so, on this delightfully warm morning, the deep burgundy drapes of her ornate White House office pulled back to allow in the freshness of the early morning breeze, Maxine sipped her tea and savoured the column inches dedicated to Dr Karin Montgomery and her not so respectable past. Maxine’s discreet efforts to ‘spread the word’ had been more than effective. She now had over fifty influential US newspapers in front of her and every one of them had picked up the story.

  ‘Listen to this one,’ said Maxine to her daughter Melissa who had just entered and now sat straight-backed and cross-legged on one of the office’s antique upholstered chairs. ‘“Which dark-haired Latino diva dumped her budding lawyer soon-to-be superstar husband for a famous European surgeon with all the class of a power-hungry alley cat?”’

  ‘Lovely,’ said Melissa, picking at a piece of fresh ripe cantaloupe.

  ‘And the Miami Herald goes straight for the jugular: “There is no doubt Dr Karin Montgomery must be ruing the day she unceremoniously walked out on her College sweetheart and first husband David Cavanaugh. Ironically, in opting for the high-profile Montgomery she left one of the country’s ‘most respected’ for the country’s ‘most wanted’.”’

  ‘Forgive me, Mother, but I fail to understand your obsession with this woman.’

  ‘It’s simple, Melissa, the trial is taking place in Massachusetts – Boston, the birthplace of independence, JFK’s home town. We need the local people behind us. Cavanaugh is a popular man and the locals won’t be happy with anyone who dumped him for some foreign political climber.’

  ‘Really, Mother?’ said Melissa, sitting back in her seat. ‘From what I hear Karin Montgomery is a well-liked and intelligent woman. Let’s not forget Stuart Montgomery is a very charming individual. He’s smart, chivalrous, impressive. I remember when she married him she was considered one of the luckiest women in Washington.’

  ‘Hmmm, well, not anymore. But I’ll grant you she is sharp and attractive, and as such potentially dangerous. The last thing we need is for the press to make a victim out of her. And besides, Montgomery was not a catch. Tom was a catch.’

  Maxine saw her daughter flinch and realised this may have sounded a little harsh under the circumstances, but she also knew her daughter shared her realistic take on life and was far too practical for platitudes.

  ‘Yes, he was,’ said Melissa. ‘But if I recall, Mother, you did not think so when I chose him over the possibility of running for your old seat of Governor. And then there was your view on his history of drug abuse. I think, at the time, you called him an “Ivy League gutter junkie” and spent most of your energies trying to convince me to leave him. As it turns out, of course, I made the right decision for both of us – did I not?’

  ‘That was before I had all the information.’

  ‘Tom never lied about his past.’

  ‘No. What I mean to say is, I didn’t realise . . .’

  ‘. . . that he was clean and had been for years before I met him. And that he had that one in a million, indefinable quality that gave him the ability to win the hearts of Americans like no one had ever done before – except perhaps for Kennedy.’

  Melissa looked her squarely in the eye before going on. ‘Tom was the government’s ticket to longevity, Mother. And you and the President were happy to ride his popularity all the way to the polls.’

  Maxine returned her daughter’s gaze and could not help but smile; she was not offended by her bluntness – on the contrary she was proud of it. She may have had her father’s innate sense of diplomacy, but she was a fighter like her mother and refused to be patronised. Even as a child she had stood her ground – never raising her voice, never throwing a tantrum, simply reasoning her way out of situations she saw to be ‘unsatisfactory’. There were times when she had wondered if her role as dutiful daughter and then dutiful wife would lull her into the role of the prototype ‘supporter’. But Melissa had chosen her path and fulfilled her obligations with veracity.

  ‘All right, my dear, point taken, but you and I both know this is no time for hindsight. The race is close and time is short.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said
Melissa. ‘You need to announce Tom’s replacement.’

  ‘I know,’ said Maxine, pouring them both another cup of tea.

  ‘Who?’ asked Melissa, and Maxine guessed by her expression that she knew the answer before it was even suggested.

  ‘It was your idea actually,’ Maxine said now, lowering her voice. ‘Something you said last week, at the President’s Beneficial Dinner, about choosing someone close to home. Someone the people already know and trust. President Latham listens to you, darling. He agrees, as do I.’

  ‘I see,’ said Melissa.

  ‘You have always trusted my judgement, haven’t you, darling? Known that no matter what I take on, I have always had your best interests at heart – and those of Tom Junior and Alicia, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I know that public life is a difficult one, but you have perfected being an undying support to people in power to a fine art, and I think, in a way, it defines you – as the special person that you are.’

  ‘I see,’ Melissa said again.

  ‘Therefore, I feel it only fair to tell you, my dear, that it is highly likely my role is about to change. I am sure I do not need to elaborate. I just wanted to . . .’ Maxine stopped there, looking squarely at her daughter, unsure as to how to read her expressionless face, her seemingly calm demeanour.

  ‘It’s all right, Mother. I understand,’ said Melissa at last, her voice even, collected, composed. ‘You will do what is best for the Party and I will support you. Believe it or not, there is little that fazes me anymore.’

  ‘I know, darling,’ said Maxine, her voice tinged with a slight sigh of relief – not so much at her daughter’s approval, but at her acknowledgement that she would continue to be a visible campaign support. ‘It’s in your genes, darling, the ability to see past the obstacles. The strength, the determination, the sacrifice . . .’