Stranglehold

by Ed Gorman

  “I’m not sure yet. I need to learn a few more things.”

  “I’m just terrified it’ll leak out somehow. All the stories about her wild-child days will be back in the news again. She won’t have a chance.”

  It was time to go. “I’d appreciate you letting that check go through. I’d hate to have to sue you.”

  She was on her feet and standing two inches from me. “Oh, Dev, you know my temper. I say a lot of things I don’t mean when I’m angry. Of course the check will go through. And, of course, you’re not fired. I need you now more than ever.”

  I was tired of her and her devious charms. “I can find my way out. And I’d like to talk to Wyatt before I go.”

  “Wyatt’s playing golf. Just keep me informed.” She waved her dismissal. “Winnie’s around somewhere. She’ll see you out.”

  She was right about Winnie. I was no more than ten feet from the study when Winnie appeared and fell into step with me.

  “You missed a good one in there. Acting class. Every fake emotion you could think of.”

  “Oh, now, weren’t you at least a bit charmed, Mr. Conrad?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “I’ve seen her win over some very powerful men.”

  “Not anybody I’d care to know.”

  At the door she said: “There’s more to her than you might think.”

  “There’d have to be. Nobody could be that superficial.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll have to put you in the loss column.”

  “Loss column?”

  She touched her fingers to her temple. “I keep a running score of who she’s able to win over and who she’s not. I’m afraid you’re in the loss column.”

  “What’s the score now?”

  She smiled as she opened the door and held it for me. “You’re her only loss.”

  “I’m proud of myself.”

  She touched my sleeve. “Between us, I’m proud of you, too. Now good-bye, Mr. Conrad.”

  . . .

  I went back to the office and found David Manning using one of our phones. His face was red and his voice was sharp. “I’ve told you. Everything is fine with us. Very happily married. I don’t know how many times I have to say it. Now I’m very busy.”

  As he spoke, his assistant, Doris Kelly, watched him. She was seated on the edge of the small divan where staffers relaxed sometimes. Her hands were tight little fists and her knuckles bone white.

  “Look,” Manning said into the phone, “I’m sorry I snapped at you. It’s just that you’re about the tenth caller in the past couple of hours. You’re just doing your job and I should understand that. But I’m telling you the truth, all right?” Pause. “Thanks for saying that. I appreciate it.” Pause. “You, too. Bye.”

  Away from Natalie and his servitude Manning was a competent, collected man. As he started to speak his eyes met Doris’s. “I’ll bring you up to date, Dev. There was a scene this morning. Natalie called. She wanted to see me. Urgent. I canceled a meeting so we could talk. I had a sense of what she was going to say, but it was still a shock. She came to my office and told me that a reporter had stopped her assistant Winnie and was asking questions about Susan and me—about our marriage and whether we slept in the same room. All those things. So then Natalie managed to track down Susan and demand that she come over to the office, too.”

  He stood up. His anger was harsh in his eyes and voice. “Then when Susan came, Natalie told us that we need to start being seen in public together. Then Natalie got crazy. Everybody was shouting. There was a reporter in the lobby. I doubt she could hear the exact words, but she certainly heard all the anger.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that, either,” I said. “Did you hear any of it, Doris?”

  “Yes. I have a small office outside of David’s. I’m his receptionist, among other things.”

  “She’s everything, Dev. I’m the most disorganized man on the planet. I couldn’t get along without her.” He nodded to Ben. “I just needed to get out of the office. So I came over here to tell you folks what happened. That reporter must have filed a story about it already because that was another reporter who called me here.”

  “We have to be at the college in twenty minutes, David.”

  Manning smiled down at Doris and said, “See what I mean about how she keeps me organized?”

  After they were gone, Ben said, “I’ll start working on a press release.”

  I went to one of the computers and started checking every local news source I could find. One newspaper, four radio stations. Two of them carried stories of an angry exchange between Congresswoman Cooper and her stepmother.

  “Two sources have the story, Ben.”

  “Everybody over at the Duffy campaign is probably drinking champagne and snorting coke and fucking each other’s brains out.”

  “Let’s go join ’em.”

  He held up a hand. “I don’t want to smile.”

  “All right.”

  He laughed. “You’re right. If we could catch Duffy all coked up and hitting on some seventeen-year-old volunteer . . .”

  “Dream on.”

  He went back to banging out the press release. Hunched over his computer, his tie askew, a yellow pencil behind his ear, he looked like a reporter for a big-city newspaper of the forties or fifties, one of those hard-nosed guys in a film noir. He was one of the few people I knew who could write and talk at the same time. “That Doris. I always go for those kinds of looks. The sexy librarian. But I could never get near anybody who looks like her. I think there are certain types who are attracted to certain other types. And whatever her type is, my type doesn’t do it for her.” He blew out a breath. “I’m babbling.”

  “Gee, I hadn’t noticed.”

  He paused long enough to flip me the bird. Then: “I’ll finish this release and get a couple reporters over here and we’ll talk it through. We have to answer it. ‘All campaigns have spirited moments and this was just one of ours.’ I’ll make the argument about campaign tactics and say it didn’t have anything to do with the marriage.”

  I spent the next half hour working on the campaign. I’d recently seen a documentary about my chosen profession. The script made an interesting point early on. Political campaigns have been with us for centuries, dating back to when a segment of Greeks had pushed to banish or kill Socrates. They had tried to discredit and smear him and it had worked. Political parties today did the same thing with less dire consequences. What I studied now were pages of microtargeting, a breakdown of key voting blocs we needed to win over, and how to tailor everything from our direct mail to our billboards to appeal to them.

  We were headed into the final push, and that meant our TV and radio expenditures would quadruple. Not only did we have to create commercials that did us good, we had to create commercials that did us no harm. In every election cycle there is a story of a commercial or a series of commercials that damages the candidate who created them. You then spend your time, your desperate frantic time, trying to undo what you’ve done. This happens most often when you’ve made negative charges that are so nasty even some of your supporters find them unacceptable.

  I wanted to know which segments we were still having trouble with. Duffy was a hardliner but not a fool. He ran a careful, persuasive campaign that appealed to voting segments across the board. His chief vulnerability was that he’d been a lobbyist for twenty years before moving back to his hometown and running for office. We were happy to remind voters that he had worked as a hired gun for some pretty odious people and corporations, including one that had replaced local workers with a large number of undocumented ones. We’d decided early on to keep body-punching him with his history. By contrast we reminded voters of how much Susan had done for her district. We’d always known the race would tighten, and the internals we were seeing bore that out. We still had a safe lead. The task now would be to keep it.

  Ben finished his press release and we went over it. We acknowledged that there had been
a “discussion” between campaign staffers that had gotten heated, but then, “What campaign doesn’t have heated discussions now and then?” We could deny that it had ever happened, that somebody had made up this “fight” story to discredit us, but that would only keep the incident alive. The press would push harder and harder to make us admit the truth. This way, with any luck, they’d quote our release and go on to something else.

  The other staffers were gone. Lunch hours were staggered and there was work to do all over the district. During all this Kristin was in and out. She’d asked me twice if I knew where Susan was. There was another radio interview show she was supposed to be doing later this afternoon. I couldn’t help her, of course. The final time she hurried back into the office she said: “She just called me on my cell.”

  I swiveled around in the chair. “Susan, you mean?”

  “Right. She said she’d call the station at four and would do the interview.”

  “Did she say where she was?”

  “No.”

  “Great.”

  Her gaze moved from me to Ben and back to me. “Do I get to know what’s going on here? Why wouldn’t Susan tell me where she was?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She glanced at Ben. “He’s lying, isn’t he?”

  “I can’t tell. He won’t tell me what’s going on, but maybe he doesn’t know where she is.”

  “This whole thing is coming apart, isn’t it?”

  “Kristin—”

  “Don’t play that ‘Kristin’ bullshit, Dev. What’s going on? You’re the boss, but Ben and I are running this campaign. We asked you to deal with Susan only because you seem to be able to get along with Natalie. We deserve to know what the hell is going on.”

  Ben said, “I agree, Dev. I’d say if you don’t trust us enough to tell us what you’ve found out, then why did you hire us in the first place?”

  “Maybe I’ll just go get drunk and call you later.”

  “Ben and I will go with you. We’ll get you so bombed you’ll tell us everything.”

  “Susan’s name may come up in the Monica Davies murder.”

  “My God. Are you serious?”

  “No, Kristin, I’m making it up because I enjoy watching you and Ben go into shock.”

  “You don’t mean she actually committed the murder?” Again she glanced at Ben.

  “I don’t have any way of knowing. But my guess is no.”

  I spent ten minutes laying it out for them. The motel with the blood on the desk. Gwen and Bobby. Larson. The blackmail.

  “And you don’t know anything about this red-haired man—this Craig Donovan?” Ben said.

  “He’s Bobby’s father. You see the resemblance to Susan when you look closely at Bobby. But he doesn’t look like either one of them to any great degree.”

  “So what the hell are we going to do now?” Kristin said.

  “There’s only one thing to do,” I said. “Find Donovan and confront him.”

  “How do you find him?”

  “I’ll have to lean on somebody I don’t want to.”

  They stood beside me while I made my next phone call.

  The Stay-Rite was a grim little motel on the north edge of Aldyne. It made the place where Gwen and Bobby had been staying look upscale. Two long flanks fanned out from a central office in standard fashion. The white stucco exterior looked as if a giant had pissed on it, long ugly streaks of rust covering much of the surface. In spots the walkway in front of the rooms had been reduced to rubble. One window bore a poster of Toby Keith and a few showed Confederate flags. The motel must have had rates for lengthy stays.

  I’d learned about the place when I’d called Gwen from the office.

  “Is Bobby there?”

  “He’s taking a shower.”

  “Good. I need to know where I can find Craig Donovan.”

  “Oh, God, Mr. Conrad, I can’t tell you that. Bobby would never forgive me.”

  “I’m trying to help Bobby, Gwen, whether he knows it or not. You know that, don’t you?”

  She hesitated and then said, “Please never tell him I told you.”

  So here I sat on the edge of an industrial zone. The streets were lined with food franchises, tattoo parlors, convenience stores, and strip malls that looked like they’d been lifted from third-world countries.

  I didn’t know how I was going to handle it. This was the man with all the answers, and I didn’t much care how I got them.

  The sun was behind the clouds. The afternoon had a faint scent of winter on it. Dog shit, what appeared to be dried human vomit, and the stain from a broken bottle of tomato juice covered the walk in front of room 146. Jagged pieces of glass looked like piranha teeth. Welcome home.

  A game show played behind the faded red metal door. A female voice shouted, “Go for it, you stupid bitch! Go for it!” I had to knock loudly to be heard.

  If you were drunk and forlorn enough, you might take her home when the bar announced last call for the night. She was maybe thirty and pretty in a ruined way. The breasts were balloons trapped inside a yellow terry-cloth halter. The exposed belly was fleshy but not unattractive. The lower legs were shapely but the thighs were heavy. The red-and-blue cobra tattoos that climbed both her arms were nicely done. The teeth showed a heavy tobacco habit. And her right eye was her spiritual résumé. Somebody had punched her very hard and recently. She was a floozy. The hand on the hip, the cock of the head, the insolence of the brown gaze. “Who’re you supposed to be?”

  I smiled at the way she’d said it. “Well, I’m supposed to be a doctor. That’s what my folks wanted. But it didn’t turn out that way. Who’re you supposed to be?”

  “If it’s any of your business, I’m supposed to be cutting hair at my sister’s beauty shop right now, but she’s such a bitch, I can’t stand to be around her. So what do you want?”

  “I’m looking for a man named Craig Donovan.”

  “Yeah? Why?”

  “I have a message for him.”

  “I’m beginning to think you’re a cop. I hate cops.”

  “Not a cop. Just a private citizen with a message.”

  The insolence was now anger. “You’re lucky he isn’t here. He’d punch your face in.”

  “The same way he punched yours in?”

  Her stubby fingers touched her eye. The wound was fresh enough that she winced. “He didn’t mean it.”

  “He mustn’t have meant it when he put those bruises on your arm and neck, either.”

  Her cheeks colored. “Maybe I had it coming. I got a little drunk and I was talking to this guy at the bar while Craig was in the john and—” Then: “Why the hell am I telling you anything? This isn’t any of your business. Now, get out of here before he comes back.”

  “Think he’ll kick you around a little more if he sees me here?”

  “It’d be worth it just to see him pound your face in. Now go.”

  Behind her the phone rang. She traipsed back to it. Her bottom had survived her years. Nice and tight. She picked up and said, “Well, I can’t fucking help it how busy you are. I’ve got the flu. I already told you that and I can’t come in.” Pause. “Well, what difference does it make if I’m sick in my apartment or sick over here?” Pause. “Well, you go right ahead and think I’m shacked up if you want. But I won’t be in until I feel better.”

  She slammed the phone down and came back. “My sister’s a real bitch. She runs this beauty parlor down the street. She treats me worse than any of her other beauticians. They have a day or two off, she don’t say anything. I take a few days off . . .”

  I had no doubt that she was an ideal employee. She had a good attitude and seemed easy to get along with.

  Behind her the TV crowd erupted. I wondered if the contestant had taken her advice and gone for it after all.

  “My name’s Dev Conrad. Tell him I work for Natalie Cooper and tell him that I’m staying at the Commodore Hotel.” I reached into the inside pocket of my suit coat and p
ulled out a loose card. “My cell phone number’s on there. Tell him to give me a call.”

  She snapped the card from my fingers and looked at it. Fear played in her eyes now. She swallowed hard. “When I give him this card he’s going to say that you came into the room and I let you do something to me.”

  “Grab your clothes. I’ll take you anywhere you want to go. I don’t want to see you get hit anymore.”

  “For your information, I’m in love with him. He told me he’d marry me.” She was beyond help again. “I’m not gonna spend my life working for my sister, that’s for sure.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Why?”

  “Just like to know who I’m talking to.”

  “Heather, if it’s any of your fucking business.”

  Somewhere in the ether the TV crowd had a collective orgasm.

  She stepped back into the dank darkness of the room and slammed the door.

  . . .

  I was used to spending time with women who lived in apartments or condos. Chicago women mostly. It had been a long time since I’d pulled into a driveway and walked up to a door. Inevitably I thought of high-school days and facing parents in order to drag off their daughters for love or something like it. Even in your forties those memories are vivid. Too many of them were like opening night in front of a hostile audience. I always had to writhe through small talk while trying to seem as harmless as possible. Yes, sir, I promise to get your daughter home at nine-thirty, and with her virginity still intact.

  At least Jane didn’t have a father on the premises. She opened the door in a rush of smiles and perfume and a small hand that squeezed one of mine. She wore a black wrap dress that emphasized her slender hips and small but most intriguing breasts. Her red beaded necklace matched the color of her lipstick. “This is exciting. A real date.”

  Behind her in the vestibule two mutt cats—one golden tom and one black-and-white female—stood primly watching us. She turned to them and said, “Now you’ve got plenty of food and water. And I’ve left the TV on for you in the family room. I’ll see you later.”