Stranglehold

by Ed Gorman

  Winnie had stepped aside as if afraid of violence.

  “Natalie, I could give a shit about your rules. I want to talk to Wyatt in the study, and I don’t want you in there with him. And I don’t want you listening at the door.”

  I moved so fast she had to back up. She made noises that were not exactly words. Finally she shouted, “Wyatt! I want you to call the police!”

  A few seconds later Byrnes appeared, walking fast. He wore a Western shirt and jeans. His feet were bare. Before he reached us he said, “What the hell’s going on?”

  “I want him arrested.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Natalie, what the hell are you talking about?” To me he said, “Why’re you here so early?”

  “Have you read the paper this morning or gone online?”

  “No, why?”

  “They’re moving on us. Right now they’re just talking about internal squabbling with our campaign. But obviously somebody in our camp is talking to this reporter. I’m pretty sure it’s going to get a lot worse.”

  “You bastard,” she said. “This is all your fault. You and Ben. I don’t know why I ever hired you. You’re the most incompetent people I’ve ever worked with.” She stabbed a finger in my direction. “You’re a fucking joke!”

  It was a good exit line. She whipped her train around her and stalked to the sweeping staircase. She had learned her Scarlett O’Hara well.

  Byrnes sighed and shook his head. “Well, you may as well come in. Natalie’s already going to have my head anyway. Winnie, would you bring us coffee in the study?”

  “Of course.”

  I followed him into the study. His bare feet slapped on the parquet floor. He was swearing under his breath the whole time.

  When we were inside, he walked over to one of the mullioned windows and opened it from the bottom. He pointed to a leather wing chair. I sat and watched him dig something out of his desk. I wasn’t sure what it was until he was standing next to the open window. He tamped a cigarette from a pack of Winstons. “My secret vice. I only smoke one when I’m really stressed. And this morning sure as shit qualifies. It’s going to be hell around here.” He stood by the window, exhaling into the fresh air. I half expected him to stick his head outside and smoke.

  He took seven or eight drags, inhaling each of them. Then he licked his thumb and forefinger and squeezed the flame out between them. “My father taught me that trick. Picked it up when he was a cowboy—a real one, not a pretend one like me.” He sounded bitter. He closed the window, locked it, and walked back to his desk.

  But he wasn’t done with the smoking ceremony yet. From a different drawer he pulled one of those small battery-powered fans. He turned it on. It sounded like the biggest horsefly that had ever lived. He went back to the window and began covering the entire area with swipes of the fan. Then he shut it off, brought it back to the desk, closed the drawer, and sat down.

  “She hasn’t caught me yet.” His smile was sour. He was a prisoner of her wealth and power like everybody else. The stranglehold.

  “I assume something bad has happened, Dev, or you wouldn’t be here so early.”

  “Craig Donovan paid me a visit last night.”

  “What did that bastard want?”

  “You mean aside from working on my head with brass knuckles?”

  “I want to kill that son of a bitch. He swaggers in here and makes his demands. You can see how much he’s enjoying himself. No matter how low Susan sank when she was running around, I don’t know how she ever hooked up with him. He’s a psychopath. I resented giving him a damned dime. But then it’s not my money. Natalie thought she could buy him off the one time and he wouldn’t come back for more.”

  “He’s already come back for more.”

  “What the hell’re you talking about?”

  “He wants double the amount. Another full payment.”

  “He’s crazy.”

  “He probably is. But right now that doesn’t matter. We have to figure out how to handle this.”

  I was surprised he didn’t go for another cigarette. His face tried to form an expression that contained both anger and misery. He just looked helpless. “Natalie’s going to hit the roof.”

  “The threat is he goes public. The trouble is that if you pay him twice he may ask for even more.”

  “Goddammit,” he said. “I always think of myself as a man of the world. I’ve been around the block more than a few times, Dev. I’ve even heard of people being shaken down like this. But they agreed to pay and they were left alone for a while. Donovan’s a wild man. Who the hell knows what he’s going to do?”

  “There’s always the chance he’s bluffing.”

  “You believe that’s the case?”

  “I don’t have any idea. He’s too unpredictable.”

  There wasn’t any doubt who was pounding on the door. There had been our quiet conversation and now there was a threatening thunder of assaults on the wood that was keeping her out.

  He shook his head. “It’s not locked, Natalie.”

  “I want to know exactly what you’re talking about. This is my house and my money being spent, and whether this bastard likes it or not I have the final say on this campaign.”

  So nice to see you, Natalie. Won’t you have a cup of coffee and sit down and chat for a while? You just have a way of brightening up a room.

  She charged up to Byrnes’s desk. “What the hell have you two been talking about?”

  “Darling, it would help if you’d calm down.”

  “This bastard forces his way in here at breakfast time and I don’t know what’s going on—in my own house? Now I want to hear everything you’ve said.”

  And with that she gathered her black train and went to sit in a leather wing chair identical to mine. I took pleasure in watching her try to get comfortable with her ridiculous train piled beneath her. She was angry with her train. If she got mad enough at it, she’d probably set it on fire.

  Byrnes sighed and said, “You won’t be happy to hear this, Natalie.”

  “And why should that make any difference? I haven’t been happy to hear anything since this man and his flunkies started bungling Susan’s campaign.”

  “This isn’t something they did, Natalie. This is—”

  I could almost see him drawing himself up to give her the bad news. “Craig Donovan physically attacked Dev last night and told him that he wanted a second payment in the same amount—and he wants it delivered by tonight.”

  Both Byrnes and I were ready to crouch into defensive positions because the blast would likely smash windows and toss furniture around. But it didn’t happen. We glanced at each other. It was a cartoon moment, when two characters stare at a stick of dynamite that burns down but doesn’t explode.

  She laughed. “Well, isn’t that just fucking ducky? So now Mr. Conrad here has managed to screw up the situation with Donovan, too.” The voice started to rise at the end. “And just why the hell did he come to you?”

  I lied. “I’m not sure.”

  “That doesn’t matter now. What matters is what we do next. Do we pay him again?”

  She put her head down, folded her hands in her lap, and began shaking her head back and forth. Without looking up she said, “If we weren’t so close to the election, I’d fire your ass and rip you up in public, which I plan to do whether we win or lose.” This was the old Natalie. She didn’t want to disappoint her fans. When her head came up she glared at Byrnes. “If you were any kind of a man, you’d punch him right in the face.”

  “Oh God, Nat,” Byrnes said. “C’mon. That kind of talk isn’t going to help anything.”

  “Oh? And just what kind of talk will help anything?”

  He started to push back from his desk. I had the same impulse he did. To get up and walk around, anything to break the tension.

  “Why don’t I fix you a brandy, Nat?” Byrnes said.

  “It’s eight o’clock in the goddamned morning, Wyatt. What are we, lushes?”
But her words lacked their usual fire. She sounded more miserable than angry. When she finally met my eyes, she said, “I want you out of here.”

  “All right.”

  “I’m going to fix it so you’ll have a hard time getting any kind of clients, Conrad—even city council ones. I’ll ruin you.” Then to Byrnes: “I thought you were going to get me a brandy? You don’t do anything else around here. Can’t you at least do that?”

  There was no point in saying good-bye. I was at the moment in crime movies of the forties when the detective always picks up his fedora and walks out. Except I didn’t have a fedora. I closed the door quietly.

  About halfway down the hall, just at the point where I could see the sunlight blaze through the vestibule window, Winnie appeared and slid her arm through mine. “I take it Natalie’s not happy.”

  “I don’t know how you stand it.”

  Her laugh was warm and bright. “Oh, Natalie’s all right. In her way she means well. She’s like most control freaks. They think they’re doing you a favor by having everything their own way. It’s for your own good—and they just don’t understand why you can’t understand that. I had an older sister who was like that, God rest her soul.”

  She opened the front door for me. The chill, brilliant day leapt at me. She looked back down the hall. “There are times when I actually feel sorry for her.”

  I smiled. “I guess I haven’t gotten to that point yet. And somehow I don’t think I ever will.”

  She touched my arm and laughed. “A lot of people say that, I’m afraid.” Then she was closing the door, sealing herself inside the tomb with the one and only Natalie Cooper.

  CHAPTER 16

  David Manning and Doris Kelly sat next to each other just inside the office headquarters. Given their expressions you’d think they were patients waiting on bad news from a doctor.

  Manning said, “We’re hiding out here, Dev.” Doris nodded. She was pale and nervous.

  “From what?”

  Before Manning could speak, Ben came back from his desk and said, “They got it after we did.”

  “Got what?”

  “Reporters,” Ben said. “Three of them were here for an hour. I had to practically push them out the door. Then they went over to the foundation.”

  “That’s why we came over here,” Manning said.

  From her desk, Kristin said, “Then they started in on me first.”

  “What the hell are we all talking about?” I said.

  “The son. Bobby,” Ben said. “Somehow they found out about Susan and her son.”

  So there you had it. The information hit my brain and my entire body tensed. The word was out and from here on in there was no way we could get ahead of this story. All we could do was defend ourselves, and when you defend yourself a good share of people assume you’re guilty. If we’d broken the story at a press conference that we had called, we could have spun it our way—a mother reunited with her son, sad and sorry that she’d had to give him up for adoption, but now they were together again. Duffy and the press would still have come after us, but at least we would have put a tender face on it before the savagery began.

  “I assume we don’t know who contacted the press.”

  “Not yet, Dev,” Ben said.

  Manning said, “We’ve got a lot of work to do at the foundation, but I don’t want to go back there. I don’t want to get trapped into saying the wrong thing.”

  “They even followed me to the bathroom,” Doris said. “I was half afraid the woman reporter was going to follow me inside.”

  “I suppose Duffy’ll be on TV right away. Gloating.”

  “He won’t have to be on TV, David,” I said. “The press’ll do all his work for him. He can stay above it. He gets to sit in the stands while we get ripped up in the arena.”

  “Who the hell knew about it?” Ben said. “Just a handful of people.”

  “Larson, that’s who I’m thinking of.” Kristin continued working on her computer as she talked. “That’s what he’s good at. He manages to find out things that other people never get to.”

  I was thinking of the woman I’d met at Craig Donovan’s. Another possibility. She knew about it. Donovan would have told her. Not unthinkable that he’d beaten her again and she’d decided to ruin his plan for blackmail.

  The first thing I had to concentrate on was preparing a presentation for the press. I had to find Susan and we had to work out a story. Then we had to find Bobby. Even though our heartwarming mother-and-son reunion spin was late, it had to be performed, anyway. We had to do our best to keep Susan in a sympathetic light. We would lose votes over this; the thing was to hold those losses to a minimum.

  “I need to talk to Susan,” I said. “What’s her schedule today?”

  “She doesn’t have anything until late this afternoon,” Kristin said.

  “Where is she now?”

  Kristin shrugged. “I don’t know, Dev.”

  I tried her cell phone number. No answer. “When was the last time anybody talked to her?”

  Manning said, “I managed to get her when the reporters started coming. I think she was out at Jane’s.”

  I grabbed a phone book from a nearby desk and searched for Jane’s number. I punched the digits in. Jane answered. “How’re you feeling?”

  “Pretty good. Jane, is Susan there?”

  The phone seemed to go dead. “Jane?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  “You just did answer it. I need to talk to her. I’m sorry about putting you in the middle, but she’s got to talk to me.”

  “We heard the news station. About Bobby.”

  “Please put her on.”

  “I’m not sure she’ll talk to you—or anybody, Dev.”

  “Try. Please. She’s a big girl. She’s got to face this.”

  “She’s scared.”

  “So are the rest of us.”

  “Damn,” she said. “Just a minute, Dev. I’ll do what I can.”

  When she finally came on the phone, Susan said, “I don’t think there’s anything I can do except resign. I’m just trying to get up the nerve to call a press conference and get it over with.”

  “We need to talk.”

  “I just told you I’ll need to resign.”

  Her words didn’t surprise me. I’d seen this happen to politicians before. There are those who hang on forever. Sure, I visited whorehouses every night for twenty years and took more than a million dollars in graft and have a fifteen-year-old girlfriend. But is that any reason to deprive my constituents of my brilliance? At the other extreme you find those who just get overwhelmed and decide they don’t have the strength they thought they had. They get tired, they get worn down, they get embarrassed, and they think, The hell with it. One painful press conference and they’ll slink off the stage. Susan was in that mode now.

  “Not before we talk. I need to know everything before we talk about resigning.”

  “This isn’t your decision; it’s mine.”

  “That’s true. But maybe I can help you make the right one.”

  “You really think we still have a chance?”

  “It’s possible to put a good face on this, Susan. If we think it through. You have a son. You’ve been reunited. You’re about to become a grandmother.”

  “I guess that’s why we pay you.” Her laugh was weary. “I got a chill when you said ‘grandmother.’ I could see how it might work. I love Bobby and I love Gwen.”

  “Good. I’ll see you in twenty minutes.”

  After I hung up, I saw them looking at me—Ben, Kristin, Manning, and Doris Kelly. Kristin was smiling. “You should write soap operas. You had me going there. I can really see how this could play at a press conference.”

  Doris Kelly said, “There was a lot more of that going on than anybody wanted to admit—giving children up for adoption when the mothers didn’t know what else to do. I don’t see where that would be such a big deal.”

  It wasn’t the forc
e of her idea that startled me; it was the fact that she’d expressed it. I’d never heard her really say anything before.

  “This is a long way from over,” Ben said.

  “I’m going out to see Susan. You’ve got my cell number if you need to talk to me.”

  “What do you want to tell the press for now?” Kristin said.

  “Tell them we’ll be announcing a press conference and until then we won’t have anything to say.”

  “That’s going to be some press conference,” Ben said.

  “It had better be, Ben. Or we’re all through.”

  All the way out to Jane’s I played a fantasy press conference in my mind. With Susan standing with Gwen and Bobby and presenting the whole thing as a happy story of reunion rather than any kind of scandal—and promises of being together from now on—we could create a reconciliation narrative that the press would go for. Interviews with Bobby about his growing-up years. Interviews with Gwen about what a fine man Bobby was and how the baby would bring them even closer together. David Manning would have to put in an appearance, too. Some camera time for all four of them, David, of course, delighted at this sudden surprise. I’d keep Natalie chained in a bunker somewhere. Duffy would keep going at us, but he’d have to be careful. These were no longer the days of The Scarlet Letter. These were the days of watching fame-driven nobodies giving blow jobs to other fame-driven nobodies right there on the family screen. They called them reality shows. Well, our show was G-rated compared to that kind of sleaze.

  Jane met me at the front door. Given her somber appearance, there should have been a black wreath on the door and I should have been bearing condolences.

  “Just go easy on her, Dev. She’s really confused right now. And very vulnerable. She’s a tough cookie and always has been. So seeing her this way is kind of scary.”

  I went inside. It seemed natural to pull her to me and give her a hug. It seemed even more natural to give her a kiss. She smelled good and tasted even better.

  There was a coat tree in the vestibule. She pulled down a blue goose-down vest. “I’m going to do some grocery shopping. She’s in the kitchen in the breakfast nook. She’s had way too much coffee, too. There’s plenty of caffeine-free diet Pepsi in there. Get her to drink that instead.”