3 Strange Bedfellows

by Matt Witten

  Not that I was thinking about the state of my pants just then. I was staring into the eyes of Hack Sr. They gleamed angrily in the darkness.

  "Come here," he hissed, and pulled me out of the hallway. I was so stunned, I let myself be pulled.

  He led me into another hallway, in the opposite direction from where I'd come. Then he opened a door into a pitch black stairwell. I stopped dead. "Come here," he hissed again, louder this time now that we were far away from anyone who might hear us.

  This was getting way too cloak and dagger for my tastes. Speaking of daggers, did he have any weapons of destruction hidden away in that bulky jacket of his? "What do you want?" I asked tremulously.

  He shoved me into the stairwell, showing amazing strength for a sick old man. Thoroughly frightened by now, I was about to shove him back and haul ass out of there as fast as my running shoes could carry me. But then, without warning, he went into one of his patented coughing spasms. I'd have felt ridiculous shoving the guy. I felt ridiculous even being scared of him.

  At last the hacking receded to the point where he could talk again, or at least croak out words.

  "You're killing me," he gasped.

  I didn't know how to respond. Even with the stairwell door open, I couldn't see his face, just a shadow.

  After another few coughs, he was able to get out, "Why are you bothering her?"

  "Look, how about we go back and get you some water?"

  "Why?" he croaked again.

  "Sir, I'm trying to solve a murder here," I said.

  His voice was growing stronger. "Susan's got nothing to do with it!"

  "I need to find that out for myself."

  "The lady has been through hell. Her and the kid are all I got left." He poked my chest with his bony finger. "You fuck with her, you fuck with me."

  "I'm not fucking with anybody. I just have a couple of questions."

  "Like what?"

  Somehow it didn't feel polite to ask the man if his son was a wife beater. I didn't feel like discussing his son's sexual peccadilloes, either. So I said, "I really do need to ask Susan."

  He started coughing again. I finally remembered the mashed potato plate sticking to my pants. I reached down to get it off of me, but Hack Sr. suddenly grabbed hold of my arm.

  "I'm dying," he rasped.

  "I'm sorry to hear that," I said.

  "I got one month. Maybe two. You think I care about jail?"

  He was still gripping my arm as tight as he could, and it started to hurt. But I didn't want to complain about minor arm pain to someone who'd just told me he was dying.

  Hack Sr. himself wasn't burdened by any such concerns about social niceties, as his next words showed. "You bother Susan again," he wheezed, "so help me God, I'll shoot you. I'll blow your fucking brains out with my shotgun."

  It seemed to me he was being a tad overprotective, but I didn't argue. Then the old man let go of my arm, coughed some more, and walked away.

  After that cozy little tête-à-tête with Hack Sr., I somehow didn't feel up to tackling Susan just then. So I went back home to change my potatoed pants.

  There was a note for me on the kitchen table. "J, We went to Mom's house. Feel safer there. Join us, A." I crumpled up the note and threw it away, feeling guilty—not for the first time—about exposing my family to danger. Did I really have the right to do that?

  But no way could I just leave Will swinging in the wind.

  A ringing doorbell interrupted my ethical dilemma. Was it an annoying but harmless buzzard, or my favorite blonde bombshell dropping by for another go at seducing me, or a crazed killer? I grabbed one of the kids' baseball bats and went to the door.

  It turned out to be the blonde bombshell's husband. He didn't look like a crazed killer. He looked haggard and worn, his shoulders hunched up against the autumn breezes.

  How could I be feeling sorry for the all-powerful State Senate Majority Leader Ducky Medwick? Next to Alfonse D'Amato, Ducky was the New York politician I most loathed. But he was also a tired, wounded, cuckolded man. I opened the door and let him in.

  He gave me a nod and entered wordlessly, sitting down on the same sofa his wife had lounged in yesterday when she put the moves on me. Despite myself, a tingle went through my nether regions at the memory. Dogs.

  "Can I get you some coffee?" I asked.

  "Thanks," Ducky answered.

  "Be right back."

  When I returned a couple of minutes later with a cup of hot java, he was leaning back in the sofa, eyes closed. He didn't seem to hear me come in. Was he asleep? "Here's your coffee," I said nervously, far too loud.

  Without opening his eyes, or moving anything except his lips, Ducky asked, "Do you know how old I am?"

  I sat down. "No."

  "Sixty." The eyes slowly opened, but they had none of their usual vigor, just dull, aching pain. "I turned sixty last week."

  "You don't look it." It's true, he didn't. Right then he looked about ninety.

  "I'm dying," he said.

  Shit, not another terminally ill old man. But he quickly dispelled that misunderstanding. "Not right away. I'm not sick. But I can't do what I used to, you know what I mean?"

  He looked to me with mute appeal. But I didn't know what I was supposed to say, so I just nodded. He picked up his coffee, cradling the warm cup in his hands.

  "I never should've married her," he said to his coffee. "She was nineteen. I was forty-five. It was stupid." He put the cup back down and looked me in the eye. "Now we have two kids. I don't want them getting hurt."

  Why was everyone hitting me with this "don't hurt the kids" thing? I must look like a softie. "I don't want that, either," I said.

  He looked around the room as if noticing it for the first time. "Did someone really shoot at your house last night?"

  I froze at the memory. "Yes." I wanted to ask, Was it you? but refrained. For the moment.

  "And you honestly think they were trying to stop your investigation?"

  "I do."

  "But you're not stopping." It was a statement, not a question. "Phil Rogers called. The Saratoga chairman. He saw you at Susan Tamarack's rally today."

  "News travels fast."

  For the first time, a flash of Ducky's old fire leapt into his eyes. "Can't you get it through your thick skull that your friend Shmuckler killed Jack Tamarack? This shooting last night had nothing to do with Jack!"

  "Look—"

  "Because of your insane stubbornness, people will suffer. Innocent people!" Anger mixed with self-pity in his voice. "All I wanted was a simple divorce. 'Irreconcilable differences. The parties remain amicable.' Instead, the kids will have their mother's infidelities shouted out in every TV newscast! Everyone in the whole state will know about this! Everyone!"

  True enough. And now at last I understood Ducky's deepest fears. They had nothing to do with his kids. Ducky was scared of being publicly branded as a cuckold. He was imagining his colleagues and the media buzzards tittering about him in the cloakroom of the State Senate.

  I wasn't the only one who was worried about his shortcomings as a private dick. Power is perception, and if people began perceiving Ducky as half a man, his power was gone.

  Now, I'd be the last guy to get upset if Senator Ducky Medwick lost power. But unfortunately, I do have these unpleasant things called scruples. I'm not Larry Flynt, or even worse, Kenneth Starr. "Senator," I said, "I see no reason to go public with what I know, as long as I can be convinced that you didn't kill the Hack yourself."

  "Why in the world would I want to kill him?"

  "Well, obviously, because he was sleeping with your wife."

  Ducky snorted with disgust at my ignorance. "My wife never slept with Jack Tamarack."

  "Sure, she did."

  "Nonsense." His shoulders gave a shudder, then he said, "She was sleeping with Pierce."

  My own shoulders snapped back in surprise. "Pierce?"

  "Yeah, Pierce, the sonufabitch, my goddamn protégé." Now his w
ords tumbled out fast and furious, like he'd been damming them in for a long time. "I go to his office last week to take him out for a beer. His secretary sees me coming, says don't go in there, he's busy. I laugh her off. Hey, I'm Ducky Medwick, I don't wait for anybody, I don't even wait for Pataki. So I go in Pierce's office. Linda is fucking him on the desk."

  Ducky was so upset, his hands were shaking. Some of his coffee spilled onto the rug, but I didn't say anything. Ducky's story matched Linda's in every respect but one: the name of the guy she was shtupping. Kind of a key detail. So who was lying here… and why?

  Luckily for my rug, Ducky finally got himself more or less under control. "So that night I packed up and left home," he continued. "What the hell else do you want to know, goddammit?"

  "Look, I'm sorry."

  "Sure, you are. You'll be telling Ducky Medwick jokes just like all the rest of them."

  The expression "go fuck a duck" came unbidden into my mind. I shook it off and tried to think of my next move. Should I tell Ducky what his wife had told me? Or should I play that close to the vest?

  I decided to throw him a curveball while he was still off balance. "What was the Hack blackmailing you with?"

  He looked rattled at my sudden change of topic, then rolled his eyes. "Don't be an idiot. I told you last time—"

  "Look, you want me to protect your privacy? Then you better come clean on everything."

  "But there's nothing to come clean on here!"

  "If that's how you want to play it, fine. I'll just find out from Zzyp," I blustered.

  "Zzyp?" he said, acting puzzled, like he'd never heard the name before.

  And maybe he hadn't, I couldn't tell, but I kept hammering away. "You know exactly who I'm talking about. Zzypowski. I'll have to slip him a few grand for the info, which may kind of piss me off. I may get so pissed off, I'll decide to expose all your little scandals."

  Ducky threw up his hands. "If I knew what you were talking about, I'd tell you, I swear."

  "Cut the crap. Pierce was your protégé, you said so yourself. So why didn't you endorse him for Congress?"

  "Because—"

  "Because the Hack blackmailed you into endorsing him instead.”

  "You've got it all wrong—"

  "Don't give me this baloney—"

  "Will you just shut up and listen? Pierce refused to run!"

  I stared at Ducky. "But I thought—"

  "Yeah, everybody thought. See, at first he was running. But then when the Republican Committee met at the beginning of June, he told us behind closed doors at the last minute he was backing out. Asked us not to tell the media or anyone else. We tried to get him to run, or at least explain why he wasn't, but he said he had personal reasons."

  Personal reasons. Yeah, they were personal, all right. Finally everything was coming together.

  The Hack had used that photograph on Pierce, after all. That's how he forced Pierce to quit running.

  But now that the Hack had been killed, Pierce was free to do whatever he wanted.

  How convenient for him.

  10

  After Senator Ducky left, I called Will to give him the latest. He wasn't home, though. Instead I got a cheerful message: "You have reached the answering machine of Will Shmuckler on Saturday, September 11. I'm not home now, but you can find me at Crossgates Mall from four to five, the Latham Citizens Association monthly meeting from six-thirty to eight, and the Red Hook Town Council meeting after eight-thirty. Yes, folks, the Will Shmuckler for Congress Campaign is back on track. All on board!"

  It was good to hear Will sounding upbeat again. Evidently his campaign events were no longer being canceled. I guess people weren't so sure anymore that he was a murderer.

  Now if only I could convince the cops.

  First, though, I better do the Daddy thing for a while, and try to avoid family chaos. I followed Andrea and the kids to Grandma's house in Lake Luzerne. The road to Lake Luzerne is a winding, two-lane divided highway, and I was pretty confident that if someone were tailing me, I would have spotted him, even with my limited skills.

  Grandma's house overlooks a large pond in the middle of a thick spruce forest that totally blocks out any signs of human life. You can sit on Grandma's back porch, gaze down at the pond, and pretend you're living in the sixteenth century. Except for one jarring note. The back porch is where Grandma keeps her computer.

  The darn things are everywhere. Pretty soon they'll be attaching them to toilets, so you can log on to AOL while you're taking a Nixon.

  Grandma—a.k.a. Hannah—had just returned from six months of tramping through Asia. She bought herself a Gateway to keep in touch with her new foreign friends via e-mail. Now she and her grandchildren like to sit at the computer, send messages all over the world, and laugh at me for being so ignorant about the Technology Revolution. It's disconcerting—everyone understands computers better than I do.

  I can't help myself. I still miss Wite-Out. Remember that stuff? If you made a typo, you could just brush on Wite-Out, wait for it to dry, and then type right over it. I used to think Wite-Out was the coolest thing in the world. It had such a nice smell, too.

  But who am I to complain? Grandma's computer, and the expertise of my two boys and Grandma herself, enabled me to get Robert Pierce's phone number. I wish computers weren't so darn useful. It would be so much easier to truly hate them.

  After two hours of getting no answer at Pierce's house, I finally reached him at 11:30. I hit him with vague threats about "damaging information" that had "come into my possession."

  "What kind of 'damaging information'?" he asked, trying to sound sarcastic, but the tremor in his voice betrayed him.

  "I'll tell you all about it. At your house. In thirty minutes."

  "What? Tonight?"

  "Right. Midnight. And just so you know, I'm telling my wife and mother-in-law I'm going over there." Actually, Andrea and Hannah were already sleeping, but Pierce didn't have to know that.

  "Why are you telling them?" he asked.

  "In case you get the urge to kill me," I said, and hung up.

  So as you can see, the background for our late-night rendezvous wasn't all that congenial. The rendezvous itself was no better, though I must admit that listening to Pierce rant and rave at me was educational in a way. I had no idea there were so many synonyms for slimeball. My favorite was "scumsucking toad."

  Finally I had enough. I got up from his kitchen chair and said, "Okay, Pierce, if all you're gonna do is call me names and stonewall me, I'll just take this charming little photograph to the cops."

  "Go right ahead, you shit," he said. Evidently he'd run out of interesting epithets, and was going back to the tried and true. "That photo is meaningless."

  "Then why was the Hack hiding it?"

  "I got no idea. Look, you wanna know what's in that envelope Sarafian is giving me?"

  "I already do. Money."

  "One thousand bucks, that's all. It was a legitimate campaign contribution."

  Legitimate campaign contribution—the identical words that Sarafian used. Had they been on the phone together, polishing their story? Or is "legitimate campaign contribution" a phrase that all scumsucking-toad politicians use?

  "If it's so legit, why'd he pay you in cash?"

  Pierce made a big show of shrugging. "You don't believe me, call my secretary in the morning. She'll give you a copy of my campaign finance disclosure form. Sarafian is on it, for one grand."

  "What campaign was he giving you money for? You weren't running for anything then."

  "Some people like to contribute in advance."

  I took a couple of steps forward so I was standing over him. "Pierce, you're full of it. Sarafian was bribing you to oppose the Hudson River dredging."

  Pierce looked up at me and smirked. "Really? Says who?"

  "Okay, pal, answer me this. Why didn't you run for Congress until after the Hack was dead?"

  "Personal reasons."

  "Yeah, like the Hack
was riding your ass about this bribe."

  "Prove it."

  "You don't get it, you dumb prick," I said. "I don't have to prove it. Right now, with my house getting shot at, the media is hanging on every word I say. All I gotta do is drop a couple of choice words about you and Sarafian, and you drop a couple of dozen points in the polls. 'Congresswoman Tamarack'—has a nice ring to it, don't you think?"

  Suddenly Pierce slammed his fist on the kitchen table. "I wasn't bribed—and I wasn't blackmailed! My not running for Congress wasn't about that!"

  "Tell it to the newspapers."

  "For Christ's sake, I was fucking Ducky's wife!" Pierce exploded, the veins in his forehead throbbing. Then he grabbed a heavy crystal salt shaker off the table, reared back his arm, and aimed at my head.

  Oh God, I thought as I ducked, I hope he remembers about my wife and mother-in-law knowing where I am. But at the last moment he fired the salt shaker at the refrigerator instead. The salt shaker shattered, and the refrigerator got a huge dent.

  Well, better the refrigerator than my head.

  The sight of the ruined salt shaker seemed to calm Pierce down somewhat. "How could I look Ducky in the eye," he said through gritted teeth, "and ask him for an endorsement? The man had done everything in the world for me, and here I was screwing his wife!"

  So Pierce and Ducky were both claiming that Linda slept with Pierce. But then why was Linda's story different?

  "Pierce, don't try to play me," I said.

  "I'm not—"

  "Let's say you were sleeping with her. So what? You're still way too ambitious to let mere morality stand in the way of your career—"

  "Shut up. You just hate me because I'm gonna win the election against your pathetic friend. You don't know jack shit about me."

  "So educate me."

  "Look, I'm not the ambitious asshole you think I am. I'm a small-town guy," he said earnestly. If he weren't a politician, I might have thought he was being sincere. "My three kids live a couple of miles from here. Sure, being a congressman sounded good. But there's a State Senate seat opening up next year, and I was planning to run for that instead. That way I can stay near my kids. And I don't need to go through Ducky to run for the State Senate, it's a different process."