Elimination

by Ed Gorman

  ‘Was Denny along?’

  ‘Yes. But he got away. Showalter said that they needed to lay low for a while. One day Denny asked him about the money and the compound. Denny was pretty sharp about most things but he hadn’t figured out that Showalter was a con artist. Until that day. Showalter planted some of the robbery money in his apartment and then claimed that he’d confronted Denny about it and Denny had drawn his weapon. Showalter didn’t have any choice but to kill him. That was the story he gave, anyway. It made the national news, then he got invited to this big police convention. I guess the speech he gave about dishonest cops was pretty good stuff. He even got interviewed on 60 Minutes.’

  ‘How did you learn about all this?’

  ‘Denny told Don about it a few days before he was killed. Don said Denny didn’t regret anything – not about the racist group or robbing banks, not even the bank teller who’d been shot pretty badly by one of the other men. He just wanted Don to know the truth. He said if he was killed it would be by Showalter. Don had to figure out some of it by himself after Denny died, but I’m sure he was right.’

  ‘So what did Don do?’

  ‘Went to the DA. But the DA said that given Denny’s history and the fact that the only person making these claims was Denny’s father …’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You think Showalter’s running the same scam here?’

  ‘Maybe if we can ever find that recorder we’ll know for sure. But my guess would be yes. Dave Fletcher was perfect for him. He wanted somebody to follow, to believe in. Showalter knows how to play the role. But he didn’t bet on Dave making a recording.’

  My eyes shifted to Wade across the way. He had been watching us then quickly looked away.

  ‘Now do I get to know about Grimes?’

  I smiled. ‘Yeah, what the hell.’

  I spent a few minutes bringing her up to date: how Cindy had called me, how Grimes had scoped me out and how he claimed at first that he’d suffered a head wound for no apparent reason. And then he’d told me more about Dave Fletcher and the recorder.

  The food was good and we relaxed enough to talk about our lives. I probably told a few more stories about my daughter Sarah than I needed to and she probably told a few more tales about her twice-married and very glamorous sister, but I liked her and I sensed she liked me. And I was touched by her relationship with her stepfather. Nailing Showalter was a holy quest for her; she managed not to sound deranged about it. The few people I’d known who were shaping their lives around vengeance had sometimes turned out to be as dangerous as the people they were chasing. But it was pretty difficult to argue with her. Not all dirty cops are menaces to the society they pretend to serve. They’re dishonorable, but taking a few bucks here and there is just the kind of capitalism Wall Street practices. Unfortunately Showalter was the worst kind of cop and needed to be brought down.

  ‘I’d like to talk to Grimes again. Want to come along?’

  ‘What about my friend Wade over there? He’ll follow me.’

  ‘Yeah. But I know a way to shake him.’

  Leaning on my army days again, I told her how my first boss, a colonel, had outlined a way to lose a tail. You needed yourself and a cohort to do it.

  ‘Pretty slick, Dev. As long as Wade doesn’t figure it out.’

  ‘Worth a try.’

  ‘You know something?’ Karen said. ‘I’ve really enjoyed this, thanks.’

  THIRTY

  The trick was simple enough.

  As we were leaving the restaurant, we agreed on a meeting point, a pharmacy in a strip mall near the constituency office. I’d been in there once and knew that there was an alley behind it.

  I got there a few minutes before she did and pulled up next to the back door of the place. It didn’t take long. She came hurrying out the door and climbed into the car, leaving Wade sitting across the street from the front of the pharmacy, waiting for her.

  Grimes’s house was once again dark.

  A full moon outlined it, doing it no favors.

  Even bathed in gold the stark shambles were as ugly as ever. Urban gothic. His Ford was not out front.

  We agreed that she’d knock on the front door while I walked around back.

  The Ford wasn’t parked on the narrow patch of gravel in back, either.

  The neighborhood was quiet. No teenagers driving up and down. No music shaking the stars. No shouts from arguing couples. Her knocks were sharp as gunshots.

  A tomcat on the grass behind me got all operatic for half a minute and the smell of an overflowing garbage can made me wince.

  The back door was unlocked so it was at this point that I brought out my Glock. Grimes’s religion was paranoia. There was no way he would have left the back door unlocked.

  I walked to the front door and let Karen in. Even in the shadows I could see that her Glock was also drawn.

  I remembered the American flag table lamp on the end table next to the couch.

  I called out, ‘Grimes? It’s Dev Conrad.’

  I started checking the house out room by room. None of them gave any indication that there had been trouble. No blood. Nothing knocked over or smashed.

  Each room was a museum. The huge TV console with the ten-inch screen in the spare room. The record albums in the living room by Stevie Wonder and Derek and the Dominos and Fleetwood Mac. The closet with two tie-dyed shirts and a pair of red-and-blue-whirled bell bottoms.

  The basement smelled from age and disrepair. The floor and the walls were wet and moisture had seeped into the stacks of magazines and newspapers that marked him as a hoarder of some kind.

  When we got back upstairs the phone shrieked in the silence. I walked over to it and picked up.

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Dev Conrad, Cindy.’

  ‘Oh – oh, God, Dev. I didn’t recognize your voice and it scared me. How come Granddad didn’t answer?’

  ‘He’s not here.’

  She needed to prepare herself for what she said next. ‘He has Dave’s recorder. He told me that tonight on the phone. Dave gave it to him because he was scared to keep it himself. And this is how crazy he is now. He said he’s going to sell it to Showalter. He said it’s his turn to have some money.’ Finally, she was able to say, shakily, ‘I told him not to do it.’

  ‘Showalter will kill him.’

  ‘I told him the same thing. But he said he’d made a deal with them. They were going to pay him a hundred thousand dollars for it and once he got the cash he would tell them where to find it. He wouldn’t listen to me. You know how stubborn he is.’

  ‘I’ll do my best to find him before it’s too late, Cindy. I’ll call you later.’

  After I hung up, Karen said, ‘I could hear pretty much everything. I could almost feel sorry for him. But greed’s making him stupid.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘imagine that. Greed making somebody stupid.’

  Then we got out of there.

  THIRTY-ONE

  ‘Be weird if somebody killed her tonight.’

  I suppose at most other times he would have irritated, if not enraged me. A woman is shot at and you show up to see if maybe tonight the shooter will return and get lucky.

  But most people there were thinking that. Most, being decent prairie people, were hoping that wouldn’t be the case. They worried about it.

  I couldn’t judge this man’s intentions for saying that. Certainly there were some at the rally who wouldn’t have minded seeing it happen. They’d turned out to boo and ridicule her. They’d come to support Dorsey. Others just wanted some excitement, the kind you could talk about to your grandkids. Oh, yes, kids, I was there the night that congresswoman got killed. Two shots. One in the head and one in the chest. Never forget anything like that no matter how old you get.

  So all I said was, ‘Yeah, but the odds are against it.’

  Something in my tone must have alerted him to my disapproval of what he’d said.

  ‘
Hey, I don’t want to see it. I’m just saying.’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  He was a young husband – not even thirty, probably. Bears cap and sad start on a goatee, standing next to an even younger wife. Her holding the blue-blanketed infant, a four- or five-year-old girl clinging to him.

  I nodded and moved away.

  He’d had no idea who I was but we live in the land of paranoia. In the case that Jess actually was assassinated he’d probably feel guilty. And if he didn’t, his wife would remind him of his words and then he’d be obliged to at least fake feeling guilty. When he’d spoken his wife had frowned and hugged her infant even tighter.

  It was colder than I would have liked. I’d been hoping for five, six hundred people. We’d gotten four at most. Thirty-five degrees is a little chilly for many people.

  The setting was a large city park with a bandstand. When Jess appeared that was where she’d be when she addressed the crowd.

  I counted eighteen uniforms from three different groups. Local, state and a security firm Ted had personally hired. They split up, checking out the crowd, the wooded area and the area near the parking lot. A lean, mean man in a tan uniform and a heavy vest stood on the bandstand, carefully surveying the crowd and the wooded area to the left. Though the AK-47 was the weapon of choice these days, his was an M-16. A bit old-fashioned, but God help you if you ever caught a bullet from one.

  There were fifteen minutes to go before Jess appeared.

  A nice-looking young black TV reporter and her heavyset white cameraman knew who I was and trapped me between a wedge of crowd and the left side of the bandstand.

  ‘Susan Harrison, Channel 4, Mr Conrad.’

  I knew who she was. She’d been assigned to Jess since the staged shooting scenario had surfaced. She was one of those reporters who was a master at sounding friendly and accusatory at the same time. There’s a special place in hell for these people.

  With the camera rolling, she said, ‘Everybody’s asking if the congresswoman is nervous about coming here tonight. Who would know better than her campaign manager, Dev Conrad?’

  ‘We’re all a little on edge, Susan. I think that’s only natural.’

  ‘Some people say she has nothing to be nervous about if the shooting the other night was staged.’

  ‘Well, some people think the earth is flat. That theory has yet to be proved.’

  ‘One of your volunteers has been arrested for staging it.’

  ‘He’s been arrested but that doesn’t mean he’s done it.’

  ‘Are you saying he’s innocent?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I’m saying.’

  She couldn’t keep the pleasure out of her appealing gaze. She’d gotten exactly the kind of sound bite that would play well at ten o’clock. She’d forced the campaign on the defensive. When you did that you always made the target sound guilty.

  ‘Well, I join everybody here and at home, Mr Conrad, in hoping that there are no problems for the congresswoman tonight and that everything goes smoothly, whether the other night was staged or not.’

  If I’d known where her car was I would have torched it.

  For the past twenty minutes Abby had been working the crowd, trying to get them to volunteer for knocking on doors and working the phones at campaign headquarters. She wore a cheery red coat, cut quite fine, and looked damned appealing in it.

  Now she stood next to me, the carnal scent of her perfume mixing with the silver of her breath.

  ‘Well, if they actually come through, I got eight phone people and nine door knockers.’

  ‘I’d say that’s a very good night.’

  ‘If they come through. That’s always the problem.’

  The brass band came from nowhere. Six older gents in heavy winter jackets and straw hats climbed the bandstand steps and played a Dixieland piece that cleaned your ears. The noise and the cold brought back memories of high-school football games on Friday nights. Ever the athlete, I sat in the stands and smoked Winstons. The music was welcome, giving the freezing crowd new energy.

  I heard sudden noise behind me. A small caravan had pulled into the parking lot. Jess had arrived, escorted by three police cars with flashing red lights painting the surroundings.

  The officers brought her to the bandstand in a formal way the other side would make fun of. She was lost inside six bear-sized police officers. They marched her to the bandstand and up the steps. The lean, mean sharpshooter with the M-16 managed to look even leaner and meaner.

  A man was testing the stand-up microphone. It screeched a few times but the sound was mostly lost in the music of the brass band.

  Jess waved and smiled. She wore a severely tailored dark blue coat. She always worried about looking too good – as did every campaign runner she’d ever had – so tonight she’d gone easy on the makeup. The face was a little wan and the dark lines under the eyes suggested concern. I wondered if they were real or if Ted had convinced his makeup person to put them on. Whichever, they were a nice touch.

  Now both the band and the applause battled the air for dominance.

  I saw the cheeks of women and a few men that glistened with tears.

  I saw hands holding up the kind of lighted candles people use at rock concerts.

  I saw a huge sign unfurl that read: JESS BRADSHAW FOR PRESIDENT!

  She modestly waved for all the celebrating to stop. And then she began.

  She did not play to the other night at first. She relied on a version of her stump speech. The issues we faced, the way she wanted to help lead the country, the terrible ways Dorsey wanted to change America. It was her version of a State of the Union address and like that increasingly hollow speech it was contrived for audience participation. Every fourth line got applause. The newsbites would show the genuine enthusiasm she inspired. Not that there weren’t a few boos from a small group at the back. A new sign had appeared in their midst: WE WANT OUR COUNTRY BACK, BRADSHAW. At least they weren’t waving any guns. Small mercies in this era of a Supreme Court bent on turning us into Beirut.

  The sudden silence from Jess certainly got everybody’s attention. She spent a few seconds shifting positions slightly, then turned her head so she could clear her throat.

  ‘I’m sure you’ve been waiting for me to speak to the accusation that the shots fired at me the other night were part of some conspiracy to win this election. I think that those of you who’ve followed my time in the State House and later in the United States Congress trust me enough to know that I would never under any circumstances be part of anything so deceitful. I know I’m in a tough race – the toughest of my career as a public servant.’

  The applause was loud enough to sway trees and crack windows.

  But she waved it down. ‘I really appreciate your support and faith in me. But this is difficult – painful – for me to talk about, so I’d really appreciate it if you’d just let me finish.’

  She paused once again.

  ‘One of my volunteers has been arrested for setting up the shooting. The police claim that they found the rifle in the trunk of his car. I don’t know Cory Tucker well but the people in my campaign who do assure me that he’s a very intelligent, honest, hardworking young man who’d never do anything like this.

  ‘The important word in what I just said is “intelligent.” If you were to fake a shooting like this you would have to be very stupid to think you’d get away with it. Law enforcement would see through it pretty quickly, and they have.’

  These would be, as she’d told me when I suggested admitting that the assassination attempt had been, in fact, contrived, the most difficult words to speak. Wouldn’t admitting that the incident had been a fraud simply sound like a confession?

  ‘What I’m saying is that somebody did stage this assassination attempt and staged it in such a way that it would clearly be exposed as a fake – and then planted the rifle in Cory Tucker’s trunk so it would appear that we concocted the whole thing ourselves.’

  This time she
did not try to stop the applause.

  I knew how afraid she was now. I was anxious myself. Those who’d doubted us would cry that we’d come up with this pathetic spy-novel conspiracy story to save ourselves now that everybody knew we were liars. Dorsey would use Showalter to discredit Jess’s words and I doubted that more than one or two on the task force would speak up on her behalf. But I’d also suggested one more thing to say.

  ‘I’m asking the United States Justice Department to launch an investigation into this attempt to destroy not only my campaign but the life of a very decent young man who is now in great jeopardy.’

  She didn’t try to stanch the applause this time either. The boos and shouts were correspondingly louder as well.

  Admitting that the assassination attempt had been staged and then calling for a federal investigation to be launched at least demonstrated to our admirers and our detractors that we were eager to fight back.

  It was just then that two gunshots cracked through the air. Shouts. Screams. Two state policemen grabbed Jess and rushed her down the stairs.

  Some in the crowd were frozen in place. Some gaped and moved around. Some sobbed and grabbed their loved ones. Some rushed to their cars.

  They hadn’t been gunshots, of course. They’d been the kind of firecrackers designed to scare folks into believing they were gunshots.

  A state officer was now reassuring the crowd that the congresswoman was safe, number one, and, number two, that somebody who would soon be found had set off two firecrackers.

  As a matter of fact, another state man dragging a skinny man in a dirty white shirt way too thin for the temperature appeared and basically flung the man into the arms of another state man. Out came the cuffs and a violent shove in the direction of the state police cars.

  Now that I could see him in some detail he resembled a poster icon for meth addicts. Even from a distance I could see that the cheeks had caved in and that the eyes had the zombie look that could frighten even old pros. He was screaming: ‘I was just foolin’ around! I was just foolin’ around!’

  A half-ass DA could make the case that he had endangered lives in several ways, not least by risking the health of the elderly present tonight. People with heart problems could suffer an attack or even death.