Elimination

by Ed Gorman

  Or I should say I found Rose Mary amusing until I got the digital recorder back to my office after Showalter took his own life and Detective Wade went into the hospital with a serious wound between his shoulder and his heart, leaving me with the recorder overnight.

  I was still working in my office when the staff started trooping in with coffee and questions about the shootout at the church. Because I was exhausted I didn’t realize that their questions would be joined by dozens and dozens more when the press started questioning me during the next three days, right up to the night of the final debate.

  I had transferred the recording to my computer and gone to work on it. A good deal of it was Dave’s rambling about the ‘New America’ he and his cohorts were going to found. It was only toward the end that he spent a drunken, rambling eight minutes talking about Showalter and his group. The chief had indeed run his old scam. His group – and Dave named all the men involved – had robbed four banks for him out of state and turned the funds over to him for safekeeping. There was plenty on the tape to convict the cops who’d been in the group. His remorse for being part of the staged shooting came at the very end. And then he revealed who’d helped him with the staged shooting. I just sat there, stunned. At first I tried to reject the name on the tape, but why would Dave have lied? This was a name that would destroy a number of people. It was there that I went all Rose Mary Woods. I edited it out entirely and permanently.

  When Abby came in I told her about the recording and asked her to deliver the copy I’d made to Wade’s office. Then we devised between us how the contents of the recording, which had four references to the friendship between Showalter and Dorsey, would be leaked to the press in time for the debate tonight.

  Before I left the office I checked on the condition of both Karen Foster, who was conscious now, and Matt Wade, who had just talked to the press from his hospital bed. The mayor had been there and had referred to him as ‘Police Chief Wade’ several times.

  I hung out the DO NOT DISTURB sign and crashed for seven straight hours.

  The press was up for a lynching that night.

  They had tightened the noose but not dropped the trapdoor with Jess about the staged shooting. Frustrated that they hadn’t gotten a clean kill with her they were – God bless ’em – going to take out their fury on Dorsey.

  In between questions about the economy, pay for teachers, prayer in school, foreign policy and economic recovery, the four press representatives pounded him with inquisitional queries about his relationship with Showalter. Abby had leaked just the right allegations so it would be easy to assume that Showalter had been behind the fake shooting. Among many, many other high crimes.

  Dorsey stammered, sputtered, exploded and sweated. By the end of the debate he looked like he’d just run through a car wash. He would not shake hands with Jess afterward, at which time his handlers probably raced to the nearest bar. Not what you’d call a wise choice on Dorsey’s part.

  I had to wonder if he’d provide the press with a second suicide.

  The next night there were two stretch limos in front of Jess’s magnificent home.

  One belonged to our governor and the other to our senator. When I say ‘our,’ I mean our party.

  There was a six-piece band, bright, quick alcohol bearers to make sure your intake would set records, a male television personality from Chicago who had been famous when I was a kid, at least three unattached thirty-something women who took at least a vague shine to me because I, too, was unattached, and all our office staff.

  I gave up counting the number of toasts that were made when we sat around a mahogany table long enough to land a jet fighter on. Even Cory Tucker, sitting next to his very attractive girlfriend, made a toast. This was the pre-victory victory party, but after our campaign had been absolved of all suspicion in the staged shooting incident, plus Dorsey’s psycho performance last night, the only thing that could stop us from winning was if either Jess or Ted admitted to keeping small children caged in the basement.

  Just before the food came – catered seafood, chicken, pork and beef entrées, and damned good at that – Ted pinged his glass with his fork and stood up. Then he reached down and took Jess’s hand.

  To the assembled, he said, ‘Some of you may have heard the dirty rumor that the love of my life and I are getting a divorce. Speaking for both of us, I can tell you that’s a filthy lie!’

  There was applause, tears and more applause. They would return to their God-given right as a Washington power couple.

  I drank with Katherine, then with one of the unescorted women, then decided that if I could sneak out of here sober enough I could go back to my hotel room and call my daughter. And then I could get up with no hangover in the morning and spend three or four hours in Karen’s hospital room since she was conscious now.

  Mike Edelstein halted the band mid-tune to lead those sober enough to hoist their glasses in what had to be the hundredth toast. It was while I was supporting my glass in the air that I saw my person of interest slip out to the small patio. Hoping we’d be alone, I followed.

  The big prairie moon lent the patio a proper mood of melancholy. Just right for what I was about to say.

  ‘Oh, Dev. I didn’t hear you come out here.’

  ‘I just needed to talk to you a little bit.’

  He had good radar. That handsome Bradshaw face of his clenched and then he turned his back to me. Two hundred yards or so away from here you could see the river. It was moonlit and tranquil, and on the far shore you could see a few campfires despite the chill. ‘I guess you figured it out, huh?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He faced me again. ‘But the news makes it sound as if Showalter was behind it.’

  ‘That was my intention.’

  ‘But why? I’m the guilty one.’

  ‘I’m hoping you have a reason for doing it that’s so good I won’t feel guilty about covering for you.’

  ‘God, this is when I really need a drink.’

  ‘Don’t even joke about that, Joel.’ Given his history of alcoholism I was afraid he might be half-serious.

  ‘I wish I at least had a smoke.’ He folded his hands and stared down at them. He didn’t speak for a time.

  Far downriver, I could hear motorboats.

  ‘What did it was how they treated Katherine when she was sick. They let the public know about it because it was good press – the poor congresswoman and all that bullshit – but if it hadn’t been for Nan and me, Katherine would’ve been alone most of the time.’ He took his hands apart, then raised his head. ‘They just got worse and worse and worse over the years. With her, I mean. There’s no room for anybody but them. For Katherine’s sake I decided to take away the only thing that mattered to them.’

  ‘Her Congressional seat.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You hired Dave Fletcher to do the fake shooting, knowing that the press would know it was a fake almost immediately.’

  ‘And she’d lose. And both Jess and my dear brother wouldn’t be the superstars they think they are. God, what a word. “Superstars.” It almost gags me to say it. But that’s how they look at themselves.’

  ‘A lot of them do.’

  ‘“A lot of them?”’

  ‘Politicians. And it’s both sides of the aisle. They become megalomaniacs.’

  The smile was bleak. ‘I guess you’d know. You’ve worked with enough of them.’

  ‘As long as they generally vote the right way. That’s all I ask for. As people – well, you can go into a factory or supermarket and pick twenty people at random and you’ll find twenty better people than you’ll find at random in Congress.’

  ‘Hey, there you are!’

  Ted was drunk. His champagne glass was held at a sixty-degree angle.

  ‘We’re sort of talking here, Ted,’ I said.

  ‘Well, fucking excuse me. You’re such a fucking superior being you forget I write your check every month.’

  ‘Actually, Jess does,
Ted,’ Joel said.

  I could not have predicted his reaction. The arrogant, drunken, angry Ted Bradshaw said: ‘We’re supposed to be brothers. Why would you say something like that to me?’ He teetered as he said this and champagne ran from his tilted glass like a rich boy’s piss. I thought he was going to cry.

  ‘You say stuff like that all the time to me, Ted.’

  But then Jess was in the doorway, saying, ‘C’mon Ted, the governor and his wife want to say goodbye to us.’

  She wisely a) took his glass from his hand, b) pushed her arm through his and c) guided him into the still-going-strong party.

  Joel offered a slight smile and shook his head. ‘What a couple.’

  ‘Thank God Katherine has always had you.’

  ‘She had me when I was sober, anyway.’ He was beating himself up. Then, ‘And speaking of sober, this is the kind of thing I never admitted to anybody even when I was drunk, but I’m going to tell you, Dev. And I’m going to trust that you’ll never tell anybody else.’

  He hit somebody with his car when he was drunk. He had been embezzling campaign funds. He was gay. He’d taken a couple of drinks tonight despite telling me he was sober. What the hell was he going to tell me?

  ‘Katherine’s actually my daughter.’

  I had to quickly survey all the words in the English language so I’d know what to say. I didn’t want to sound shocked because that might hurt his feelings. And I didn’t want to sound judgmental in any way because he’d been her real father all along.

  ‘I’m not quite sure why, but that doesn’t surprise me.’

  ‘Ted was having one of his flings and Jess was having particular problems with this one so she showed up at my apartment in Georgetown. She was very drunk. And I was pretty drunk myself. It was one of those periods when I was trying to convince myself that I could handle having a few drinks. Anyway, we made love several times that night. Maybe there was a little bit of revenge in it for her but I think that at the time we were both just desperately needy people.

  ‘And two months later she called and said she was pregnant and that it couldn’t be Ted’s because he hadn’t touched her in a while.’

  ‘Ted never suspected?’

  ‘No. He gets sort of crazy when he’s having his relationships. As far as I know, he’s never suspected. He just assumed that he and Jess slept together during his fling and Katherine was the result.’

  ‘You ever going to tell her?’

  ‘I’m not sure she could handle it.’

  ‘Maybe what you’re saying is that you’re not sure your brother could handle it.’

  Then she was in the doorway – the fragile beauty and the elegant wan presence of her, his daughter, Katherine.

  ‘The band’s going to play a slow song, Uncle Joel. You still owe me a dance.’

  ‘You didn’t think I was going to forget, did you?’

  ‘No, but I know how much fun it is to talk to Dev. You never want to leave.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘I’m sending you a check for that one, Katherine.’

  She laughed and held out her slender arm. ‘C’mon now, Uncle Joel. Before the song ends.’

  ‘I’m a lucky man,’ Joel said as he went to her.

  ‘And she,’ I said, ‘is a lucky woman.’

  FORTY-FOUR

  We won the election by six points.

  During the course of the real victory party two weeks later I found out that Katherine was going to work as Joel’s assistant, that Abby was on the verge of being engaged, that Mike Edelstein’s sudden biopsy for possible prostate cancer revealed that he was fine and that neither Jess nor Ted seemed dismayed in the slightest when I told them I was resigning.

  Wade got one of Showalter’s dirty cops to admit that Showalter and his buddy Dorsey saw an easy opportunity to take down Jess so they planted the rifle in Cory’s trunk. As for Cory, he told me he needed to take a break from politics. I gave him a thousand dollars of Jess’s campaign money to enjoy his break.

  ‘Truth be told, Dev,’ Ted said as we sat in his den, him playing the hard-nosed politician he was in his dreams, ‘I’ve been talking to a couple of firms and they think Jess needs a redo on some things.’

  ‘But if we get any calls for recommendations, Dev, there’ll be nothing but praise for you,’ Jess said.

  ‘Hell, not just praise, Dev. Super praise.’

  ‘Wow. Just plain old praise is hard enough to come by. But super praise—’

  ‘That’s Dev for you, honey. You try to pay him a compliment and he comes back with a cynical remark. We’re gonna miss that, Dev.’

  ‘We’re going to miss it a lot,’ Jess said.

  She’d made herself a stranger to me in the past few days. She was a clone that had programmed me out of her memory.

  Ted stood up. ‘Well, I’d say it was time for more champagne.’

  But it wasn’t, of course. Not with them anyway. Not with them.

  I got to the hospital in time to spend a full hour with Karen.

  She told me that the new Chief Wade had visited her and she’d explained how Showalter had chased her up into the hills and then piled into her car so she’d be driven into the ravine.

  Then we talked about what she was going to do in the future. I told her Chicago was a good place to be, especially since this campaign manager she’d said a few nice things about happened to live there, too.

  Then I showed her iPhone photos of some of the Chicago apartments I’d been looking at. I needed more space because you just couldn’t tell when somebody might want to move in with you.

  She smiled that smile of hers and said no, you really never could predict when somebody just might move in with you.

  I thought that it was awful nice of her to understand.