by Stuart Woods
I am sure you know that I refer to the black woman with whom you have enjoyed a carnal relationship for more than twenty years, and who has borne you two sons. I am prepared, if necessary, to have her name and address released to the yellowest of the media, along with the names and university addresses of her children. They will all look fine on television.
If you can keep me happy, then I’m sure you can live out your tenure in the Senate and the remainder of your life, secure in the secrecy with which you have so carefully acted these many years. I should tell you, however, that although I would prefer not to muddy the clear waters of your life, it would not cause me the slightest regret to do so. In fact, if I should choose to confide in a certain magazine publisher, I might walk away with a million dollars, which, at my time of life, I could certainly use.
Trusting that you understand me clearly, I remain
Yours most sincerely
Jonah
Senator Wallace knocked back the jigger of bourbon, then spoke aloud a string of very bad words. He had not lived this long and done this well to be brought down by a common blackmailer. He had to acknowledge to himself, however, that he, by his love of this dark woman, had made himself highly black-mailable. He had known, of course, that it would all come out eventually, but he had planned to be comfortably dead by that time, and the hell with the aftermath. He knew very well that his wife would immediately and noisily divorce him if she should learn of his liaison, and, since their marriage, he had depended upon her large fortune to keep him in the style to which he had long ago become accustomed. He was not about to give that up, so he had to move fast.
First, he dialed the private office number of the syndicated conservative political columnist Hogan Parks.
“Yeah?”
“You know who this is?”
“Sure. How are you?”
“Mildly agitated,” Wallace replied.
“About what?”
“Have you used the information I gave you?”
“I’m writing the column as we speak.”
“Stop writing it.”
“What’s the matter, Freddie? Getting cold feet?”
“Goddammit, don’t you use my name on the telephone!”
“Sorry about that; what’s got into you?”
Wallace was not about to give an honest answer to that question. “It has come to my attention that I may have been misled.”
“What? You would give me that kind of information when it might not be true?”
At the time, I believed it to be entirely true; now I’m not quite so sure.”
“Even after his performance at dinner the other evening?”
“I may have misinterpreted that.”
There was a moment’s silence, then Parks spoke. “I think I’m inclined to write the column anyway.”
“You can’t do that,” Wallace said.
“I think I might enjoy the fuss it will make,” Parks said. “I don’t have to use his name, or even identify his exact illness. Enough people in this town can connect the dots. And when it comes out that a certain other person had knowledge of the illness, it could change a very important outcome.”
“Let me be very clear about this, Hogan,” Wallace said. “If you run so much as a hint of this story before I say so, then by this time next week, you will no longer have a column. You will, in fact, have become the Matt Drudge of print journalism, with all the accolades that such a position enjoys. Do you understand me?”
“I believe I understand that you are threatening me,” Parks replied coldly.
“Then you understand me very well,” Wallace said. “You may consider what I have said a promise, as well as a threat. And I have the means with which to deliver on that promise. You know that, don’t you?”
“You would do that to me?”
“Only if you insist on doing it to yourself.”
“One mistake,” Parks muttered, half to himself. “One mistake in a lifetime.”
“That’s all it takes, my friend,” Wallace said, and hung up.
Wallace took a telephone book from a table drawer, looked up the private office number of a deputy director of the FBI, and dialed.
“Yes?”
“This is Freddie Wallace.”
“Good morning, Senator; what can I do for you?”
“You can send an agent over to my hideaway office to collect a document. I want it analyzed immediately, in every possible way; I want to know who wrote it and where it came from.”
“I’ll have a man there in under half an hour.”
“Thank you, and no official record is to be kept of this work, do you understand?”
“Completely, Senator.”
Wallace hung up, took a razor blade from a drawer, and excised all references to his name and his black paramour, then dropped the remainder of the letter and its envelope into a larger envelope.
He flicked his cigar lighter, touched the flame to the excised paper, and watched it crumble in his ashtray. Then he stirred the ashes with a pencil until they were powder.
Near the end of the day, back in his hideaway office, Wallace received a phone call from his FBI contact.
“Senator,” the man said, “I have carried out your instructions with regard to the document you sent me.”
“And what have you found?”
The letter was typed by an expert typist on an Olympia Reporter portable typewriter manufactured between 1956 and 1971. It is the sort of machine that was popular with journalists in the field, before the advent of laptop computers. Analysis of the signature, Jonah, indicates that it was signed by a male of sixty years of age or older, and the syntax and use of the language indicates a seventy percent probability that the writer was Caucasian and well educated. There were no fingerprints on either the letter or the envelope, except yours. No DNA residue was found on the envelope flap, so it was moistened without licking. There is, however, DNA residue on the stamp, indicating to us that the letter was stamped and mailed by a person different from the writer. It was mailed from a sub–post office on the west side of Atlanta, near a residential area popular with employees of the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. Finally, the paper on which the letter was written meets the specifications and bears the watermark of stationery purchased in large quantities by the federal government for use by many branches, including the prison service.
“Our conclusions, therefore, are that the letter was written by an employee or a prisoner at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary on a personal typewriter, and that the letter was entrusted for mailing to a guard or other employee, who removed it from the prison, bought a stamp, and mailed it.”
“Excellent,” Wallace said.
“If you like, we can extend our investigation to the prison, and I believe that, within a period of ten days to two weeks, we could identify the mailer and then learn from him the identity of the writer. However, I should tell you that, should we initiate such an investigation, this would involve the Atlanta office and would have to become an official matter. We deduce from the composition of the letter that it is extorsive in nature, and we noticed, of course, that a portion of the letter, probably including the extortion, has been excised. We would need your comments on the record about that.”
“I don’t believe any further investigation is warranted,” Wallace said, “and I would like you to return to me immediately the original and any copies of the letter.”
“Of course, Senator, and you may rely on our discretion. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
Yes, would you get me a list of the names of all prisoners and employees at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. I’d like it delivered by hand to the address on the envelope by nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”
“Of course, Senator.”
Wallace said good-bye and hung up. He would see whom, among the inhabitants of that prison, he had met on a number of occasions, always in passing.
31
Zeke Tennant read the syndicated column in
the Las Vegas newspaper with interest. He had been waiting for his pigeon to come west.
Senator Will Lee, in spite of being well behind front-runner George Kiel for the Democratic nomination, continues to drive his staff nuts by doing quixotic things like his appearance in Santa Fe, New Mexico, this weekend, at a fund-raiser in Santa Fe’s main plaza for his friend, Congressman Roberto Chavez. Although it has been pointed out to him that New Mexico has only five electoral votes, and that his time could be better spent in more thickly populated states, he has insisted on going to the aid of Chavez, who is in a tight race against a right-wing Republican and whose support may be eroded by the presence of a Green Party candidate on the ballot. In past elections, the Green Party candidate has siphoned off Democratic votes, throwing elections to the Republicans.
Questioned on his campaign plane about this trip, Senator Lee said, “Roberto Chavez is a top-notch congressman, and the nation can ill afford to lose him. He’s also my friend, and it is personally important to me to see him reelected.”
Santa Fe looked good to Zeke; he could drive there overnight and be there in plenty of time for the political rally. He thought Santa Fe and its Plaza might afford a good opportunity for a kill. He continued reading the column and was very interested in what it had to say.
In an hour-long chat with this reporter and others on his campaign plane, Senator Lee spoke at length about news reports concerning a case he handled as a lawyer some ten years ago, in his home state of Georgia. A prisoner on Georgia’s death row, Larry Eugene Moody, has appealed his conviction for murder on the grounds that his legal representation was incompetent. Senator Lee, quite naturally, took umbrage at this description of his legal skills. He explained to me how he came to be assigned to defend Moody, at the request of a local judge, who later refused to release him from the case.
“The judge called another lawyer and me into his chambers and explained that, because of the illness of the county prosecutor and a shortage of lawyers, he was asking one of us to act as prosecutor and the other as the defendant’s counsel. We agreed, reluctantly, and the judge flipped a coin to see who would do which job. Heads, I defended, tails the other lawyer did. It came up heads, and I found myself dragged into this case. Later I learned that the judge’s coin had heads on both sides.”
When we had stopped laughing, the senator told us of his hard work on the case and how he lost it in the end because his client had withheld information from him about a previous charge of rape that had not been prosecuted. When a defense witness inadvertently mentioned the earlier accusation, the prosecution was able to call the rape victim to the stand, and her testimony was pivotal in convicting Moody.
The senator from Georgia has also been accused of a liaison with an important defense witness, the defendant’s girlfriend, who is now well-known as the actress Charlene Joiner. Lee explained that there had been only one encounter, on a weekend late in the trial, after Ms. Joiner had testified, and at a time when she had become estranged from Mr. Moody. They were both unattached adults. He pointed out that Ms. Joiner had confirmed these details in a press conference after the trial ended.
Senator Lee’s staff have also been making this case all week, and their damage control seems to be working. The most recent polls have shown no drop in Lee’s support; indeed, he is up a point or two in most polls, at the expense of George Kiel, and there have been reports of worry among Kiel’s people. The Charlene Joiner connection seems to have had the effect of making Senator Lee more human, and the fact that she has become an important movie actress hasn’t hurt. She is nothing like the pathetic Paula Jones; she is talented, accomplished, and quite beautiful, seemingly without the aid of surgeons. Whatever his appetites, Will Lee certainly has better taste in paramours than Bill Clinton.
Zeke put down the paper, got out a suitcase, and started packing. He went into the master-bedroom closet, removed a panel, and took out a Czech sniper’s rifle, which broke down and went into an ordinary-looking briefcase. He hid the rifle’s silencer under the spare tire, since only that was illegal, and headed out of Las Vegas.
Zeke drove at the speed limit. Even though he was fully prepared for a stop by the police or highway patrol, with his driver’s license, credit cards, and other ID, he had no wish to invite attention. He had plenty of time; Will Lee’s political rally wasn’t for two more days. He looked out the window, enjoying the desert scenery. Zeke had been brought up in greener places, and the vistas of the Southwest were exotic to him. Half a mile ahead, a coyote ran across the road, carrying something in its mouth.
He got to Santa Fe at noon the following day and made his way to the Plaza, driving slowly around it, noting the Indian jewelry sellers displaying their wares on the sidewalk in front of the old Governor’s Palace. There was only one hotel directly on the square, La Fonda, which stood at the southeast corner. He used his cell phone to reserve a room, then parked in the ground-floor garage and checked in. He took a long nap and woke late in the afternoon, with the sun low in the sky. His room gave a partial view of the Plaza, not good enough to shoot from, but then he had no intention of firing from a room he had rented. He would have to do some exploring.
He shaved, showered, dressed, and, reading from a brochure, took an elevator to a roof restaurant on the east side of the hotel. There was an outdoor bar, and he took a seat, looking around him. The rooftop terrace was on the wrong side of the building for shooting, but above him was more roof. He ordered a margarita and strolled around the restaurant, looking for access to a higher area. At the back side of the hotel was a trellis planted with some sort of climbing plant. It went up a good twelve feet to what seemed to be the roof. It should do nicely.
Zeke went back to the bar and concentrated on finding a woman to pick up. After all, he had another twenty-four hours, and he had to do something with his time.
32
Freddie Wallace let himself into his hideaway office and found another envelope waiting for him, this one of the plain brown variety. He took it to his usual comfortable chair, poured himself his morning shot of bourbon, and opened the envelope.
Sir:
Enclosed please find the lists you requested of employees and inmates at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. Some corrections have been made, which makes the lists accurate as of yesterday. Please be assured of our discretion in this matter, and please let me know if you require further assistance.
The note was typed and not signed, but Freddie knew whom it was from. He switched on a reading lamp and, sipping his bourbon, began reading the list of employees. Somewhat to his surprise, he knew two of them—the warden, who had once testified at a hearing before a committee on which Freddie sat, and the captain of the guard, a former constituent who had once sought his help in obtaining employment in the federal prison system. He thought carefully about both men, then discarded them both as potential authors of the letter he had received. The warden would have had no motivation to write it, and the captain of the guard was in his debt.
Next, he turned to the list of prisoners, which was considerably longer than the list of employees. Freddie had a prodigious memory, and he recognized a number of the names as belonging to people whose cases had made the newspapers when they were tried. Finally, he was left with three candidates for Jonah: the first, Emilio Costas, was a real-estate developer whose backing turned out to have been from the Cali Cartel of Colombian drug lords and who had made a substantial contribution to Freddie’s last campaign for the Senate. The contribution had been returned when the man’s backers became known. The second was a lawyer who had actually worked in Freddie’s Senate office more than ten years before and who had been imprisoned for stealing from a government agency by whom he had subsequently been employed. The third was the notorious CIA mole and traitor Edward Rawls.
Freddie gave careful thought to each candidate. Certainly, Costas was capable of doing anything that might get him out of prison, but Freddie could not see how threatening a United States senator could
aid in that effort. The lawyer, he had known a great deal better than in passing, but Jonah’s description of their acquaintance could have been to simply throw Freddie off the scent. Still, he had helped the man, getting him transferred to Atlanta, to be near his family, and Freddie did not judge him aggressive enough to be the kind of threat in question, nor would he have had any reason to protect either the vice president or Will Lee.
Edward Rawls was another matter. He had, indeed, met Rawls in passing on a number of occasions—a dinner party at the home of a CIA official, when Rawls had testified before a Senate committee; at a White House diplomatic reception; and on at least two other such occasions that Freddie could recall. Freddie allowed his mind to range over the history and reputation of Edward Rawls, looking for nexuses. He found two, lodged in long-unused brain cells. Rawls had very likely known Joe Adams when Adams was in the Senate, serving on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He would also have known Will Lee, who was counsel to the same committee at the time. Most important, he recalled that Katharine Rule Lee had been the instrument of Rawls’s downfall in the CIA, but before that had occurred, he had been something of a mentor to Kate. They had known each other well. This was promising.
Now, Freddie thought about those relationships. What did Rawls have to gain from them? Well, from Joe Adams, nothing. Adams was out of Rawls’s reach, now, both politically and medically. Joe Adams might well not even remember who Rawls was. Will Lee, on the other hand, might be very useful indeed to Rawls. If Lee were elected president, a pardon of Rawls, his wife’s old friend, would be within his gift. So, Freddie reasoned, Rawls had every reason to protect Will Lee.
Freddie made his decision, and it was not a hard one. He switched on his computer, typed a short letter, printed it, and sealed it in an envelope. On the envelope, he wrote the name “Jonah,” then sealed it. Taking care not to leave a fingerprint on either letter or envelope, he dropped them into another, larger envelope. Consulting a large, computer-generated address book, he addressed the larger envelope to the captain of the guard at home, then he made a call to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.
