Oppo

by Tom Rosenstiel

  “Wade and Beverly had another child, Emily, six years younger than Wendy. The family lived upstairs from the bar. They mostly just got by.”

  Wiley looked up from her computer over her reading glasses: “Then there were deaths.”

  In 1980, when Upton was thirteen, her biological father died of cancer. Three years later Upton’s mother, Beverly, and stepfather, Wade, died in a car crash. Upton was sixteen. Her sister was ten. They were orphans without any other family.

  “The state wanted to put the kids into the system. The girls were both minors. There was no living family nearby. Wendy refused to let it happen. It was 1983, the summer after her sophomore year in high school. Wendy took the GED and passed, which gave her a high school diploma. Then she sued the state to treat her as an emancipated minor who could be responsible for her sister.”

  “Jesus,” Smolonsky said from his hotel room in Tucson.

  “There’s more,” said Wiley. “The state still wanted to put the little sister in the system, even after granting legal adulthood to Wendy. It argued that taking care of a ten-year-old sister while trying to run a business was too much for a sixteen-year-old to handle. Wendy rallied the folks in the neighborhood and the patrons at the tavern-restaurant to support her, including some regular who was a lawyer. The community got all its ducks in a row behind her. She got a lot of publicity. She sued the state a second time and won custody of her sister.”

  “How rich is the documentation?” Brooks asked.

  “Mostly sealed,” Wiley said. “But from age sixteen, Upton spent the next four years being a parent and local business owner.”

  “How does a kid own a bar?” asked Jonathan Robinson.

  “Someone held the liquor license for her so Upton could run the place until she was twenty-one.”

  When Upton turned twenty, Wiley explained, her sister was finally ready for high school. Wendy enrolled at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She commuted to school during the day, ran the business in the evening, and raised her sister at the same time.

  “And she graduated college in two years,” Wiley said.

  “Girl in a hurry to catch up,” said Robinson.

  “Right,” said Wiley. “About to turn twenty-three, she was a full-time parent and tavern owner and a new college graduate.”

  “At age twenty-three I was knee-deep in . . .” Smolonsky began.

  “Uh-huh,” Hallie Jobe cut him off. The minister’s daughter didn’t want to hear about the rest of Smolo’s extracurricular education. She nodded to Wiley to continue.

  “Upton joined ROTC in college, on top of everything else. When she graduated, her sister was halfway through high school. Upton enrolled in law school at the University of Arizona on the army’s dime.”

  “She was in law school, running the tavern business, and raising her kid sister in high school? What could go wrong?” said Arvid Lupsa, one of the two computer detectives.

  Brooks said to Smolonsky: “Walt, you’re going to look at the early years in Tucson—running the family business as a kid, then college and law school, even though chances are she’s being targeted for something she did later.”

  “On it,” said Smolonsky.

  “Two years after sister Emily graduated high school,” Wiley continued, “Wendy graduated law school. She was twenty-six. Basically, she had caught up. It was 1992.”

  Rena noticed the faces in the room were swept up in the story now. This was important to keep them going for what would likely be days without rest.

  “She owed the army time as an attorney,” Wiley said. “She went to work in the judge advocate general’s office. The younger sister, Emily, now twenty, took over managing the family business, the bar and the store.”

  “Wow,” Jonathan Robinson said, shaking his head.

  Hallie Jobe took over the narrative now: the military years.

  “Upton was a JAG attorney for the next six years, 1992 to 1998. A good one, apparently. Made her name prosecuting sexual harassment cases.”

  “Might have made enemies doing that,” Robinson suggested.

  That earned a stare from Jobe. Although she had reasons to be suspicious of American institutions—she was a black woman—she who also was a proud former marine and staunch defender of the military.

  “A lot of people in the military care about reform, too,” she said testily. “More than you’d get from the media.” She paused. Jobe didn’t like to show emotion, but she was tired. It had been a long night. “And it looks like Upton was a careful reformer. Her literature says ‘she worked within the system for responsible changes to the rules for handling sexual misconduct cases in the military.’”

  “Responsible changes? What does that mean?” Brooks asked.

  “It means she’s got a lot of military and ex-military voters in Arizona,” Conner said.

  Jobe was becoming more irritated by the liberals in the room. She thought Conner and Brooks didn’t understand how the military operated and the range of people inside it.

  Rena tried to keep them on track: “Check out if she made enemies from her sexual harassment work. Maybe some case she prosecuted turned someone to revenge.”

  Jobe nodded she understood.

  And Maureen Conner took up the description of the congressional years:

  “She did a rotation as military liaison to the U.S. Senate. It’s a yearlong gig. Upton was thirty-three years old. It was 1999. There she caught the eye of Furman Morgan, who at the end of her rotation encouraged her to leave the military and take a job on his staff.”

  There was a pregnant silence. Senator Furman Morgan, the now-retired senator from South Carolina, had been a legendary “ladies’ man” in his youth, as he would have been described back then.

  “This was an older Furman Morgan,” Conner said in response to the sardonic looks.

  In his dotage, which went on a good while, Morgan eased into becoming an even more effective senator, a champion of minority rights, a bipartisan colleague, and even a gifted recruiter of talented staff, particularly strong women. Yes, they were usually attractive. But Morgan had mellowed in his old age and become a revered figure. He had retired just last year at age eighty-eight, seemingly in full command of his faculties.

  “Then 9/11 happened,” Conner said. “Upton had been a staffer for a little over a year. Morgan persuaded his new star aide to go back to Arizona and run for office herself. He told her the country needed more elected officials who understood the military. She then served two terms in the House before running for the Senate in 2006 and won her first time out. She’s in her third term now.”

  “Look at her committee work,” Rena said. “Where she might have come down hard on somebody, a special interest or an industry.”

  “Ang and I have it,” Conner said, referring to the newest staff member, Ang Liu.

  “What are her Senate committees?” Brooks asked.

  “She sits on four,” Conner said. “Judiciary, Finance, Armed Services, and Energy and Natural Resources.”

  “Heavy list,” Brooks said. Some senators had three committee assignments.

  “She’s young and vigorous.”

  “And she chairs the subcommittee of Finance on taxes.”

  “Jeezus,” said Smolonsky from Tucson. “That’s a lot of chances to make enemies.”

  Jonathan Robinson, the former political consultant, said, “Well, she’s tough on corporations hiding profits overseas, and on exotic tax maneuvers. So she has antagonized some on Wall Street. She bucks the party on women’s health and climate change, though she’s quiet about it. She’s a big champion of small business over large corporations. And she believes in using the tax code to motivate behavior—not regulation. That puts her at odds with the antitax crowd in the party and the Democrats who want regulation because they can’t get Republicans to vote to do anything but cut taxes. Hell, who does that leave out as potential enemies?”

  Rena wanted to keep spirits up: “Maureen and Ang, don’t skip over th
ose two years before she actually ran for office—when she was a Senate aide. I think it’s a porous moment.”

  “A porous moment?” Liu asked.

  “A time in someone’s life when they might have relaxed and opened themselves to others—shared secrets,” Brooks said. “Usually a moment of transition, making new friends. Congressional staffers gossip with each other, and there are a lot of them. You meet a lot of people all day. You have a lot of friends who in turn have a lot of friends. And Upton was still pretty young. Thirty-four, thirty-five”

  Jobe said: “And she wasn’t as responsible for her sister anymore. She had left the military, too. If she was going to let loose, try things, or let her hair down with people, she might have done it there.”

  “Porous moments,” Liu repeated.

  “You look for change in a life, a wrinkle, a bump, a vibration, an acceleration,” Rena explained. “People have patterns, though they may not know it. Look for a moment where the pattern involves slowing down or speeding up, or some break in the pattern itself.”

  Brooks added one more piece of counsel: “We look for adjacency to bad people, too, people in their lives who went on to become notorious. Were there ever any of those near the subject? That’s what we mean when we say we are looking for sources who might be selling bad stories about someone.”

  They were teaching Liu the methodology of suspicion, techniques for uncovering secrets that Rena, Brooks & Associates had developed over a decade. Liu looked intrigued.

  “It’s not as predatory as it sounds,” Rena said. “These are often the moments when people are at their best.”

  Brooks tried to wrap it up: “I know everyone was up most of the night. So take a couple hours if you need them. Get some sleep. When you come back, look for anything that sticks out in the areas you’ve been assigned. Any bumpy stones. Turn them over. And put everything into the Grid,” Brooks added. “I’ve opened up a new version for this case.”

  The Grid was a digital system Lupsa had built to track their work. It broke down all the key elements of any investigation into categories that could be easily sorted and compared, and put everything the team learned into one document. The Grid helped them share information faster, spotted contradictions between conflicting accounts, and protected them against falling in love with a single theory while ignoring dissonant facts later.

  “We have two Grid documents at the moment,” Brooks said. She touched her computer and the screen on the wall popped to life.

  On it she showed the two easels they had looked at yesterday, now in a trackable digital form. The first document was called “Possible Blackmail Incidents/Upton BIO.”

  “This one breaks her life into periods when there might have been some incident that could be used against her. But again, I think the later years will be more likely.”

  On the screen was a series of tabs, electronic file folders, each one labeled with a time in Upton’s life:

  Tavern Years, age 16–20

  College and Law School, age 20–26

  Military-JAG, age 27–32

  Senate Staff Years, age 33–36

  House Member, age 36–39

  Senator, age 40–53

  “As you go through, fill in anything you think might be a possible incident or period of vulnerability.”

  The next document was named “Possible Blackmailers.”

  Most of the tabs contained the names of each of the people campaigning for president. Underneath those, in subtabs, were the names of key players in the campaigns, PACs, major donors, consultants, and other kingmakers.

  “These folks working for or supporting each of the candidates are people who themselves might be suspects,” Brooks reminded the team. “When we’re looking at the potential blackmailers, the question is who benefits from hurting Upton and why?”

  After meeting with McGrath yesterday, Rena and Brooks considered the candidates themselves unlikely blackmailers.

  “It may be campaigns. It may be someone who is not directly tied to these campaigns. And our list may be wrong. We may have knocked people off it who should be on it.”

  And there was room for more tabs. The Grid could be unlimited.

  For now, Rena thought, what was projected on the screen mostly documented how little they knew.

  “Ellen will curate,” Brooks said, meaning that Wiley would be checking to see what everyone posted in the Grid, both about possible blackmail incidents and possible blackmailers.

  AS PEOPLE FILED OUT, Rena asked Smolonsky to stay on the line. “Walt, keep your head up out there. See who else is in town.”

  This was the other way to track who might be after Upton: find who was nosing around Tucson, if there were any private investigators or lawyers asking questions lately, and see who had hired them in the past—in effect, reverse engineering someone else’s oppo. They might find investigators working for Traynor and Bakke. But they might just catch the blackmailer by finding the people the blackmailer had hired.

  National investigative firms out of Washington and other major cities kept former law enforcement people around the country on retainer. You want to know something about people on the ground? Tap your local contact in whatever city. These local folks usually know everyone in town who could get you an answer.

  So what local ex-cops or new rent-a-cops were poking around Tucson and Phoenix, looking to end the bright and rising career of Wendy Upton?

  “On it,” Smolo said.

  “And go see that goddamn worm of a finance chair who passed on the threat,” Brooks said.

  Fourteen

  Tucson, Arizona

  Jerry Farmer bore the unhealthy look of a man who got too much of his nourishment and hydration at political fund-raisers.

  The finance chairman for Wendy Upton’s last Senate campaign had a pallid, precancerous complexion and a quick smile. At the moment, Farmer’s smile made it quite clear he had no interest in talking to Walt Smolonsky.

  Smolo had shown up at Farmer’s office without an appointment and with a message, for Farmer’s secretary, that he was here from Washington on behalf of Senator Wendy Upton. When Farmer emerged from his inner office, it didn’t help his mood that Smolonsky was six five and about 240 pounds.

  “Come inside,” the fund-raiser said, adding a glower for his secretary.

  He closed the door: “I told the senator’s people I didn’t know anything.”

  Smolonsky took a chair that wasn’t offered.

  Farmer, who’d apparently intended to stand, moved around his desk reluctantly and sat down.

  “Yeah, that was a strong move,” Smolo said, “calling the senator, dropping the bomb, and saying don’t call me back.”

  Farmer was in commercial real estate, and from the look of the office he was good at it.

  “What do you want to know?” Farmer asked. He was pouty. As if Smolo’s presence hurt his feelings.

  For reasons Smolonsky never fully understood, people often imagined large men to be stupid. And sometimes, to get what he needed, it could be helpful to make them think they were right.

  But the better play with Farmer right now was to employ every inch and pound Smolo had in straight-on belligerence.

  “I want to know who the hell called you. And who called them.”

  Farmer laughed.

  “I don’t know who called them. But I made a promise not to betray the confidence of the person who called me.”

  “Really? You made a promise? You’re making this about loyalty?”

  Farmer tried to look offended. He said:

  “Who do you think you are, coming in here like this?”

  Smolonsky got bigger in his chair.

  “You have my card there. I’m a guy who finds things out that people try to hide. You don’t have anything to hide, do you, Jerry?”

  Farmer frowned and said, “You can tell Wendy I don’t appreciate being muscled.”

  “I bet she’s pretty interested in what you appreciate.”

&nbs
p; At this, and perhaps the recognition that United States senators were still feudal lords in their own states, Farmer changed his tack. He glanced at the card to make sure he had Smolo’s name right.

  “Look, Walt. See this from more than one perspective. I don’t know where this is coming from. The guy who called me is a donor. Someone who gives money. And a lot of it. And persuades other people to give money, too. That’s an important relationship. For me and for Wendy.”

  Smolo said nothing. Farmer kept talking.

  “The guy who called me isn’t the one making the threat. He’s passing the warning along, passing it to me to pass to Wendy. He thinks he’s doing her a favor. And the guy who called him was just passing it along. You understand? This was handled. Insulated. So the people behind it were protected.”

  Smolonsky sighed. “If he really wants to do Wendy a favor, your friend should call the senator himself and tell her everything he knows and everything he suspects. Like you should, right now.”

  Farmer looked exasperated.

  “You guys in Washington really don’t live in the real world, do you? This is my state. My city. And Wendy isn’t the only person we raise money for. And to be blunt, these relationships back here, they keep going—even after Wendy has moved on. People in politics come and go. The money in a state, that goes on for generations. Everyone has their role to play.”

  “Even you,” Smolo said.

  “And you,” said Farmer. But the look underneath it was worried. “Call Wendy. Tell her I wish I could help her. But I don’t know anything.”

  “You can count on it.”

  BROOKS WAS GONE from the office when Smolo called, but Rena was there.

  “The guy is terrified,” he said.

  He tried to explain. “Look, Upton might seem politically invincible to people in Washington, having won all her Senate campaigns easily. But I saw something else in this guy’s body language. He tried to look tough. But he couldn’t hide it.”

  That morning, as they walked through Upton’s life, Wiley had told them that the hard-right Arizona Common Sense Coalition had mounted a primary challenge in Upton’s last campaign. Her opponent, a local radio talk show host named Cal Carter, had campaigned on Upton being a “Rino”—Republican in name only—soft on abortion and “in the pocket of the vaccine industry.” Upton had beaten him by thirty points.