Oppo

by Tom Rosenstiel

  Sedaka was married with two kids, happily, by all they could find—and they had looked. He and Upton appeared to be a classic work couple—married at the office, but not connected outside. She was quiet, forceful, with something vulnerable about her. He was shrewd and smart, a son of South Carolina gentry with a reputation for protecting her politically. He seemed utterly loyal.

  “I’m not protecting her. We just have boundaries. One way we support each other is by not getting involved in the other part of each other’s lives.”

  “Two days ago, when this started, we asked you who might want to blackmail her. You said you wanted to think about that. Now you’ve had time.”

  “And I’ve been wracking my brain.”

  “Not hard enough.”

  He nodded. “She’s been hard on international tax cheats,” he said. “But it’s a long list. She bucks the party on women’s issues. And health. She’s worried about climate change, though she can’t talk about it.”

  “And we have a short amount of time. So tomorrow, Gil, we’re sending someone to spend the day with you to go through it. Clear your calendar.”

  When they returned to the den, Liu was telling Upton they would need her complete email history. It was possible Upton’s email had been hacked, she explained. That intrusion of privacy had become a feature of Washington in the last two years. As Lupsa put it, “People need to understand email is like skywriting.”

  “It will be years of them. Tens of thousands,” Upton told her.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Liu said.

  They had algorithms that would go through them, and only a few hundred would be relevant. They had done this before, this quantifying of a person via their inbox. One can measure how human beings spend and squander their time now from the detritus of their email.

  At this, finally Upton seemed to sag. “It doesn’t end, does it?”

  Rena watched her and decided she wasn’t pretending or trying to be strong anymore. And after hours of leaning on her, he now tried to reassure her. “This is going to be all right,” he told her. “We will get to the bottom of it.”

  He liked her, perhaps more than he should a client. She might still be lying or not revealing something, or more than one thing, but he doubted it.

  “Are we done?” he asked Brooks.

  “For now.”

  Rena walked Upton and Sedaka to the door. Upton looked at him searchingly. They had not discovered everything they had wanted. But now, he thought, she realized how much she needed them. From now on, she would be more open.

  He thought about the men who had been watching them, and how much larger this threat now seemed than it did even a few hours ago. “We’ll get them,” he said. And he wondered if he believed it.

  When he returned to the living room, Brooks was writing in her notebook. Liu looked shock worn.

  “She will help us more now,” Rena said.

  Brooks looked up at him.

  “The women and the old boyfriend,” she said.

  Liu, rubbing her eyes, asked, “Why the old boyfriend?”

  “The lost love,” Brooks said. “It was a long time ago, but he could be bitter. We need to talk to him face-to-face.”

  “Why?” Liu said.

  “Because of the women,” Brooks said. “If she’s telling us the truth, the boyfriend and her experiments with women happened around the same time. Maybe that ended the relationship with David Garrod. He may know about it. If it bothered him, maybe he’s the source for whoever is making the threat.” Brooks looked to see if Liu understood. “I doubt it’s going to be that simple. But it’s the strongest thing we got tonight.”

  “You really think a fling with women that long ago could be used against her?” Liu asked. “In the twenty-first century?”

  Brooks frowned. “Homosexuality in national politics is uncharted territory. You know how many gay senators are public? One. Senator Fred Blaylish. And he could never run for president because of it.”

  Rena and his partner had never discussed Brooks’s own sexuality. In college, she had discovered her roommate murdered, and it had helped shape her life. She had dropped out of school for a semester and helped solve the woman’s killing—and the experience had drawn her to the law and ultimately to becoming an investigator. Rena also was convinced, though Randi had never told him, that she and her murdered roommate were lovers. He watched Brooks’s face now and thought he saw a deeper sadness there.

  Rena still hadn’t told Brooks they were being watched, that his house monitors had picked it up, that he had seen a car outside, and that he’d called Samantha Reese. But he didn’t want to do it in front of Ang Liu.

  “None of that gets us to the blackmailer,” Brooks said.

  “The blackmailer is a political enemy,” said Rena.

  “Then we’ll find that in political work,” Brooks said. “Probably from her time in the Senate. Tomorrow. We just need to hope we don’t run out of time.”

  “I don’t understand why she put up with this tonight. With how tough you were,” said Liu.

  Brooks, who had been standing up, sat down on the sofa.

  “That’s the goddamn thing about the people in public life, at least at this level: it’s incredible what they will put up with.”

  “Why do they?” Liu asked.

  “That’s something I’m not sure I’ll ever understand,” Brooks said. “Politicians come in different flavors. Different motivations. Public service. Ego. For some, a kind of weird need. But most of these people—at least the ones who get near the presidency—they’re different than the rest of us. Someone sometime must have told them, ‘You should be president.’ And they believed them. They thought, Yeah, I should be the one who holds the nuclear football with the fate of the world in my hands. And have every moment of my life scrutinized. And have half the world hate me. Yeah, I want that.”

  She closed her eyes. “What time is it?”

  “Almost four thirty,” said Rena. “You can both sleep here. I’ll get blankets.”

  “I need my own bed,” Brooks said, “and a long shower. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Liu said, “It is tomorrow.”

  Day Four

  Thursday

  February 27

  Twenty-Three

  Houston, Texas

  The Traynor campaign liked to do a rally the morning after a debate. “A sign you’re pumped up ’cause you kicked a little butt and ain’t sneakin’ out of town with your tail between your legs,” Sterling Moss always said. “That’s the best kind of spin: when you do something, say nothing much about it, and reporters imagine what they’re thinking is their idea.”

  The godforsaken “breakfast rally” was being held at Station 3, a converted firehouse now used for events. David Traynor looked energized, eyes glowing, the intelligence he often hid behind them more visible. He was happy. For all his image as careless and fun loving, he was a driven man used to rising early, working out first thing—speed-reading books while on the elliptical machine—and starting the day on a dead run.

  “Yowza!” he said from the dais. “Thank y’all for being here so early.”

  There were smiles in the crowd, raised orange juice glasses, scattered hoots.

  “Quite a night. All those Republicans. And Jeff Scott, he wanted to kill Dick Bakke and go dancing with Maria Pena!” Knowing laughs for that one. “After they were done rewriting the Constitution and getting rid of some of our democratic institutions. Some scary stuff going on.”

  The laughs turned nervous and were joined by a few chants of “Hell, no, David.”

  “I’ll tell you, working in tech, you see a lot of bad ideas. You learn to smoke ’em out fast—or risk losing a lot of money in a hurry. You need to be able to tell the difference these days between the next big thing and the next big hoax.”

  That generated some genuine Texas whoops and real applause.

  Near the back, two men slipped off their cowboy shirts and were wearing PENA FOR PRESID
ENT long-sleeve tees underneath. They were both Hispanic. They moved along the back of the room until they stood next to a big burly man wearing a TRAYNOR FOR THE FUTURE baseball cap. The man in the cap looked like he could handle himself. He had a tattoo on his right wrist and a beard, that chic hipster lumberjack look of a computer coder from Austin, but one who liked a hockey game and an occasional bar fight. The smaller man in the Pena T-shirt started pushing the man in the Traynor cap from behind.

  “Fuck, man, what do you think you’re doing?” the man in the Traynor cap asked.

  “Stopping you white shitheads from ruining the country.”

  “What the fuck you just say?”

  “I said we’re coming across the border and we’re gonna take this continent back and send your Euro asses back to Ireland where you belong. Chinga tu puta madre.”

  The first blow caught the mouthy Hispanic guy hard just below the temple.

  People around them screamed. Alabama started to climb onto the ABN camera platform near him for a better look.

  By then the guy in the Traynor hat was wailing on the little guy pretty good. He had the man on the ground and he was throwing right after right at the smaller man’s head, using the wooden floor as a backboard.

  There was a lot of screaming. Alabama was surprised the second Pena guy took as long as he did to jump in and try to pull the guy in the Traynor hat off his friend.

  The heat of it was over quickly. Security guards grabbed the big man throwing all the punches. Underneath, the little guy in the Pena shirt wasn’t moving. There was a lot of blood, and the second man was hysterical.

  “You’re fucking crazy! What is wrong with you people?” he shouted.

  Or it sounded something like that to Alabama. The guy throwing the punches was being pinned by cops and put in handcuffs. The EMS team hovered over the guy who was hurt. By the time they had checked him out and got him a gurney and started rolling it out, it was clear the injuries were serious.

  Alabama called New York and said he was breaking off from Traynor and going to look into the fight and the men involved. Too many fights at too many rallies, too many days in a row. That, Alabama thought, was the tip of a real story.

  Twenty-Four

  Washington, D.C.

  Ellen Wiley started the morning searching video on the Web. She called it “cultural sailing,” and it relaxed her.

  She’d come in early to find video of a young Wendy Upton, before the senator had become careful and guarded. What was she like before she became the person she made herself into?

  She knew a little-known video archive at Vanderbilt University, the lifework of a now-retired scholar who had painstakingly archived the logs of every local television station in the country going back a half century. Wiley could type in a name and find, with fair accuracy, any time a person had appeared on a local television news program since 1972. You still had to track down whether that video existed anywhere on the Web. It was a crapshoot. But Wiley had ways to find those as well.

  When she typed in Wendy Upton’s name, she came across a couple of appearances by her sister, Emily, the bar owner and singer. The longest, more than a decade old, was from a local Arizona TV show, Good Morning Tucson. She found a viewable copy of the appearance in the archive of the University of Arizona student video lab—not exactly public, but not exactly secure if you knew what you were doing.

  The program’s morning host was asking Emily what it was like to be the sister of the famous Wendy Upton. Later, the show hinted, Emily would sing with her rock band.

  Emily Upton was dressed in red cowboy boots, a denim miniskirt, a straw cowboy hat, and a low-cut Mexican blouse. The program’s host, Susie Stanton, wore big red glasses and had a younger hunky male sidekick named Todd.

  “True that your code name during your sister’s run for the Senate was ‘Headache’?”

  Todd laughed. The audience roared.

  Emily tugged at a handkerchief in her hand and smiled tightly. “Might be, Susie.”

  Stanton made a droll face that seemed to say, now tell the truth. “And did you live up to the name—create any headaches for your sister?”

  More laughter, but uneasy this time. Emily, shot mostly from the side, looked suspiciously at Susie and Todd.

  It went on like this awhile. Susie Stanton was rolling: “Let’s talk about your relationship with your sister when you were kids. She actually raised you, didn’t she? She was like your sister and your mother. Oh, that sounded a little weird, like the scene in Chinatown. ‘Sister, daughter, sister, daughter.’ Oops.”

  Todd didn’t laugh, and Susie realized the joke had missed. “But you are pretty different, aren’t you, you and Wendy?”

  After a moment Emily said, “Yeah, she was always a little more disciplined. I was always a little wilder.”

  “Let’s talk about that.”

  What happened next was subtle. Something seemed to go out of Emily, some liveliness, as she surrendered to the clown’s role she had been cast to play—the bad sister—in exchange for the chance to promote her new CD.

  “Well, basically, Susie, I’m a college dropout. I became a rock and roll singer. I got married when I was eighteen and divorced when I was twenty. And Wendy, she was, well, you know, Phi Beta Kappa, a lawyer, U.S. senator. So, yeah, we’re pretty different.”

  Even Susie Stanton looked uneasy now. The shallow banter of the segment had rubbed away and only the cynical gawking behind it remained. After a few more awkward exchanges she invited Emily to sing.

  Emily Upton had a boozy roadhouse voice. Wiley imagined she was better than this usually, but Upton’s voice was flat and off key. Wiley thought the just-finished, humiliating interview probably had something to do with it. The songs were hard to watch.

  Emily Upton had been reduced to a type: the slob political sibling. The other kid, who could never compete with their overachieving brother or sister, so they defined themselves as the opposite. It was a crowded category: Dick Nixon’s brother, Donald; Bill Clinton’s brother, Roger; Jimmy Carter’s brother, Billy. Emily played the role uneasily, complicated by the fact that her sister had also raised her. The competitor was also the protector.

  Wiley closed the video and walked into Brooks’s office.

  “You need to see this.”

  When Brooks finished watching they went to see Rena.

  He didn’t need to watch it all the way through.

  “Maybe we should be looking more closely at the sister,” Brooks said.

  Rena said, “Let’s call Smolo.”

  Twenty-Five

  Walt Smolonsky got lucky quickly. Maybe because they were finally looking in the right place.

  Phil Dixon, the former local sheriff’s deputy he’d hired to be their local PI, found something on the sister that wasn’t in the records. He’d done it by working old friends in law enforcement. A half-dozen calls in, he came up with rumors of an old drug case—possession with intent to sell. Emily Upton was suspected of dealing. And then the case had gone away.

  The arresting officer, Bobby Triska, was still on the force. When Dixon and Smolo reached him, the detective wasn’t enthusiastic about talking, but he eventually agreed to see them outside of the office at a Sonoran hot dog place called Guero Canelo in South Tucson, the predominantly Hispanic part of town.

  Triska was waiting for them at a picnic table.

  He was skeptical of Smolo, the out-of-towner, but remembered Dixon. “I don’t get you guys,” Triska said. “You want to know about this case, but you’re working for Wendy Upton?”

  “Way it works,” said Smolo. “You find out all the worst things about your own candidate first. So you know what’s coming.”

  Triska glanced at Dixon, then rolled his eyes like politics was some international sport with rules he didn’t understand. “Why not ask her?” he said.

  “We will. Once I know what really happened,” Smolo said.

  Dixon tried to be reassuring. “Bobby, he really does work for U
pton. And he really is interested in finding out what happened. Either it disqualifies her. Which we need to know. Or it can be explained. Which we also need to know.”

  Triska said: “Simpler to put the bad guys in jail, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?” said Smolo.

  Dixon got everyone coffee while Smolonsky and Triska talked.

  “We had Emily Upton dead to rights. Had one of her bartenders selling from behind the bar. Cocaine. And some Molly. No way she didn’t know.”

  He was a thick man with a shaved head and big ears, and Smolo sensed he seemed stuck and was waiting to retire.

  They’d gotten onto the case through an anonymous tip, Triska said. “There had been stories before about Emily, the fuck-up sister. She was trying to put out music CDs back then, make it as a rock star. But she was already too old.”

  The fact that Emily Upton had never been charged, and the case against the dealer had never been connected publicly to Shiny’s bar, had stuck in Triska’s craw. Smolo thought he and Dixon couldn’t possibly have been the first people Triska’d ever told. But it also felt like it’d been a while since he’d talked about it.

  “A tip?” Smolonsky asked.

  “That seem fishy to you?” Dixon added. “Or maybe political?”

  “This stuff never comes from virgins,” Triska said. “You were in law enforcement. You know, where there’s smoke there’s fire. The time you catch them, it’s never the first time they did it. Just the first time they were caught.”

  Smolonsky asked: “So you had the drugs. You had the bartender. And you had Upton.”

  “She claimed she had no idea. Of course.”

  “What’d the bartender say?”

  “He was ready to say it was all her—that he was her employee in all things.”

  “What happened?”

  “What happens in the world?” Triska said. “Big people get protected. A different set of rules for everybody else.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Smolo.