Oppo

by Tom Rosenstiel

  “You never got a call from the senator or her people?”

  “Telling me to drop the case? Hell, no. And I resent the accusation. This office is not for sale. Put that in your oppo research book.”

  Burdick pushed a buzzer under his desk and his secretary entered a moment later—like it was 1975. “I’m afraid I’ve things to do. Janice will see you see out.”

  “Hi, Janice,” Smolo said.

  “IF I HAD TO PICK one guy who lied to me, it’d be the D.A.,” Smolonsky told Rena after he got back to Phil Dixon’s office.

  “I don’t know if it matters whether he was lying,” Rena said. He walked through the scenarios with Smolo: If Emily had been selling drugs out of Shiny’s bar, a place Wendy Upton still half owned, and a strong case against her had suddenly vanished, it could be enough to knock Upton from being a vice presidential choice.

  And if there were any record of communication between her and Burdick during that time, it might be enough to beat her in a Senate run. And if the FBI got involved and mounted an investigation, it might charge her with obstruction of justice.

  “You could make two and two look like four even if Burdick swore out an affidavit he killed the case on the merits.”

  Not good math.

  And if this were the hidden scandal Upton was being threatened with—that she had intervened to protect her sister—their work wasn’t over. They still had no idea who was threatening Upton with it. Smolonsky had unearthed no evidence for that.

  Another fact nagged at Rena, too. Upton hadn’t mentioned this drug case to them.

  He wanted to confront her. But he wanted Brooks with him. And she was still out someplace.

  Twenty-Eight

  Washington, D.C.

  Randi Brooks was not a gumshoe. Not like Peter, or Smolonsky, or Hallie Jobe. She’d never been a cop or carried a gun—or even shot one. She wasn’t a computer hacker like Ellen Wiley or Arvid Lupsa. She didn’t understand the Dark Web. And she certainly didn’t want to visit it, thank you very much.

  She was a lawyer. Proudly. Double Ivy, Cambridge and New Haven—and the Dalton School in New York City before that, where, as a scholarship girl, she had also acquired a healthy distrust of the very wealthy. She was good at following documents and logic. She believed in the story they told. And, as Peter often said, she was the most relentless researcher he knew. For she believed that if you followed the documents all the way down, you could see just what people really do. How far they will go. Documents don’t lie. They don’t smile. They don’t flirt. They get jobs done—the dirty, cold, greedy jobs you hide in the fine print and don’t admit to in person. You just had to know how to find the right documents. And how to read them. And Randi surely did.

  She wanted to know which documents answered the puzzle of who was threatening Wendy Upton. That’s how they would solve this. And for this, friends could definitely help, especially women, whom she found easier to comprehend because they were complicated in ways she understood. And she thought women didn’t lie as easily, or at least they were more tortured when they did. Yes, friends could help.

  Judy Worthington was one of those friends, an old acquaintance from the other side of the aisle, chief of staff for Republican Senator Arnie Nelson of Arkansas. She and Worthington were similar in age, Judy a little older, and had risen through the Senate ranks together, Judy as a Senate chief, Randi as a committee counsel. They were from different parties, but they’d come up at a time when women in senior positions were rare enough to consider themselves members of a shared tribe. And she knew Judy thought the world of Wendy Upton.

  They had a reservation at the Monocle, one of the oldest and most venerated meeting spots on the Senate side of the Hill. They were shown to a table at the back, caught up on old friends and—in Judy’s case—kids and a grandchild. And she heard about the progress of Worthington’s most personal legislative cause, Alzheimer’s research, inspired by the illness of Judy’s mother-in-law as well as Senator Nelson’s mother. Worthington had been working on the bill for more than ten years, which to genuine Senate veterans was not all that long.

  “We haven’t had a meal during the week together in years,” Worthington said. “Why are we here?”

  “I wanted to fix that.”

  “Okay. We’ve fixed that. Why are we here?”

  Brooks smiled at her friend’s candor.

  “I want to know who Wendy Upton’s enemies are.”

  Worthington stared at her a long moment. “Of course you can’t tell me what you’re really working on.”

  “Of course not. But I’m here to help Wendy Upton. Not harm her.” Brooks matched Judy’s stare with her own. Women like us, it said, don’t lie to women like us. “Help me, Judy, help Wendy. I’m not a Democrat here or a Republican.”

  “You were never a Republican, Randi. You were someone who tried to beat Republicans.”

  “Who are Wendy’s enemies who might try to harm her? I mean mortal enemies.”

  “I wouldn’t call them enemies, exactly,” Worthington said.

  “Whatever you might call them, who are they?”

  “Well, they mostly wear pants,” Worthington said with a sour expression. “And most of them are on the far right of my own party.”

  While members of Congress in both parties now were more politically extreme than in the past, they were usually not as extreme as their constituents. And their staff tended to be more politically moderate than their bosses. All this was the opposite of what it was a generation ago, when the senators tended to be moderates and their staffers more hotheaded.

  The waiter appeared with water but not a lot of patience, a man in his sixties wearing a tuxedo and a glower. The Monocle was old school, not a place where the wait staff introduced themselves, said they would be your server, and asked how your day had been.

  He left with their orders and Worthington said, “Well, I put Dick Bakke at the top of any list of enemies of Wendy’s.”

  Brooks didn’t dare tell her that Bakke had secretly offered Upton a place on his campaign ticket. “Who else? Who challenges her directly when they’re in conference?”

  Conference referred to the meetings all Republican senators had with each other in private. Usually, chiefs of staff attended, too, which meant Worthington was there. Conference was one of the few places senators were blunt with each other. Word was the meetings had become increasingly ugly as the GOP had begun to fissure.

  “Guy Filippo was once really terrible to Wendy,” Worthington said. Filippo was the junior senator from Wyoming. “Upton had refused to vote the party line on a women’s-health issue. I don’t remember the particular vote anymore. Guy, who is as dumb as a box of rocks, told Upton there needed to be some accountability for women breaking with the party on this issue. He suggested she be stripped of her seat on the committee.”

  Brooks gave a disgusted look.

  “I mean, ‘accountability for women’?” Worthington said. “Ever hear someone say there needed to be accountability for men, like it was a gender problem?”

  “What happened?”

  “Wendy got that voice she has, you know, the one where she gets hyperarticulate and sounds like the most adult person you ever met.” Brooks nodded and Worthington continued. “And she said something like, ‘Senator, as a matter of this institution’s rules as well as law, I am not accountable to you. Not as a senator, and certainly not as a woman. As I assume you know from taking the oath of office, senators are accountable to upholding the Constitution, to upholding the law, to serving the voters of their state, and to their own conscience—in that order.’”

  Worthington’s eyes went wide. She loved Upton.

  “Then, get this: she told Filippo if he tried to punish her for her vote, she would be delighted to make his threat public and test their differing theories of accountability in the next election—including in Wyoming.” Worthington formed her mouth into a circle shape and raised her eyebrows, and silently mouthed the word wow. “I
t was pretty fucking awesome.”

  “What did Filippo say?”

  “Not a word. I think the only thing I heard was the sound of his testicles receding.” She paused to let the insult settle. “In fact, the old rat hasn’t been able to look Wendy in the eye since. Or virtually any other woman in the GOP. The man is a human hairball.”

  The food arrived. The two women had both ordered Caesars, Brooks’s with steak, Worthington’s shrimp.

  “What about legislatively? Any big donors Upton has tangled with on committee? Any heavy pressure on lobbying that looked especially intense—like she had hit a nerve?”

  Sometimes the only sign you got up here was when a lawyer showed up with new language to put in a bill, along with an attitude that the language was not negotiable. Someone whose boss had dropped real money into a PAC anonymously. The day of reckoning came when the guy in a suit was in your office with a piece of paper and draft language and said, ‘Put this into bill SR 9024, section 48, paragraph 3, line 2.’ And it was a change in the law that would create a loophole for companies that fit a certain description, but if you looked hard it turned out there was only one such company in the world, and it was owned by this one anonymous donor, and the language you couldn’t parse saved him billions.

  Worthington’s expression became more intense: “She hates corporations hiding profits overseas, moving jobs, and using exotic tax schemes. She really got serious a couple years back about something called basket trading. That one involved some heavy hitters, the really major donors.”

  “Remind me,” Brooks said, pretending she might have heard of it.

  “It’s a corporate tax evasion scheme. I think it’s called basket trading. Maybe it’s ‘bundled trading.’ Whatever. It’s this complicated thing where hedge funds and banks were conspiring with each other, passing money back and forth, making it look like the hedge fund was investing the bank’s money when it was really its own funds. It helped the hedge funds avoid millions in taxes. Came up in Wendy’s subcommittee. She came down pretty hard on it. Found billions in back taxes owed. Really, billions. That would be enough to make someone hold a grudge.”

  “It might.”

  “She’s also been hard on hiding profits overseas, too. Worked with Jonathan Kaplan on some legislation to close those loopholes.” Kaplan was a Democratic senator from New Jersey. “And she angered a lot of people on health care. Quietly, you know, she is trying to protect women’s health. Even my own senator would probably call Wendy soft on abortion.”

  Then Worthington got a worried look. “Randi, what are you really up to?”

  “I’m looking for something—a moment, or a piece of legislation—that might cause someone to hold a grudge against Upton. A grudge with no limits to it.”

  Worthington shook her head sadly. Like a lot of longtime veterans of the Hill, she barely recognized the institution she loved. It was like watching a family member go through a personality transformation after an illness, and nothing you did to stop it helped. A lot of her friends who had dedicated their lives to public service had reached a point they called “the dark woods,” like the title of the scary book by Ruth Ware. They were lost and wondering, Do I stay and try to change things? Or am I deluding myself and part of the problem? People talked about it endlessly.

  “You know, of course, it could be personal,” Worthington said. “There isn’t a better person up here than Wendy. But I’ve never seen her with a man or a woman—or anyone socially. There is a secret there, Randi.”

  Brooks looked back blankly at her friend, recalling Upton’s painful closed-down quality last night as she described her private life.

  Worthington was saying, “I don’t know if Wendy has skeletons in her closet or not, and I don’t care. Some people find her a little holier than thou. Mostly she’s just tough. But some people hate her because she doesn’t fit their definition of how a woman should behave.”

  “How should they behave?”

  “She isn’t deferential enough. She actually talks in meetings. And even interrupts if a man isn’t listening.”

  “Wow. What a bitch.” Brooks said.

  Twenty-Nine

  Brooks called Rena from outside the Monocle. “Don’t come back here,” he told her. “Meet me at Upton’s office.”

  Smolonsky had found something about the sister in Tucson, he explained. Upton had agreed to see them, though he hadn’t told the senator what it was about. Meet him inside the Capitol Building.

  Maybe, just maybe, he said, they were getting near a solution.

  They met in Upton’s “hideaway” Senate office in the Capitol, away from staff and constituents, away from one’s official rooms in the Russell, Dirksen, or Hart Office Buildings.

  Upton sat on a small sofa, Rena and Brooks in chairs facing her. Rena walked through what Smolo knew of the case against Emily.

  Upton began shaking her head slowly. She knew about this, Rena thought. He felt a cool liquid anger rising in his throat. She’d said nothing about this last night. And that was unacceptable. If Upton didn’t begin to reveal everything—starting right now—maybe they really would have to walk away. And that would be a disaster for everyone.

  “I never intervened,” Upton said. Her head was bowed. Then she lifted it toward the ceiling, eyes closed.

  “It sure as hell looks like you did,” said Rena.

  Upton’s eyes opened, and she was looking at him.

  “We’ve got a cop who says the case was killed for political reasons,” he said. “A prosecutor who doesn’t deny it, and the district attorney, who does deny it, looks to our people like a self-righteous liar. All our instincts tell us this case was quashed from the top.”

  Upton took a deep breath. “I did the opposite of intervening,”

  “I have no idea what that means,” Brooks said.

  “It means I never spoke to the D.A., Burdick. Look, yes, I heard about the case. A friend in Tucson called Gil. I told Gil to make it clear to the prosecutors I was staying out of it—that they should follow the law wherever it took them. Like any other case. No special treatment.”

  The pain from that memory flushed suddenly in Upton’s face. “This wasn’t the first incident with Emily. There was an arrest that’s sealed. She was seventeen, and I was twenty-three. I had just started law school. I asked a friend in the sheriff’s department, a guy who worked as an off-duty bouncer at the bar, if there was anything he could do. Emily was selling pot, or had enough to charge her with selling, which would have been a felony. They dropped the charges down to possession. That was a long time ago, and it took them about two seconds to agree.”

  Upton was shaking her head slowly. “But this time I said no. This was the time I stopped telling myself Emily would change—that she would grow up. I decided this was who Emily was. And I was not responsible. She was an adult, and I had to stop trying to fix her.” Upton closed her eyes again and exhaled. She wasn’t looking at them when she said, “Maybe if I were really her parent I would have reacted differently. But I didn’t.”

  Then tears welled up in her eyes and started rolling down her cheeks, the first ones they had seen since any of this had begun four days ago. Now that they’d come, the tears flowed and flowed.

  “I wasn’t proud of this. It wasn’t the best day of my life.” She didn’t wipe the tears away. She looked at the two of them and said, “I knew a part of me was only protecting myself. Did I really think it would be good for Emily to be convicted of drug trafficking? I didn’t just refuse to intervene. I hid from this. I didn’t even call her.”

  “But the D.A. dropped the case,” Brooks said.

  Rena kept his eyes on Upton. She held the backs of her hands to her face now to dry her cheeks.

  “So it sure looks like someone intervened,” Brooks said.

  “The D.A. in Tucson, this man named Burdick, is not one of my favorite people. I have never spoken to him about it. But it’s absolutely possible he thought I would be in his debt. Officially,
I was told there were problems with the evidence—no proof Emily was involved and not a strong case to get it. I thought she got lucky, frankly. But I never asked. I stayed as far away as I could.”

  Brooks glanced at Rena, wondering what her partner’s famous intuition was telling him.

  Upton was shaking her head as if it were all an ironic joke. “You think this is what they have on me? What they think will destroy me? Something I didn’t do?”

  “It may be,” Brooks said. “If it is, and you’re telling us everything, I think we can get in front of it.”

  “You mean my abandonment of my sister is my defense?” Upton grimaced. “Extolling that as a virtue strikes me as worse than the abandonment itself.”

  “Would you have gone to court with her if it had gone to trial? Stood by her every day?” Brooks asked.

  Upton’s grimace turned into look of miserable uncertainty. “To be honest, I don’t know. I knew that was what I should do, though I suspect someone would have told me to simply drop my sister from my life entirely. But a part of me would have felt sitting in court with her was cynical, too. Just for show. Honestly, I didn’t know what I was going to do. We never got that far.”

  Rena, who had been quiet, spoke for the first time in a while. “The fact that you feel conflicted makes me think I believe you.”

  And Upton turned to him, realizing only then that she didn’t have his full confidence.

  “But you should have told us all this yesterday. Or the first day,” he said.

  “I was trying to walk through the things I had done. Not the ones I hadn’t.” She paused. “It isn’t easy, imagining everything in one’s life that could be turned against you. You live trying to be one way. You don’t see how others see it.”

  Politics was not his chosen world. But Rena was reminded then that politicians are just as human as anyone else. Despite their years of preparation, the hyperbole and evasions that surround them every day, and the layers upon layers of armor they learn to wear to steel themselves for power, they’re still just people. It was simple and obvious, and at the same time, at that moment, surprising.