Текст книги " Red White and Black and Blue "
Автор книги: Richard Stevenson
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Chapter Four
I thought Jackman and Insinger both might have been right that in a real enough sense Assemblyman Louderbush
"drove" Greg Stiver to suicide. At a minimum, Louderbush preyed on Stiver's vulnerabilities, cruelly manipulated him psychologically, and treated him sadistically—and illegally. If Jackman's and Insinger's description of events was accurate, Louderbush was a man of despicable character who was unfit for public office, even in a country with traditionally low standards of electability. While the American electorate was often at home with officials who had some outsider-y rough edges—rampant infidelity, expense-account ambiguity, a DUI or two—violently unstable men ordinarily did not receive a pass from voters.
And yet the situation remained murky. While Virgil Jackman was willing to sign an affidavit attesting to Louderbush's physical abuse and said he would "go on Liz Bishop"—a Schenectady TV news anchor—if asked to do so, Insinger said she wanted her name kept out of it. Her parents would not want her in the public eye in a matter of such heated controversy, and neither would Walmart.
From the Outback parking lot, I phoned Dunphy.
"Tom, this may take some time. I'm going to need more to go on than what Jackman and Insinger are offering. They're both credible enough for our purposes, but Insinger doesn't want her name used, and Jackman's family has union ties—
his dad was an IUE shop steward—and that'll have the 44
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Louderbush people yelling foul. I'd like to keep digging and see if I can come up with some other people who will corroborate Insinger's and Jackman's allegations and are willing to do it publicly."
"Go for it. I told Shy that you were on Louderbush's case, and he is positively thrilled that you're taking this on."
"Good."
"He is so disgusted by the abuse story and the suicide of a gay young man that he asked if it might be possible to have Louderbush prosecuted. I'm not sure what the statute of limitations would be on that, but I'm going to have our legal guys and gals look into it."
"If it's all true, sure."
"Just work fast. It's three months till the primary, and we're all strapped to the ass of a charging rhinoceros. Our TV
ad campaign for the primary launches just after the Fourth of July, and it would be just loverly if we could scrap all that and husband our ever-too-meager resources for the general. Get Louderbush the fuck out of the way, and we can save a pile of dough and sail past Merle into the governor's mansion. Think you can do it, Don? From what I've heard about you, I'm betting you can."
Dunphy liked to lay it on. "If I can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars in television ad buys," I said, "maybe I should be working on a percentage basis. Twenty-five percent of whatever you would have spent."
His breathy pause suggested he thought I was serious.
"That would possibly be against the law, but I'm sure a bonus 45
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above and beyond your reasonable fee might be doable.
Maybe five K. Or something in that neighborhood."
"Thanks, but let's see what I come up with."
"Of course."
It occurred to me that Dunphy might be recording our conversation. This would have been illegal in itself since Dunphy had not informed me he was doing so. But he had never met me before that day, and he probably didn't fully trust Myron Lipschutz and whoever else in the party had recommended me.
I said, "Assuming I get the goods on Louderbush's rotten behavior and then you go the media-leak route as opposed to the privately-confront-Louderbush route, I want this to be air-tight. Even cable news will be wary of a story as incendiary as this, so it's essential, I think, that I find more witnesses willing to go public with what they know. In the Spitzer case, how was the initial leak handled?"
Dunphy hesitated and seemed to be choosing his words carefully, and now I was convinced that our conversation was going straight into a recorder. "Nobody knows for sure exactly how it was done. The guys at the Times and the Post who broke the story aren't talking as to who their sources were.
But the assumption is that private investigators hired by Sam Krupa, the old GOP dirty tricks guy, followed the gov when he walked into post offices to buy untraceable money orders to pay off his K-an-hour gal-pals. Other operatives bribed hotel workers. They had names and places and dates, and they checked this stuff against the governor's official schedule, and it all jibed. Then they found a prosecutor in Miami who was 46
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eager to make history by busting one of the entrepreneurial gals and offering her a deal if she named the governor. Then Krupa leaked word of the official investigation, and the caped crusader's cook was goosed."
"But there's no official investigation of Louderbush underway," I said. "So the witnesses we offer up have to be a hundred percent credible, and the more of them there are, the better."
"I agree."
"So who hired Sam Krupa to bring down Spitzer? The Wall Street guys he'd gone after as AG?"
"That's the common assumption. Nobody is admitting to it.
The big bank guys hated him to the depths of their tainted souls. Spitzer inspired such rage in the financial community that any number of those people would have done just about anything to bring about his comeuppance. In the end—an end that gathered itself soon after he took office and then fell upon the governor with the speed of light—in the end, his enemies didn't need hit men or sabotage or the political equivalent of tactical nuclear weapons to finish him off. It was death by floozy, that most commonplace of downfalls. Who would have thought? Who in hell would have thought?"
"It's a compelling enough story," I said, "but it has something the Louderbush situation lacks so far, and that is direct participants in the misdeeds of the accused who are willing to offer first-hand testimony. Some of Spitzer's call girls and their employers talked in the end, but Greg Stiver is dead and unable to do that. So you'll need more to go on, and that's my job at this point."
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"It is indeed."
"I'm going to work on this because (a) you are paying me, but also because (b) Louderbush's crime is far worse than Eliot Spitzer's. Hubris and a wayward dick are serious misdemeanors in a political context, but assault is just plain rotten and indefensible. Especially when it's an older person beating on a young and vulnerable person over a period of time. If Louderbush did what Jackman and Insinger claim he did, even if it didn't lead directly to Stiver's suicide, he should be run out of office and maybe, if it's not too late, into jail."
Standing next to my Toyota near the sparsely utilized rear of the Outback parking lot, I was aware that a dark-colored SUV with tinted windows had pulled in next to me and three men had quickly gotten out of it. One immediately ripped the phone out of my hand as another whacked me in the back of both knees with something metallic.
As I was going down, a third man pounded my face with a leather-gloved fist. The pain that roared through me was so overwhelming that I was surprised there was still room for the intensity of the nausea that hit a millisecond later. The three were kicking me now on the back and shoulders, and at my midsection whenever it was exposed. I fought back through a fog of blood, but these three were as coordinated in their joint efforts as the New York Giants, except they seemed larger and meaner.
I rolled and tried to protect my head as more blows were struck, and I managed to get part of my lower body under a vehicle before I realized it was theirs and they might climb back into the thing and drive over me. I tried to wriggle free 48
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again and was aided in this effort by grabbing an ankle and hanging onto it while its owner attempted to wrench himself free. The man was wearing finely made summer-weight dark wool slacks and his excellently crafted shoes had been nicely shined, if now scuffed.
Somebody else kicked me hard on the side of my head, and then I saw red and left all my cares behind.
* * * *
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Chapter Five
I said, "What happened to my Blackberry?"
"Somebody picked it up. I have it."
Timmy was in the chair next to my bed, and at the foot of the bed Dunphy had planted himself in a wheelchair he had dragged in from the corridor on the sixth floor D-wing at Albany Med.
Dunphy said, "Don't worry about using your phone anytime soon. Just concentrate on healing. Even if you're out of here later today, take a day or three to regroup. Obviously the situation is urgent, but the most important thing you can do for all of us at this point is for you to be able to function at one hundred percent."
"Nothing's broken," I said. "No concussion either, apparently. I'm just scraped up and bruised all over and sore as shit, and my head hurts where they mangled my bad ear.
That ear has been through it: D-Day, the siege of Hue, Albany politics."
"You can't hear very well through that bandage," Timmy said. "Shouldn't you wait until the bandage comes off before you try to work again?"
"What?"
"You heard me."
"Exactly."
I said to Dunphy, "Timmy tells me that Jackman and Insinger are both okay. Nobody went after them. And they have protection now?"
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"Some discreet security guys for when they leave work.
Jackman we had to talk into it, but Insinger was grateful.
Budgetwise the campaign can't legitimately pick this up at this point, but some friends of Shy have stepped up to the plate, no problem."
I pointed at the curtain behind Timmy. "Anybody in that other bed?"
"He died overnight," Timmy said. "And elderly man from Scotia."
"Oh."
"What did you tell the cops?" Dunphy asked. "They haven't been in touch with us, so I assume we're keeping them out of it at this point? And I do think it's preferable that they remain out of the loop for the time being."
"A police dick I know was in a while ago, Bill Hanratty. I told him I was working on something but preferred not to say what. He knows I consort with dubious types such as yourself, Tom, so he wasn't surprised to see me banged up, and he was okay with letting it ride for now. Anyhow, he's a humble cop who's busy with your garden-variety apolitical criminals, and he feels no deep need to involve himself in the glamorous world of democracy-at-work savagery."
"Hanratty did talk to a couple of witnesses," Timmy said,
"who Don plans to interview."
"Witnesses to the attack?"
"The tail end of it apparently. Three guys who work for an insurance office up Wolf Road. If they hadn't come out of the restaurant just then, the beaters might have gotten some more licks in. I was lucky. The attackers took off when these 51
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insurance guys saw what was going on and one of them took out his cell, Hanratty said, and got 911."
"This could have been so much worse," Timmy said, squeezing my arm. "I'm the one who's still shaky when I think about that."
I said, "Ouch."
"Sorry."
"What's interesting was how they seemed to know exactly what they were doing in the sense of inflicting pain but minimal permanent damage. They hit the backs of my legs but not my kneecaps. They smacked me good on the upper back but not lower down where they could have messed up any number of organs. The head stuff was nasty. It knocked me out, and it bloodied my scalp and messed up my ear. But the hits were glancing. These guys were not trying to kill me or even wreck me for life. It was more of a violent warning."
"But they didn't say anything?" Dunphy asked.
"Not a word. It was as if they knew I knew why this was happening."
"Are you working on any other cases this could be related to?"
"No, just routine stuff. Missing ex-husbands and girlfriends, some insurance scams, a township pilfering thing involving probable theft of road department fuel supplies. This thing is related to the Louderbush situation, I'm pretty sure.
My question is, though, why did whoever it was go after me and not Jackman and Insinger? Why warn me off and not them? I'm replaceable in this equation. Any number of Manhattan PIs I know of could handle it, but the two 52
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witnesses to Louderbush's crimes are central. Yet nobody's laid a finger on them. There has to be a reason for that."
"Both of them were upset when we told them what had happened," Dunphy said. "Especially Insinger. She said Walmart doesn't like violence."
"Did the TU have anything? Or the TV stations?"
Timmy said, "Not so far. If it had been somebody's house pet who got mauled, TV would be all over it."
Dunphy asked me if I had gotten a good look at the attackers, and I said I hadn't. "I doubt if I could pick them out of a lineup. What I can say is, they were tall, beefy guys, thirtyish or thereabouts, and two looked kind of Slavic maybe.
Serbian? Or am I just reading that into it from news photos of Ratko Mladic? One was a bit darker. Not black. Brownish, though not Hispanic probably. Gypsy possibly."
Timmy said, "Roma."
"Okay."
"It's what they prefer to be called."
"Well, far be it for me. I hope I run into this guy again so I can apologize."
Timmy told Dunphy, "A writer friend once told me that I have the soul of a copy editor. I took it as a compliment."
Uncertain of what to make of this two-acerbic-gay-guys-in-love back-and-forth, Dunphy said, "So the insurance-guy witnesses must have gotten a look at the car the baddies were driving, no?"
"Hanratty says it was a black Lincoln Navigator with Jersey tags. The three witnesses disagreed on what the numbers were. If this was a higher priority case, the cops might fool 53
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around with different number combinations and try to match them with New Jersey Navigators. But they don't have a lot of extra time on their hands, and of course the Albany Police Department is unaware that what I am working on is destined to alter the course of Empire State history."
Timmy said, "Lincoln Navigators aren't your usual Jersey goon style of vehicle. Or are they? They're usually the mode of transport of magnates, rock stars, the Secret Service."
"These guys could have been any of the above. Come to think of it, they were all nattily clad—upscale smart casual."
"Those blood stains will be hard to get out," Timmy said.
"Their slacks will probably need dry cleaning."
"And there I was writhing on the tarmac outside Outback in my togs from Marshalls. Maybe I was attacked for my questionable taste."
"It wouldn't have been the first time."
Dunphy said, "You guys sure are taking this a lot more lightly than I would have. I'd be shitting my pants and probably going into hiding. Anyway, I'm grateful you're willing to stick this out, Don. It shows you know how important this project is and that you're willing to do what's... I hate to sound sloppy, but the word that comes to mind is patriotic."
Timmy and I exchanged glances, and I said to Dunphy,
"It's true this is a job I don't think I need to be embarrassed about. Not so far. But you know, one thing you might be able to help me out with, Tom, is this: Who besides you and Shy McCloskey knew that I agreed just yesterday morning to take this Louderbush thing on? And who besides you knew I was meeting Jackman and Insinger yesterday afternoon? It seems 54
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odd that anybody working for Louderbush—if that's who we're looking at here—would have learned so quickly of my plans and of my whereabouts. I keep trying to figure that out. It's puzzling."
Timmy and I both looked at Dunphy. He had been sitting with his elegantly shod feet on the metal footrests of his wheelchair, and now he shifted and placed both feet on the floor. "You're right. How did these guys know?"
"It's disturbing."
"Yeah."
"Either Jackman or Insinger could have let something slip.
Although, I set up my appointments with them only a few hours before I met them. There wasn't much time for either of them to mention me to anybody casually and innocently.
Either of them, of course, could have done it intentionally—
set me up for whatever weird unknown malign reason. But when I met them, both struck me as sincere in their strong disapproval of Kenyon Louderbush and his actions, and highly unlikely to be reporting secretly to him or his staff or his Serbian militia."
"You're right."
"It's baffling."
"All I can say, Don, is that I certainly have not discussed your working for us with anybody except Shy. And he was unaware of the specifics of your meetings yesterday until after they took place and you landed in here."
"What about your staff? Beryl and her crew out there?"
"They don't even know who the fuck you are. You're just some security guy."
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"Right."
"What about Myron Lipschutz?" Dunphy asked. "Timothy, your boss."
"He knows Don is working for you, but not that it's about Louderbush. And Myron certainly didn't know Don was meeting yesterday with Jackman and Insinger."
I said, "And you're sure your phone lines are clean? And your office? What about your computers?"
"Absolutely. The computers are checked for hackers, and the rooms and phone lines are swept every morning just before Beryl gets in."
"By Clean-Tech?"
"Yes."
"And they're trustworthy? The company isn't owned by Diebold Incorporated. or Karl Rove's brother-in-law in Florida?"
Dunphy screwed up his pink face. "Jesus, you're making me nervous, Don. If you can't trust the firms you pay the big bucks to secure your information, who can you trust?"
"You don't by chance record telephone conversations yourself, do you, Tom?"
"Me? Why would I?"
* * * *
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Chapter Six
My head hurt. The doctors said I wasn't concussed—no unsteadiness, no disorientation, nothing untoward on the MRI—but every beat of my heart was like a sledgehammer against my cranium.
"Now I know what a circus tent stake feels like when those apelike guys take turns pounding it into the ground," I told Timmy.
"Funny, I think of tent stakes as insensate. But maybe it's because they don't have mouths that we never hear their pitiful cries."
"When was my last Tylenol?"
"Six thirty. You'd better wait another little while. I guess a beer wouldn't help at this point. Or a medicinal bit of weed."
"Nah."
I was in bed at our house on Crow Street. When I'd gotten home just after five, Timmy had warmed up some tam yam gai he'd picked up at the Thai place on Lark Street and I sat at the kitchen table and ate it. Such an improvement over the hospital boiled-chicken-in-mucus. I went up to lie down then and make some calls on my cell, but at first the throbbing was just too disconcerting. Looking at TV was out of the question—MSNBC is not the answer to a headache—so I tried some Art Tatum. That was too busy for the state of my tender brain, and Timmy put on a Bach partita, but that was even busier.
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I tried silence for a while, thinking I might drift off to sleep, but then I kept wondering who it was who had set me up, and my mind was so busy chewing over that question that soon I was wide awake.
While Timmy filled in the answers to the Times crossword puzzle with a military-pace hut-two-three-four, I made myself place two calls and each time concentrate hard on what I was saying and what was being said to me.
"You're at home, Janie?"
"Yeah, I just got in."
"All's well?"
"Oh, yeah, I'm like scared shitless. But other than that."
"You're being looked after, Tom Dunphy said."
"Some guy Anthony. He's actually kind of cute."
"So you know what happened after I left you yesterday.
You must have just pulled out of the Outback. I was in the parking lot on the phone."
"I know. That is so creepy."
"I'm trying to figure out how these guys knew I was meeting with you. Did you happen to mention our four o'clock appointment to anybody yesterday?"
A silence. "I'm trying to think."
"Take your time."
After a moment she said, "Just Kev. Kev called during my break—he knows I have twelve minutes rest period from two-fifteen to two-twenty-seven—and I told him I was gonna see you at Outback and talk to you about you-know-what. But Kev wouldn't mention any of that to anybody. He respects my privacy, and he knows how I am."
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"Kev is your boyfriend?"
"Yeah, Kevin LeBow. He's an installer at Verizon."
"And he supports your decision to expose Kenyon Louderbush?"
"Oh sure. Kev hates crap like that as much as I do, and also his union can't stand Louderbush."
"And there's nobody else you might have mentioned our meeting to ahead of time? What about your supervisor?"
"Oh God, no. Alma would put a letter in my file. She'd friggin' call Arkansas."
"If you were meeting with a private investigator?"
"Walmart is suspicious. But I think, like, what they don't know won't hurt them."
I thought, Kev LeBow. Could he have been recruited by the Louderbush people to ingratiate himself with Insinger and seduce her and report back on her contacts with the McCloskey campaign and its agents? Not likely. They'd been a pair for quite a while. Was I just practicing due diligence, or was I becoming as paranoid as Insinger's employer?
I told Insinger I thought she should do whatever Anthony the security guy suggested, and to be watchful otherwise, and that I'd be in touch.
I got Virgil Jackman on his cell at Jock World. He said he couldn't talk but that he had an eleven-minute break coming up and he'd call me back in ten minutes.
Timmy said, "What's a five-letter word meaning ancient stringed instrument? First letter R, third letter B?"
"Robot?"
"Come on."
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"Rhubarb."
"The second letter might be E."
"Rebar."
"Not exactly a musical instrument."
"It could be. Percussion."
"Keep trying."
"I'm doing my best."
"I hope not."
Soon, Jackman called back. I asked him first how things were going with the security Tom Dunphy was providing.
"I don't really need it, but this guy Damien is okay to hang with. He follows me around in this Hummer he has. He's even bigger than I am. I'm glad he's on our side."
"It's good," I said, "that these guys went after me and not you and Janie. It means that their employer has some sense.
Going after you two could generate serious backlash if you went public right away and linked Louderbush to the attacks.
But by beating on me they send the message to the McCloskey campaign that they are prepared to play rough and McCloskey should have second thoughts about pursuing any exposure of Louderbush's vile behavior. Anyway, Tom Dunphy is prepared to press on, if you are. So am I."
"Sure. I'm scared, I have to admit. But I'm not gonna take any shit from somebody who did what Louderbush did to Greg. What about Janie? Is she cool?"
"It's a little bit murky as to her usefulness as a witness.
But she's accepted security from the campaign, and she's still talking to us. One thing I'm doing is trying to find other people who might have witnessed the abuse or who at least 60
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had some direct knowledge of it. People Stiver confided in and who maybe saw the shiner and the split lip and the other physical damage from the beatings. There has to be somebody who knows something, even if not as much as you and Janie do."
"I got the idea," Jackman said, "that maybe Greg dropped some of his friends after he got involved with Louderbush. He was embarrassed or whatever. I know he dropped out of the gay Republicans and that other organization—upholding the Constitution and so forth. He told Janie and I he had to finish his thesis, and he didn't have time for all those people, but I'll bet it was that he didn't want anybody asking a lot of questions about his messed up appearance. I mean, how many times can you tell people you slipped in the shower or you were in a car wreck? Especially when your car wasn't banged up or anything."
"The story about his suicide in the Times Union said he had friends who were concerned about his being despondent. Who do you think the paper might have been referring to?"
"A reporter called Janie and I after she talked to Mrs.
Pensivy. So I guess maybe that means us?"
"What about Greg's parents and his brother and sister in Schenectady? Might he have confided in any of them?"
"He mentioned his sister, Jennifer, sometimes. She might've known something. But his mom and dad he had nothing to do with. His dad was a violent jerk and his mom was no help. I don't know about Greg's brother, Hugh. I think he moved out at some point and was no longer part of the family equation."
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I made a note to track down Stiver's sister. As well as his thesis advisor.
I told Jackman that I was puzzled as to how anybody knew I was meeting him and Insinger on Wolf Road Tuesday afternoon. I asked him if he had mentioned to anyone that we planned on meeting.
"Not that I can think of," he said. "In fact, no. I was so busy at work...oh fuck! Shit! My break is over. I'm two minutes late. Shit. Gotta run, dude!"
He hung up.
I said to Timmy, "I still don't know how the Serbians knew they could find me in the Outback parking lot. Nobody involved recalls telling anybody I'd be there."
"The two Serbians and one Roma."
"Right."
"You never saw the driver of the Navigator?"
"No, just the three who jumped me."
"And you tend to believe Insinger and Jackman?"
"I tend to, yeah."
"And you trust Tom Dunphy?"
"Sure. Why not?"
"He's well thought of. Of course, the line of work he's in...well."
"You would know."
"You bet."
"No, it's not Dunphy or Jackman or Insinger who set me up, I don't think. There's something I'm missing here."
Timmy said, "Rebec."
"What?"
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"The ancient stringed instrument is a rebec."
"Never heard of it."
"Now you have."
"I would think rebec meant to bec again."
He ignored this and moved on. I could see that he had about three quarters of the puzzle filled in, all of it in ink.
I said, "Would you hand me the phone book, please?"
I looked up Stiver listings in Schenectady and found two: Anson on Ridgemont Drive and J Stiver on Pond Street. J for Jennifer?
I dialed the J number.
"Yes, hello?" Female, firm, clear.
"Is this Jennifer Stiver?"
The expected pause. Was I a telemarketer? "Yes, I'm Jenny. And you?"
"I'm Donald Strachey, a private investigator, and I'm calling about a matter concerning your late brother Greg. I understand from friends of Greg's that you and Greg were close."
I made out what sounded like a muttered oh shit before the line went dead.
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