Текст книги "Strachey's Folly "

Автор книги: Richard Stevenson

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

The three of us were seated around a small outside table at the cafe with the excellent croissants on Second Street, SE. The early-morning Capitol Hill before-work crowd had been arriving for some time, and those seated closest to us must have been having trouble concentrating on their Posts and Timeses and lattes. LoBello was a strikingly attractive man, with the womanly—as opposed to effeminate—manner of the best drag queens. He had longish, swept-back, perfectly groomed dark hair in the style of an Italian maestro, and a fine-boned face that could have been out of La Dolce Vita except for the spectacularly large cold sore that took up about a quarter of his nicely shaped upper lip. The mustache LoBello had grown for his G. Gordon Liddy Dole act, and to cover up the sore, was gone now, as was the fat cigar.

Timmy had set up the meeting with LoBello while I was in Mexico. We had known that LoBello was a disgruntled former boyfriend of Suter's who, we figured, might have quilt-panel sewing ability. This was before Suter theorized to me that the panel had in fact been a warning to him from the drug gang, but also before Ray Craig had come up with the news that LoBello had once charged Suter with assault—assault to the upper lip with an ugly virus.

I said to LoBello, "I guess you don't know where Jim Suter is. Otherwise you would have launched your suit against him." "I haven't got a clue where Jim is. Wherever he is, I'm sure the place has turned into Chernobyl just from his presence. I could probably just keep my eyes peeled for emotional mushroom clouds rising. Meanwhile, I was thinking of hiring a private detective to locate the elusive Jimmy. And Timothy tells me you're a dick. Since you're looking for him anyway, perhaps you would do me the kindness when you locate Jim to give me or my attorney a jingle. You can bill me for whatever you want– up to twenty dollars, if you don't mind." "Okay."

"I've done everything I could think of to smoke Suter out. But he's gone. His phone's disconnected, and I've waited outside his building dozens of times, sometimes for hours, just sitting on the curb nursing my rage. But he never goes in and he never goes out. It's hard to imagine that Jim Suter could stay away from Washington for long. This town is where he's a star—a big, big star. Jim's the Jane Fonda—I used to do her, too, by the way—he's the Jane Fonda of backroom, right-wing-political Washington, is what he is—as Jim will be the first to let you know."

"Suter may be a star," Timmy said, "but he seems not to be a well-loved star."

"No, Mary Tillotson, Jimmy is not." LoBello dabbed at the filmy latte mustache that didn't begin to camouflage his large cold sore. "There's a good chance, of course, that he's here in town and he's hiding out. There are probably dozens of Washington men looking for his ass so they can take legal action. Either on grounds of mental cruelty—which won't get them far in one of the local homophobic courts of law—or for passing his hideous herpes around, as in my unhappy case. My attorney has advised me that anybody whose livelihood is dependent on their physical appearance—and let's face it, whose isn't?—could make an airtight legal case against any person who ruined that physical appearance. Legally, it's disfigurement."

"You're still quite lovely, Carmen," I said sincerely.

"Thanks, but I'll never be Liddy Dole again. Do you think Liddy Dole would leave her apartment looking like this? Oh, no. 'No. Thanks,' the great lady of the Red Cross would say, 'but no thanks.' I mean, did Clara Barton have herpes? I don't believe so."

"Don't cold sores tend to come and go?" Timmy said. "I know people with herpes of that type, and they'll sometimes go for months without a sore breaking out."

LoBello gave Timmy a duh look and said, "Timothy, honey, do you know what makes cold sores break out?"

"I've heard fatigue can do it. And of course stress."

LoBello grimaced theatrically and said, "Say no more. Also, it's not just that Suter gave me herpes. It's that, like everything else, he lied about the sore on his lip when we went to bed. He said it was just some dumb zit. I told him, 'Honey, you better stay away from those candy bars.' Later, when I broke out with this grotesque thing on my lip, and I caught up with Jim and made him admit to the truth, he not only confessed. He admitted to me that he himself had picked up the viais from rimming some closeted right-wing queen on Jesse Helms's staff who had anal herpes. God, if I ever run into Helms, I'd love to plant a big, wet one on that ugly kisser of his."

Timmy was staring at my mouth. I said, "I can appreciate, Carmen, why you might be upset about this."

"Upset? That hardly describes how I feel about James Suter."

"And I can see why you're determined to track Jim down."

"My latest tactic," LoBello said, leaning closer to me and lowering his voice, "has been trying to smoke Jim out by using what I have to admit is a kind of tasteless stunt." He glanced quickly around the cafe and, his face flushed, said, "I know you know about a panel in the AIDS quilt with Jim's name on it, even though as far as I know he's not dead. He doesn't even have AIDS or HIV."

"We're aware of the quilt panel," I said.

"I know you are. I saw you looking at it on Saturday."

"Uh-huh."

"Well—I did it. I made and submitted the quilt panel in memory of Mr. Suter." LoBello grinned nervously and fluttered his eyelashes.

"You did this to smoke Jim out?"

"Yes, and it's been all over the media. I thought, if I can't find Jim, maybe the press can. Although they haven't so far apparently. Anyway, I knew he'd hear about it, and it was a way of telling Jim exactly what I thought of him. I'm sure he knows who did it."

I said, "Why is that, Carmen?"

"Because I took one of his old manuscripts out of his apartment the last time I was in it, and I kept it, and in May I sewed pages from the manuscript into the quilt panel. I took the manuscript in the first place because I thought there was some dirt in it that I could use against Jim, though it turned out there wasn't. It was just his Betty Krumfutz campaign biography—a piece of cheap political hackery. But I stuck it on the quilt panel to humiliate Jim—and maybe to fuck him up professionally, the way he did me—and to lower him in the eyes of his good pal and onetime employer, that obnoxious right-wing Republican witch, Betty Krumfutz."

With a feeling that was not yet sinking but was poised to descend, I began to wonder why Suter had told me thirty-six hours earlier that he guessed the quilt panel had been a menacing stunt perpetrated by the drug gang to keep him in line. If he knew LoBello had possession of his Krumfutz campaign-bio manuscript, and Sweet and Heckinger were keeping him up-to-date on Washington developments, he would surely have fingered LoBello, the angry ex-lover with sewing skills who wanted to sue him, as the quilt-panel creep. Yet Suter had apparently lied to me about the quilt panel and what he must have known about it.

I asked LoBello, "What made you think the Krumfutz manuscript might have had dirt in it that you could use against Jim? What kind of dirt?"

LoBello smirked, but uneasily. "This is quite intimate. It involves pillow talk between me and Jim. Can you take it?"

"Mm-hm."

"Right after Jim and I met," LoBello said, lowering his voice again, "when things were hot and heavy between us, we were in bed sharing a joint one night while I was running my fingers through that gorgeous head of hair of Jimmy's. Jim started to tell me how much our relationship meant to him because it took his mind off something big and important in his life that had been gnawing at him. He dumped me two weeks later—the big puddle of puke—but that night I had brought peace to his soul, Jim told me, and I helped him get centered at a time when he needed that more than ever. Jim said he knew things about certain well-known people that would rock Washington and rock the country. That's how he put it: 'rock Washington and rock the whole country.'"

LoBello sipped his latte, dabbed his lips with a napkin, and as Timmy and I watched and listened with mounting interest, he continued, "Naturally, I asked Jim, what's this thing that's so earthshaking? But he wouldn't tell me. Which was unusual. Jim loved dropping names and dishing people on the Hill—who's fucking whom, metaphorically and actually and whatnot. This big thing was a Hill thing, he said, that might have changed the outcome of the '94 congressional elections if it had gotten out.

"I could tell that Jim was actually quite scared of this big, scandalous whatever it was, and he never brought it up again. But when I suddenly realized one night a couple of weeks later that it -was my turn to get dumped on my ass by Jim Suter, I remembered this conversation, and as I was on my way out, I grabbed the first thing on Jim's desk that looked like some kind of Hill papers, and I stuffed it in my bag. I went over the damn thing with a fine-tooth comb, and all it was, was the stupid campaign-bio manuscript. What a waste of time, and what a bore. But I kept the thing, even after Jim called all irritated and indignant and demanded that I mail it back to him, and then in May I sewed a chunk of the stupid thing on the quilt panel. So I got to use it to stick Jim and give the knife a twist after all."

I said, "When did this conversation about the scandalous situation take place?"

"In January of this year. Around the tenth or twelfth, it would have been. On the twenty-seventh I became another of Jim's ex-lover nonpersons. I guess you've heard about that category. There are hundreds of us. Thousands maybe."

"Did Jim give you any idea of when the shocking event, or events, actually took place?" I asked.

"Not really. Only that it was on his mind at the time, and he said he'd be lucky if he didn't come out of this one with an ulcer."

"You said, Carmen, that you were sharing a joint when this thing came up. Is it possible that drugs were involved in the scandalous circumstances? And that your smoking marijuana somehow triggered Jim's discussion of this large matter that was eating at him?"

LoBello gave me a don't-be-ridiculous look. "Honey, we shared a joint just about every night. Both before and after we made love. And making love with Jim Suter is about as good as making sweet love gets. You can take my word for that and put it in the bank. It's just too bad Jim was also a liar, an emotional sadist, and a morally empty shell. Except for those, he was the best. But he was all of the above, and worse. And for doing what he did to me, Miss LoBello regrets to say, Mr. Suter is going to have to pay. He's going to have to pay very dearly."

I said, "Carmen, among the Washington power-women you impersonated in your drag act—and impersonated quite brilliantly, by all accounts—was one of them Betty Krumfutz?"

LoBello affected a poker face and said, "Oh, yes. I did Betty." He was both trying hard not to grin and obviously enjoying letting us know that he was trying hard not to grin.

"And did you reprise your Betty Krumfutz routine Saturday afternoon at the AIDS quilt display? Maybe to draw extra attention to the Suter quilt panel you sewed and submitted to the Names Project in order to embarrass Jim among his Capitol Hill friends, acquaintances, and colleagues?"

LoBello beamed. "Am I good, or am I good?"

Timmy and I looked at each other. I thought, yes, LoBello is an accomplished actor—as is Jim Suter.

Chapter 24

I needed to speak with Betty Krumfutz fast. I called her office at the Glenn Beale Foundation and was told that she had left Washington Thursday night for Log Heaven and would not be back in her office until Monday morning. I could have phoned her in Pennsylvania, but a face-to-face meeting was what I wanted. I needed to question her in depth, if I could, on whatever it was that she had on her husband, Nelson, that would put him away "for the rest of his life," as she had worded it to me during my visit to Log Heaven, but which she had held back at his trial.

Did Mrs. Krumfutz hold incriminating evidence of the car-dealer-drug-smuggling scheme? If she knew about an illegal narcotics operation and didn't report it, that was obstruction of justice, at least. Although any knowledge Nelson Krumfutz had of his wife's variations on Mexican Indian rituals might have kept her from hitting him with a full legal whammy. But why, then, would it not have kept her from hitting him with any whammy at all?

Jim Suter had insisted to me that Mrs. Krumfutz knew nothing of the drug scheme. But now I knew that Suter had lied to me about the origins of the quilt panel—attributing it to the drug gang, even though he knew Carmen LoBello had made off with the Krumfutz campaign-bio manuscript—just as Suter had lied to me about the "zit" on his upper lip, a matter that Timmy had agreed to postpone discussing until the arguably larger questions surrounding an attempted murder and a major drug-smuggling operation had been cleared up.

There was also the puzzling matter of the scandalous goings-on that Jim Suter had alluded to when he'd gotten high with Carmen LoBello. Revelations of a drug gang involving the husband of a Pennsylvania congresswoman would have made headlines certainly, although such news would not, as far as Timmy or I could judge, "rock the nation" or alter the outcome of the 1994 congressional elections. So, I figured, maybe the scandal was something else entirely, or even that it was just some weird type of inside-the-Beltway braggadocio on Suter's part.

Timmy was even more intrigued by the historic-scandal possibilities than I was, for they fit his theory of a large, many-tentacled conspiracy. I had been unable to persuade him that the D.C. police had us under clumsy surveillance simply because they were poorly led and lacked imagination, and that neither hospital personnel nor bagel-shop cashiers were threats to us. I agreed with him that drug gangs were ruthless forces to be reckoned with, but that in Washington, unlike in Tijuana and Mexico City, the gangs' reach did not extend into every facet of official and private life. Timmy told me I was naive and I told him he was paranoid, and for the time being we decided to let it go at that.

I arrived in Log Heaven just after two on Friday afternoon and drove directly to the Krumfutz house on Susquehanna Drive. I saw the Chrysler in the driveway but no sign of the pickup truck with Texas plates. Five days earlier bagged leaves had been piled at the side of the Krumfutz lawn. Now the bags were gone, and the yard needed raking again. I guessed Mrs. Krumfutz had her yard crew in on weekends—both for tidying up outdoors and for heartrending rituals indoors—and since it was Friday afternoon, I wondered if her crew might be showing up soon.

I parked in front of the house, walked up to the front entrance, and pressed the button next to a door with three small stepped windows in it. A face soon appeared at the lowest window, and then the door swung open.

"Oh, for heaven sakes, what are you doing back here? I thought I was rid of you last—when was it? Sunday? And now here you are deviling me again. Well, you can just tell Nelson that if he sends you down here one more time, he has had it! He's got nothing criminal on me, and I've got the pictures in my scrapbook of him committing a felony, and I'll use them if I have to, believe you me!"

Mrs. Krumfutz stood glaring out at me in her pale pink sweat suit, and while she did not appear Mayan-queen-like at all, she did look as if she might rip my heart out if I said the wrong word.

I said, "Mrs. Krumfutz, I left a wrong impression on Sunday. I don't work for your husband."

"How's that? Come again?"

"I am a private investigator, but I'm actually looking into the danger Jim Suter is in, which I mentioned to you, and into the shooting of a friend of mine in Washington. I'm no threat to you. I have no interest in your personal life. I just need more information about a couple of things. May I come in?"

Looking wary, she said, "Information about what?"

"About what you have on your husband that could send him to prison for life, as you put it to me on Sunday. Whatever you've got seems to be in addition to the campaign finance scam he's already been convicted of. Am I right?"

"You bet. Right as rain."

"Is it that you have evidence of the drug-smuggling operation your husband was running with Hugh Myers?"

She screwed up her face and said, "The what operation?"

"Are you going to tell me that you know nothing of an elaborate scheme that your husband and Hugh Myers concocted for smuggling narcotics into Central Pennsylvania from Mexico in the seat backs of the GM cars Myers imports?"

"Are you off your rocker!" Her eyes were bright with anger and her voice rose with indignation. "Why, Hugh Myers was a deacon in the Presbyterian Church! My word, don't be spreading a ridiculous story like that around Log Heaven, especially right now. Poor Hugh passed away this morning. He was hit by a car in front of his house on River Street, and the fool driver never even stopped. It was dreadful, just dreadful."

"I'm sorry to hear that. Were Mr. Myers and your family close?"

"No, not close. We're Methodist, and Nelson always bought Chrysler products. But I've known Hugh and Edna for years, and my heart goes out to that girl. It's a tragedy, just a tragedy. Now, where in the world did you get the idea that Nelson and Hugh were drug traffickers? Hugh would never even have thought to do such a thing, and Nelson couldn't even organize some campaign-fund pilfering and get away with it."

"So if it's not drug dealing that you've got on your husband, what is it?"

She signaled for me to enter the house. I followed her in and she shut the door behind us. The place was hung with Yu-catecan landscapes, and the shelves were loaded with Mexican pottery and photographs of Mayan ruins. Chichen Itza, Coba, and Uxmal were the ones I recognized. The furniture was old, overstuffed pieces draped with colorful scrapes. The picture-window drapes were open, and the view was across the Susque-hanna to the autumn hills beyond.

"Make yourself at home," Mrs. Krumfutz said, indicating the couch, and she disappeared down a corridor. I leafed through a magazine called South of the Border Living, which was aimed at U.S. retirees who lived or planned on living in Mexico. There were pieces on property ownership, tax dodges, and on keeping the help in line. Nothing on the reenactments of Indian rituals that employed beef hearts from the A & P. Or could Suter have been lying about that, too?

Mrs. Krumfutz returned with a K Mart-style photo album done in pale green artificial leather with golden curlicues in the corners. She sat down beside me and said, "Are you squeamish?"

"Not especially." I hoped she wasn't about to show me her collection of aborted fetuses.

Not yet opening the album, Mrs. Krumfutz said, "I'm going out to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. Look through this, and then just holler when you're through. Or when you've had more than enough. If you need to toss your cookies, the bathroom is down the hall. You wanted to know what I've got on Nelson? "Well, this is it." She looked over at me, her face sad and tired.

"Thank you."

"Don't look till I'm in the kitchen."

"All right."

"I'm showing this to you," she said, getting up, "even though I hardly know you from Adam, for the same reason I've started showing it to other people. If anything should happen to me, I want the truth to be known about Nelson. Nelson has treated me no better than a dog, and I want the word out on what a big turd my ex-husband is."

"Why didn't you use what's in this album in Nelson's fraud trial, Mrs. Krumfutz?"

Looking weary and resigned, she said, "Because Nelson has a photo album, too, and I'd be pretty darned embarrassed if it got passed around the district."

"Oh."

"So, in that way, we're stalemated."

"I see. A sort of Mexican standoff." I hadn't meant that as a mean joke, but I realized it was one as soon as it came out. Mrs. Krumfutz forced a thin smile, then turned and left the room.

I opened the album and leafed through it. It contained page after page of color photographs showing a nude, middle-aged man, presumably Nelson Krumfutz, performing a wide variety of sex acts with a nude young woman many years his junior. Nelson was a wiry little man, and the young woman—Tammy Pam Jameson?—was slight also and, in many of the photos—which seemed to have been taken on a number of occasions over a period of years—just barely pubescent.

Nelson had begun to develop a paunch in the later pictures, and the young woman's hair color changed from mousy brown to auburn to blond. If it ever occurred to Nelson that the girl's age might have posed a legal problem for him, surely he erred when the two were photographed with the girl seated on a kitchen counter, grinning toothily, her legs spread, Nelson's head between them, and clearly visible next to the girl, just above a butter-yellow rotary wall phone, was a Hall's Beer Distributor's calendar whose current page located the event in April of 1985. My guess was, Tammy Pam was thirteen or fourteen at the time.

I closed the album and walked into the kitchen, where Mrs. Krumfutz was seated in the breakfast nook perusing the front page of the Log Heaven Gazette. "Who took the pictures, Mrs. Krumfutz, and how did you get hold of them?"

She looked up and said, "Tammy Pam's best friend, Kelly Bobst, took the pictures. For several years Kelly dated Floppy O'Toole, who runs O'Toole's camera shop in Engineville. Floppy developed the pictures and then kept the negatives. And when he fell out with Kelly in '93, he sent me these prints and asked me if I'd like to buy the negatives. I said no thanks. Floppy thought I'd like to use the pictures to put the screws to Nelson. But, as I say, I couldn't. What I think is, Floppy then offered the negatives to Nelson, and Nelson bought them and paid a high price, using cash he diverted from the campaign fund. About fifty thousand dollars is still unaccounted for, and my guess is, that's where it went, to Floppy. Though I can't prove it."

The teakettle on Mrs. Krumfutz's electric range began to whistle, and she got up and removed it from the burner. "Care for a cup of tea?"

"Thank you. Have you got coffee?"

"I've got Nescafe."

"I thought you might. I'll have a cup of that, please."

"Why, sure."

As she mixed the coffee crystals and hot water, I said, "I can see why you decided not to remain in Congress. Campaign fraud is one thing—that's as American as cherry pie. But these photo albums—that's something else."

"Yes, if the pictures had started coming out . . . I've got two grown daughters, Terri in Aliquippa and Hilaine in Frackville, and I wouldn't want them to be hurt, or their husbands or their kids. So I threw in the towel, despite my ongoing commitment to the rights of gun owners and the unborn."

Mrs. Krumfutz served my coffee in the breakfast nook and slid in across from me with her cup of tea. I said, "None of this may have anything to do with Jim Suter's current troubles. But it might. Either way, I'd appreciate your telling me what you know about Jim, Mrs. Krumfutz."

Apparently relieved by the change of subject, Mrs. Krumfutz spoke for several minutes about her onetime campaign employee and sometime professional acquaintance and casual friend. She described Suter as a committed conservative and an able -writer and political operative. She recited a long list of Suter's successes for a number of conservative causes, most of them election campaigns. Suter had also been involved, she said, in several lobbying operations on the Hill, including the campaign to prevent legalization of gays in the military. "Jim's a pansy," Mrs. Krumfutz said, "but first and foremost he's an American."

I let that go, and she went on to mention Suter's work on behalf of a right-to-life constitutional amendment and his pro-NAFTA organizing efforts with Alan McChesney for her and for her colleague Burton Olds.

I asked Mrs. Krumfutz straight out if she had ever doubted Suter's truthfulness. After a long, thoughtful moment she said, "Not on matters that were all that earthshaking, if that's what you mean. Why do you ask?"

Before I could reply, the telephone twittered, and Mrs. Krumfutz excused herself and went to answer it. As she stood by the kitchen counter, I heard her cry out, "Oh! Oh, my Lord! When?"

Mrs. Krumfutz fell back against the counter and shook her head in anguish. I quickly went to her side, for her face had gone gray and the hand holding the telephone receiver trembled.

Again, she cried, "Oh, no! No! Oh, no!" After a moment, she said, "I've got to hang up and call the girls. I'll call you back."

Shakily, she placed the receiver back in its cradle. She moaned, "Oh, my heavens! Oh, I can't tell the girls!"

"What happened?"

"Nelson is dead!" she cried out, and then she began to weep.

Between sobs, Mrs. Krumfutz told me that the caller had been Engineville police chief Boat Pignatelli. The chief told Mrs. Krumfutz that a few hours earlier an explosion had struck the house occupied by Nelson Krumfutz and Tammy Pam Jameson. Both had died in the fire that quickly engulfed the structure. The cause of the explosion had not yet been determined.

I comforted Mrs. Krumfutz as well as I could as she collected her wits and attempted to make a list on the kitchen blackboard of people whom she would need to notify. I suggested she phone a Log Heaven close friend or relative who could be with her. So before she called her and Nelson's daughters, Mrs. Krumfutz phoned her friend Marion Smith. Mrs. Smith said she would come as soon as she checked up on her dogs. She had only just gotten home, she said, after taking a casserole over to Edna Myers, whose husband had been killed earlier in the day in a hit-and-run accident.

Edna Myers's husband, Hugh, was the Log Heaven car dealer who, according to Jim Suter, had been involved in a drug-smuggling operation with Nelson Krumfutz—although Mrs. Krumfutz had found that accusation preposterous. It now occurred to me that both men had died violently on the same day in separate incidents. And they were the two men who could have confirmed—or denied—Suter's wild tale of drug smuggling in GM-product seat backs. Now, suddenly, both were dead. Had Mrs. Krumfutz not been so distraught, she might have noticed that now my hand was a little unsteady, too, and my need to place a phone call almost as urgent as hers.

Chapter 25

I’m heading back to Washington as soon as I can get out of here," I told Timmy, "and then probably back to the Yucatan. Jim Suter's story about drug smuggling into Central Penn sylvania might be true or might not be true, I just don't know. But if it is true—or something like it, maybe even worse is true—then somehow the Mexican gang found out that Suter blabbed to me about it—maybe Jorge's house is wired—and now they are killing all the witnesses."

Timmy said, "Oh. Oh, no. Oh."

I described to him the mysterious hit-and-run incident that ended the life of the Log Heaven GM dealer that morning and the explosion that killed Nelson Krumfutz and Tammy Pam Jameson a few hours later. "I hate to say it," I added, "but now Jim Suter is probably dead, too, or soon will be."

This was followed by a tense silence at the other end of the line. While Mrs. Krumfutz was off changing her clothes, I had reached Timmy in Maynard's room at GW. I could hear May-nard's voice in the background as he talked about a problematical IV with, I guessed, a nurse. Finally, Timmy said, "If some Mexican drug cartel is eliminating all the people who know about its Pennsylvania operations, where does that leave you? And, for that matter, me?"

"We know Suter's story, but we can't prove anything. If the story is true, the gang might think it has to remove anybody who might be in a position to describe the operation to us or to any authority we reported it to. But I doubt if they'd see any reason to actually eliminate us."

"You doubt it? Oh, good. Then, tell me this, Don. Why did the cartel try to kill Maynard? And why did they wreck his house searching for something? Maynard certainly knew a lot less about all this . . . this whatever it is than we do."

"What you say is true."

"Anyway, Maynard doesn't think it's drugs. He wants to talk to you as soon as you get back here—which, by the way, the sooner the better. I clued Maynard in on Carmen LoBello's story on some would-be-cataclysmic scandal Suter talked to LoBello about when they were high, and Maynard thinks he knows what it has to do with."

"He does? What? He can tell me now."

"Hang on."

Timmy put Maynard on the line. "It's the date." Maynard's voice was weak, but steady and clear. "When Timmy told me that this conversation took place in January of this year, I tried to think of what was going on then that might have involved scandalous secret machinations. I couldn't think of anything that was happening at the White House—a potential Jim Sutergate– or on the Hill that month that might have a potential Mexico connection. Which was a connection I assumed, based on subsequent, especially recent, developments. So I phoned Dana Mosel at the Post, and she called up all the paper's front pages and told me what made headlines last January that was Mexico-related. What Dana told me this morning sure was interesting. It had nothing to do with drugs though."

"What was it?"

"Bryant Ulmer's murder."

"Congressman Olds's chief of staff?"

"Yeah."

"What did Ulmer have to do with Mexico?"

"Olds was the nominal head of the GOP pro-NAFTA vote-gathering operation in the House, but it was Ulmer who actually ran it. Working directly with Clinton's people, he and Alan Mc-Chesney, who was then Betty Krumfutz's chief of staff, pretty much put together the bipartisan pro-NAFTA coalition in the House. Aid a nice job they did, too, for the free-trade-at-any-cost crowd. NAFTA passed the House 234 to 200. I agree with labor that it was a bad treaty. It cost jobs on this side of the border and is at this very moment no doubt poisoning thousands of underpaid workers on the Mexican side. But Clinton was a slick salesman, and NAFTA's most vocal enemies were an off-putting bunch, from Perot to Pat Buchanan. So Ulmer and McChesney were able to pull it off. The whole thing really made Bryant Ulmer's reputation on the Hill, and from that time on he was known as Mr. NAFTA. It's also the reason why his murder made the front page of the papers, not just the metro section."