I don't mean to beat a dead horse, but one of the two reporters on this story was killed. And the other one, me, despite all your attempts to help, has more questions than answers. I know Curtis Black is involved. I know he tried to assassinate the president of the United States. But I don't know why, and I don't have proof. In other words, so many days and so much tragedy, and I can't even get a news story out of this. So nothing personal, Gus, but you haven't done a whole lot by me yet, not, at least, as much as you probably intended.'
Gus looked at me in a curious way, speaking, it seemed, without talking.
'You have it partly right,' he said.
I whirled toward him and asked, pointedly, 'What do you mean by that?'
He fell mute. I softened my tone. 'Gus, you want to help. I trust you on that. So help me. No more hoops. No more hurdles. No more being cryptic. Help me.'
There was more than a hint of desperation in my voice, but at this point, so what? Gus stood up a little straighter, though his leg was still bent in that familiar way it always is.
He said, 'You know Curtis Black went into the witness protection program, right? We've established that.'
I nodded.
'So he gets a new identity. I don't know what happened to him in the program. I heard he vanished- abandoned his new, government-issued identity and got a third identity on his own.'
This coincided with the government records that I had seen the previous morning, which showed that Clawson vanished in 1988.
Gus continued. 'So he's running around, and no one knows who he is: not the government who gave him a free ride on a felony murder offense, not the guys he betrayed and put away for the rest of their lives.
'No one knows who he is,' Gus continued. 'No one knows where he is.'
I asked finally, 'So then why does Curtis Black take a shot at the president?'
Gus looked at me long and hard, leaving the sensation that he was looking through me, into my mind, willing information to me.
'He doesn't,' Gus said, still staring at me. Abruptly he turned around, opened his car door, reached beneath his seat, and pulled out a copy of that morning's Boston Record. He shut the door and held out the front page in front of me.
I looked at a pair of side-by-side colorful photographs taking up much of the top half of the page. The first one was of Senator Stanny Nichols working a ropeline at an event in Los Angeles, leaning over the yellow tape, both his hands stretched out for the thronging crowd of Democratic supporters to shake. The second one, right beside it, was of President Clayton Hutchins standing behind a podium on the tarmac of the Milwaukee airport, a lineup of fully uniformed policemen standing behind him in an anticrime event, and behind them the distant outline of Air Force One.
Gus pointed slowly at Hutchins, his finger lingering on his face for a few seconds. He looked me in the eye and slowly, somberly, said,
'That's Curtis Black.'
And just like that, so many pieces fall into so many empty places, a picture suddenly emerging from all the disparate parts, though it didn't yet become entirely clear. I stared at the photograph, then at Gus.
'He's had some cosmetic work done,' he said. 'He's worked on his speech patterns, his Boston accent. But it's him. We knew it was him, but we couldn't be sure, so from prison, Paul sent a message to him when he was vice president, through a brother-in-law who was a big fund-raiser. The message said simply, 'Paul Stemple knows and needs to be pardoned.' And lo and behold, he was.'
My head was swimming, my hands visibly shaking, my voice weak from mental exhaustion.
I asked, 'So if Black is the president, not the would-be assassin, and all the other men in the gang are dead or in jail, then who shot at Black, and why?'
Before he could open his mouth to answer, I felt another piece of this nearly completed puzzle jamming into place. No one shot at Hutchins.
Someone shot at me. I was the first man struck. Drinker was right when he floated that theory, though for all the wrong reasons. I was the intended victim of someone who was trying to maintain Hutchins's secret.
Gus said, 'We can't prove it, but my belief is that it was you they were gunning for, not Hutchins. From what I've heard inside the Record, you were nosing around on this pardon early on, and they must have been trying to get you out of the way. Someone was. I just don't know who.'
There was a long silence between us. The chill breeze continued to rustle through my suitcoat, though I didn't actually feel cold. Planes continued to rumble overhead, though I didn't hear a sound.
'Why didn't you just tell me all this to begin with?' I asked, a dose of aggravation seeping into my voice. 'We could have avoided a lot of tragedy.'
Gus shook his head slowly and looked down at the ground, then back up at me. 'I think I have a pretty good idea about how you work. God knows, I've been watching you since you were greener than a meadow.
I've known you a long time, Jack. If I just gave you what I had, anonymously, you would have dismissed me as some sort of crackpot and never checked the information. If I had come to you on the record, I would have destroyed my entire life. My wife doesn't know about this armored car heist. My daughters, they don't know about this armored car heist. You're the best reporter I know. I wanted you to figure this out on your own, without my direct involvement, and come to the answers yourself. It almost worked.'
I said, 'So you won't go on the record? I need you on the record on this.'
Gus shook his head slowly. He said, 'I just can't. I busted my hump to recover from where I was. I've made a life for myself. I'm happy.
My wife is happy. I can't destroy all that now.'
'Who killed Havlicek and Stemple?' I asked.
'That part, you're going to have to learn on your own. It's either Hutchins or the FBI. I just can't tell you who.'
Standing there, I suddenly felt the driving urge to get somewhere fast, though I wasn't quite sure where I needed to be. I was sitting on information that no one else in the world had, but I wasn't quite sure how to let anyone else know.
I nodded slowly to Gus. I couldn't well be angry, but I was somewhere shy of appreciative. 'I've got to get out of here,' I said.
'You have what you need?'
I don't think he meant luggage. 'I have, I think, whatever I'm going to get.'
I looked back at my bodyguards and gave them a wave to approach. Their car started, and they raced up to where we were standing. Gus took a step toward me, reached his arm out to hug me, and I fell into his embrace. As we stepped back from each other, he looked me in the eye and said, 'You're a man of words. Me, I'll never be able to tell you how sorry I am. For everything.'
He smiled and hit me softly on the shoulder with his open fingers.
Then he added, 'You're on your own now, and for you, with your talents, that's not a bad place to be.'
twenty-two
So on your own really means being on your own. It means having a newspaper that doesn't want you on the story. It means having a key informant who has nothing else to give. It means having an FBI that may be trying to kill you rather than help you. It means returning home to Washington to nobody and nothing but the presence of imminent danger.
After all that had gone on that day, with all that was left to come, my hotel room seemed depressing, if I had the time or inclination to be depressed, which, right now, I didn't. As I fired up my laptop, I leaned back in my chair and pondered what I had. The president of the United States was a former armored car robber named Curtis Black who had entered the federal witness protection program at the invitation of the government under the name
