He thought,
“I still don’t want to go to prison,” she said.
“Don’t worry about it. You could get hit by a car before then.”
“God, you’re such a comfort.”
“Mmm . . .” He looked at the potful of chili. “Think we could stick a pork chop in there?”
They ate early. As they were eating, Fox flashed a newsbreak: “Sources at the White House are telling Fox News today that there is speculation the vice president will resign. We repeat: Vice President Landers may be resigning his office. Sources say he has been accused of corruption going back to his administration in Wisconsin . . .”
“In my day, when I was on TV, you generally didn’t let your nipples show through your blouse,” Madison said.
“Poor girl’s excited,” Jake said. “She can’t help herself.”
“I think we should go into seclusion,” Madison said. “The New York apartment—we could leave a phone number for Novatny.”
“If we did that, we could walk over to the Met, down to MoMA.”
“Museum of Natural History.”
“Spend a lot of time in the bathtub,” he said.
“Down on Madison Avenue. I could use a new hat.”
“Hide out until midnight,” Jake said. “Catch the red-eye out of National.”
“Good idea.”
A minute later, he said, “Sooner or later, I’ll go down to talk to Arlo. We need an understanding.”
“Is he going to be vice president?”
“No. As I understand it, the front-runner is the senator from Texas.”
“Hmm. Our first female VP,” Madison said. “It’s gonna be tough to get you fuckin’ Democrats out of there, if all the girls are voting for you.”
“That was the thought,” Jake said.
The vice president announced his resignation at seven o’clock, his weeping wife, in a pale orange dress, seated behind him. Landers was a large man, pink and fleshy, with thick political hair going white.
“If these absurd and tendentious charges came at any other moment, I would fight them from office, as the president has urged me to do. But they are being made, as Lincoln Bowe was perfectly aware when he began this conspiracy, at the one moment when I could not afford to fight them from office—at the beginning of a long and difficult reelection campaign.
“Bowe and his criminal gang have succeeded to an extent: I am going. But they attacked me not because they wanted to damage a mere vice president. They attacked me as part of a greater game, to damage our party, our president, and indeed the aspirations of the American people, as reflected by this presidency. I won’t allow that to happen. I will fight with all my might, but I will not allow the best American president since John F. Kennedy to be handicapped during a campaign of such great importance to the American people.”
The speech was widely ridiculed in the papers and the television talk shows the next day, as was his wife in her orange dress, and his daughter, who was overweight, and who was filmed eating a caramel-and-pecan bun at a bakery near her apartment in Cambridge.
The bodies of Darrell Goodman and George Brenner sat in the SUV for four days, until somebody got curious about the fact that the truck hadn’t been moved. When the somebody got close enough, he noticed a “peculiar odor” and called the cops.
Arlo Goodman blamed the gangs, and vowed to free up more funds for gang-suppression efforts.
The FBI announced a massive investigation under the direction of a special prosecutor, the federal district attorney from Atlanta, Georgia.
“You remember when I begged you to appoint him,” Danzig said to the president. They were in the president’s private office, drinking a wonderful single-malt Scotch that the president had extorted from the distiller, using the British prime minister’s office as the pry-bar.
“I remember that. I was reluctant. There was some question about his integrity . . .”
“There was no question at all,” Danzig said. “He’s crookeder than Landers, and I’ve got the sonofabitch’s testicles locked in my desk drawer. That ‘independent counsel’ theory can kiss my ass.”
Jake and Madison hid out in New York for two weeks, talking only to Danzig and Novatny. Then Jake called Arlo Goodman from a pay phone, and flew out to Richmond on a Wednesday afternoon. Goodman walked out of the
