'No. The one thing that's clear to me is, Louderbush is a rat who has to be kept out of the governor's mansion.
Anything else that's ambiguous here pales in comparison to the importance of driving Louderbush out of the race for governor.'
'Are you convinced that Louderbush actually drove Greg Stiver to kill himself, as his neighbors think happened?'
'Yes and no. No and yes. I have no clear idea what happened. And neither, really, does anybody else that I've talked to so far. But I'm a long way from finished. It looks, in fact, as if I'm just getting started. Anyway, the primary is still three months away.'
'I thought Dunphy wanted answers next Tuesday at the latest, and last Tuesday would be even better.'
'Yes, but he also wants me to get this right. The worst thing that could happen to McCloskey is if we're somehow all wrong about Louderbush and his relationship with Greg Stiver, and the whole reeking mess suddenly blows up in McCloskey's face. That could create a big sympathy vote for Louderbush, and then both McCloskey and Ostwind would be screwed.'
'That borders on plausible.'
'I'm not sure I'll be home for dinner. I may go lie down somewhere. I'm still sore all over and the ear is still throbbing. Should it still be doing that?'
'I think so. Body parts that have been partially detached are going to hurt for a while. I do wish, Don, that you could just let this thing go at least for a few days while you heal.
Really.'
'I won't be doing anything too strenuous, not to worry.
There are a few more people I need to talk to, and I'm guessing those contacts will lead to others and with luck a clearer picture will emerge. Or it won't emerge, and then the hell with our pals the Democrats.'
'All that will be just as true two or three days from now when you're not feeling so wounded and drained.'
'Noted.'
He knew when he had made his point with me and I had considered it and I was jolly well going to do as I jolly well pleased. He recited an obscure Buddhist good-luck mantra he had picked up on our trip to Thailand a few years earlier.
Then he called me a few names in Sanskrit and rang off.
Triple A hadn't shown up yet, so I called Bud Giannopolous.
'Can you get into a life insurance company's policyholder records?'
'Sure.'
'Greg Stiver had a fifty-thousand-dollar policy that Shenango Life apparently weaseled out of honoring. Stiver's sister Jennifer was to have been the beneficiary. I need to know if in fact it really happened that way. And I need to know if Shenengo's investigator concurred with the police finding of suicide, or if he or she had any other ideas, and if so what they were. And of course I'd like to know whether or not Kenyon Louderbush figured anywhere in the company's report.'
'Okay.'
'You'll call me?'
'Later tonight.'
I retrieved the bag with the Smith amp; Wesson from the trunk of my disabled car and stretched out on the grass while a few stragglers made their way out of the elementary school and into their cars and out onto the street. I studied the warning note left by the Serbians. It had been hand-lettered with a felt pen on a piece of ordinary copying paper.
Fingerprints? In case the FBI was later involved in the case, pending my gangland-related demise, I placed the note under the front passenger seat of the car, taking care to handle it only by its edges.
The Triple A guy was bug-eyed at the sight of my car with its four flats.
'Who did it?'
'My ex-girlfriend, I think.'
'Holy shit. Did you call the cops?'
'No, that would really set her off. I just have to face the fact that the relationship is over.'
The guy used a winch to drag the car up a ramp onto his flatbed truck.
I said, 'Won't this hurt the wheels?'
'It might.'
I got to sit high up next to the driver for the ride into Schenectady.
'It looks like your ex-girlfriend went to work on you, too,' the Triple A guy said.
'You noticed.'
'You must be glad to be rid of her.'
'Tell me about it.'
I picked up a Hyundai at the rental agency across the street from the garage. My car would be ready to drive in the morning, but I told the garage, 'Just hang onto it.'
I needed my laptop, so I drove into Albany and found a parking spot on Dove Street only a block from the house.
Timmy was not yet home from work. I checked the fax machine, and there was the five-page police report on Greg Stiver's death my friend at APD had promised to send me. I folded it and stuffed it into the shoulder bag with my gun. I packed an overnight bag and left with it, the shoulder bag, and my laptop.
I went out the back door, down the steps, across our tiny urban patch of scraggly lawn, and up onto the wooden crate that had housed some statuary we had had shipped back from Thailand. I climbed over the fence into the backyard that abutted Timmy's and mine. I knocked on the kitchen door of Dot and Edith, a lesbian couple I had helped out some years earlier when they lived on a farm and who were now quite old. Dot led me through the house and out her front door.
She was used to this; I'd done it a number of times.
The rental car was as I'd left it. There seemed to be no need to check it for explosives. Though when I turned the key in the ignition, I held my breath for just an instant, and I could feel my heart thudding.
Chapter Eleven
I phoned Tom Dunphy and told him I was staying at the Crowne Plaza and that if he looked out his office window up State Street he might see me waving at him from mine.
'The Super 8 was fully booked? What are you doing putting up at the Crowne Plaza on the campaign's meager dime? Christ Almighty.'
'This place is convenient to your office. Basically I'm hiding out. Those assholes slashed my tires, and they warned me again to back off.' I described my visits with Paul Podolski and Jennifer Stiver and then the vandalism.
'How the hell do they know where you are all the time? I don't get that.'
'I don't either. I would like my car checked for a tracking device or for listening devices as soon as I get it back, probably tomorrow. I'm driving a rental car that's parked in the hotel garage. If they track me here, I'm going to be very weirded out.'
'So Stiver's sister isn't going to be much help exposing Louderbush? That's a shame.'
'She actually seems to think her brother might have wanted Louderbush to become governor.'
'That's sick.'
'Or something. It does complicate our strategy here. Of course, we don't know what Greg Stiver would have wanted.
To the extent that he confided in anybody at all, he seemed 101
Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson to leave different impressions with different people and even to tell entirely different stories.'
