Lucky Bastard (38 page)

“Absolutely. We can start today.”

“What about Jack?”

Cindy said, “When was the last time he came into the office? As a lawyer, not as a candidate?”

“Not since he was elected attorney general. As long as he's a public official he can't mess around with the firm. You know that.”

“Which means he'll never come back, because he's going to spend the rest of his life being elected to higher and higher office. Isn't that the plan?”

Danny shrugged. “Unless he loses one.”

“Fat chance.”

“Cindy, he may not come in to practice law, but he comes in almost every day to talk politics or drop off the kids.”

Cindy paused, eyes wide. “He drops off the kids?”

“Only for an hour or two. The receptionist watches them.”

“What about Morgan?”

“He never brings them in when she's there.”

“Ah. He's using them for cover while he gets laid.”

“Probably.”

“That will stop,” Cindy said. “No kids in the office. And no politics. You've got to split the political operation off from the practice. You can keep the space you've got now as campaign headquarters or whatever you want to call it. Meet him there.”

“Isolate the virus?”

“You said it, not me.”

“Cindy, why this?”

“I'm unemployed.”

“You can get a job with any firm in town.”

“No thanks. You can't handle the firm alone. You're going broke. You need a litigator and a partner with contacts with the people who run this town. I need a job. Unless you don't want me.”

“I want you. You're the best lawyer in Columbus. But is this realistic?”

Cindy took Danny's hand. She said, “Danny, I don't need any lessons in reality. Let's go look at the new offices. We can walk.”

“New offices?”

She looked over her shoulder at him, smiling, and crooked a finger: Follow me. To Danny she did not look a day older than she had looked in the corridors of Tannery Falls High. She had rented the offices the week before, in a glass building next door to the Merriwether Building. The brass plate on the mahogany door read:
MILLER
,
ADAMS & MILLER
.

“Jack between us,” Cindy said. “Just like always.”

She turned the key and opened the door onto a handsome suite of offices. Light fell through a glass ceiling onto mahogany and leather, onto Bokhara carpets and aromatic leather-bound books.

Danny whistled. “Can we afford this?”

“If we don't let Jack sign checks, yes, I think so,” Cindy replied.

In her office, next to Danny's corner office, she unlocked a drawer and removed the papers she had drawn up for the partnership.

“I've already signed,” she said. “Sign them yourself and get Jack's signature and we're in business.”

3
To everyone's surprise, Morgan accepted the new partnership with enthusiasm. She saw advantages in removing Cindy from the encampment of the enemy and placing her, as it were, in protective custody. The closer her physical presence, the easier she was to watch and control. Yes, control: Morgan did, after all, have the power to disclose Cindy's innermost secret—or to put her in a position where she would be forced either to confess it to Danny, thus making wreckage of his life, or to do what her blackmailer asked. Any such blackmail would be more likely to succeed if Cindy had no power base of her own. As Morgan saw it, Cindy's loss of a gilded future at Street, Frew, Street & Merriwether was in every way our gain.

Also, from the start, Morgan had disliked having Danny in the same office with her and Jack. Danny's presence was the reason why she and Jack conversed in whispers when they discussed operational matters. Whispering annoyed them both—Jack because he disliked the hiss of Morgan's displeasure in his ear, Morgan because Jack made her want to shout and she was seldom able to do so.

To make possible more outspoken communications she converted Jack's old office into a soundproof room, telling the office staff that Jack needed a place to think, practice and play back his speeches, and, especially, hold strategy meetings out of earshot of the right-wing spies who stalked all persons of conscience who were fighting for social justice. The secretaries and the receptionist were themselves persons of conscience who had lived since Movement days with the suspicion that their telephones were being tapped and their food and drink were being poisoned by fascists, so this explanation made perfect sense to them.

The staff called it Morgan's room. It was equipped with a television set, a coffeepot of its own, a small refrigerator and microwave oven for heating pizza, a reading chair and lamp, a sofa bed. It could only be entered through a heavy steel door with a keypad lock to which Morgan alone had the combination. Not even Jack—especially not Jack—was entrusted with the entry code.

The room was also equipped with a hidden safe and certain other clandestine features. These were installed at night by her friend the Georgian sexual mechanic. He did this without my knowledge or approval. As provided by the approved procedure, he and Morgan now met at least once a month, usually in a motel after she met me. Unbeknownst to me, they also met from time to time on an impulse. These heated assignations had reawakened the Georgian's sexual obsession. In or out of bed, he would—as I soon learned—do anything for Morgan.

It was the Georgian, as you will remember, who headed the team that bugged the Gruesomes' penthouse. For what I thought were sound operational reasons, I had refused to let Morgan keep the tapes of Jack in action. It was, however, a simple matter for the Georgian to make copies and hand them over to her. Given his virtually matchless experience of women and what they are capable of doing in the name of love, this was an act of almost unbelievable folly. You would have thought him the last person in the world to fall into this particular trap. But as the history of the world had taught us long before these two lovers met, no one falls so deeply, madly, truly in love as a whore.

In any case, Morgan stored the tapes in the safe in her soundproof room and sometimes went there at night to study them. Her power over Jack was slipping from her fingers. I had taken away her control of his sex life. As lieutenant governor, Jack had shaken loose from other bonds. He kept later hours, presiding over the state senate during crucial night sessions and traveling around Ohio to speak at political dinners and other name-building events. After “selling” the bungalow (which was subsequently resold at a loss by its purchaser), the Adamses purchased a new, larger house in an upscale part of town. Jack now had a car of his own, in which Morgan frequently discovered, in wee-hour searches, such traces of female occupancy as long hair of many colors, lipstick-smudged cigarette butts, combs, barrettes, lingerie, the lingering aroma of perfume and bodily secretions, and telltale stains on the upholstery—even, once, a diaphragm. All this forensic evidence of Jack's incurable treachery she kept in her hidden safe, sealed in a Tupperware container.

She sat up late and alone watching tapes of Jack & friends, especially the infrared sequences, in which specters seemed to be making love. Watching them was a disembodying experience, somewhere between seeing in the dark and a bad dream, and she never tired of it. In time it occurred to her that it might be useful to know who else had used the penthouse for adulterous assignations. She began in her usual studious, systematic way to review the other tapes. She found them laughable: pudgy members of the Gruesome engaged in the sort of sex she had left behind even before she was the age of some of their partners, mostly high school girls who paid for their cocaine with inert coitus or reluctant and ludicrously inept fellatio.

And then at the end of a long evening, at the very end of one tape, she saw something that interested her very much: the governor of the state, sucking on a Popsicle with a look of dopey ecstasy that no known flavor of confectionery ice could possibly produce. The camera, remotely controlled by the Georgian or one of his colleagues from a rented room on the floor below, pulls back to show a girl, her back to the camera, kneeling in front of the governor. The girl is a thin blonde with buds for breasts who looks no more than twelve. She licks a Popsicle. The governor asks if she'll share it with him. “No, but I'll give you my sweater!” He holds the Popsicle while she strips off her sweater. This is repeated, while she disrobes item by item, saying, “Don't you dare lick my Popsicle!” At last she is stark naked: prominent ribs, a row of knobs down her spine. He refuses to give back her Popsicle. She whimpers, pleading, “But I
have
to have something to lick.” To which the governor replies (I am not making this up), “How about Uncle Wiggly?” She falls to her knees.

Showing me this footage, Morgan said, “Can you imagine?”

“There seems to be no need to imagine anything. Including who gave this to you.”

Morgan made no apologies. She said, “You do understand what you have just seen and what it means, do you not?”

I thought I did, but I said, “You tell me.”

A completely spontaneous smile, luminous with delight—such a rare event—spread over her face. Giggling, she said, “The Good Humor Man has just made our boy governor of Ohio. And therefore, sooner than we ever hoped, president of the United States.”

Peter agreed. He demanded immediate action to exploit this break. This was no work for Morgan. We delivered a copy of the tape to the governor along with several stop-action pictures of the Popsicle so that he would not delay watching it. A day or two later one of our people called him on his car phone.

“Yes.”

“This is the photographer.”

“What do you want?”

“Take the elevator to the penthouse at five forty-three tomorrow morning.”

“Impossible.”

“In that case, watch the Public Access Channel at six-thirty.”

“Listen, you—”

“The elevator, five forty-three.”

Click
.

At the appointed hour the Georgian and another man, both wearing gorilla masks, met the governor in the same elevator car in which Jack and I had had our chat about the perils of indulging in sex and drugs in the presence of witnesses. The governor was staggered by the price his blackmailers named.

“Resign?” he said, baffled. “What can I do for you if I do that?”

“We've already told you what you can do for us,” said the smaller gorilla, who sounded like a Princeton man who had something disagreeable in his mouth and was looking for a place to spit. “You can accept it or see the tape on television.”

“They'd never run it.”

“No? Then this is your last day of happiness. Every newspaper and TV station will have a copy by the end of the day.”

The governor said, “You're crazy.”

“It's up to you. You can resign and walk away or refuse and take the consequences. Either way, you'll be out in a week. We're offering you a chance to go back to the practice of law. But if you prefer twenty years in prison for statutory rape, we won't stand in your way.”

The smaller gorilla handed the governor his playmate's birth certificate. “That makes her thirteen,” the gorilla said. “She's an eighth grader. Her father is a fireman. Both her parents are devout Baptists. The girl sings in the choir. She's a hopeless cocaine addict, thanks to you. Think about it.”

The birth certificate dropped from the governor's long manicured fingers and fluttered to the floor.

“For Christ's sake,” he said. “Give me a break.”

“Okay, you've got forty-eight hours,” said the Georgian. “Today is Tuesday. Resign not later than Thursday.”

“That's too soon. It can't be done.”

“The stuff goes out in the last mail on Thursday.”

On Wednesday night the governor went on television, confessed that owing to the stresses of public life he had developed a dependence on prescription drugs and alcohol that clouded his judgment and endangered his life. His four teenage daughters sat beside him on the sofa as, holding his wife's hand, he formally resigned his office. He asked for the prayers of all Ohioans that the course of treatment on which he was about to enter in a private hospital would restore him, whole and healthy again, to his wife and their wonderful family.

Jack took the oath of office immediately, and a week later he and Morgan moved into the Governor's Mansion and into an office that had previously been held by seven future presidents of the United States.

4
Jack regarded the governorship as a wonderful opportunity to campaign on a continual basis. He had no real interest in actually governing. Running for office was what exhilarated him, and every victory was important only as a prelude to the next victory.

He continued to denounce crime, to hammer the special interests without interfering with them in any significant way, to champion the downtrodden and walk among them whenever a camera was present. It was a rare month on Ohio television when Jack, often accompanied by the twins, did not visit a distressed welfare mother and promise succor, or visit a school to teach a class to the learning disabled, or throw his arms around the close relatives of a murder victim. He was often on the telephone, consoling widows and orphans, congratulating athletes and scholars, commending policemen on useful arrests and prosecutors on convictions. Ohioans from every walk of life found themselves invited to the governor's mansion for breakfast or lunch or dinner, or just for a chat with Jack Adams. His sincerity was genuine, if not very long in duration—but then, it had to last only long enough for a shutter to whir.

“He's a political mosquito flying around looking for warm bodies,” said Cindy, watching him work a disaster scene on the evening news. “A drop of blood here, another case of political malaria there. Thanks for the blood, have a microbe! Today Chillicothe, tomorrow the world.”