Richard Stevenson - Red White and Black and Blue

"If any of these trash you've been talking to asserted that I myself have ever been anally penetrated, they are lying or delusional."

"No one went into particulars. I didn't ask. I didn't really want to know."

"So, leave me with just this one shred of self-respect, will you, please?"

He poured himself another drink, although this time he nearly missed the cup and splashed whiskey on some documents on his desk. He was getting as drunk as he could as fast as he could. Was he then going to kiss me? Punch me in the face?

I said, "I'm going to go after you on the Stiver death.

There's a witness who saw two people on the Quad Four roof before Greg fell. And if you went into a drunken rage and admitted to Trey Bigelow that you shoved Greg over the edge, you might have admitted the same thing-bragged about it-to other men under similar circumstances. If so, I'm going to find these men and depose them and they are going to form a queue outside the Albany DA's office. You killed a decent, screwed up young gay man with his life ahead of him, and you're not going to get away with it."

Louderbush stood up and shook his head again over and over. He looked down at the family photo on his desk, and he began to snuffle. Suddenly he croaked out, "I'm sorry, Deidre, I'm so sorry!"

He sat down again with a thunk — seemed to collapse into his chair-but before I realized what he was up to, he was up again, fast, turned, and flung open a window behind him and dove into the cool evening air.

I raced out of the office and down the stairs to Main Street. Cars had stopped, and a few passers-by had already gathered to gawk and exclaim into their cell phones. Heaped on the sidewalk, Louderbush was breathing well enough, but he was still weeping, from physical and all kinds of other deeper pain. One arm was twisted weirdly, and one leg was ominously misshapen, too.

Just after two in the morning, I checked into a motel off the Thruway, near Kingston. I was spent, and I was still mad.

Louderbush had tried to tell the cops I'd pushed him out the window, but three teenagers down on the street had seen him dive out on his own. Also, the cops could smell the whiskey on his breath, and the hospital he was hauled off to would undoubtedly verify that the assemblyman had been inebriated when he fell or jumped from his office window. I told the police I had been interviewing Louderbush for an article in Le Monde when he began acting strangely and then plunged out the window. One cop said, "Some people can't hold their liquor."

I was back on the road by eight Thursday morning, and just after nine WCBS news radio reported that gubernatorial candidate Kenyon Louderbush was in an upstate hospital recovering from injuries suffered in a fall the night before. No details were yet available, WCBS said, but "unconfirmed reports" had the assemblyman tumbling from a second-story window.

In another hour I was creeping down FDR Drive in the all-day, all-night rush-hour traffic. I swung off the FDR at ten past ten and found a parking garage on 58th. I told the attendant I'd just be a few hours.

It was a perfectly lovely June morning in Manhattan. I arrived at the small leafy park at the end of well-appointed 57th Street early and sat on a bench enjoying the view over the East River and, beyond that, of ever up-and-coming Queens. I watched the traffic shoving itself across the waltzing tangle of girders of the 59th Street Bridge. Nearby, a couple of moms kept one eye on their Blackberries and another on their tots in the play area, and a woman with what might have been a small squash racket in her hair led around the park a dog that looked like a giraffe wearing a grass skirt.

Sam Krupa ambled in right on time and sat down next to me.

"You're the only person in the park seedy-looking enough to be a private detective. You're Strachey?"

"Yep, I am. And you're the only person in the park sneaky-looking enough to have worked for Nixon's political operation.

You're Krupa."

"Sneaky-looking? Nobody except John Ehrlichman ever told me to my face that I looked the part. And that's when I was oh so much younger and oh so much meaner than I am now. I find it hard to believe that anybody would look at Sam Krupa today with Maalox stains on my tie and my cashmere Depends down below and consider me anything but a harmless old pisher, a fucking nobody."

"That's what I mean by sneaky. Mr. Krupa, you're still somebody. I mean, are you ever. Don't forget, I've seen the e-mails of your conversations with Stanley Weaver and Jay Goshen. And look at this ear of mine that's practically falling off. Hey, fella, you did that. You're…what? In your eighties?

And when the masters of the universe want the body politic rearranged to their liking, who do they turn to? Sam Krupa.

Maybe you pee in your pants nowadays-I'll take you at your 254

Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson word on that-but you still have the brass and the cojones and the cunning and the ruthlessness to get the filthiest of the filthy political jobs done. So, you aren't going to try to tell me you've mellowed now, are you?"

He had a surprisingly bland and inexpressive face, and the benign pale eyes gave away nothing. His epiglottis jumped around, though, even when he wasn't speaking, and it seem to be telegraphing something that might have been useful to understand for anybody knowledgeable enough to decode its machinations. I didn't know about his diapers, but otherwise he was dressed like a billion dollars, or at least like a client and probably social friend of a billion dollars, or ten.

He gargled out what might have been a chuckle. "No, I'm more worn out than I used to be, but I'm no mellower. I still like to kick the bad guys in the balls. Or the side of the head in your case. That's rare for me, though. Always has been, getting physical. I generally aim not for the solar plexus, but for the psyche, the emotional weak spot, the reputation."

"Like with Eliot Spitzer?"

He nodded, and the Adam's apple bobbed and weaved.

"Oh, yeah, those stories."

"Somebody had to orchestrate his downfall."

A quizzical look. "Eliot didn't orchestrate it himself? That's how I understood it to happen."

"He didn't request sleazy PIs like me to follow him around and examine hotel linen with microscopes, and then tip off prosecutors and reporters. Somebody-a particular individual-arranged for those lurid aspects of Spitzer's spectacular ruination."

Krupa folded his pink hands over his beautifully tailored little belly. "Yeah, if only I still had the moxie for a move like that. Oh boy." He wasn't about to admit anything to some Albany pol's valet.

"This time it's not working," I said. "The Serbians were a bad mistake. You thought I was crude and you hired crude people to deal with me, and you got caught at it. And while you've got hacker Todd on your payroll, other people can play that game, too."

A tight smile. "I wrote the book on political hardball, and now other people have read it. Shouldn't I be collecting royalties?"

One of the moms had vacated her bench and led her little girl out onto Sutton Place. She was replaced by a middle-age black woman pushing a small white child in a stroller.

"Where," I asked, "did you get your information about me and how I could be expected to react to the rough stuff? A lot of people in Albany know that about me, I guess."

He seemed to take pleasure in looking me in the eye and telling me, "A PI here in the city who's much like yourself talked to people in Albany. I'm not sure who they were. But it did come back to me that Shy McCloskey knew what was going on, and he approved. He didn't want you wandering away or getting discouraged. Until, of course, he did. After you became more of a liability than a help, he had a couple of suggestions we gratefully accepted. Shy didn't want anybody to break your legs or what have you. Like a lot of liberals, he's a pacifist. But I'm told he said, why doesn't somebody just blow up Strachey's car? Then maybe you'd go away."