Ed Gorman: Blindside

A half-dozen voices started whining behind me. They didn’t know who I was but they sure as hell didn’t like me anyway. I could have been a priest, rabbi, or even doctor. It didn’t matter. I was some jerk-off who got to go inside.

The sergeant was a burly middle-aged black man with gray hair and gray mustache. He was at least as skeptical about me as the female cop had been. ‘You belong in here, huh?’

‘I’m working here for a few days.’

‘This is a crime scene.’

I didn’t say anything.

‘That means you don’t touch anything and I mean anything. You walk along that wall to the back where you’ll ask for Lieutenant Neame. She’s a lady. She’ll take it from there.’

We stood just outside the entrance. He pointed to the wall I was to follow. ‘I’m going to be standing here watching you. You go straight back and you make it fast. I got other problems I need to attend to.’

I shrugged and started my walk. I wasn’t alone. Four cops with flashlights were scanning the ground looking for anything worth bagging.

Lieutenant Neame was big and dark-haired. I imagined she was something of an athlete. With her gray pantsuit and snappy voice she had the intimidation thing down just right. She dispatched her troops with blunt force trauma. God help you if you disobeyed. Part of this, I assumed, was for show. She needed to hold her own with all the macho guys who didn’t like taking orders from a woman.

‘And you would be Dev Conrad, I guess, huh?’

‘That’s what they tell me.’

‘Cute.’ Then: ‘Did you know James Francis Waters?’

The back of the headquarters was filled with an ambulance and three squad cars. A dusty, dull, ten-year-old Volvo sat in the center of the parking lot. The hood and the trunk were up. All the doors were open. Three different officers in suits worked over the interior.

‘I met him this afternoon. We were supposed to have dinner tonight.’

‘What time?’

‘We left that open. I went back to my hotel to have a nap. He had my cell phone number. He was supposed to call me. Then we were supposed to eat in the hotel restaurant.’

‘That’s the Royale?’

‘Right.’

‘Any special reason you were having dinner with him?’

Before I could answer, two of the cops working on the car came up to her. The three of them had one of those football-like huddles meant to exclude the ears of outlanders. Namely me.

When they were done she was all mine again. ‘So why were you having dinner with him?’

‘I’m just here for forty-eight hours. He was under the impression — the wrong impression — that I was here to suggest shaking up the staff.’

‘Meaning firing people?’

‘Right.’

‘Just why are you here?’

‘Every campaign needs to be assessed from time to time. Congressman Ward’s father was a close friend of my father’s. Tom Ward thought I might have a few ideas about improving things here. Streamlining them.’

‘He’s not going to win. Burkhart is.’

‘Is that a paid political announcement?’

She was very good at hiding how much she cared for me.

‘Ward and three of his staffers are inside being interviewed by two of my officers. I want them to interview you, too.’

‘I don’t know much. I didn’t meet the staff until a few hours ago.’

‘The back door is standing open. Don’t touch anything or speak to any of the officers. They’re busy. Just go straight inside. One of the officers in uniform will take you to where the interviews are being conducted. This place is going to be hell within another twenty minutes or so. We need you all to cooperate because we’re going to get state press here right away. And maybe even national press, too. And that’s going to make our job one hell of a lot harder.’

‘I understand.’

The downturn of her lips said she doubted it.

She was right about the uniformed officer waiting for me just inside the opened back door. He was young, tall, scrawny, and had an Adam’s apple the size of a baseball.

‘Follow me, please.’

The police were using the conference room for the interviews. Two offices down sat Lucy Cummings and Kathy Tomlin.

The officer escorted me inside the office and then pointed to the sole empty chair on the visitor’s side of the desk. Nobody said anything. I sat down next to Lucy.

‘He’s dead,’ Kathy said. Big tears loomed on the lower edges of her blue eyes. ‘At least he died in that Captain America jacket he loved so much. It sounds crazy, but it meant a lot to him.’ Then: ‘I wish I would have been more of a help to him.’

Enough of remorse. There would be time for that later. The big problem now was managing the press. ‘What the hell happened, anyway?’ All I knew was that he’d been found murdered in his car. This would be the most predictable kind of story — a mystery inside a political campaign. Was some sleazy secret being kept from the public? Was this poor young man killed because he knew too much? Burkhart would hire extra PR flacks to push this story twenty-four/seven.

Lucy hid her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook. I slid my arm around her.

Kathy said, ‘I’d be the same way Lucy is if I’d found him, Dev. She told me she heard two noises that she thought might be gunshots. She ran to the back door to look through the window. She saw Jim’s car back there. The door was open and she could see a foot dangling beneath it.’

Lucy took her hands from her face and with a great deal of sniffling and snuffling said, ‘I ran out there. It was stupid because whoever’d fired the gun might still be out there. But I knew something had happened to Jim. And that’s how I found him. He’d been shot in the side of the head. Poor Jimmy.’ The face went into the hands again. The shoulders shook once more.

Kathy finished the story. ‘She told me she saw the blood on the side of his head. Where the bullet had gone in. And then somehow she managed to call 911 on her cell phone. When I came in I heard her throwing up in the bathroom. I went in and she managed to tell me about Jim. By then the police were here.’

‘What about enemies?’ I said. ‘Did he ever mention somebody being after him or something?’

‘No,’ Kathy said. ‘Though we got a lot of threats on the phone and in the mail. Not so much here. But in Jeff’s congressional office across town — you know, where people can come to get help. They’ve had to close down twice because they found things that looked like they might be bombs. And one night somebody spray-painted ‘Nigger Lover’ on their front window. And ‘Death to Tyrants.’ You know, because of Obama. Things like that got to all of us. I got to the point where I’d park as close to the back door here as I could so at night I didn’t have to walk far to get in my car and go home. All these guns floating around and all these threats scared everybody. Campaigns always get rough but we’ve never seen anything like this. It affected everybody.’

‘The police will have to look into the possibility that he was robbed.’

‘Jim didn’t have any money to speak of,’ Kathy said.

‘These days you can get killed for fifty cents,’ I said. ‘Right now that’s a possibility we have to consider.’

‘So it could be just a coincidence?’ Lucy sniffled.

‘Possibly,’ I said. ‘It’s not out of the question. But what I’m worried about is how the press is going to handle this.’

Kathy nodded. ‘Burkhart’s already put out a lot of brochures playing up Jeff’s reputation as an ass bandit. He managed to dig up all these old photos of when Jeff was still single and dressing up in dinner jackets and going out with great-looking young women on his arm. Before he was married, Jeff used to date this beautiful black woman. Naturally that’s the biggest photo in all the brochures and handouts.’