Stephen Cannell - The Plan

"While you've been stuck in tax hell, I managed to sniff up a little something interesting."

"What's that?"

"Got through to a guy who worked with Litman at Harcort, Lowe and Smith in Chicago. C. Wallace Litman, as you'll recall, was an account manager for them as a young CPA before he quit and came north to seek his fortune i n t elevision."

"What about it?" Kaz asked.

The waitress came over and Cole glanced at her. "I'm celebrating. Martini, two olives." She moved away, a hefty woman who looked ridiculous in her farm girl skirt and fluffy white apron.

"We gotta find another place to meet," Cole said. "This place fails on every level, from placemats-to pussy." "Get to it. What did you find?"

"Well, this guy says that he remembers C. Wallace saying that he was handling Meyer Lansky's wife's personal accounts after Meyer moved to southern Florida."

"C. Wallace was Theodora Lansky's investment adviser?"

"That's what this guy says."

"Jesus, how the fuck we prove that?"

"I figured if he filed her tax returns, he hadda sign 'em. Instead of going through C. Wallace's taxes, why don't you dig up Teddy Lansky's and see what you find? I can almost guarantee there won't be any interlocking companies."

It was then that the TV in the bar showed a picture of Anita Farrington Richards. Kaz caught it out of the corner of his eye. "Look 't that."

Cole swung around as the waitress brought the martini. "Were you watching the TV in there?"

The waitress nodded. "Haze Richards's wife just died. Went down in a plane crash on her way to meet him in Ohio." She walked away.

Kaz and Cole exchanged looks and clambered out of the booth. They galloped into the bir like two water buffalos after a cow.

"There isn't much left of the plane," a field correspondent in a checkered coat was saying. "Apparently, several other flights have undershot Hopkins International Airport in recent years. The Lear-55, carrying Mrs. Richards, the wife of the certain Democratic nominee for President, crashed into a grain locker and exploded. The FAA is on the scene and they will be moving pieces of the debris to a hangar at Hopkins Field for inspection. So far, three bodies have been retrieved from the wreckage and the flight plan filed in Providence showed them to be David Horton, the pilot; Sam Shelton, the copilot; and the candidate's w ife, Anita Richards. Dental identifications will confirm that, probably sometime tomorrow."

Then Vidal Brown was on camera in a shot that had been taped earlier.

"Haze Richards is under sedation. Anita was Haze's life mate; they met in college and she shared all of Haze's hopes and dreams. He is simply devastated by this loss."

"How you wanna work this?" Cole said.

C. Wallace Litman saw the story while he was monitoring the ten o'clock news. He always stayed up until the late newscast was complete so he could make notes to be passed out at the morning meeting. The UBC affiliate in Cleveland had supplied the footage of the Lear jet crash and the confirmation word that Anita Richards was dead. C. Wallace dropped his pad and called Steve Israel, at his desk on the Rim, hoping he would give him the broad strokes.

"I don't know," Steve told him, after he'd asked what the political ramifications would be. "This has never happened before. The closest we can come is James Buchanan in 1857. His fiancee, who he was going to many before the inauguration, committed suicide, so his niece, a woman named Harriet Lane, ended up serving as the first lady. Of course, this is completely different. We're conducting a telephone poll right now, but my guess is Haze is gonna get a huge wave of sympathy."

C. Wallace moved to the window after he hung up and looked out over the New York skyline. A troubling thought hit him. Could Mickey have had anything to do with the crash? Then he brushed the idea away. What would he possibly have to gain?

The men at Fudge Anderson's Washington, D. C., election headquarters were gathered in a small room in a suite of offices they had rented for the campaign. They were waiting for Fudge and Henny, who arrived twenty minutes late. Fudge dropped his overcoat on the table and they al l s at down. Henny turned to Justin Davis, the campaign pollster.

"Justin, you have the results?"

Davis, a heavyset man with brooding good looks, had already done a quick telephone tracking poll. He had the results in front of him. It looked horrible for them.

He got to his feet with the slip of paper in his hand. "To begin with, I feel bad for Haze's loss. . But we've got to deal with the political fallout. It could affect our strategy, so forgive me if this sounds a little cold-blooded."

"Understood," Pudge said.

"Okay. This is just a three-hundred-call survey, so its accuracy is moderate, but representative. It is also random, so it is demographically scattered. The people we called felt immense sympathy for Haze. When asked if the loss of his wife would affect his ability to be President, most people said no. That didn't surprise me. The thing that I found surprising was that this has somehow lifted his internals. The spot percentage is almost fifteen percent higher than when we asked the same character questions a week ago. Same on the crisis questions and the economy. How this plane crash could improve his ability to deal with a national military crisis or the economy baffles me, but there it is. Of course, this is just a preliminary survey, but we've gotta deal with the fact that Haze is a recipient of a helluva lot of goodwill right now. My guess is this will build, not ebb. The question is whether it's a two-week phenomenon or whether it drops to the bottom line and becomes part of his baseline goodwill coefficient." Justin sat down and looked at Pudge and Henny.

"What do you want to do with the bimbo?" Stan Dershman said from the back of the room, asking the question they were all thinking. Dershman was the press secretary and he had a big kiss-and-tell tournament planned for tomorrow in which Bonita Money was going to get up and put Haze in the Philanderers Hall of Fame.

"If you go through with that, we're gonna get backlashed into oblivion," Justin said.

The room was silent.

"How 'bout we just change the timing?" Dershman continued. "They're not going to mourn this woman for long. . Maybe in a month, we can trot Bonni out and she can sling her shit-burger and it won't blow back on us."

"After his wife is gone, the fact that he had an affair with a woman two years before sort of loses its impact, doesn't it?" Justin said. "If Anita's not on stage to bleed for the TV cameras, I don't think we get the same energy out of it."

"The man has lost his wife," Pudge's voice interrupted them. He had rested his chin on steepled fingers. "I can't believe you guys are saying what you're saying. I always hated this Bonita Money thing. I never was sure she was telling the truth. It's over. We're not going to use it."

"What if she decides to go public on her own?"

"You go to her, Justin. . Do whatever you can, just make sure she stays quiet. Let's get out of this sewer and get back to running a campaign." He picked up his coat and walked to the door, then turned and looked back at the roomful of people. "There are times when the end doesn't justify the means."

Pudge walked down the hall, where he found an empty office, and wrote Haze Richards a personal note of condolence.

Mickey got the news directly from Milo, who had called him on the secure line from a gas station minutes after the crash. The conversation had been brief.

"Catch it on the news," Milo said and hung up.

Mickey waited around for the first news report that came in as a special bulletin at nine-thirty. He watched, without emotion, as the newscaster talked about the flaming wreckage and the curse of Hopkins Field in Cleveland-a curse that had already claimed three other aircraft in eighteen months. Mickey Alo shut off the set, then went downstair s t o the kitchen and fixed himself a sandwich and a cold beer.