Mounting Fears

46

WILLIE GAYNES WATCHED THE REPORTER ENTER HIS OFFICE. HE WAS NELSON Pickett, whom Willie had recruited from a rival rag to replace Ned Partain.

"Did you listen to the recordings, Nelson?" Willie asked.

"Yeah, I did," Pickett replied.

"Well?"

"The guy is certainly Martin Stanton, but in order to go with that, we'd need to know who the woman on the recordings is," Pickett said.

"Tell me about it. Any candidates?"

"Three, sort of."

"What do you mean, 'sort of'?"

"I mean it could be one of the following: Jean Rodgers, with whom Stanton was alleged to have had a long-running affair when he was still practicing law in L.A. She is the wife of Elton Rodgers, a very big real estate developer in southern California, and the two of them were a presence on the charity-dinner circuit. She's twenty years younger than Stanton, gorgeous, and has a reputation for liking lots of sex, some of it with more than one partner. Apparently, gender doesn't matter."

"That's juicy."

"Yeah, but we'd have to put half a dozen stringers on it, maybe for weeks, to nail it down."

"Who else is on the list?"

"His traveling campaign manager, Elizabeth Wharton. I've talked to two people on his campaign plane who say they've caught them looking hungrily at each other. Nobody, however, has been able to put them in the sack together."

"Okay, put on a stringer to shadow Stanton's campaign schedule. I want staff bribed at every hotel they stay at. I want to know the location of their respective rooms and the room-service delivery schedule to those rooms. I want to know how many Stanton orders for."

"Will do." Pickett made a note.

"Who's the third?"

"Barbara Ortega, who was Stanton's chief of staff the last two years he was governor. This is not the hottest tip, it's supposition based on proximity: she was there, so given Stanton's reputation for libido, he must have fucked her."

"That would be a legitimate basis on which to proceed," Willie said, "if we had six more months to nail it down, but we don't. Is this Ortega traveling with Stanton on the campaign? A threesome with Stanton and Wharton would be a nice thing."

"No, she's just been appointed head of the Criminal Division at the Justice Department. She's been living at the Ritz-Carlton for a couple of weeks, and she bought a house in Georgetown. They were seen together in Sacramento at the swearing-in ceremony for Mike Rivera, Stanton's successor, but not before or after. They can't be put together at any other time since Stanton got the vice-presidential nod."

Gaynes sat back in his chair and gazed out his window toward the Potomac River. "Tell you what," he said, "get recordings of the voices of all three women and have our guy compare them to the woman's voice on the Stanton recordings."

"Great idea!" Pickett said, sarcastically. "Any ideas on how I can manage that?"

"What do you think I'm paying you the big bucks for, Nelson? Do I have to do all the thinking around here? Now, get out and get on it! We're short of time!"

TODD BACON SAT on a bar stool at El Conquistador and sipped his third margarita. It was his third evening on the hunt, and he was with a code clerk from the embassy, a dish named Rita. He'd had his eye on her for a while, and now he had a professional reason for taking her out.

"When are we going to get some dinner?" Rita asked plaintively. "I'm going to topple off this bar stool in a minute."

"Just a sec," Bacon said. An elderly man with longish white hair and a Vandyke beard had just entered the bar, and Bacon's pulse was up at least ten points. The man was the right size and age, and the hair and beard were a good disguise. He rearranged himself on the bar stool so that Rita was between him and the mark. That way he could seem to be looking at Rita when he was actually looking past her.

"Todd, I'm not kidding," Rita said. "I'm drunk and hungry, and I'm going to faint any minute."

Bacon waved at the bartender. "Can we dine at the bar, seсor?"

The bartender brought two menus.

"Can't we get a table?" Rita asked.

"Rita, baby, I'm working, here; you know about work, don't you? Order anything you like, and order one for me, too."

"You spooks are all alike," Rita said. "Work, work, work, day and night."

Bacon ran a hand up her skirt and found, to his surprise and delight, that she was wearing stockings and a garter belt, instead of panty hose. "Hey, hey," he said.

"Not now," she replied. "Not until I've had some food." She waved the bartender over and held up two fingers. "Dos specialitees," she said in mangled Spanish, "and a bottle of vino blanco primo."

Bacon snapped his attention back to the man at the bar to check out the left ear. Unfortunately, the man's hair covered the ear entirely. Just what the mark would do, Bacon thought.

Plates of guacamole appeared before them on the bar, and Rita dug in with a vengeance. "Oh, God, that's good," she said. "I might make it through the evening."

Bacon tried it, and she was right; it was good, and he was very hungry, too. The man with the beard was saying something to the bartender, and he strained to hear it. It was English, but that was the best he could do. Bacon was beginning to believe with all his heart that the man he was looking at was his mark. The man looked like a cross between Colonel Sanders and Grandpa on The Waltons. He had seen the reruns on Nickelodeon when he was a kid.

"So Toddy," Rita said, "where'd you go to school?"

"Alabama," Bacon replied absently.

"Joe Namath Alabama?"

"One and the same."

"So you're southern white trash, or what?"

Bacon fixed her with his gaze. "Southern white aristocracy," he replied, "not that you'd know the difference." The man at the bar reached under his hair with a finger and scratched at his ear, but there wasn't time for Bacon to fix on it before it was covered with hair again.

"You mean your people owned slaves and all that?"

"Lots of slaves and lots of all that," Bacon replied.

"So they were rich?"

"They were, for a time. They had to get it all back after the war."

"The Civil War?"

"The War Between the States," Bacon replied, "or the Struggle for Southern Independence, take your pick."

Then something awful happened. A pretty blonde in her thirties came into the bar and sat down beside the man with the beard, giving him a peck on the cheek. "Hey, sweetheart," she said.

"This is Mrs. Williams," the man said to the bartender. "We were married just before we left New York."

Mrs. Williams shook hands with the bartender.

"Is this your first time in Panama, seсor?" the bartender asked.

"It certainly is," Williams replied. "We're taking a private tour of the canal tomorrow."

"I hope your rooms are satisfactory."

"Yes, we have a real nice suite on the top floor."

Bacon's heart sank. "Shit," he said under his breath.

"What?" Rita asked.

"Never mind, baby," Bacon said. "You just eat your dinner, then we'll go back to my place." At least the evening wouldn't be a total loss.

"Deal," Rita replied, mopping up the last of the guacamole and receiving a plate of some sort of stew.

"What the hell," Bacon said, starting on his stew. "You win some, you lose some. There's always tomorrow."

TEDDY FAY WATCHED the young couple at the bar from his table. "Mrs. Williams" was an American hooker he occasionally spent a night with in a hotel room, and he was looking forward to this night.

Teddy noticed the bartender head for the men's room. He excused himself from the table, walked over to the bar, to where the credit card machine was kept, and quickly fingered through the pile of receipts. Bacon-that was one of the names on the embassy's website. Bacon belonged to Owen Masters.

Teddy rejoined his date, but his mind was elsewhere.