Blindside

TWENTY-THREE

I saw a woman on TV once who claimed that she could see the souls of the newly dead leaving their bodies and seeking the light only they could see. She said she saw this most often when she visited hospitals, something she didn’t do unless a loved one was sick, because watching the souls flee the dead frightened her. This came to mind as I stepped off the elevator on the third floor of St Francis Hospital, where surgery was being performed on David Nolan.

Mrs Nolan was in the waiting room. She glared at me as I started to enter. I did us both a favor and joined Kathy and Lucy in a small grotto-like cove down the hall. This was an older section of the hospital. I wondered how many hundreds of people had waited here for the appearance of a doctor to bring them his or her verdict. I could almost tap into all the relieved smiles as well as the shock and disbelief and horror of those who wouldn’t be smiling for a long time.

There is no silence like hospital silence. It is easy to imagine the classic Grim Reaper in his hooded attire slipping into rooms at random and smiting sleeping patients with his scythe and dispatching their souls to the next realm. The three of us sat on a small tufted gray couch between framed paintings of a maternal Virgin and a weary Jesus. I sat between the women. Kathy touched my hand and said, ‘It should have been Jeff, not David.’

Her bitter words preceded by seconds a fleeting sob of Lucy’s. She hadn’t acknowledged me as yet. She stared off at something only she could see. And she kept fingering a small gold cross.

One of the police officers at the accident scene had let me ride with him to the hospital. I was there half an hour before Bryn Nolan slammed into the small office where I was talking to the surgeon who’d operate on Nolan. Without hesitating, she pointed to me and snapped, ‘I want him out of here. This is my husband we’re talking about. And this man is no friend of mine or my husband’s. I wanted to call the police about David being missing but he wouldn’t let me.’

Since I’d pretty much passed myself off as a coworker of Nolan’s, the graying doctor’s face tightened in confusion and then suspicion. He wasn’t up for a war. ‘Maybe you’d better leave, Mr Conrad. I appreciate your help.’

‘I want to know everything he told you.’

Even crazed Bryn was an appealing sight in her soft white sweater and jeans, her hair in one of those perfect chignons that upper-class women wear as badges of honor. But crazed she was. Did she really think I would’ve said, ‘You know, Doc, Nolan’s wife was humping the shit out of his best friend.’ Damned unlikely.

There was nothing to say. I left. I used my cell phone to call Ward’s father and got an answering machine. I left a message and told him to call me no matter what time it was.

After fifteen minutes in the cove with Lucy and Kathy, I took the elevator to the ground floor. The cafeteria was closed but there were, mercifully, two pots of free coffee. Neither Kathy nor Lucy had wanted any. As I rode back upstairs on the elevator, a cup of coffee in my hand, I started worrying about how we needed to play all this to the press.

Reporters would soon find out that Nolan had been the disguised man asking the question about prostitutes. They would also soon find out that Nolan hadn’t been at work. Campaigns break people; they’d be wondering where he’d been. I’ve come close myself at times. The days and nights become one and they become endless. You are in a war and the enemy never stops firing. You are constantly backing and filling. And then securing enough ammunition to attack on your own so that the other side spends its time backing and filling.

When I got to the cove I found Lucy quietly crying and Kathy noshing on one fingernail. I was left with no real idea of what was going on. A private detective had videotaped material destructive to both Ward and Burkhart. Mrs Burkhart and David Nolan had conspired and paid to have it done. The private detective died unexpectedly. Nolan raced to Chicago and found the material he wanted and brought it back here. The idea was to blackmail both candidates. Vengeance on the part of both Mrs Burkhart and David Nolan. And then Jim Waters had stolen the DVD and was going to blackmail them himself. Then Waters was murdered. But who murdered him, and why?

‘I wonder what’s taking so long,’ Lucy said.

‘You heard what the doctor said, Lucy.’ Kathy laid a sisterly hand on Lucy’s arm. ‘This could take hours.’

Lucy’s blue eyes shimmered with tears. ‘There’s a chapel on the ground floor. I’ve been to Mass there sometimes. I think I’ll go downstairs and light a candle for him.’

After she lifted her purse and got to her feet, her gaze came to me and rested there for a time. As if she was trying to deduce something. I couldn’t tell what her eyes were saying. Maybe she was angry; maybe she thought, as I had, that if I hadn’t been chasing Nolan he wouldn’t be on the operating table right now.

But then her mouth broke into a quick, shy smile and she turned and headed for the elevator.

Kathy and I sat there without saying anything for a time. The unseen shoes of nurses squeaked down hallways somewhere on this floor. Faint conversations could be heard up at the nurse’s desk. Elevator doors opened without dispatching anybody, then closed.

Kathy said, ‘You notice he’s not here.’

‘Ward?’

‘Yes. He’s somewhere with a bimbo and after he’s done he’ll sit up all night trying to figure out how to play this to the press.’

‘I was doing that myself.’

‘That’s your job. Besides, you haven’t hurt David the way he has. David’s sort of old-fashioned in a nice way. He and Ward would always have it out when Ward started sleeping with staffers. David really hated that.’

‘I hadn’t heard about that.’

‘Oh, yes. Jeff is compelled to try and get every female staffer into bed. He got me as far as his motel room when we were on the road one night, but I sobered up before we could do the deed. He wouldn’t speak to me for a week or so afterward. The worst part was when one or two of the younger ones fell in love with him. They’d end up crying on David’s shoulder. He didn’t know how to handle it. Who would?’

I was beginning to understand the breadth of the problem of handling Jeff Ward. So many ways he could be brought down. ‘At least his opening remarks tonight were really strong. Waters could really write.’

‘He could before Jeff tried to fire him. Lucy saved him. She started writing all his stuff for him. Turned out she was better at it than Jimmy was. Jeff didn’t know about it.’

‘Jimmy seemed bitter when I talked to him.’

‘He was. Every time we’d have a conference and Ward would compliment him on how good something was, Jimmy’d look at me. He knew that I knew, that Lucy had confided in me. Plus he resented her for sleeping with Ward.’

‘Lucy did?’

‘Yes, she used to call me up nights. She was always crying. They’d been sleeping together for a few months before I knew anything about it. She actually asked me if I thought he’d leave his wife for her. I’ve got a little sister who’s naive like that. I wanted to cry myself when she talked that way. I imagine Jimmy did, too. He and Lucy had gone out for so long they’d been talking about moving in together. Then she was in Washington for a couple of weeks and she came back and she was all starry-eyed.’

Starry-eyed, I thought. What a terrible way to feel when you’re in the clutches of somebody like Jeff Ward. But then I started thinking about Lucy and Jim Waters. If they were intimate then she’d probably known about the DVDs and if she hated Ward for dumping her…

In my army days I saw a lot of bases and a lot of chapels. Every so often I’d park my lapsed Catholic ass in a small chapel — never a church — and just sit in a pew for fifteen or twenty minutes. I liked the theatricality of Catholicism. The red and green and gold votive lights and the deep dancing shadows they cast on the walls. I liked it especially when the scent of incense was still on the air.

Now I thought about Erin and how much I loved her and how frightened I was for her. A schoolboy Our Father found its way to my lips.

At this hour Lucy was alone in the chapel. It was short and narrow. All the lights had been shut off but the doors remained open. There was a single line of pews. She sat in the front row.

I took a seat in the pew behind her. It was so dark in here the altar was lost in all but rough outline.

We sat in the sad silence for several minutes. The only sound was that of her occasional sighs. She cleared her throat before she spoke. She didn’t turn around. ‘Any more news on David?’

‘Sorry. You know as much as I do.’

‘Poor David. He got drunk one night and told me what Jeff and his wife had done.’

‘Is that when you knew Jeff wasn’t going to marry you?’

Her head tilted downward. ‘I guess Kathy told you. It just makes me feel stupid is all, what I did.’

‘I’m sorry you were hurt, Lucy.’

‘I’m thirty-four years old. Jimmy laughed at me when I told him we were breaking up because of Jeff. He said he knew he was nerdy but at least he wasn’t naive the way I was. I shouldn’t ever have left him.’

‘But you went back to him. And he told you about the DVD he’d stolen from David.’ A conjecture, but a reasonable one.

‘Jim was going to blackmail them. He wanted me to help him and then we’d run away and get married. He was in love with me; we’d been sleeping together for a long time. I wasn’t sure if I loved him but I liked the idea of getting back at Jeff. But he wouldn’t do it. He got scared. All his big talk and his big plans, but when it came right down to it he wouldn’t do it. He just kept saying we’d go to prison. He got real paranoid. He even managed to get a gun somewhere and kept it in his car.’ I thought of the. 38 bullets I’d found in one of his bureau drawers; now I knew where he’d kept the gun. But the police hadn’t found it in his car.

‘You wrote his speeches for him.’

‘He had some kind of block. He wrote a couple of bad ones and Jeff started riding him. And that intimidated him. He couldn’t write anymore. I didn’t want to see him get fired. Is that how you figured out how I knew about the DVD?’

‘When I found out I started thinking maybe there was a connection. If you were close enough to know about his block, you’d probably be close enough to know about the DVD.’

After a time, she said, ‘When I was little and my parents got into their fights I’d always run down to the church and sit in the chapel. They had terrible fights. I got so I’d be afraid to go home. But sitting in the chapel with just the candles always helped me. Like nothing could touch me as long as I was there.’ Then: ‘I leaked a lot of stuff to the Burkhart campaign. I really wanted to hurt Jeff. Now I wish I hadn’t done that.’

So I finally had my spy.

‘I hate to say anything at a time like this, Dev — I mean poor David’s being operated on and here I’m worrying about myself — but do you think I’m in any legal trouble?’

‘Not if nobody ever finds out. Just about every campaign has a leaker once in a while. You should be fine.’

‘But I still feel guilty anyway. I wish I’d been nicer to Jim, too, and I wish I’d never known anything about that DVD. I think I really would’ve gone through with it.’

‘Maybe not. Maybe at the last minute you would’ve changed your mind.’

‘But I was really tempted.’

‘We’re all tempted to do all kinds of things. But we don’t do them. That’s what matters.’

I put my hand on her shoulder. ‘C’mon, I’ll walk you back to see Kathy. She’s probably worried about you.’

‘Sometimes this is all like a dream,’ she said, then stood up and carefully made her way out of the pew. She made a quick sign of the cross, then turned to me and said, ‘Even if we win, I’m going to quit. I can’t take any more of him, Dev. I really can’t.’