Red White and Black and Blue

Chapter Ten

All four tires on the Toyota had been slashed. There was no other damage to the car. What was done would have been carried out discreetly, what with teachers and other staff moving about in the school parking lot while I was inside being both helped and hindered by Jennifer Stiver.

I knew that the tire job had been done by the Serbians and not by sixth-graders who go around saying fuck-because a handwritten note had been stuck under my windshield wiper. It read This is your second and final warning.

Okay, so they had followed me? I was certainly unaware of any tail when I left the house in the morning and when I was cruising around the all-but-deserted SUNY parking lot next to Paul Podolski's office building. I'd stopped for lunch at the Gateway diner on Central Avenue, and I guessed they might have spotted me there and followed me to Rotterdam. But were they staking out all the upper Hudson Valley lunch spots in case I got hungry? Hardly. Who had I told that I was seeing Podolski and then Jennifer Stiver? Timmy and…Bud?

Bud was on the good guy's side, I was certain, or at least on the team that was paying his fat fee. Computer hackers operated outside the law, but they had their own rigid code of ethics, like Good Housekeeping and the Tupac Amaru.

I looked at the note again. This was my second and final warning, but my final warning before what?

I phoned a Triple A garage in Schenectady, explained that my tires had been vandalized and I would need a car carrier, not just a tow, and also a lift and a rental car. They said forty-five minutes.

One by one, two women and two men walked out of the school while I waited, took note of my flat tires, and asked me what had happened. I said, "My ex-girlfriend is pissed off.

I suppose she has her reasons." Each of these people peered at my car and at my bandaged ear and at my giant hickey, and then nodded, walked on and drove away.

Jennifer Stiver soon appeared, but she was busy talking on her cell phone and got into a red Dodge Neon parked nearer the school building and drove off without noticing me.

I phoned Timmy at work and explained my situation, leaving out the part about the final warning note.

"Oh, good grief. Do you want me to come out and pick you up?"

"No need. I'll get a rental car. Anyhow, it might be good to have an anonymous car for a day or two. I'm also thinking of staying in a hotel overnight. I can't figure out how these people seem to know where I am all the time."

"Could they have hidden an electronic tracker somewhere in your car?"

"This is looming as a possibility. I've checked the car for explosives but not for a tracker. After I get the car back, I'll ask the campaign's security people to take a look. Dunphy uses Clean-Tech, and I know they're good. If there's anything to be found, they'll find it. Meanwhile, I should be as elusive as possible for a while."

"You actually checked the car for explosives? I thought you said these people weren't trying to kill you, just to warn you off."

"That's true. I'm just being overdramatic. Anyway, they somehow seem to know that I'm still working on getting the goods on Kenyon Louderbush, and they badly want me to stop. This only confirms that Louderbush is a despicable human being who must never be elected governor."

"Any idea yet who they are? I assume it's the actual Louderbush campaign."

"Maybe. Though it could be out-of-control Tea Partiers or other right-wing fringe types who are doing bad things on Louderbush's behalf without him or his campaign people knowing exactly what's going on. So if anything leaks out Louderbush will have plausible deniability."

"It sounds like the Nixon White House."

"You don't have to go that far back. Don't forget Cheney and Rove and the Valerie Plame CIA outing. I doubt Bush himself ever knew."

"Was Jennifer Stiver helpful at all? What was she like?"

"She was helpful in the sense that she confirmed that her brother was a tortured soul who had been taken advantage of by a sadistic creep. And she doesn't seem to doubt that Greg took his own life. She was unhelpful in the sense that, like her brother, she's a conservative Republican and she wants Merle Ostwind to win the governor's race, and she's unwilling to do anything that might get Shy McCloskey elected. Ms. Stiver doesn't like liberals."

"You didn't wave your ACLU card in her face, I take it."

"I didn't need to. I'm working for the McCloskey campaign, and that's bad enough. I tried to leave the impression that I'm merely mercenary, figuring that as a good Republican she would approve of that. But now she apparently just thinks of me as unprincipled. So I don't know how much use Jennifer's going to be in exposing Louderbush."

"What a rat's nest you've stepped in. Any second thoughts about getting involved in this?"

"No. The one thing that's clear to me is, Louderbush is a rat who has to be kept out of the governor's mansion.

Anything else that's ambiguous here pales in comparison to the importance of driving Louderbush out of the race for governor."

"Are you convinced that Louderbush actually drove Greg Stiver to kill himself, as his neighbors think happened?"

"Yes and no. No and yes. I have no clear idea what happened. And neither, really, does anybody else that I've talked to so far. But I'm a long way from finished. It looks, in fact, as if I'm just getting started. Anyway, the primary is still three months away."

"I thought Dunphy wanted answers next Tuesday at the latest, and last Tuesday would be even better."

"Yes, but he also wants me to get this right. The worst thing that could happen to McCloskey is if we're somehow all wrong about Louderbush and his relationship with Greg Stiver, and the whole reeking mess suddenly blows up in McCloskey's face. That could create a big sympathy vote for Louderbush, and then both McCloskey and Ostwind would be screwed."

"That borders on plausible."

"I'm not sure I'll be home for dinner. I may go lie down somewhere. I'm still sore all over and the ear is still throbbing. Should it still be doing that?"

"I think so. Body parts that have been partially detached are going to hurt for a while. I do wish, Don, that you could just let this thing go at least for a few days while you heal.

Really."

"I won't be doing anything too strenuous, not to worry.

There are a few more people I need to talk to, and I'm guessing those contacts will lead to others and with luck a clearer picture will emerge. Or it won't emerge, and then the hell with our pals the Democrats."

"All that will be just as true two or three days from now when you're not feeling so wounded and drained."

"Noted."

He knew when he had made his point with me and I had considered it and I was jolly well going to do as I jolly well pleased. He recited an obscure Buddhist good-luck mantra he had picked up on our trip to Thailand a few years earlier.

Then he called me a few names in Sanskrit and rang off.

Triple A hadn't shown up yet, so I called Bud Giannopolous.

"Can you get into a life insurance company's policyholder records?"

"Sure."

"Greg Stiver had a fifty-thousand-dollar policy that Shenango Life apparently weaseled out of honoring. Stiver's sister Jennifer was to have been the beneficiary. I need to know if in fact it really happened that way. And I need to know if Shenengo's investigator concurred with the police finding of suicide, or if he or she had any other ideas, and if so what they were. And of course I'd like to know whether or not Kenyon Louderbush figured anywhere in the company's report."

"Okay."

"You'll call me?"

"Later tonight."

I retrieved the bag with the Smith amp; Wesson from the trunk of my disabled car and stretched out on the grass while a few stragglers made their way out of the elementary school and into their cars and out onto the street. I studied the warning note left by the Serbians. It had been hand-lettered with a felt pen on a piece of ordinary copying paper.

Fingerprints? In case the FBI was later involved in the case, pending my gangland-related demise, I placed the note under the front passenger seat of the car, taking care to handle it only by its edges.

The Triple A guy was bug-eyed at the sight of my car with its four flats.

"Who did it?"

"My ex-girlfriend, I think."

"Holy shit. Did you call the cops?"

"No, that would really set her off. I just have to face the fact that the relationship is over."

The guy used a winch to drag the car up a ramp onto his flatbed truck.

I said, "Won't this hurt the wheels?"

"It might."

I got to sit high up next to the driver for the ride into Schenectady.

"It looks like your ex-girlfriend went to work on you, too," the Triple A guy said.

"You noticed."

"You must be glad to be rid of her."

"Tell me about it."

I picked up a Hyundai at the rental agency across the street from the garage. My car would be ready to drive in the morning, but I told the garage, "Just hang onto it."

I needed my laptop, so I drove into Albany and found a parking spot on Dove Street only a block from the house.

Timmy was not yet home from work. I checked the fax machine, and there was the five-page police report on Greg Stiver's death my friend at APD had promised to send me. I folded it and stuffed it into the shoulder bag with my gun. I packed an overnight bag and left with it, the shoulder bag, and my laptop.

I went out the back door, down the steps, across our tiny urban patch of scraggly lawn, and up onto the wooden crate that had housed some statuary we had had shipped back from Thailand. I climbed over the fence into the backyard that abutted Timmy's and mine. I knocked on the kitchen door of Dot and Edith, a lesbian couple I had helped out some years earlier when they lived on a farm and who were now quite old. Dot led me through the house and out her front door.

She was used to this; I'd done it a number of times.

The rental car was as I'd left it. There seemed to be no need to check it for explosives. Though when I turned the key in the ignition, I held my breath for just an instant, and I could feel my heart thudding.