Red White and Black and Blue

Chapter Eleven

I phoned Tom Dunphy and told him I was staying at the Crowne Plaza and that if he looked out his office window up State Street he might see me waving at him from mine.

"The Super 8 was fully booked? What are you doing putting up at the Crowne Plaza on the campaign's meager dime? Christ Almighty."

"This place is convenient to your office. Basically I'm hiding out. Those assholes slashed my tires, and they warned me again to back off." I described my visits with Paul Podolski and Jennifer Stiver and then the vandalism.

"How the hell do they know where you are all the time? I don't get that."

"I don't either. I would like my car checked for a tracking device or for listening devices as soon as I get it back, probably tomorrow. I'm driving a rental car that's parked in the hotel garage. If they track me here, I'm going to be very weirded out."

"So Stiver's sister isn't going to be much help exposing Louderbush? That's a shame."

"She actually seems to think her brother might have wanted Louderbush to become governor."

"That's sick."

"Or something. It does complicate our strategy here. Of course, we don't know what Greg Stiver would have wanted.

To the extent that he confided in anybody at all, he seemed 101

Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson to leave different impressions with different people and even to tell entirely different stories."

"But it sounds as if you're making headway. Building a narrative."

"A narrative? Yeah, if you consider Naked Lunch a narrative. This is just a lot of ugly confusion and atmospherics and impressions."

"Anyway, I'll tell Shy you're on top of this, or soon will be.

Don, I've heard so much about you and I know we can count on you."

I'd had enough of Dunphy for one day and rang off and called Timmy.

"Are you at home?"

"Yes. Where are you?"

"In room 612 at the Crowne Plaza. Not to worry. Nobody knows I'm here, and I'm resting and popping Tylenol."

"You can get room service and then a good night's sleep.

Would you like me to come over?"

"Thanks, but there's no need. I'll be going over the police report on the suicide, and later I'll be getting briefed on the insurance investigator's report on Stiver's death. And then I'm sure I'll lapse happily into unconsciousness."

"The insurance company is letting you see their report?

Those companies are so protective of that sort of thing. How did you manage to get hold of it?"

"I don't have it yet. I found somebody who has access."

"Wow, who?"

"A guy I know."

"What? Why are you being so cagey? Is this some guy you used to sleep with? Who is it?"

"No, I barely know the guy. It's just somebody who does research for me once in a while."

"Oh, a leg man."

"Yeah, leg man. Not an ass man, ha ha."

"Ha ha. Is it Bud Giannopolous?"

"Yes. Yes, it is Bud Giannopolous."

A silence. "Bud is eventually going to go to prison, you know. Do you want to go with him?"

"I should never have told you about Bud. You take this kind of thing way too seriously. It's the world we live in, Timothy."

"Yes, it's the world we live in. We being the Russian mafia, the Pakistani intelligence services, the North Korean Politburo, al Qaeda, and Dick Cheney. The rest of us we 's still respect the institutional and personal privacy that's one of the cornerstones of what's left of civilization. What Bud does is immoral, and it is illegal."

"But not fattening?"

"This is not funny. You are going to end up in the federal pen. And when it happens you'll-it hurts me to say this you'll deserve it." He muttered something else and hung up.

God. al Qaeda? He'd never called me that one before.

I phoned room service and ordered gazpacho, a Caesar salad, and a Sam Adams.

The police report on Greg Stiver's death was a chore to wade through. How could anybody with a five-hundred word vocabulary be this verbose? The document basically repeated in its stiff, dense way what the SUNY cops had said: the body discovered at ten twenty in the morning; the apparent plunge from the Quad Four roof; death as a result of brain and other injuries. A Detective Ivor Nichols had interviewed Mrs.

Pensivy, Stiver's landlady, along with Janie Insinger and Virgil Jackman, and the two "friends of the deceased" had spoken of his having been depressed over employment and other difficulties. They apparently had not mentioned Kenyon Louderbush and all that mishegoss. Why? Nor was there any reference to "call from Leg. Blessing responding," as in the handwritten note on the SUNY report on the incident. The presumed suicide note was quoted-"I hurt too much"-but there was no photo of the note itself and no mention of what had become of it.

I read the report a second time, and then a third, and then the soup, salad, and beer arrived. With the safety lock on the door in place, I retrieved the Smith amp; Wesson from my shoulder bag and placed it next to my laptop. Why had I taken it out? Roaches? Bedbugs? I did believe I was safe in this room, whose number was known only to Timmy and to the hotel front desk.

Down below on State Street the last office-worker stragglers were heading out of the neighborhood, which would soon be all but deserted. Albany nightlife, such as it was on a Thursday evening in June, would take place largely on the outskirts of the city. Only a few hardcore pols and the lobbyists that kept the officeholders' throats hydrated and their arteries clogged would be hanging around downtown at the few ancient joints like Jack's Oyster House that somehow had survived the long-ago retail and entertainment flight to the suburbs.

While I ate, I did an Internet search for Hugh Stiver, Greg's brother, who, according to Jennifer, had lit out for parts unknown at the earliest opportunity. I found a total of nineteen Hugh Stivers, but none seemed to be the right age or race or-for those on Facebook-to bear any physical resemblance to either Greg or Jennifer. They were scattered all over the United States. One elderly Hugh Stiver resided in Uruguay.

My Hugh was elusive or reclusive-or perhaps had changed his name? I searched for Hugh Cutler, Cutler being the Stiver siblings' surname prior to the arrival in the household of Anson Stiver. Seven of these turned up; one was the right age, thirty-two. This Hugh Cutler was a mechanic at a garage in Arlington, Massachusetts. He had no Facebook page, and I found him through court records; Cutler was on probation following his conviction a year earlier for assault.

I phoned Jennifer Stiver. "Hey, thanks for your help today.

I just have a quick question. Was your brother Hugh a mechanic?"

"Yes, but I can't talk to you anymore. I'm just too…ambivalent about what you're doing. I'm hanging up. Sorry."

And she was gone. So I couldn't ask her if she knew that Hugh apparently had a violent streak.

I finished the soup and salad.

I tried Virgil Jackman, reached his voice mail, and left no message.

Janie Insinger did answer her phone. She said she and Kev were "like, going out," and she could speak to me briefly.

"Just one question, Janie. When you were interviewed by the police after Greg's death, you told them he had been despondent. That was in the police report. Did you also mention his relationship with Kenyon Louderbush?"

"You bet we did. Why not? I was so ripshit, I didn't give a crap if he was some senator or if he was just some pissant geek."

"And the police noted this and asked you more about it?

The physical abuse, for example…did that come up?"

"Sure, but this old bald guy detective-I forget his name he just said that wasn't anything the cops could, like, get mixed up in. It was private. He said it used to be different, but nowadays the police didn't care about gay people and their private business. The new chief would just say it was none of the police's business."

"Uh-huh. Was this a Detective Nichols, do you remember?"

"Coulda been. He had hair coming out of his ears."

This would make him easy to find. Bald and hairy. "What about Greg's brother, Hugh? Did Greg ever talk about him to you? Hugh was a couple of years older."

"Greg had a brother? I didn't know that. Are you sure?"

"Yes. I heard about him from Jennifer. Hugh left Schenectady when he was eighteen."

"Greg never talked about him. They probably weren't close."

"Is Anthony still with you, the security guy from the campaign?"

"He's downstairs. Kev doesn't like him around, so we might give him the night off. Virgil probably would've tried to get him in the sack with us, but Kev is too straight for that, thank God."

"Well, be careful."

"You too."

I reread the police report. Why wasn't Insinger's mention of Louderbush in there? The cop would have known that Louderbush was a big cheese in the Legislature, so apparently discretion had overridden conscientiousness.

My Blackberry alerted me that something had come in from Bud Giannopolous, and I checked the laptop. This was timely. The sizeable file was the Shenango Life Insurance Company report on the death of its policyholder, Gregory Stiver. The nine-page report by investigator Lorraine Fallon included the SUNY security and Albany Police findings and the APD verdict of suicide. In a "note to the files," Fallon wrote that a handwritten "addendum" to the police report labeled CONFIDENTIAL mentioned "a physically abusive male/male relationship" and "the possibility of foul play," rather than suicide. Fallon noted additionally, "Conversation with Nichols/APD. Suggest destroy copy. Unsubstantiated.

Libelous? Leg. kahuna."

The copy of this handwritten addendum was missing from the insurance company's copy of the police report, as it was from my copy. The SUNY security report did include the scribbled note, "Call from Leg. Blessing responding." In her report, Fallon made no mention of this cryptic notation.

Fallon's "reluctant" recommendation to Shenango Life was to withhold paying the insurance policy's beneficiary, Jennifer Stiver, because the official verdict was suicide, and standard policy precluded a payout under such circumstances.

I went over this material twice again, and each time my attention snagged on the disappearing confidential memo about an abusive "Leg. kahuna," and on the "call from Leg." to which "Blessing" was to have responded.

I e-mailed Bud Giannopolous and asked him to please find out if SUNY had somebody on its staff named Blessing.

Then I called my pal at APD.

"I need to talk to a detective on the force named Ivor Nichols. Can you set something up?"

"Can't. Sorry. Ivor retired a couple of years ago. Even worse, both for him and for you, he passed away just last week."

"Crap."

"What's this about? Maybe I can help."

"What kind of cop was Nichols? Would he have altered a report to protect somebody important in the Legislature?"

"I guess you could say that Ivor was traditional in the regard. Yeah, I'd have to say so."

"What did he die of? Nothing violent, I hope."

"Lung cancer. It's not violent, technically speaking, although I've heard it feels that way."