“Some pressing case? You seem really engrossed.”
“Naw. Just researching.” Butthead. “Stuff for the future.”
The computer screen displayed a Florida newspaper extract. It confirmed what the security officer had described.
“Staying ahead of the curve, huh?” he offered.
“Yup.”
“Interesting stuff?” he asked.
“Some.”
He looked at her yellow pad.
She sensed his eyes bearing down, and Katie quickly turned to the next, blank page. “If you don’t mind, Donald,” she said, swiveling in her chair.
“Citing some future client privilege, are we?”
“I just don’t like it when someone starts breathing over me.”
“Sorry. Anything I can help you with?” He paused, then decided to add, “For the sake of the firm.”
“No, thank you, Donald.”
“Who did you say it was for?” he asked, trying to draw her out.
“I didn’t.” Too many questions, Katie thought. “Like I said, it’s just research,” she added sharply.
Katie turned away and typed in an innocuous, unrelated research parameter. The screen immediately came up with a list of new links.
“Well, let me know if I can help. We newbies have to stick together. After all, someday we might make partners together.”
In your wet dreams. “Never know,” she offered aloud.
Witherspoon leered more than smiled and left. Although he wouldn’t do it immediately, there was one call he’d make from a random public phone. Slowly, carefully, unobserved. He’d report just the kind of behavior he was told to look for, from the only person he was instructed to watch: Katie Kessler.
Chapter 11
“You want to know what you can do?” Elliott Strong asked the caller on the tape. It was Gonzales’s second time listening.
“Yes.”
“You are the government,” Strong explained. “Not a liberal congress. Not a president you didn’t elect. Not a vice president you booted out. Not the Supreme Court.” The usual rambling. “You are the government. Do you have any idea what that means? Ever hear of something called an Amendment?”
Gonzales laughed. Strong spelled out the word. Then the host added, “It’s one of the ways you change things. A bit slow for my taste, but it works.” Elliott Strong had been putting ideas in people’s heads for sixteen years, the last six of them as a nationally syndicated host. It was hard for even the most faithful listeners to say they knew much about him. They just liked what he had to say.
Occasionally he dropped a thought or two about how he lifted himself out of the horrible life his parents led. He admitted that they were unskilled migrant workers. Real card-carrying white trash, forced to follow the sun and the seasons to scrape out a pitiful living.
Strong often recalled how he couldn’t wait to escape his parents’ reach. His father beat him until the day he finally fought back. His mother died of emphysema but it was hard for him to care. She never showed any love for him whenever his father was around.
So, according to Strong, he retreated into books. He read everything in sight, from American and world history to travel and political nonfiction. He worked on his speaking voice, realizing he wouldn’t become anything if he couldn’t communicate. He recounted the story every year on the anniversary of his first day in radio.
“It was on my seventeenth birthday. I hitched a ride to Fresno in a navy blue Ford pickup truck that stunk from lousy cigars and nickel beer. I would have gone farther, but when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I said, ‘Pull over there!’ I don’t think he ever came to a complete stop. I jumped out, and he took off. I walked for about a mile or so and came to a radio station. It was a little single-story Navajo white building with bright blue call letters over the door. That, my friends, was Mecca. I marched straight into the offices of that 1,000-watt station and said to the first person I saw, ‘Hi, I’m Elliott Strong. And I’m here for a job.’”
Strong never embellished his story. He always told it the same. “There was a girl. She was twenty-one and beautiful, with a full head of blonde hair done up like Farrah Fawcett’s and lipstick the color of the reddest rose, with lips just as soft. She was unbelievable, but then again, I was seventeen. I’d never seen anyone like her. ‘And you are?’ She asked.
‘Elliott Strong, miss. And I’m ready to start my career in broadcasting.’” This is the point where he always broke up telling the story. “I had dusty overalls on, a plaid shirt and worn boots. She must have wondered which tractor I’d fallen off.”
‘Doing what? Mowing the lawns?’
‘If that’s what it takes. Yes.’
“The secretary took some pity on me. She gave me a soda and went into the general manager’s office and closed the door. I heard some laughter. After a few minutes she came back out, followed by this older man. Maybe he was forty, maybe fifty. What’s a kid know? But he was wiping his mouth, and believe you me, he didn’t get rid of all the lipstick. That’s when I realized she was more than just his secretary.”
‘Gina tells me you’re ready to get into radio, son.’
‘That’s right. I can read real good. You’ll see.’
‘We don’t need anyone new. I’ve got a fine staff here. Some of them have been with me for almost a year. Anyway, it’s ‘I can read really well.’’
‘Thank you. Really well. You’ll never have to tell me that again, sir. Honestly.’
‘No, I don’t imagine I will,’ the manager said. ‘And I don’t need to go anywhere. I can wait for one of your announcers to leave. You won’t have to look around. In the meantime, I gather the grass needs some attention.’
‘See,’ the secretary whispered. ‘He’s cute. Why not?’
“The man nodded. ‘Okay. Overstreet’s the name.’ He offered me his hand.
‘Elliott Strong, Mr. Overstreet. Pleased to meet you.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Here and there.’
‘Well, now you’re here. By your appearance, I’d say you’re pretty comfortable in the great outdoors. That’s where I do need some help. Buck-fifty an hour. Cash, which I think you’ll appreciate.’
‘How much do your announcers make?’
“He laughed. ‘Buck fifty, but we take taxes out.’
‘Sounds fine to me. Keep my seat warm.’”
As Strong told the story, he was doing the graveyard shift in less than four months. By the end of the year, he was also getting a little extra from Gina on the side.
Over the next six years, he earned his high school equivalency and lived the life of a gypsy disc jockey. Fresno to Prescott, Arizona to Bakersfield, California, and on to Sacramento and Phoenix. Along the way, he audited as many college political science courses as possible. When he got bored with straight announcing and spinning records, he moved into talk radio with a bright, witty, fast tongue and a conservative point of view. He found himself in the right place at the right time, when radio made a sharp turn to the right in the mid-1990s.
“That’s right,” the broadcaster continued on the tape. “Amend the Constitution. Just like you did a few years ago. Or don’t you remember that battle? Now there are twenty-eight Amendments. How do you think they got there? Out of thin air? Materializing on parchment in the National Archives?” He was on one of his rants. “As Americans, you decide how to live your lives. We decide. Not somebody waiting for “Hail to the Chief” as a cue to walk down some red carpet…someone whose only connection with the people is through the windows of his stretch limo.
“You decide, my friends, just as all the colonists decided they didn’t want the British to be running things here. They didn’t want to support some clown in a crown thousands of miles away who said, ‘Pay the taxes or go to the stockades.’ And Americans before you said that presidents aren’t kings, so they can’t serve for life. Your parents and grandparents decided that in 1951 when they voted state-by-state to limit a president to two terms. No more dynasties like Franklin Roosevelt’s. No imperial presidents. And how did they do it? By amending the Constitution. For the record, it’s number twenty-two. Go look it up.”