‘Who’s she?’
Not only the question but the tartness of the voice brought me out of my thoughts about the election.
I was sitting between two women on the ass-numbing folding chairs. On my left was Caitlin Conners, who ran the day-to-day operations of the campaign for my firm. Caitlin was long, lean and red-haired, a college star in track with a pretty prairie-girl face and a sly smile. On my right was Elise Logan, Robert’s wife, a striking if somewhat ethereal woman you had to be careful with. She had suffered a terrible childhood trauma, so terrible that she had been sent to psychiatric hospitals throughout her life, most recently three years ago. Shay’s people couldn’t talk about this on paid media but their printed material coyly referred to it many times. I liked Elise more than I did Robert, actually. She was one of those wan beauties you always read about in Agatha Christie; I wanted to protect her.
I had to scan the crowd to see whom she’d referred to. I didn’t see the woman until my eyes reached the back of the gym.
From this distance she looked wrong not only for a town hall meeting, but also for a small burg like Linton. Just the way her hip was cocked, the way she smiled so obviously at Logan and the way her white silk blouse and tight dark skirt clung to her suggested that she likely had a big-city life somewhere. Not that she seemed obvious in any way; on the contrary, she was the kind of young woman — from here I guessed her age at around thirty — you saw in expensive clubs in Chicago and Washington, DC. I would have bet that the hairstyle had cost her three or four hundred and the duds an easy fifteen hundred. And if her facial features up close were as elegant as they appeared to be from here, I would probably be in danger of falling in love for an hour or two tonight.
The concern in Caitlin’s response surprised me. ‘She’s nobody, Elise. She’s probably press or something.’
The conversation ended when a cranky older woman in the crowd stood up and barked, ‘What are you going to do about high school girls sending pictures of their boobies to their boyfriends?’
Hilarity, as they say, ensued.
The next morning I flew back to Chicago, and in the battles that awaited me forgot all about the woman at the back of the gym and Elise Logan’s angry response to her. In fact, if I remembered anything it was the way the senator had responded to the booby question. He’d laughed and said, ‘My only solution is to bow our heads and pray.’ He’d gotten a big ovation. Then he’d gone on to make the correct pious noises.
Eleven days later I was with Caitlin and the senator again. I had talked to him every day, Skyped with him every other day or so and poured over the daily internal polls. We were up with women and African-Americans, but getting a miserable twenty-two percent of white working-class males, which was terrible for us, and trailing substantially behind with college-educated males, a group that tended to vote. Our opponent was a believer in taxing the grubbing poor and helping the much misunderstood but deserving rich. I suppose that explained it.
And now we were back in Chicago at a major fundraiser. My one and only dinner jacket was fraying on the left cuff but I assumed I could get through the evening without causing a social catastrophe. As I had been without woman since my friend of several months had decided to go back to her faithless husband after all — this time he’d be different, she’d said, and I cared enough about her to let the lie go unchallenged — I had vague hopes of meeting somebody tonight.
Combing my hair in my room before the festivities I puckered my lips then smiled at myself in the mirror. I almost always did this before a fundraiser where wealthy people were the targets. Some of them expected Olympian-level ass-kissing and always got it. They wanted you to know how important they were to the campaign and what they expected the senator would do for them when and if he returned to Washington for an additional six years. The Pope doesn’t get the kind of servility they expect. Fortunately that’s a small number of them.
This being Chicago, a small troop of security men with guns had been hired to make sure that nobody was packing and that everybody who walked through the front door was on the approved list. Assassination was not exactly unknown in America.
I arrived early and was met by James-never-Jim Logan, the younger and less successful brother of the senator. They were near twins physically. Tall, lean, lanky and both graying some — nice-looking if not quite handsome in traditional manly ways. Mid-forties, my own age.
But there the similarities ended. Their father had spent his life in communications — radio, mostly — and at the time of his death owned a large number of small and mid-size radio stations across the country. That was the basis of his sprawling fortune, a fortune Robert had overseen quite well before entering politics, where he was equally successful.
James was the swashbuckler. Fast cars, faster women and three failed start-ups in a three-year period. At that point, his own inheritance depleted, he patched up a quarrelsome relationship with Robert and began to live off his older brother’s charity. First he worked as a staffer for the then Representative Logan. But Robert made him do the kind of scut work most staffers have to do. So James did what every right-thinking American lad does who loves to sit and drink and toss the ol’ shit back and forth. He became a lobbyist, spending most of his time working for firms that were interested in snagging his brother’s vote. But it turned out that Robert’s charity didn’t extend to selling his vote to James’ firms so they fired him. Unhappily he went back to work on Robert’s staff.
‘I saw the internals, Dev. Not looking so good.’ James was friends with another group of consultants. He had tried to convince Robert to dump me and go with them. All this took place two years ago. He still took every opportunity to challenge me. Everybody knows somebody who’s better at a particular job than you are; consultants are used to that. But James makes it personal. Had I been less of the considerate gent I am, I would have brought up the subject of the loan he’d been begging his brother to make him. I’d caught them wrangling about it several times. James had another dumb idea for a dumb business — a public-relations agency for raccoons or something — and Robert was understandably sick of hearing about it.
‘I don’t like the internals either but we’re holding our own. And we have three weeks to go.’
‘What’s that expression? Whistling past the graveyard?’ Then he turned his attention to the doors and the sudden influx of sparkling high-end donors.
More than a dozen women in evening dresses were filing in on the arms of their husbands. James had two reputations — one as a heavy-drinking hothead and the other as a chaser. He was one of those mysterious males you run into occasionally. He didn’t have the looks or the charm to be successful with women but somehow he was. It could have been his brother’s money or his brother’s status as a senator, but somehow I didn’t think so because there was also the matter of the mysterious female. Women you credit with intelligence and judgment become slaves of a kind to men who treat them terribly. So maybe it was the bad-boy syndrome that kept James in contention. But fortunately I don’t know that many women so inclined, so most kept their distance from him. He specialized in treating women horribly; there had been a few lawsuits, in fact, and one abuse incident in which police had been called but the woman refused to press charges. This was after, I was told, Robert offered her a good chunk of change.