Edward Gorman
Senatorial Privilege
To my editor, Greg Cox—
a strong, clear light in the dark, dark forest
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Amy Markon and Dori Butler for their considerable help with this novel.
He was discreet about it. In this town, you had to worry about your rep, after all.
Over the twenty-six years he’d been here, there’d been two wives and a succession of mistresses. Wife number one, he’d divorced. Wife number two had died of a brain aneurysm. This was four days after she’d caught him having sex with his current mistress late one night in his office.
He was not only discreet, he was no braggart. A lot of his peers seemed to have sex not so much for the pleasures of the flesh but just so they could brag about it afterward. “I’ll tell you one thing, that little gal was real surprised by the ride I gave her,” one of them had said to him recently. “She just figured that with my white hair and all, I probably wouldn’t be able to get a full-bore erection. But I wore her out. Absolutely wore her out.”
Talk like this vaguely disgusted him. He wasn’t a prude. He just didn’t approve of sharing this kind of intimacy... It somehow diminished the act itself... as if you were doing it for ulterior motives. But then, this was a town wall-to-wall with ulterior motives... the most treacherous city in the world, Winston Churchill had once called it.
“What’re you thinking about?” she said.
“Winston Churchill.”
She smiled. “That’s nice. You’re lying next to a completely naked woman and you’re thinking about Winston Churchill?”
He laughed. “I guess that didn’t sound very flattering, did it?”
He liked to treat his mistresses with the same generosity he treated his home state. He was the prize champion when it came to pork-barreling. His state received more federal dollars than any other small state in the Union.
And his mistresses received more compliments, attention, and gifts than any other mistresses in town, too. He never forgot birthdays, anniversaries, or PMS days. He’d been on a subcommittee that had looked into PMS and he took the subject very seriously.
“Maybe you didn’t like how I did you tonight,” the mistress said coyly.
“Oh, come on, now. You’re the best and you know it.”
“Am I really? The best, I mean?”
“You know you are.”
She lay on her side, and he was pressed up against her singularly lovely bottom. He was starting to get in the mood again.
“That feels good,” she said, as he pressed himself a little harder to her.
“Yes, it certainly does.”
He slid his hand between her arm and rib cage and began playing with her nipple between his thumb and forefinger.
“Wow,” she said.
“Wow is right,” he laughed.
“You’ve really got stamina.”
“Clean living.”
“I bet.”
“No, it’s true,” he said, pressing even harder against her backside.
Her hips had begun to move slowly and deliciously.
“That’s your image, anyway,” she teased. “The clean-living thing.”
“Well, it’s true,” he said. “Compared to some of my colleagues, I’m an absolute saint.”
“I wonder what they’d say if they knew about us?”
“Oh, they’d probably just smile a little. Maybe wink at each other.”
“Not the press.”
“No,” he said. “The press would probably make a big thing of it.”
“A big thing? Are you kidding? They’d make a scandal out of it. I mean, my father would spend every dime he had destroying you.”
She liked to do that sometimes. Remind him of who really had the power in this relationship.
But right now, he was in no mood to worry about power.
His own hips had started to move in rhythm with hers. There was no other reality now except the sweet hot reality between her beautifully sleek legs.
“He really would,” she said. “He’d go on TV and tell everybody how you were sleeping with his fifteen-year-old daughter.”
“His virginal fifteen-year-old daughter.”
She giggled, then parted her legs so that he could get up inside her.
“Right,” she giggled. “His virginal fifteen-year-old daughter.”
Later that night, he went back to his office and sat in his leather chair and took out a bottle of brandy from the bottom right drawer of his desk. Then he sat there and looked out the window at Washington, D.C. Sometimes, he actually got chills thinking of all the men who had been here before him. They hadn’t been perfect men, either.
That’s what he often said to himself when he started worrying about some of his extracurricular activities. True, he did seem to enjoy the company of teenage girls, but my God, who was without fault? Surely not George Washington, who’d cheated lavishly on the expense account the Continental Congress had given him. Surely not Jefferson, who’d kept slaves and likely sired a bunch of mixed-race children. And surely not his own personal icon, Jack Kennedy. My God, this was a man who had slept with movie stars throughout his sadly brief tenure as president.
It always made him feel better, thinking this way. Sure he was a senator and sure he had responsibilities and sure he probably shouldn’t be sleeping with the fifteen-year-old daughter of the senator who sat right across the aisle from him.
But who in this life was without sin?
And in a town like Washington, who could afford to cast the first stone?
He sighed, sipped some brandy. He needed to get out of Washington for a while, back to his small-town roots. He saw himself as Jimmy Stewart, as Gary Cooper, a man from the plains who fought for right and justice.
He couldn’t help it; he was just that kinda guy.
Part 1
One
1
“You think you could do it?”
“You mean pull the lever myself?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You ask hard questions.”
“You thought I was just going to be some high-school kid, huh?”
Amy McGuire smiled at the slight, sandy-haired seventeen-year-old in front of her. His name was Brian Wright and he was editor of the Roosevelt High School newspaper. He wore a white button-down shirt and blue, sharply creased slacks and black socks and cordovan penny loafers. And he wore a crew cut. He was a part of the fifties revival feeling in the air, and Amy liked it.
“You’re right. I thought this was going to be a simple little interview.”
“Well, it seems to me, Ms. McGuire, you being the district attorney and all, if you believe in capital punishment the way you say you do, you should be willing to pull the lever on the electric chair yourself.”
Amy leaned back in her chair. She was a slender woman of average height and weight. She wore her dark hair short, which flattered the delicate bones of her face, and especially brought out the dazzling cornflower blue of her eyes. She wasn’t beautiful, but most men found her extremely attractive.
Amy said, “If he killed a child, I could.”
“How about if he killed somebody while he was sticking up a store?”
“Probably I could.”
“How about drugs?”
“If he took drugs?”
“No, I wondered if you have ever taken drugs.”
She laughed. “God, you’re really asking me that? For a high school newspaper?”
“I liked your campaign. You seemed honest. So I thought I’d give you a little test and see just how honest you really were.”