First, he dialed the private office number of the syndicated conservative political columnist Hogan Parks.
“Yeah?”
“You know who this is?”
“Sure. How are you?”
“Mildly agitated,” Wallace replied.
“About what?”
“Have you used the information I gave you?”
“I’m writing the column as we speak.”
“Stop writing it.”
“What’s the matter, Freddie? Getting cold feet?”
“Goddammit, don’t you use my name on the telephone!”
“Sorry about that; what’s got into you?”
Wallace was not about to give an honest answer to that question. “It has come to my attention that I may have been misled.”
“What? You would give me that kind of information when it might not be true?”
At the time, I believed it to be entirely true; now I’m not quite so sure.”
“Even after his performance at dinner the other evening?”
“I may have misinterpreted that.”
There was a moment’s silence, then Parks spoke. “I think I’m inclined to write the column anyway.”
“You can’t do that,” Wallace said.
“I think I might enjoy the fuss it will make,” Parks said. “I don’t have to use his name, or even identify his exact illness. Enough people in this town can connect the dots. And when it comes out that a certain other person had knowledge of the illness, it could change a very important outcome.”
“Let me be very clear about this, Hogan,” Wallace said. “If you run so much as a hint of this story before I say so, then by this time next week, you will no longer have a column. You will, in fact, have become the Matt Drudge of print journalism, with all the accolades that such a position enjoys. Do you understand me?”
“I believe I understand that you are threatening me,” Parks replied coldly.
“Then you understand me very well,” Wallace said. “You may consider what I have said a promise, as well as a threat. And I have the means with which to deliver on that promise. You know that, don’t you?”
“You would do that to me?”
“Only if you insist on doing it to yourself.”
“One mistake,” Parks muttered, half to himself. “One mistake in a lifetime.”
“That’s all it takes, my friend,” Wallace said, and hung up.
Wallace took a telephone book from a table drawer, looked up the private office number of a deputy director of the FBI, and dialed.
“Yes?”
“This is Freddie Wallace.”
“Good morning, Senator; what can I do for you?”
“You can send an agent over to my hideaway office to collect a document. I want it analyzed immediately, in every possible way; I want to know who wrote it and where it came from.”
“I’ll have a man there in under half an hour.”
“Thank you, and no official record is to be kept of this work, do you understand?”
“Completely, Senator.”
Wallace hung up, took a razor blade from a drawer, and excised all references to his name and his black paramour, then dropped the remainder of the letter and its envelope into a larger envelope.
He flicked his cigar lighter, touched the flame to the excised paper, and watched it crumble in his ashtray. Then he stirred the ashes with a pencil until they were powder.
Near the end of the day, back in his hideaway office, Wallace received a phone call from his FBI contact.
“Senator,” the man said, “I have carried out your instructions with regard to the document you sent me.”
“And what have you found?”
The letter was typed by an expert typist on an Olympia Reporter portable typewriter manufactured between 1956 and 1971. It is the sort of machine that was popular with journalists in the field, before the advent of laptop computers. Analysis of the signature, Jonah, indicates that it was signed by a male of sixty years of age or older, and the syntax and use of the language indicates a seventy percent probability that the writer was Caucasian and well educated. There were no fingerprints on either the letter or the envelope, except yours. No DNA residue was found on the envelope flap, so it was moistened without licking. There is, however, DNA residue on the stamp, indicating to us that the letter was stamped and mailed by a person different from the writer. It was mailed from a sub — post office on the west side of Atlanta, near a residential area popular with employees of the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. Finally, the paper on which the letter was written meets the specifications and bears the watermark of stationery purchased in large quantities by the federal government for use by many branches, including the prison service.
“Our conclusions, therefore, are that the letter was written by an employee or a prisoner at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary on a personal typewriter, and that the letter was entrusted for mailing to a guard or other employee, who removed it from the prison, bought a stamp, and mailed it.”
“Excellent,” Wallace said.
“If you like, we can extend our investigation to the prison, and I believe that, within a period of ten days to two weeks, we could identify the mailer and then learn from him the identity of the writer. However, I should tell you that, should we initiate such an investigation, this would involve the Atlanta office and would have to become an official matter. We deduce from the composition of the letter that it is extorsive in nature, and we noticed, of course, that a portion of the letter, probably including the extortion, has been excised. We would need your comments on the record about that.”
“I don’t believe any further investigation is warranted,” Wallace said, “and I would like you to return to me immediately the original and any copies of the letter.”
“Of course, Senator, and you may rely on our discretion. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
Yes, would you get me a list of the names of all prisoners and employees at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. I’d like it delivered by hand to the address on the envelope by nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”
“Of course, Senator.”
Wallace said good-bye and hung up. He would see whom, among the inhabitants of that prison, he had met on a number of occasions, always in passing.
31
Zeke Tennant read the syndicated column in the Las Vegas newspaper with interest. He had been waiting for his pigeon to come west.
Senator Will Lee, in spite of being well behind front-runner George Kiel for the Democratic nomination, continues to drive his staff nuts by doing quixotic things like his appearance in Santa Fe, New Mexico, this weekend, at a fund-raiser in Santa Fe’s main plaza for his friend, Congressman Roberto Chavez. Although it has been pointed out to him that New Mexico has only five electoral votes, and that his time could be better spent in more thickly populated states, he has insisted on going to the aid of Chavez, who is in a tight race against a right-wing Republican and whose support may be eroded by the presence of a Green Party candidate on the ballot. In past elections, the Green Party candidate has siphoned off Democratic votes, throwing elections to the Republicans.
Questioned on his campaign plane about this trip, Senator Lee said, “Roberto Chavez is a top-notch congressman, and the nation can ill afford to lose him. He’s also my friend, and it is personally important to me to see him reelected.”
Santa Fe looked good to Zeke; he could drive there overnight and be there in plenty of time for the political rally. He thought Santa Fe and its Plaza might afford a good opportunity for a kill. He continued reading the column and was very interested in what it had to say.