Authors: Robert Ellis
As he ate and Buddha pretended not to watch, he went through the files on Woody’s clients Linda had given him before she left for her trip with Jason Hardly. Six of Woody’s clients wanted to stay with the firm. Frank and Linda would each handle three. Frank told himself that he wanted to get a feel for their chances so that he could budget his time and interest. But he also knew that his motive was more far reaching than that.
Halfway through dinner he came to realize why Woody may have been so moody these past few months. Frank had always thought that Woody’s clients would lose because they couldn’t raise enough money to run decent campaigns. That was true, but now he understood that in each case the candidate’s problems ran deeper than that.
The first was a progressive candidate running in Alabama. Frank had predicted that the South would go conservative three cycles ago. When O.J. Simpson was acquitted in his criminal trial for the murder of his wife, the fate of the South was sealed, and Frank’s predictions had been proven correct. Acknowledging that there might be exceptions here and there, a progressive candidate had no chance in the South for perhaps another decade. Maybe even a generation or two. Frank wouldn’t waste too much time on this race. Two, maybe three spots to be made in the next few days and then forgotten.
The second race was a hard-fought congressional contest between two women in Portland, Oregon. Woody’s client had beaten her opponent in the previous election two years before. Now the opponent had returned with a new hair style, contact lenses, and a fashionable dress designer to accommodate her leaner figure. Her spots looked like feminine hygiene commercials complete with warm and fuzzy music. But there was nothing warm and fuzzy about the opponent herself. Along with her new image were charges of hiring private detectives to follow Woody’s client around and dig up dirt. There had also been a mysterious infusion of cash into the opponent’s campaign reported to be in excess of one million dollars. She was running a dirty race, and Woody’s client only had about two hundred thousand collected from small contributions to defend herself.
The race in Portland was over the moment the opponent cheated, receiving that mysterious one million dollars in cash. Frank knew that nothing he could do would change that. The opponent would win and her crimes would have to be sorted out after the election.
He ate another bite of lasagna and took a sip of wine, then opened the next file.
The last race was a woman from Michigan, running for an open seat in the House. Unfortunately, she had made the mistake of accepting her governor’s appointment to the state parole board ten years before. Crime was the big issue in the race, and she had the support of every police organization in the state. She was tough on crime and her opponent was a right-wing fanatic with no experience. In a rational world, she would have been a shoe-in to win the race. Instead, her accomplishments were the very thing that made her vulnerable, and as such, the district had been targeted by the opponent’s national committee.
The money and commercials against her weren’t coming from her congressional district or even her state, but directly from Washington.
Frank suddenly remembered Woody showing him one of their ads a few months ago. The opponent’s party had gone through every criminal legally paroled in the last ten years and picked out the four most vicious mug shots they could find. The spot had the subtlety of a sledgehammer and seemed to indicate that Woody’s client favored releasing rapists and murderers over jail time.
Woody’s client had been thrown into the weeds. She didn’t stand a chance.
Frank closed the files and returned them to his briefcase. Unfortunately, there was nothing there he hadn’t seen before. No one involved would have had a reason to harm Woody. In each race, Woody’s client was destined to lose.
Disappointed that he hadn’t found anything that even sparked his imagination, Frank carried his dishes into the kitchen and scraped morsels of leftover lasagna into Buddha’s bowl. As he watched the dog eat them with delight, he poured a drink and walked into the study. Linda had been over the other night, and he thought that he could still smell the light scent of her body lotion as he stood by the couch. He looked at his watch. It was only nine in Washington, but felt later. Considering the time difference, she and Hardly would be in their hotel room getting changed for dinner about now. He wondered if the room had a view of the mountains. If it did, maybe they would decide to order room service tonight and eat in….
Frank switched off the lights and returned to the kitchen, grabbing the bottle and stepping out onto the back porch. He slid a chair away from the table with his foot. As he sat down, he topped off his glass and sipped it. The vodka tasted smooth, warming his stomach as he gazed into the backyard. Heavily planted, the property had the appearance of almost being woods. The moon was out tonight, and he could see it floating through the leafless branches and misty clouds just above the horizon.
There were times when Frank could turn off the white noise of traffic and even ignore the sounds of police sirens hurrying to and fro. But not tonight. He needed a plan. A next move. Some way of finding the man with spiked gray hair.
Chapter 32
Frank packed up his laptop, threw it over his shoulder and headed out. Because it was Saturday, the phones were quiet and only Tracy came in. She was at her desk, updating TV buy orders on the master spreadsheet. As he passed her, she stopped working and gave him a look.
“Is there anything I can help you with, Frank?”
“Everything’s fine. If Juliana Merdock calls, tell her I’m over at the talk radio campaign. She’s already got the address.”
“Juliana?” she said with a devious smile.
He nodded, ignoring the tease and heading downstairs.
He’d spent the morning in Linda’s office, reviewing the three clients she would be handling on Woody’s behalf. When he couldn’t find a hint or clue pointing him in the right direction, he pulled the files on the two candidates who decided to leave the firm. Nothing stood out with them either.
Frustrated, he decided to spend the afternoon trying to keep busy. He’d been listening to the radio. Without new copy, his talk radio campaign might begin to sound stale.
In spite of the rain, he made the drive in fifteen minutes. The elevator opened onto a vacant floor, and he started down the hall. The real estate agent had been true to her word with Frank renting an office on a short-term lease because the floor was due to be renovated sometime after election day. It was quiet. They were the only tenants occupying the entire floor and had all the privacy they would ever need.
The entrance at the end of the hall was unmarked, the glass blocked with plain brown paper. Frank pushed the door open and walked inside.
Long tables filled out the large, open space with thirty volunteers, most of them seniors, listening to the radio on headsets and working the phones. Frank had brought them in from the Hilltop Rest Home and it was clear that they were glad to be working. He had provided them with cheat sheets detailing the points he wanted them to discuss. After a few hours, they understood the routine and their speech patterns began to relax. After a few days, their delivery sounded smooth and conversational. Even Frank couldn’t tell that he was creating the content for every talk radio station in Virginia.
He moved to the catering tray at the head of the room, grabbed a cup of coffee and set up his computer and portable printer beside an older woman who had just gone on the air.
“Am I on?” the woman said into her phone. “Great talking to you, Ollie. I listen to your show every day. That’s the kids in the background. I’m a housewife and I agree with the last caller. I’m tired of politicians like Lou Kay running negative campaigns.”
The room was buzzing. Frank noticed a man with short white hair seated at the next table taking notes. As he began speaking, there was a hint of anger in his voice, a real sense of frustration that Frank knew would play like honesty.
“All I’m asking for is a little common sense,” the man was saying. “It’s really that simple. If Lou Kay wants to be a senator, he should have the courtesy of letting us know where he stands on the issues like Merdock has.”
Frank dug into his keyboard, passing out new copy as fast as he could write it. He forgot about Woody and being overwhelmed by the feeling that somewhere in his friend’s life was a reason why he and an innocent teenager had been murdered. After several hours, he lost track of time. When he looked up, he saw Juliana enter the room. Carrying a raincoat, she was dressed casually in a dark skirt and light top. She looked relaxed, as if she had enjoyed the drive into town in the rain. Frank remembered seeing the red Mustang parked outside her house.
She saw Frank and walked over. The woman sitting beside him was about to hang up when she brought the phone back to her ear and started speaking again.
“Are you saying that I should believe Lou Kay just because of his address? I don’t think so. I don’t give a hoot where either one of them is from. We’re all Americans, right? And just maybe we need someone new.”
Frank noticed Juliana eyeing the woman. He closed his laptop and stood up.
“Thanks for coming,” he said. “You hungry?”
Juliana smiled and seemed a bit overwhelmed. She glanced around the room, then looked back and nodded. Frank grabbed his jacket.
“There’s a place around the corner,” he said.
Most of the time, the spouse of a new candidate was a liability. Most of the time, whether they were a man or a woman, the spouse got in the way until they realized that they were in over their heads and knew nothing about politics, or they became angry, forcing their way in with a bruised ego and refusing to budge regardless of the consequences.
Frank had signed on with a client like that ten years ago. The candidate was running for a House seat in New York and his wife wasn’t happy with the spots Frank had made. She had dismissed them as being too gritty and hard edged. She thought that she knew better and wanted to be the one who saved the day. She was eight months pregnant when she showed up at Vintage Video, creating a scene and demanding to see all the available footage so that she could pick out the shots on her own. At the time, they were enjoying a ten-point lead. At the time, Frank didn’t have the clout or reputation to tell her to go fuck herself, which he would have liked to have done and certainly would do today. Instead, he had tried to reason with her, explaining that the goal of any political spot was to stand out and be noticed. And the only way to do that, given the circumstances which changed from election to election, would be to make the spots look gritty and hard edged.
She wouldn’t listen. And when she was done fooling around in the edit suite and the new spots finally aired, the bottom fell out of her husband’s campaign. They lost the race and she blamed Frank for it. Frank didn’t know what the man was doing anymore. They’d lost touch after the election. But three or four years ago he’d heard that the woman had pressed charges against her husband for domestic violence and filed for a divorce. Frank guessed that the man had finally had enough. Both of them had. They’d learned the hard way that politics was about more than having an opinion and keeping up with the news.
But Juliana Merdock was different. As Frank sat across the table watching her finish a salad and look out at the rain, he sensed that she was.
“We’re working radio twenty-four hours a day,” he said. “You need to be patient. We’ve got a lot of ground to make up.”
She picked up her wine glass. “I saw the overnight poll you sent over, Frank. It doesn’t look like anything’s changed.”
“That’s the change,” he said. “We’ve stopped falling. By tomorrow I think you’ll find that we’ve gained two or three points. People are starting to doubt Kay. They know who we are now. We’re moving in the right direction.”
Her eyes rose from the table, big and blue and filled with excitement. He could tell that she hadn’t expected the news to be this good this early, if at all. Stewart Brown had succeeded in spoiling the battlefield to such an extent that Frank’s TV spots for Merdock were falling on deaf ears. Dumping more money into TV would never change that, no matter what the amount. But hearing people talk on the radio had changed everything. They’d been hammering the message to talk radio junkies for days. Now the tide was turning, the ground fertilized. People were beginning to call in on their own, and Frank knew that they were finally ready to accept his media campaign. In a few more days, Merdock would have the momentum and his TV spots would begin working. By the end of next week, Merdock would be the man to beat, unless there was an unforeseen problem, another issue throwing them off course.
“How do you come up with these ideas?” she asked.
Frank looked at her face, then let his eyes drift down to her body. Her skin was lightly tanned and looked soft. Her breasts were small and perky. From where Frank sat, perfectly formed. By any standard, Juliana Merdock was a beautiful woman.
“How’s your home life?” he asked, pushing his plate aside.
She gave him a look and laughed. “My marriage?”
“Yeah,” he said. “How are you and Mel getting along?”
She sat back in the chair and seemed amused. He watched her casually glance around the restaurant. No one would be showing up for dinner for an hour or two. Except for another couple in the corner, they had the place to themselves and could talk freely. When she turned back, her eyes had that reach that he’d always found so attractive.