Another Dead Republican (32 page)

Mrs. Grum was sobbing. The two women led her away. A minion I didn’t recognize ran after the dog.

FORTY-EIGHT

Sunday 12:10 A.M.

After the wake, back at Veronica’s, we’d eaten with her in the kitchen and spent time with my brothers and mom and dad, talking in the living room. We went to bed just after midnight.

In the room I went to Scott and pulled him close. “I love you so much.”

We held each other in a warm, safe embrace.

I said, “What you said to Mrs. Grum was the most kind and wonderful thing and in the face of such rage.”

He murmured into my ear, “I don’t think I started shaking until we got up here. I feel so sorry for her.” He pulled back a few inches and looked me in the eye. “But I will hate her forever. What madness.” He had tears in his eyes. We clinched again. I soothed and caressed him.

When we were calmer, he asked, “How are you after being up front with Veronica all day?”

“You do what you have to do. She liked having all those people just like Wednesday and Thursday. Good for her. I hope it helped.”

We got undressed and ready for bed. We climbed in and held each other and said endearing things and finally I felt him relax into sleep.

FORTY-NINE

Sunday 4:00 A.M.

I woke about four. The house was silent. I often have a hard time sleeping when we aren’t in our own bed. I got up and looked out the window. Nothing disturbed the quiet of the night. I watched Scott sleep for several minutes. I enjoy watching the man I love in quiet and repose.

I was tired but too keyed up to get back to sleep. I threw on jeans and a T-shirt and sat at the computer and called up Edgar’s stuff that I’d saved to my zip drive that first morning. I worked very quietly so as not to disturb Scott. I started going through it again. Zachary Ross had written that Edgar was for sure hiding knowledge of the election being stolen.

I hunted through every document, clicked on every icon, and opened every folder. I checked recent items, pictures, applications, recent documents, recently downloaded items, and anything else that I could think of. There wasn’t a nanobyte about the election.

Finally, I went back to the porn sites. Most of them I couldn’t get on because I didn’t have the password. Then I realized that there were some basic ways to pay for porn, some general processing sites that took credit card information. If I could get into his account there, I could retrieve his passwords. I didn’t see much point in this, but I figured I might as well be totally thorough.

I eased out of the room and down the stairs to the dead animal den and got Edgar’s credit card statements which contained his card number. Upstairs I eased shut the door and sat back down.

Scott stirred. I looked over and saw he was awake. He said, “It’s five in the morning.”

“Couldn’t sleep.”

He threw on tight black boxer briefs that had a special pouch in the front designed to hug the contours of the wearer’s dick and balls. Then he walked over and stood next to me.

He asked, “What are you up to?”

“I thought I’d try these porn sites. I’ve looked at every single document in every folder I could find. None of them contain anything about the election. If I can get into the billing sites he used, I can probably retrieve his passwords.”

“Is there a point to calling up all this porn?”

“It’s the only thing on here I haven’t been able to open.”

“And you know about Internet pornographic billing sites how?”

“You really want to know?”

“Not particularly.” He rubbed his brief covered crotch against my shoulder. I shut my eyes and leaned back into his warmth for a moment.

FIFTY

Sunday 5:10 A.M.

With the credit card and e-mail address which I had from the mass of documents in the dead animal room closet, I was able to get into the billing site and retrieve his passwords. I began examining the porn sites.

Scott said, “How would information be on these sites?”

I shrugged. There was a slight chill in the room. He threw on pants and a shirt and brought me one to put on over my T-shirt.

I went to the bookmarked list and called each one up but got nothing. I went back to the desktop and its mass of icons listing pornographic pictures. I clicked on them to go to more sites. It was tedium upon tedium to open each one and examine pornographic images which I did not have the slightest interest in. It must have taken at least an hour. Edgar was a voracious consumer of porn.

When I got to Mona Moans for You, the one that had been opened when the computer came on the first time we’d tried it, I realized there were two for Mona.

“Why does she get two?” I asked.

Scott said, “She was his “go to” site when he wanted to get off?”

“How do you know about “go to” sites?”

“Do you really want to know?”

Touché.

I opened the first Mona and got pornographic pictures of a woman with gargantuan breasts. I opened the second. It looked the same to me.

I began to reach to click off them when Scott said, “Wait.”

“What?”

“It’s different. Your question was right. Why is it the only one that’s a duplicate?”

I put the pictures next to each other on the screen. Like watching a tennis match back and forth, we compared the two. I listened to the two of us breathe. Finally, he reached out to the screen tapped the left breast of Mona on the left and the left breast of Mona on the right. He said, “The nipples are pointed in the opposite direction.”

He was right.

He moved the cursor over her left nipple on the picture on the left and clicked. Nothing.

He tried the left nipple on the picture on the right.

I let out a breath. Data flooded the screen.

Before we even started to read, I saved it to my zip drive then e-mailed it to myself and to my attorney.

Then we started to read.

FIFTY-ONE

Sunday 6:27 A.M.

We found charts with lists of rows and rows of voting machines by number on the machine, and the county and precinct they were assigned to.

But the bonanza came when we found hundreds and hundreds of notes written by Edgar. They were filled with anger and resentment about how his family didn’t respect him or listen to him or want him around. That all they thought of him was that he was a fuck-up. That he was going to get even with them. That they were going to pay. He claimed he found out they were going to steal the election electronically. He claimed he had the goods on them.

Edgar’s notes were far more scattered and less articulate than Zachary’s, but they were no less clear in the insistent notion that criminality was afoot.

Then we found pages of dense code. Edgar’s title for that section was Logarithmic Design. I scrolled to the end and found several paragraphs of summary. It said that the machines were geared to respond to a remote code from a cell phone to change vote totals.

“They were cheating,” I said.

Edgar had outlined what he believed to be the whole convoluted scheme. Turns out the Grums hadn’t trusted the Ducharmés and were not as enthralled to the brothers’ billions as had been presumed. The Grums had hired people to infiltrate the Ducharmés’ businesses so they would have their own information. They may have been patsies, but they were paranoid enough to want protection for themselves.

Mr. and Mrs. Grum had told Barry, their presumptive heir, all this information. They had wanted to be proactive and come up with a plan if the Ducharmés turned on them. Barry had told Dewey, who hadn’t been able to keep his mouth shut and had blabbed to Edgar. Now we knew where Edgar had gotten his information.

Edgar in his notes was far more vicious than noble. He detailed who told lies to whom, who changed sides in familial disputes, who prayed hard enough. The family stuff included notes on alliances of brothers, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, even kids and grandkids. Many of the disputes seemed to be minor clashes over such things as the best directions to the summer reunion but rose to greater heights over things like who got to keep great grandmother Grum’s souvenir plate from the 1912 Republican convention. Zachary had some items in notes about the family fights, but Edgar went into far more detail. To what effect, I had no idea except the election stuff. Edgar was hot about the election, stealing it, and how he could make what he found out work for him.

Armed with this knowledge about the election, he’d threatened to expose all of them. He had access to the campaign’s passwords and managed to download all the information. This struck me as not too smart.

Edgar revealed in his notes that it was he who was going to meet with Zachary Ross that night on the bridge. Edgar’s notes claimed Zachary never showed up. His last entry was written immediately after he found out Zachary was dead. It was ghastly reading it now. “They came for Zachary. They’ll come for me.” There were no further notes that I could find.

Had someone decided to take action to stop Edgar? Had Zachary and Edgar been working together and someone found out about it?

I turned back to the election results. I called up returns for the election by county.

I compared them to the data Edgar had. As far as I could understand the formula for the program, Edgar was right. Enough votes were to have been switched upon the machine’s receipt of a command sent from a cell phone.

I compared columns of figures.

I pointed, “This isn’t wrong.”

“Huh?”

“According to what Edgar has here, if the vote was this close in this precinct the machine was supposed to change it by this many so that Governor Mallon would have more votes not less, but look at the official results. She actually wound up with less.”

“Maybe they only changed certain precincts. They only had to change enough to win.”

“But it wasn’t enough to win.”

We spent half an hour examining back and forth. I even took the zip drive down to the dead animal den, where there was a printer and hooked up my laptop to it so we could look at a hard copy instead of going back and forth on a computer screen.

We examined the numbers again. After another half hour, I announced, “Someone, the Grums or the Ducharmés, was trying to cheat. Presumably the Ducharmés since the machines were theirs, but the program didn’t work. They had the machines rigged all right.”

“All the machines failed?”

“All the machines counted correctly. The bug they put in the system didn’t bug.”

“Someone unbugged it?”

I tapped the screen. “These are the reported vote results by precinct for Harrison County.” I pointed to a column of numbers on the printout. “Here’s what the computer program was supposed to cheat by.
It might have been sabotage. It might have just not worked. Whatever they planted didn’t do what they wanted it to do.”

“So the election results were honest?”

“Well, no. Fake. The Harrison County results still don’t work mathematically. The skewed percents we talked about the other day are still skewed. I just can’t believe nobody noticed all this. Where the hell are newspapers and reporters?”

Scott said, “One person’s fuzzy math is another person’s truth. If the math is fixed, then obviously the election is won for their side.”

I asked, “So who’s got the power to fix the math?”

We looked at each other and answered simultaneously. “Beulah Grum.”

We sat back in our chairs.

I said, “What I don’t get is what Edgar was going to do. He was going to tell on them? On his family? Out them all as cheating crooks?”

“Maybe he was blackmailing them.”