Death of a Political Plant (27 page)

With her knees getting sore from contact with the flagstone, she slid over to a sitting position and clasped her hands around her knees and thought. Jay had told the editor his work, his efforts, were “ending up with the fishes.” That was a joke, not a lament, and a joke with Jay, she recalled from the old days when they were sweethearts, meant a trick. Some fact concealed. Something hidden. But where, and what? She already had Jay’s backup, thanks to Melissa. What could be hidden “with the fishes”? More hard copy, perhaps, like the sheaf of papers she had found in her toolshed. And could she conceivably find the computer in this yard? It was small, and the opportunities for hiding it in the woods were endless.

First, she looked around her, but she was reluctant to do a thorough search because people would see her if she rose to a standing position. She was surrounded with ornamental grass clumps interspersed with plants of cimicifuga, penstemon, gaillardia, and goatsbeard. Adding a vertical note here and there were Mary’s favorite trees, the skyrocket juniper, soaring above the pool and its surroundings. She hoped Jay had not buried things like she had, under a plant, for there were scores of plants in this yard, placed there by a paid landscaper who had gone slightly overboard. Yet she would put nothing past her friend. That might take excavating Mary Mougey’s entire backyard.

It rattled the koi a bit when she peered into the pool; the fish thought she had more food, dessert, perhaps, and speeded up their activity. Good, they needed to raise their heart level. Louise doubted a reporter would hide things in the water.
Writers were like soldiers: Soldiers kept their powder dry, and writers kept their paper dry.

She was just noticing how rough the stones were on her palms when she cut a finger on a ridge of caulking. As she sucked her finger to stop the bleeding, she reflected that the Mougeys had been taken. Just a year ago they had hired the finest pool company in Washington to install this fishpond, and yet the ravages of Washington’s wet climate already had made inroads. The loosened caulking under her fingers was not the only place that had deteriorated. She prodded at the upraised ridge, using her strong thumbnail as a wedge. There was a slight give. With more pressure the flagstone came up; beneath it was a scooped-out area. Not very deep, just deep enough for a three-and-one-half-inch computer disk in a cardboard box. This disk looked identical to the one that Jay’s daughter had just given her an hour ago, and when she took it out of its box, she saw it was marked “Original.”

Wanting to shout with joy, instead she stuck the disk in her pants pocket and swiftly scooped up the worm container and the box. She would forego her hunt for Jay’s computer: it would take an unearthing of this whole yard to find it, if it were there. When she looked toward the street she saw nothing. But she could hear something that sent fear through her: two men’s voices. She even recognized them: Geraghty and Morton. She had to move quickly, for they were probably going in the house. They would sight her like a hunter sighting a duck through the Mougeys’ enormous floor-to-ceiling living room windows. Confronting the police was far more dangerous than encountering some nosy kid in the cul-de-sac, A lad she could always con with some excuse.

Keeping low, she sprinted past the bronze statue of the dancer, past the bronze deer, and into the thick woods. Once
there, she straightened and stood trembling, listening. No one had seen her. But she could see Geraghty and Morton walking around the back of the house, wandering up the path to the pool where she had knelt moments earlier. Geraghty stared into the woods where she stood, and she froze like a deer in headlights. They scuffed around the flagstones a bit, and she panicked: had she put that flagstone back firmly in place? Apparently so. Then, the two men wandered around the house, out of sight.

She let out a big breath and made her way carefully through the backyards again. Now she had two disks, the original and the backup. But there was a danger until the detectives left the neighborhood. She intended to turn over the disks to the police. But first she had to find out what Jay’s story was all about.

Once safely locked inside her house, she watched the police from the guest room, which had the best view of the street. Bill’s high-intensity binoculars helped; unbeknownst to Bill, she had taken to storing them in the guest room closet, so they would be handy whenever she wished to survey the neighborhood.

She watched George Morton shake his big head back and forth as he talked to Mike Geraghty, and then slam himself into the passenger seat of the unmarked green police car. A frustrated man, his every move told her. Geraghty went around to the driver’s side, pausing before getting in and taking a long look at her house and yard. She prayed that they wouldn’t decide to pop by, but quickly remembered it wasn’t what detectives did. Like the British, they always scheduled first.

She was beginning to read the detectives pretty well, and their demeanor said several things: that they didn’t have a good
lead on Jay’s killer; that they were going to do another search of the Mougey property and her property as well; and that they wanted to talk to her again.

Louise felt a twinge of guilt for not leveling with Geraghty, but quickly suppressed it. She had work to do.

H
ER COMPUTER WAS IN THE AD
dition, which the family had nicknamed “the hut.” It was a freestanding building opposite the front door connected architecturally to the house by the grayed redwood pergola, with a view of the bog garden that made it a little like Thoreau’s cabin near Walden Pond. It was her writing place, but other family members used it as a refuge when they needed to be alone. When she was riffling through garden
books at the library recently, she’d been captivated to discover the renowned British gardener Gertrude Jekyll had similarly named her workshop “The Hut.”

In her hands Louise carried a big tray containing the two computer disks, a pot of coffee she’d made in her old aluminum drip pot, a cup, and some cheese, fruit, and cookies. These last would substitute for dinner.

It was almost six, and within a few minutes she would know Jay’s secrets.

She bolted the door, then turned on her computer. As she waited for it to boot up, she stared out the glass doors that faced her at the end of the addition and remembered another time she sat in this room and found herself in grave danger. This time she would take no chances: She got up and pulled the drapes on the doors and on the side window so that not even a crack was showing.

As she often had done when working in the hut, and sometimes to her disadvantage, she had left the phone in the house; but right now, she didn’t want a phone as a distraction.

She inserted Jay’s original disk in drive A and pulled up the index. There was one story only, called “Watergate Revisited: The Dirty Tricks Campaign of Congressman Lloyd Good-rich.” Other files were shorter in length and appeared to be research notes.

The main file was dated Wednesday, the day of Jay’s death, the time, ten-fifteen
P.M.
That was about twenty minutes before Gil Whitson strolled over to the Mougeys’ to look at the koi pond.

She called the file up on the screen. Its title was apt. It was the story of a dirty tricks campaign, waged by Goodrich, first against his opponents for the nomination, and then against President Fairchild. This was dirty tricks, nineties style, as the
author described it. The heart and soul of it depended upon the media, primarily the tabloids and the more sensational “news” shows: feeding these sources undocumented stories and rumors that got play often in print, sometimes on television, occasionally both, and became the grist for the mills of conservative radio talk shows.

Jay McCormick had been an effective political plant, documenting Goodrich campaign activities from March through July. As part of the story’s lead, he declared that he could prove at least one person had been paid by Goodrich to make false sexual harassment charges against the President, and, even more damning, evidence had been fabricated to hint that Fairchild had been investigated for the murder of an army clerk, purportedly to clear his service record.

To the reporter, the most grievous incident was manufacturing evidence regarding Fairchild’s activities in Vietnam. And, as Jay pointed out toward the end of his long story, this charge was having serious adverse effects on the President’s popularity With direct quotes from principals, including Willie Upchurch and Ted French, Jay documented that the story was phony and the army records carefully fabricated by an expert.

Each part of the bizarre smear campaign was approved by the author of the undercover operation within the Goodrich campaign, Franklin Rawlings; and by the executors of the plans, Willie Upchurch and Ted French. Congressman Lloyd Goodrich was said to have known of the effort and to have given it a verbal okay.

Rawlings, mastermind of the operation, was portrayed as a consummate hypocrite. He was described as putting others out front to take the brunt of the “dirty tricks” charges. Furthermore, Jay had obtained information about the California
senatorial campaign headed by Rawlings, revealing similar dishonest campaigning there.

As a mole inside the campaign, Jay scrupulously recorded, with quotes and examples, the intense cynicism with which the dirty tricks had been planned by this select group. Many campaign staff, including the day-to-day manager, Nate Wein-stein, were left out of the loop, not privy to the details of these activities.

The campaign distributed rumors about the President’s drinking and purported womanizing, based on sketchy sources that the reporter said were “eagerly embraced, nevertheless.” One woman was paid to make sexual allegations against the President, according to the story. A constant stream of rumors was put out to slander Fairchild’s wife and children.

Jay went on to detail irregular campaign contributions that bolstered the campaign from its earliest days. Ironically, the efforts were spurred by the reform of campaign rules after the previous presidential election. The reforms changed the system, but didn’t relieve the problem: they only made needed campaign funds more scarce, and opened a Pandora’s box of devious new ways to get around the laws. These big chunks of money allowed Goodrich to run a heavier television ad campaign than his primary opponents, smoothing the way to his probable nomination at the August convention.

Louise stared in disbelief at the next paragraph: Lannie Gordon, Jay’s former wife, was named as a source of hundreds of thousands of dollars in questionable funds. Based on the pattern of previous political fund-raising scandals, Jay calculated that the news media and congressional probes would not have caught up with these facts until after the election and a probable Goodrich victory.

Lannie set up a bogus charitable foundation for children
that actually was a conduit to funnel money into Goodrich’s campaign. She recognized him early on as the one who would win the nomination, and even before he qualified for matching federal funds, this money source allowed him to pay for crucial TV exposure. Her system was to contact big money people for donations to Goodrich and provide them with a tax deduction because they were handled through this foundation.

Jay wrote that even his ex-wife’s fellow tobacco industry colleagues appeared not to know that the operation was outside the law, since it was a one-on-one deal between Lannie Gordon and Rawlings.

Damning words, thought Louise. She sat back for a moment and thought. Did Lannie suspect her complicity had been discovered by Jay? If so, it was no wonder she wanted that disk so badly.

Jay’s story was long, probably ten thousand words. At the end, there was an editorial note that said tapes had been made of conversations that took place in the opposition presidential campaign office that proved Jay McCormick’s allegations. He said his daughter, Melissa, had a key to a safety deposit box in Riggs National Bank, where the tapes were hidden.

When she reached the end of the story, Louise leaned her elbows on the antique table and put her head in her hands. This was what her friend had died for. And it was pretty clear who would want him dead. Jay had come right out and said that he had worked for the campaign as a speechwriter. Near the end of his story, Jay had written that Upchurch particularly had begun to mistrust him.

Why did they begin to mistrust him? Louise could think of only one reason. Lannie, with her link to these political operators, probably caught a glimpse of Jay, perhaps when he was making a secret visit to Melissa, trailed him to work at Goodrich
headquarters, and then tipped someone off: French, perhaps, or maybe Rawlings. Since Jay was low profile, and almost the perfect man to become a political plant, only Lannie could have put the pieces together.

Louise sighed. Thank heavens, Bill would be here in a few hours. Although that raised other problems: Her husband might insist she turn the story directly over to the police, since he seemed to have a higher standard for her behavior than for his own. She hunched protectively over the computer and frowned, and felt like a mother bear protecting its cub. What would happen to this material if she turned it over to the police?