—
AMES WAS A DIFFERENT KIND of college town from those of Lucas’s experience. The University of Minnesota, where he’d played four years of hockey, not counting a fifth year as a rare hockey redshirt, was built on the banks of the Mississippi, and was a thoroughly urban campus, within walking distance of downtown Minneapolis and the strip of bars and music clubs on Hennepin Avenue.
The other college towns he’d visited as part of the hockey team, or on Big-Ten related sports trips, were also pretty interesting, even when small: often a little shabby, with old-line bars and riverside or lakeside walks, and long-haired hipsters and lots of girls reading Khalil Gibran. The presence of The Prophet had always, in his experience, boosted the potential for hasty romances. He even knew a few handy lines: Fill each other’s cup, but drink not from one cup. And you could take that any way you wanted . . .
—
AMES, ON THE OTHER HAND, was flat and dry, or almost so; and the main street facing the campus looked like it had been built by recent refugees from the old Soviet Union, who’d been allowed to use bricks instead of concrete. The coeds—not too many, in the dead of summer—all looked like they were majoring in something that required math or rubber gloves and weren’t carrying copies of The Prophet. There wasn’t a hipster in sight.
Lucas followed the truck’s nav system down Lincoln, spotted the student union, drove around for a couple of minutes and found a parking spot outside a Jimmy John’s sub restaurant, which was a good thing. He plugged the meter and ambled on over to the student union.
Checked his watch: 1:45.
He could see Henderson’s political rally from the far side of the street, a crowd of brightly dressed young people overflowing down the steps of a concrete terrace off the left side of the student union. He crossed the street and climbed the steps to the terrace, where he found Neil Mitford, a pale, balding man with a sun-pinked face, in a blue-and-white-striped seersucker suit, leaning against a terrace wall, a drink in one hand. The terrace was packed, a hundred and fifty people pounding on a drinks-and-snacks table like ravenous wolves.
Mitford nodded at Lucas and said, “Right on time.”
From where he was standing, Lucas could see another, higher level to the terrace, as crowded as the one they were on, with the governor standing in the center of it, surrounded by the coeds that Lucas hadn’t seen on the streets.
“You needed a bigger space,” Lucas said.
“Which tells me how much you know about politics,” Mitford said. “If you think five people are going to show up, you hold the rally in a phone booth. If it’s twenty-five, you hold it in a garage. If it’s five hundred, it’s this place—it’s a place where not quite everybody can get in, so the press says you’re attracting overflow crowds.”
“You’ve mentioned that before,” Lucas said. “I forgot it because it wasn’t important.”
“And because you’re not a political influential, like me.”
“I gotta admit, I didn’t think the crowd would be this big, this early in the campaign,” Lucas said. There were probably a hundred young women in royal-blue-and-gold T-shirts, Henderson’s campaign colors.
Mitford said, “Four words: college campus, free food.”
“Ah. What does Elmer want me to do?” Lucas asked. “Something criminal?”
Mitford shrugged: “Maybe, but I’ll let him tell you about it. It’ll take some of your time, though, so you better cancel everything else.”
“I’m not going to do it if it involves Elmer’s sex life,” Lucas said.
“It doesn’t.”
“Good. Anyway, I charge four hundred bucks an hour,” Lucas said. “Eight hundred if it involves something criminal.”
Mitford made a farting noise with his lips, then said, “The governor expects you to contribute your time, since you’re already richer than Croesus.” He paused, then said, “Croesus was—”
“I know who Croesus was,” Lucas said. “I was a hockey player, not a moron.”
“Sorry. But you know, get hit in the head by too many pucks . . . By the way, we haven’t actually seen your name on our donors’ list.”
“Must have missed it,” Lucas said.
—
ON THE LAWN below the terrace, a fight had broken out. Lucas felt no compulsion to do anything about it, other than to look past Mitford’s shoulder and say, “Fight.”
Mitford turned to look, where two middle-aged men were rolling around on the grass next to a pond and a fallen political sign.
“Oh, that guy,” Mitford said, leaning over the terrace wall, watching with interest. “The one in the white shirt. He’s got these big signs that bounce up and down on a spring, on top of a pole that’s about fifteen feet high. One says, ‘The Henderson Hoagie, Two Girls Better Than One,’ and the other one says, ‘Henderson Equals Godless Comminism.’ That’s c-o-m-m-I-n-i-s-m.”
“Must be one of your right-wing intellectuals,” Lucas said.
A crowd encircled the two fighting men, but nobody seemed about to intervene, except a woman in a yellow blouse who kept pleading, “Is this the way to settle anything? Is this the way adults . . .” She stopped and dabbed at a spot of blood that spattered on her blouse.
Lucas wondered briefly if she were intellectually challenged: in his experience, fights settled all sorts of things. Some of them permanently.
“He’s been following us around the state. He’s harmless, but embarrassing,” Mitford said. Now four men were trying to pull the fighters apart, but the guy on top got in a last three or four good-looking shots to the face, and Mitford shouted, “Hit him again, Walt.”
Lucas: “Walt? You hired that guy?”
“Of course not. That would be wrong. But we’re pretty sure Bowden hired the guy with the sign.” Mitford went back to his drink.
The fighters were dragged apart, the winner disappearing with professional discretion into the crowd, while the loser tried to sop up the blood from his nose with a blue cowboy handkerchief.
—
A WOMAN’S ARM SLIPPED around Lucas’s waist and he looked down at a redhead who was slender in all the right places.
“How are you?” he asked.
Alice Green looked up at him and smiled, her green eyes a little tired. He could feel the gun on her hip.
“Not bad.”
“Having a good time?” Lucas asked.
Her eyes slipped away. “I guess. Working pretty hard.”
Lucas looked at her for a moment and she never looked back, and he pulled her a few steps away from Mitford and said, “Don’t tell me . . .”
“I don’t want to hear a fuckin’ word about it, Lucas,” she said. “I knew you’d figure it out, right away, and I don’t want to hear a single fuckin’ word.”
“Does Neil know?”
“I’m sure he does,” she said.
“How long?” he asked.
“Couple months.”
“It’s not going anywhere,” Lucas said.
“Depends on what you mean by ‘going.’ He’s not going to marry me, but I could come out of it with a hell of a job in Washington.”
“Ah, man . . . I hope you know what you’re doing,” Lucas said.
“I don’t, entirely,” she said. “I really like him and he really likes me. Trouble is, there are a lot of women who really like him and he really likes them back. And his wife is basically Darth Vader in an Oscar de la Renta dress.”
“Really? I always thought she looked like a decorator lamp with a twenty-five-watt bulb.”
“The lamp part is right, the dim bulb not so much,” Green said. “She’s at least half the brains in the family and she’s not going anywhere.”
—
GREEN HEADED Henderson’s security detail. Lucas had introduced them at the end of a U.S. Senate campaign in which Green, a former Secret Service agent, h
ad been working for a psychopathic Senate candidate named Taryn Grant. Lucas was positive that Grant had orchestrated the murders of several people during a Senate campaign in Minnesota.
Lucas asked, “You hear anything from Taryn?”
“No. She was unhappy when I quit, so I don’t think I will,” Green said. “You still thinking about her?”
“From time to time,” Lucas said. “I know goddamn well that she was behind those killings.”
“Won’t get her, not after all this time,” Green said.
“Not for those,” Lucas said. “She’ll go after somebody else, though—freaks like her do it for the thrill of it and they get addicted to the risk. She’ll screw up somewhere along the line. I’d like to be there when she does.”
“You’d need a new cop job,” Green said.
“I could see myself coming back, under the right circumstances,” Lucas said. “I just haven’t figured out exactly what the job would be.”
“Nobody likes a freelancer,” she said.
“Including me. I wouldn’t go freelance. I’d like a real badge, but it’s got to be the right one,” he said. And, “Do you have any idea what Elmer wants?”
“Yes, but I’ll let him tell you. The governor speaks for himself.” A group of young women dressed all in black were picking up the leftover food and dumping it into garbage sacks and stacking up unused paper plates, signaling the end of the party. Green said, “Let’s go talk to the guy.”
—
HENDERSON, A TALL, SLENDER MAN with blond hair, was still surrounded by coeds and the kind of soft-faced young men who walked around with policy manuals under their elbows. They’d all wind up in Washington where, even if they never did good, they’d certainly do well.
The governor saw Lucas and lifted a hand and said to the people around him, “My muscle has arrived. We’ve got to go talk. I’ll be back. I’d like somebody to show me those pool tables.”
Several young things volunteered and the governor, babbling a variety of assurances and clichés, waded through the crowd, shook hands with Lucas, and said, “Come on, let’s go across the street.”
He led the way down the steps to the street level, Mitford, Green, and another security guy running interference for them. They crossed the street and Henderson waved back at the crowd, then took Lucas’s elbow and led him onto a sidewalk that bordered a large winding pond.
“So what’s up?” Lucas asked, as they walked along.
“Let me turn my music on,” Henderson said. He took an iPhone from his pocket, pushed some buttons, and JD McPherson started singing “Let the Good Times Roll.”
Lucas looked around. “Boom mikes?”
“Can never tell,” Henderson said. He held the rockin’ iPhone between them. “Better to not take a chance.”
“It’s that bad?”
“Don’t know,” Henderson said. “But it’s got a nasty vibe.”
“Tell me.”
—
HENDERSON OUTLINED some background that Lucas already knew: that he wasn’t really running for the presidency, but for the vice presidency, and that most political insiders knew that.
“I’d like to be president someday and this is my only chance—I can’t get to it without getting the vice presidency first. That whole Henderson Hoagie business, and too many people know that I fooled around with some cocaine . . . well. Since 1901, seven vice presidents—Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, and George Bush the First—got to be president, for a whole variety of different reasons. There’s no sure thing, but if I can get there, get to be the VP, I’ve got a fair chance at the top job. Bowden has almost got the nomination sewn up. Jack Gardner’s still hanging around, but he’s well back in third place and he’s too wimpy for any major job. I’m a perfect fit for the vice presidency. I’m popular in the Midwest, where Bowden’s weak, I’m a Catholic and she’s a Protestant . . .”
“Male and female, tall and short, blond and brunette, left-wing crazy and moderate centrist . . .” Lucas added.
“Exactly,” said the left-wing crazy. “We’ve gotten some strong signals from her camp that if I don’t say anything too rude, I’m at the top of the list. If I beat her here in Iowa and ease up and let her take New Hampshire, it’s a done deal.”
“But. There’s gotta be a ‘but.’”
“There is.” He paused, then, “I was working the rope line down at the Des Moines airport and this chubby white-haired middle-aged lady took my hand and held on to it, walked along with me for a way, and she said, ‘Governor, you’ve got to move to the center. You have to be ready for the nomination, in case Bowden doesn’t make it, in case something happens to her.’ She was quite intense, very sincere, and I think a little unhinged.”
“Uh-huh. What’d you say?”
“I rolled out a cliché or two and kept trying to get my hand back. Eventually I did, but the incident was odd enough that I remembered it, because she had this scary intensity about her. A few days later, I was in Waterloo and this farm kinda guy took my hand and said, ‘Governor, you gotta move to the center. We know where your heart is, but you’ve got to pretend to move to the center if you want the nomination. You gotta be ready if Bowden goes down.’ The thing is, this guy had these pale gray eyes, you really felt them. Creepy. And he looked like the chubby lady, except he had a thin face and the gray eyes . . . The features were hers, you know what I mean? The mouth and the nose . . . And he said the same thing she had, almost exactly the same words. And when he said it, I had the feeling that something bad might happen to Bowden. He had that look about him—like somebody had slapped him on the side of the head with a flatiron.”
“That’s pretty serious,” Lucas said. “You talk to Bowden’s security people?”
“I didn’t myself. What I did was, I called Bowden directly and told her I was worried. She said she’d talk to her security. One of her guys came over to talk to me and I couldn’t give him anything but those gray eyes, that curly white hair on the old lady—she wore rimless glasses—and the dates of the encounters.”
“Did they take you seriously?”
“Sure, but I didn’t give them much to work with,” Henderson said. “These guys really aren’t investigators. They’re security people, bodyguards.”
“You want me to find the chubby lady . . .”
“Wait one,” Henderson said. He waved at a couple walking along the sidewalk, and they cooed at him, and they went on their way. “Bowden and I had that little get-together in Sioux City, along with the also-rans. I’m looking out at the crowd, and here’s this farmy-looking guy again. He looks like those pictures you see of Confederate soldiers. Those flat gray eyes, shaggy hair, too skinny. He was staring at Bowden, fixing on her, then he glances at me and sees that I’m fixed on him. Alice was right off the stage and I excused myself for a minute and I grabbed her and told her about him and she tried to get a picture of the guy with her cell phone, but he was moving away, fast. The photo she got is less than half-assed. Anyway, we passed it all along to Bowden.”
“What’d she do?” Lucas asked.
“Got more security, I hope—but she’s got this weasel working for her, Norman Clay, and he comes by and he says, ‘You’re not trying to push Secretary Bowden out of Iowa, are you, Elmer?’”
“And you said?”
“I said, ‘Go fuck yourself, Norm. I wouldn’t pull that kind of bullshit on you.’ He went away, but she’s still here, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they thought I was trying to get her out of the state. We’re dealing with some serious skepticism over there.”
“One chubby lady with curly white hair and glasses and a guy with gray eyes who looks like a Confederate soldier, and one bad cell phone photo. That’s all you’ve got?”
“There’s a little more,” Henderson said. “Our website is inundated with e-m
ail. We have a few guys going through it looking for two things: possible donors and possible threats. There have been four e-mails from somebody named ‘Babs.’ They read like nutty political position papers and they also urge me to move toward the center. One of them says that the author knows my heart’s in the right place, but I can’t get the nomination unless I pretend to move to the center.”
“Exactly what the chubby lady told you,” Lucas said.
“Precisely the same words. But, instead of a momentary contact, there are also these position papers. It’s the position papers that tell you these people may be crazy and may be dangerous. You’ll have to read them. They want a revolution. If a few eggs have to be broken, that’s the only way to make an omelet.”
“Okay. What do you want me to do?” Lucas asked.
“I want you to find these people and find out what they’re up to,” Henderson said. “And do it fast. I’m really afraid something could happen here. When you find them, we’ll get the Iowa cops to sit on them.”
“If something did happen to Bowden, how would that affect your chances?” Lucas asked.
“What a rotten, cynical question to ask. I’m proud of you,” Henderson said.
“What’s the answer?”
Henderson shook his head. “I’d be done. I can’t take the nomination straight out. I’m too far left. There’s no way I could pretend to move to the center and Minnesota isn’t a swing state. If Bowden went down, Carl Bartley from Ohio would jump into the middle of it, and maybe Doug Jensen from Missouri. If either one of them got the nomination, neither one would offer me the vice presidency, because I don’t match up so well with them. They’re both Midwesterners, for one thing. They’d go for a woman or a big-state guy, somebody from one of the coasts. North Carolina or Florida or Washington.”
“All right. I’ll go talk to Alice, see what she has to say, and see if I can figure something out,” Lucas said.
“Alice . . .” Henderson said. He glanced at Lucas.
“Did you really have to do that, Governor?” Lucas asked.
Henderson spread his hands. “You know I’ve always had trouble with pretty women. Especially redheads. And blondes.”