TWENTY-FOUR

It took the Bohemian little time to find someone familiar with the congressional campaign that Marilyn Paul, Piser, Shea, Halvorson and Timothy Wade had worked on together twenty years earlier. Nor did he settle for a minor operative. He arranged for me to meet the failed candidate himself, Delman Bean, in a small anteroom at the Chicago Enterprise Club at eleven-thirty the next morning.

I had to take the train into the city because the Cook County Sheriff’s Police had my Jeep. That was worrisome. Experts might well find transfer traces of Marilyn Paul’s DNA in the back, where the box had been, and her blood under the front seat, left by the knife.

The train was almost empty. I sat by a window. It didn’t relax my mind. The day was dark, wanting to rain. It matched my mood.

I arrived at the lobby of the Enterprise Club early. It was a place of brass elevator doors, veiny gray marble and veiny gray old men.

The former candidate rolled down the marble staircase twenty minutes late, presumably from the bar two flights up. ‘I can give you five minutes,’ Delman Bean said.

He was power dressed in a light gray suit, white shirt and solid purple tie, and smelled strongly of musky cologne overlaid by too much whiskey. According to the Internet, he’d used his political connections to make a fortune fronting for a road construction contractor, certainly much more than he would have gotten chiseling as a US congressman from Illinois.

‘Marilyn Paul,’ I said.

‘So Anton told me. Bossy bitch in charge of our phone bank but not bossy enough to get out the vote.’

‘John Shea, Gary Halvorson, Willard Piser.’

‘Punks. They bailed on me just before the election.’

‘All three at the same time?’ Lena Jankowski had said merely that they’d taken jobs on an oil rig, not that they’d quit so abruptly as to leave the campaign in a lurch.

‘Quit with no notice, the three of them. We’d rented vans for them to pick up old people and get them to the polls. They were reliable votes, those old people. Hell, we thought of everything, right down to putting goody bags in the vans, soft chocolate, apple sauce – the crap old people can eat. We gave our drivers routes all planned out, names and addresses of people to be picked up and when. But we didn’t think of our drivers quitting so sudden, taking with them the lists of people to be driven. And there went the whole shootin’ match. We didn’t do much with computers back then and nobody else had the lists. We lost by a lousy five hundred votes.’

‘Timothy Wade volunteered for you in that campaign?’

‘And now the Wades are a shoo-in for the senate because they’re worth millions and self-fund his campaign. Once in they will be solid party supporters. No worries about them.’

‘You’re including his sister?’

‘She calls most of the shots. Reclusive, an invalid, probably half-insane from never leaving her house. But everybody says she’s sharp as a tack.’ He looked at his watch. He’d respected the code he shared with the Bohemian – to supply a minimum of information without asking why anyone would need it. Now he was done.

I was only beginning.