Scuzzy Schwartz was between stories when the phone rang. The flamboyant chief reporter for the Top Star News, Schwartz got a lot of crazy calls and this was the fourth of the day. But the news business was slow this winter, so he amused himself by listening. The caller said his name was Andy and he had some dirt on President Corcoran.
“Yeah, so…” Schwartz said. He had heard these come-ons before, so he gazed at the newsroom clock and gave Andy 30 seconds to come to the point or the phone would find itself back on its cradle.
Andy’s voice was feint and he coughed several times before he began talking again. Schwartz began drumming a pencil on his desk.
“The president’s got a girlfriend,” Andy said.
“Yes…”
“Or at least he did.”
“Uh, huh.”
“And I think she’s sick…”
“So what does that have to do with the president?” Scuzzy inquired.
“Maybe she’s sick because of the president,” the voice said.
“What—the president gave her the clap?” Schwartz said with mock amazement.
“No, not exactly,” Andy said. “But you should check her out yourself.”
“You wouldn’t have a name and a phone number, would you, pal?” Scuzzy said, waiting for the usual pause, stutter and click of the phone.
But this time he was in for a surprise. “Her name is Sally Winters,” Andy said amid the coughs, “and she lives in Topeka, Kansas.”
Scuzzy sat up straight in his chair. Maybe this wasn’t just another crazy caller.
“Come again, son?”
“Sally Winters is her name,” Andy said. “Her mother’s name is Claire. You should ask her why she’s sick.”
Click.
Schwartz sat there, phone still in his hand, clearly intrigued. This, he said to himself, has possibilities.
The Top Star News is a supermarket tabloid that loves to expose the foibles of the rich, powerful and famous. Sometimes its stories are even true. And in the tabloid biz, Scuzzy Schwartz was one of the best. He hounded friends and acquaintances of celebrities, offering money, fame and exposure, but mostly money. The longer they held out, the more he paid. He was rarely disappointed. He knew more Beverly Hills maids than most California cleaning services.
Born Gerald Nathanial Schwartz, Scuzzy was once the metro editor of a dying Pittsburgh daily. When he got a pricey offer from the Florida-based Star News, he hopped on his motorcycle and was gone. As soon as he walked into the Star News’ newsroom, it was obvious he was different, a renegade in a renegade’s profession. He was partial to black leather jackets, white T-shirts and alligator boots, even on the hottest days of the year. He claimed never to have owned a tie. Reporters called him Elvis, partly because of his dress, partly because he was on the road so often. With his long, stringy hair, pockmarked face and high-pitched voice, he looked like a refugee from a grunge band, not one of the highest-paid reporters in the country.
He got his nickname long before he showed up in Orlando. He was bird-dogging a corrupt councilman outside a nightclub in Pittsburgh, looking for a quote for a late-breaking story. When the pol emerged, he had a hot blonde on his arm who happened to be the niece of a local mobster. The pol, the blonde and the uncle all made it into the next day’s story, prompting an editor to call Schwartz the “scuzziest” reporter he had ever known. The name stuck.
Scuzzy first made his name at the Star News on the Michael Jackson story years ago. He seemed to know every boy under the age of 13 Jackson had befriended and most of his entourage as well. He provoked as many libel suits as screaming headlines, which was just fine with him. He lived on the front page; the more scandalous the story, the better.
He first dipped his toe into national politics during Corcoran’s presidential campaign when he exposed his links to right-wing militias. He got a hold of a video tape of a Corcoran aide named John Aldrace spewing hate at a militia convention. The story made the national papers and the networks ate it up, driving Aldrace out of the campaign and making Scuzzy a star. Did the morning talk shows, Meet the Press, Face the Nation and all the top podcasts. Even his mother was impressed. For a day, he was respectable.
Scuzzy got lots of calls every day. People were always claiming to know the “real” story about politicians, actors, network anchormen, sports stars—anyone whose mug was on the evening news the night before. Schwartz’s secretary would catalogue the calls for him. Her most popular categories were loonies, druggies, miss lonely hearts and jail house rockers. She would screen the patently outrageous calls, but Schwartz talked to many himself. He could usually tell in 15 seconds whether the caller had something worth pursuing.
And “coughing Andy,” as Schwartz quickly dubbed his newest informant, could be on to something. Corcoran was the great church-going moral leader of the country, raging against homosexuality and sex on television, denouncing the divorce rate as a sign of America’s decline. But there had never even been a hint that he fooled around. And that was something hard to hide given the kind of scrutiny politicians constantly live under, especially in Washington.
Schwartz quickly saw the headlines—he always wrote the headlines in his head before he began reporting a story—and this one was a stunner. “Moralist Prez Caught in Love Nest.” It reminded him of the movie “Citizen Kane” and the movie’s famous tabloid front page that destroyed the political career of publisher Charles Foster Kane, the character director/writer Orson Wells based on William Randolph Hearst. Time to visit to Winters residence, Scuzzy decided.
Topeka in January is cold, but Scuzzy’s only concession to the weather was donning a sweater over his T-shirt and under his black leather jacket. His boots came in handy for navigating through the snow that lay a few inches thick on the ground. The Winters house wasn’t hard to find. One click on Google and Claire Winters was listed right there. Twenty-three Maple Street, a simple, gray, two-story clapboard house on a quiet residential street on the outskirts of the city. Schwartz had to return several times before he found someone home. It was early evening when Claire Winters answered the door.
A short, pleasant, trusting woman, she invited Schwartz in when he said he was an old friend of Sally’s from college and was trying to track her down. Mrs. Winters wore a frayed housecoat and her hair looked like she had just gotten out of bed. But the house was snug and the coffee warm, especially for a frigid winter’s night.
“Sally was always a spirited girl,” her mother said. “Free, easy, pretty. A bit like her mother.” She laughed at herself. “A little too easy to make friends, actually.”
“Where is she now, Mrs. Winters?” Schwartz asked.
She did not seem to hear him. She was a lonely woman who appeared to have few visitors. So with her audience of one, she rambled on about a daughter who clearly did not appear to be home. She talked about Sally in high school—“One of the best cheerleaders they had”—and in college, Kansas State for two years before transferring to George Mason University in northern Virginia. “Something about a boy, I recall,” she said. “She was too strong-willed for me to stop her. I thought she’d be better here, with a nice young farm boy. But she had other, bigger, ideas.”
Schwartz thought of coughing Andy and wondered whether he was the boy that kept Sally Winters in Washington. More ominous, from the way she talked, Scuzzy feared Sally may not be alive. That could sure kill a story quickly. Unless he knew how she died.
“We knew each other some at George Mason,” Scuzzy said, vamping as he did so well. “But then I lost track of her. What happened?”
“Oh, she got mixed up in politics,” she recalled. “She worked for one of those conservative groups, against abortion and all—mind you, I’m no fan of abortion. I think if a girl gets herself pregnant, she should go ahead and have the child, even if she has to give it up if she can’t care for it right. But I’m not much for political activity. I say, let’s people be as they be.”
So maybe Sally worked for Corcoran, Schwartz guessed, trying to figure out how the pieces fit together.
“I heard she worked for the president once.” he ventured.
“Oh yes, but that was before he became the president,” Mrs. Winters said. “He was just a senator. She was very proud of that. She was real happy when she got that job, working on Capital Hill and all…”
So if she was Corcoran’s girlfriend, it probably was before he was elected president, Schwartz thought.
“…Said she worked real hard, long hours. But I don’t know what she did. Didn’t call much, or write neither. Though the few letters she did send were on his official stationary. That seemed pretty impressive to me. But the job didn’t last. She left and pretty soon she was back here, all sick and hungry. Not sure what went wrong…”
“What was wrong with her?” Schwartz asked.
“I don’t know,” her mother said. “She just seemed to have lost her energy. I tried to care for her, but she was too sick. Eventually she had to go to the clinic.”
“So she doesn’t live at home anymore?” Schwartz asked.
“Oh, no,” her mother said. “I couldn’t handle her. She was too sick.”
“Do you know what she’s suffering from?”
“No, just lack of pep. She didn’t want to tell me too much.”
“Chronic fatigue syndrome?” Schwartz asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe,” Mrs. Winters said. “I don’t know those medical things very well.”
“Where is the clinic?” asked Schwartz, puzzled.
“Oh, somewhere in Kansas City.”
“Do you visit her?”
“Did for awhile, but she told me she didn’t want me seeing her looking so bad, so I haven’t been in a while. We talk some on the phone. She has friends there, so she’s not alone.”
“In Kansas City?”
“Well, it’s her political friends. They look out for her.”
“Do you have the name and address of the clinic?”
She fished it out of a side drawer. “Here,” she said, “though she doesn’t like visitors.”
“And what about Sally’s father?” Schwartz asked, seeing little evidence that Mrs. Winters lived with anyone.
“Oh, I haven’t seen Roger for ages,” Mrs. Winters said. Schwartz’s eyes suddenly widened. Roger Winters was a well-known militia leader in the Ozarks. He had been arrested on gun violations several times, but the feds were never able to nail him on anything serious. There had been some stories several years back suggesting that he knew Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, but nothing was ever proved. Could this be the same Roger Winters. If so, Schwartz thought, this could get very interesting very quickly…
“Roger Winters—is that the Roger Winters who is involved in the militia groups?” Scuzzy asked.
“Could be,” Mrs. Winters said. “He was always tied up with one right-wing thing or another. I couldn’t stand any of it.”
“Did Sally’s father help her get the job on Corcoran’s staff?” he asked.
“How should I know?” her mother said. “She didn’t tell me and I haven’t talked to or seen her father in years. He’s too busy collecting guns and playing toy soldier. That’s why I kicked him out.”
Scuzzy Schwartz soon thanked his host and departed. Kansas City was only an hour from Topeka. As he drove away from 23 Maple St., a dark late-model sedan followed him back to his hotel at a discreet distance. The reporter now had a tail.
As Schwartz returned to his Topeka hotel, he realized he wasn’t exactly sure what—if anything—he had stumbled onto. Why was Sally Winters so sick that she was in a clinic, and not at home? And she worked for Corcoran as a senator—that was three years ago—why was she still sick? And from what? Her mother seemed at a loss. And there was the militia angle. He remembered Roger Winters’ name coming up when he did the militia story during the campaign. Did he have a back-channel connection to Corcoran? Are those ties still alive and well? Maybe if he got to talk to Sally Winters, some of these mysteries would be cleared up.
The drive into Kansas City was quick and easy. The search for Sally Winters’ clinic proved a bit more difficult. Seems Mrs. Winters hadn’t remembered if the clinic was in Kansas City, Kansas, or Kansas City, Missouri, and Schwartz searched for the clinic nearly all day. He finally found it on the Missouri side. By then it was already late afternoon and getting dark. The clinic, the Kansas City Care Center, was a squat one-story brick building tucked into a poor neighborhood, surrounded by the squalor and filth of a deserted inner city street. As Schwartz walked through the front door, the winter winds howled, kicking up the trash left on the sidewalk.
The clinic’s receptionist, to Schwartz’s surprise, was a tall clean-cut man wearing a suit and tie. Somehow, he had expected to see a woman at the front desk, but he told himself that was probably just him gender stereotyping.
More puzzling, the man said he had never heard of Sally Winters. There was no one with that name at the clinic and never had been, the man said.
“Could I talk with the director of the clinic?” Schwartz asked. “Maybe he knows what happened to her?”
“That isn’t possible today,” the receptionist said. “Actually, it’s a she and she’s gone for today. Maybe she’ll be back tomorrow.”
This was very puzzling, Scuzzy thought, so he decided to find a hotel and stay the night. He wasn’t going to give up that easily. He also did not notice that the tail he had picked up in Topeka had rejoined him in Kansas City and followed him back to the hotel.
After dinner at the hotel restaurant, Schwartz tried to figure out how he could find Sally Winters. It’s possible that she had moved to another clinic—or a hospital or in with a friend. Maybe she moved to her own apartment. Maybe she got married. But her mother would surely have known. Maybe the clinic director would know when he talked to her in the morning, he decided.
There was also something odd about the receptionist, though. He seemed like he belonged in a law firm, not a down-and-out health clinic in the inner city. He also remembered Mrs. Winters saying she talked to her daughter by phone several times. Maybe he could do the same. There was still a phone book in the hotel desk draw, so he grabbed the white pages and looked up the number for the Kansas City Care Center.
“Sally Winters, please,” he said.
“Just a moment,” was the response.
This was interesting, Schwartz thought. There was a long silence, then a thin female voice got on the line. “Hello?” the voice said hesitantly.
“Sally Winters?”
“Yesssss, who is this?”
Bingo! Scuzzy was in business. He had to talk fast, but that was his forte.
“Hi Sally, my name is Gerald Schwartz,” the reporter said. “I’m a journalist and I’m doing some research on President Corcoran. I understand you used to work for him?”
“Well, that was a long time ago, several years ago, I don’t know much about him now,” she said. Her voice was frail and Schwartz thought she sounded either very sick or very afraid. She also had a bad cough.
“Well, could we talk? I’m here in Kansas City for a couple of days and I’d love to come by and chat with you?”
“I don’t know much about the president,” she said.
“Well, you never know,” Scuzzy said. “How long have you been in the clinic?”
“Oh, quite a while,” Sally said. “I don’t quite remember time that well.”
“What do the doctors say is wrong?” he asked delicately.
“Oh, they just say I have to take my medicine and I’ll get better,” she said evasively.
“I’d love to sit down and talk to you,” Scuzzy said. “If you’d like, I can be of help to you financially.”
“Well, I don’t know…”
“Are you free tomorrow morning?” Scuzzy pushed.
“Yes, I’m free most mornings,” Sally said, giggling slightly. It was the first evidence of a personality. “I guess I’ll be here. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Okay, I’ll be over around 10, is that okay?”
“Uh, I guess so,” Sally said. “I’ll have to tell the doctors, though.”
“That’s okay,” Schwartz said. “I won’t take too long.”
“Bye, bye, now.”
The next morning, Schwartz drove back to the Kansas City Care Center the following morning and, for the first time, he noticed a car was following his, a few hundred feet behind as he left the hotel. That made him both nervous and excited. If this wasn’t a story, why was someone trailing him? What had he stumbled upon?
Scuzzy walked slowly through the front door. At the receptionist’s desk was a different man, dressed again in a suit and tie like the receptionist the day before. This is a bit eerie, Schwartz thought.
“Hi, my name is Gerald Schwartz and I’m here to see Sally Winters,” he said.
“I’m sorry, there is no one here by that name,” the man said.
Now, Scuzzy knew something was amiss. “That’s not true,” he said angrily. “I talked to her just last night and we agreed to meet this morning.”
“You must be mistaken, Mr., uh, uh—”
“Schwartz.”
“Yes, Mr. Schwartz. There is no Sally Winters here.”
At that, several husky men appeared near the receptionist’s desk, all dressed like lawyers, all looking like wrestlers.
Nervously eyeing them, Schwartz stood his ground. “I’m not sure what you’re trying to pull, but—”
At that, the man at the receptionist’s desk nodded and the men pounced. They grabbed Scuzzy, carrying him out the door and throwing him hard unto the pavement. As he gathered to pick himself up, they stood by the front door, daring him to re-enter.
“This is private property,” one of them said. “For your own good, you should leave here immediately.”
As Schwartz drove off, he noticed a different car following him back to the hotel. He quickly checked out and caught a plane back to Orlando. Clearly, he had stumbled across something, but he wasn’t sure just what. But he had to find a way to talk to Sally Winters.