Dead Watch

Jake came in, he looked up and asked, “Is it bad?”
    “It could be,” Jake said. “Really bad.”
    Danzig pointed at a chair: “What?”
    Jake sat down and said, “A low-level operator for the RNC has been talking to another operator, a guy who worked a bunch of Senate and gubernatorial campaigns, including Bowe’s last campaign. He’s a Bowe guy, now with ALERT! His name is Tony Patterson. He was making tentative inquiries about dropping a scandal on you. On us. Supposedly, a rock-solid accusation against Vice President Landers that would dump him off the ticket. The question he was putting to the RNC was, when to drop the package on us. The timing.”
    “Why would he ask the RNC?” Danzig asked. “Why not Bowe? Bowe would know.”
    “I don’t know. I do know that he and this woman, the woman at the RNC, were old campaign buddies. So it was partially old-buddy stuff. And there was just a hint that the package might be coming from Bowe. That Bowe might be trying to distance himself from it.”
    “Goddamnit,” Danzig said. They looked at each other in silence for a moment, then Danzig said, “If it’s true, one obvious conclusion would be that Bowe was killed to stop this package from coming out.”
    “Yes.”
    “That’d be a disaster.” Jake said nothing and Danzig spun his chair away, thinking. Then he said, coming back around, “On the other hand, if we push the investigation into this hypothetical package, and it turns out that Bowe was killed for some completely unrelated reason, we’re still in trouble. Because once anybody knows about the package, it’s gonna leak.”
    Jake nodded. “If the package exists. If it’s not part of some scheme by Bowe, including his disappearance, to mess with us.”
    “He had himself killed to mess with us?”
    “I haven’t worked out that part,” Jake said.

    Danzig smiled, a rueful smile, said, “Ah, God,” twirled again in his chair, came back around, said about the vice president, “Landers is a crooked sonofabitch and we’ve known it from Day One. But he gave us Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa, and we needed them.”
    Jake said nothing.
    Danzig said, “He’ll deny everything. He’ll ride it right to the end. There’s no way we could go to him and say, ‘Is there anything in your past?’ because we all know there is, and we all know he’ll deny it. Deny, deny, deny.”
    “Want me to jack up Patterson?”
    Danzig rubbed his face, suddenly looking old and tired. “Wait overnight. Let me sleep on it,” he said.
    “Okay.”
    Danzig leaned forward. “The problem is this: the RNC may be feeding you this rumor, knowing it will get to me. I talk to the president, we ask around. Even if we keep it secret, the RNC feeds it through the back door to some conservative sheet or cable station. The L.A. Times, maybe. Tells them that we know about it. Then we’re in trouble, whether or not it’s true. We can’t even deny that we asked around. Landers gets investigated all summer, into the campaign.”
    Jake nodded. That’s what would happen.
    “If we have to dump Landers, we’ve got to do it before summer,” Danzig said. He was talking to himself as much as to Jake. “We can’t carry him into the convention. But if the accusation is bullshit, then Landers pees on us.”
    “We need some specifics,” Jake said.
    “Just like with Bowe,” Danzig said. “If we could only get the specifics, we could move. Without them, we could be screwed no matter what we do.”
    “But if we don’t look into it . . . we could get into pretty deep trouble ourselves,” Jake said. “I mean us, personally. Obstruction of justice and all that.”
    Danzig nodded: “Of course. But everybody would give us a day or two. Working through the bureaucracy.”
    Jake stood up: “I’ll be on the phone. Call anytime.”
    “What about Schmidt?”
    “Nothing new. Can’t find him,” Jake said.
    “But we’re looking.”
    “Novatny’s tearing up the countryside. He’s pretty competent.”
    Danzig picked up a pencil, drummed it, stuck it behind an ear, rubbed his face with both hands. Tired. Finally he said, “Best thing that could happen is, we find Schmidt and pin the killing on him. Or on the Watchmen,” Danzig said. “Then we find the package and get rid of Landers, and never let anybody even hint that there might have been a connection.”
    “Gonna be tough,” Jake said. “The media’s running around like a herd of weasels, putting every rumor they