Dead Watch

worked. . . .”

    Danzig wanted to review each piece of paper, to crawl through the books on the DVD disks, to find inconsistencies. They took two hours, the longest time Jake had ever spent in Danzig’s office. They found inconsistencies, but they appeared to be paperwork mistakes, rather than logical errors that would suggest a fraud. When they were done, Danzig stood up, walked around the room in his stocking feet, sighed, and said, “Shit.”
    “What do you think?” Jake asked.
    “They’re real. I’ve seen stuff like this before, and they have the feeling of reality about them. The grit. A few pieces are missing, but that’s what you’d expect if it was real. The inconsistencies are consistent with reality.”
    “I agree. You could get somebody else, maybe, to do some specific checks on the public records, to nail it down.”
    Danzig nodded. “Of course. We’ll start that tomorrow. Tonight, if we can, maybe some of the stuff is online.”
    “I’d want to see the actual paper, where it exists . . .”
    “So would I,” Danzig said. Then, “Okay. You wait here for a minute. I’m going to get the boss.”
    “There’s another thing, somewhat related,” Jake said. “And it’s about to pop. Lincoln Bowe was gay. His death was a conspiracy that Bowe set up himself, carried out by a close friend, or a few close friends, in an effort to embarrass Goodman.”
    Danzig’s face didn’t move for a moment, as though he hadn’t heard. Then he said, “Holy shit.”
    “I had to tell the feds. They’re now investigating Bowe’s gay friends. It’s gonna leak in the next day or two, and the whole investigation is going to lurch that way, away from the package. But it’ll come back.”
    Danzig ran one hand through his oily hair and then said, “You’re a hell of a researcher, Jake. I hope you never come after me.”

    Danzig padded out of the office, returned five minutes later, trailed by the president. The president was a tall, white-haired Indianan, a former governor and senator, a middle-of-the-roader chosen to lead the ticket when the Democrats decided to get serious. He was wearing a dark suit and white shirt, without a tie, and like Danzig, was in his stocking feet. Jake stood up when he walked in.
    “Hey, Jake,” he said. They shook hands and the president asked, “What the heck did you drag in this time?”
    They spent another twenty minutes combing through the package, and finally the president said to Danzig, “I believe it. What do you think?”
    Danzig glanced at Jake, then back to the president, who said, “Go ahead. He’s in deeper than we are.”
    “We’ve got to do some verification and then we talk to Landers,” Danzig said. “He’s in town. We’ll get his ass over here, stick this thing up it. Come to some kind of agreement.”
    The president looked at Jake. “You say there’s another copy?”
    “At least one more—probably in the dead man’s safe-deposit box,” Jake said. “The FBI will get to it sooner or later. Probably sooner, since Novatny’s working the case.”
    “I don’t know him,” the president said.
    “He’s pretty good, sir. Also, there are quite a few other people who know about it, know enough details to cause trouble, even if they don’t have the package. It’s possible that the package could be replicated, at least a good part of it, from public records. If the Republicans talk to the L.A. Times , and they put a couple of investigators on it, they’ll hang the vice president; and maybe get us in passing.”
    “All right,” the president said. To Danzig: “Get Delong and Henricks here tonight. We want to get this taken care of, and I want to turn this over to the FBI by the end of the week. I want Jake to do it. We need to cover him.” Delong was Landers’s chief of staff; Henricks, the president’s legal counsel.
    “We’ve got a lot to talk about,” Danzig said to the president. He was tense, but seemed happier than he usually was. He liked an outrageous problem, Jake decided. And this would make a hell of a scene in a what-really-happened book, five years after the president left office.
    “We do,” the president said. “We don’t need Jake to do that.”
    “Mr. President, I do have one thing to suggest,” Jake said. “When you’re talking about the other stuff, don’t spend too much time thinking about Arlo Goodman as a replacement for the vice president.”
    The president nodded, but asked, “Why