The Devils Teardrop

It had saved him. Lifting him out of the poverty of Northeast D.C., boosting him into William and Mary Law School. It got him a beautiful, brilliant wife, two successful sons, a career he was proud of.)
    No one disagreed with the basic premise that education could save people of course. But how to solve the puzzle of making sure the children learned was a different matter. The conservatives bitched about what people ought to be like and if they didn’t love their neighbors and live by family values then that was their problem. We home-school; why can’t everybody? The liberals whined and pumped more money into the schools but all the cash did was slow the decay of the infrastructure. It did nothing to make students stay in those buildings.
    This was the challenge for Gerald David Kennedy. He couldn’t wave a wand and bring fathers back to mothers, he couldn’t invent an antidote to crack cocaine, he couldn’tget guns out of the hands of people who lived only fifteen miles from the National Rifle Association’s headquarters.
    But he did have a vision of how to make sure kids in the District continued their education. And his plan could pretty much be summarized by one word: bribery.
    Though he and Wendell Jefferies called it by another name—Project 2000.
    For the past year Kennedy, aided by his wife, Jefferies and a few other close associates, had been negotiating with members of the Congressional District Committee to impose yet another tax on companies doing business in Washington. The money would go into a fund from which students would be paid cash to complete high school—provided they remained drug free and weren’t convicted of any crimes.
    In one swoop, Kennedy managed to incur the political hatred of the entire political spectrum. The liberals dismissed the idea as a potential source of massive corruption and had problems with the mandatory drug testing as a civil liberties issue. The conservatives simply laughed. The corporations to be taxed had their own opinion, of course. Immediately, the threats started—threats of major companies pulling out of the District altogether, political action committee funds and hard and soft campaign money vanishing from Democratic party coffers, even hints of exposing sexual indiscretions (of which there were none—but try telling that to the media after they’ve gotten their hands on blurry videotapes of a man and a woman walking into a Motel Six or Holiday Inn).
    Still, Kennedy was more than willing to risk this. And in his months of bargaining on Capitol Hill to get the measure through committee it appeared that the measure might actually pass, thanks largely to popular support.
    But then that city employee—Gary Moss—had summoned up his courage and gone to the FBI with evidence of a huge kickback scheme involving school construction and maintenance. Early investigations showed that wiring and masonry were so shoddy in some schools that faculty and students were at serious physical risk. The scandal kept growing and, it turned out, involved a number of contractors and subs and high-ranking District officials, some of them Kennedy appointees and longtime friends.
    Kennedy himself had extolled Moss and thrown himself into the job of rooting out the corruption. But the press, not to mention his opponents, continued to try to link him to the scandal. Every news story about payoffs in the “Kennedy administration”—and there were plenty of them—eroded the support for Project 2000 more and more.
    Fighting back, the mayor had done what he did best: He gave dozens of speeches describing the importance of the plan, he horse-traded with Congress and the teachers’ union to shore up support, he even accompanied kids home from school to talk to their astonished parents about why Project 2000 was important to everyone in the city. The figures in the polls stabilized and it seemed to Kennedy and Wendy Jefferies that they might just hold the line.
    But then the Digger arrived . . . murdering with impunity, escaping from crowded crime scenes, striking again. And who got blamed? Not the faceless FBI. But everyone’s favorite target: Jerry Kennedy. If the madman killed any more citizens, he believed, Project 2000—the hope for his city’s future—would likely become just a sour footnote in Kennedy’s memoirs.
    And this was the reason that Jefferies was on the phone at the moment. The aide put his hand over the receiver.
    “He’s here,” Jefferies