Access to Power (15 page)

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Frank had been hiding in a minivan parked at the curb with his 16mm film camera loaded and ready for over an hour. It was almost midnight, two years ago. Strip clubs and porno theaters lined the block with a steady stream of whores and hungry customers on the sidewalks. Frank looked at them, waiting for one face. One man.

And then it happened.

Frank threw the camera on his shoulder, pointed it out the window and hit the
go
button. Dark and gritty, the footage was shot with available light on high-speed film. And Frank couldn’t believe what he was seeing through the lens. His good luck and good fortune. He’d just caught a portly Ozzie Olson walking out of a porno theater with his fly open. When Olson looked up and down the street eyeing the whores and vanishing into a strip bar, Frank knew that he had all he needed. Olson’s chances of winning the election against Helen Pryor had just been thrown into the wind. Ozzie Olson would not be a U.S. Senator. He was road kill.

VOICE-OVER ANNOUNCER:

Meet Ozzie Olson, candidate for the U.S. Senate... This is where Olson stands on women’s issues... AGAINST the Family Leave Act. AGAINST enforcing laws barring sexual discrimination in the work place. AGAINST stronger laws protecting women from spousal abuse and domestic violence. AGAINST a woman’s right to choose, even in cases of rape or incest. But Ozzie Olson says he’s a lover of women. Sure he is. Ozzie Olson should NOT be elected to the U.S. Senate. On Tuesday, you can make the difference. Vote.

They were in Senator Helen Pryor’s office in the Russell Building. Detectives Randolph and Grimes sat before the television, trying to hide their smiles as Frank ejected the spot from the VCR.

“It aired twice before we pulled it,” Frank said.

Randolph shrugged. “Why did you pull it?”

“We got a tip Olson had been seen down there every night for a week. I went with a camera and there he was.”

Helen sat back in her desk chair with a pained expression on her face. It was late. She looked tired.

“After the spot aired,” she said quietly, “we learned that Ozzie was really looking for his sixteen-year-old niece. A run-away.”

“We held a press conference,” Frank said. “We tried to straighten everything out, but it was sweeps week. The local news stations and all those political shows on cable used it as their lead-in as much as they could.”

Grimes smiled again, then caught himself. “His fly was down.”

“It was down at a press conference that same afternoon,” Frank said. “It turned out that it was broken, but no one believed him.”

Helen shook her head at the memory. “It was a horrible situation. We disagreed on everything, but we liked each other very much. Ozzie was a good man and a brilliant attorney. Before that ad was broadcast, he had more than enough votes to win.”

“How bad did it get?” Randolph asked.

“He lost in a landslide,” Frank said.

Frank moved to the couch, watching Randolph think it through from a chair on the other side of the coffee table.

“So Olson’s been brooding for a couple of years,” Randolph said. “And now he’s finally snapped. Woody was shot in your office, Frank. The lights were out. Olson shot Woody thinking he was shooting you. Stockwell’s body was there to take the fall because he was a known burglar. Alan Ingrams was murdered tonight because he witnessed part of the crime.”

Frank leaned forward. “What about what Ingrams told me he saw? The man with spiked gray hair. That doesn’t sound like Olson.”

“Who’s to say Olson’s in it alone?” Grimes said.

Everyone turned and looked at him. Grimes had moved to the chair before Helen’s desk and found a bowl of Hershey’s Kisses. Frank had never heard Grimes make sense before. Even Randolph seemed surprised. Grimes popped the piece of chocolate into his mouth and shrugged.

“Olson’s a lawyer,” he said. “He’s got clients, right? And this has been going on for two years. He probably knew just the right guy to call. Good old what’s-his-name. That gray-haired guy with the do.”

Chapter 35

The possibilities clicked through Olson’s head like a satellite transmission spewing information indiscriminately all over the universe. He was sweating it out in the backseat, watching Randolph drive and Grimes clasp the radio mike to the dash. The car bottomed out on the rough road. His wrists hurt, his arms drawn tight behind his back and handcuffed. He was clean, sober—able to think and feel pain, even fear.

He wouldn’t talk to them, he decided. He’d see how much they knew. Maybe there was a chance that he could still get out of this.

He’d been picked up in the short-term parking lot at Washington National Airport just before midnight. Thrown on the ground and searched by a pair of idiot cops after making a run for it to his car. As he’d waited for the detectives to arrive, the cops checked his ticket. Olson remembered the look on their faces. He hadn’t been trying to flee the city. Instead, he’d just returned from a two-day trip in Atlanta and didn’t know what the hell was going on.

Olson saw Randolph staring at him in the rearview mirror.

“Don’t think we don’t get it, Olson. You get trashed by a negative ad and want revenge on the guy you think ruined your piece-of-shit life. Only you screwed up big time. Your buddy got the wrong guy.”

Grimes turned to Olson. “Makes a good story, huh?”

Olson wasn’t listening. He leaned forward for a look out the windshield. The Metro station was a block ahead. The radio rumbled softly in the background.

“Did you guys put out an APB?”

“Why?” Grimes asked. “You gonna write a book?”

Olson gulped at the air, losing his patience. “Did my arrest go out over the radio?”

He got his answer as they turned into the lot. The press was by the door. Fifty of them, readying their cameras as the meat went on the grill.

Randolph grimaced, pulling to a stop in the middle of the crowd. They were surrounded. Grimes threw his jacket over Olson’s face as they got out. Olson began to stumble, then felt Grimes grab his shoulders and begin shoving him toward the building. The reporters were shouting questions at him, calling him a murderer. He could hear the motor drives from the still cameras rattling like machine guns. When he peeked out through the jacket, he saw Grimes grabbing a photographer and pushing him away from the door, the detective’s movements jittering as strobe lights blasted away from every direction.

No matter what happened over the next twenty-four hours, Olson knew that he was out in the open and in big trouble now. If he could worm his way past the Metro cops, he’d have to say good-bye to his wife and kids and make a run for it. At least for a while.

Chapter 36

Raymond glanced at the morning paper as he sipped his coffee and waited for breakfast. He had planned on taking advantage of the Iwo Jima Motel’s free continental breakfast, but another tour bus arrived last night. When he walked into the informal breakfast room, it was filled with people blabbing at each other in a foreign language. Raymond knew that he’d never be able to concentrate, and chose a seat at the counter in the diner instead.

It had been several days since the Alan Ingrams incident and the twitch on the right side of his face had finally stopped. He was more calm now.

Reviewing the front page, a story on the Supreme Court in Texas caught his interest. Apparently every member of the court was on the take. Instead of being appointed, elections were held and members of the court spent most of their time raising money for their advertising campaigns. The attorneys who appeared before them were only too happy to write checks. Same with big business. And now the court’s decisions were openly favoring their contributors. Although every member of the court denied it, their record proved otherwise. In Texas, if your check was big enough, your win was guaranteed.

Every time Raymond had given a judge money, no matter how small the amount, both of them understood that it was a payoff. What used to be called a
bribe
. He made a mental note to remember the word
contribution
. He liked it. If it ever came up in the future, he would ask the judge if he could make a
contribution
to his or her campaign.

The waitress stepped over, filling his cup and smiling at him.

Raymond had seen her before, usually at dinner, and watched as she moved down the counter with the coffee pot. In her early thirties with short brown hair and an attractive face, there was a certain something about her that appealed to him. She was a flirt, and he enjoyed that, too. The way she leaned her elbows on the counter and bent her leg when talking to a customer. She was a woman, but the girl in her hadn’t died yet. He could see it shining through clear as day.

When she finally set down the pot and walked into the kitchen, he turned back to the newspaper. Coverage of the Ingrams murder had been a huge disappointment. Raymond couldn’t believe that such a horrific crime would generate so few words. Just two inches buried in all those ads the day after the murder. His memory of that afternoon was still vague, and he’d been counting on the newspaper to fill in the gaps.

But then he flipped the paper over and spotted a headline on the bottom section of the front page:
OZZIE OLSON QUESTIONED IN MULTIPLE SLAYINGS
. A photograph was included, Olson in the backseat of a car in handcuffs. Raymond studied it carefully, pushing his coffee aside.

Ozzie Olson was being questioned for the murders of Woody Darrow, Sonny Stockwell, and Alan Ingrams. The writer had sketched out Olson’s troubled past with Frank Miles, pointing to it as the most likely motive. Olson had been defeated in the election two years ago and publically humiliated on television. Although it couldn’t be confirmed, the story seemed to suggest that Olson had been trying to kill Frank Miles and botched it. Woody Darrow’s murder had been a mistake by someone involved with Olson who didn’t know what he was doing. Some incompetent boob.

The waitress arrived with his breakfast. Bacon and eggs with home fries and whole wheat toast with orange marmalade. Raymond pulled out his billfold.

“I’ve gotta make a call,” he said, trying to keep his voice at an even pitch.

She smiled and winked, shaking off the money. When she picked up the plate and gave it to a man seated three stools down, Raymond headed for the door with his newspaper as casually as he could.

Olson had been arrested for the murders, but the story didn’t mention what they had on him. What could they possibly have? And without evidence, how could they hold him?

Crossing the lobby, Raymond entered the hall and picked up speed. He passed a maid’s cart, then another, reaching his room and unlocking the door. When he entered, he glanced at the TV and caught the last ten seconds of a political advertisement on MSNBC. It was the ad he’d read about in the paper—Olson on the street with his fly down, walking into a strip bar.

Raymond grabbed the phone and dialed, trying to think it through. He should have anticipated Olson’s arrest even though it was beyond the realm of possibility. If he wanted to do business in Washington and become a real player, he realized that he was the one person who should have known.

Chapter 37

Frank adjusted another one of his small pieces of torn paper beneath the title camera to fit the words Kip had typed onto the TV screen. The result looked like a headline ripped out of a newspaper:
MERDOCK PUSHES TO LOWER TAXES FOR MIDDLE-CLASS FAMILIES
. Then the graphic was placed over an image of Merdock hustling through a busy lobby as if late for an important meeting—Mel Merdock, the one man who could get things done.

Juliana sat at the client’s table, her eyes glued on Frank.

“Where do you want the text?” Kip asked.

“On the right so their eyes go to it,” Frank said without hesitation.

As Kip adjusted the graphic, Frank returned to his seat beside Juliana. She had become more involved in the campaign and he welcomed it. Her husband seemed less worried and was no longer bothering him with needless phone calls. Besides, Frank had worries of his own. Olson’s arrest was story one around town. Radio, television—the news had enough life to bounce off the Metro Section onto the front page of
The Post
. It made a great read. A loser candidate so filled with rage by his defeat that he had sought revenge on the media consultant who had taken him down. But it was also a consultant’s worst nightmare. Someone Frank didn’t know and had only met in passing had tried to have him killed because of the job he’d done. Even worse, they’d screwed it up and murdered Woody.

Still, Frank felt a great sense of relief with Olson behind bars. Even if he didn’t entirely trust it and had to endure the reminder of what he’d done to the man during the election two years ago. His TV spot had been dragged off the shelves, once again becoming the lead-in for the local news broadcasts on all five stations. Frank had seen it while going over this week’s schedule with Juliana yesterday afternoon. When he clicked through the cable channels, CNN and Fox News were running it as well, complete with political analysis by commentators whose usual sneers were replaced with smiles and open laughter. Three people had been murdered. Frank didn’t think anything about it was funny. He’d waited for one of the commentators to mention it, but not one of them ever did. They had a story and they owned the mike. Frank guessed that they’d milk it for as long as they could. If they were lucky, the run would fill out the TV season into the holidays and beyond.