The Appeal (38 page)

While this was happening, Barry Rinehart and Tony
Zachary pored over the findings from their latest poll. Fisk’s sixteen-point lead had been reduced to five, the most dramatic seventy-two-hour drop Barry had ever seen. But he was too seasoned to panic. Tony, however, was a nervous wreck.

They decided to reshuffle the television ads. They discarded the Darrel Sackett attack piece and one showing illegal aliens crossing the border. For the next three days, they would stick to gay marriage and the glory of guns. Over the weekend, they would shift to the comfort ads and leave the voters with warm and fuzzy feelings about Ron Fisk and his wholesomeness.

Meanwhile, the weary mail carriers in south Mississippi would deliver several tons of Fisk propaganda each day until the campaign was mercifully over.

All to be done with Mr. Fisk’s approval, of course.

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D
enny Ott finished his letter after several drafts and asked his wife to read it. When she approved, he took it to the post office. It read:

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A
t noon Thursday, the Payton law firm met for a quick lunch and final review of its last-minute campaigning. On a Sheetrock wall in The Pit, Sherman had arranged,
in chronological order, the print ads used so far by Ron Fisk. There were six full-page solicitations from newspapers and five direct mailings. The collection was now being updated daily because the Fisk printing presses were working overtime.

It was an impressive, and quite depressing, lineup.

Using a street map of Hattiesburg and a list of registered voters, Sherman assigned neighborhoods near the university. Walking door-to-door, he would go with Tabby, Rusty with Vicky, Wes with Mary Grace. They had two thousand doors to cover during the next five days. Olivia agreed to stay behind and answer the phone. She was a bit too arthritic to hit the streets.

Other teams, many of them from the offices of local trial lawyers, would canvass the rest of Hattiesburg and its outlying suburbs. In addition to handing out McCarthy materials, most of these volunteers would distribute brochures for Judge Thomas Harrison.

The prospect of knocking on hundreds of doors was actually quite welcome, at least to Wes and Mary Grace. The mood at the office had been funereal since Monday. The settlement fiasco had drained their spirits. The constant chatter about Krane filing Chapter 11 frightened them. They were distracted and edgy, and both needed a few days off.

The final push was orchestrated by Nat Lester. Every precinct in all twenty-seven counties had someone assigned to it, and Nat had the cell phone number of every volunteer. He started calling them Thursday afternoon, and he would hound them until late Monday night.

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T
he letter from Brother Ted was hand delivered to Pine Grove Church. It read:

B
y noon Friday, Barry Rinehart had propped up his poll numbers to the point where he felt confident enough to call Mr. Trudeau. Fisk was seven points ahead and seemed to have regained momentum. Barry had no qualms about rounding the numbers up a bit to make the great man feel better. He’d been lying all week anyway. Mr. Trudeau would never know they had almost blown a sixteen-point lead.

“We’re up by ten points,” Barry said confidently from his hotel suite.

“Then it’s over?”

“I know of no election in which the front-runner has dropped ten points over the last weekend. And, with all the money we’re spending on media, I think we’re gaining.”

“Nice job, Barry,” Carl said, and closed his phone.

As Wall Street waited for the news that Krane
Chemical would file for bankruptcy, Carl Trudeau purchased five million shares of the company’s stock in a private transaction. The seller was a fund manager who handled the retirement portfolio of the public employees of Minnesota. Carl had been stalking the stock for months, and the manager was finally convinced that Krane was hopeless. He dumped the stock for $11 a share and considered himself lucky.

Carl then launched a plan to purchase another five million shares as soon as the market opened. His identity as the buyer would not be disclosed until he filed with the SEC ten days later.

By then, of course, the election would be over.

In the year since the verdict, he had secretly and methodically increased his stake in the company. Using offshore trusts, Panamanian banks, two dummy corporations based in Singapore, and the expert advice of a Swiss banker, the Trudeau Group now owned 60 percent of Krane. The sudden grab for ten million more shares would raise Carl’s ownership to 77 percent.

At 2:30 p.m. Friday, Krane issued a brief press release announcing that “a bankruptcy filing has been indefinitely postponed.”

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B
arry Rinehart was not following the news on Wall Street. He had little interest in Krane Chemical and its financial dealings. There were at least three dozen important matters to monitor during the next seventy-two
hours, and none could be overlooked. However, after five days in the hotel suite, he needed to move.

With Tony driving, they left Jackson and went to Hattiesburg, where Barry got a quick tour of the important sights: the Forrest County Circuit Court building, where the verdict started it all, the semi-abandoned shopping center that the Paytons called their office—Kenny’s Karate on one side and a whiskey store on the other—and a couple of neighborhoods where Ron Fisk yard signs outnumbered Sheila McCarthy’s two to one. They had dinner in a downtown restaurant called 206 Front Street and at 7:00 p.m. parked outside Reed Green Coliseum on the campus of Southern Miss. They sat in the car for thirty minutes and watched the crowd arrive, in vans and converted school buses and fancy coaches, each one with the name of its church painted boldly along the sides. They were from Purvis, Poplarville, Lumberton, Bowmore, Collins, Mount Olive, Brooklyn, and Sand Hill.

“Some of those towns are an hour from here,” Tony said with satisfaction.

The worshippers poured into the parking lots around the coliseum and hurried inside. Many carried identical blue and white signs that said, “Save the Family.”

“Where did you get the signs?” Tony asked.

“Vietnam.”

“Vietnam?”

“Got ’em for a buck ten, fifty thousand total. The Chinese company wanted a buck thirty.”

“So nice to hear we’re saving money.”

At 7:30, Rinehart and Zachary entered the coliseum and hustled up to the nosebleed seats, as far away as possible from the excited mob below. A stage was set up at one end, with huge “Save the Family” banners hanging behind it. A well-known white gospel quartet ($4,500 for the night, $15,000 for the weekend) was warming up the crowd. The floor was covered with neat rows of folding chairs, thousands of them, all filled with folks in a joyous mood.

“What’s the seating capacity?” Barry asked.

“Eight thousand for basketball,” Tony said glancing around the arena. A few sections behind the stage were empty. “With the seats on the floor, I’d say we’re close to nine thousand.”

Barry seemed satisfied.

The master of ceremonies was a local preacher who quieted the crowd with a long prayer, toward the end of which many of his people began waving their hands upward, as if reaching for heaven. There was a fair amount of mumbling and whispering as they prayed fervently. Barry and Tony just watched, content in their prayerlessness.

The quartet fired them up with another song, then a black gospel group ($500 for the night) rocked the place with a rowdy rendition of “Born to Worship.” The first speaker was Walter Utley, from the American Family Alliance in Washington, and when he assumed the podium, Tony recalled their first meeting ten months earlier when Ron Fisk made the rounds. It seemed like
years ago. Utley was not a preacher, nor was he much of a speaker. He dulled the crowd with a frightening list of all the evils being proposed in Washington. He railed against the courts and politicians and a host of other bad people. When he finished, the crowd applauded and waved their signs.

More music. Another prayer. The star of the rally was David Wilfong, a Christian activist with a knack for wedging himself into every high-profile dispute involving God. Twenty million people listened to his radio show every day. Many sent him money. Many bought his books and tapes. He was an educated, ordained minister with a fiery, frantic voice, and within five minutes he had the crowd jumping up in a standing ovation. He condemned immorality on every front, but he saved his heavy stuff for gays and lesbians who wanted to get married. The crowd could not sit still or remain quiet. It was their chance to verbally express their opposition, and to do so in a very public manner. After every third sentence, Wilfong had to wait for the applause to die down.

He was being paid $50,000 for the weekend, money that had originated months earlier from somewhere in the mysterious depths of the Trudeau Group. But no human could trace it.

Twenty minutes into his performance, Wilfong stopped for a special introduction. When Ron and Doreen Fisk stepped onto the stage, the arena seemed to shake. Ron spoke for five minutes. He asked for their votes come Tuesday, and for their prayers. He and
Doreen walked across the stage to a thunderous standing ovation. They waved and shook their fists in triumph, then walked to the other side of the stage as the mob stomped its feet.

Barry Rinehart managed to contain his amusement. Of all his creations, Ron Fisk was the most perfect.

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F
amilies were saved throughout south Mississippi the following day and into Sunday. Utley and Wilfong drew huge crowds, and of course the crowds adored Ron and Doreen Fisk.

Those who chose not to take a church bus to a rally were bombarded with relentless advertising on television. And the mailman was always close by, hauling to the besieged homes yet more campaign propaganda.

While publicly the campaign raced on in a numbing frenzy, a darker side came together over the weekend. Under Marlin’s direction, a dozen operatives fanned out through the district and hooked up with old contacts. They visited rural supervisors on their farms, and black preachers in their churches, and county ward bosses in their hunting cabins. Voter registration rolls were reviewed. Numbers were agreed upon. Sacks of cash changed hands. The tariff was $25 per vote. Some called it “gas money,” as if it could be justified as a legitimate expense.

The operatives were working for Ron Fisk, though he would never know of their activities. Suspicions would be raised after the votes were counted, after Fisk
received an astounding number of votes in black precincts, but Tony would assure him that it was simply a case of some wise people understanding the issues.

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O
n November 4, two-thirds of those registered in the southern district cast their votes.

When the polls closed at 7:00 p.m., Sheila McCarthy drove straight to the Biloxi Riviera Casino, where her volunteers were preparing for a party. No reporters were allowed. The first results were somewhat satisfying. She carried Harrison County, her home, with 55 percent of the vote.

When Nat Lester saw this figure in Jackson, at the McCarthy headquarters, he knew they were dead. Fisk got almost half the votes in the most laid-back county in the district. It soon got much worse.