3 Strange Bedfellows by Matt Witten Read Free Book Online

"Madeline and I are taking a mini-vacation, and nothing's gonna stop us."
    I got Dave to sit back down and listen, but I couldn't convince him of Will's innocence. No doubt Will's other campaign volunteers would feel the same as Dave. I couldn't count on any support from them.
    But so what? Did Sam Spade ever get support?
    After Dave left me, I squared my shoulders and headed off to the Hack's campaign headquarters. The Republican county chairmen had a press conference scheduled there for eleven, to announce who they were endorsing for Congress.
    The Hack's HQ was right on Broadway, in a storefront that used to be a Papa Gorilla's restaurant before it went out of business. I'd looked into renting it for Will, but the price was way out of his league. Only a Republican could afford a place like that. The Hack probably got more donations from tobacco companies alone than Will got from all of his contributors put together.
    The windows were still poignantly plastered with "Tamarack for Congress" posters. Well, that was one good reason for the chairmen to endorse Susan Tamarack: they wouldn't have to go to the trouble of making up new posters.
    Looking through the window, I saw a long row of eleven men seated solemnly behind two tables at the far end of the room. There were cameras trained on them from all five local televi sion stations. Newspaper reporters, their ball points, spiral notebooks, and laptop computers poised, filled several rows of folding chairs. The big press conference was about to commence.
    I hurried through the front door, but was immediately stopped by a large, surly, twenty-something black man with an elephant-shaped tie clip. "Who are you with?" he demanded.
    Good question. For close to twenty years I'd been a freelancer who was basically with nobody, and I always got stumped whenever people asked me this difficult query. But finally I'd developed a stock reply, which I employed now. "I'm with the madmen and the dreamers," I told the black Republican bouncer. Black Republican —what an oxymoron. Kind of like Jews for Jesus.
    The surly oxymoron was as unimpressed with me as I was with him. "If you're not a member of the media," he said, "you'll have to exit the premises."
    "But—"
    "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome," proclaimed a deep-voiced man standing at the front table. It was the same bald guy who'd opened the bathroom door on me yesterday and turned me into a worm.
    "Sir, please leave," Oxymoron said, crowding me backward toward the door. Several reporters turned to watch me get thrown out. I was being wormed yet again.
    But then I spotted Judy Demarest in the back row. Besides being my wife's bowling buddy, Judy was also editor-in-chief of the Daily Saratogian . "I'm covering this for the Saratogian," I told Oxymoron, and gestured toward Judy.
    After she got over her surprise, she gave Oxymoron an amused nod. His nostrils flared with annoyance, showing off a healthy cluster of nose hairs, but there was nothing he could do. He stepped out of my way and I walked past him.
    I grabbed the last empty seat in the room, right next to Judy. "Who's the bald guy?" I whispered out of the side of my mouth.
    She raised her eyebrow, acting shocked at my ignorance. "Senator Ducky, of course," she whispered back. "Some reporter you are."
    "So fire me," I said, then looked back at Senator Donald "Ducky" Medwick. I hadn't recognized him, but I knew who he was, all right.
    Like my two sons, Ducky Medwick had the same name as a famous baseball star, the original Ducky M. having pounded out home runs for the St. Louis Browns back in the 30s. But any similarities between Senator Ducky and my sons ended right there. My sons had a lot more hair, whereas Ducky had a lot more power. As the majority leader of the New York State Senate, he had successfully stymied progressive legislation in New York for over a decade.
    Ducky was also, as he pointed out now in his speech, the Hack's last boss before he died. When the Hack worked as