Sleeping Dogs by Ed Gorman Read Free Book Online Page B

apartment somewhere in the city but was told that when he wanted to celebrate something, he took a hotel room for
a week or two. I’d checked the hotel. Not there. I was hoping he would end up here for a couple of quick ones before he went across the street to get into his jammies for the night.
    â€œWell, I’m going to stick around for a little while longer, anyway. Hoping to run into an old friend of mine. Man name of Greaves.”
    The bartender’s face cracked wide open with a grandpop smile. “R.D.? He’s some character, isn’t he?”
    â€œOh, you know him?”
    â€œWell, not know him, know him. But he’s been coming in here the last three weeks. He likes it when the gal comes in to play the piano onstage. Always giving her money to play songs he can sing along with. He’s got a hell of a good voice, you know that?”
    â€œNo. I guess I didn’t.”
    The stage was not much bigger than a walk-in closet, and even that space was halved by the shiny new electric piano. The bar was on the west wall, small tables on the left. There were only three other customers, a black man in a gray suit five stools away from me and a thirtyish couple who laughed a lot. It was a middle-class bar for salespeople who traveled and imbibed. I couldn’t find a single physical reference to parrots. Maybe the urinals were shaped like them.
    â€œPlus he’ll buy two, three rounds a night for people. Usually scores with the ladies, too. Of course, they’re not the little chickadees we’d all like to score with. He gets the middle-aged ones. But nice middle-aged if you know what I mean.”
    The black gentleman raised his empty glass. The bartender went to fill it.
    A good singing voice, rounds for everybody, a better class of women in his lonely bed. This was unfortunate information to have because it gave R.D., the prick, a humanity I didn’t think he deserved.
    Where did you start with R.D.? There were some who insisted that he didn’t exist. The reasoning went that nobody that corrupt and mercenary could possibly avoid prison as long as R.D. had. Then there
were those who half-believed that R.D. was some kind of supernatural force. Nobody human could be as devious, as ruthless, as merciless as R.D. Just wasn’t possible, the human genome being what it was. He had to be some kind of satanic being.
    Item: Two election cycles back, Greaves paid sixty elderly black people to help pass out flyers that claimed that the sitting candidate had once been arrested for beating a black man so severely the man had been in the hospital for three weeks. Greaves had one of his techies Photoshop an arrest warrant that detailed the charge. He repeated this in four different cities and towns in the congressional district. This, along with equally dishonest direct mail pieces and truly inflammatory radio spots, helped suppress the black vote and contributed significantly to the incumbent’s loss.
    Item: The somewhat mannish wife of a sitting governor became the focal point of flyers that claimed that, as a NOW member, she saw nothing wrong with lesbians being gym teachers and touching girls and even watching them shower. The wife was Photoshopped holding hands with another unidentified woman. This was another candidate who lost his seat partly due to Greaves’s cunning. His wife, heterosexual from all accounts, was said to still be suffering from acute depression, blaming herself for her husband’s loss.
    Item: Greaves hired a hacker to obtain the private medical records of an opponent. The senatorial candidate had suffered a severe breakdown following the death of his younger brother in a boating accident. This had been back in the Vietnam era. According to Greaves, the candidate used his brother’s death and his own depression (which included shock treatments) to get out of being drafted, “the way too many rich boys were able to avoid that terrible war.”