The Incumbent Page 4

  "I'll get the doctor. And I have to get back to Boston. The publisher was nice enough to pay my freight down here, but I have to get back to work tonight." And with that, a proud smile came over Gus's face. He gave my hand a long, affectionate squeeze, whispered, "Jack, do your job," then limped out of the room.

  Cops and reporters are like oil and water. They share a like goal: to gather information for an ultimate presentation in the public domain.

  Police prepare for court cases. Reporters compile information for the pages of their newspaper. But how they go about it is vastly different. Police detectives prefer the privacy of an interrogation room, sitting at a spare table with graffiti marks dug into the top, surrounded by bare slab walls, illuminated by a single lamp, with some suspect or witness looking around at the sober surroundings and wondering what has become of his life and how he can quickly and drastically change it. Detectives can take the most theatrical, most sensational case and break it down into the dull sum of its scientific parts-semen and blood samples, fingerprints and fibers. They move with a painstaking methodology gleaned from the pages of the police training manual they memorized when they ascended to the position so many years before. God forbid, publicity. That causes witnesses to be tainted, politicians to speak out, police chiefs to demand hasty action, and ultimately, protocol and common sense to be violated.

  Reporters, meanwhile, like to interview people in action, capturing color and a sense of place. A good reporter can take the most mundane murder, inject it with a heavy dose of human emotion, massage it with a rapid-fire series of verbs, and end up with what the average reader might be convinced is the crime of the century, at least until the next day's paper. Reporters are constantly looking at the whole at the expense of some of its parts, glossing over this angle or that aspect to play upon what editors call "the big picture." Good reporters move at breakneck speed, well aware of the competition from other newspapers or television stations. Best to have an incomplete story first than the entire tale last. And virtually everything, they believe, is appropriate in the public realm, allowing readers to decide what is right or wrong, whether the grammar school principal is really a child molester or if the accusations of decade-old misdeeds are a piece of sad whimsy on the part of a psychologically unfit former student.

  So it is all the more fruitful and delicious when a reporter is able to strike up a relationship with a police detective, and I take no small amount of pride in saying that much of the success I've had in my career-and, since you're wondering, I've had my share-has been due to my ability to get along with cops. My grandfather was a Boston police sergeant. One of my uncles was a Boston police detective. I know how to communicate with them in a way that Troy Ellis, for instance, never would-when to cuss, when to talk big, when to be respectful, how to engage them in some back and forth and involve them in my needs.

  None of this, though, seemed to have any direct bearing on my new relationship with Samantha Stevens.

  She didn't spend a lot of time on niceties when she strode into my hospital room, just a moment after the doctor had left. "Why don't we start with the basics?" she said. "What is it you were doing playing golf with the president of the United States?"

  Her partner, who briefly introduced himself as an assistant director of the FBI, no less, stood impassively against the wall.

  "He invited me," I said, taken aback, but trying to maintain composure.

  "Why's that?" she asked, aloof, almost clinical.

  I didn't like where this was going, mostly because I wasn't particularly keen on word getting out already about this offer to be press secretary.

  "Why don't you ask him?" I said, and I watched as her very becoming face flushed red.

  "Why don't I decide how to conduct the investigation?" she replied, just as aloof, just as clinical.

  This wasn't quite unpleasant, but it wasn't far from it. I expected a nice, collegial little discussion, maybe share a can of orange juice and rhapsodize about what had become of a society where a collection of country bumpkins would think it's meaningful, even laudable, to kill the president of the United States and overthrow our democratic form of government. Instead, I was being treated like a suspect in a purse snatching.

  Stevens was standing a few feet from my bed. I was sitting up on some pillows. Not that she gave me any encouragement to think about such things, but she looked even better than the day before, her straight black hair cascading across her shoulders and over the top part of a smart navy blue work suit. She had tiny little bags under her blazing blue eyes, and little crow's feet beside them, betraying the only signs of her age. She gave no indication whether she was pleased or displeased with how our little chat was proceeding.

  "We are conducting the most important investigation in the bureau right now, Mr. Flynn," she said. "Forgive my manner, if you are for some reason offended by it. But I have to dedicate myself to getting to the bottom of this case as quickly as humanly possible. And such a mission doesn't accord me much time for excessive civility."

  "Apparently not," I said. "If it would help," I added, knowing what I was about to suggest would do anything but, "I could call my lawyer and have him come down and sit in."

  That seemed to take Stevens by surprise, not to mention her colleague Drinker, who I caught furrowing his brow. Me, too, actually. What the hell was I thinking?

  "That would be a mistake for all of us," she said.

  She paused, standing there with her arms crossed, then added, "Look, we didn't get off on the very best foot here. I just want you to understand the gravity of this investigation. We have vastly different interests, and I didn't necessarily appreciate reading your eyewitness account in the newspaper before we had a chance to talk. This is first and foremost an FBI investigation of an assassination attempt on the president, not simply some sensational story to help you sell more papers. Why don't we revisit this tomorrow, and I'm sure we'll make some more progress."

  "That would be fine," I said, not wanting to be any more disagreeable.

  She turned around to leave, and Drinker followed silently without even so much as looking my way. At the door, Drinker turned back around.

  "By the way, who was that who called you earlier, when everyone was in the room?" His tone was soft, even pleasant.

  "Oh, just an old friend of mine," I said, fumbling for an answer in a way that might have been obvious.

  "What's the friend's name?" he asked.

  I'm sure he saw the uncertainty on my face or sensed the flustered tone of my voice. "That's personal," I said eventually, and Drinker simply nodded as the two of them headed out the door.

  four

  There is a saying about hospitals, except, of course, among hypochondriacs, that the longer you stay, the more things can go wrong.

  As someone who had never been in a hospital before in his life, I had already been in far too long, and when the doctor told me I could head home the following morning, I prevailed on him to endorse my departure for that very night.

  The press corps treated me as well as I could have hoped, given that a few of the network stars were a bit miffed about being on the sidelines while an ink-stained wretch from an out-of-town paper basked in the limelight. I spent half an hour before the cameras, concentrating on good eye contact-never look down, make pleasant facial expressions, and never stammer um or ah-and was on my way home with my good friend and former college roommate Harry Putnam.

  "Now what do you do?" he asked as his Audi rolled down Wisconsin Avenue, past the fast food restaurants and specialty shops all lit up on this breezy autumn night.

  What indeed? For starters, there was the matter of my interview with this somewhat obstinate FBI agent, probably in the morning. More important, there was an anonymous call coming my way in the afternoon.

  Hutchins had been discharged from the hospital a few hours before me, telling reporters on the way out that danger be damned, he was heading back out on the campaign trail. I very much wanted to get back t
o work, despite these tight bandages wrapped around my aching ribs.

  There was much to do on this story, and I was in a prime position to do it. Most important of all, it was time to come to terms with my new reality of being home. It was time to stop running.

  "Where do I begin?" I said. "I deal with it. No, I try to get ahead of it, all of it."

  I fell silent, watching the Roy Rogers slide past, the Cineplex Odeon-Ten Screens, Free Validated Parking-the Chesapeake Bagelry.

  Harry, who knows me about as well as I know myself, sensed through my quiet that I was of no mind to have a deep, philosophical discussion about where I was in my life and where I might be heading.

  "You want to stop for a beer, maybe something to eat?" he asked.

  I did and I didn't. Mostly, I felt like being alone, to start to sort some things out, to prepare for what I thought would be an onslaught in the days ahead. "I'm going to take a pass on this one," I said, and he nodded his understanding.

  "I'm around all weekend," he said.

  We pulled up to the curb in front of my red brick townhouse in the heart of the East Village of Georgetown. Katherine and I had bought it two years earlier. I was enchanted by the enormous bowfront window with the small panes, and even though we first saw it in the dead of a humid Washington August, I pictured how it would look with a towering, lighted Christmas tree. She was smitten with the condition of the place, which was atrocious, so we could gut it and start anew, creating an interior in our own image-or, I should say, her image, with a few peripheral touches by me like, say, the doorbell.

  Harry and I bade farewell, and I ambled up the stairs. This should have been a pleasant homecoming. I was a sudden celebrity, and even under the most trying of circumstances, I had re-proved myself to the newspaper, perhaps unnecessarily so, but in my business it was something that was always good to do. Besides that, I was suddenly on very good terms with the president-terms so good he wanted me to be his next press secretary. And beyond even that, I had days ahead of the terrific story of an assassination attempt a dozen days before a presidential election.

  Still, maybe it was the lingering effects of the painkillers the doctors had put in my intravenous tubes. Maybe it was my complete physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion. But as I stepped inside my dark, empty house, I felt a sense of helplessness, of melancholy, and I craved a sleep that I knew I wouldn't get.

  More than anything else, I missed Katherine, and thought to myself that this was no time to be alone. In a few days, it would be one year that she had been gone. We had been married three years and, like everyone else, had our ups and downs. We were far from a perfect couple, but for my money, we were more perfect than most. A friend of mine, wrestling with his own decision whether to get married, asked me once how I knew Katherine was the right person and that the marriage was happening at the right time. I said you never really know for sure.

  Look at the divorce rate. And I'm too independent to ever say, "I have to have this woman for the rest of my life." What I came to understand, though, was that I couldn't picture my life without her.

  So in a defensive gesture, we married, and it was the smartest thing I ever did.

  We bought the house and renovated it top to bottom, inside and out. We bought a golden retriever and named him Baker. We had sex in spurts.

  There were weeks when we couldn't keep our hands off each other, when we would call each other at work and talk tawdry, as if we were having an affair, then steal off in the late afternoon, feigning meetings, and have sex in the waning sunlight of our second-floor bedroom.

  Afterward, exhausted, we would lie in bed, leaning on our elbows, and look silently out into our back garden, breaking the quiet to tell each other of our day. We would slowly dress in the descending dark and walk down the street to our favorite restaurant, La Chaumiere, still smelling of sex, our private secret. Of course, other times we were more physically aloof. One or the other of us was tired, or preoccupied, or just not around, and then we would enjoy our friendship, actually test the limits of our friendship, to eventually wake up one morning and feel the need to have sex. More than anything else, she was my friend, and trite as it is to say, she could make me laugh, knowing exactly which buttons to push at exactly the right times.

  Her pregnancy brought on a real potpourri of emotions. She was constantly sick at first, dry-heaving at the very mention of food one moment and starving the next. I, meanwhile, was coming to terms with the thought of fatherhood. For most of my adult life I had taken pride in my dearth of worldly possessions, which were so limited that for years, when it came time to move, I was able to wrap the cord around the alarm clock and pack everything I owned into the back of my hatchback. Initially, the thought of the responsibility petrified me, sometimes making me as sick to my stomach as she was. By the sixth month or so, I had arrived at an inner peace and understood and openly appreciated the length of a woman's pregnancy, this nine-month readjustment period. By then, she was a glowing mother-to-be, all her new weight centered in her stomach. I couldn't wait to greet my newborn into our house, and privately I hoped for a daughter. I had a recurring fantasy of stealing home from work early one day, coming around the corner on foot, and running into my wife, pushing a carriage, Baker padding patiently and proudly beside them. I never actually figured out where that fantasy went from there, or if it even involved sex. I'm not sure if there is such a thing as a sexless fantasy, so perhaps I should reclassify it.

  Anyways, it was all for naught. Katherine was due in mid October. By the second, I was a basket case, nervous to the point of being unable to work. So I stayed home that day and played with the dog and puttered around the house. Katherine, meanwhile, continued to make calls to her public relations clients from our upstairs office, sending out faxes and approving advertising strategies as if she didn't have a worry in the world. She did this right up to the time when she came walking out the French doors onto our back patio and announced to me that the time had come to head to Georgetown Hospital. She told me I was making her so nervous, I probably induced the delivery. I was wiping down our wrought iron outdoor furniture. Baker was sprawled on the cool bricks, in a patch of shade.

  In the delivery room, as we began to run through all the breathing exercises we had learned in eight weeks of birthing classes, her pain seemed almost unbearable. She pushed and counted, counted and pushed, when suddenly a nurse monitoring her vital signs snapped up a telephone and had the receptionist page our obstetrician. The doctor came rushing in less than two minutes later, took measure of the situation, and told me in no uncertain terms to leave the room and have a seat in the waiting lounge. Worried sick, profoundly confused, I did as I was told, trying to meet my wife's eyes as I left, watching her face, covered in sweat, watch mine as I backed out of the room. She mouthed the words "Don't go." The doctor overrode her, yelling, "Please leave." In the waiting area, I sat staring at my feet for the next two hours.

  Dr. Joyce was an attractive, late fiftyish woman with the look of competence you would never think to question and a reputation that placed her among the top obstgyns in the city of Washington. As I sat there, lost in my fears, she came up so quietly I never saw her, took me by the hand, and began walking back toward the delivery room.

  For a fleeting moment, all my dreadful thoughts gave way to the sparkling optimism that we were heading back to see my wife and newborn baby. I expected Katherine to be sound asleep, the effect of painkillers taking their toll. And I thought that our baby, boy or girl, would be kicking and screaming in a nearby crib. Already, I thought, I'm going to be pressed into service as a father. But before we arrived at the swinging doors that led into the maternity ward Dr.

  Joyce pulled me into a small conference room, bare except for a circular table, a few swivel chairs, and some institutional art-a covered bridge in what looked like Vermont is the one I best remember.

  She directed me into a seat, then leaned against a wall, looked me in the eye, and spoke, exhausted.


  "There's no good way to say this, Jack. Katherine died during delivery. She had what is called a placental tear, and she died from internal bleeding. We did everything we could, and for a while, I thought we were going to be able to revive her, but the bleeding was too much."

  A wave that began in the pit of my stomach worked its way up my chest and into my head. I had never felt so alone, so detached from everything and everyone I had ever known, in all of my life. I was physically devastated and emotionally incapacitated. I remember supporting myself on the table with my elbows as my head bowed in a storm of salty, silent tears. The doctor continued to speak.

  "Jack, I can't imagine how tough this is, but I also have to explain to you, your daughter was stillborn. Once the internal hemorrhaging began, she never really had a chance."

  I don't know if I passed out or if my mind just stopped functioning. I don't know if we were in that conference room for five minutes or five hours. At some point, I felt a weak sense of composure returning. I rubbed my palms repeatedly across my eyes and nose to soak up the tears and moisture. Dr. Joyce was still there. I vaguely remember her talking, but I have no idea what else she might have said. She was looking forlornly at me, waiting patiently until I was ready to do God only knows what.

  "Do you want to say goodbye?" she asked me. I was in no position to decide anything, but shook my head yes. She led me back into the delivery room, now empty but for a lifeless form on a rolling hospital gurney, and pulled back the sheet from Katherine's face. Her hair was still wet around her forehead from the sweat of her pain. Her eyes had been pushed shut. She looked like a doll, not a person. I clutched her cold hand and I kissed her cheek, and then her forehead, and then let my lips linger on hers until a tear rolled off my nose and onto her face. And I walked out of the room, forever changed, always something less than I should have been.

  These were the thoughts that filled my mind as I prepared to go to bed.