Death Before Bedtime Read Free Page A

Byrd … I stared at them all. Then the swinging door opened and Leander Rhodes, the Great Bear of the West as he liked to hear himself referred to, appeared in the cloakroom, his face red fromspeechmaking, his gray hair tangled above his bloodshot eyes, eyes like his daughter’s I thought, recalling irreverently her face on the pillow beside me that morning. But no time for that.
    “Ah, Sargeant. Glad to see you. Glad to see you. Prompt. I like promptness. Secret of success, punctuality.” Since neither of us could either prove or disprove this statement, I murmured agreement.
    “Been to the office yet? Yes? Good scout. Let’s go to lunch.”
    It took us quite awhile to get from the cloakroom to the Senate Dining Room. Every few yards or so, the Senator would pause to shake hands with some other Senator or with some tourist who wanted to meet him. He was obviously quite popular with the voters; the other Senators were a bit cool with him, or so I thought, since he was, after all, by reputation anyway, a near-idiot with a perfect Senate record of obstruction. He regarded the administration of Chester A. Arthur as the high point of American history and he felt it his duty to check as much as possible the subsequent national decline from that high level. He was a devout isolationist although, according to legend, at the time of the First World War he had campaigned furiously for our entry into that war, on the side of the Kaiser.
    I suppose I shouldn’t, in actual fact, accept jobs from men for whom I have so little respect but since it never occurred to me that Lee Rhodes had a chance in the world of getting nominated, much less elected, President, I saw no harm in spending a few months at a considerable salary to see that his name appeared in the newspaper, often and favorably.
    The lunch was excellent, served in an old-fashioned dining room with tile floor where the Senators eat … there is aPre-Civil War feeling about the Senate Dining Room … especially the menu, the remarkable cornbread, the legendary bean soup which I wolfed hungrily, trying not to stare too hard at Senator Taft, who sat demurely at the next table reading a newspaper as he lunched.
    “Suppose Rufus here has briefed you?” said Senator Rhodes, when coffee arrived and all around the room cigars were lit, like Roman candles.
    I nodded, holding my breath as a wreath of blue Senatorial smoke crossed the table and settled about my neck.
    “Day after tomorrow, Friday, that’s the big day. Making announcement then. Want it well covered. Can you do that?”
    I told him that all speeches by such a celebrated statesman were well-covered by the press. He took my remark quietly, adding that he wanted
Life
there, or else. I said that
Life
would be there.
    “Get yourself located yet?” he asked, after we had exchanged a number of very businesslike remarks. I said that I hadn’t, that I’d only just arrived on the morning train.
    “Stay with
us
then; for a few days,” said the Senator generously. “Got plenty of room. Give us a chance to talk strategy.”
    “I’d appreciate that, sir. By the way I happen to know your daughter slightly. I came down on the train with her this morning.”
    Was it my imagination … no, it wasn’t; the Senator sighed rather sadly. “A wonderful girl, Ellen,” he said mechanically.
    “She seems very pleasant.”
    “Like her mother … a wonderful woman.”
    “So I’ve been told.”
    The Senator rose. “I’ll see you this evening then, at thehouse. Got a committee meeting now. Rufus will show you around. Remember: this is a kind of crusade.”
3
    A crusade was putting it lightly. It was an unscrupulous and desperate effort of one Leander Rhodes to organize the illiberal minority of the country into a party within his party … and, I suspect, if he’d been younger and a little more intelligent he might very well have got himself into the White House. As it was, from what little Rufus Hollister would