"Assemblyman Louderbush represents a district near Rochester. Was Greg hoping to live near him?"
"Oh. He didn't say. But he wouldn't have said anything.
Not to Virgil and me. He knew we disapproved and that we thought the relationship was self-destructive for Greg."
I said, "I understand you saw the suicide note."
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"Yeah. It was so sad. I cried. Even Virgil teared up. Mrs.
Pensivy cried her heart out."
"The landlady."
"She lived next door, but she let us in before the cops came. Somebody called her who she knew at SUNY."
"And the note said—what was it?"
"'I hurt too much.' So sad, so sad."
"And you recognized Greg's handwriting?"
"Yeah."
"Where had you seen his handwriting before?"
"Oh, hmm. I guess when he taped a note to our door about rides or whatever."
"What became of the suicide note?"
"The cops took it, I guess."
"How can you be sure that Greg's suicide was directly related to Kenyon Louderbush? It's plain that he was a source of stress and confusion and pain in Greg's life. But it also sounds as if Greg thought that the relationship had some kind of future. Greg's attempt to move to Louderbush's assembly district is an indication of that. You and Virgil told the McCloskey campaign that you thought Louderbush drove Greg to suicide. Wasn't that the term you both used?"
"Yeah."
"How could you be so certain?"
"Well, jeez. I mean, like, if you were involved with a person who was giving you a black eye once or twice a week and making your lip hang off and bleed all over, and you just couldn't help yourself and get away, and you didn't know any other way out, wouldn't you think about just ending it all?
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When life is a living hell, and the person who is making it that way won't back off, it's just what people do sometimes."
"But is that 'driving' someone to suicide? It's not clear-cut.
There are alternatives."
"Well, it's clear enough cut to me. What do you want, for me to draw you a freakin' diagram?"
* * * *
[Back to Table of Contents]
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Chapter Four
I thought Jackman and Insinger both might have been right that in a real enough sense Assemblyman Louderbush
"drove" Greg Stiver to suicide. At a minimum, Louderbush preyed on Stiver's vulnerabilities, cruelly manipulated him psychologically, and treated him sadistically—and illegally. If Jackman's and Insinger's description of events was accurate, Louderbush was a man of despicable character who was unfit for public office, even in a country with traditionally low standards of electability. While the American electorate was often at home with officials who had some outsider-y rough edges—rampant infidelity, expense-account ambiguity, a DUI or two—violently unstable men ordinarily did not receive a pass from voters.
And yet the situation remained murky. While Virgil Jackman was willing to sign an affidavit attesting to Louderbush's physical abuse and said he would "go on Liz Bishop"—a Schenectady TV news anchor—if asked to do so, Insinger said she wanted her name kept out of it. Her parents would not want her in the public eye in a matter of such heated controversy, and neither would Walmart.
From the Outback parking lot, I phoned Dunphy.
"Tom, this may take some time. I'm going to need more to go on than what Jackman and Insinger are offering. They're both credible enough for our purposes, but Insinger doesn't want her name used, and Jackman's family has union ties—
his dad was an IUE shop steward—and that'll have the 44
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Louderbush people yelling foul. I'd like to keep digging and see if I can come up with some other people who will corroborate Insinger's and Jackman's allegations and are willing to do it publicly."
"Go for it. I told Shy that you were on Louderbush's case, and he is positively thrilled that you're taking this on."
"Good."
"He is so disgusted by the abuse story and the suicide of a gay young man that he asked if it might be possible to have Louderbush prosecuted. I'm not sure what the statute of limitations would be on that, but I'm going to have our legal guys and gals look into it."
"If it's all true, sure."
"Just work fast. It's three months till the primary, and we're all strapped to the ass of a charging rhinoceros. Our TV
ad campaign for the primary launches just after the Fourth of July, and it would be just loverly if we could scrap all that and husband our ever-too-meager resources for the general. Get Louderbush the fuck out of the way, and we can save a pile of dough and sail past Merle into the governor's mansion. Think you can do it, Don? From what I've heard about you, I'm betting you can."
Dunphy liked to lay it on. "If I can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars in television ad buys," I said, "maybe I should be working on a percentage basis. Twenty-five percent of whatever you would have spent."
His breathy pause suggested he thought I was serious.
"That would possibly be against the law, but I'm sure a bonus 45
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above and beyond your reasonable fee might be doable.
Maybe five K. Or something in that neighborhood."
"Thanks, but let's see what I come up with."
"Of course."
It occurred to me that Dunphy might be recording our conversation. This would have been illegal in itself since Dunphy had not informed me he was doing so. But he had never met me before that day, and he probably didn't fully trust Myron Lipschutz and whoever else in the party had recommended me.
I said, "Assuming I get the goods on Louderbush's rotten behavior and then you go the media-leak route as opposed to the privately-confront-Louderbush route, I want this to be air-tight. Even cable news will be wary of a story as incendiary as this, so it's essential, I think, that I find more witnesses willing to go public with what they know. In the Spitzer case, how was the initial leak handled?"
Dunphy hesitated and seemed to be choosing his words carefully, and now I was convinced that our conversation was going straight into a recorder. "Nobody knows for sure exactly how it was done. The guys at the Times and the Post who broke the story aren't talking as to who their sources were.
But the assumption is that private investigators hired by Sam Krupa, the old GOP dirty tricks guy, followed the gov when he walked into post offices to buy untraceable money orders to pay off his K-an-hour gal-pals. Other operatives bribed hotel workers. They had names and places and dates, and they checked this stuff against the governor's official schedule, and it all jibed. Then they found a prosecutor in Miami who was 46
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eager to make history by busting one of the entrepreneurial gals and offering her a deal if she named the governor. Then Krupa leaked word of the official investigation, and the caped crusader's cook was goosed."