The Last Debate by Jim Lehrer

Author:Jim Lehrer [Lehrer, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, General Fiction
ISBN: 9780517177617
Publisher: Random House Value Publishing
Published: 1995-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I went back across to the Inn in search of Howley. Twenty or thirty people were gathered around a small television set in a corner of the lobby. I heard the voice of Jack and then Jill interviewing Doug Mulvane, the man they called Pompous Perfect. He proclaimed this “journalism’s darkest hour,” and he called “on every journalist in America who cares about the future of his or her noble profession to stand up, speak up, shout out, and be counted, to condemn what those four people did under the sacred cloak of journalism on that stage in Williamsburg tonight.”

A woman at the Inn’s front desk said Howley had not checked out, but she refused—politely but firmly—to give me his room number. The doorman told me he had not seen Howley leave the Inn since he returned shortly after the debate ended. But he said there were several other doors besides the big front one here at the lobby. Said the doorman: “Everybody’s been looking for him. He’s more famous than Patrick Henry around here right now.” Spoken, I thought, like a well-trained man of eighteenth-century Williamsburg.

Another person—a source not affiliated with the Inn who must remain unidentified—assisted me in obtaining Howley’s room number. It was 3255, down a long hallway on the second floor.

I went to it and put my ear to it. There was no sound of a television or anything else. It was only nine o’clock. It seemed inconceivable to me that Howley could be sitting quietly in his room reading a good book or staring silently off into space. There was simply no way in the world a normal mortal could resist watching and listening to all of the Jacks and Jills, Normans and Rosses, of the world chew over and spit out what they thought of what he had just done across the street to a candidate for president of the United States.

I knocked on the door. I put my ear back against it. Not a sound. I hit it a couple more times. Again, no response. The man was clearly gone or dead. Dead? Was it possible that Michael J. Howley, overcome with profound second thoughts about what he had wrought, had ended his own life? Was that possible?

At that moment I caught sight of a maid, a young woman, working her way with her cart of clean towels, chocolate mints, and the like on her “turn-down” rounds. I ran to her and pulled on her something I saw Richard Widmark do once in a movie.

“Pardon me,” I said in my most worried voice. “I left my wife alone in the room a while ago after we had an argument. Now I can’t raise her. I’m worried, frankly. Could you quickly open the door to see if she’s in there—and all right? I hope she hasn’t … you know … hurt herself.”

The woman, easily deceived because she was a caring person, ran with me to 3255 and opened the door with her master key.

It was empty.

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