The Curiosity by Stephen P. Kiernan

Author:Stephen P. Kiernan [Kiernan, P. Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 24

In the Front Row

(Daniel Dixon)

I FOUND HIM. It wasn’t that hard, when he’s so handsome his face belonged on a coin. He might spend his days wrangling shouters and marchers and public praying types, our organizer of protesters, but the guy’s mug was like a cross between a surfer dude and a Canadian Mountie. Yours truly just plopped down with the wire services’ photos from large protests, and sure enough he started popping up like corn in a hot frying pan.

There is a little thrill that never goes away, when I dig something up for a story. One time I convinced a city coroner to give me the blood type found on a murder victim, and it matched the dead woman’s own son. Gruesome, but to me it was a little jewel.

So the first thing was hunting down this protest leader’s name. That took digging, and the better part of an afternoon. Finally I found a photo in the Washington Post, taken on the steps of the Supreme Court: four lawyers all wearing their best credibility, and beside them, in a Stetson ten gallons deep, stood our boy: Wade, T. J. Wade.

This rabble-rouser had given me the creeps right from the start. And once I read his background, I knew why: a pro, a full-time pitchman from Kansas, Wade was an evangelical hell-raiser about two inches shy of the Klan. He specialized in nasty tactics. For example, using a hidden camera to trap liberal politicians into saying something breath-takingly stupid—a job, I have to say, they seemed to make awfully easy for him. But worse, too: making noise outside a soldier’s funeral to protest federal spending policies. Holding a news conference to blame bad weather on the queers.

I could just guess what T.J. stood for. Maybe the initials of the third president?

Twice Wade had come before the Supreme Court to test the limits of free speech, and neither time did he stand anywhere near the side of reasonableness. Somebody with a fat wallet liked keeping him in the noise-making game, I suppose. Lawyers who argue in front of the Supremes don’t come cheap.

Wade had management skills, I grant him that. He’d pulled the motley sign wavers together, increased their numbers a little every day, worked up schedules so they could still hold jobs, and through it all, raised their rage about four notches higher. But it was the box lunches that impressed me most: all these people sitting on the lawn munching quietly between their regularly scheduled outbursts. Wade started timing the demonstrations to suit the news cycle, a dirty move just like we did with video releases.

He had one trick I hadn’t seen before: each morning he’d hold a news conference to review the coverage from the day before. Was this headline fair? Did supporters of the project get more column inches than his group? One day Wade read quotes from reports about the prior day’s press conference and compared them with what he’d said, which he verified right then with a tape recorder.

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