Cape Disappointment by Earl Emerson Page A

drinking. When I thought about it, as I did off and on for the rest of the evening, while the speeches and toasts were being made, while the bands played, and while I had nobody to dance with, I realized that as much as Kathy had been peeved by my actions in the last few weeks, I'd been even more peeved by hers. By and large we did share the same politics, but I wasn't acting on it. But then, where was it written that I had to? I was helping Maddox for my own recently unearthed reasons, and if I chose to do so, she had no right to carp at me. Okay, so I had accidentally on purpose inveigled her into offending Maddox. When you thought about it, except for the fact that I'd gotten Kathy steamed, it had been a slick piece of chicanery.
    As the evening wore on and Kathy failed to materialize beside me, I realized I didn't regret having embarrassed Maddox, but Kathy's mortification was something else entirely. What the hell had I been thinking?

“YOU'RE HERE ABOUT the position on the campaign staff?” asked the redhead.
    “Right. I'm Thomas Black. Jim Maddox called me yesterday.”
    “He said you'd be coming by. If you don't mind waiting a moment?”
    “No problem.”
    We were in a small office complex in Kirkland, the windows looking out over Lake Washington about a block away. The day was sunny and warm, considering it was the last week of September, and the building offered an impressive view: Soaring gulls littered the sky; a water-skier made graceful arcs on water that looked like blue molten glass.
    The redhead, whose name was Deborah Driscoll, wore a conservative suit and a pair of plastic-rimmed glasses that looked as though they were just for the office. About once every two minutes somebody trotted in from the main room. Ms. Driscoll fielded their queries, complaints, and concerns in an adroit, businesslike manner. She was tall and moved with a Spartan efficiency one saw in ballerinas and other athletes. She was younger than I was, probably around thirty, and did not once glance in my direction while I hunkered on a sofa against a wall and thumbed through a golfing magazine. I didn't play golf, but the choices were golf or airplane magazines. I didn't fly, either. Maddox did both.
    I'd met James Maddox early in my tenure in the police department, and while we'd never worked together, our paths had crossed a few times, always with polite words and deference on both sides. Maddox had ingratiated himself with the administration and was highly regarded in the mayor's office. Nobody wrote a better letter or performed favors for those outranking him more frequently or efficiently than James Maddox. And, as I was to learn later, nobody crapped on those below him with more casual disdain.
    At first, people thought challenging Jane Sheffield for her Senate seat was a rash move, but Republicans were on a national tear to replace roadblock Democrats wherever they could, so even though he didn't have the voter support, he was attracting huge amounts of money both in and out of state. In the beginning he'd polled only a few points behind Sheffield, but in their debate he'd been unable to parry Sheffield's extensive utilization of facts and figures; at one point he even lost his temper and called the moderator a jackass. For many it was a snapshot of a personality for which they were not ready to vote.
    Over the years I'd followed his politics and found him sincere in his beliefs but austere and judgmental in the way he regarded the man on the street. He went to church and wore the fact on his sleeve. His motto seemed to be “Let no good deed go untouted.” As a representative in Congress, Maddox had been implicated in some shenanigans involving payoffs, and the word around the Hill, according to the blogs, was that he had escaped an indictment by the skin of his teeth. The federal prosecutor who was investigating was grievously injured in a car wreck, and the prosecutor who took over from her dropped the ball. It was odd how