handed them to Mac. Mac picked up the cell phone record he’d printed off for Montgomery. “There, those two spoke to each other for five minutes from 12:08 to 12:13 p.m.,” Mac said, jotting it down on the whiteboard as he said it. “So he speaks with Montgomery and he says we have to ‘go to ground’ but Stroudt acts too late. Whoever is tracking him is already on him, sees his opportunity at The Snelling and now we have a dead body.”
Lich shrugged. “Pure speculation.”
“Speculation is my middle name,” was Mac’s ready reply. “We need to find us some facts, but it’s not a bad theory.”
“If you do say so yourself.”
“I do.”
Lich’s phone rang. “Yes, this is Detective Lich. Okay, how do I get into the system?” Lich wrote feverishly into his notebook. “Right, thanks.” Dick finished writing.
“So what was that?”
“Stroudt rented a car when he got to town today.”
Mac picked up right away, “But it wasn’t at The Snelling.”
“Exactly. It was moved.”
“And you know this how?”
“GPS tracking in the car.”
“Where did the car end up?”
“Parking lot outside the Penalty Box in Roseville.” The Penalty Box was a sports bar that was just a few miles north of The Snelling, located across the street from Rosedale Mall.
“He rented it at the airport, right?”
“Yes.”
“And we have our four-hour gap between when he landed and he got to the hotel. Will the GPS tell us everywhere he went?”
“It will.”
* * *
Heath Connolly sat in his plane seat, sipped his martini and looked over the polling data spread across his lap. On paper, the situation was under control.
The vice president was feeling good about his chances. He said he could feel it in the crowds, the surge of momentum. He said it repeatedly, “I can feel the surge out there. The momentum is with us.”
And the vice president wasn’t necessarily wrong. He was closing really well in the light red states like Missouri, New Mexico and West Virginia, all states Vice President Wellesley would need to win. There was momentum there and further visits wouldn’t be necessary. Of course, those were states Connolly fully expected to win in the end.
There was also some small momentum in Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio and Virginia, the states where the election would ultimately be won or lost. The Super PAC advertising was a non-stop barrage that the Thomson campaign simply couldn’t match. Yet despite the vice president’s feeling of momentum, they still trailed and Connolly’s own internal polls showed that.
But they were close enough. The plan was coming together.
The Plan.
It made him think of one of his political heroes—Joe Kennedy.
Joe Kennedy was an odd political hero for Heath Connolly. He hated the Kennedys, hated what they had stood for, hated their politics, hated their self-righteousness, hated their sense of entitlement, hated their status as political royalty, but he admired the hell out of the family’s patriarch Joe Kennedy.
When it came to politics, when it came to winning, Joe Kennedy would leave nothing to chance. He would spend whatever it took to win an election. He would look for every advantage possible to win an election and he wouldn’t just exploit it, he’d drive a semi-truck through it and then put the truck in reverse and back over it. Joe Kennedy once got another Joe Russo on the ballot in John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s first congressional race in 1946. Why? To split the vote with the Joe Russo his son was already running against. The voters were confused about which Russo to vote for and the vote split allowed JFK to sneak through and win his first election. It was low, it was dirty, it was brilliant, it was Joe Kennedy at his conniving best and Connolly loved it.
That set the stage for 1960. Kennedy v. Nixon was dead even going into the last week, akin to the current Thomson v. Wellesley. Much has been made of the televised 1960 presidential debate and how Kennedy looked so youthful and good on television and that Nixon looked and sounded so bad on television and that this played the pivotal role in the election. It may have played a role, but what Connolly admired and what he believed in is what Joe Kennedy did.
The story was that Joe Kennedy made a deal with the Chicago mob and Sam Giancana in particular, to turn the vote in Chicago in Senator Kennedy’s favor. Frank Sinatra served as a go between, brokering the deal. Joe Kennedy denied it and historians have never been sure