In this section of the ms, I’ve given the Narrator (still don’t have a name for her) a project to do – researching a candidate from the opposition party. I’ve decide that the candidate will have something to do with the story problem so that this isn’t just a pointless side quest, but I don’t know what. He should probably be some kind of fairy creature but I don’t know what kind. Vampire leaped to mind but I feel like I don’t have anything new to say about vampires, so probably not.

In writing a scene today, the bartender in the scene turned out to be hostile, so I decided to lean into that and make it because she can sense what the Narrator is. There’s a connection between the bartender and the candidate, so this works well to add a little intrigue and tension to the story since the story problem hasn’t been established yet.

I stopped to do a little research about who/what I want the villain to be. I decide that some people—wizards?—should be helping him … do what? They want to prey on “sheep.”

Maybe the villain can be some kind of fairy creature that feeds on emotion? His “fae-ness” can be turned on and off, maybe? Will he try to seduce the Narrator?

In an earlier scene I’ve had the Narrator spy a bird-like woman. Because the bird-woman is mentioned in this section, I decided to refresh my memory about harpies and I’ve learned that harpies have been known to punish evil-doers. That can go into the ms somewhere—the harpy is here to punish someone.

The phrase “by the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes” pops into mind and it reminds me of the sparks the Narrator feels in the opening scene. But I don’t think I want an explicit connection between “sparks” and “evil things happening.” Maybe it could be an early warning system? Maybe it’s not “evil” things, maybe it’s just “magical” things.

The candidate under investigation has two children, which I seem to have dropped from consideration during the drafting process but they could become a complicating factor of some sort during revision.

~

The opposition was fielding two candidates for governor. In California’s winner-takes-all primaries, the top two vote-getters, regardless of party affiliation, face off in the general election. California was a Democratic stronghold and had been for years, but this midterm, the outgoing governor was term-limited and couldn’t run again. So the field was wide open for Democratic candidates—and a shitload of them had filed to run.

Democrats have no party discipline, perhaps because it’s such an all-encompassing party, but at times like these, the senior leaders despair. The opposition strategy was to run a far right-wing candidate and a slightly more centrist candidate, appeasing both the nutjobs in the party and the independent voters who don’t pay attention to much. The Democrats, on the other hand, had thirteen contestants, and that was going to split the vote. This meant the opposition had a very good chance of snagging the top two slots and shutting out the Democrats.

My job was to find something so egregious that even Republicans would balk at voting for their candidate. I tried to imagine what this would be and failed.

The best idea, it seemed to me—and the leadership agreed—was to get something on the centrist candidate since independent and centrist voters still objected to the more vile of character flaws, like pedophilia and murder. They even disliked infidelity, the shooting of dogs, and the mocking of the disabled. Whether they disliked these things more than they disliked candidates who promised inclusion and equality depended on a number of factors that the party leaders were trying desperately to understand.

Anyway, if I could get some solid, verifiable dirt on Hugh Smalls, there was a good chance the leaders could sink his candidacy and open up a slot for one of their own—if they could also convince Democratic voters to get behind a single candidate—and without it seeming like they were trying to orchestrate anything, because that always pissed off Democrats.

Basically, as long as one Democrat could get on the fall ballot, that candidate would win the gubernatorial race handily, much to the annoyance of everyone in the Inland Empire.

My job was to get the dirt on Smalls. The leadership’s job was to help one candidate rise to the top of the field without enraging the backers of other candidates. My job was the easier one—though by no means easy.

Hugh Smalls owned a chain of laundromats throughout LA where you could get a beer or a glass of wine while your clothes were tumbling dry. Voters in the opposition party fanboy over small business owners for reasons that remain opaque to me but I kinda liked this business idea. Anything to take the drudgery out of chores like laundry.

Laundromats, not to mention bars, used to be prime businesses for money laundering because so much cash is involved but over the years, Smalls had transitioned all of his laundromats over to cards. You could buy a card with cash from a machine but most people just used a debit or credit card, so it was hard to see how he could launder much cash under the circumstances, or why he’d have gone to card readers in the first place if money laundering was his sin. Anything is possible but it seemed to be a less fruitful road to venture down.

The attached bars were the same; everyone paid by tapping a card or a phone, although there was probably a little more room for imaginary accounting there, what with inventory, labor costs, and so on. But, again, I didn’t think money laundering was the place to start. And anyway it wouldn’t be anything I could prove this close to the primaries. It was the kind of thing that took law enforcement a lot of months to build a painstaking case.

My apartment complex has a perfectly serviceable laundry room in a corner of the garage, but I bundled all of my dirty clothes into a basket and shoved them in my car. I wanted to get a closer look at Smalls and the leadership had told me he had a tendency to visit each laundromat on a rotating basis, and if he held to schedule, this afternoon, he’d be at the one on Tabor and Mentone, making sure the machines were working and the bartenders were pouring.

If I were a small business owner, I wouldn’t do anything as predictable as showing up at the Palms location at 3 p.m. on Tuesdays and Fridays, but maybe he wasn’t as cynical as I was. Or maybe he figured all his employees knew his face and would hide whatever it was they were doing that they shouldn’t be doing the instant he showed, so maybe he had spies, people they didn’t know about who pretended to be customers like me.

Idly I wondered how much a secret shopper gig might pay. It couldn’t possibly be enough to cover my rent, and so I put the idea out of my mind.

The tiny parking lot in back was jammed full of cars but I found a spot on the street on Tabor, across from the laundromat, and lugged my basket inside.

I paid the attendant at the window for a card even though I could have gotten one from the machine on the wall because I wanted a chance to talk to an employee.

In the humid, dryer-sheet-scented air, it seemed to pain the attendant to speak and all he said was, “How much on the card,” and “That’ll be twenty-two dollars.”

I asked him how he was doing and mentioned the lovely weather but he made no attempt to field either throw and once I got my load started, I walked over to the bar, where the bartender, a woman in her mid-thirties with a full sleeve of tattoos on her right arm was chatting with a younger woman nursing a pink beverage in a martini glass.

“So I said to him,” the bartender said and caught me in the corner of her eye. She broke off, gave the younger woman a small smile, and drifted down the counter to where I’d hoisted my not inconsiderable ass onto a barstool. Nothing makes a normal woman feel quite so gigantic as LA actors.

Of course, she might have been an influencer, not an actor, but she wasn’t taking selfies so I doubted it.

“What’ll it be,” the bartender asked, wiping at the counter with a bar rag. What bartenders might do with themselves without that piece of equipment, I do not know.

“I’m dying to hear what you said to him,” I remarked.

“Fuck off,” the bartender said, which made me lift a brow. You don’t expect that kind of hostility in LA.

She gave a simpering smile and added, “Is what I said to him.”

I wasn’t sure how to play it. “And did he get the message?” I asked.

“Remains to be seen,” she said, then repeated, “What’ll it be?”

I figured she’d find a way to spit into anything I ordered, so I said, “Bottle of Heineken, no glass, I brought my own opener,” even though I really wanted a nice pinot grigio.

She dragged a bottle out of the cooler and thunked it on the counter, taking me at my word and leaving the cap on.

I hooked the edge of the cap against the edge of the bar, gave the neck of the bottle a whack, and popped the cap loose.

It’s a stupid party trick I learned a long time ago when it seemed important to learn stupid party tricks, and I’d just brought the bottle to my lips when the bartender straightened up, glanced over my shoulder, and started emptying the dishwasher.

The look-busy effort suggested that Mr. Smalls had arrived for his afternoon stroll through the north forty (this is a farming metaphor; I can’t help my upbringing), and I finished my swallow and gave him a glance over my shoulder. He looked a little beefier than his publicity photo suggested and his face was redder, his hair thinner, but undoubtedly he was the man I had come to study.

He gave me a nod and took a stool equidistant between me and the other woman.

“A Coke, Mr. Smalls?” the bartender asked obsequiously and he gave her a nod.

I was trying to figure out her angle—people who hate their jobs and take it out on everyone, including the customers, had been known to brown nose the boss anyway, but usually they didn’t discriminate in sharing how much they despised what they had to do.

She brought the Coke and when Smalls put out a hand to take it without looking up from his phone, she cleared her throat in an obvious signal. When she had his attention, she shifted her eyes in my direction twice, emphatically both times, warning him off somehow. Warning him about what?

Did she know who I was and suspect why I was there? It was always a risk I took when I decided to size up a subject face-to-face. I tried to stay as anonymous as possible but word gets around. LA is a big city, and California is a big state, but word gets around.

Yes, you’d expect Smalls to be the one who’d know who I was; he was the candidate, and unless the bartender also doubled as his campaign manager, I didn’t know why she’d know something that he didn’t.

He didn’t turn to look at me, just sipped his drink and continued looking at his phone. The bartender stepped away from the bar into the back room, and disappeared.

A moment later, the other woman at the bar, dug her phone out of her pocket, then slipped off her stool and left the bar, snugging sunglasses against her face as she went, perhaps eager to keep the hoi polloi from recognizing her. Maybe she was someone that someone somewhere might recognize.

Three minutes later, Smalls slipped off his barstool with a sigh and went out of the bar and into the laundromat.

The bartender didn’t return. I sat alone at the bar, feeling shunned. I took a discreet sniff at my pits. Nah, that wasn’t it.

I finished my beer, realized I hadn’t paid for it, and dug a couple of bucks out of my pocket and left them on the counter.

“And fuck you, too,” I said aloud but no one answered.

*

I took my freshly laundered clothes back home and put them away, then sat down with a sigh to start digging.

The major parties do some vetting of their candidates, of course, and in years past, newspapers also did a lot of digging, but the few journalists left in the biz could barely cover the breaking news, let alone dig into a candidate’s dim and distant past. I was sorry for society about the decline of investigative reporting, but I was glad I could make a buck from it.

I started with the easy stuff—Google searching and social media dives. You’d be surprised at how much sordid crap you can turn up that way, right there on the surface.

The thing is, all these guys (and gals) are narcissists, or narcissist-adjacent, and they think their shit don’t stink. They get away with crap because they’re charming or they have money or connections or some combination of the above, and the lack of consequences convinces them of the odorlessness of their shit. Secretly they believe everyone is like themselves, empty inside and only existing in the admiration of other people, so they don’t even bother to hide it half the time.

I got out a legal pad and started working out a timeline. This was almost always a good way to find discrepancies—a missing chunk of time they’d spent in rehab that they never told anyone about, or in one memorable case, a felony conviction under another name. These fuckwits can be brazen. They think other people are stupid, where in fact other people are not disordered fuckwits and therefore they trust others and they believe that most people are decent and really want what’s best for the children.

First thing I noticed was that he’d shaved three—no, four—years off his age in between graduating from college and becoming a gubernatorial candidate. I understood this bit of vanity; voters like politicians who are older but not actually old, especially when they’re new to the game, as Smalls was. It was hard to be a young up-and-comer if you were already sixty.

I didn’t give this lie too much weight; it wasn’t the kind of sin that turned voters off. Smalls would brush it aside as a typo that had just slipped into all of his campaign materials.

It took me all of thirty minutes to find the mistress. I hunted her down after I saw that Smalls had divorced his first wife and gotten married again three months later and had a baby four months after that. This had happened well before his political aspirations, and he was still married to the other woman, so it was old dirt and probably not compelling enough to make a difference to voters. He’d just make a mealy mouthed statement about a “mistake” and then trout out his loving second wife and swear it had never happened again.

Uh huh.

He had a college-aged son with his first wife, and I guessed if pressed she would probably talk about forgiveness and eat the shit sandwich so that Smalls would keep paying for college. Or maybe she was one of those who think a “mistake” can include the thousands of lies and deceptions required to carry on an affair that results in a divorce, another marriage, and a baby. I mean maybe a drunken one-night stand can be a mistake. But an ongoing affair? That’s a decision.

So I’d already established that his character sucked and I’d barely started. Since he’d married his mistress, that created a job opening. I was sure he’d filled it.

I know what it sounds like, but I’m not one of those once a cheater, always a—

No, wait, I am. Goes for female cheaters, too; the character disordered come in all flavors.

I tapped my pen against the legal pad. I wasn’t sure a current affair would be enough dirt; the kinds of people that voters for the opposition had put into office beggared belief, so I suspected I’d have to find something more. But where you have entitlement mentality, you’ll find a lot of creepy, crawly things.

First, I needed to nail down who this new mistress was. But because I was afraid Smalls and the bartender had recognized me, I didn’t want to do the stalking myself, so I called Mickey, a licensed private detective I’ve worked with before and asked him if he could take on the job.

He could, and promised daily updates until he found something or I called him off. I got the leadership to agree to pay his bill—Arnold was delighted that I’d already dug something up, and I may have suggested that I’d spent hours tracking it down. Client management is an important part of being a freelance consultant.

~~~

Jennifer Lawler has been a writer-editor for more than twenty-five years and has published more than forty novels and nonfiction books. She is the founder of the online education company Club Ed LLC.