McGoverning #3: They What?

Dick Dougherty didn’t sleep in California. At least not long — the June dawn, up long before any civilized hour, swamped him even through layers of hotel curtains. Usually he slept well enough on the road but in the stress of recent days, a continent apart from the kind sureness of Cynthia — the second-time-around love match that had rescued both of them — falling idly asleep alone was a contradiction in terms.

He thrashed and fidgeted when he did, then woke up — didn’t check the hour, didn’t need to — in full fret over his daughter’s dead-end job and the threadbare ache of wishing her happiness. Just as he stole around on his own distemper and nodded off again, there came the phone.

It took a few sentences in to catch up with the fact that it was Barry Sussman, the Washington Post’s city editor. Dougherty knew him only a little but did pal around with some of the paper’s other old boys, inclusive of Ben Bradlee, legendary Boston Brahmin friend of Kennedys and managing editor. “I told Bradlee what we’ve got and it’s hot, maybe,” Sussman went on, “and it involves you guys directly. Al Lewis just confirmed” — Dougherty also knew the Post’s longtime man on the police beat — “so here it is.”

Dougherty listened; if he’d checked the electric clock on the bedside table he would have seen not even two minutes pass before he popped out with, “they what?”