“Let me tell you what he tells me. He says he starts out feeling fine, except that he’s nervous. He has to speak to a lot of people, get up in front of a crowd, he gets nervous—”
“Bad habit in a politician.”
“Bad habit in an actor, too, but it didn’t hurt Laurence Olivier any. So. Stephen gets nervous, but he feels fine, until suddenly he doesn’t feel fine.”
“Are you sure it’s suddenly?”
“He says it’s like being hit with a brick.”
“There’s no warning at all?”
Chester hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said uneasily. “I don’t think so. Stephen definitely doesn’t think so.”
Gregor was puzzled. “Is he that—distracted by his stage fright? How could you not be sure, how could he not be sure—”
“It’s not that he’s distracted.” Chester sounded desperate. “It’s the way the stage fright takes him. He says it makes his body prickle.”
“Prickle?”
“He’s been telling me that for years and I never paid any attention to it. After all this started, I made him explain it to me at length. As far as I can figure out, he gets the kind of feeling you’d have if your entire body went to sleep.”
“Ah,” Gregor said.
Chester drank the rest of his coffee and put his cup on the floor. “I told all this to the doctors. They tested him out for circulatory problems. Nothing.”
“He always has this prickling feeling before he has one of his attacks?”
“Yes.”
“Does he always have an attack when he gets the prickling feeling?”
Chester started. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask him. I didn’t even think to ask him.”
“Maybe, after we talk, we should pay a visit to Senator Fox. In the meantime, can you make a guess? He’s had these attacks—”
“Three times,” Chester said. “The first time was at a cocktail party in Washington, the day we moved him into his new office. It was also the day we announced the Act in Aid of Exceptional Children. That was a month ago.”
“And the other two?”
“The second time was about a week later. We were at a dinner for contributors. A fund-raising dinner, I mean. The third time was about four days after that. Stephen had a speaking engagement at some citizens’ group in Virginia.”
Gregor thought about it. “From what I understand, the cocktail party where the senator had his first attack was a fund-raiser?”
“That’s right,” Chester said.
“And this speaking engagement—”
“He got paid for it. You don’t have to beat around the bush. Everybody on Capitol Hill with a title to sell supplements his income that way.”
“So that was a fund-raiser, too, in a way.”
“It raised funds,” Chester said, “but it raised them for Stephen personally. Not for the campaign.”
“The press was out in force at all three events?”
“No,” Chester said. “At the first two, yes, but not at the third. No self-respecting Washington reporter is going to trek all the way out to the Blue Ridge Mountains just to hear Stephen talk about how we have to develop the compassion to cherish and support our mentally retarded children.”
“All right.” Gregor thought he wouldn’t have trekked all the way out to Virginia for that either. He wouldn’t have taken a taxi across town. “What about between those times? Did Senator Fox do anything that would normally give him a case of stage fright? Anything at all?”
“Oh, yes,” Chester said. “He got an award from the American Osteopathic Association. For his support, you know it was a straight payback, if you want to know the truth. There was a bill—”
“You don’t have to tell me, Mr. Chester.”
“Yeah. I don’t suppose I do. You were with the Bureau in Washington forever. Anyway, there was that. Two thousand people. Some reporters but not a lot.”
“Was that a fund-raiser?”
“Not directly. The AOA has a PAC. They give a lot of money away. Some of it they give to Stephen.”
“Anything else?”
Chester considered it. “Yes,” he said finally. “A couple of things. Small ones, really. He had a meeting with the Boy Scouts—the Connecticut council, or whatever it’s called. Big picnic with all the parents there. He gave a speech.”
“Stage fright but no attack?”
“Stephen always has stage fright when he has to talk to a crowd that big. That wasn’t a fund-raiser, but there was press. We do it every year. Like I said, it’s no big deal, There was a small dinner for the American Association of University Women, too, maybe three days ago. About two hundred people and one reporter for a local paper.”