I explained that I was working on a profile of Abelard and needed to ask about a sensitive matter.

“How sensitive is it?”

He wanted to know, so I told him. “It concerns Senator Abelard’s medical history. His mental health.”

“Oh, Christ!” he said. “I know what this is. The depression thing, right?”

I tapped gently on the keys of my computer, so he wouldn’t hear me taking notes. It was so easy, really. You asked questions, and people told you things.

DeFazio paused a moment, realizing the gravity of what he had just said. “You aren’t going to run that shit, are you?”

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “I’m just trying to figure out what the facts are. The newspaper will decide later what to run. I take it you have some information about his medical history.”

“Look, we ran against the guy. We picked up a lot of stuff we never used. What was the point? We were going to lose. Why make Hap look like a prick? By the way, this is all off the record.”

“Of course,” I said. “Listen, it happens that I’m going to be in Pittsburgh tomorrow. I was wondering if I could come see you.” When he said yes, I called the travel agent and booked a flight. Dirk was unhappy that I was going on a reporting trip without taking him along, but I said if I got anything good, I would share it with him.

DeFazio met me at a restaurant called the Tin Angel on Mount Washington. It was across from downtown Pittsburgh and overlooked the point where the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers meet to form the Ohio. He was as ordinary-looking a man as you could hope to find, with a potbelly and dark curly hair that was disappearing on top. He stood up uncomfortably when I introduced myself. A manila envelope was sitting on the table next to him.

The lawyer talked plainly, chug-chug-chug, moving slowly and deliberately like the coal barges plying the river below us. He explained that like most campaigns of the 1990s, Winstead’s had formed an opposition research team to gather negative information about the opposing candidate. The group had interviewed a number of Abelard’s former staff people, and one of these former staffers had mentioned a 1982 incident.

“Tell me about it,” I said. I wasn’t taking any notes, fearing that would scare him off.

“Abelard had been in the Senate only a year. He was a very hot ticket. The Reagan people all loved him. And then something happened. The senator went away for a long vacation, and people in his office were whispering that he’d had some kind of breakdown. That was all this staff guy knew. So we asked other people.”

“What people?”

“People who know things. The state police. A guy we knew at the FBI. Someone at the state agency that licenses pharmacists and mental hospitals.”