“What did you find out?”

“This.” He pushed the manila folder across the table. I opened it. Inside were two sheets of paper. The first was a photocopy of a prescription for an antidepressant, filed with a pharmacy in Erie. The space usually provided for the patient’s name was blank. The name of the prescribing doctor was Morris Soderberg, in Pittsburgh. I looked quizzically at DeFazio.

“It’s his,” he said. “Don’t ask how we know. We know.”

The second piece of paper simply had the words “Sewickley Institute” and an address. I pushed it back toward DeFazio to interpret.

“It’s a small, private clinic outside Pittsburgh. It’s where the senator went in 1982.”

I nodded. Looking at these most personal artifacts of a man’s private life, I felt a dampness. My skin was clammy. My throat was clogged. I put the papers into my briefcase.

“What are you going to do with that stuff?” he asked quietly.

“Talk to people. Find out if it’s true.”

“What are you going to do then? Because I’m telling you, it’s true.”

“I don’t know. As my executive editor likes to say, we’ll jump off that bridge when we get to it. Tell me again: Why didn’t you use this information in the campaign?” I wanted to know: What made him different? Why hadn’t he eaten the shit sandwich?

DeFazio shook his head. “Come on. You know why. It was too dirty. And we were running so far behind, we were going to lose. Why be an asshole? I have to live in this town after the election is over. I never even told Winstead.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because he might have wanted to use it. And I knew we shouldn’t.”

“Then why are you giving it to me?”

“Because he’s running for president now, and it seems different. And because you’re from the Mirror, which is a serious newspaper, and I figure you won’t run a story unless it’s the right thing to do.”

I called Dr. Soderberg that afternoon. He was with a patient, but when I called back an hour later, he answered the phone. I gave him a spiel about how I was from The New York Mirror and it was an emergency and I would be in Pittsburgh for only a few hours. He asked me what I wanted to talk about, and I said I couldn’t discuss it over the phone. I had to see him in person. That was really just a way to get my foot in the door, but he apparently regarded it as a positive sign of discretion, because he told me to come to his office at 6:00 that evening.