‘No, I don’t. The race was always going to be between me and the Dems. Ogden Bush was running their campaign, and the word on the street was that Ogden was going to bury Birch with negative ads. Pop his balloon. It would have worked, too. Birch’s numbers were paper-thin.’

‘What did you think when Birch was killed?’

Warren gulped coffee. His face on the mug had the same big smile. The Happy Patriot. ‘I thought that was the end of my political career, and I was right. And no, I’m not minimizing what happened. It was terrible. However, I knew what it meant for my campaign.’

‘Namely?’ Cab asked.

‘The mainstream media would blame me. They’d been trying to crucify me from the beginning. That Orlando reporter, Rufus Twill, kept hyping bullshit stories about me and the Alliance. Chuck’s a radical! Chuck’s a right-wing extremist! Chuck’s in bed with the Nazis! I knew the rest of the media would start talking about “hate speech” and calling this a political assassination and pointing fingers at me. Which is exactly what they did. Hell, some people thought I had Birch killed to get him out of the race.’

‘Did you?’ Cab asked with a small smile.

Warren grinned. ‘I told you, I love cops. They can’t resist asking gotcha questions. No, not true. See, if I wanted to get Birch out of the race, I would have set him up with a hooker a week or two before the election. I wouldn’t have killed him. Dead people get sympathy. The last thing my campaign needed was Birch Fairmont made into a martyr.’

‘The FBI think Hamilton Brock and the Liberty Empire Alliance were behind the assassination.’

‘So they say.’

‘You don’t think so?’

‘I think the feds conducted the most exhaustive investigation since Lincoln or Kennedy, and they didn’t find a shred of real evidence linking Ham to the murders. That’s a little funny, don’t you think?’

‘Hamilton Brock was a donor to your campaign. So were several of his lieutenants.’

Warren took the cigar and jabbed it at Cab, but without any malice in the gesture. The man relished the give-and-take of political debate. ‘Well, first, I don’t control who gives me money. Anybody wants to open a checkbook, I think that’s their God-given American right, and I don’t care what they believe. Second, Ham says those contributions were phony. He knew it would hurt me more than help me to have his group associated with my campaign.’

‘And yet you obviously know him,’ Cab said.

‘Sure, I do. I’ve interviewed him on my show from the Coleman penitentiary. You ask me, Ham’s a political prisoner. They needed to put someone away for the murders at Bok, so they trumped up tax charges against Ham in order to pretend they’d done their job.’

‘You think he’s innocent?’

‘I do.’