Chapter 20

Mike glanced up and saw the outer door to the Record-Herald office open and George Battle come through it, carrying a copy of the paper and a full head of steam. "Speaking of which," he said to no one in particular.

Susan leaned back against a desk. This, she thought, could be interesting.

The inner door burst open with Battle's words. "McMahon!" he shouted. "Is this shit true?"

"Actually, it only scratches the surface," Mike told him. "For obvious reasons we decided to only print stuff that could be documented, but we, well, actually Henry, found out a lot more than we felt we could print."

"I thought that idiot was up to something," Battle fumed, his voice a little more muted – but only a little.

"Gingrich?" Mike smiled. "It was pretty clear to us that he wasn't all he was cracked up to be."

"He's just the kind of idiot I expected Glenn Aho would try to ram down the board's throat, and this time he managed it. What an asshole! That idiot can't be trusted as far as he could throw a fit! If I could have gotten one more damn board member to listen to me, we could have avoided this whole damn thing. But no, they had to listen to that asshole, and now we've got this shit all over our hands."

Susan picked up a reporter's notebook off the desk, and began to take notes. It seemed pretty clear that as mad as Battle was, he was going to spill something. She didn't know the man – well, she'd seen him on the street and recognized him, but that was all – but he'd come up in conversation regarding the story as the more-or-less leader of the group that had voted against hiring Gingrich. Presumably he knew something the Record-Herald staff didn't. It would be interesting to see what it was.

"That's something we're not real clear on," Mike replied, trying to project a little calm. "We know that Glenn pushed pretty hard to get Gingrich hired, but we don't know why."

"Damned if I know," Battle shook his head, settling down now that he knew he was among friends, even though it was obvious that he was still pretty angry. "He pulled every damn string he could think of, called in every favor he had, and look what we got out of it! We got this sack of shit, that's what. That's what those idiots got for listening to him."

"I'm not at all clear on what Glenn did to get the votes," Mike said, glancing over to see that Susan was busily taking notes on the conversation. "We were having staff problems at the time and it didn't get covered as well as it should have."

"I don't know the whole story myself," Battle replied, still obviously angry but calming down a little. "I know he went to Ed Rickenbaugh and offered to support Ed in not renewing Jerome Weilfahrt's contract as football coach when his contract expires. That's ridiculous! Weilfahrt is a breath of fresh air as a football coach after that idiot Johansen, and he's as fine a man as we've ever had in the job."

Susan rolled her eyes, but kept her mouth shut. She only had a limited interest in football in general and the Spearfish Lake team in particular. However, that was enough to know that no matter how fine a man that Jerome Weilfahrt may have been, all anyone had to do was to look at the team's lousy record to tell that he wasn't much as a football coach. It seemed pretty clear to her that Battle was as blind about Weilfahrt as Aho apparently was about Gingrich. But still, Battle was a source of inside board information they hadn't had before.

"Since Ed voted for Gingrich, I take it he went along with the deal," Mike commented, obviously trying to drag Battle back to the topic of hiring Gingrich rather than getting into the ongoing controversy about the football team. That had gone on around town for years and showed no sign of ever ending.

"Oh, yeah, of course, all he can think about is winning; he doesn't look at the overall experience for the kids. Football players are supposed to be kids and have a little fun, not be some kind of damn machines that march up and down the field like a bunch of little tin soldiers. We're not done with that yet, not by a damn sight."

"Do you know what Glenn used on the other board members to get them to go along with him?" Mike said, again trying to drag Battle back to the topic everyone really wanted to know about.

"Not really," Battle shrugged. "Ed was the only one who came clean with me about it. Glenn didn't come to me about voting for Gingrich, not at all. He knows goddamn well I'd never have listened to him. Asking me to vote for the guy would be as good as getting a vote against, he knows that. Even the bastard had to stall the final vote until Don Friedenbach came on the board, and I don't know what that idiot said to Don, either."

Apparently there wasn't much love lost between George Battle and Glenn Aho, Susan thought. I wonder what that's all about. She didn't voice her words; she was too busy trying to get the gist of the notes down.

"Yeah, I thought that was a little cute, but like I said, with the junior reporter we had here then I didn't know what really happened until it was long over with," Mike said.

"It probably wouldn't have mattered; it was cut and dried by the time it came to a vote. Don at least has his head screwed on right about the football team, so there's that in his favor."

"The thing we've all wondered about," Mike said, again trying to keep the discussion from heading off into football, "was that we can't believe that any kind of investigation at all wouldn't have turned up Gingrich's court problems. I mean, Susan turned it up on the Internet, and I don't think she looked for two minutes."

"Investigation?" Battle snorted. "What investigation? I mean, there was supposed to be one, and the committee was supposed to do one on all three of the candidates, but what Ed told me was that Glenn said he would take care of it. Ed said the only investigation results Glenn gave the committee was a verbal report that consisted of 'They're all OK.' I didn't think Glenn did much investigating, and if you turned up that stuff that easy, I guess I'm right. I'm goddamn going to do something about that, don't think I won't."

"We suspected something like that," Mike said, a lot of suspicions being confirmed in that one statement. "But nobody's ever come out and said it in so many words until now. I take it you don't think much of Gingrich, either."

"I thought he was an asshole when he was being interviewed, and I was pretty damn sure he was covering something up, but of course I had no idea what it could be. This," he said, waving the paper around, "just proves I was dead right, not that I didn't already know it. All Gingrich has done with the board so far is keep us in the dark and feed us shit, like we're a bunch of mushrooms. Now that this has come out, we've got to do something about that, too."

"Glenn was able to get enough votes to hire Gingrich," Mike observed. "But now that this has come out, do you think he's going to get enough votes to keep him?"

"Hell, if Gingrich gets one vote now it'll be Glenn's," Battle snorted. "And that idiot will be stupid enough to vote for him, no matter what."

"Do you think they'll be willing to eat the cost of his contract to get rid of him?"

"It doesn't matter," Battle snorted again. "Have you seen the contract?"

"No," Mike said. "Like I told you, the junior reporter we had at the time was just about the next thing to useless. All we've had to work with on that are the board packets from last summer, and if there was a copy of the contract in there we've never found it."

"There's a ninety-day grace period buried in it, and we're still inside it," Battle told him. "Glenn tried to get it removed when we worked out the contract; I guess Gingrich had bitched to him about the clause. At least I was able to fight him off on that. I told the board that the grace period language has been in there for the last several superintendents and all the other personnel the board has hired, so there was no good reason we ought to go to a special effort on that one. Friedenbach went along with me on that one, thank God, and we at least won that one on a four to three, and it may save our asses. That means we're going to have to move pretty damn quick, and we'd never have been able to do it, if this hadn't come out."

"I sure would like to know why Glenn thinks Gingrich is so great," Mike mused aloud, obviously for Battle's benefit.

"I'd like to know myself," Battle replied. "It can't be anything good, not if Glenn is involved. I mean, he sold Gingrich up and down as being such hot shit, and I didn't think much of him at the interview. When we started the superintendent search, I told the board that we needed to get someone with experience with a big school district who could help us get some grants and stuff to ease the financial situation we're getting into. With this idiot governor we've got, the school funding is just getting worse and worse since she sees the schools as a place to dip into for funds for all the damn left-wing liberal programs she can think of. That's going to bite us in the ass, and sooner than we think. Hell, she took a bunch of money from the schools and dumped it into some damn college expansions downstate, as if the goddamn colleges don't get enough money anyway with the fees and tuition they're charging. That money should be going to the school foundation grant where it belongs."

Although Susan was doing her best to note down Battle's rant, as a college student facing the need to come up with the money to go to school, she wasn't exactly sure how much she agreed with him. In Germany, of course, most of the unis were fully supported by the government, but that sure wasn't the case in this state. She was pretty sure that some of the money Battle was ranting about were funds used to get Southern Michigan University going, so whether she wound up going there or not, it was money well spent as far as she was concerned. At least Mizuki would benefit, she thought.

"You probably have a point on that," Mike replied, being conciliatory for the sake of keeping the conversation going. "I haven't looked into it enough to be able to have an opinion. But getting back to the situation at hand, you're sure there was no investigation done."

"Honestly, I can't say if there was one done or not," Battle said, now a little more reflective and a little calmer. "I really doubt that there was, but all I can say is that there was no formal report ever made to the full board, and according to Ed, there wasn't one made to the search committee, either. But with this kind of stuff lying out there and as easy to find as you say it was, that makes me think that Glenn just didn't bother. That's not going to happen again if I have anything to say about it."