Wynne nodded as he took two heavy puffs of his pipe. “It’ll be better if I show you.”
Badde followed him down the sidewalk to the side of the house along Catharine Street. There was a weathered wooden door with another Badde campaign poster on it. Badde knew that this was the separate entrance to the basement; another was inside the house, under the stairwell that led to the upper floor.
Wynne unlocked the door, went inside, and flipped on a light switch. Badde followed—and immediately saw what Wynne wanted him to see firsthand.
The basement, which Kenny had set up as his combination bedroom and office, was completely trashed. The mattress was overturned. The old wooden desk was up on its side. And all three of the rusty and battered metal four-drawer filing cabinets had been ransacked. Some of the drawers still contained papers and folders, but most were empty.
“When the hell did this happen?” Badde asked.
Wynne puffed on his pipe once, then exhaled smoke as he said, “Sometime in the last twenty-four hours. It was okay after lunch yesterday when I was down here.”
“You don’t know exactly when? This had to have made one helluva racket.”
“I told you on the phone that I didn’t get back here until after I got your voice mail. That’s why there was the delay.”
He looked at Badde and saw anger.
Roger Wynne took two hard puffs on his pipe.
Then he got mad, too.
“What the hell, Rapp? Last night was Halloween, and there was a great party at U of P. I live here. I’m not a prisoner. Nor am I a goddamn warden, watching that moron Kareem. I never liked the idea of him being here when you first forced him on me. But you said it was an important political favor and that he’d be fine in the basement. And I reluctantly agreed. Which, of course, I obviously now regret.”
Roger Wynne then made a sweeping gesture at the destroyed room. “How the hell was I supposed to know this was going to happen?”
Badde glanced at him, then looked back at the destruction and sighed audibly.
“Okay, Roger, besides the obvious, what’s the damage?” He pointed at the filing cabinets. “What was in them?”
“Mostly Kareem’s logs, the lists of all the voters he collected. And he also had many of their absentee-voter cards or forms. I was dumbfounded how he could collect so many. He wouldn’t tell me. He just showed them to me and said it was because he was a hard worker and you were going to reward him for that.”
Badde raised his eyebrows at the word “reward.”
I do have a reward in mind for you, Kenny.
Just not the one you’re probably expecting.
Wynne continued: “So, I, uh, came down here one day while he was out ‘canvassing’ for the so-called Forgotten Voters Initiative. I had a little look around and found all the records. In addition to going door to door, he’d gone to retirement homes and signed up voters en masse. Then he’d moved on to nursing homes.”
Badde already knew this, of course, but replied, “Really? Well, you have to give him c
redit for thinking outside of the box.”
Badde walked over and pulled an official-looking governmental form from one of the metal file drawers. The letterhead had the familiar crest of the City of Philadelphia and: CITY COMMISSIONERS
COUNTY BOARD OF ELECTIONS
ROOM 142, CITY HALL
PHILADELPHIA, PA 19107
215-686-3469 215-686-3943
The first line of the sheet read: “Absentee Ballot Application & Requirements.”
He read farther down and saw the requirements for “Alternative Ballots”: If you are a registered voter who is disabled or age sixty-five or older AND who is assigned to an inaccessible polling place, you are qualified to vote using an Alternative Ballot.
Badde looked up at Wynne and said, “And I do give the bastard credit. He found groups of voters who probably really had been forgotten by the system. Well . . . some, anyway.”