The Big Lie

by James Grippando

  “We talk on the phone,” said Theo.

  “When last?”

  “A few days ago.”

  “Why don’t you go down there and see her?”

  A couple seated themselves on the other side of the U-shaped bar. Theo seized the opportunity to cut the conversation short. He wasn’t one to talk about his feelings. Unless the feeling was hunger. Jack glanced at the newsfeed on his phone as Theo mixed cocktails. Jack’s client appeared on the screen, and even though the sound was off, Jack could hear the sound bite in his head: Truth matters.

  Theo returned and caught a glimpse of what Jack was watching. “The thing about the truth is that Jack Nicholson had it right in that movie with Tom Cruise. Most people can’t handle it.”

  Jack laid his phone on the bar. “You don’t really believe that.”

  “I can prove it. Try this one on for size: I didn’t vote.”

  “What? You lost four years of freedom for something you didn’t do! How could you not vote?”

  “See. I knew you couldn’t handle it. Actually, I did vote.”

  “Really?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. But now you can believe what you want to believe. Isn’t that a lot easier to handle?”

  Oddly enough, it was. But Jack wouldn’t admit it.

  Theo glanced toward the club entrance and smiled. “Well, here comes trouble.”

  Andie was holding Righley’s hand as they passed the hostess stand. Righley broke free and ran to Jack, but the real purpose of the visit was soon evident.

  “Can I play the piano, Uncle Theo?” she asked with excitement. “Please, please?”

  Righley could have asked to burn the club down, and Theo would have said yes. Andie took the stool beside Jack at the bar, and they cozied up for a twenty-minute recital of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” Theo got her started in the right key and then returned to his place behind the bar.

  “Not to start trouble,” said Theo, “but, Andie: What did you think of Charlotte Holmes and ‘the truth matters’?”

  “Sorry,” she said. “Jack and I try not to talk about his cases.”

  “It’s fine,” said Jack. “Theo’s not really asking about the case. It’s something we all saw on the news.”

  She gave her husband a sobering look. “Jack, you’re not going to like my take on it.”

  “I might surprise you. Let’s hear it.”

  “Honestly, to me it sounded like she drank a bad batch of blue Kool Aid.”

  Theo laughed—too hard to suit Jack.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” asked Jack.

  “I’m not blaming Charlotte,” said Andie. “It’s what all people do when they suddenly change sides. What they say has a pious kernel of truth to it, but the message is really beside the point.”

  “It’s not beside the point. Half the world calls our president the ‘Lyin’ King.’”

  “Yes. But all politicians lie, and at least MacLeod’s lies are contrary to verifiable facts. We know when he’s lying. The same can’t be said of Senator Stahl. He denies he had a gay lover. But is he lying, or is he telling the truth? Nobody knows, except for him and his lover. Potentially, that makes him more dangerous than MacLeod.”

  “It doesn’t make him dangerous at all,” said Jack. “Who cares if he’s gay?”

  “He does. And that’s exactly what makes him so dangerous. If he’s hiding something, he’s vulnerable to blackmail. Not a good thing if you’re president. That’s the whole point of FBI background checks for public officials.”

  “So what is Charlotte supposed to do?” asked Jack. “Wait for an FBI investigation before she casts her vote in the Electoral College?”

  “Maybe that’s not a bad idea.”

  “Now you sound like J. Edgar Hoover,” said Jack.

  “Better than sounding like the B-team on CNN.”

  “Whoa,” said Theo.

  Righley hit an off note on the piano, taking the twinkle out of the proverbial stars.

  Jack took Andie’s hand. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to compare you to J. Edgar.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” said Andie, and then she smiled. “You’re at least as good as the B-team on MSNBC.”

  “Mommy, I need help!” Righley shouted from the piano.

  Andie gave Jack a kiss, then climbed down from the barstool and went to Righley, leaving Jack and Theo alone at the bar.

  Theo topped off Jack’s beer glass. “Damn, dude. Now you know why I like to keep the TV tuned to ESPN.”

  “Bad?”

  “Medium. A bartender sees it all. I can’t count the number of dates I’ve watched blow up over this. It’s like—FOOD FIGHT!—is the new political debate.”

  Jack smiled, then turned serious. “Andie’s right, you know.”

  “About what?”

  “If Senator Stahl is compromised, Charlotte is making a huge mistake.”

  “Does that worry you?”

  Jack glanced at the television. AMATT Media continued, as yet another panel of experts dissected the latest MacLeod tweet. Had there been food on the set, it would have been flying.

  “I’ll tell you what worries me more.”

  “What?”

  Jack looked down into his beer. “Right or wrong, my client may be in over her head.”

  Chapter 13

  It was 7:00 a.m. in Singapore when Gwen Stahl woke to “breaking news” out of Florida. Her husband’s vow to fight on to the Electoral College was gaining traction. Gwen nearly choked on her kaya toast when she saw the banner headline on CNN International: “‘Truth Matters’ to Stahl, Says Florida Elector.”

  “Except in his marriage,” Gwen could have told them.

  “Hi, Mommy,” said Rachel.

  Gwen grabbed the remote and switched off the television. This latest news update had yet to drift into the cesspool of sensationalism, but she couldn’t take the risk. The whole world knew—Gwen had told everyone from her parents to the random passenger sitting next to her on the flight out of Miami—that insulating her nine-year-old daughter from salacious news coverage was the reason she’d agreed to leave the country. It just wasn’t enough for the media to report on an “extramarital affair.” It had to be, over and over again, “rumors of a same-sex extramarital affair.”

  “Good morning, pumpkin,” she said, giving her daughter a hug.

  Rachel took a seat and, with a glance from her mother, removed her elbows from the tabletop. Gwen served her the usual toast with kaya, a sort of jam made from coconut, egg, and pandan leaves. Rachel liked the hint of vanilla flavor.

  “Can I call Daddy after breakfast?”

  Singapore was twelve hours ahead of Miami. Evan hated being interrupted during dinner—unless the call was from someone other than his family. “Let’s wait for him to call. It should be any minute.”

  Gwen went to the kitchen and poured herself another cup of kopi. A decent cup of coffee was one of the many things she missed in Singapore. Most Americans found kopi to be a thin and unremarkable brew, and drinking it required Gwen to rid her mind of the fact that it was made from partly digested coffee cherries eaten and defecated by the Asian palm civet. Gwen had become quite the expert at putting things out of her mind.

  The phone rang, and Rachel sprang from her chair. “I’ll get it!”

  Gwen followed her to the living room. Rachel grabbed the phone from the coffee table and answered with excitement in her voice.

  “Hi, Daddy!”

  Gwen watched, trying to hide the sadness in her smile.

  Rachel covered the phone and looked at her mother in a way that hit her like a glimpse into the teenage future. “Mom, privacy, please?”

  Gwen wondered if the request had been prompted by something her father had said to her. Gwen shrugged it off, opened the sliding glass door, and stepped out onto the terrace.

  The view from forty stories up was the best thing about their downtown Singapore apartment, though it reminded Gwen so much of Miami’s storied financial distric
t that it only made her homesick. It wasn’t just the number of high-rises in such a small area—more than eighty buildings exceeded four hundred feet—that harked back to Miami’s breathtaking beauty. It was the glimpses of blue-green sea through the fifty-story slits of airspace between buildings. The glimmer of chrome and glass in the tropical sun. The glisten of infinity pools atop towering hotels. Both cities even had man-made islands offshore, though that is where the similarity ended. The colorful Art Deco buildings of Miami Beach were built on sand dredged up by the Army Corps of Engineers. In Singapore, the man-made smear of mud offshore was home to the petrochemical industry, so crowded with spindly, cracking towers and squat oil-storage tanks that the landscape was a proverbial billboard of the biggest names in the business—BASF, ExxonMobil, Vopak, and more.

  Gwen slid open the glass door and checked on Rachel.

  “It’s okay, Daddy,” Rachel was saying into the phone. “I know, I know.”

  Gwen detected a hint of sadness in her little voice. She wanted to ask Rachel what was the matter, but the last time she’d interrupted a call from Evan it had triggered an across-the-globe argument over the to-be-defined boundaries of what was strictly between father and daughter and none of Mommy’s business. Gwen stepped back onto the terrace.

  Over the past few weeks, Gwen had done plenty of soul searching while sitting in the patio chair, taking in this view from the terrace. The FDLE had fully accommodated her request for a leave of absence so that she could travel with her husband’s campaign. She understood that she wasn’t the candidate, but as a trained psychiatrist who treated violent offenders in a psychiatric hospital, she’d thought someone might be curious about her views on mental health or treatment of the mentally ill. Right up to the convention, however, media interest was on the order of “Who designed your dress?” or “Which school will Rachel attend if the family moves to Washington?” It was awful. Or at least she’d thought it was awful—until after the convention, when the story broke, and Gwen longed for the good ol’ mind-numbing days.

  The glass door slid open. Rachel stepped out onto the terrace and sat in her mother’s lap.

  “Are you sad, pumpkin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you tell Daddy you miss your friends?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He thinks maybe we can come back in January.”

  “January?”

  “Maybe.”

  Gwen suppressed her anger. She and Rachel were absolutely not spending Christmas in Singapore alone, away from family and friends.

  “I miss Nanny, too,” said Rachel. “Nanny” had moved in to help with Rachel after Gwen returned to work. It had broken Rachel’s heart to hear that Nanny had gone back to Colombia.

  “Go get dressed, Rachel. Mommy needs to take care of something.”

  Rachel slid out of her mother’s lap and left through the other sliding door that led directly to the master suite. Gwen dialed her husband on her cell phone.

  “Hello, Gwen,” he said in a flat tone.

  “Apparently you don’t take hints very well,” she said. “Did you not get the message that Rachel misses her friends, her school—her life?”

  “Now is not a good time for you to come back.”

  “And whose fault is that?”

  “Can we not play the blame game, Gwen?”

  “It’s not about blame. It’s about our daughter. I’m here because it was best to get away from . . . from everything. But it’s been over two months now. That’s long enough.”

  “Can you at least wait until the Electoral College vote?”

  “No! That’s three more weeks.”

  “Gwen, please. I wouldn’t say this if it wasn’t in everybody’s best interest.”

  “By ‘everybody’ you mean your campaign.”

  “No. I mean you as well. It’s getting very intense. My people tell me that MacLeod will pull out all the stops between now and December fourteenth to get to the bottom of who—well, you know the rumors as well as anyone.”

  “Ya think?”

  “I’m just saying that if you come back before the Electoral College meets, they will pounce all over you.”

  Gwen considered it, but not for long. “None of this is my fault, Evan.”

  “I know it’s not.”

  “Then deal with it. We’re coming home. Be out of the house by Friday.”

  She hung up the phone, breathed out her anger, and then glanced out at the skyline that reminded her of home, wiping away the tear that was rolling down her cheek.

  Chapter 14

  Charlotte waited at the curb outside Madeline Chisel’s office.

  Services like Uber and Lyft were a crapshoot in a college town like Tallahassee, where drivers lined the back seats of their cars with protective towels that too often reeked of frat boys tossing their cookies. Charlotte took a chance, and the driver showed up in a shiny blue pickup truck, which made her smile. It was the closest she’d felt to home since returning from Miami. Her concealed-carry holster was uncomfortable when sitting, so she tucked it away in her box of belongings from Madeline, loaded the box and her carry-on in the small back seat of the extended cab, and climbed into the passenger seat.

  “Nice truck, Tex,” she said, feeling like she should literally be riding shotgun.

  “How’d you know I was from Texas?”

  With a jerk of her head Charlotte pointed out the tinted decal across the rear window: the Lone Star flag.

  “Exhibit A,” she said.

  “Guilty as charged,” he said, turning on the accent. Charlotte found it charming in a Matthew McConaughey kind of way, but her gaze carried past him, all the way across the street to the shadowy figure standing on the sidewalk just outside the glow of the streetlamp. The lighthearted moment was over, and Charlotte froze.

  “You okay?” asked Tex.

  It was that same guy again—the one she’d seen standing by her mailbox outside her house, wearing the same camouflage jacket and baseball cap. She was suddenly thinking of the death threats against the elector in Michigan.

  “Just drive, okay?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  Tex pulled away from the curb. They were quickly out of the business district, and Charlotte glanced several times over her shoulder as the avenue turned darker, more residential.

  “What’d you do, rob a bank or something?” asked Tex.

  “What? No. I just—”

  “Somebody following you?”

  Charlotte didn’t answer.

  “Boyfriend?” asked Tex, giving his V-8 a little more gas. “We can outrun him.”

  “No, nothing like that.” Charlotte checked the speedometer. He was doing almost fifty in a thirty-mile-per-hour zone. “You don’t have to speed.”

  Tex glanced over. “Hey, aren’t you that lady who was on TV today,” he said, pronouncing “TV” as if it were “Stevie.”

  Charlotte had no interest in that kind of celebrity. “What lady?”

  He took another gander. “Yeah. That was you. No wonder you’re lookin’ over your shoulder. Woo-wee, you got folks pissed off.”

  Charlotte wasn’t sure if it was on the “woo” or the “wee,” but she smelled bourbon. “Have you been drinking?”

  “Me? Nah.”

  “Could you slow down, please?”

  “I just told ya, I ain’t been drinkin’.”

  “You’re speeding.”

  Tex just smiled and speed-dialed from the controls on his steering wheel. The LCD screen on the dashboard flashed the name “Jerry,” and he answered on speaker. Tex shouted back much louder than necessary.

  “Jerry! Guess who I got in the truck with me.”

  “No idea,” his friend said.

  “Lemme give you a hint. Hashtag ‘Elitist Bitch.’”

  Charlotte felt a chill. Were these guys at my house?

  “You shittin’ me?” said Jerry.

  “Nope,” he said, glancing at Charl
otte. “Say hello to Jerry.”

  The smell of bourbon returned with Tex’s hel-low. “Just stop the truck and let me out here,” said Charlotte.

  “That is her!” said Jerry.

  “Told ya!”

  “I’m dead serious,” said Charlotte. “Stop the truck and let me out.”

  “What do you think, Jerry? Should I stop and let her out?”

  “Hell no, dude. Do the world a favor and run your truck into a tree.”

  The men roared with laughter. “That’d make me a hero, wouldn’t it?”

  More laughter. “Yeah, it would,” said Jerry.

  Tex floored it, and his pickup lunged forward with so much thrust that Charlotte’s head slammed against the headrest.

  “Stop!” she shouted, but Tex wasn’t listening. The truck came up quickly on the set of taillights ahead of them. Tex maneuvered around the slow-moving vehicle like a NASCAR driver, only to come upon a van pulling out of a gas station. Tex howled with excitement as he steered around it, tires squealing.

  “Stop the damn truck!” Charlotte shouted.

  “You still votin’ for Stahl?”

  “I said stop!”

  “Got it up to eighty, Jerry. Still votin’ for the homo!”

  “Go to ninety! Make her change!”

  Charlotte pulled her cell phone from her pocket. “I’m dialing nine-one-one.”

  “No, I’m on probation!”

  Tex swung his arm and knocked the phone from her hands. It disappeared somewhere between the passenger seat and the console. Charlotte was digging for it when she noticed the sharp curve in the road ahead.

  “Slow down!”

  Tex veered left to make the turn, but his truck was going way too fast. A horn blasted as the pickup raced through the stop sign. Charlotte’s heart was in her throat.