Senator

by Richard Bowker

  She looked at me. "Have you told the police you were having an affair with Amanda Taylor?" she asked.

  So much for normality. "No, I haven't," I admitted.

  "So you've been lying to them."

  "Um, I have to empty this barrel. I'll be right back." Kathleen had been brooding, obviously. So what could I do about it? I emptied the leaves onto the ground and returned out front. "Yes, I've been lying to them," I said.

  "What if they come and question me? Should I tell them the truth? You told me you were having an affair, remember?"

  "They won't question you, Kathleen," I responded gently.

  "But suppose they do?"

  "Then you should tell them the truth."

  "Why is it okay for you to lie to the police and not me?"

  I leaned against my rake. Kathleen's cheeks were ruddy in the cold air. Her jeans had holes in the knees. The laces of her sneakers were untied. Was that the fashion, I wondered, or just her sloppiness? My love for her was heart-stopping. "I didn't say that what I'm doing is okay," I replied. "I would like for you to be a better person than I am, that's all. I'm just sorry I can't set you a better example."

  "I'd be a better person by turning you in?"

  "You wouldn't be turning me in. I didn't murder the woman."

  "But the police would arrest you if they could prove you were having an affair with her. That's why you're lying to them, right?"

  "Yeah, I guess so. But your job isn't to protect me from the consequences of my sins."

  "Then what is my job?"

  "To rake leaves. To obey your father. To tie your shoelaces."

  Kathleen looked down and scuffed the ground with her sneaker. "Sometimes I just don't feel like growing up," she said.

  "Sometimes I know how you feel," I said.

  She knelt and tied her shoelaces. A car came up the driveway.

  Not an ordinary car. A gold Jaguar, low and sleek. Backlit by the setting sun, it looked like a chariot of fire. I figured I knew who it belonged to.

  "Nice car," Kathleen breathed as it pulled up next to us.

  "Do you have some homework to do?" I asked.

  "Nope."

  "Then go play with your fractals."

  She continued to gawk at the car. "Who's that?"

  "He's the new hired hand. He'll finish up the raking."

  Kathleen stuck her tongue out at me and returned to the house. The Jaguar's door opened, and Paul Everson got out.

  He was impeccably dressed, as usual, from his mohair topcoat to his tasseled Gucci loafers. I held the rake out to him. "I could use some help," I said.

  He grinned and walked toward me. "Was that Kathleen?" he asked.

  "I think she wants to marry you. Or at least go for a ride in your car."

  "Anytime, Jim. Anytime."

  Not on your life, I thought. "So what brings you to my happy Hingham home?" I asked.

  "Harold White said I'd find you here. I have news."

  News? I became a little excited. He wouldn't show up in person unless it was good news. Had he actually come through for me? "What is it?"

  He took a tape out of the pocket of his topcoat, and I became more excited still. "Sid," he said.

  Sid? It took a moment for me to remember Sid. The other witness to Bobby Finn's atrocity in Vietnam. I didn't want to know about Bobby Finn. "How is Sid?" I asked.

  "Not well," Everson replied. "He's in a VA hospital in Fresno. Liver trouble, I understand. But he remembers our governor all right. And what he remembers supports Larry Spalding's account. You've got him, Jim."

  "That's great," I managed to say.

  Everson stared at me. My lack of interest was not hard to discern. "You've won the election," he said. "It's in the bag. Even with the stuff that's been happening lately."

  "Right."

  His stare turned angry, then exasperated. "You're not going to use this, are you?" he said.

  I shrugged. "I haven't decided."

  "Well, you won't get out of it easy, because I gave Harold a copy of the tape, too. He's not going to let you simply forget about it."

  "Harold won't do anything with this if I tell him not to."

  Everson kicked at the leaves with one of his expensive loafers. He shook his head, as if despairing of me. "Why are you destroying yourself, Jim?" he asked softly. "The Harvard Bust—why did you have to bring that up in the debate? That was a lifetime ago."

  "It was a big event for both of us."

  "So what? Jesus, I'm no politician, but even I'd know better than to talk about the police beating up a kid in a wheelchair."

  I scooped up some leaves and put them in the barrel. I didn't need political advice from Paul Everson. "Find out anything about Danny's tape?" I asked him.

  "Forget about the tape!" he said, throwing up his hands. "There is no tape. Look, you don't want to hear this from me, but—well, I understand. I know what you're going through. And believe me, you have to get beyond it. And fast. What's done is done. Life isn't going to wait for you to decide that it's okay to go on living."

  What the hell was he talking about? What did he understand about me? I could imagine him knowing the truth about Amanda and me, with all his spies. I could even imagine him knowing about Jackie Scanlon. But could he know that my wife was having an affair with my best friend? Could he know that my father was afraid of dying and my brother was afraid of living? Could he know that the man I respected most in the Senate was just giving up, unable to see the point of it all anymore?

  It didn't matter. I didn't need advice from this man; I needed favors. I thought of Larry Spalding, guarding one of Everson's many companies. "You know my brother Danny," I said.

  "Of course."

  "He's an alcoholic, more or less, and he just got fired from his job, but he's not stupid, and he's not a bad guy. He's got four kids. I was wondering if you could find him a spot somewhere."

  "No problem, Jim."

  "Maybe something in sales—but not liquor sales. And we've got to do it without him finding out I'm involved."

  "Don't worry. These things can be made to look completely innocent."

  "You do this often?" I asked.

  "For friends, sure." He paused. "I've done terrible things, you know, but that doesn't make me a terrible person."

  I didn't know how to respond to that. "Thanks," I said. I scooped up some more leaves.

  Everson stood there for a moment, as if wondering if he should say more, and then he returned to his golden car and drove away.

  I lugged the barrel behind the house and emptied it. Kathleen intercepted me as I trudged back out front. "Kevin Feeney's on the phone," she said. "He says it's urgent."

  What now? I wondered. Maybe Harold had told him what we had on Finn, and he was calling to share the triumph with me. Poor Kevin. I went inside and picked up the phone in my office. "Yeah, Kevin."

  "Jim, you'll never guess," he said. He was calling me Jim again. His voice was quivering with excitement.

  "What's that, Kevin?"

  "Jim, we just found out who murdered Amanda Taylor."

  Chapter 25

  The Lynn Arms. Even the name sounded depressing, and I was not surprised when I found it wedged between a plumbing supply house and a driver's ed school, on a dismal side street near the center of that dismal city. It was a narrow brick building, with the name inscribed over the doorway and two small weathered concrete lions on either side of the entrance. Someone had blackened the eyes of both lions. The walk was littered with Doritos wrappers, a supermarket advertising supplement, the remains of a broken beer bottle. The place had once been genteel, perhaps, when Lynn was thriving and people wanted to live downtown. Now the stores were closed and everyone had fled to the suburbs, and you'd live in such a place only if you had to. I shivered and went inside.

  Surprisingly, the inner door was locked, and I had to ring the bell of the man I was looking for. The intercom didn't work, apparently, or else he didn't care who he let in; he simply buzzed
the door open, and I walked up the steep stairway.

  I heard TV noises as I climbed: guns firing and tires squealing, a gleeful laugh track. A woman shouted in rapid-fire Spanish. I smelled onions being fried. A cardboard Halloween skeleton was taped to a door. I had forgotten about Halloween.

  The man I had come to see was waiting for me on the third floor—older but still easy to recognize, even in these surroundings. His thatch of hair was white now, but it still fell over his forehead in that way women (I am told) found endearingly boyish. The narrow face, the Roman nose, the mouth twisted into a half-sneer or half-smile, depending on your point of view: all that hadn't changed.

  But he had changed, in ways that couldn't be blamed merely on the passage of time. In the old days who would ever have caught Tom Donato wearing a shapeless acrylic sweater—with a hole in it no less? And the way he stood was different. He had always been on the balls of his feet back then—because he wanted to look a little taller, perhaps, or because he had so much energy pent up inside him that he simply couldn't stand still. Now that energy was gone, and his body sagged. The energy had left his eyes, too, the eyes that had once sparkled with the joy of doing battle. It was depressing.

  Still, when he caught sight of me, his eyes did seem to come to life a little, and he started to laugh. "Well, if it isn't Senator O'Connor, paying a call," he said. "What a wonderful surprise."

  "Hi, Tom," I said. We didn't shake hands. He just stared at me for a long moment, and I began to wonder if he really believed I was there.

  "Come on inside," he said finally. "Let me show you my spectacular dwelling place."

  I followed him into his apartment. There was a tiny kitchen to the left, and one large room straight ahead, crammed with a bed, a TV, a couple of armchairs, and a roll-top desk. The bed faced a walled-over fireplace; on the mantel were photographs of three smiling teenage boys. The bed was unmade; the TV flickered soundlessly. In the corner a parakeet whistled and chirped in its cage.

  "Excuse the mess," he said. "Maid's day off, wouldn't you know. I've given up the booze, but I think I have a bottle here somewhere—" He went into the kitchen and started rummaging in a cabinet.

  "That's fine, Tom," I said. "I'll have whatever you're having."

  He nodded and poured us each a small glass of orange juice. Tom Donato drinking orange juice! I followed him into the bedroom, and we sat down in the armchairs. He reached over and switched the TV off; the parakeet continued to chirp merrily. "Cheers," he said, raising his glass to me.

  "Cheers."

  He smiled and put his glass down. "I notice that things don't seem to be going well in your campaign," he remarked. "So I assume you're here looking for my endorsement."

  He still had his sense of humor. But the time was long past when we could trade quips. "You know Kevin Feeney?" I asked.

  "Of course. How is Kevin?"

  "You know Amanda Taylor?"

  He shrugged, still smiling. "I read the newspapers. I keep up, God knows why."

  "I had Kevin hire a private investigator to look into Amanda Taylor's murder," I said. "Just in case the police investigation was a little—well, slanted."

  "With the Monsignor in charge? My, you're a suspicious person."

  I shrugged. "The guy didn't come up with much to begin with. But Kevin had this theory, you see. He thought Amanda Taylor was murdered by someone trying to get back at me. Someone who hoped the murder would somehow destroy my career the way I had destroyed theirs. So Kevin got hold of photographs of people he thought were likely suspects, and he gave them to the private eye, who started showing them around. No one in the apartment building recognized any of them, but the UPS guy did. Remembered you going into the apartment building while he was there. He even talked to you, shook your hand. Turns out he had a cousin who got a job from you once. Small world, huh, Tom?"

  My host kept smiling.

  "So what do you think of Kevin's theory, Tom?" I went on. " 'Donato's the one, Jim,' he says to me this afternoon. 'After all, who fell further? Who's got more reason to hate you—except maybe the Monsignor?' Thomas Donato, senate president, the most powerful man in the commonwealth back then, according to some people. Perhaps the next governor. But then the ambitious young AG decides to go after him and catches him taking a bribe. And he ends up Thomas Donato, jailbird, the latest symbol of political corruption in Massachusetts. Does that make Thomas Donato, ex-con, capable of murdering to get his revenge on the ambitious AG who destroyed him?"

  My host downed the rest of his orange juice. "Sounds like a pretty good theory to me, Senator. I'd have this guy Donato arrested. Send him back to prison where scum like that belong. What do you think?"

  "I don't know. I'm reserving judgment on everything nowadays."

  "And that's why you're here: to interview the suspect in person? You're pretty fearless. What if I decide to kill you, too?"

  I took Liz's gun out of the inside pocket of my jacket. "The possibility occurred to me," I said.

  Donato laughed. "Good old Jim O'Connor. Always prepared. Always has the angles covered."

  "So what were you doing there, Tom?"

  "Same as everyone else apparently: She was interviewing me about you. She offered to come visit me here, but the maid was on vacation that week, wouldn't you know, so I said I'd go into the city instead. Feels good to get back to the city. Of course, I don't have the parking space behind the State House anymore. But then again I don't really need it because I don't have a car either. This was about a week before the woman was killed, though. No one saw me there the day of the murder, right?"

  "Kevin's theory is that you got the idea the first time you went there, then returned another day to actually commit the crime."

  Donato shook his head. "Kevin's a treasure. I used to have aides like him. A couple of them still think you framed me."

  "Did you murder Amanda Taylor, Tom?"

  Donato got up and went back to the kitchenette. I studied the parakeet, which hadn't shut up since I arrived. I wondered why Donato liked keeping something in a cage. Had he turned into the birdman of MCI Concord? Maybe he wanted to treat a prisoner better than he himself had been treated. He returned with the carton of orange juice and offered to refill my glass. I shook my head. He poured some more into his own glass, then sat back down in his armchair and leaned forward. His eyes were totally alive now, staring into mine with all the intensity of the politician I had once known. "Senator, I have no desire to destroy you," he said. "And if I did, it'd be a lot easier for me than committing murder. All I'd have to do is pick up the phone, call my old buddy Francis Cavanaugh, and tell him about you and Jackie Scanlon."

  I hadn't expected that. I returned his gaze, but I could feel myself start to sweat. "Did Amanda tell you about Jackie Scanlon?" I asked him finally.

  "Nope. A guy named Tom Glenn did."

  Tom Glenn. The man who had walked off with the IRA's money. This could not have been worse. "Where did you meet him? In prison?"

  Donato nodded. "He was in for insurance fraud. Funny the friends you make in prison. Of course, we had mutual acquaintances, more or less."

  "What did he tell you?"

  "Well, it was a great story. It started out with him having some guns to sell; I think you probably know that part. What you might not know is that he went to the IRA people first. Jackie Scanlon found out because he finds out about everything that goes on in Southie. And he also found out that Glenn was an old Navy buddy of your brother's. So he got together with Glenn and the IRA people and offered them a proposition. He'd front the money for the guns if they'd do things his way. It was too good a deal for anyone to pass up, so they agreed."

  Donato sipped his juice, a satisfied look on his face. I looked blankly at the gun in my hand. Poor Danny. Poor me. "So it was all a scam?" I managed to say.

  "I'm afraid so, Senator. They arranged it so your brother would think he was in the hole four hundred thousand dollars to a bunch of desperate terrorists, and Jackie Scanlon
was the only man who could save him."

  "Four hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money to spend, even for my influence," I said.

  "That was the beauty of it, though," Donato replied. "It didn't cost Scanlon anywhere near that much. The first shipment of guns was the only one he bought; they were the only weapons Glenn had. He loans the IRA the four hundred thousand. The IRA hands it over to Glenn for the bogus second shipment, and he hands it back to Scanlon, minus a few thousand for his trouble. Then Scanlon hands the same money over to your brother in return for his confession, your brother hands it over to the IRA to save his life—he thinks—and they hand it back to Scanlon. The IRA gets their guns, Glenn gets his money, and Scanlon gets you. Pretty neat, huh?"

  Pretty neat. I sighed. The big adventure of Danny's life, and it was all a con game to trap me. "So how come you didn't tell anyone when you found out about it?" I asked.

  Donato leaned back and ran a hand through his white hair. "It occurred to me, Senator. Oh, yes, it occurred to me. But for one thing, I didn't have any proof that you were involved. Glenn just knew this was how the scheme was supposed to work. He wasn't around to find out if you really took the bait. From reading the newspapers it was pretty obvious to me that you did, but I wasn't sure anyone would believe a couple of convicts, one of whom clearly had a grudge against you."

  "Could have done some damage, at least."

  "Sure, but here's the thing. In a strange sort of way Glenn's story actually made me like you. At least it proved you were human, and maybe only half a jerk, doing that for your brother. I mean, it's not that different from what I did. Sure I took a kickback to get that courthouse built. But why? I'll tell you why: because I'm not a fuckin' Kennedy. No one gave me a trust fund so I could be a public servant; no one gave me a damn thing. Twenty-five years in politics, and I was making less than some kid a year out of Harvard Law. So I ended up with three sons in college and a mortgage and a wife who never worked a day in her life, and the bills were killing me. I had to provide for my family, and damned if I could figure out how to do it on the salary I got paid in the state senate. I had to make a choice—just like you.