Then Chris said softly, “Jesus Christ!”
Neither of them spoke for a time. Chris got up and mixed Gus another drink, and opened himself another beer.
“So why are you telling me all this stuff now?” Chris said.
“Because I’m turning myself in to you, Special Prosecutor. I’m blowing the fucking whistle on the whole fucking deal.”
“You could have done that anytime,” Chris said.
Gus shrugged.
“You’re doing it now because Flaherty’s going to fire me.”
“Well,” Gus said, “Patrick’s dead. Butchie goes up for money laundering. The gang wars are over. The special prosecutor did a hell of a job. Flaherty can’t fire you.”
“I can’t let you go to jail,” Chris said.
Gus grinned briefly. “I can cop a plea with the special prosecutor.”
Chris shook his head.
“Walk away from it,” Chris said. “You must have money. Get the fuck out of here. Go to Seattle. I’ll do something about Tom Winslow. I can’t let you just blow yourself up for me.”
He was pacing slowly back and forth in his narrow kitchen, his jacket off, his hands in his back pockets. Gus nodded. Chris paused at the counter and gestured at the bottle of Scotch. Gus shook his head.
Chris said, “Me either,” and went back to pacing.
“What about Ma?” he said.
“She sees this as something I’ve done to her. I knew she would.”
“You’ve talked to her.”
Gus nodded.
“She can’t”—Chris tossed his hands—“she can’t deal with this.”
“I’ve left her,” Gus said.
Chris paused in his pacing again. He looked at his own reflection in the dark window over the sink. He shook his head.
“Well, I gotta give you credit,” Chris said. “You decide to revise things, you go full fucking bore.”
“There’s another woman,” Gus said.
“Your friend,” Chris said.
“No … Laura Winslow.”
Chris turned slowly from the window. He took his hands from his back pockets and folded them across his chest as he gazed at his father.
“Laura Winslow,” he said.
“Un-huh.”
“Grace’s mother.”
“Yeah.”
“The wife of the serial killer.”
“Yeah.”
Chris stared at him and then began slowly to smile. The smile got wider and became a soft laugh and grew. Chris laughed harder. He bent over with laughter. Tears rolled down his cheeks. He was having trouble catching his breath. Gus heard the edge of hysteria in it. He sat and waited. Slowly Chris got control. He wiped his eyes and then turned to the sink and splashed cold water on his face. He dried his hands and face on a paper towel and threw the towel in the wastebasket under the sink.
“Sorry,” he said.
He shook his head.
“This family …” he said.
“Yeah,” Gus said. “And that family. Three generations now.”
“And what happens between you and Laura?” Chris said.
“Nothing good,” Gus said.
“Be hard on Grace too,” Chris said.
“Should pretty well sew up Flaherty’s election, though,” Gus said.
“My opponent’s father is a serial killer? Yeah, that’ll play,” Chris said. “Maybe we could just do him on the money laundering thing, and not mention the pedophilia. It would get him out of circulation.”
Gus shook his head.
“It would be in his own best interest to cover that part up,” Chris said. “And you don’t have to tell the world you covered up a murder.”
“And let two more happen.”
Chris began to pace again, hands in his back pockets, looking at the wide boards of the yellow pine flooring.
“We could rig this,” he said. “You turn state’s evidence. Robinson’ll plea-bargain. Flaherty will love this. He’ll climb all over Robinson to do it.”
“No,” Gus said. “You’re starting to trim. You can’t trim.”
“Why the fuck not?” Chris said. “You trimmed. Christ, you slashed.”
“That’s why,” Gus said. “You’re all that’s left.”
“Left of what?”
“Left that matters,” Gus said.
Chris stared again at his father for a silent moment. Then he began slowly to nod.
“What about Tom Winslow?” Chris said.
“Tom’s dead,” Gus said.
Chris walked around the table and stood behind his father. He bent over and put his arm around his father’s shoulder and rested his cheek on the top of Gus’s head.
“What a fucking mess,” he said.
Flaherty
Mary Alice was leaning on the wall near the window, with her arms folded, and one ankle crossed over the other. Flaherty was behind his desk, his swivel chair turned sideways and tilted, one foot on the lower drawer. He was wearing a dark blue double breasted suit that went elegantly with his high color and his silver hair. He glanced at himself reflected in the long mirror opposite. Senator Flaherty, he thought. Chris Sheridan was there looking young and athletic, and Kendall Robinson, the DA, looking very Harvard, and Fiora Gardello, looking determinedly equal to anybody.
“Okay,” Chris said. “Your gang war is over, and your serial child-killing is finished, and you’re going to be the junior senator from Massachusetts.”
“Are you aware that Cabot Winslow withdrew this morning?” Flaherty said. His voice was neutral.
Chris ignored him.
“What I’m after,” Chris said, talking to Kendall Robinson, “is a deal for my old man.”
“No deals,” Flaherty said. “He goes down too.”
Chris continued to ignore Flaherty, talking to Robinson.
“He handed us this thing,” Chris said. “Wasn’t for him we’d be floundering around on this until the twelfth of never.”
“He’s a crooked cop,” Flaherty said. “With all due regard, Chris, he’s guilty as sin.”
Chris turned his gaze on Flaherty. It was almost like Gus’s, Flaherty noticed. Not as crazy, but still uncomfortable.
“And he got you the election,” Chris said.
“He didn’t do that for me. He wanted you to be a hero.”
“And I’ll be one,” Chris said. “‘Incorruptible son arrests own father.’ And I’ll be a media darling and I’ll be on all the talk shows, and every chance I get, I will try to stick it into you and break it off.”
“You think you can scare me?” Flaherty said.
“I can appeal to your pragmatic sense,” Chris said.
Mary Alice left the wall and walked to the coffee table. She took a small notepad out of her purse, and wrote something, and tore the sheet from the pad, and folded it in two.
“He gave it all to us,” Fiora Gardello said to Flaherty. “And he’ll testify.”
“Unless, of course, his testimony is self-incriminating,” Chris said. “In which case, of course, I can’t let him do it.”
“This is a conflict of interest,” Flaherty said. “You can’t be my prosecutor and his lawyer.”
“Quitting this job will be easier than anything I’ve ever done before,” Chris said.
“He has a point, Parnell,” Robinson said. “If we’re to get convictions we need Gus’s testimony, and we’ll have to deal with the self-incrimination problem.”
Mary Alice walked to Flaherty’s desk, and handed him the slip of paper, and winked at him and walked back to her post by the window. No one paid attention. She knew they wouldn’t. They were used to her, the trusted gal Friday, barely visible.
Holding the unopened note, Flaherty said, “The sonova bitch sat right there and drank my Scotch and lied his fucking brains out.”
He opened the note and read it. The note said: Take the deal or the press gets a detailed description of your cunnilingus skills on the office couch.
“You want
his testimony, you work with me,” Chris said. He knew he was bluffing. His father would testify anyway. But nobody here was capable of understanding that. It was a workable bluff.
Flaherty finished reading the note and looked up at Mary Alice standing by the window. His face had no expression on it. Mary Alice smiled at him. He folded the note back in half and slipped it into his inside jacket pocket.
“What do you think about this, Mary Alice?”
“You’re an old hand, Parnell, whatever you think is the best course.”
Flaherty looked at Chris.
“I don’t like disloyalty,” Flaherty said. “And I don’t like threats. But I am paid to do what’s best for the people of this city.”
Chris was quiet. He could feel the direction changing. Flaherty turned to Kendall Robinson.
“You want the deal?” Flaherty said.
“Fiora,” Robinson said. “You’ll prosecute. It’s your call.”
“Sure,” she said. “Immunity.”
Chris nodded.
“Your word?” he said to Flaherty.
“I’ll abide by the recommendation of my district attorney and my prosecutor,” Flaherty said.
“Your word,” Chris said.
Their eyes locked for a moment. Then Flaherty smiled.
“Hell, yes, Chris-boy. You’ve got my word.”
Chris said, “Thank you,” and stood.
No one else spoke.
“My father and I will be in touch,” Chris said. He looked at Mary Alice and smiled and turned and walked out of the office.
In the elevator, riding down, Chris thought, What was in the note?
1994 Voice-Over
“Gus gets immunity for testifying,” I said. “Your brother withdraws. I’m a great hero of the people for fifteen minutes. And Flaherty gets elected.”
“And my father is dead and my family is disgraced.”
“That too,” I said.
“And you ran.”
“I like to think of it as getting some distance,” I said. “But ran will do. I called you once, you didn’t return the call. I was almost relieved. I couldn’t think what I could say about all of it, anyway. So I went to Dublin.”
“There wouldn’t be much you could say, would there?”
“No,” I said. “And I see that I’m not the only one with some rage to work on.”
Grace nodded. “Yes, I know. I’ve been working on that. I also know that the calamity was not in fact of your doing, or mine.”
“Do you also feel it?” I said.
“Get ’em by the head,” Grace said. “The soul will follow.”
I smiled at her. The storm was beginning to settle, the snow kept coming, but the thunder was maybe more distant now, and the time between the light and the sound was increasing.
“You know, a little sort of sidebar. Flaherty was always so certain that your brother, being what Flaherty called a Goo Goo, if elected would destroy Flaherty’s city. And when Flaherty gets elected to the Senate he leaves the deputy mayor to fill out his term.”
“Piper?”
“Yes,” I said. “Look up Goo Goo in a dictionary and there’s a picture of Winston Piper.”
“So we got the city after all,” Grace said.
“I guess you did.”
We were quiet, like survivors looking over the field where the battle had been fought. I could hear Grace’s breath as she took in some air and let it out slowly. It was late. We were tired, but neither of us seemed to have arrived at anyplace where we could stop.
“After the shootout?” Grace said. “With, ah, what’s his name?”
“Patrick Malloy,” I said.
“After that, why did Gus leave you? What did he do?”
“He never said,” I answered, “but he had to get clear with my mother. It’s like once the purge started it had to be complete before he could sit and talk.”
“So he went and made his peace with Peggy.”
“Yeah,” I said. “His peace, not hers—she’ll never forgive him.”
“Even though he did it for you?”
“Ma doesn’t work that way. Everything is about her.”
Grace reached toward me and patted my hand.
“My father was a child molester,” she said. “And I had a better deal than you did.”
“Ma’d be pleased to hear that,” I said. “There was another thing, I think, unless I’m just thinking pretty.”
“What?”
“He wanted me to have the chance to be in charge. He did whatever he did with my mother, she won’t talk about it, and then he just went over to my house and sat on the steps and waited for me.”
“And did you know what it was you were in charge of?”
“I knew we were arresting them for money laundering. I knew my father had evidence. I didn’t know what.”
“You didn’t know about my father yet.”
“No.”
“It’s so odd, to think of my father like that, as a—a monster. I didn’t really know him. He was so remote. He stayed so far away from me.”
“Probably why,” I said. “He knew he was a pedophile. He didn’t dare come near his daughter.”
“Isn’t that crazy. That’s what I resented. He seemed to give all his attention to Cabot. I was so jealous of Cabot, so angry at my father. And he did the best thing for me he could have done.”
“It’s why you weren’t destroyed, I guess.”
“Yes, and my mother cared about me. She made me feel that I mattered.”
“Maybe he stayed away from you because you mattered,” Chris said.
“I know. Maybe he was being as good a parent as he could be, given what he was.”
“The poor bastard.”
“What a dreadful world,” Grace said. Her face was angry. “Where you have to give up what you love to save it.”
“And you’re only able to get what you need by not needing it,” I said.
“Makes one believe in a grand design, doesn’t it?” Grace said.
“‘If design govern in a thing so small,’” I said.
Mary Alice
Winston Piper didn’t look right to her in what she thought of as Flaherty’s office. When he stood at the window and looked down at Quincy Market, his pants legs reached to the anklebone.
They may know how to conserve money, Mary Alice thought, but they sure don’t know how to dress. She sat on the couch. Piper turned from the window and went to the desk. They all look as if their wives cut their hair.
“So, my little chickadee,” Piper said. W. C. Fields was his favorite, and he was sure he did a convincing impression of him. “You’re not in Washington with Parnell.”
Mary Alice shrugged and smiled.
“Well,” Piper said, “Parnell’s loss is certainly my gain.”
“It certainly is,” Mary Alice said.
“I know you had Parnell’s confidence, and I want you to know that you have mine.”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” Mary Alice said. I wonder if he’s hinting for a blowjob.
She smiled. Piper smiled back.
“My friends call me Win,” he said. “No need for formality.”
“Sure, Win.” He’s hinting.
Piper sat down. He was wearing a gray suit with narrow lapels. The suit jacket seemed pinched around the shoulders. His tie was narrow and was narrowly patterned with blue and gray stripes. Behind the desk he sat straight up, both feet on the floor, his back not touching the chair. He drank a sip of coffee—black, no sugar, decaffeinated.
“What do you think of the way I’m portrayed in the press, Mary Alice?”
“The press is full of overeducated Paddies,” Mary Alice said, “that still want to be Irish homeboys. And one way to stay loyal to your roots is to make fun of affluent Protestants.”
“Like me.”
“Exactly like you.”
Piper looked into his coffee cup for a while as he thought about what Mary Alice had said.
“I
like this job. I’m going to run for a full term this fall,” Piper said. “I even have a campaign slogan. Win with Win!”
“Great slogan,” Mary Alice said. “Now what you need to do is something that will get the anti-Wasps on your side without alienating the Wasps.”
“I’ll be guided by your recommendation. I know Parnell counted you among his most trusted advisors.”
“Most trusted,” Mary Alice said.
Piper stood and walked across the room and sat beside her on the couch. His face was bright red. There was a hint of sweat on his forehead. He put his hand on her thigh.
Mary Alice grinned at him.
“Perks of office, Winston?”
“I”—Piper cleared his throat—“I admire you very much, Mary Alice. I’d like it a lot if you were to be my trusted advisor too,” he said.
Mary Alice nodded, still grinning.
“Shall I just lie back here on the couch and we can advise and consent for a bit?”
The sweat was clearly visible on Piper’s high forehead.
“I don’t want you to misjudge me, Mary Alice.”
“No problem, Winston,” she said. “I’m a modern gal. Just a collegial toss on the couch. We may do it again. But fun is all that’s at stake.”
“I love my wife,” Piper said. His voice was raspy.
“Sure you do, except she wears Birkenstocks and no makeup and thinks head is the opposite of foot.”
Piper blushed. Mary Alice smiled.
“So we’ll get to know each other and when it’s over maybe I’ll have a recommendation you’ll want to implement.”
“Yes,” Piper said. His voice was very hoarse. “Anything. Please.”
Without his clothes Winston Piper was as narrow and pale as his wardrobe. His shoulders were narrow. His legs were pale. Mary Alice showed him things to do. When they were through he got up immediately and began to dress. Mary Alice lay back comfortably on the couch. She made no effort to rearrange it. As he dressed, Piper stared at her nakedness.
She smiled at him.
“Win,” she said, “I recommend you name Chris Sheridan police commissioner.”
Laura
She met Gus for a drink at the Ritz bar, where they had met first to talk of their children. People looked covertly at Gus. His picture had been everywhere.
All Our Yesterdays Page 31