by David Ellis
I wasn’t telling Moody anything he didn’t already know, that he hadn’t already calculated twenty different ways. “That still doesn’t mean it’s a good idea that you do this.”
“One of those people ordered Greg Connolly’s murder,” I said. “And mine, if I hadn’t convinced them I was clean. As a general rule, I don’t take kindly to people who try to kill me.”
Moody still didn’t seem convinced, but he’d obviously decided to move forward with our plan. Because what I’d said was true. He was out of options. I was his best, and possibly only, way to move beyond Charlie Cimino.
“The minute it gets too hot, you tell us,” he said. “No foolin’.”
“You’ll be the first.”
Moody walked over to me and extended a hand. It was a gesture typically reserved for friendly acquaintances, so I wasn’t sure what to do. I decided to shake it.
“Don’t get dead,” he said.
65
THE FIRST DAY OF MY NEW JOB BEGAN WITH THE MIND numbing rigmarole of filling out forms of every possible color. I was placed in an office that was standard government size, standard government décor. After an hour of providing the state a bunch of information I’d already provided when I signed up with the PCB, I was ready for a drink.
“There he is.” Hector Almundo waltzed through the door, beaming. Hector looked better every time I’d seen him since the trial, as his reincarnation continued. He was back on a winning team, climbing a ladder again.
And he looked the part, as always. He was wearing an expensive coffee-colored suit with an orange tie and another of those tiepins he always wore, even during his trial when we told him to dress down. Hector didn’t know how to dress down. Me, I was wearing my standard dark suit, white shirt, conservative tie. Expensive, admittedly, but not flashy. No tiepins or pocket squares or French cuffs, nothing extravagant, unless you counted the elaborate eavesdropping device I was wearing inside my coat pocket.
After we shook hands, he sat down next to me. “You’re getting here just in time,” he said. “Big things happening. We’ll need you.”
Because I couldn’t think of anything better to say, I asked, “How’s it going?”
Hector moved his head in virtually every direction, showing worry and excitement. “The thing with Greg. You heard about that?”
“Heard about it,” I said, which was an understatement.
“Yeah, that put everyone on their heels for a few days.”
I didn’t know who knew the truth about what happened to Greg Connolly. There was no chance that Charlie Cimino would be generous with that kind of information. But my working theory was that someone was in on it with him from above. Hector didn’t really qualify as “above” Charlie, as far as I knew. But the truth was, I didn’t know. That’s why I was here.
“But you can’t slow down, y’know?” Hector went on. “Willie Bryant’s been making some headway. He could hurt us downstate. He’s getting some money now, too. He was a slow starter, but he’s building steam. So it’s like, you feel terrible about Greg, but you have to move on. Bryant sure as hell isn’t going to slow down.”
Until last night, when I looked him up on the Internet, I couldn’t have picked Secretary of State Willie Bryant out of a lineup. Before his two terms as secretary of state, he’d been a state representative from a downstate county adjacent to the one where our last governor, Langdon Trotter, came from. He even looked a little like Trotter, the rugged hunter look, which probably shouldn’t matter but obviously did. From what I could gather, he fell into the category of conservative Democrat, which meant he liked guns as much as trial lawyers.
I looked up some polling numbers online and saw that Carlton Snow seemed to have an edge over Willie Bryant, 37 percent to 29 percent, with a healthy undecided vote.
A young woman appeared in the doorway and knocked gently on the door. “Excuse me. Mr. Kolarich, the chief of staff would like to see you.”
“I’ll take him,” Hector said.
The office of the chief of staff was at the corner of my hallway. The number of people filtering in and out of Madison Koehler’s office, while we waited patiently outside, could have filled a small convention center. Most of the people were young and fresh and ambitious. I envied them not because I lacked ambition myself but because I’d once had it in vast supply. It went off the cliff with my wife and daughter. I had something akin to ambition now, a mission to be sure, but not one of personal advancement. It allowed me a detachment that would probably serve me well.
The assistant outside Madison’s office called to me. “The chief will see you now.”
The chief? You gotta be kidding me.
Hector stood up with me. “She likes being called Chief,” he whispered.
Madison Koehler had a spacious corner office, sufficient for a conference table at one end and windows showing the north and east side of our commercial district. She was seated behind a steel desk she must have imported because it wasn’t government-issue, or if it was, the taxpayers were spending too much money on such things and I might have to write a letter to my state senator. Or to my governor. Or to Charlie Cimino.
The desk was busy in terms of the sheer volume of paper but immaculate to a fault, everything neatly categorized and the stacks lined up with razor precision. I could live my whole life, and I’ll never understand how people can be so tidy.
“How we doing, Chief?” Hector called out.
“Good . . . good.” She looked up from whatever she’d been reading, wearing those glasses I had last seen when Madison was lying on a bed, wearing my shirt and her panties. “Jason,” she said.
“Madison,” I said.
“Sit, sit.”
She returned to the document on her desk. If she was still busy with whatever that item was, she could have kept us waiting outside. But she’d invited me in so I could sit, compliantly, while she showed me I wasn’t that important. I just love office politics.
“Senator, I’ll just need Jason right now,” she said. She momentarily looked up at Hector. “If that’s all right.”
Hector, no stranger to politics of any kind, looked a bit out of sorts, a clenched jaw and sullen expression. But he didn’t put up a fight. “Sure thing,” he said.
Having expelled Senator Almundo from the room in a probably unnecessary display of power, Madison kept working on the document in front of her for another few minutes. It was hard for me to look at her without recalling our last encounter. Nothing was going to happen in this office, but that didn’t stop my mind from traveling down salacious corridors.
“Okay,” she said, looking up. She appraised me for a moment, then slid a piece of paper across her desk. On a piece of stationery that reminded everyone she was the governor’s chief of staff was written a list of names down one column, across from each of which were job titles and names of various administrative agencies. Nine names, nine different jobs.
“Those people need those jobs,” she said.
I didn’t know what to do with this, so I just waited. Madison had returned to writing something but, after a healthy spell, looked over her glasses at me. “Those people,” she repeated, “need those jobs.”
It was obvious that I required more information. I don’t particularly enjoy being set up to look stupid. Call it a character flaw.
“Then hire them,” I said.
She froze a stare on me, but when I said nothing further, she elaborated. “There are some people who would argue they have a superior right to those positions over the people on this list,” she said. “Veterans, for one. We have a veterans’ preference for most positions. Is any of this”—she rolled her hand—“sounding even vaguely familiar to you?”
“Not even vaguely,” I said. “But I’ll figure it out.”
“Oh, would you?” She delivered it with mock sweetness, returning to the notes in front of her. I wasn’t sure what she was writing. My money was on I am not a pleasant person. “It would be very helpful . . . if you cou
ld do your job . . . so I could do mine.” She finished what she was writing, put down her pen, and looked at me. “Mac will give you details.”
Mac, meaning Brady MacAleer, presumably.
“One other thing,” Madison said, peering over her glasses at me. “Have you heard of Antwain Otis?”
I shook my head.
“He’s on death row. He’s scheduled to be executed in a few days. The governor’s meeting with some people tomorrow seeking clemency. I want you there. The meeting’s—it was supposed to be tomorrow but it might have moved back one day. My assistant has the file. She’ll know.”
“What did he do? Antwain Otis.”
Madison spoke as she rearranged files on her desk. “He killed two people, eleven years ago. Now he’s part of the prison ministry. He’s made a name for himself. Too bad he hadn’t found God before he killed a woman and her son. Read the file, handle the meeting, and then help Pesh with anything the press might want on this. We want everyone to know that the governor gave this careful consideration.”
“Okay. You want me to evaluate the clemency petition?”
She stopped what she was doing and stared at me a moment, like she would a slow child. “Make sure the governor has all the support he needs for his decision. The IRRB already recommended denying the clemency petition. Some of our staff attorneys—leftovers from the Trotter administration—also reviewed it and recommended denial. There should be plenty there for you to choose from.”
Ah. I understood now. If she wanted me to pull from the recommendations from the Inmate Review and Release Board, as well as our internal staff lawyers, both of which had recommended denying the petition, it wasn’t hard to see which way she wanted me to fall.
“We’re denying the petition,” I said.
“Of course we are. He killed a mother and child. Oh, here it is.” She found some document she was looking for and scribbled a note on it. “Thank you,” she said.
I wasn’t really sure why she was thanking me.
She looked over her glasses at me again. “Thank you. That’s all.”
Ah. I showed myself out. It was a slightly more polite excusal than Hector had received. I wasn’t sure why Hector had to be excused at all, now that I thought about it, but I was glad for it. I was wearing a wire, after all, and I was hoping that I could spare Hector from the fun that would ensue. It seemed that Hector wasn’t in on some of the things I would be asked to help out with—meaning the illegal stuff.
When I returned to my office, I had a message to call Charlie Cimino on his cell.
“The honeymoon’s over,” he told me. “Six o’clock for dinner.”
66
I MET CHARLIE OUTSIDE THE STATE BUILDING. WE jumped in a cab and headed north.
“You’re getting in just in time,” Charlie said to me. “We’ve needed a lawyer for a long time.”
“You guys are short on lawyers? They’re not exactly hard to come by, Charlie.”
“Not one of our own.” He looked at me. “You’ve got to appreciate, Carl’s only been the governor a year. And it flew by. Most of the people working for him, they’re Lang Trotter’s people.”
“Republicans?” I asked.
“Well, that, yes—but more to the point, not Carl’s guys. I mean, we had to hit the ground running. Trotter didn’t give a lot of notice before he jumped ship to D.C. It took Carl two months to even find Madison—and until Maddie arrived, these guys didn’t know their asses from their elbows. Remember, Carl was city clerk and then governor lite. He never had anything to do. All of a sudden he’s governor. These guys”—Charlie chuckled at the memory—“these guys looked around at each other like, ‘What do we do now?’ I mean, they’re still in catch-up mode. And now we have an election upon us,” Charlie added. “He never hired a lawyer of his own—not at the top level, and definitely not someone with your talent.”
All of this, I assumed, would be music to Chris Moody’s ears, when he listened to the contents of the F-Bird in my coat pocket. The criminal schemes—whatever they were—were still in their infancy, waiting to happen right before the federal government’s eyes.
We arrived ten minutes later at Travelers, an old-school steak house just over the river. The place was crazy busy with the professional set, but that didn’t stop Charlie from parting the crowd and walking through the restaurant to a reserved area in the back, separated by space and a rope from the rest of the restaurant. There, a man was seated at a lone table, nursing a glass of scotch. I’d never met the guy, but I’d seen his photo stuck to a piece of poster board in Suite 410.
“Brady MacAleer, Jason Kolarich,” Charlie said.
“Call me Mac.” Favors and fixes, Moody had said about Brady MacAleer. He certainly looked the part of a fixer. Big through the chest, short legs, a weathered face that was square and flat and had been through some scrapes. He’d lost most of his hair to the north and cropped it to the east and west in a military buzz. His eyes were small and bloodshot and hostile in their appraisal. I was a new guy, an unknown, and guys like him didn’t like unknowns.
I knew his story, more or less, before he’d said ten words. Drank his liquor straight, had a short fuse, viewed the world in an uncompromising fashion. You were with him or against him, nothing in between. The kind of guy you’d prefer to have on your side in a scrape. A pit bull. He reminded me of guys I played ball with. I didn’t like most of the guys I played ball with.
Charlie talked me up to Mac but followed the felons’ etiquette of keeping it vague. He imparted no material information to Mac but basically told him that I had proven myself useful in delicate matters. “He could walk up to you, pull out his dick, piss all over your leg, and convince you it was raining,” Charlie said of me. I was supposed to be flattered. It wasn’t lost on me that Charlie’s description was almost exactly how I would describe my father.
“Yeah, I heard all about Jason.” Mac took another swallow of his scotch. He wasn’t returning the compliment. He liked his circle of friends small and airtight.
A plate of fried calamari arrived without warning. Charlie and I ordered drinks.
“So here it is,” said Charlie. “This thing is coming down to the unions. Two—”
“We gotta wait for the queen,” said Mac.
Charlie looked at him, annoyed at the interruption. “I’m giving him background.”
“Queenie said to wait for her.”
“I’m giving him background, so when she arrives, we can dive right in. That okay with you?” Charlie made it clear he wasn’t talking to an equal, at least not in his mind. Charlie wasn’t a government employee. He was a capitalist. A successful one. He’d made a calculation that money could be made by getting close to people in government, but that didn’t make him a bootlicker. And that, I could see, was how he ultimately viewed Brady MacAleer, an unsophisticated lackey. Mac had the governor’s trust, apparently, which bought him a seat at the table, but Charlie wasn’t going to pretend they were on the same level.
MacAleer fished a stringy piece of the calamari off the plate, his silence indicating acquiescence.
“The race is tightening,” said Charlie. “Willie Bryant’s making headway. It’s going to come down to media and organization. Media is all about having the cash to buy airtime. Organization is all about the unions.”
Okay. I was following so far. A union endorsement bought a lot of votes from the rank-and-file members.
“But it buys more than that,” Charlie said. “It buys workers. It buys foot soldiers on Election Day. We need people to get our voters to the polls. We need the union people.”
“Got it.”
Charlie made a peace sign with his fingers. “Two unions that matter in this state. The government employees and the laborers. The IBCL—the International Brotherhood of Commercial Laborers. And SLEU.”
“Slew?” I asked.
“S-L-E-U. State and Local Employees United. The IBCL and SLEU haven’t made endorsements yet. They haven’t picked us or B
ryant. We get the laborers and employees, and we win on organization. We already have more money than Bryant. If we have the organization, it’s game over.”
“Gardner goes back with Bryant,” said Mac.
“Gary Gardner,” Charlie explained to me. “He runs the IBCL.”
“It’s a wonder he hasn’t already gone with Willie,” said Mac.
“He hasn’t gone with Willie because we’ve been begging him to hold off,” said Charlie. “These guys—Gardner with the Laborers, Rick Harmoning with SLEU—they’re playing kingmakers right now. They know it. See, here’s the problem—”
Our drinks arrived. Mine was wrong; it was a straight martini without the splash of olive juice, but it still tasted good so I didn’t complain.
“Nobody knows us, is the problem,” Mac said, filling in for Charlie. “Willie Bryant was a state rep for ten years and secretary of state for eight. He’s been around the block with all these guys. The governor’s only had a year of being governor, compared to eighteen years in state government for Willie.” He shrugged. “Nobody knows us, is the problem, you wanna hear it straight. Only thing keeping us in the game is the cash.”
That sounded like an accurate assessment. Governor Snow was apparently outpacing Secretary of State Bryant in the fundraising department. It kept him viable and gave him credibility. The unions, presumably, would want to go with a winner. They pick a loser, then next time their endorsement is a little less important and, thus, so are they. That’s how I would view it, if I were making the decisions.
“What about the politics?” I asked. “Does one have better policies than the other?”
Both of these guys smirked. I could see it was an irrelevant consideration. Charlie said, “The unions want a Democrat, but it probably wouldn’t make much difference between the governor and Bryant.”