by Ed Gorman
I got myself a cup of coffee and sat down at a Mac to check my e-mail. I needed to get caught up on the two other races my company was handling. The news made me feel better than it should have. I was probably just thankful that there weren’t any scandals associated with either one. We were holding small leads in both, but right now that felt like smashing victories.
“I’m meeting somebody for an early dinner,” Kristin said, slipping into her tan Burberry and grabbing her umbrella. “If either of you need me, I’ll keep my cell on.”
“What could go wrong?” Ben said. “Not on this campaign.”
Kristin laughed. “Oh, God, don’t even joke about it. I just keep thinking the worst is over and then something else happens. It’s been like that since they found Monica Davies in her hotel room.”
“Dev here has assured me that if we can just keep Susan’s police record as a hooker away from the press, everything’ll be fine.”
“And don’t forget when she was teaching grade school and selling crack to her students,” I said. I was glad to be making fun of it all. At this point there wasn’t much else to do with it. “But I’m pretty sure that won’t come out, either.”
“You two are terrible,” Kristin said. “You should have more respect for teachers who sell crack to their third-grade students.”
And with that she was gone into the cold, wet, black afternoon.
Ben took three calls from the press with no more than a few minutes between each one. He was patient and professional until the very end of the third one, when his sighs filled the room. “No, I told you Bobby hadn’t been officially charged with murder. Right now all they’re doing is questioning him.” Pause. “I know there’s a story on one of the radio stations that he’s been charged, but it isn’t true and that’s why we don’t have a statement about him being charged.” Pause. “I’ll tell you what, Nina. Call the police station. They’ll confirm what I’ve said.” Pause. “You’re welcome.”
After he hung up, he turned in his chair and said to me, “Kristin’s off to meet the new one.”
“I figured.”
“It won’t work out any better than the other ones, but right now she won’t admit that to herself.”
“But as soon as he mentions settling down and raising a family—”
“Kristin’s a political junkie just like us. She should settle down and have kids, but she probably won’t.”
“Look at her role models—you and I were shit parents. No offense.”
“She’d be a hell of a lot better at it than we were.”
“That wouldn’t be too hard.”
I always wondered if that wasn’t one of the reasons Ben and I were such good friends. We’d only gotten to know our children after they were grown. There was a lot of remorse and shame in our conversations.
But now it was back to work. We both knew what we were up against, and that the odds of succeeding were getting longer by the hour. I’d spent half a delusional day convincing myself that after a fess-up press conference the story would go away. But we’d had to play defense at the press conference. And we hadn’t expected the news about Bobby being sought by the police.
Another reporter called. Ben went back at it. He threw fastballs, sliders, curves. Ben at his best, which was very, very good.
And while he was talking I wrote e-mails to the managers of our other two campaigns. One of them wrote back immediately, saying that the Susan story was starting to get traction up where he was working. Not what I wanted to hear.
I was thinking about dinner and a few drinks when the cell phone in my pants pocket bleated. I didn’t recognize the number of the caller. “Hello.”
“Mr. Conrad?” The voice was unmistakable. Sister from the beauty shop.
“Yes.”
She identified herself and then said, speaking quietly, almost a whisper, “We’ll be closing up here pretty soon. I had a talk with Heather and I’m real worried about her. She says she’s gonna leave town tonight.”
“Did she say why?” I tried not to sound excited—you know, like a doctor when he sees a thirty-pound tumor; nothing here to get agitated about at all, Mr. Gleason—so I stayed calm. But obviously Heather was afraid now and I wondered why.
“She—” Now her words were barely audible. “Could you just come over here? I need to go. She’s coming back here to the office now.” She clicked off.
Ben was answering another call as I hung up. I heard him say, “Yes, Natalie. He’s right here.”
Ben waggled the receiver in my direction and rolled his eyes. Sotto voce he said, “She’s pissed off!”
I punched in the blinking line and picked up the receiver. “Hi, Natalie.”
“This is to inform you that as of this moment our reelection campaign is officially being run by Crane and Wilbur from Washington, D.C. In return for your help with any transition problems they might have, I’ll personally see to it that all your reasonable fees and charges are paid promptly.”
I was pretty sure she’d written this down and was reading it.
“They’re flying six people out here tomorrow morning. I’ll be announcing the changeover tonight. I’ve called two newspapers and three TV stations. I plan to be professional. All I’ll say is that we had certain intractable disagreements about procedures. I won’t get into personalities.”
“I appreciate that, Natalie.”
Ben stood over me now. He sensed the nature of the call.
“Wyatt said to tell you that he sends his best and that he wishes all of you good luck.”
“That’s very nice of him. And good luck to you and the campaign, Natalie.”
“Good-bye, Dev.”
“Bye, Natalie.”
“She fucking dumped us?”
“Yep,” I said, hanging up.
“This late in the campaign?”
“Crane and Wilbur.”
“No shit? Well, at least she made a good choice. They’re on a roll.”
“They’re sending an invasion force tomorrow. Six people. They’ll want to see everything. According to Natalie, if we help them with the transition, she’ll pay all the ‘reasonable’ bills we submit.”
“I love that ‘reasonable.’ Pure Natalie.”
I pushed back from the desk and went to get my coat. Natalie’s call hadn’t done its damage yet. It probably wouldn’t do its worst until the middle of the night when I’d wake up and face the fallout from being fired. I doubted Natalie would keep her word. She’d managed to stick a shiv in us at least once during these interviews. She’d also try to cheap-jack us on the bills, denying this one and that one as legitimate expenses. If she said anything especially nasty, we’d have to respond. The public wouldn’t care about our battle, but insiders would. Like Susan at her press conference, we’d be on the defensive. We’d have to explain ourselves, and even those who’d been in our position from time to time would pretend otherwise and shake their heads and say poor old Dev must be losing it. It was vanity mostly, I knew. But the image of certain enemies smirking over martinis at the mention of your name was not comforting.
“Where are you going?” Ben said. He sounded plaintive. He didn’t want to be alone at this moment, and I didn’t blame him. But just because we’d been fired didn’t mean I wanted Bobby to sit in jail any longer than he had to.
“I’m sorry, Ben. Sometime tonight steaks and drinks are on me.”
“A lot of drinks.”
“A lot, a lot.”
“Dumped by a fricking starlet,” he said. “With one of the greatest asses in history.”
I laughed. “So you had fantasies about her, too?”
“You, too? God, how can we hate somebody this much and still want to go to bed with her?”
“A question for the ages, my friend. For the ages.”
CHAPTER 21
Rain and darkness hid the grim little strip mall. The only light came from Hair Fare and that was in the back of the shop. I peeked through the window. The front of the p
lace was in shadows. The barber chairs were empty. The light came from the tiny office. I knocked and got no response, so I started pounding.
Sister appeared soon after. She waved and shook her head. With the unlocking of the door came the apology: “I’m so sorry. I didn’t hear you. The rain drowns everything out.”
“Is Heather still here?”
“Yeah. Sitting in the office. Hurry up. I didn’t tell her I asked you to come over. She’ll try and get out the back door if she figures it out.”
We hurried through the darkness ripe with the scents of hair spray, hair dye, and all the other chemicals used in the various processes.
Sister was right about the bolting. Heather was facing front when I reached the threshold of the office, but when she turned and saw me, she jumped up and said, “No way! Goddamn you, why did you tell him to come here?” Then she lunged at me, palms flat so she could push me away. She was a forceful woman but not forceful enough. I spun her around and dragged her back to her chair and pushed her down in it. Then I slammed the door shut behind us.
“I’m not going to say a single goddamn word to either of you,” Heather said, folding her arms across her chest. “We can just sit here all night.”
Sister sat behind her desk now. “I did this for your benefit, whether you believe that or not, Heather. You’re terrified of something and all you can think of is running away? To where? You don’t have any money. I’ll bet if I checked your account you’d be overdrawn as usual. And where the hell would you go anyway?”
“To Aunt Sally’s.” Heather had broken her vow of silence, but now wasn’t a good time to point it out.
“Aunt Sally’s.” Sister found this hilarious. “Between her cooking and his farting, you’d go crazy after one night.” Sister looked at me and said, “Aunt Sally gave people food poisoning at three different family reunions over the years. And Uncle Len’s always had these gas problems. And it’s not just that he farts loud—he smells. We used to have to sit on his lap when we were little, and you just had to hold your breath.”
I stood to the left of the desk so that I could see both their faces. Heather couldn’t help herself. She smiled at the memory. Sister smiled, too. Her eyes gleamed with tears. “Honey, you got to tell Mr. Conrad here about what you saw. I know you saw something, and I know that you think if you tell anybody, the cops will think you were in on the whole thing.”
Heather, blond, blowsy, beaten, now said quietly, “I was in on the whole thing, Sis. I mean, I helped him with things.”
“What sort of ‘things’?”
Heather’s ruined eyes met mine. “I made a couple calls to Cooper’s mother. That rich bitch. I disguised my voice though.”
“Anything else?” I said.
A long sigh. “I stood in the hallway the night he killed Monica Davies. He wanted me to warn him if anybody came along.”
“Oh, God, honey. Oh, God.”
Sister’s tears reached her cheeks now.
“So he admitted that he killed Monica and took the money?”
“Oh, yeah. He told me all about it. He told me what her face looked like when she was dying.”
“What do they call that, Mr. Conrad—assess—”
“Accessory.”
“Oh, shit, honey. When Mom finds out—”
We sat in silence. All three of us knew the implications of what she’d just said. Sister started crying now, openly. Put her elbows on her desk and put her face in her hands. She’d been tough and now she was no longer tough, and it was sad to see.
“That’s why I want to run away.”
You and Bobby, I thought. The pipe dream of Mexico.
Sister snuffled up her tears and sat back in her chair. In the silence, it creaked. “What can she do, Mr. Conrad?”
“The first thing she needs is a lawyer.”
“We know one, but he’s pretty much a cokehead.”
“You mean Larry? The one I dated?”
“Yeah.”
“I wouldn’t want him as my lawyer. I couldn’t even stand him as a boyfriend.”
“I guess you weren’t listening, Heather. I wouldn’t want him as a lawyer, either. That’s why I said he was a cokehead. What’s so damned hard to understand about that?” Then: “Sorry I snapped at you. It’s just—”
“Let me help you find a lawyer.”
Heather’s hard gaze met mine. “All this is for Bobby, right?”
“Right.”
“And you don’t particularly give a shit about what happens to me?”
“I give a shit only to the degree that you tell me everything you know about who killed Donovan in his motel room.”
“That’s fair,” Sister said. “That’s damned fair. You help him, he helps you. What the hell’s wrong with that?”
Heather traced her fingers across the top of her skull. A sigh exploded from her ripe lips. “I don’t know if this means anything or not.” She was watching me. “I lied to the cops. I told them I wasn’t at Craig’s motel last night. But I was. He told me he had some business to take care of and he couldn’t see me till morning. Sometimes I’d stop in before work. He never got tired of it, that’s one thing you could say for him. You could never wear him out.”
“But you went there?”
“Not inside. Not at first. I stood behind a tree—it was like I was back in junior high and following a boy I had a crush on—and just watched. I didn’t even care about the rain. I was picturing him in there with a girl. I was really mad. I wasn’t there very long before I saw this other guy come out. He was really in a hurry. I wondered why. Dumb me, I thought maybe he was in there on business or something. I didn’t think he might’ve done something to Craig. So when he left I went up to the door. It wasn’t closed all the way. I just kind of nudged it with my knee, just enough so I could see inside, you know? And that’s when I saw Craig. And I knew he was dead. He was the first dead man I’d ever seen except for people at funerals. But I knew he was dead. And I knew I had to get out of there. I thought maybe the police wouldn’t connect me with anything, that maybe I could get by with it. But too many people knew about Craig and me, so the cops found me right away.”
“Who was the man you saw?”
She shrugged. “I’m not sure. But I saw the car he was in.”
“What kind was it?”
“Some kind of foreign thing, really expensive from the looks of it. It was silver.”
There wasn’t much doubt about whose car she was describing. But to be sure, I said, “Was it a convertible?”
She sounded curious and surprised. “Yeah. How did you know?”
“Just a lucky guess.”
Sister said, “You know who that car belongs to, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I do.”
Then she looked at Heather. “I hope you’re happy, Sis. This is going to tear Mom apart.”
But by then I was already at the door and moving fast.
Fog rolled down the streets on my way to foundation headquarters. Streetlights were dulled by ghosts and stoplights burned like evil eyes through the mist. A long stretch of fast-food places shone like a cheap carnival midway in the rolling clouds. And always there was the relentless cold rain, gutters and intersections filling up fast.
Maybe I would have done what Manning did. Maybe I would have started to hate myself so much for being in Natalie’s grasp that only an act of violence could make me feel honorable again. Easy to rationalize killing a monster like Craig Donovan. Easy to rationalize taking the money and hiding it until one day you made your escape. People escaped all the time. Just vanished. A good share of them were caught. But some weren’t. Some were never heard from again. The lucky ones. The ones who got to start over, clean and whole.
It was funny thinking of the pain he’d feel when he had to give up his sleek new Aston Martin. But he’d have to be careful with his bounty. He could squander it in fast order if he wasn’t cautious. There wouldn’t be any more Aston Martins in his f
uture unless he was very, very lucky. But he would be free of the stranglehold.
The foundation parking lot held two cars, the Aston Martin and an inexpensive little Ford two-door. I parked near the street end of the lot and reached in for the Glock I’d put in the glove compartment.
The fog on the sidewalk was thick enough to get lost in. Somewhere on the street, headlights tore the fabric of the gray stuff as they headed to the end of the block. Smells of fried chicken from a KFC around the corner. A car radio pounding out rap. Somewhere behind me a pair of cars dueling with their horns. All of it lost in the swamp of gray.
I made my way to the front entrance and tried the door. Unlocked. I went inside and stood on the parquet floor. The only lights on this floor were on the tracks above the framed pieces in the gallery. Keisha’s desk was empty.
A churchly quiet was threatened only by my footsteps as I moved through the shadows. The stairs to the second floor looked iconic, like stairs in a movie poster that led the audience to places it shouldn’t go. The heating system came on with a tornado of noise.
I eased the Glock from my overcoat pocket and started my way up the wide, curving staircase that ended in what appeared to be impenetrable gloom.
Near the top, trying to make myself alert to even the faintest sound, I heard the first of it. An animal noise. I thought of kittens sick or kittens dying. But it wasn’t a kitten, of course. When I reached the top of the stairs and tried to orient myself—I remembered that I turned left to find Manning’s office—I heard it again and recognized it for what it was. Another weeping woman.
Between sobs she was talking to somebody. I moved on tiptoe down the hall to the glass-paneled entrance. The reception area was dark. Down the hall behind Doris Kelly’s desk I saw a spear of light on the carpet. Manning’s office door was open a few inches. I went into the sort of big pantomime movements actors in silent films used. I made it into the reception area and then the hall without being heard. I took a deep breath. I was a silent-movie comic sneaking into a house. I eased the door open just enough to slip through. Then I waited, heart pounding, for any sign that they’d heard me.