The Whole Lie

by Steve Ulfelder

  “That I noticed.”

  “Not even Bert Saginaw can make the Cambridge city council move faster than it wants to,” Krall said.

  “He was embarrassed at the delay,” Savvy said, “so he called the men in Dubai who owned this joint and made a cash offer they couldn’t turn down.”

  “The man’s got some serious cake,” I said.

  “Bet your ass,” Krall said.

  “Then he cleared out a couple of floors,” Savvy said, “and made a temporary HQ.”

  “And installed you in the penthouse,” I said.

  “Can you blame him?” she said.

  The doors opened.

  On a hushed nuthouse.

  It was a huge space, maybe sixty feet by a hundred, and most of the walls had been knocked out. Temporary desks were jammed together everywhere, and a long Formica counter ran the width of one window wall. Here and there a ceiling tile had been shunted aside and a snake-nest of black cabling—T-1 lines, I assumed—had been pulled through.

  For all the workers. There were dozens, maybe a hundred. They banged away at laptops or worked phones, every damn one of them, and none of them looked up. Aside from a crooked TINKER-SAGINAW banner near a coffee area, this room could be anything: insurance agency, call center, boiler-room stock scam.

  “Usually,” Krall said, “I’d call this smilin’ and dialin’. But I know for a fact most of these are incoming calls. When everybody knows you’re going to win, the big dollars roll. People want it on the record that they backed you. This is the fun part.”

  “But you’re worried,” I said. “Or I wouldn’t be here.”

  His smile tightened. He walked away fast without saying anything. Savvy followed, leading me through the cheerful mess. The workers were young for the most part, and chipper in their little rent-a-desk forts, with smelly takeout cartons piled up and sub-shop menus and laptop bags. Everybody likes being on a winning team.

  Down a hall, quick left into a swank suite. I whistled. It reminded me of rooms you saw on TV shows about Las Vegas high-rollers. Marble floors, twelve-foot ceilings, sliders to a good-sized patio, animal-skin rugs, sinks and bars and doors everywhere.

  “Sax!” Saginaw spread his arms as he said it, crossing the room in a Joe Politician suit that couldn’t quite hide his bowlegs, his strange proportions. “Not bad for a college dropout, huh?” He caught Krall’s eye and jerked his head toward the door. “Pete, Savvy. Ten minutes, ’kay?”

  They left. Saginaw sat on a long sofa, nodded. I took the other end. It was like sitting in a pat of melting butter.

  I said, “Nice.”

  Saginaw said nothing for a while. Then he put a finger to his lips, cat-walked to the door, set his ear against it, and whipped it open. Looked both ways, closed it, sat again.

  “Paranoid,” I said.

  “Bet your sweet ass,” he said. “I don’t trust a goddamn one of ’em. Especially Krall.”

  “You don’t trust the guy who’s running your campaign.”

  “Know anything about him?”

  I shook my head.

  “Pete Krall would like you to think he’s a big man in his world,” Saginaw said, leaning forward. “Truth is, he was a minor-leaguer on his best day. And his best day was a long time ago. Sure, he helped a couple South American guys win reelection, but those were banana republics. Places where Maximum Leader wins ninety-eight percent of the vote, and the next day two percent of the houses get torched. You know?”

  “So why’s he running the show? You and Tinker are both loaded.”

  “It was Tinker’s call,” he said. “She waited too long, playing the reluctant-politician bit. By the time she jumped in, the heavy hitters were under contract. Besides, she was supposed to win in a walkover. Didn’t think she needed the best.”

  “Does he know what he’s doing?”

  “Not really. Ever see an NFL coach on the sidelines, and you could tell from his eyes he had no friggin’ idea what was going on out there? He was just hoping for the best?”

  “Wade Phillips,” I said.

  Saginaw laughed big, actually slapped his thigh. “I like it! Yeah, when you see Krall in action you get that Wade Phillips vibe. Krall needs a big win to salvage his career.”

  We were quiet awhile.

  “You going to tell me why I’m here?” I finally said.

  “Today’s Wednesday,” Saginaw said, not looking at me. “That makes tomorrow Dirt Drop Day.”

  I said nothing.

  He shifted, looked me in the eye. “Old campaign tradition, they tell me. It’s when the other guys throw their last, best, worst dirty trick at you. Thursday’s the perfect day because it jams up the news cycle all weekend, doesn’t give you much of a chance to come back.”

  “What’s their dirty trick for you?” I said.

  “Tomorrow … meaning tonight, really, ’cause the newspapers release all the good stuff early on the Web … the Globe’s gonna run a story about me. It’s embarrassing, but it’s not fatal. It’ll trim a bunch of points off our lead, but it won’t cost us the election.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  Long pause. “The problem,” he finally said, “is another set of pics.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Let me get this straight,” Randall said on the other end of the line. “Saginaw knows of not one but two, count ’em, two sets of photos that could potentially sink him?”

  “And Tinker, of course. Reading between the lines, it seemed what scared him most was the idea of pulling her down with him.” I jumped on the brakes to avoid a pair of college kids sauntering across the street. I was on my way from Cambridge to Winthrop. Two miles as the crow flies, but one of those can’t-get-there-from-here drives.

  “Talk about renaming oneself mud,” Randall said. “Obviously, the Tinker people tried to vet Saginaw before selecting him as her running mate.”

  “Yup.”

  “Also obviously, he lied through his teeth.”

  “Now it’s biting him in the tail.”

  “It always does.”

  “But they never learn.”

  “How much did he tell you about this second set of blackmail fodder?”

  In his Vegas-style suite, Saginaw had said there was one, and only one, copy of each photo. “They used a brand-new digital camera,” he’d said. “They printed the shots on a virgin printer, then destroyed all the hardware. Never scanned anything, never e-mailed anything, none of that.”

  I’d told him that was most likely bullshit—a story to suck him in for the first big payment. Then they’d find more copies so they could keep bleeding him.

  “What did Saginaw say to that?” Randall said.

  “He was positive that whoever’s doing the blackmailing speaks the truth on this.”

  Long pause. Finally: “Huh.”

  “I know,” I said. “Huh. Guess what he did next?”

  Randall waited.

  “You know that check they cut me yesterday?”

  “Sure.”

  “He said a matched set is always nice, reached in his pocket, and slipped me another one for the same amount. But this one was a personal check from Hubert Saginaw.”

  “Tell me you didn’t take it.”

  “Of course I did.”

  “Why, Conway?”

  “Imagine how fast I can pay off Charlene.”

  “Interesting word choice,” he said. “Pay off, rather than pay back.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Never mind.” He was quiet a full thirty seconds. Then he sighed. “So what’s the next move?”

  “I’m going to see my pal Moe Coover.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “A Barnburner, a real old-timer,” I said. “It was Moe helped me move Savvy down to North Carolina.”

  “And?”

  “Moe was like this with the state cops for forty years. Dirt was his stock in trade. If it happened in this state and it’s worth knowing, Moe knows it.”
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br />   * * *

  “Come on now, come on come on come on … fuck me.”

  “Thanks, nice to be here,” I said, setting down a pair of sandwiches from Royal Roast Beef.

  “Shut up a sec,” Moe Coover said, a pair of military-spec binoculars pinned to his face. “Logan-SFO seven-five-seven bearing down, full to the gunwales, heavy jumbo all the way.” I watched the plane roll straight at us, then peel from the runway all at once, nose up, pulling hard left while its landing gear retracted. The wind worked in our favor, pushing noise away. Moe tracked the plane with his binocs, said again: “Come on now, come on come on come on … fuck me.”

  Without leaving the peeling white wicker chair on his enclosed front porch, he flicked the power switches on one broadcast-quality video camera and two still cameras with lenses as long as my forearm. All three were aimed at the runway that ended a hundred and fifty yards from Moe’s house.

  I’d come to see Moe to compare notes on Savvy and learn more about Saginaw. In-person was best—Moe was past the age for long telephone conversations.

  Besides, it’d been too long. Moe’s mom had died what, four years ago? It was around then he’d started rooting for plane crashes, saying he was going to make a killing with high-quality pics and vids.

  For a while, we Barnburners had assumed he was joking.

  We’d been wrong. Moe pulled away from the group, especially after a couple of fender-benders made him stop driving at night. Barnburners dropped in on Moe now and then, and always reported back that he was sharp as a tack. But something in him broke when his mom died. I felt shame for not visiting myself until I needed info.

  Moe kicked a second chair, indicating I should sit, and checked his watch. “If they don’t wreck before the landing gear’s stowed,” he said, “there’s a ninety-nine-point-eight-eight percent chance they won’t wreck at all.” He squinted at a black digital watch that looked big as a Frisbee on his thin wrist. “Now talk. You got thirteen minutes ’til the next busy stretch.”

  His head reminded me more than ever of a walnut. He wore a sweatshirt that said BERRY THE BEARS. He also wore blue jeans that were oversized in a way that hinted at a diaper beneath. Big deal: He could wear ladies’ underpants on his head without cutting my respect for him one bit.

  Moe Coover, who had to be eighty-five now, was an original Barnburner. There weren’t more than three or four left.

  Short history lesson: After World War II, a couple million Moe Coovers streamed back to the U.S. They’d been raised Depression poor. Then they’d served two, three, or four years fighting in jungles or hedgerows. A lot of them had passed the time stuffing entrails back inside their pals, policing up arms and legs on day-after battlefields, watching each other burn to death in downed airplanes.

  So it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that when these vets were back Stateside, while some set down their rifles and started families, others drank. Drank like fish, matter of fact, and raised mucho hell—and got paid for it, twenty bucks a week for a year, GI Bill moolah. “Goddamn dream come true,” Moe had told a bunch of us years ago. “Twenty bucks a week? Back then that was a roof over your head, three hots a day, and drink yourself blind every night. With enough left over to go see a whore on Saturday.”

  Meanwhile, this oddball group called Alcoholics Anonymous, launched in Ohio before the war, was gaining traction. Guys just like Moe, guys who for years couldn’t get out of bed without a bracer, were walking around clear-eyed and employed, swearing by this AA. “I didn’t trust it,” Moe said. “It smelled like a racket. It smelled like a tub-thumper’s trap.”

  But one Saturday, the promise of free eats lured him to a traveling AA road show—he still has a picture of himself with Bill W and Doctor Bob, claims he’s turned down an offer of ten grand for the snap—and, like a lot of us since, Moe Coover heard something that clicked.

  He sobered up April 28, 1946. Two nights later, he helped pull together the first meeting of an AA group that would become the Barnburners.

  I was here now because Moe eventually wangled himself a plush civilian job with the Massachusetts State Police, running the staties’ entire fleet. That brought power—the various barracks and subagencies were always competing for the newest vehicles—and smart-cookie Moe took his power in the form of knowledge. His specialty: buried bodies, closeted skeletons. If a trooper scored a blowjob from a drunk-and-disorderly teenager, badged his way out of a DUI in some burg at three A.M., or bagged a few law-abiding citizens to meet his speeding-ticket quota, Moe knew about it. He had eyes and ears from Pittsfield to Provincetown.

  In Massachusetts, the state police swing a big club: They can and have run governors out of office. And for thirty-five years, Moe Coover was the most powerful man on the staties’ payroll. He didn’t look so powerful now, this little no-eyebrows man, probably wearing a diaper, staring me down. But in his day, he’d been something.

  He said, “Savvy Kane, huh?” Just like that. Typical Moe. I hadn’t seen him for two, three years, hadn’t been to this house since his mother’s wake. Had spent three minutes on the phone asking him to dust off his Rolodex and dig dirt. “I had a feeling we hadn’t seen the last of that one.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You knocked her up, didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “But everybody seems to think I did.”

  “How’s Charlene?”

  Moe Coover missed nothing.

  I said nothing.

  A jet took off, ripping over our heads, shaking the porch. “FedEx plane,” he said. “Pay it no mind. Those things never wreck, and even if they did there’d be no money in it.”

  “Mother Teresa sends her regards.”

  “Mother Teresa’s dead. Me too, soon enough. Let’s skip the bullshit, Conway.” He leaned toward me. “Let’s say it wasn’t you knocked up Savvy, and I believe it wasn’t, or at least you think it wasn’t, ’cause you never could lie worth shit. In that case, the proud papa’s got to be Bert Saginaw, and that, amigo, is a very big deal.”

  “Let me make sure you’re saying what I think you’re saying.”

  “I’m saying it all right. Back then, just before we moved Savvy, she was banging him while she was banging you. Get over it. Hell, even if he’s just the alleged proud papa it’s a very big deal.”

  “You’re taking giant steps.”

  “Don’t insult me. I haven’t talked with you in three years. You call me out of the blue, you ask about Savvy Kane. ‘Oh by the way,’ you also ask, ‘I’d like to learn a little about this Bert Saginaw and his hatchet man Krall, if you get a chance.’ You’re clever like an eight-year-old angling for another cookie, Conway. It’s what we like about you.”

  What the hell was I supposed to say to that? The people who love you are the people who know all your moves.

  I hate that about people.

  “Okay, you’re smarter than me. It’s not a small club,” I said, shrugging surrender. “What’d you learn about Saginaw?”

  “I learned, for maybe the ten thousandth time, that Fitzgerald may be the most misunderstood man in history.”

  “Who the hell?”

  “F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Moe said, leaning back, the big rush to photograph a plane crash gone now. Fine by me if he needed to be smug: It meant he had something juicy for me. He was savoring it.

  “He was a writer, right?”

  “And Jerry Rice was a football player,” Moe said. “And Ali was a fighter.”

  I waited.

  A small jet rattled the porch. Moe didn’t even look up. “Fitzgerald wrote this line,” he said. “‘There are no second acts in American lives.’”

  Moe looked to see if that meant anything to me. It didn’t. He puffed his cheeks out, frustrated. “Everybody misses it,” he said. “They quote Fitzgerald like he meant there are no second chances. When a politician gets caught with a whore or a baseball player beats up his wife, the newspaper hacks and talking heads trot out the line to mean the schmuck is fin
ished, kaput.”

  “That’s dead wrong,” I said. “It’s the opposite. A pro football player can gut a koala bear in broad daylight. If he’s any good, somebody’ll still sign him.”

  “Exactly!” Moe pounded his armrest. “Fitzgerald was talking about Act One and Act Two in a formal way, like in plays and novels. In Act One, the players get their intro, the problem is set up.”

  “What happens in Act Two?”

  From the way he smiled, I knew it was the right question.

  “Depth,” Moe said. “Complexity, conflicting paths, difficult choices.”

  We sat quietly.

  Noise built. A US Airways jumbo jet rocked the house as it took off.

  “You missed one,” I said.

  “You’ve got me all engrossed,” he said, looking at the big watch. “You prick.”

  “Just tell me about Saginaw,” I said. “No more writers. I’m beggin’.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  He jerked a thumb at the runway behind his shoulder. “If I miss my big payday bullshitting about Hubert Saginaw,” he said, “You’re a frigging dead man. What do you know already?”

  “Just that he made and blew two fortunes, then finally figured out how to hang onto his dough.”

  “Fair enough. He dropped out of college twenty-five years ago. Sold some kind of high-tech flooring, European stuff. Did great for a while, then got too big for his britches. The Swiss parent company dropped him like a hot potato. Then, in the nineties, he went to San Francisco and scored big with a software company, like every other asshole out there.”

  “And?”

  “Made a paper fortune that dried up and blew away one day. Just like every other asshole out there.”

  “Then what?”

  Moe shrugged. “Little of this, little of that. I hear he tried the motivational-speaker racket. Didn’t make any real money, but it’s where he got a taste for public speaking. Decided he’d make a dandy politician if he ever got the chance.”

  “How’d he end up in Framingham?”

  Moe shrugged. “Everybody ends up somewhere. Funny thing is, Saginaw credits a Dunkin’ Donuts in Framingham for starting his fence company. The one near the Ashland border, you’ve been there a thousand times.”