The Whole Lie

by Steve Ulfelder

  Not again.

  Not this time.

  Now she was a body. The body, to Wu.

  He must have been watching me close, because when he spoke again he sounded damn near sympathetic. “You knew her. Well?”

  “Once.” Long pause. “How’d she die?”

  “Fell off an air conditioner. Landed bad, broke her neck.”

  “What do you mean, fell off an air conditioner?”

  “Industrial unit. The size of a rail car, a full story tall.”

  “But what was she doing on it? Hell, what was she doing there? In Charlestown? Makes no sense.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “What is it to you? To you cops, I mean. Accident or murder?”

  “Homicide investigation for now,” Wu said. “But it’s shaping up like an accident. No evidence to the contrary. Nobody saw nothing.”

  “What about fingerprints? Footprints?”

  “All that good C.S.I. shit?” He shrugged, half-smiled. “Construction guys in and out of there all day. Then kids at night, drinking, screwing around.”

  Now was the time to give up the Expedition guy.

  I said nothing. Put my head in my hands.

  No way. No damn way is Savannah Kane dead.

  I’d seen her at her worst. I’d seen her at her best. I’d never seen anybody more alive.

  * * *

  Sixteen years ago, Owensboro, Kentucky. We took that Triumph Bonneville and flew from the cop and the bikers. We went on a tear, me and Savvy.

  South to Bowling Green, where we bought scissors, a disposable razor, and hair dye at a Flying J truck stop. Savvy had me choose the dye.

  “Don’t matter to me,” I said. “I’m shaving my head.”

  “Pick for me then.”

  I looked at the rack. I chose black.

  “But my hair’s black now.”

  “Make it blacker.”

  She laughed.

  Man did I like that laugh.

  We slipped into a coin-operated shower together. We cut and dyed her hair, shaved mine, got good and clean.

  Then we made love.

  It’d been awhile for me. Whiskey, speed, and road-bum paranoia had pushed sex low on my priorities totem pole.

  Savannah Kane pushed it back to the top.

  And how.

  Once I got going, it seemed neither of us could stop. Used up most of the hot water at the Flying J before we staggered out of the shower.

  “Will you do something for me, Conway?” Savvy said as we walked through rows of big rigs toward the bike, holding hands like we were at the prom.

  “Anything.” I meant it.

  She slipped a small wad from the back pocket of her jeans, tucked it in my fist. “You want to dig us up a little something?”

  I knew what she meant. “Up or down?” I said. “Asleep or awake?”

  “Either way,” she said. “I just need … something. Anything. Big old place like this, somebody must be holding.”

  Off I went.

  I scored.

  We gobbled truck-stop speed. We gassed up the bike. We slashed west.

  When false dawn hit, we were outside Paducah. Even behind shitty speed and occasional slugs from a pint of Wild Turkey, we understood that a motorcycle stolen from a working cop would be a big damn deal. I pulled into a motel that looked to have sufficiently low standards, paid nineteen of Savvy’s dollars for a room around back, and trundled the Bonneville right in the door.

  “Heh,” I said, killing the bike.

  “Sleepy,” Savvy said. She launched herself from the bike to the sagging bed, and I swear she was asleep before she landed, truck-stop speed be damned.

  Not me: I felt like I’d be awake three eyeball-jangling days.

  I sighed, set the Triumph on its kickstand, stretched, grabbed a towel from the bathroom. It was as big as a wanted poster and not much thicker. Just for something to do, I set about cleaning the bike. Checked fluid levels, wiped bugs from the headlight, then began to polish.

  What a beautiful machine. It was a T120, which made it damn old, but it’d been restored by an amateur who knew what he was doing and loved the bike. Only some lumpiness in the seat made it look less than factory-perfect.

  The lumpy seat bugged me. I began working the leather cover, trying to get the padding beneath to set just right. (Why? Mechanic’s instinct and shitty speed. I shouldn’t have to say more.) I kneaded it this way and that but couldn’t get the padding quite right. I grew frustrated, grabbed the cover with both hands, tried to roll it back so I could reset the padding.

  I rolled it back all right.

  And found out why everything was slightly off.

  My mouth made an O.

  After a minute or two I tried to wake Savannah. It wasn’t easy—she’d begun a little kitty-cat snore already. I had to rock her pretty hard.

  “Whumpf? Humph?” she said, blinking, finally focusing on me. “The fuck, dude?”

  “You need to take a look at this.” I pointed.

  She blinked a few more times. Hard to blame her. It’s not every day you wake up in a motel outside Paducah with a motorcycle eight inches from your feet.

  Then she spotted it. She took in a sharp breath. “Dude.” She flipped around, crawled to the foot of the bed, pressed a thick clear plastic bag, then another. “Is this? Are these?”

  “It is,” I said. “They are.”

  Four plastic-wrapped packets of hundred-dollar bills.

  And four of cocaine.

  * * *

  After the Barnburner meeting, Charlene followed me to her place. Her one-car garage is full of junk, so we both park in the driveway. I leaned on my fender, waited for her to climb from her Volvo SUV.

  She did, then came around and leaned on her fender. We faced each other, our toes no more than a foot apart, each with arms folded across our chests. Our breath-clouds collided.

  “It’s hard to know how to feel,” Charlene said. “All the way here I practiced saying ‘I’m sorry Savvy is gone.’ I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t sell it even to myself.”

  “I get it.”

  “No you don’t,” she said. A little too sharp, a little too quick. “You love her, Conway. Some little part, some little corner of you loves her. She was something to you that I can’t be. You never talk about it, because you never talk about anything, but…”

  I wanted to admit Charlene was right, at least partly. But I didn’t want it to hurt when I said it. I couldn’t figure out how to do both.

  So I said nothing.

  “What was she to you?” Charlene said. “What corner of you does she own? How can I own it?”

  She was pleading, or damn near. I’d never heard her do that.

  Quiet.

  “We didn’t … do anything,” I said. “Not this time, I mean. She wanted to, but we didn’t.”

  Charlene flicked a hand. “I know. You wouldn’t have been able to hide it.”

  Jesus, everybody read me like a book.

  “Savvy didn’t own any part of me,” I said. “I’m here. I’m with you.” I moved to hold her.

  But Charlene took both my elbows, kept the hug at bay. “Prove it,” she said. “Come to work tomorrow. Come to the shop at seven-thirty on the dot, fix cars all day, shoot the breeze with Floriano. Be kind and serious but a little funny, the way you are when you’re relaxed.” Pause. “The way you were.”

  Her voice, her eyes, her hands on my arms told me how much it meant to her.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  Charlene set me loose.

  “She was a Barnburner,” I said. “And I already took the money.”

  I said that last bit to nobody. Charlene was already halfway up the front steps, sobbing, keening something at the same time. It sounded like, “I knew it, I knew it.”

  But I may not have heard correctly.

  * * *

  I didn’t even want to think about Savvy while Charlene lay awake next to me. Wasn’t sure why that felt wrong,
but it did. So I waited, staring at the ceiling until her breathing went slow and deep and settled right at the edge of a snore.

  Then I let my head go where it needed to go. Which was not a good place. Because you are a joke, a goddamn unfunny joke. Square up. Face it.

  I faced it. Charlene and Randall had seen right through me: Savvy and the Bert Saginaw circus had come along at a perfect time. They’d provided me a little vacation from growing up and buckling down. And they’d fed me money that served as an excuse. A lame excuse, an excuse nobody who knew me bought, but an excuse.

  While I’d been diddling around here and there, Savvy’d been killed.

  Accident? Bullshit. Savannah Kane was more likely to fly to the moon than to find herself in a Charlestown construction site. Somebody’d manipulated her there.

  Why?

  It had something to do with blackmail. Had to.

  So who was worried about blackmail, and might be happy enough with Savvy gone?

  Bert Saginaw. Or his campaign, anyway.

  Figure out the blackmail, figure out who killed Savvy.

  Simple.

  But not easy.

  Figure out the blackmail, figure out who killed Savvy.

  I tried using it to fall asleep, repeating it in my head, forcing my breathing to slow.

  It didn’t work, not for a long time. It just made me think about Savannah Kane. I’d loved her. And how. A pointless, screw-’em-all love that had left a hole in me for a long time. Forever. Charlene sensed it, even if she could never understand it.

  Hell, I didn’t understand it myself.

  I didn’t understand a lot of things.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Did you see this?” Sophie said the next morning, Thursday. She spun her laptop to face me, polished off her cereal, and set the bowl on the floor for Dale to lick. Then she stepped to the granite counter and read the Post-it her mother had left.

  Charlene had been gone when I woke up at five thirty. That wasn’t unusual—she’s a flat-out workaholic and happy to admit it—so there was a chance Sophie hadn’t picked up on our fight the previous night.

  On the other hand, there was a better chance she had. Hard to slip anything past Sophie. Especially household tension.

  Boston.com was up on her laptop. The headline wasn’t any bigger than one you’d use the day after World War III. It read:

  SAGINAW PHOTOS STIR OUTRAGE

  Candidate compared self to Christ during business price war; eager to do “Chain Link Jesus” shoot, editor recalls

  In the pic, Saginaw was crucified on his own fencing.

  Really.

  “Holy shit,” I said. “Pardon my French. They warned me.”

  “Who warned you?”

  “Saginaw himself, kind of. And my pal Moe. But … jeez.”

  “Yeah, jeez.”

  I clicked the pic to see a bigger version. Technically, it was a stunner: Shot in a field somewhere with a filter that made blues and grays dominate, it gave the impression you were looking at a bruise. I remembered a Minnesota tornado—the sky had been those colors before hell broke loose.

  The angle: very low, the photographer belly-crawling to get lots of that bruise-blue sky as a backdrop.

  Bert Saginaw had dressed up as Jesus Christ. He’d let somebody shoot pictures of him that way. The section of chain link he was stretched out on bore a small but readable sign:

  SAGINAW FENCE CO.

  FRAMINGHAM, MA

  They’d gone the whole nine yards. He wore only a raggy loincloth. His muscles rippled and stretched. It was easy to imagine how proud he’d been in particular of his abs and his lats, the lats showcased by outstretched arms.

  I didn’t know what tricks they’d used to get his feet off the ground, but they dangled just the way you’d expect.

  Saginaw had even tilted his neck just right, looking down, patience and enduring in his eyes. He’d been into this photo. He’d gotten off on it.

  As I turned on my cell, I looked at Sophie. “They’ll get creamed for this.”

  “And how,” she said. “You might say they’ll get crucified, har har.”

  My phone began pinging like crazy with texts that had come in while it was shut down.

  They were all from Krall or Saginaw. I didn’t even read them. It was pretty clear what they were about.

  “Looks like you’ve got a full day ahead,” Sophie said, swooping up her bowl and setting it in the sink. “Speaking of which, what do you think about the new tech?”

  I looked up. “What new tech?”

  “The one mom and Floriano hired,” she said, shouldering her vintage Boris Badenov backpack. “Tory, I think the name is.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “He’s not a him,” she said. “He’s a her.”

  * * *

  I stiff-armed my new motto—figure out the blackmail, figure out who killed Savvy—and barrel-assed down Route 9 to Charlene’s office in Westborough. Slammed my truck’s door, steamed across a porch that ran the width of the building, shouldered the sticky front door, slammed it, too, made for Charlene’s suite.

  The office was in a converted Victorian that was painted three colors—all of them period-correct, all of them ugly. Charlene split the downstairs with a pair of shrinks who owned the building and lived upstairs. Everybody who worked beneath the roof was female. I always felt out of place and out of scale here.

  Charlene could afford more impressive headquarters in any of a half-dozen nearby office parks. But for the same reason she stuck with her little Shrewsbury house, she kept her staff fishing-line-thin and clung to the Victorian. I thought she ought to move—was pretty sure stubbornness had cost her some opportunities. We’d argued about it, but she was underwriting my new business, so at some point I’d realized my best bet was to shut up.

  Besides, I had to admit Charlene’s low-overhead style meant her company was pure value, no frippery or debt in sight. She’d recently turned down a cash offer of $8 million and change from her biggest national competitor.

  I whipped open the suite door. Joy, typing away while looking at a stack of forms, smiled big and said hello.

  “She here?” I said.

  Something in my voice made Joy stop typing and really look at me. “Is everything all right, Conway?” Raising her voice just a little, alerting Charlene behind her heavy four-panel office door.

  Joy Cleburne wore her hair straightened and pulled back. The hair was pure black except for a white streak directly over each ear. Damnedest thing. She spent her first fifteen years fearing her father’s belt, the next ten fearing her husband’s, and another five smoking cocaine to forget them both. Then she cleaned up and pulled her life together. She was Charlene’s first hire, Employee Number Two. Her salary was exactly a dollar a year less than Charlene’s, which was damn healthy, and she was one of the few who owned points in the company. She could and had run the operation for long stretches while Charlene wooed clients and recruited translators.

  Joy had always been kind to me, but I didn’t kid myself: She’d set me on fire before she’d let me so much as raise my voice to Charlene.

  Charlene slipped from her office. Her clothes—black pointy shoes, black pants, black jacket, light-blue blouse—and the way she closed the door told me there was a client or prospect inside.

  “Who the hell’s this new tech you hired without telling me?” I said.

  “Can we talk outside?”

  “I shouldn’t have to learn this stuff from Sophie.”

  “Can we talk outside, please?” She said it with exaggerated quiet, like a few lemon-puss teachers I had in school. The trick had pissed me off then. Still did. But I fought the red mist, the urge to break something just to be a jerk.

  As Charlene whisked past Joy’s desk, a look passed between them that pissed me off more. In a glance that lasted less than a second, they fired woman-messages back and forth:

  Here we go again.

  Is everything okay?
<
br />   I can handle him.

  Why does he get like this?

  Tell me about it.

  Is he worth it?

  We’ll see.

  Charlene elbow-steered me outside to the broad porch, and I hated the feeling I was being handled, hated how obvious it was she and Joy had talked me over before now.

  “You should have called, Conway.”

  “Just tell me if it’s true.”

  “Of course it is. Floriano and I had a tech lined up because we suspected you’d run off and do what you do. Victoria’s local, she’s ASE certified, and she’s young. Which equals cheap.”

  “But we didn’t need her! It’s a two-lift shop, and we’ve got two techs.”

  “Do we?” She folded her arms as she said it. “So you’re saying I can count on you, what with the passing of Ms. Kane?”

  I said nothing. Started to talk, stopped, started, stopped. “I can’t just drop it.”

  “Of course you can.”

  “We covered this last night. It’s a Barnburner thing. You know how that goes. You know what it means.”

  “I do,” Charlene said. “That’s my point.” Then she turned on one pointy shoe and pushed through the door.

  It opened right up for her. It didn’t stick at all. She must know the trick.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Randall’s phone rang through to voice mail the first two times I called. But I knew his ring tone—We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun, the old bubblegum song that caught on as his Army unit’s motto—would annoy him into picking up sooner or later.

  “Sorry,” I said when he did.

  “Umph,” he said.

  “I’m parked outside Charlene’s office,” I said. “I just picked a fight, and I feel like a shitheel.”

  “Mmmph.”

  “And now I’m sensing you’re not alone, and I’m feeling like even more of a shitheel.”

  My phone made its incoming-call chirp. I looked at the screen. Krall.

  “Gotta pick up the other line,” I said. “What I need you to do, I need you to research Bert Saginaw. They say he blew a couple fortunes before this one stuck. Find out how he made them, how he lost them. ’Kay?”

  “Who’s on the other line?”

  “Krall, the campaign manager.”

  “You still working for Saginaw? After what happened to Savannah Kane?”