“Pitiful and confused,” said a tall state cop who seemed to be the boss man, leaning next to me and folding his arms.
“Dipshits,” I said.
“The male Rosa Parks claims you worked him over while he was down.”
“I kicked him once,” I said. “He’ll live.”
“He will at that. Funny thing,” the cop said, looking at me, “the only real injury here is to one of my guys. Busted foot.”
“Obsitnick,” I said.
“Know anything about that?”
I said nothing for a while. Finally I turned, met the cop’s gaze. He was an inch taller than me. Silver hair just this side of a buzz cut. Didn’t have the workout muscles favored by most staties. Instead he moved like a guy who’d been a good small-college tight end, but had been relieved to lose twenty-five pounds when he graduated.
“Just a guess,” I said. “Obsitnick has a history. Bully-boy stuff, but hard to pin down. Always has an explanation, always quick with his side of the story.”
“You’ve got a ways to go on your parole.”
“Yes.”
“Manslaughter. Heavy stuff.”
“Yes. Can I go?”
He jerked a thumb to say beat it.
I pushed off the table, started for the parking lot.
Before the Tinker-Saginaw circus had pulled out of Braxton High, a flunky had told me Betsy Tinker would like to express her gratitude. I told the kid it would have to wait—I had things to do.
When he realized he’d have to deliver bad news to the boss, his lip quivered. He looked like a dog that just piddled on the floor. I clapped him on the shoulder harder than I needed to. I may have told him to grow a pair. Then I felt bad for the flunky—knew I was mostly annoyed at the Furder is Murder numbskulls. But Jesus, how old do they need to be these days before they’re men?
Checked my cell as I crossed the parking lot. Text from Sophie: Victor Lacross left state police 3 yrs ago, not sure why but he is suing to get full pension. Owns lacrossresearch.com domain, a 1-page website with e-mail address and the word RESEARCH.
The contact info for Lacross’s domain was an office address in a part of Framingham I knew well. If it was the building I was picturing, it was a shithole.
I thanked Sophie, asked if Davey had shown. She texted back a frowny face.
RESEARCH. It could mean a lot of things.
Huh.
Vic Lacross wasn’t a guy who would just happen to be at a political speech up in Braxton. Mental note: Look him up. Maybe we could help each other.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Working south on 495, I took calls from Krall, Emily Saginaw, and finally Bert Saginaw himself. The theme: Betsy Tinker wanted very much to thank me for rescuing her from a tube of blood. In person.
Undercurrent: What Betsy wanted, Betsy got. And the toadies around her weren’t used to explaining why she couldn’t have it right away.
She lived on Beacon Hill. Of course. I plugged the address into my GPS, hopped on the Mass Pike east, and thought.
Mostly I thought about the big sloppy guy in the green Expedition. He’d followed me, Savvy had followed him. A couple hours later, she was dead. I knew most of the players, but not him. Who the hell was he?
Thinking about being followed made me check my mirrors.
Then again.
“I’ll be damned,” I said out loud.
There was a red Lumina two cars behind me.
Things came back. Things clicked. The day Savvy showed up at my shop, I’d spotted a red Lumina with North Carolina plates. A geek had stood by the car staring hate-rays at me.
But what really clicked was this: The Lumina kid was also the kid featured in Savvy’s cell phone pics.
The one who sure as hell seemed like a boyfriend. Or at least a boyfriend wannabe.
“I’ll be damned,” I said again. This was good. Looked like Betsy Tinker would have to wait awhile longer.
I pulled into the next rest area. The Lumina followed. I parked but left my truck running, watched the Lumina back into a slot forty feet away. Amateur hour.
I backed out of my parking space and covered the forty feet quickly, left my passenger door half a foot from the Lumina’s nose, killed my truck, opened my door.
Give the kid credit: He spent just a second or two paralyzed. Then, quicker than I would have guessed, he was up and out of the Lumina, coming at me as I went at him. We wound up toe to toe. He was two inches shorter than me and fifty pounds lighter, but he surprised me with an index finger to my chest. “What did you do?”
I grabbed the finger and was ready to twist it—but didn’t. Dropped it instead. “Who are you?”
“What did you do?” the kid said again, shaking all over. “Why ain’t you arrested?” He said it hain’t in the North Carolina way I remembered from my NASCAR run. He shoved my chest with both hands. It was a nice try, but my feet didn’t budge.
“I saw pictures of you on her phone. What were you to Savvy? Boyfriend?”
“I’m her fiancé, or was,” he said, lips and jaw quivering. “I am Blaine Lee from Level Cross, North Carolina, and if the Yankee-ass police up here can’t take care of business, I’ll take care of it myself.”
“I’m after the same thing you are, kid. I … cared about her. A long time ago.”
“Not that long,” he said. “I saw you two the other day.”
“You said your name’s Blaine?”
He nodded.
“I didn’t kill her, Blaine. Cops would love to say I did, but they cleared me. Think I’d be walking around otherwise?”
He stood and panted at me, his adrenaline fading.
“For what it’s worth,” I said, “I told her to forget Saginaw and head back home. To her kid. And to you, I guess.”
“Then I guess she listened to you about the same as she listened to me. Which ain’t much.”
Look at him there, leaning at me, ready for whatever came next. No chest, no chin, blondish hair in a poodly near-mullet. Boxed in and outweighed, but unafraid.
You make a snap judgment. You trust yourself. You hope you’re right.
“How about I park my truck and we talk?” I said.
“That’d be fine, sir.”
I smiled as I climbed into the F-150. Sir.
“How long were you and Savvy together?” I said a minute later when Blaine joined me.
“Nearly a year.”
“And it was serious?”
“As a Fort Worth bar fight, sir. I pestered her to marry me and let me adopt Max for six months or more, and I guess I finally wore her down, ’cause she said yes.”
“But she came up here. What changed her mind?”
“Bert Motherfucking Saginaw, pardon my French. She read he was running for office. It got under her skin and stayed there.”
“You knew about her past.”
“I knew all about it,” he said, staring at me to let me know exactly what that meant. “Sir.”
“What’d you do, follow her up?”
Blaine nodded. “Savannah swore she just wanted to shake some money out of him, but he went and fell for her again soon as she knocked on his door.”
“There’s something about her.”
“I guess there sure is.”
We each looked through my windshield, thinking our thoughts.
“Was,” I finally said.
“Was,” he said.
“Cops know about you yet? Chinese-looking detective maybe, name of Wu?”
“No, sir. I can be pretty clever when I need to be.”
“They’ll want to talk with you.”
“Why’s that?”
“You’re the boyfriend. You’re the first guy they look at. But it’s even worse than that. You’re a jealous boyfriend, a dumped boyfriend.” Which is why you should be looking at him yourself, I thought. But I wasn’t buying it. Let the cops waste their time crossing Blaine Lee off their suspect list. He was crossed off mine already.
“I was not dump
ed!”
“Suit yourself.” I shrugged, thought awhile. “What do you do down in Level Cross?”
Blaine smiled. Had good teeth except for one brown one that looked like an Indian-corn kernel. “I’m an installer at Best Buy in Greensboro. It’s how we met. She wanted satellite radio.”
More quiet.
“What are we going to do?” Blaine said.
“You truly ought to head home. I think Savvy said her son is with your folks?”
“My folks. Yes, sir, he is.” He seemed to sneer on folks. But maybe I imagined it. Why the sneer? Worth keeping in mind.
“It’s a hell of a thing, what happened to his mom. Go home. Be there for Max.”
“I guess maybe I will.” Long silence. Blaine set a hand on the door handle and left it there. I could tell there was more on his mind. “Are you really the Conway Sax ran Busch Grand National back in the day?”
Racing is North Carolina’s state religion.
“Sure,” I said.
“You raced Mark Martin, Jeff Gordon, Davey Allison, all them boys.”
“Sure.”
“You beat ’em.”
“A few times.”
“Your ticket was stamped for Cup, but you drank instead. So Savannah said.”
“She was right.”
“I saw in a magazine where Jeff Gordon earned thirty-two million last year.”
“I didn’t do quite that well,” I said. “Hop out, Blaine. Drive home to your folks and your job and your boy.”
He swallowed. What an Adam’s apple on the kid. “I guess I will.”
He had one foot out the door when I said, “Hey.”
Blaine turned.
“This’ll sound strange,” I said, “but did you bring anybody up here with you? Guy my age, going to fat? Sloppy-looking, brown hair kind of long? Bombing around in a green Ford Expedition?”
Did Blaine’s eyes and jaw tighten? Or did I imagine that?
“Reason I ask,” I said, “he had your accent. Tarheel through and through.”
“Can’t say he sounds familiar,” Blaine said. “But I will think on it.”
Huh. How much thinking could it take?
I followed him back onto the Pike, stayed behind the Lumina, did some thinking myself. Blaine Lee sure didn’t strike me as a man who’d snapped his girlfriend’s neck yesterday. But the thing about really good liars is that they’re really good liars.
He took the exit for I-95 south. I kept rolling west, to an appointment with Betsy Tinker that I was now good and late for.
Blaine Lee.
Huh.
An idea hit me. The cops must not have connected Blaine to Savvy yet. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be driving around. So why not make the connection for them? That way, if I was dead wrong and he had killed her, they could nail him. And if he hadn’t? Hell, better to have the cops focusing on him than on me. More elbow room.
I fished in the F-150’s center console, came out with the business card Wu had given me. His first name was Credence. Go figure. I dialed. He picked up on half a ring, said his name.
“This is Conway Sax.”
“I know.”
“Savvy Kane gets her neck snapped in Charlestown,” I said, “and eight hours later the Globe has creepy pics of the pol she was messing around with. You feeling the pressure? Brass breathing down your neck?”
“You’re wasting my time,” Wu said. “Got anything for me?”
“Do you know about Savvy’s boyfriend?”
He sighed, paused, seemed ready to hang up. “Saginaw. No shit.”
“No,” I said. “Her other boyfriend, her real boyfriend. You must’ve seen pics of him on her phone. He wanted to marry her. She came north instead to put the squeeze on Saginaw.”
Pause. But a short one. “Tell me more.”
“Blaine Lee from Level Cross, Enn-Cee. Chevy Lumina, red, North Carolina plates.” I said the plate number. “He just got on Ninety-five south. He’ll be in Rhode Island in fifteen minutes.”
“No he won’t.” Click.
Sorry, Blaine.
I drove. I thought. Bert Saginaw, me, Blaine Lee. Savvy Kane never had much trouble getting men to do what she wanted them to do.
* * *
Sixteen years ago, Paducah motel. Savvy and I spent forty hours there, the Triumph at the foot of the bed, and we were wide awake, cocaine awake, every second. We counted our hundreds over and over again, sorting and stacking them the way kids do pennies. We had eight thousand dollars. All the money in the world. Bonnie and Clyde money. We talked Mexico. Savvy had been to Cuernavaca and wanted to go back.
When the Haitian maid knocked on the door, we slipped her a pair of the hundies and sent her for food, booze, and cigarettes. Savvy swore by Old Golds, and I found I liked them too.
Two cartons of Old Golds, two pints of Wild Turkey, a bucket of fried chicken, and a brick of cocaine. No need to screw around cutting lines: Just lick your thumb, jam it in the coke, sniff for all you’re worth, then rub your gums.
We ate. We drank. We smoked. We screwed. We stayed naked.
We fell in love.
You can laugh. You can scoff. But by midnight we were stripped naked in more ways than one. Exhausted, punchy, wanting to sleep but unable to keep our thumbs out of the coke.
We talked.
We spooned and talked all night long.
Life stories, dreams, daydreams, nightmares.
We told it all.
By sunup, I knew everything there was to know about Vinton, Virginia, where Savvy’d grown up. She felt the same way about my hometown, Mankato, Minnesota. I knew her family, her pets, her school, her tormentors. Her demons.
And she knew mine.
“Savvy?” I said into her neck at six thirty or so, traffic just starting to pick up outside.
“Mmmm.”
“Who is he?”
“Who’s who?”
“Who’s the cop?”
“I dunno. James.”
“What kind of deal was he talking about? In the bar?”
“Sleep,” she said. In a few seconds I heard the kitty-cat snore.
I slipped the lit Old Gold from her fingers, put it out on the nightstand, wondered why she was lying.
* * *
Krall’s flunkies had said I should just pull up to the front door—the future governor of Massachusetts was expecting me. Good thing: I sure as hell wasn’t going to find a parking space here on Beacon Hill.
I idled at the address, looking up and down a long row of redbrick town houses. Cream-colored trim and black shutters, as far as you could see, both sides of the street. In the center: a little park wrapped by a wrought-iron fence. Carpet of grass in the park, not a fallen leaf in sight. Neighborhood like this, they probably had a guy running around all day catching the leaves in a trash bag. Two women walked dogs smaller than my cats. Hired help, I assumed, because each wore a plastic poopy-glove on her free hand.
“Are you Mr. Sax?” a man’s voice said. I turned left, saw a guy who seemed familiar—either because I knew him or because he looked exactly like a sawed-off Ernest Borgnine. Even had the big split between his front teeth. “Conway!” he said, reaching through my rolled-down window to shake. He saw I was drawing a blank. “I’m a friend of Bill’s,” he said, not seeming offended that I didn’t quite know him. “I’m a regular with the High Steppers in Natick. We’ve visited you Barnburners at Saint Anne’s many a time.”
Small click. “Shep?” I said. “You the one tells the story about the family of possums lived under the bar?”
“That’s me! I’ve worked here seventeen years now.”
“I figured from the getup.” He looked like a bellhop from a 1946 movie, right up to the navy-and-gold hat. “But I thought you were a contractor.”
“I am. A contractor with one customer. There’s always a project needs doing…” he waved at the building behind him “… and you can’t beat the pay.”
“Hope she lets you change clothes when you’
re working. Be a shame to dirty up that uniform.”
“Yeah yeah yeah, I’ve heard all the jokes. And yeah, I’m a driver and even a butler, kinda, when there’s no real work to do. But it’s a good living and she’s a good boss, believe me.” He looked me over. “You’re the Mr. Sax come to see Miz Tinker? No offense, but you should’ve worn a suit coat. I’m supposed to park your car … truck, but I can run upstairs and grab you one. Say the word.”
“You’re dressed nice enough for both of us, Shep.” I clapped his shoulder as I stepped from the truck, looked at the marble steps and six-panel door before me. “Which apartment’s hers?”
“Apartment?” Shep had been halfway into my idling truck, but he climbed out and grabbed my sleeve, pointing, his voice a harsh whisper. “Jesus Christ, she owns from there … all the way down to there! Something like fifteen thousand square feet in Louisburg Square. You need to know who you’re dealing with, my friend.”
“Big coin.”
“The biggest.”
As I climbed the steps I remembered something about Shep, something a lot less funny than the possums under the bar: He’d lost his wife and kid in a house fire five, six years ago. The kid had been in his twenties but had never moved out—retarded, maybe, or just unable to hack it. A rough break. We’d all passed the hat for Shep a few times. I wondered if he lived here now. Had to be rooms for the hired help.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Five minutes later I was sitting in a parlor with pale pink walls, pale pink floor-length drapes, and a tiny fireplace with a tiny fire that smelled like tiny apples. I half-expected the little man from the Monopoly board to walk in.
Instead: Elizabeth Tinker. I had the presence of mind to stand. Too fast—damn near knocked my chair over with the backs of my thighs. Even up close she looked much younger than I knew she was, rich, and fit. She wore blue jeans, God bless her. Had likely changed into them after a huddle with the maid who showed me in. Another victory for the great unwashed.
“Miz Tinker,” I said, feeling oafish and oversized even in a room with nine-foot ceilings.
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