The Whole Lie

by Steve Ulfelder

  I didn’t have a cold, and Randall wasn’t feeling weepy. We were in the Chicken Bone Saloon, just a couple hundred yards from Lacross’s office. The Chicken Bone is a dive. It’s a blues bar. It serves the best wings in the state. It’s perfect.

  What we do, we order eighteen wings in garlic blaze sauce, which’ll take the bugs off your windshield, and eighteen in thermonuclear sauce, which is about what it sounds like. Only hotter. We have the waitress mix ’em all up, and then we play roulette to see who gets what. Randall was having a tough run: three thermonuclears in a row. I’ll attest that if a black man eats enough hot wings, you can watch his face turn red.

  “Did you get the skinny on Bert Saginaw?” I said. Someone behind the bar turned up a Lucinda Williams record.

  “Of course,” he said, dunking a celery stick in as much ranch dressing as it would carry. “But you go first, while I wait for my heart rate to recede.”

  “No sympathy. At least you can wash yours down with beer.”

  “I’ll drink to that.”

  While he did, I started to fill him in.

  It took a while. As I worked through my day, its fullness surprised even me. By the time I was done we had a basket full of bones, my lips were numb, and Randall had about finished his second beer.

  “That’s a hell of a day,” he said.

  “Packed,” I said. “Tell me what it means.”

  “Gee thanks.” But he looked down at his lap and began twiddling his thumbs. He actually twiddles them, but only when he’s thinking. I looked at the Chicken Bone’s stage, which wasn’t much bigger than a Ping-Pong table, and wondered how the hell the band that was trundling its gear through the door would make it all fit.

  “Question,” he finally said. “Let’s say Bert Saginaw didn’t kill Savvy. Who benefits if Saginaw looks bad?”

  “Thomas Wilton.”

  “But you stipulated Lacross as a reliable source,” Randall said, “and he says Wilton would just as soon lose.”

  “What about Betsy Tinker, then? They tell me she can still be elected with or without Saginaw. And it looks like she hates his guts and he hates hers.”

  “He hates her guts? Or Sister Emily hates her guts?”

  “Same thing. They’re a team, those two.”

  Randall grunted, either because he was unconvinced or because he’d just ripped into yet another thermonuclear wing. “Anyway,” he said, “can you picture Betsy Tinker tossing a woman from a trailer-sized A/C unit in Charlestown? In broad daylight?”

  “Of course not. Someone who works for her, though.”

  “That’s worth looking at, but … it’s hard to make the risk/reward work for a billionaire lady.” Randall paused. “Keep it simple, Conway. Blaine Lee.”

  “I didn’t get that vibe.”

  “Vibe, schmibe. Anyway, we’ll know soon enough. The state cops have him in the hot box right now.”

  “They do?”

  “You didn’t hear? It was on the radio. They picked him up down in Attleboro, beelining south.”

  “Nice work, Wu.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “What’s bothering me…” Randall said.

  “The guy in the green Expedition,” I said.

  “So maybe that’s your tomorrow project right there.”

  “I guess.” I reached for a curly fry. “Tell me about Bert Saginaw.”

  “I will, but first I have to ask: Why the curiosity about him?”

  “The more I know,” I said, “the more I know.”

  “Do you believe he’s behind Savvy’s murder?”

  “I haven’t run into anybody with a stronger motive. And even if Saginaw had nothing to do with it, there’s a chance his background’ll point us in a direction.”

  Randall considered that, then made a what the hell nod. Or maybe he was clearing his sinuses. He organized his thoughts, tented his fingers. Charlene says he’ll be a college professor someday. I don’t disagree.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Hubert Saginaw was born in 1955 in Fort Morgan, Colorado, to a failed inventor and a nurse. Dad, Paul Saginaw, was smart as a whip and had made a little money during the Depression when he patented a clever locking mechanism for livestock gates.

  But he made only a little money; the patent boosted his ego in a dangerous way, and Paul would spend the rest of his life handing out pricey business cards with his name over the single word INVENTOR. The sum total he made off his latch probably didn’t pay for the supply of cards. By the time Hubert and his two sisters were old enough to understand, Paul was a wet-eyed dreamer who spent all day messing around in his basement “lab” and explaining to the kids that no matter how hard they tried, The Man would always screw them out of what was rightfully theirs.

  Mom—Marion Saginaw nee Hartline from over in Hillrose—was the workhorse and the paycheck. She worked in the local hospital, one of those nurses who was liked by doctors but not patients. Marion didn’t give a rat’s behind who liked her: She had three kids and a useless husband to support. Wake up, get the kids off to school, work a shift, fetch groceries at the IGA on the way home (because Thomas Alva Goddamn Edison was too busy in the basement to be bothered with shopping), pull dinner together, listen to Thomas Alva Goddamn Edison whine while they ate, supervise homework, and maybe, just maybe, treat herself to a knock of so-so Scotch in the bathtub before falling into bed.

  “Whatever it is you want me to know about Saginaw,” I said, “you’re sure taking the long way around to it.”

  “Getting there,” Randall said, pushing up imaginary glasses on the bridge of his nose. He was digging the storyteller bit, the professor bit, and I’ve learned to let Randall do things his way.

  Bert Saginaw wasn’t an especially good student, so it surprised the hell out of everybody—his parents, his teachers, and the guidance counselor who’d been pointing him at local voke schools—when he was accepted at Oberlin College in Ohio. It turned out he’d taken his father’s rants about getting screwed by The Man, written them up in the form of an application essay, and impressed somebody in the elite school’s admissions office.

  In late August of ’73, armed with a duffel bag, a stack of student loans and ten twenties his mother stuffed in his shirt pocket—warning him he was on his own other than that—Bert Saginaw hitchhiked from Fort Morgan to Oberlin.

  I didn’t know much about college, but I doubted many kids thumbed twelve hundred miles to their freshman dorm.

  “Some family, huh?” Randall said, reading my thoughts.

  I took a guess. “Was that it? He never saw his parents again, and good riddance?”

  “Hell no. The inventor dad croaked fifteen years ago, but mom’s still around. Saginaw put her in a high-end nursing home out in Concord. The older sister is out of the picture, been teaching school in Hawaii forever. But Emily’s been with Saginaw his whole career, ups and downs. When he ran companies she was always his admin, his bodyguard, his … wall. You wanted to talk to Bert, you talked to Emily first. Period. She couldn’t be scared, couldn’t be bullied, thought her big brother walked on water.”

  “I picked up on that.”

  “She’s now a highly valued special advisor to the campaign.” Randall smiled. “That’s newspaper lingo for ‘queen-sized pain in the ass.’ I scanned the political blogs, and even when Tinker-Saginaw was looking unbeatable, anonymous advisors were threatening to quit over Emily’s daily goofball ideas. Nothing’s good enough for her brother, that’s what it comes down to. Naturally, Bert lets her get away with it all. Sorry about the sidebar.”

  Saginaw lasted less than a year at Oberlin. He was vague about what happened; most likely he just couldn’t keep up at the high-octane college and flunked out.

  But he didn’t walk away empty-handed: His last act before vacating the campus, he would say a hundred times in later interviews, was to peel up a section of flooring from a lab in Kettering Hall, Oberlin’s science building. That floor was made up of thick
rubber sections—chocolate in color, six inches square in size—that interlocked like a kid’s toy. The idea was that if you dropped a test tube or beaker on the stuff, it wouldn’t shatter.

  Bert had grown fascinated with the flooring. It was the most comfortable stuff he’d ever stood on, it was easy to install, and you cleaned it with a push broom. Why wasn’t this flooring everywhere? He’d asked his Basic Chemistry prof, who’d shrugged and said he’d heard it was Swiss in origin and was all the rage in Europe.

  Long story short: Bert Saginaw declined to hitchhike back to Colorado. Instead, he wrote a letter to his sister Emily and asked her in turn to write this Swiss company to see if they had a Midwest distributor.

  They did not.

  Three months later, they did. CushionAire Enterprises, based in Elyria, Ohio, consisted of Bert on the sales end and Emily, who’d been looking for a chance to escape Fort Morgan, handling everything else.

  Randall paused.

  “And?” I said.

  “And Bert Saginaw was—is—one hell of a salesman.”

  “I’ve seen him give a speech,” I said. “Tell you the truth, I wasn’t that impressed.”

  “See if this impresses you,” Randall said. “In fiscal ’75, CushionAire did thirty-four million in revenue. Let’s guesstimate a twenty percent profit margin, because he had no real competition and Euro-stuff was very hip back then. That means he put almost seven mil in his pocket. That was a lot of money back then.”

  “Back then?”

  He waved a hand, made a pffft sound, told more.

  For five or six years, floors in a big swath of the upper Midwest turned chocolate-brown and comfy to stand on. It was all Bert Saginaw’s doing. He was young, he was driven, and he was hyper-charismatic in a strange, charmless way. If he’d been born ten years later, Randall said, he would have carved out a career as an infomercial pitchman. “One of these jokers who starts out on late-night TV, and pretty soon he’s a celebrity unto his own damn self for no reason anybody can figure out.”

  “He is a politician,” I said. “Isn’t that pretty much the same thing?”

  “Har har.” CushionAire hit the skids when the Swiss parent company told Saginaw it was time to push south into the Tennessee Valley and west into the Great Plains. The expansion made it impossible for the Saginaws to run the business as a brother-sister operation. They soon learned Bert, like a star jock who makes a lousy coach, was no good at training salesmen. His brilliance was deep in the gut, and when he tried to explain it the trainees grew frustrated while Bert grew mean. Emily wasn’t much better at hiring and training the human resources, accounting, and support staff needed to grow a business.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “The Swiss company pulled an end-run,” Randall said. “They licensed new regional distributors, letting Saginaw keep the upper Midwest. The problem was, that market was saturated already. Even in the seventies, you could only convince so many people to throw out their rugs and glue ugly brown rubber to their floors.”

  Bert and Emily flailed another eighteen months before folding up CushionAire. Then they spent fifteen years in the wilderness—launching businesses that didn’t pan out, investing in sketchy franchises that went under. Slowly they became clones of their father. They convinced each other CushionAire had been the one, had been theirs, and that they’d been screwed out of their fortune by The Man.

  “We’re deep into the nineties now,” Randall said. “Got a guess as to how Bert Saginaw made his next score?”

  “That decade kind of passed me by, but Moe said something about software.”

  “Bingo.”

  Silicon Valley. A company that made software for testing the software they used to build software. “Or something like that,” Randall said, waving a hand to indicate neither of us had a chance in hell at understanding what the operation actually did.

  While stumbling after yet another half-baked franchise idea, Saginaw met some University of Chicago geeks who’d developed software, which even they considered boring, to double-check the code in their Computer Science projects. Instinctive as ever, and curious about the West Coast venture capital bonanza the business magazines were talking about, Bert smelled opportunity. He cashed in his last goodwill chits for a loan of a hundred grand, impressed the geeks with the dough, installed himself as CEO/CFO, and moved the circus to a rented place in Cupertino, California, that served the next year as a frat house–HQ combo while the geeks wrote code and Saginaw pounded pavement.

  He scored in ’96, after Netscape showed everybody just how silly these stock valuations could be.

  “What’s Netscape?” I said.

  “Sheesh,” Randall said, “you were out of it back then. Never mind.”

  The University of Chicago geeks’ software would never be as sexy as Netscape or Amazon, but it was a nice little tool for building complex Web sites. And in 1996, a nice little tool could and did win you $2 million in first-round venture funding, followed by $5 million eight months later, with the big carrot dangling out there eighteen months off: the initial public offering that made everybody rich.

  Randall said, “Guess what happened?”

  I thought. “Was Emily involved with this company, too?”

  “You bet,” he said, smiling, knowing I’d sussed it out. “Executive assistant to president, CEO, and CFO Hubert Saginaw.”

  “They crapped the bed again,” I said. “They couldn’t handle the growth.”

  “Indeed. But this time there was another factor.”

  I waited.

  “The VCs,” he said. “Venture capitalists. Sharks like you’ve never seen. They’ll rip your heart from your chest, show it to you while it’s still beating, and get you to sign it over before you fall.”

  The waitress brought our tab. Without looking at it, we each tossed a twenty on the table.

  Bert Saginaw’s problem in Silicon Valley was that he considered himself a peer of the venture capital guys. Like them, he was in his early forties. Like them, he had no particular passion for this tech nonsense, but rather for big money. Like them, he was babysitting a bunch of twentysomething geeks who spoke a different language.

  The venture capitalists saw Bert Saginaw in a different light. Had they known he considered himself their peer, they would have laughed themselves sick. Where they were California-fit in that tall, rangy way, he was a bandy-legged deadlift-and-bench-press guy. His Dockers, his weird hard-sell charisma, his strawlike hair that ran shaggy because he didn’t cut it often enough … none of it worked in that time and place. He drove a Pontiac, he thought vegan was a planet on Star Trek, he thought Napa was an auto-parts store.

  He was, in short, a mark.

  “All of this would have been forgiven,” Randall said as we rose and stepped past the band to the parking lot, “had not Bert Saginaw committed the ultimate Silicon Valley gaffe: On the day he walked into the venture firm’s Palo Alto office to sign for the five million dollars that would lead to the IPO that would make everybody rich, he actually asked the lawyers in the glass-walled room for advice.”

  They were, of course, corporate counsel. A woman and a man, neither yet thirty, both dressed in black slacks and pale blue shirts. They must have been experienced, because they managed not to break out in laughter while urging him to sign.

  “Oof,” I said.

  “He signed himself out,” Randall said. “He signed himself poor. The way the VCs see it, anybody who doesn’t bring his own lawyer to the table deserves whatever he gets.”

  “How did Saginaw’s geeks do?”

  “A year later, they were all millionaires. On paper. Five years later, they were all flat broke. Thus do bubbles burst.”

  “Once again,” I said, “Saginaw and his sister earned the chance to remind each other they’d been screwed by The Man.”

  “Yes. They believe with rock-solid confidence … no, it’s more than that, it’s fervor … that the world has screwed them over not once but twice.”
<
br />   “And they’ll never get screwed again.”

  “Never.”

  “Even if that means…” I made a question with my eyebrows.

  “Who can say?” Randall said.

  “Huh.”

  We were quiet for a minute. Finally I said, “How’d you learn all this in a day?”

  “Googlepedia, mostly. Are you headed for Charlene’s?”

  “Sure.” But I paused before I said it, and knew Randall picked up on the pause.

  “Good,” he said. “You should.” He pulled his car key, pressed its unlock button. I saw the interior light go on in the slick little Hyundai he’d recently bought. The car was parked as far from the Chicken Bone’s door as you could get and still be in the lot.

  “You could park in a handicapped spot once in a while,” I said, waving at the vacant ones right in front of us. “You’ve got the plates, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “Right you are,” Randall said, but not before staring at me a full five seconds. “Nothing to be ashamed of at all.”

  Then he pocketed his car key, clapped twice, bent double at the waist, and flipped into a handstand.

  Then he walked the twenty yards to his Hyundai.

  On his hands.

  I was still laughing when he tooted his horn twice and pulled out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “Any sign of Davey?”

  It was the first thing I said when I stepped into Charlene’s great room.

  “No,” she said, handing me a tall glass of bubbly water topped with cranberry juice. It’s my favorite drink. “And we nearly lost Sophie, too. She spent the afternoon clomping around the woods looking for him. My darling backyard neighbor called the cops. Said he thought it was a prowler, but he knew damn well who it was.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Bathtub. I chased her up there.”

  “Why?”

  But as I said it, a few things sank in. Charlene had straightened up the room, plumped the sofa pillows. The flat-screen was tuned to a jazz station, and the lights were dim.

  So was I. There was something big going on here, and I’d been too wing-stuffed and Savvy-focused to notice.