I said nothing.
“Are you one of Krall’s functionaries? No, that’s the wrong word. One of his operatives?”
“Hell no.” I finger-traced the envelope’s clasp. I didn’t meet Katy’s eyes. Knew I shouldn’t say much of anything to her. But wanted to. Decided to. “Somebody I knew got killed. I’m going to find out why. And by who.”
“And this person was … someone to you? Something?” Katy’s voice was different. Kinder.
“She was something, all right.”
I rose faster than I meant to. Strode through the big open room and clattered down the stairs louder than I meant to.
* * *
Savvy Kane was the one I betrayed. The last one.
Sixteen years ago, it had taken James Sebelius four days to break me.
That was the cop’s name, it turned out. He was with the Kentucky Bureau of Investigation, and he was dirty as hell. He told me these things in a county jail in the middle of the woods somewhere. “If I take you to KBI in Frankfort,” he said the second day, cleaning his fingernails with a four-inch knife, “we got ourselves an official investigation.” He said it OH-ficial, not bothering to look at me curled on the floor, shaking and sweating. “We do it this way instead here in my buddy’s cozy old jail, what we got is a nice little chat, nice little just-us conversation.”
Sebelius hadn’t spoken with me my first day in the cell. I spent the day thinking he was clever as hell, letting me get sick, letting me start a nice case of the DTs.
If he was clever, it was by accident: It turned out he’d spent the first day focusing on Savannah Kane.
Because she was his girlfriend.
Had I suspected that? Sure. But when he told me, with a big smile on his face, he got my attention. I paused in mid-wretch, stared his way. The stainless-steel toilet felt cool on my cheek.
“Old Savvy forgot to tell you ’bout that aspect, didn’t she? Miz Savannah is my intended, or was, as our future is looking less rosy by the minute.”
Sebelius, who’d been sitting on the cell’s only bunk, rose, stepped to me, dropped to a knee, wrinkled his nose against my smell. “I’m gonna fuck her up good, Sax. She’s a tough one, don’t respond to an honest beating in the hoped-for fashion. Well, let’s just see how she responds to a nickel up in Pewee Valley.”
I said nothing. If you don’t know that sweat can burn and freeze at the same time, you’ve never been sick the way I was sick.
He moved his face close to mine. “What you do, Sax, you blame the whole goddamn mess on her. The theft of my beloved Triumph, the big-ass drug deal that netted all that money and cocaine, the whole enchilada. We clean you up and buy you a suit. You testify, I ain’t gonna lie and say you don’t have to. But you’ll be clear of Kentucky by the end of the month, which I believe both you and I would enjoy, and you will be a free … fucking … man. How ’bout it?”
I turned my head 90 degrees to get a whiff of the toilet bowl. That was all it took.
Then I turned to him again, finger-beckoned, waited for him to lean close.
Then I vomited on James Sebelius.
I might have smiled while I did it.
But not for long. He beat me unconscious.
Day three: More of the same except that he stayed out of puking range, using his cowboy boots more than his fists. Three visits, three beatings. I could tell the sheriff who ran the jail didn’t like it. He must have owed Sebelius a lot to let it go on.
And on.
And if you want the truth, I wasn’t opposed to the beatings. They took my mind off the DTs, the sickness, the eyeball-shrinking horror of withdrawal. To feel the toe of a boot in my kidney, the heel of a boot on my knee, was to feel.
Sometime between day three and day four, James Sebelius wised up.
It was a gray morning, and he whistled into the cell slapping a folder on his thigh. I flopped from the bunk, which by gentlemen’s agreement belonged to him when he came to beat me, and scrabbled to the toilet corner.
But he didn’t kick me. Instead he sat like a schoolteacher and opened the folder. Made a big show of running his finger up and down pages, Hmmming and Ah-haing.
“Your wife,” Sebelius finally said. “She to whom you took a solemn vow shortly before vamoosing to drink and drug your worthless life away. Remember her?”
I said nothing. But the world had tipped. The folder was more powerful than any cowboy boot. I knew I was done, and I guess he knew, too—but he would draw this out, would take a victory lap.
“Your wife, way up there in Becket, Massachusetts? I got bad news, Sax. She’s a terrible momma, she is.”
“She’s not,” I said. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what? Don’t inform you she’s a terrible ole momma, neglecting your fine son when she ain’t outright abusing him?”
“Sebelius,” I said, dragging myself upright for the first time in thirty hours. I had no particular fondness for my ex-wife—still don’t—but she was one hell of a mother. It was the main reason she’d left me. “Don’t drag her in. Please.”
He shook his head and made an Mmm-mmm-mmm sound. “Not the way I see it, stud hoss. I got suspicions, see? And when a man’s got suspicions, a man’s got to air those suspicions. ’Specially a sworn officer of the court such as myself. So what I feel an urgent need to do, I feel an urgent need to pick up the phone and dial whatever you call it up there…” He flipped through pages, squinted. “… shit but it’s a mouthful. Department of Social Services, comma, Department of Children and Families, comma, Child Abuse and Neglect. I feel a need to air my suspicions. Your little boy, your little preschool boy, he’ll get pulled out of his rotten momma’s home. Neighbors’ll watch. Local rag’ll put it in the Police Log. You know how it goes.”
“Please. Don’t. She doesn’t deserve it. My kid doesn’t deserve it. If I had a white flag I’d wave it.”
“In that case.” The folder snapped shut. Sebelius eye-locked me. “You’ll clean your miserable ass up. You’ll get a suit and a haircut to make you look like less of a vile drug addict. You’ll testify exactly the way I tell you to testify.” He slapped his thighs and rose. “You’ll put poor old Savannah Kane away for at least five years. Then you’ll stick out your thumb and clear the hell out of my state and never look back. We got a deal?” Standing over me, he extended his right hand.
I hesitated, then reached to shake.
He pulled back the right and moved to punch me with the left.
I flinched hard enough to bang my head on the wall behind me.
But Sebelius had been faking. He knew the flinch was more humiliating than the punch.
As his cowboy boots clicked away for the final time, I rested my cheek on the stainless toilet and cried.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“They sent you to haul me upstairs?” I said in the lobby of the Escutcheon. “How’d you come to be low man on the totem pole?”
Emily Saginaw said nothing.
“Or should I say low girl on the totem pole? That’s it, isn’t it?”
Her face went red as she card-swiped and punched the button for the ninth floor.
“Funny how it works when you’re the only woman,” I said. “You may be the smartest person in the room, but you get stuck taking notes and fetching people from the lobby. You get all the to-dos. What are to-dos called these days? There’s a phrase. My girlfriend told me…”
“Action items,” she said as we passed the fourth floor. Ghost of a smile? “If I told you how many action items I cross off every day.”
“But you never clear the list,” I said.
We stepped from the elevator. Emily led me through the main room for workers and phone-bank volunteers, the room I’d seen buzzing the other day.
It wasn’t buzzing so much.
Maybe a third of the workers were occupied. Another third sat at their desks, arms folded, headsets on, waiting for calls. The rest clotted around coffeemakers and water coolers, talking low. In AA meetings, you hear more th
an enough layoff stories. The vibe today made me think of employees standing around waiting for the ax to fall.
“Chain Link Jesus fallout?” I said as we crossed to double frosted-glass doors.
“You’ll hear in a moment,” she said. “Short answer? Hell yes.”
The frosted doors opened to a conference room dominated by an ash table shaped like the world’s biggest surfboard. Damn thing had to be twenty-five feet long. At the far end, to my left, light flooded from a window-wall.
Around the table slouched Saginaw, Krall, and two top flunkies somebody had called boy-wonder pollsters. The room was flat. Silent. Airless. Everybody stared at laptops.
“Wish I had happier news,” one flunky said, “but we are hosed. We are fucked.” He noticed the other flunky snickering. “In fact, we are well and truly ass-fucked.”
“Ease up on the language,” I said. “For the lady’s sake.”
Head-whip. Narrowed eyes. “Or?”
“Or I’ll grab your pencil neck and bounce your face off that wall three times.”
I wasn’t looking at Emily, but she moved her hand in a way that made me think she covered a smile.
“Lighten up,” Saginaw said to me. “The kid’s right. This thing’s not bottoming out.”
“When’s the last time,” the second flunky said, “the Times, the Post, and USA Today all ran the exact same page-one pic two days running?”
“Drudge is having a goddamn field day,” the first flunky said.
Saginaw put his head in his hands, his elbows on the table. Krall just spun his chair back and forth, looking at nothing as he chewed the inside of his mouth.
“Our lead hit single digits in last night’s internals,” Saginaw said to me. “People are talking momentum. People are invoking Scott Brown.”
“Goddamn it, Pete,” Emily said, her face redder than I’d seen it before, an anger flood that came from nowhere. “Do something!”
I’m the one could do something, I thought. Could show you some pics that make Chain Link Jesus look tame. I’d spent the short drive from Katy Stoll’s place thinking about my move here. It was tempting to be a hero, produce the dirty pics, and say mission accomplished.
But with the dirty pics off Saginaw’s worry list, I’d lose all access to him and Tinker both. I’d lose leverage.
I’d lose my chance to catch Savvy’s killer.
Another factor: The con’s instinct to play it close. Same reason I’d held Vernon Lee back from Wu. Info is cash. Nobody gets a freebie.
So the photos were rolled up in my truck’s hidey-hole.
Saginaw said, “It’s not his fault, Em.”
“She’s right, though,” Krall said, rising. “We do need to quit crying and get after it. Look, deep down we all knew this day was coming. Let’s get past it. Let’s change the narrative. You say momentum? You say single digits? I say a seven-point lead the Friday before the election, and I say that’s a damn landslide. Now let’s go work our plan, work our firewall.”
It was a good pep talk. It straightened spines. Krall pounded from the room without looking back, flunkies hot on his trail.
“I hope he can peddle that horse shit to the volunteers,” Emily said.
“If he can’t, nobody can,” Saginaw said.
“Except you,” Emily said.
Saginaw half-smiled. “Except me.”
“About those Jesus pictures,” I said to Saginaw. “What the hell?”
He sighed, looked at his sister. “Tell him.”
She did.
Condensed version: Saginaw Fence Co. grew large enough to get the attention of the two national chains he was competing with. The chains started a price war. Bert decided to fight back with a public relations war.
“I’m guessing that was a bad idea,” I said.
“Instead of hiring professionals,” Emily said, “my dear brother got it in his head he could handle this PR battle against a pair of hundred-million-dollar companies, one of which was publicly held, on his own.”
“Definitely a bad idea,” I said.
“It’s true what they say about you,” Emily said. “You’re not that dumb after all.”
“Dear diary.”
Her eyes crinkled and she went on.
Like all PR newbies, Saginaw thought the whole world would be interested in his piddly-ass problem. He wrote what he considered a pretty decent press release. It was so bad, so full of indignation and one-sidedness and typos and personal insults, that its entertainment potential struck the editor of the Worcester Free Press, one of those alternative newspapers you saw tossed on sidewalks outside rock clubs.
The editor drove to Bert Saginaw’s home, photographer in tow, to profile Bert Saginaw. Emily didn’t like it; she knew it was a setup. But Bert was in red-mist mode over his price war, and the Free Press was the only rag that had responded to his press release. He spent a cloudy afternoon doing the full sit-down interview. By the end of the three hours, the editor had everything he needed—including the knowledge that Saginaw was proud of his workout routine and the resulting physique.
After a huddle, the editor and photog hit Bert with the idea. You know how Rolling Stone did these amazing cover pics that the entire industry talked about for weeks? Starlets in their panties, rockers covered in blood, shit like that? Well, they had a crazy notion of how to make Saginaw pop, really pop, on the cover of the Worcester Free Press. The drawback, the editor said—stroking his beard, baiting his trap—was that the idea only worked if Mr. Saginaw was willing to take off his shirt …
The photo had run over the headline CHAIN LINK JESUS. The article became an instant classic in alt-journalism circles: This asswipe cartoon capitalist hanging himself in thirty-five hundred well-crafted words.
“Wow,” I said when I realized Emily was done. “How long ago was this?”
“Eight years.”
I turned to Saginaw. “Like Krall said, you had to know it’d all come out when you ran for office.”
“We thought we could overcome it,” he said. “It’s why I’m playing second fiddle. It’s why I hitched a ride with sweet Betsy Tinker.”
“We can overcome it,” Emily said. “We will overcome it.”
Saginaw said nothing.
Me too.
After a minute or so, I rose and left.
* * *
As I drove to Winthrop to check on Moe, I thought things through. Or tried to.
My phone rang once. It was Wu. “That didn’t take long,” I said out loud. He must want to talk to me about Blaine Lee. I didn’t blame him. I also didn’t pick up.
Pulled into Moe’s driveway as a 727 screamed past, ducked involuntarily as usual. Wondered how long you had to live here before you stopped doing that.
Up the steps, into the enclosed porch. With the morning sun around back of the house, it was chilly.
Moe’s photo gear was set up.
No Moe, though.
I said his name. Nothing.
The door to the house itself hung open. I stepped in and said his name, louder this time, knuckle-rapping door glass.
Nothing.
I stepped inside.
It stank in here.
“Moe?”
Walked through the parlor, through what was supposed to be a dining room but was crammed with junk. The stench worsened as I walked. I moved slower as I neared the kitchen. Nightmare pace: My legs seemed to work fine, but the doorway refused to draw closer.
“Moe?” I just about whispered it, finally stepped into the kitchen.
The smell—shit, ammonia, maybe something else beneath—nearly knocked me over. I began to breathe through my mouth only. But the ammonia cut through, stinging my throat.
I looked left, around a corner formed by a half-assed pantry.
It took a few seconds to grasp what I was seeing.
My friend Moe Coover, a WWII guy, a Barnburner back when they called themselves Barnstormers, a man who’d shaken hands with AA’s founders, lay dead on the flo
or.
His head was near the oven door.
His hands were held up in the I surrender pose, knuckles resting on linoleum that hadn’t been updated in fifty years.
His pants were down around his knees, his ridiculous old-man’s privates dangling in the open.
His face was covered by his own diaper.
They’d pulled down his pants and torn his diaper off.
They’d smothered him with it. They’d forced his own yellow shit down his throat.
“Moe,” I said. “Oh Moe. Oh God. Oh Moe.”
I looked down at my hands. They were shaking.
I forced myself to him, forced myself to a knee, forced myself to peel back the diaper, to make sure.
His chest moved.
“Moe?” I said. Set my hand on his chest, felt it fall and rise.
“Moe! It’s Conway. Breathe, Moe. Breathe.” Pulled my cell, dialed 911 as I spoke.
Six minutes later, God bless ’em, the EMTs crash-carted their way in and I eased my way out. By the time the first white-on-black Winthrop police Charger slammed down Moe’s block, I was driving around the corner, making my way back to the main drag.
I drove to a drugstore I’d passed on my way in. Parked near the back corner, wobbled over to the Dumpster, puked. Wiped as much shit from my hands as I could, went in the store. Bought water, toothpaste, toothbrush, paper towels, disinfecting wipes. Ignored the clerk’s wrinkled nose while I paid. Cleaned up, brushed teeth, climbed back in my truck.
I was shaking. I was colder than I should be. I fired the truck, blasted the heater.
Think it through.
It hadn’t been neighborhood creeps who’d attacked Moe: Twenty-five grand worth of kick-ass photo gear sat untouched on his porch.
So look at it square: He’d been attacked because of me. By this fucking Vernon in the green Expedition. Had to be him. And you led Vernon right to Moe’s house the other day because you couldn’t spot a goddamn big-ass SUV riding your bumper.
But what had Vernon wanted from Moe? Had to be information, but what? I pushed puzzle pieces around. Vernon had wiped out Blaine, had smothered Moe …
My mouth dropped open.
I looked at my knuckles on the steering wheel. Death-grip white.
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