“I’m…” Thumpthumpthumpthumpthump.
“Maybe you not need no more to drink this day, sport.”
“I’m…” Thumpthumpthumpthumpthump.
I lifted the hand to stop the thumping. The glass stayed with it. The couple stared. Two busboys had materialized from the kitchen. They raised eyebrows at the barkeep.
I flicked my wrist. Heard the glass drop to the bar, but by then I was three steps toward the door.
Twenty seconds later I was in the truck. The interior had gone cold, so it looked like I’d lied to Dale, same way I’d lied to everybody else. I unlatched the cat carrier, held him to me.
“What are we going to do, Dale?” I said over and over to the cat in my lap, my face in his fur. “What are we going to do?”
But I knew.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“Need to leave you again,” I said to Dale ten minutes later. “It’ll be an hour. Sorry, brother.”
Dale chirped and rolled against the ball cap I’d shoved in his carrier so he’d have something that smelled like me.
What a goddamn trouper.
Next to the carrier: my booklet listing every meeting in this half of the state.
I sighed, eyeballed the storefront squeezed between a nail salon and a travel agency that ran people to and from Rio. Downtown Framingham. Two blocks south of Floriano’s home, five minutes west of the parking garage where Vernon had died.
The narrow store sold AA books, signs, sayings, bumper stickers. Also JESUS SAVES signs, sayings, bumper stickers. There used to be meetings here every day, but according to my booklet this was the only one left. I wasn’t surprised. Five years ago, when I’d last been here, this meeting had been at death’s door.
Every group, every meeting is different. They have life cycles: They’re formed, maybe they swell, maybe they raise the roof for a few years or a few decades. Then key players die out, and they take the meeting—its heyday, anyway—with them.
But every meeting gives somebody something they need. I was proof, wasn’t I? Like this meeting or not, here I was. And here it was.
I reminded myself of all this as I banged on the door. In this neighborhood, they had to lock it.
A hunchback named Lenny turned, squinted, rose, let me in. “Conway!” He whispered it: I was five minutes late, and a chairwoman I didn’t recognize was introducing her first speaker.
I sat in back and counted heads. Eleven drunks, squeezed in among the racks of Big Books and step books and testimonials and Bibles and those little silver fish people stick to the trunks of their cars.
I knew six of the drunks just from the backs of their heads.
Tried to listen to the speakers, but my head went where it went. I knew what I was here for. Shame had brought me. Humility would save me.
Maybe.
When the last speaker wrapped, Lenny hopped up with a clear plastic box in his hand. “Chip time!” he said, and I knew it was his big moment, the high point of his week. At the front of the room, he set the box on the counter next to an old-fashioned cash register. Rubbed his hands, peered inside.
The way it works: Some AA groups, not all, pass out coins or chips marking sobriety anniversaries. The chips are motivation for newbies. I never cared for that kind of thing myself. But everybody’s different, and you should see the look on some people’s faces when they earn their one-year chip.
“One year!” Lenny said, looking around. He held high the bronze-colored disc. “One year, going once … twice…”
No takers.
He went through the routine again for the six-month chip. A very dark woman with high cheekbones rose and shuffled forward. The other eleven of us clapped and whistled, and the way she bit back a grin as she sat damn near made me smile. Like I said, the looks on some people’s faces.
“A month?” Lenny said, raising a silver chip like an auctioneer. “One month of one-day-at-a-time sobriety?”
No takers.
Lenny looked a little blue, resigned to handing out just one chip at this meeting. But he went through the motions, holding up a turquoise disc. “Last one,” he said without putting much into it, “most important one. Twenty-nine days, twenty-four hours, or a sincere desire to quit drinking. Anybody?”
I tried to push out of my chair. Couldn’t do it at first.
“Anybody?” Lenny said.
I weighed sixteen tons.
“Going once … twice…”
I pushed off again, making it to my feet this time.
My chair scraped. My heart thundered.
In Framingham—hell, in most of the state—all the hardcore AA types knew about the Barnburners. They knew about the Meeting After the Meeting.
They knew about me.
People turned at the sound of my scraping chair.
People gasped.
My boots were cinder blocks. My legs were pudding. Lenny stood a thousand yards away.
I went to him.
Somebody whispered, “Barnburner.” Somebody else said my name. Somebody else choked on a sob.
Lenny: poleaxed, his mouth an O. I put my hand out. He just stood there. I had to reach for his hand. I had to gently pull the chip from it.
I turned.
I faced them all.
“I’m Conway,” I said. “I’m an alcoholic and a drug addict.”
They were supposed to say hi, but they were stunned. Nobody said a thing.
I wanted to say more, but my lower lip wouldn’t let me. I tried once. Then again. Then I gave up, began walking back to my chair. It was time to close with the Lord’s Prayer.
I took a step, then another. Then my legs mutinied and I couldn’t go farther. I sank to one knee. One hand clutched my new chip. The other I set over my eyes like a man driving into the sun. I stared at the floor.
I wept.
“Bring it in here,” Lenny said.
Still staring at the floor, I listened to more chair scrapes and wondered what was going on.
Then they touched me.
They laid hands on me.
Every one of them. Eleven hands. On my head, back, shoulders, arms. Someone gripped the hand I was using to shield my eyes. I looked up. It was Lenny.
“Whose father?” he said.
It was the signal to begin.
They all started. “Our father…”
Soon I joined in.
We prayed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
It was just about full dark ten minutes later when I pulled up at Floriano’s. I grabbed the cat carrier, bounced up the stairs and in the front door.
I felt … clean but jumbled. Drained and recharged both. I wanted to drink a glass of water, rinse my eyes, and lie on my cot while Dale sniffed around his new home. I wanted to think. I wanted to plan.
All that went out the window when I spotted Randall. Sitting in a chair in the living room, reading a hardcover book. Kid reads like nobody’s business.
“Well,” I said. “Hell.”
He looked me up and down. His eyes paused a beat at the cat carrier. “I tried Charlene’s place first,” he said.
“Well.”
“Yes. Set poor Dale free and I’ll tell you about Margery Lee.”
Me: rush of paranoia. Didn’t I look different to Randall? Didn’t I look like a man who’d shamed himself, who’d come this close to drinking? Paranoia doubled when I realized my free hand was fingering the twenty-nine-days coin in my pocket. I dropped the coin like it was a spider, let Dale out. He went straight over and sniffed Randall’s shoe, the one covering his real foot.
“Floriano and Maria?” I said.
“Upstairs for the night. Why are you antsy? You sent me to Nowheresville, North Carolina, Conway, and you’re going to by-God hear the results.”
I sat.
“Talk about unlucky in love,” Randall said when he was good and ready. I could tell he’d thought his story through. Probably wrote an outline on the plane ride home, or at least nailed one down in his head. He’s like that.
“No surprise.”
“I don’t mean he physically beats her. Not anymore, that is. Margery has been fully aware that her man is the boss for many, many decades, if you ask me. She’s a ghost, Conway. A skeleton, a shell.”
“Losing her son couldn’t have helped.”
“Exactly. And Blaine was her only son, I might add. Her only child. Now here’s a twist: How would you react if I told you Savvy came north not to squeeze Bert Saginaw, but to protect him from being squeezed?”
“Protect him from … Vernon?”
“Indeed.” Randall’s eyes went cloudy. “Once I got Margery going, once I opened her up, it was … it was a torrent. She couldn’t stop telling me things Vernon’s done. I shall quote again. ‘He’s a corruptor,’ Margery Lee did say about her betrothed. ‘A befouler, a viper, a ruiner of anything and everything sweet.’”
“He’s also dead,” I said. “I mention that yet?”
“What?”
I told him about the parking garage, the crash through the wall. I tried to make it breezy.
It didn’t come out breezy.
Randall looked at me awhile when I finished. “This explains the various abrasions and the fact you’re moving like a constipated octogenarian,” he said.
I said nothing.
“But there’s more, isn’t there?”
I wondered how he saw through me so easily. I’d fibbed about how Vernon came to be following me, had made it sound like I just happened to spot him. Hadn’t mentioned trawling. Hadn’t explained in-cold-blood versus red mist.
I wanted to tell Randall. I wanted to explain. I wanted him to know it all, to tell me it was okay.
I said nothing.
“There’s more,” Randall said, “but you won’t tell me until you tell me. I get it. Still, just what you have told me … it’s a lot. On your shoulders. It’s too much.”
I said nothing.
“No ill effects from the gendarmerie?” he asked.
I told him about Wu. “Believe it or not, he hasn’t even braced me yet on Vernon.”
“That can’t be. Savvy Kane dies, her boyfriend dies, her boyfriend’s father dies, and they haven’t even put you in the hot box? Nonsense.” Randall stared at nothing for a while. Dale jumped on his chair back, sniffed Randall’s head. “Is there any chance,” he finally said, “Vernon survived?”
“I watched him fall five stories in a two-ton SUV. It was pretty convincing.”
“Huh.” He was still skeptical.
“My guess,” I said, “the Vernon news is under wraps because it can only hurt Tinker’s chances, which are looking worse every hour. Wednesday morning, you’ll see a two-inch story about Vernon on page eleven of the Globe.”
“Huh.”
“You’re not convinced.”
“Where was I?”
“Befouler. Viper.”
“Ah yes.”
By the time Savannah Kane met Blaine Lee at Best Buy in Greensboro, her son Max was five years old. Blaine went full head-over-heels in a way that maybe Savvy didn’t—Margery admitted her son had never had a lot of luck with girls—but from the start, Savvy struck her as a decent sort and a good mother. A good single mother, working a succession of nothing jobs, and that wasn’t easy.
My face went red. Savvy’d told me this, or had tried to, and I hadn’t believed her—to me she was stuck as a biker-bar broad, a gal who hopped on the back of a stolen Triumph Bonneville and went on a speed-fueled tear with a drunk. A gal willing to blackmail her old lover with dirty pictures she somehow stumbled across—and willing to double-cross me, sucking me into an investigation she knew would lead to nothing.
Time for a rethink. Maybe Max had brought Savvy something she’d never experienced: serenity. Nice time to accept that. Very helpful. She was only murdered two days ago.
Blaine was both a gentleman and a gentle man, according to his mother. Best of all, he and Max adored each other.
“Blaine popped the question,” Randall said. “Savvy said yes.”
“Then what?”
“Then they moved in with Blaine’s folks. And everything turned to shit.”
On paper, it made sense. The idea was for the new little family to live rent-free while saving for a down payment on their own place. Vernon and Margery lived in a run-down but decent three-bedroom ranch house. There was plenty of room.
“Vernon,” I said. “What did he do to her?”
“Margery knew it was a bad idea from the start,” Randall said. “You see, he was very high on the move-in plan, always talking it up. That made a big blip on Margery’s radar, because Vernon never offered to share anything with anybody.”
“What did he do to Savvy?”
“He got her in bed,” Randall said. “But first he got her…”
I pinched the bridge of my nose, anticipating it.
“First he got her drunk,” Randall said. He knew it hit me hard. Whatever you thought about Savvy, it was a fact she’d put together a good chunk of sobriety.
Nine years ago, when she’d walked into her first Barnburners meeting—I probably asked her two hundred times how she tracked me down, but she never did say—she’d already been sober four years. Had hooked into the prison AA/NA group in Kentucky. Said they’d saved her life.
That sounded familiar.
Charlene and I’d been aware of each other at the time, circling each other, but not dating. Me and Savvy clicked like that. Every night was like the motel room in Kentucky. Hell, I could practically smell grease dripping from that old Triumph Bonneville.
Going through all this—the whispering, the confiding, the planning, the lovemaking—stone-cold sober made it even better.
For me, anyway.
Savvy had grown restless. Savvy had stopped showing up at Barnburners meetings. Then she’d stopped showing up at my apartment. I knew now that was when she started in with Bert Saginaw.
I shook my head clear, focused on Randall. “There wasn’t a lot to do in Level Cross,” he was saying.
Each morning, Blaine would head off to Best Buy and Savvy would put Max on the kindergarten bus. Three days a week, Margery worked a full shift in the church food pantry. That left Savvy and Vernon alone, watching awful daytime TV shows. Vernon started drinking at ten thirty, as he had for close to three decades.
“After a while,” I said, “Savannah drank with him.”
He nodded.
Two adults watching trailer-trash TV, drunk by noon. One of them a corruptor, according to his own wife, the other hating herself for drinking. You didn’t have to be a genius to see how it went where it went.
Margery had walked in one time, she told Randall, intending to make a quick sandwich. She’d paused in the kitchen, had put an ear to the door of her own bedroom. Had heard Vernon berating Savvy, beating her down with words. He was telling her he’d understood her slutty nature right from the get-go, had seen she was dying to dump the AA nonsense and make it with a real man.
“What did Margery do?” I said.
“Margery walked out the kitchen door very quietly,” Randall said, “and made it a point to wash the sheets that night. As I said, Vernon beat the life out of her long ago. She’s a husk.”
By the time Max popped off the bus each afternoon, Savvy was showered and made up and mostly sober. Her son saw something, felt something was different about mommy. Margery, who adored Max by then, could see the puzzlement in his eyes, in his attitude. But he handled it the way boys do: He said nothing, kept to himself more, gave Vernon a wide berth. And Blaine, puppy-love Blaine the car-stereo genius, never knew anything, never figured it out.
“Blaine knew more than he let on to his mother,” I said. “He had to at least suspect s
omething was rotten. That would explain why he claimed not to know Vernon when I first met him.”
Randall nodded. “Possible. Very possible. Hell, he may have been planning to kill the old man.”
“The old man beat him to it.”
We were quiet awhile.
“Keep going,” I finally said. “Savvy must have told Vernon about Bert Saginaw.”
“That’s how Margery sees it.” Randall nodded. “Pillow talk. Savvy let it slip that Max’s biological father was a rich man running for office. Vernon got dollar signs in his eyes. He’d been playing short cons for decades, and he didn’t mind telling his wife he was plumb wore out by the effort. He and Savvy would make their way up to the People’s Republic of Massachusetts and separate Mr. Hubert Saginaw from a sizeable piece of money. Then old Vernon would return home to Level Cross, invest in a nice rocking chair, and declare himself a retired country gentleman.”
“And if Savvy refused to go along with the plan,” I said, “Vernon would blow the whistle. He’d sit his son down and tell him what a good lay his fiancée was.”
“And Max, who was just getting a taste of life with a daddy and a gramma, would be the first casualty.”
We were quiet awhile.
“So Savvy had to show up on Saginaw’s doorstep and make like a gold-digger,” I said. “But it was a front. She was really just trying to keep a leash on old Vernon, trying to spare Blaine and Max.”
“Which would explain why you saw her following Vernon that day.”
I thought. “But why didn’t she tell me? Why didn’t she tell me?”
Randall tented his long fingers, looked at them. “Would you have believed her?”
I tried to tell myself the answer was yes.
“No,” I finally said.
He nodded.
I sighed.
“There’s a problem,” I said. “All this only makes sense if the blackmail threat was that Savvy would go public about the kid. Which wasn’t the threat at all.”
Randall nodded. “Those damn pictures. I spent the plane ride thinking about them.”
“I don’t know how Savvy and Blaine came across them,” I said, “or who Saginaw’s buddy from the pics is. But I did learn a few things.”
“So you’ve done something in the last thirty-six hours other than kill a man?”
The Whole Lie Page 21