The Whole Lie

by Steve Ulfelder

  “It’s not funny.”

  “It’s not. Sorry.”

  I told him. About Katy Stoll and the likely High Steppers link between Emily Saginaw and Shep.

  I said nothing about Charlene.

  I said nothing about how close I’d come to picking up a few hours ago.

  When I finished, Randall whistled. Then frowned. Then twiddled his thumbs.

  “The way I see it,” he finally said, “you’re all done here. Or this close to it. You’ve figured out Shep snapped the dirty pictures of Saginaw, and you’ve already done right by Savvy Kane.”

  “I knew you’d say that.”

  By way of answer, Randall raised his eyebrows.

  “I need to figure out exactly how this blackmail worked,” I said. “And exactly who was involved. I’m sick of being jerked around by rich people. I’m sick of hearing bullshit and semi-bullshit and half-truths.”

  “Whole lies.”

  “Huh?”

  “Old Yiddish saying. ‘A half-truth is a whole lie.’”

  We were quiet a minute.

  I finally said, “Yiddish?”

  Randall shrugged.

  I’ll never figure that kid out.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Woke the next morning with Dale purring on my back.

  I felt ready. I felt clean. Popped up, deposited Dale in the warm spot. He didn’t complain.

  One good thing about living in a house full of Brazilians: No matter how early a riser you think you are, you never have to worry about waking people up. Even on Sunday, the kitchen and dining room burbled with Portuguese and knife-and-fork clanks. Maria cranked out ham and eggs as fast as she could, trying to keep up with a half-dozen guys—kids, cousins, cousins’ cousins—who were fueling up. Her youngest son, who everybody called Dozen for some reason, helped by washing dishes on the fly. For some, Sunday meant a third job. For some it meant a fourth.

  Show me a man who works harder than a Brazilian and I’ll show you another Brazilian.

  Before I could say no, Maria deposited a plate of ham and eggs and a cup of black coffee on the counter in front of me, kissed me on the cheek to boot. I ate standing up, nodded at Floriano as he made for the sink with dirty dishes.

  He nodded back.

  Awkward. Tuesday, pre-Savvy Kane, we’d been on the same wavelength, gung-ho about the new shop. Now we were in different places.

  “How’d the week end up?” I said.

  “Was good,” he said.

  “That’s good,” I said.

  “Yes, good,” he said.

  Maria watched all this, her mouth becoming a stern line. She fired a dose of Portuguese at Floriano, nodding in my direction a couple times. His face went red as she spoke. Finally he gestured surrender and leaned next to me on the counter.

  “The shop took off like that,” he said, snapping his fingers. “Me and Tory talking about another lift in that third bay. Charlene says maybe we should move to a bigger place. Already.”

  “Wow.” The battle inside me: pride at being part of it, embarrassment at not being a bigger part, resentment that Floriano and Charlene got to talk about expansion without me. “Is this what Maria told you to tell me?”

  “What she told me to tell you,” Floriano said, “is … we been friends a long time, Connie. When you finish doing what you’re doing, helping your friend, you come back. We’ll have a bay for you.”

  “Obrigado, amigo,” I said, whacking his shoulder. Then I winked at Maria, who was doing dishes and pretending not to listen. “Obrigado, amiga.”

  She smiled just a little and nudged Floriano.

  “One more thing,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Maria says if you split up with Charlene, you a big dumb jerk.”

  * * *

  My plan: Start at Saginaw’s place, then find Shep. Needed to nail down the connection between Shep and Emily. I was pretty sure it was there—but what did it mean? How deep did it run?

  That was the angle Randall had kept picking at the night before, in Floriano’s living room. “You’re talking as if it’s a lead-pipe cinch,” he’d said after we argued awhile, “but I’m not seeing it. Nobody knows AA better than you. Groups turn over all the time, am I right?”

  “Sure.”

  “So Shep and Emily both spent time at this High Steppers group in Natick. Who knows if they ever talked with each other? Hell, who knows if they even overlapped?”

  I shook my head. “Shep’s been a High Stepper forever. For him, the group’s like the Barnburners are for me.”

  “Okay. So stipulated. But still. Coincidence does happen, Conway.”

  “Are we better off if we call it coincidence?” I said. “Or are we better off if we smell a rat and check it out?”

  “Well.”

  “Figure out the blackmail, figure out who killed Savvy,” I said. “That’s been my motto. Thought the one would lead to the other, but I screwed up. Got the hard part first—it seemed like the hard part, anyway—but the blackmail’s just sitting there.”

  “And until you’re satisfied you’ve figured out the blackmail, you can’t be satisfied you’ve truly figured out the murder.”

  “Yup.”

  “Any chance, any chance at all, you can view this as a job well done, thank God you’re not in prison, and walk away?”

  I stared at him.

  “Sorry,” Randall said. “Dumb question.”

  The other thing Randall and I had teased out—something that had bugged me, something even Katy Stoll had commented on—was Saginaw’s confidence there was one copy and one copy only of the shots that could torpedo his career. “Why does he think that?” Randall had said.

  “I got the vibe he’d been in contact with the blackmailer,” I said. “Had gotten the info firsthand.”

  “Yes, but who believes a blackmailer?”

  It was a good point, and the reason I was headed to Saginaw’s place early. The idea was to get him alone before the day turned hectic, press him for more info on the blackmailer.

  But before I even cleared downtown Framingham, my plan got kicked in the teeth. I was angling southeast when something caught my eye. Looked left, saw flashing headlights in a convenience store parking lot. Kept moving …

  … had that been a black Crown Vic?

  Sighed, spun a 180, pulled into the lot.

  Vic Lacross.

  He’d backed into a slot. I pulled in, put us window to window, rolled mine down. Chilly morning: I watched his breath as he spoke.

  “Glad you spotted me,” Lacross said. “I put myself between Saginaw’s house and where I hoped you were. We shoulda swapped cell numbers.”

  We took care of that. I said, “What do you want?”

  “I told you my guy, Wilton, wants no part of winning this thing. Didn’t I?”

  “Sure.”

  “You maybe didn’t believe me.”

  I said nothing.

  “I take no offense,” Lacross said, plucking something from his passenger seat. “Switch us around and you tell me the same thing about your team, I would’ve thought you were full of shit.”

  I said nothing.

  “Wilton’s an early riser,” Lacross said. “A crack-of-dawn guy. Likes to watch the sun rise over his three-million-dollar slice of Scituate Harbor.” He held up a brown envelope, nine inches by twelve. “When he toddled out to his patio this morning, he found this on his favorite chair.”

  He passed the envelope over.

  I rested it on my steering wheel.

  I undid the cheapo clasp.

  I reached. I pulled. I flipped.

  I looked.

  At another copy of the dirty pictures.

  “I’m on my way to see Saginaw about these,” I said. “He swore there was just the one copy. Guess he was wrong.”

  Then I looked again.

  My mouth fell open.

  I looked again, held a shot close to my face, squinted, made sure. If I’d had a jeweler’s loupe
, I would’ve held it over the picture.

  There was no red dot.

  I flipped.

  There were no red dots at all.

  Just a woman’s face.

  My mouth stayed open.

  “It’s not a Photoshop,” Lacross said. “What do you think, uh?”

  I couldn’t stop looking.

  You could see Saginaw’s costar clear as day.

  There was no doubt.

  “When Wilton looked inside,” Lacross said, “he didn’t know whether to shit or wind his watch. Woke me up, told me to haul ass down there.”

  “Nobody else has seen these?”

  “Not a soul. He gave ’em the hot-potato treatment. Said he didn’t care what I did with ’em, but he never wanted to see ’em again or hear about anybody who did. Now do you believe Wilton doesn’t want to win this thing?”

  I looked at the pics again.

  And believed.

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  “Have a nice day,” Lacross said.

  He rolled up his window and drove away, leaving me to goggle at pictures of two adults banging away like barnyard animals.

  Bert Saginaw.

  And Betsy Tinker.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  It was a lot to think about. It could overwhelm me if I let it, cause me to lock up, keep me from doing anything productive. Analysis paralysis, Randall called it.

  But analyzing things to death had never been my problem—Randall liked to point that out, too, the little bastard—so I kept moving.

  Saginaw’s place felt like a funeral home. The pollster flunkies huddled in a den, whispering to each other and pointing at their laptops.

  “Like a wake in here,” I said when Emily clacked around a corner in a sensible tan pantsuit, laptop beneath one arm.

  “There’s a reason for that.” She plucked a Globe from a hall table, held it to her chest. Big-ass headline:

  GOVERNOR’S RACE NOW VIRTUAL TIE

  Below:

  New poll shows Wilton within margin of error; Tinker campaign denies 11th-hour shake-up

  “Ouch,” I said. There was another headline, DEBATE DEBACLE or somesuch, but she set down the paper before I got much of a look.

  “And that’s our friendliest poll. The others are really ugly. Did you see the undebate last night?”

  “The hell’s an undebate?”

  “I’ll show you, but fair warning: Bert’s on the warpath. Pete Krall is on the hot seat, and I advise you not to let him off it.”

  I wondered what she was talking about while she led me up the stairs, down the hall, into an office suite.

  Saginaw: campaign-ready in a charcoal suit, light-blue shirt, red tie. He had tossed the suit’s jacket across a chair, had rolled up his shirtsleeves. He kept firing a clicker at a flat-screen across the room like he was trying to shoot a hole in it. All the while, he fired commentary too—at Krall, who sat on the couch making no facial expression at all.

  Saginaw fast-forwarded. “Here’s a softball I could’ve hit out of the park … if I’d been there!” Fast-forward. “And here’s where I would have hammered this clown on his Beacon Hill lobbying record … if I’d fucking well been there!” Fast-forward. “And here we have the crowning glory, the moment of pure gold … what say we watch it frame by frame, numbnuts? With popcorn, extra butter?”

  By then, Saginaw was shrieking. A little drool sagged from one corner of his mouth.

  I said, “You want to calm down there, Bert? And maybe tell me what’s going on?”

  The gratitude in Krall’s eyes almost made me feel bad for him.

  Almost.

  The way Saginaw spun told me he hadn’t even known Emily and I were there. “Finally,” he said, “someone with a set of balls, someone who’s not just cruising til his next paycheck.” He pointed at Krall. “And last, I might add! Win, lose, or draw, Pete, you have fucked us royally. Your next gig will be with some crackpot running for selectman in Gill. I will see to it personally, boyo.”

  Saginaw faded as he spoke, energy draining in a way you could truly see. He panted a few seconds, flung the clicker to the floor, and stomped from the room.

  I said, “Fill me in.”

  Krall gulped. All blood had drained from his face. He stood and tried his confident college-swimmer pose, hands on narrow hips, but it wasn’t working—he’d been unmanned. “I, ah,” he said. “I may have made a mistake last night.”

  “The Jesus pictures turned Bert into a liability on the campaign trail,” Emily said. “Pete made the call to pull him back as of yesterday.”

  “That doesn’t seem like a bad idea.”

  “It was,” she said without looking at Krall. “Several of us tried to tell him so.” She plucked the clicker from the floor, aimed, fired. “You see, the one and only debate between the lieutenant governor candidates was supposed to be last night.”

  “I decided not to send him,” Krall said. “I used the old scheduling-conflicts excuse.”

  “Thus this,” Emily said, hitting play.

  “Oh,” I said.

  We watched a few seconds more.

  “Oh damn,” I said.

  Smallish stage. One podium on each side, both tagged SUFFOLK UNIVERSITY. At one podium: a soft, balding guy I’d never seen before, speaking into his microphone. He must be the other lieutenant governor candidate, Wilton’s running mate.

  Behind the stage-right podium: a cardboard cutout, life-size, of Bert Saginaw. Wearing a Saginaw Fence Co. polo shirt, a half-sneer on his face.

  Emily hit the volume, and after a minute or two I figured out what Team Wilton had done. They’d made a comedy routine out of Saginaw’s no-show. The opponent would ask a reasonable-sounding question, then cock his ear like he was waiting for Saginaw to answer. After a while, he would mug for the audience, who were eating it up, before rattling off his own position on the question.

  “This was on TV?” I said.

  “When Bert bowed out,” Krall said, “Wilton’s folks swooped in, bought the time slot, and said they were ready for a debate, as promised. I knew then we were screwed.”

  We watched some more. Every few questions, a couple of flunkies would come on stage, carry off the life-size cutout of Saginaw—and return with another that was even less flattering. The students would howl.

  “Piece de resistance,” Emily said after a few minutes, clicker-jockeying.

  “Oh no,” I said, knowing what was coming.

  “Oh yes,” she said.

  It came, to laughter and applause that shook the camera: Saginaw as Chain Link Jesus. The loin cloth, the sinewy muscles, the torqued torso, the tilted, tragic face. Propped behind the podium.

  Hoots. Shrieks of laughter. The auditorium shook.

  Krall heel-rubbed his eyes. “Bert watched all night. Made me sit here the whole time.”

  “I need to talk with him,” I said.

  “No way,” Emily said. “He needs to regroup. Big day today.”

  “Where is he?”

  Neither of them spoke.

  “I’ll find him,” I said, and left. Then stepped back into the room, grabbed Saginaw’s jacket, and left again.

  * * *

  It took a while. I walked both wings of the ridiculous house, finally spotting him through a window. He sat on a tiny patio outside a study. I stepped through the door.

  Saginaw had his face turned to catch thin sunlight. His arms were folded across his chest. He didn’t open his eyes, didn’t turn his head.

  “Cold day,” I said. “And you stomped out of the room in a huff. Then you realized you’d left your jacket, but after that exit you were damned if you were gonna go back in.” I soft-tossed the jacket so it landed on his chest. Then I scraped a wrought-iron chair across flagstone and sat next to him.

  Saginaw still hadn’t opened his eyes. But he was smiling now. “Good guess about the jacket,” he said. “Cold out here.” The smile grew broad, became a chuckle as he slipped his arms through the sleeves. “It
’s hard getting a good mad on.”

  “It’s a young man’s game,” I said. The words came to my head, flashed: In cold blood.

  “Remind me why I wanted to be governor,” he said.

  “Lieutenant governor.”

  “Sure. What the hell am I supposed to do now, Sax? After the humiliation last night?”

  “You do what everybody does. You get past it. You put on your coat, make your speeches, shake a few hands.” I scraped my chair closer to his, looked around some, pulled the folder that’d been tucked between my T-shirt and my flannel shirt. “But first, you need to look at these.”

  “Those what I think they are?”

  “You tell me.”

  As it had with me, it took him a half-beat to realize he could see Betsy Tinker’s face. “Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy shit.” He whispered it. “They were supposed to … she said…”

  Bingo. She said. I jumped on it. “What did Emily say?”

  “They told her they’d made only the single copy. That they snapped the pics, printed ’em, destroyed the camera and printer. Just like that.”

  “You believed her.”

  “We believed them, you mean.”

  “Still haven’t put it together?”

  “The hell is that crack supposed to mean?”

  “Your sister’s the blackmailer, Saginaw.”

  He moved quick, I’ll give him that. Hit me with a decent right that rocked my chair. Followed with his body, trying to swarm me to my back on the patio. And he damn near did it, and then maybe he could’ve done a little damage.

  Instead: My chair back wedged against the heavy wrought-iron table, which scraped but didn’t move far. So as Saginaw tried to get an arm-bar across my throat, all I had to do was reach up and squeeze his.

  The move cut both his air and his blood. His eyes went big. The fight went out of him.

  Still holding, I stood. I rattled his throat to get his attention, eye-locked him. “Knock it off, you dumb fuck. There are a bunch of people around here I want to hurt. You’re not one of them.”

  Saginaw relaxed. Didn’t have much choice.

  We righted our chairs. We sat as if nothing had happened.

  “Tell me what you think you know,” he said, rubbing his Adam’s apple.