The Whole Lie

by Steve Ulfelder

“The blackmailers have been dealing with Emily all along, right? Everything you told me you got from her?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Thought so,” I said. “Something about the amount of detail, and how sure you were that there was just the one set. Emily sold you that bullshit, didn’t she?”

  “Come on—”

  “Think! She did, didn’t she?”

  Saginaw thought.

  Then nodded. “She made it sound like a done deal. But why?”

  “Blackmail one-oh-one,” I said. “The mark needs to believe he can make it go away with one big payout.”

  “That’s not what I mean. Why? What’s mine is hers.” He spread his arms. “All of it. I’d do anything for Em. I do everything for her.”

  “Not my department,” I said. “I’m no shrink. Here’s what I need. I’m going to see Tinker next, and I want your sister to come with me. Make her do it, okay?”

  “Why?”

  “Never mind. Just make it happen. Convince her.”

  As I stepped back into the house, Saginaw said my name.

  I stopped, turned, held open the door.

  “About those pictures,” he said. “There’s, ah, there’s a story there.”

  “It’s an old one.”

  I closed the door behind me.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  “What does Tinker’s day look like?” I said to Emily Saginaw, who didn’t look thrilled to be riding in my F-150, fifteen minutes later.

  She didn’t even have to look at her iPad. “There was a Waltham Elks breakfast. That wrapped on schedule, so now she’s shaking hands outside Whole Foods in Sudbury. We should catch the tail end of that. Church services in town, then a breast-cancer awareness march on the Common. It’s a five-K walk, but she makes a speech, ducks out after a few hundred yards, and shoots over to Arlington where they’re breaking ground to expand the town bike path. Want me to keep going?”

  “For crying out loud.”

  “It’s the home stretch. And as you know, there’s a new sense of urgency.”

  “And then some,” I said. Looked through the windshield, tried for a casual tone. “I imagine Shep’s driving her around today?” My plan: Let Emily know I had the goods on Shep, but keep the High Steppers connection to myself. Once she saw the momentum was going against Shep, she’d likely rat him out, tell me a few things I didn’t know already.

  “I imagine so,” Emily said, and if the name fired alarms in her head she hid them well. “But Tinker’s got a good-sized staff, and lately they haven’t been bending over backward to keep us in the loop. So who knows?”

  “Shep’s been with her … what’d he say, seventeen years?”

  Now Emily did stiffen. The truck’s vibe changed.

  “I really wouldn’t know,” she said as I hooked left onto Route 20, the main drag in swank Sudbury.

  Time for the bomb-drop. “Reason I ask,” I said, going for complete deadpan, “it turns out old Shep is behind the dirty pics of Bert.”

  Dead quiet. Beside me, Emily sat still as a good hunting dog. But there was a giveaway: a tiny cracking sound. She’d broken a freshly manicured thumbnail on her iPad.

  “Aren’t you going to congratulate me?” I said. “I tracked ’em down. Tinker-Saginaw can rest easy.”

  Emily regrouped as we rolled north past cute shops and gas stations dressed up as colonial trading posts. Sudbury’s that kind of town.

  I frowned as if something was just occurring to me. “Shep must have used a cutout whenever he communicated with you, of course. He would’ve been scared you’d recognize his … it was you who spoke with the blackmailer, right? Bert said so not twenty minutes ago.”

  “Of course,” she said, composed again, a pro. “And I certainly didn’t recognize the voice, not that I know Shep’s especially well. But back up a few steps, please. What makes you think he’s the one?”

  I told her about my look-see at Tinker’s house. The dummy heat vent, the ladder in the next room, the way that room was conveniently unfinished so nobody could bunk there.

  “You’re quite the investigator,” Emily said as I sliced into the left-turn-only lane for an upscale strip mall. “Very enterprising. Do I congratulate you on cracking the case? That sounds very … very Magnum, P.I. It sounds somewhat ridiculous.”

  I said nothing. Was waiting for her to ask the big questions, the first questions anybody should ask: Who was Bert with? And why had he felt the need to get laid in Betsy Tinker’s house, of all places?

  She didn’t ask.

  Which told me a lot.

  I rolled toward the western end of the strip mall, where a decent-sized crowd stood outside a yuppie grocery store.

  I spotted a Range Rover identical to the ones in Betsy Tinker’s alley. Parked near it, killed my truck. We stepped out, looked at the knot of people. I heard Betsy Tinker’s pure voice over a loudspeaker.

  “What will you do?” Emily Saginaw said. “To Shep?”

  “First,” I said, folding my arms, leaning on my hood, not looking at her, “I’ll bust him open. Find out was he working alone or did he have a partner.”

  Emily didn’t have much to say to that.

  “Then I’ll deal with him,” I said. How, though? That’ll be a problem.

  “By having him arrested?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Because if he’s arrested…”

  “I know. That’s why we’ll have to see.” I was annoyed: Emily, no dummy, had picked up on the problem facing me. If I handed Shep over to the cops, a shitstorm would follow. The pics would go public—hell, they’d go viral. There was no way around it.

  Was that what I wanted? Did I want to splash Betsy Tinker all over the Internet?

  “Look,” I said, “Tinker’s wrapping up, and I need to talk with her. Whyn’t you run along and find one of her flunkies to chat with?”

  Emily walked toward the knot of people, which was starting to break up. Looked over her shoulder a bunch of times. I’d rattled her good.

  It shouldn’t have made me happy.

  But it did.

  The novelty of sweet Betsy Tinker speaking to the great unwashed must have worn off, because there was just one news truck in sight, and no state troopers. There was a local cruiser, white with blue, a bored cop leaning on its door. He looked fourteen years old. More and more of them do to me.

  I watched the rally dissolve. Shep, who wore a brown suit instead of his 1946 bellhop uniform, was helping one flunky wrap a microphone cord and shut down an amplifier. Another flunky sat behind a folding table, doling out bumper stickers and flyers. A third circulated through the dispersing crowd, clipboard in hand, buttonholing folks here and there. That would be the bagman, the closer, the one who put the arm on potential donors so Betsy Tinker didn’t have to soil herself discussing money.

  Dressed exactly as a rich, kind lady on her way to church ought to be dressed, Tinker was working her way toward the Range Rover. Every single person who approached her got the full thirty-second treatment, including a photo if they asked. I could tell they walked away believing they had connected with Betsy Tinker, had expressed their point of view, had persuaded her of something or other.

  She even kissed a baby.

  When she finally made it over, listening to a flunky who had to be six-four and looked like a vampire, she said hello, maybe a touch puzzled to see me, and asked where Shep was.

  “Over there, helping,” I said. “Just as well, tell you the truth. Like to talk with you a sec.” I opened the left rear door. “In private.”

  The vampire didn’t like it, but Tinker nodded him away.

  “Yes?” Tinker said when we were inside.

  I leaned forward, pulled the envelope from between my shirts. Then I held it.

  Quiet. Those Limeys at Land Rover don’t skimp on the soundproofing.

  “This won’t be easy,” I said.

  “I’m on my way to church, Mr. Sax. How may I help you?”

  Betsy Tinker di
dn’t seem to give much of a damn about the envelope in my hands. She wasn’t acting like a woman who knew, or even suspected, she costarred in a batch of raunchy pics.

  Deep breath. “Church may have to wait,” I said, unclasping the envelope.

  Part of me wanted to turn my head as she slipped out the pictures, to give her a few seconds of something like privacy.

  But I couldn’t do that. I had to see her reaction.

  She screamed.

  She clapped her free hand across her mouth.

  Her eyes went round and bulged in a way I remembered from Road Runner cartoons.

  Her pale skin turned pale pink, then the deeper pink of her church suit, and finally red like a fire hydrant.

  Betsy Tinker hadn’t known about these pictures until just now. I would have staked my life on it. Sitting eighteen inches from me, forcing herself to flip through the sheaf, Betsy Tinker was being violated again.

  Convinced of this, I did look away. My ears felt hot, and I figured my face was about the same color as hers.

  “Oh,” she said after a long time. “Oh.” The word—more of a moan, really—was muffled by the hand that stayed across her mouth.

  Outside the Range Rover, to my right, three skinny boys in skinny pants did skateboard tricks against parking curbs. It was cold, but none of the boys wore coats. The bored cop was watching the skateboarders.

  But not really, I realized as he slouched against his cruiser and scanned the parking lot. He was keeping an eye on Betsy Tinker’s car without being obvious about it.

  He wasn’t bored at all. He was a smart young cop.

  Good to know.

  “My house,” Tinker said. “In my house. Who’s responsible?”

  “Shep.”

  “Nonsense,” she said. “Shep’s been with me forever.”

  “Still,” I said. I gave her a thirty-second rundown on the unfinished bedroom, the ladder, the removable vent cover. And, in particular, the screw heads with their shafts trimmed off. Filed nice and smooth, epoxied to the cover. That was the craftsman’s touch. It pointed to someone who knew his way around the toolbox, who took some pride in his craft.

  It pointed at Shep.

  While I spoke she looked out the window, seeing the skateboarders but not seeing them. I felt for her—she had to be reliving the night. Had to be considering logistics, the room, the angle.

  “Yes,” Betsy Tinker finally said. “Yes,” she said again, firmer this time. “Good God. Shep.”

  We were quiet.

  Outside my window, one of the skateboarders actually landed a trick for the first time since I’d been watching. Must have surprised himself, because he glided a few feet and fell on his ass. I expected his buddies to laugh. They didn’t. Too cool.

  “Your business is your business, but I can’t help but wonder,” I said. “You and Saginaw? Was it … engineered? Manipulated?” By Emily? I thought but didn’t say.

  She’d aged twenty years in two minutes, had gone slack and doughy. The spring and smarts had left her face, and I saw what she might look like if she were a secretary or a cafeteria lady instead of a bazillionaire. I tried to think of something good to say.

  I couldn’t.

  So I said nothing for a while.

  So did Betsy. She squared up the corners of the pics, dropped them neatly into the envelope, tamped it on her lap. When she tried to refold the clasps, one broke and stabbed her thumb.

  “Damn,” she said, looking at a blood droplet, popping it in her mouth.

  “Metal fatigue,” I said.

  “To say the least,” she said. And laughed. I couldn’t figure out why, but she laughed a long while with her thumb in her mouth.

  “Bert was … is … what is the word?” she finally said, now pressing the thumb to the manila envelope in her lap.

  I waited.

  “Magnetic?” she said. “Forceful? Not quite. Elemental, that’s it. Bert Saginaw is elemental. If he desires you, he assumes he will have you. You may as well try to hold back the tide as fend him off. This is old-fashioned and politically incorrect, and that’s putting it mildly. Bert Saginaw is macho. Not in the smirking manner in which the word is used today, mind you. He is truly macho.”

  She swiveled her head and looked hard at me—wondering, I knew, if I understood.

  I did.

  “To some women,” she said, “this trait is both appalling and appealing. And somehow, its appallingness can, in the right circumstances, make it … make him … still more appealing. Is there any chance whatsoever that you can grasp this, Mr. Sax? That you’ll permit it as a … a mitigating circumstance?”

  “Call me Conway. And your business is your business. I said it once. But this much I have to ask: What happened? And when?”

  I glanced through the window on Betsy’s side. The flunkies had finished shutting down and schmoozing with the high-dollar types, and Shep was ambling this way. I needed to hurry.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  “Kissinger said power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” Tinker said. “He meant to explain how men who looked like … well, who looked like Henry Kissinger managed to attract pert, big-eyed young things. But sauce for the goose, and all that.”

  I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about.

  I nodded.

  “It happened the evening my people and Bert’s people met to engineer our run. The consultants, the courtiers, the mountebanks … and Conway, you absolutely would not believe how many of them a well-funded campaign attracts—”

  “You’re wrong there,” I said.

  She smiled some. “It was a very heady evening. By the time the aperitifs appeared, they had Bert and me convinced we would breeze to the governorship. And they had me convinced that from there it was merely a hop, a skip, and a jump to the Oval Office.”

  Shep was forty yards from the Range Rover.

  “Two manhattans, a bottle of wine, the aforementioned aperitifs, and a foolproof path to glory,” Betsy said. “Once the courtiers had been shooed away, Bert Saginaw’s arrogant, annoying, irresistible manner caught me just the right way. Or the wrong way.”

  “And Shep was ready,” I said. “Luckiest night of his life.”

  Shep: twenty yards and closing. He walked like a sailor.

  “What now?” Betsy said.

  “I need you to trust me three ways.”

  Her eyebrows made a question.

  “First,” I said, taking the envelope and tucking it away, “I need to hang on to these awhile.”

  She said nothing.

  “Second,” I said, “I need to borrow Shep. You’ll have to find another driver.”

  “Easily done. And third?”

  “You know that check you wrote me the other day?”

  Betsy’s nose wrinkled.

  “I want you to write another,” I said. “But I want you to times it by three.”

  She looked at me maybe ten seconds, nose still wrinkled. “Really, Conway? That seems out of character. It seems dreary in an unexpected way.”

  “I could explain,” I said, “But I won’t. Maybe there’s a better reason than the one you’re guessing.”

  She said nothing. Her eyes said I’d lost her.

  Tough.

  “Have your bagman … what did you call them, your courtiers?… get the check to me real soon.”

  Betsy sighed. “Of course.”

  “Now you go on to church like nothing happened here,” I said, “while I have a little talk with Shep.”

  Seven seconds later I was out the right rear door, around the back of the SUV, and up to the driver’s door. Shep was just grabbing its handle.

  When you’re two feet from the next governor, and you’ve got an audience of three wise-ass skateboarders and a sharp young cop, you don’t just lay a man out with a Sunday punch. No matter how bad you want to.

  “Hey-hey, Shep!” I said it loud for the cop’s benefit—me and old Shep, happy members of Team Tinker. I extended my right hand. His ey
es told me he knew something smelled rotten, but what were his choices? His boss was right there. He pulled his hand from the door handle and extended it. I gave him one of those strange half-shake/half-hugs that men do these days.

  Then I did my level best to break Shep’s hand.

  I had size, leverage, and surprise on him. In two seconds, his eyes crossed with pain. In two more, his legs began to quiver. Still in half-hug posture with my left arm crooked around his neck, I grabbed his left ear. “I’ll tear it off,” I said, twisting it some, whispering, a grin plastered to my face. “Climb in my truck or I swear I will tear it the fuck off.”

  He wobbled toward my truck.

  I drove slowly past storefronts until we were out of the cop’s sightline. Then I punched the gas, wanting to keep Shep off balance. Thought he might put up a fight, but he was meek as we drove around back of the stores. I drove faster than I needed to on the service road, flew to the back of a Chinese restaurant that wasn’t open yet, chirped the tires while stopping, threw the truck in park, ran around to Shep’s door. Pulled him out, slapped him six or eight times. Open hands. Humiliating. Like he was a schoolboy and I was a nun. Like I couldn’t be bothered to hit him with a closed fist. Like he wasn’t man enough to merit that.

  “Conway!” he said between slaps. “Conway! What? Why?”

  I stopped, faked one last slap—his flinch made for bonus humiliation—pulled the envelope from my shirt. “Here’s why.” I showed him just enough of one pic. “I found the peephole you set up in Tinker’s house, champ. You’re Employee of the Month.”

  Anything I hadn’t already slapped or squeezed or threatened out of Shep left him then. He deflated against the side of my truck. He was done.

  “Oh,” he said.

  It stank back here. Maybe there’s something smells worse than a Chinese restaurant’s Dumpster after a busy Saturday night. But most likely there isn’t.

  “Why?” I said.

  “Seventeen years,” he said. “Everything I lost. Everything she’s got. Want to know what Tinker said when my house burned down? When my family died?”

  “No,” I said.

  “She said—”

  “I said no.”

  “But she said—”

  I did punch him then. In the gut. To shut him up.