The Whole Lie

by Steve Ulfelder

  I gave him half a minute to catch his breath. “The big question, Shep. Who?”

  “Who what?”

  “Who’ve you been working with? You’re not ambitious enough to put something like this together. Sure, you set up the shooting blind for the dirty pics, but I’m betting it was mostly the maids used that room. A little fuck pad for the household help. Am I right?”

  He said nothing.

  Give her up, Shep. If Emily Saginaw had anything to do with Savvy’s murder, dime her out now.

  Frustration. No red mist, no sweet fury. Just mucho frustration.

  I slapped him. “And you got your rocks off watching. That’s how it started. Am I right?”

  He said nothing.

  I slapped him again. “Somebody convinced you to use your little peephole for profit, Shep, not just pervert kicks. Who?” Nothing. Slap. “Who?”

  I saw I’d lost him. You learn to recognize the signs. Shep had curled into himself like a high school sophomore arguing with his father. My little slaps weren’t working. If I wanted to stick with the physical route, I was going to have to deliver pain in more serious ways.

  Hell, I didn’t want to do that.

  Plan B.

  I put hands on hips, tut-tutted, shook my head, half-laughed. “This is some one-sided loyalty. She didn’t have any trouble giving you up. No trouble at all.”

  “She who? I mean, who? Who do you think you mean?”

  “Duh,” I said. “Emily Saginaw. She fingered you so fast her knuckles cracked.”

  “Bullshit.” But his eyes gave away the game.

  “No bullshit,” I said, then cemented things with a guess that wasn’t really a guess. “She told me everything, starting when she first came around to the High Steppers meetings.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Emily. Oh, Emily.”

  “Just tell it. Tell your side of it.”

  He was quiet for a full minute. His eyes went wet.

  “It started with the meetings, like she told you,” Shep finally said. “Typical stuff. Going on commitments, having coffee. I told her I worked for Tinker, maybe made it seem like I was a big wheel. Maybe I was trying to impress her.” Pause. “Maybe I was trying to get in her pants, okay?”

  “When was this?”

  “Two years ago? Three?”

  Huh. That didn’t fit. That was ancient history. “Did you date her? Get in her pants, the way you were trying to?”

  “Not then. She stopped coming around. All of us High Steppers knew she would. Emily comes across as buttoned-down, very together. When you get to know her, though, you see she’s a dabbler. She’s done meditation, witchcraft, any religion you can name, goofy diets, all that. AA was just a flavor of the month.”

  Now it was making sense. “So you didn’t see her at the High Steppers for a couple years. Then she started coming around again. And not long ago, right?”

  He nodded. “She bumped into me one day. I know what you’re thinking, Conway. I’m not stupid. I knew it wasn’t coincidence that Emily Saginaw tracked me down. By then, everybody knew Ms. Tinker was running, and the lieutenant governor rumors about Saginaw were hot and heavy. It wasn’t hard to figure out Emily had something planned. I knew she was using me some way or another, but…” He shrugged.

  “You still wanted to get her in bed.”

  “Sure.”

  I felt sad all of a sudden. Sad and tired. Knew I had to keep pressing Shep, poor dumb Shep who lost his wife and kid and just wanted to get laid. Money and sex. The only motives. Toss a coin.

  “What about your dirty little setup in Tinker’s house? Your peeping Tom rig?”

  “I, ah.”

  “You told Emily about it.” I thought for a few seconds. “This is important,” I said. “Did you tell Emily about the peeping Tom business when you first knew her? Or just recently?”

  “When I first knew her,” he said. “We were doing sort of a mini Fourth Step during a BS session one night. You know, the Fearless Moral Inventory. Talking about rotten things we’d done while we drank. I, ah, I may have mentioned the peephole then.”

  “But you weren’t drinking when you set it up. You’ve been sober a hell of a long time.”

  “I, ah, may have fudged that detail.”

  The smell back here made me want to puke.

  Or maybe it wasn’t the smell.

  “You were wrong about one thing,” he finally said. “It wasn’t the staff used that room for a fuck pad. It was Betsy Goddamn Tinker, the Bay State Sweetheart herself.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Shep nodded like a bobble-head doll. “After her husband passed, she had me furnish that room. The maids knew better than to go in there except to clean up after.”

  “After what?”

  “Miz Tinker brought guys home once in a while. I won’t say they were rough trade, but they sure weren’t the same crowd she went to the opera with, get my drift? They were younger guys, oily guys. Car salesmen, hustlers.”

  I thought about that. Nodded. It fit. Shep wasn’t the only one in the house looking to get laid. But the guys who caught Betsy Tinker’s eye, the Bert Saginaws of the world, were guys she didn’t want to share her Beacon Hill master bedroom with. What would her adoring fans think about these creeps? Not to mention the late senator, watching from blue-blood heaven?

  “You wanted to impress Emily,” I said. “You spilled Betsy Tinker’s dirty little habits. Emily’s eyes lit up. It was her idea to get blackmail shots of Tinker.”

  “Sure. Emily had—has—this dumb-ass idea her brother’s gonna be president someday. Me, I don’t see it, but I played along. The problem was, just when we started cooking up this plan, Miz Tinker stopped taking guys to bed.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “She got tired of banging thirty-five-year-old telemarketers? She hit menopause? Maybe she knew it was a risk she couldn’t take once she was running for office?”

  “I’m guessing Emily got impatient,” I said.

  “And how. She said I was missing opportunities, said maybe I’d been lying to her all along. She even, ah, cut me off.”

  “Cut you off?”

  “You know,” Shep said. “By then we were sleeping together. Until she cut me off.”

  I said nothing. Felt tired. Sex and money. The only two motives.

  “So when my alarm finally went off—I set up a little sensor in the door to that room, it dials my cell when somebody opens it—I was good and ready to do my thing, believe you me. Hustled into the room next door, set up my ladder, pushed the heater vent out of the way. Then I saw who Miz Tinker was rolling around with, and I don’t mind telling you I nearly shit myself. So’d Emily, when I showed her the pictures.”

  “That should’ve wrecked her plan,” I said. “She couldn’t blackmail Tinker without dragging down her brother.”

  “We talked it over,” Shep said. “Emily decided to print two sets of the pics. One would have Saginaw’s face scratched out, and the other would have Miz Tinker’s face scratched out.”

  “What was the second set for, the one with Tinker scratched out?”

  “Emily said she needed to make sure her brother took her seriously.”

  I nodded. “There’s a hell of a brother-sister power play going on. She’s been blackmailing him anonymously, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “But why?” I said. “You know Emily better than most. What’s going on there?”

  “You answered that already,” Shep said. “Bert never took Emily seriously, from the first time he called and asked her to trade her life for being his secretary. In his head, she’s an assistant. In her head, she’s a fifty-fifty partner who makes everything run.”

  “Saginaw didn’t know it was her til I told him, and even then he didn’t want to believe it. He tried to fight me over it.”

  “That was dumb,” Shep said.

  I checked my watch. We’d been here awhile, and I was worried about the young cop from the parking lot. Th
e way I read him, he’d take a casual swing around this service road before he took off.

  It hit me then. “Wait a sec. You said there were two sets. What about these?” I tapped the envelope. “Nobody’s face is scratched out.”

  Shep looked like a kid busted by his mom with frosting on his mouth. “That set might’ve been my idea,” he said. “Just in case.”

  “That’s about what I expected,” I said. “What I mean, though, why’d you take them to Wilton?”

  “Wilton who?”

  Sigh. “Thomas Wilton, the guy Tinker’s running against.”

  “What? Didn’t you find those pics in my room when you were snooping around?”

  I gave him the forty-five-second explainer on what I’d found, how I’d never even made it into his room, how the pics had turned up this morning on Wilton’s patio.

  “I have no fucking idea about any of this,” Shep said. “I swear to God.”

  “This line I keep hearing,” I said, “about the dirty pics. I keep hearing they were shot with a new camera and printed on a new printer. Then the hardware was destroyed. True?”

  “Smashed it all myself out in Miz Tinker’s alley,” he said, eager as hell. “With a five-pound hammer.”

  “I’m sick of being lied to. First there was only the one copy. Then there were two. Now there are three. Are any more going to pop up?”

  “Absolutely not, on my dear wife’s headstone.”

  I believed him. It was in his eyes, the openness of his face. Shep didn’t know what the hell was going on with this third set, the no-red-dots set.

  Neither did I.

  My head hurt with possibilities. Combos, shakedowns, double-crosses, triple-crosses.

  My cell buzzed. Sophie. I didn’t pick up. I had things to do.

  While I thought about Shep, he did me a favor and read my mind. “What are we going to do here?” he said.

  “In about three minutes,” I said, “that cop from the parking lot is going to roll through. He had me marked as wrong the second he saw me. What I ought to do, what I want to do, is hand you over to that cop. I’d tell him to pass you to a state police detective name of Wu. You’d have a ball, Shep. You’d spend the next two weeks blabbing.”

  “But?” Shep said, reading my tone, knowing there was hope.

  “But cops can’t keep their mouths shut any better’n anybody else. I hand you to Wu, then you go to trial. And somehow those pics go public. I’ve been around too long to see it any other way.”

  We were quiet awhile.

  “I saw this movie,” I finally said. “Ancient Greeks, or Romans, or some damn thing. A man got busted for a crime, a big one. Know what they did?”

  Shep was all ears.

  “They gave him a choice. Death or exile.”

  “Come on.”

  “I want you out of Massachusetts by sundown,” I said. “I don’t care where you end up, long as it’s in a different time zone.”

  Shep looked at me like I had an ear growing from my forehead. “By sundown? What are you, Wyatt Fucking Earp?”

  “I told you,” I said, shaking my head, “the movie was about Greeks. Or maybe Romans. Send me a postcard from wherever you end up. Iowa’s nice.”

  I used my forearm to gently move Shep away from my door. I climbed in.

  “In this movie,” he said, “you said they had a choice. Death or exile. What I want to know, if I tell you to go shit in your wallet, do I get death? Are you really gonna kill me? Really, Conway?”

  I didn’t even look at him as I drove away. I let my reputation do the work.

  * * *

  Checked the message from Sophie. She was incoherent. She babbled three times to call her ASAP, then hung up.

  I did. She picked up on half a ring. “He’s out!” she said. “He’s okay!”

  “Who?” Instant regret as I figured out who she meant.

  “Davey. For God’s sake, did you forget about him?”

  “Course not. Lot on my mind.”

  “They’re putting a dressing on, and then we’re going to spring him. Come out and see.”

  “Well…” Started to say I had a thousand things to do, but she’d clicked off.

  I cursed the timing. Not only had I figured out Emily Saginaw was in this mess up to her eyeballs—possibly in on Savvy’s murder, even—I’d more or less told her so. Who knew what she’d do if I took off?

  But.

  If you looked at it from another angle, this was a good place to leave her. Without wheels of her own, she’d be forced to tag along with Tinker’s people. And when Shep split, she’d likely take it as a sign he was the fall guy.

  Yup. Leave her here, thinking she’d pulled it off.

  I headed west.

  I should have stayed, should have rounded up Emily then and there. Things would’ve turned out different. Better.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  When I walked into the waiting room at Tufts, Charlene had a credit card in her hand and Sophie had Davey in her lap. She was just about smothering the guy, trying to stroke and kiss and envelop him all at once.

  He didn’t look like he minded. Purred like a freight train. Maybe his eyes were gummy, and he looked silly because they’d shaved most of his right flank to sew him up, but he was all there. He smelled me, then spotted me, as I squatted before him. His tail made dipsy doodles.

  “Conway!” Sophie squealed it when she saw me. Her eyes were wet. She moved to pass Davey over, but I gestured no. He looked happy where he was.

  “I hope that cat can sing the ‘Star-Spangled Banner,’” Charlene said, holding a credit card receipt in two fingers, “because I need to take him on the road to recoup my investment.”

  She smiled as she said it. Sort of.

  “This place smells like rubbing alcohol and wet dog,” I said. “Let’s head across the street.”

  “Is that what I think it is?” Sophie said. “Where’d you find it?”

  “I found it,” I said, passing her the cat leash Davey used to love.

  Tufts is in a pretty spot. Old-time farm country, a grassy hill that rolls to a river valley and a set of east-west train tracks. There’s a rectangular patch, maybe three acres, ringed by a dog-walking trail.

  It was now a cat-walking trail, too, or would be as soon as Sophie got Davey in his harness. I kept a close eye on his shaved flank, but it didn’t seem to be bothering him, and Sophie was careful.

  Charlene and I stood at the trailhead. Her arms were folded. Mine too. In a typical New England trick, the temp had sunk ten degrees in an hour. Making conversation, Charlene said something about snow on the way. I watched Sophie and Davey bounce down the path.

  “I’ll pay you back,” I said after a while. “For Davey.”

  “Never mind that.”

  “I’ll pay you back for the shop, too.”

  “Right.” She snorted it.

  That pissed me off. I thought about the collection of checks in my wallet. Daydreamed about snapping one out, signing it over to Charlene, and clearing my debt. Just like that.

  I could do it.

  I wanted to do it.

  I didn’t do it. That dough was earmarked.

  I started to speak, but my tongue tangled up the way it did, and the idea in my head lost its shape like a smoke ring, the way they do.

  But this was important. I dragged the idea back, forced myself to speak, didn’t allow myself to worry about how smart—or not—I sounded.

  “You think money’s the problem for me,” I said. “You think I can’t handle owing money to a girl.”

  Charlene said nothing. I had her attention, though.

  “But that’s not it,” I said. “The problem is with you. Money means more to you than it should.”

  “It does not!”

  “You’re a millionaire single mom with two daughters,” I said, “and you work seven days a week. My new shop is your second job, your hobby, and you’ve worked more hours there than most people do at their first job.”
/>
  Charlene: arms folded, mouth working. But no sound coming out.

  “It’s not about the money for you,” I said. “It’s about achieving. It’s about being useful. Productive. It’s about making up for … for another time in your life. I get it, but there’s a time to throttle back.”

  Still she said nothing. But her eyes weren’t playing offense anymore. She was listening.

  “Maybe I should throttle back, too,” I said. “Because what I do … the Barnburners stuff … that’s about another time in my life.”

  A train interrupted. Westbound, silver and purple, Commuter Rail they call it. Things grew quiet in the train’s wake. When I looked at Charlene she had turned away, was looking down the valley.

  That was okay. I’d said my piece, and she’d heard it. The thought had to percolate.

  She said, “What’s this I hear about you collecting a training-wheels chip at a meeting yesterday?”

  I said nothing. Didn’t bother to ask how she knew. AA was a small world, and Mary Giarusso had an itchy dialing finger—we called her Switchboard Mary for a reason.

  “Did you pick up?” Charlene said.

  “No.”

  “Why the chip, then?”

  “It was something I needed.” Long pause. “I needed humility. I needed to stop doing everything my way. I didn’t pick up, but that was dumb luck. I was out of control. I went to that sushi place in Northborough looking to drink.”

  “Dumb luck or no, I’m glad you didn’t pick up.”

  Quiet.

  “I wish,” I finally said.

  “You wish what?”

  “I wish it was different. I wish I was different.”

  Ice-blue eyes opened all at once. “I wish I weren’t a sucker,” she said.

  “You’re nobody’s sucker.”

  “That’s almost true. I’m a sucker for you, and you know it. You leverage it.”

  “Not for a long time I haven’t. Not the way you’re thinking.”

  Seventy yards off, Sophie cooed and clicked at Davey.

  “When we were kids,” I said, “didn’t people our age—the age we are now—seem older?”

  “Yes. Because we were young and stupid. And high. What’s your point?”

  “I thought … I thought by the time I was this age, I’d have my mistakes behind me. The big ones, anyway.”