The Whole Lie

by Steve Ulfelder

  I opened the driver’s door for Lacross. “Climb out,” I said. He did.

  Ten minutes later, all VIN info had been cut from the Crown Vic. I dropped the metal plates, still hot from the grinding wheel, in my pocket. Stowed the tools, nodded Lacross back into the car, climbed in beside him.

  I directed him to the back of the yard. To the Granutech crusher Mikey was so proud of.

  While the Granutech warmed up, I parked the big car parallel to its maw, fired a propane-powered forklift, backed it into position, and moved its forks to the height I needed. Lacross watched, blowing on his hands and dancing around to fight the cold.

  I eased forward. The forks went through the car’s right-side windows. When the lift itself touched the car’s doors, I raised the forks. Up went two tons of Ford, just like that. I drove the forklift a foot at a time, glancing left and right to make sure I was on target.

  Then I lowered the car into the crusher and backed away.

  As I got down and stepped to the Granutech’s control panel, everything hit me. I had to stop walking. My legs just about gave way.

  I fought it.

  Then I stopped fighting and relaxed into it.

  I went to one knee in snowy mud.

  “Sax?” Lacross said.

  I said nothing.

  Soon the shaking stopped.

  I rose. I stepped to the panel.

  The big red button, the only one that mattered, was labeled: COMPRESS STAND CLEAR.

  I stood clear.

  I punched the button.

  I compressed.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, after forklifting the Crown Vic—which was by then the size of a fancy refrigerator—to a two-acre pile of other crushed cars, Lacross and I stepped through the gate, punched the code again, and watched the gate roll shut behind us.

  Randall was idling away in my F-150.

  He’d been my third call.

  We climbed in.

  Three grown men on a bench seat. Tight fit.

  Randall nodded at Lacross, who nodded back, then looked at me a long time. He said nothing. He handed us each a steaming Dunkin’ Donuts cup.

  I took one. But couldn’t get a sip from it: My hand was shaking too much. Randall and Lacross pretended not to notice.

  We drove.

  Randall worked northeast and said nothing.

  Everything was grainy, raw, black and white. Audio hallucinations screwed around with my ears, my head.

  “Need to grab a few hours’ sleep,” I finally said.

  “Want me to drop you at Floriano’s place?”

  “No. Drop him first”—jerking a thumb at Lacross—“then I’ll sleep in my truck.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “One more thing to do.”

  “May I ask what?”

  I said nothing.

  We drove quietly for a few miles.

  “Pull over,” I said as we thumped up a sleepy road in Upton. “By that pond.”

  I looked ahead, looked back, saw nobody, stepped out quickly. Took from my pocket a handful of metal tiles, the VIN plates from Lacross’s car.

  I threw them hard enough to make my shoulder sing. Threw them sidearm, the way you’d skim a rock. Watched them scatter, watched them plonk into the pond.

  “Did I do right?” I said as we pulled away. I was asking both of them, or neither, or myself. Hell, I didn’t know who I was asking.

  Lacross said nothing.

  Randall didn’t answer for a long time. “You weren’t exactly swamped with good options,” he finally said.

  When we hit Framingham, the snowfall was over, but the plows and sanders were still working.

  “You know what’s been bugging me?” Randall said.

  “The third set of pics,” I said. “Shep’s little insurance stash without the red dots.”

  “Yes! How the hell’d they get to Thomas Wilton’s house?”

  “Tell him what you told me,” I said. Lacross had filled me in on the trip to Blackstone Valley Salvage.

  “Wilton has a top-end security cam setup,” he said, “but a bunch of clowns manning it. Took me ten minutes reviewing video to spot a man coming out of the hedge and dropping the dirty pics on a patio chair.”

  “And that man was?”

  “That man,” Lacross said, “is currently residing in the trunk of my car, which I’m gonna report stolen soon as the game’s over.”

  “Tell him the rest,” I said.

  “Scituate cops don’t get a lot of what you’d call hardcore crime,” Lacross said.

  Randall looked confused.

  “Scituate’s where Wilton lives,” I said.

  “Aha,” Randall said.

  “The Scituate cops just about peed in their panties,” Lacross said, “when one of them took a routine look in a car parked at the harbor and saw the ignition had been busted out.”

  “The car was stolen two blocks from Betsy Tinker’s house,” I said.

  “So Vernon Lee laid his hands on Shep’s set of the pictures somehow,” Randall said after thinking it through, “stole a car, made his way down to Scituate, and set them out for Wilton to find?”

  “About how I see it,” Lacross said.

  Randall thought awhile.

  “But how? Why?” he finally said. “That is, how’d he learn about them in the first place, and why would he take them to Wilton? Where was the profit supposed to be?”

  That was for me to answer.

  “Margery Lee said it. Vernon was a corruptor, a befouler. Got his kicks screwing up anything and everything that was even a little sweet, a little pure.”

  “Okay.” He stretched the word, needing more.

  “Vernon’s blackmail play had been toast ever since that day in the parking garage,” I said. “Who knows how bad he was hurt. He’d killed Savvy, he’d killed Blaine, and he hadn’t been paid a nickel by Emily Saginaw because he hadn’t found the pics in Blaine’s car. So take the corrupter and befouler bit, and cross them with the wounded-and-cornered-animal bit. I think he turned on Emily, decided to go for the double-cross. He must have known throwing the election to Wilton was the best way to get back at Emily.”

  Randall nodded. “So he blindly searched Shep’s quarters.”

  “Tinker’s house was easy enough to break into,” I said. “I proved that.”

  More nodding. “Then he stole the first car he could and made a beeline for Wilton’s place.”

  “Lashing out,” I said.

  “Tasmanian devil,” Lacross said.

  Nobody spoke the rest of the trip.

  When Lacross climbed out in the dumpy parking lot of his office-that-was-also-his-apartment, he nodded once and closed the door of my truck. Then he hesitated, turned, gestured at me to roll down the window.

  I did.

  Lacross stuck his head and right arm through the window and leaned across me. It was an awkward move, and when his long hair drooped I saw the knotty remnant of his ear.

  He shook hands with Randall. “You’re okay,” he said, and pulled himself out of the truck and walked away.

  A few minutes later, Randall turned onto Floriano’s street. He shut down my truck right behind his own car.

  We sat.

  Dozen had done a good job fitting plywood to the gap where Vernon and I had destroyed stained glass. He’d also screwed a two-by-four across the busted porch railing. Good for him.

  The F-150’s engine ticked as it cooled.

  “What is it you still need to do?” Randall said.

  I said nothing.

  He sighed. “Can I help?”

  “No.”

  “When is it enough, Conway?”

  I said nothing.

  Randall sighed, climbed out, began clearing snow from his Hyundai.

  I lay down. Or maybe I fell down.

  I was out before the truck got cold enough to bother me. I slept hard.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  It was late Monday afternoon when I rolled in
to Level Cross.

  I’d woken at first light feeling awful.

  But I was born to drive. Red Bull, Slim Jims, ibuprofen, and twelve hours took me to the former home of Vernon and Blaine Lee.

  And, for a while, Savannah Kane.

  Randall had described it well. Raw little ranch house set on a short hill fronting a four-lane road. I had to wait a long time to grab a left turn up the driveway, and the street—nearly a highway—was busy enough so I kept a nervous eye on traffic behind me. Stop to take a left on a road like this, you were a sitting duck for highballing semis.

  It had probably been a decent little one-story home, a decent little neighborhood, before they added extra lanes to the road. Now it was wind-scrubbed and achy, a house and lot that would be part of a strip mall in five years max. Somebody had once planted a hedge to shield the lot from cars streaming past, but the hedge had about thrown in the towel.

  I rolled up the driveway’s short hill, parked in front of the door—the paving carried right to its jamb—and looked around. Yard: grass that didn’t look much different from dirt. Ahead: a detached building, a cross between a shed and a one-car garage, painted the same fading yellow as the main house. Next to the shed: a pile of car-related crap, rims and a pair of seats and who knew what else. Parked in front of the shed: a dark-blue Chevy Tahoe, dirty, six or eight years old.

  I killed the F-150, heel-rubbed my eyes. My head throbbed. My breath could knock a buzzard off a shit-wagon. I’d spent most of the drive trying to un-see things—Vernon’s mushy skull, Moe’s face when he told me about being diaper-smothered, Emily Saginaw daintily stepping from a ninth-floor window.

  I saw those things still.

  Climbed out, stretched, knocked. Sensed and heard a flurry, waited a while. Finally she opened up.

  I said, “Miz Lee?”

  “Margery,” she said, keeping most of herself behind the door. “And you are?”

  I told her, reminded her we’d spoken, waited to be asked in.

  And waited.

  The Southern hospitality I’d known in my racing days was in short supply.

  “I’ve got something for you,” I said, looking over her shoulder.

  “Well,” she said. And stepped aside. Finally.

  Looking around the kitchen, I couldn’t see that Margery Lee had anything to be ashamed of, house-wise. The place was as tired inside as out—no-color linoleum, a Formica table with only three chairs, duct tape on the arms of the sofa in the parlor to my right—but from the way she’d hidden behind the door, I’d half-expected a hoarder’s home full of one-eyed cats and old magazines.

  “The state has been coming around,” she said, reading my puzzlement. “Child Protective Services.”

  “I’m not them.”

  “I know. Now. Please sit.” She waved toward the parlor. “I’ll get you a drink.”

  “Okay,” I said, but stood instead. Watched.

  Margery Lee suited this place. Faded and run-down now, she’d been plain-vanilla pretty once. She was a woman who would’ve hosted bridge games back when people played bridge.

  My mother had loved bridge.

  As Margery Lee bent at the waist to pull a Mountain Dew from the yellow-gold fridge, I saw how her jeans, which had already been taken in at the waist, bagged. I saw the crown of her head where her hair had thinned. I saw black moles on her neck that a woman with money would’ve had removed.

  “Oh!” she said when she turned and I was still there. “Would you…?” Motioning again to the parlor.

  From outside came the sound of a bouncing basketball.

  “Is that Max?” I said. “Savvy’s kid?”

  “It is.”

  “I’d like to meet him.”

  “He’s better off outside.” She spoke quickly, then must have decided she sounded rude. “He spends more time inside than he ought to, truth be told. I’m sure that’s my fault.”

  “How is he?” I said. “How are you?”

  “We should really sit,” Margery said, and led me to the front room.

  There was a picture window here. She looked at my truck, its license plate. “My, Mr. Sax, did you drive down?”

  “Call me Conway. I don’t like flying.” What I didn’t tell her: I’m on a list. I buy an airline ticket, the Massachusetts Parole Board gets an auto-notice and my parole officer calls me looking for answers. The PO is Luther Swale, Randall’s father, and we have an informal long-leash deal. But I didn’t want to push him or my luck. So I’d driven, and had removed my FAST LANE transponder so I couldn’t be tracked through toll payments.

  I sat at one end of the sofa, leaving an armchair for her. But she didn’t take it, sat at the other end of the sofa instead. I looked at the chair: It was newer than anything else in the room save a fifty-inch flat-screen.

  Aha. Margery Lee had been so scared of Vernon that even now she wouldn’t use his chair.

  We sat awhile. I sipped Mountain Dew. Margery twisted her hands. This wasn’t working out the way I’d expected.

  You wanted a sweet auntie type to invite you in for pie. You wanted to talk about Level Cross and the Petty family and racing. You thought someone might pull out a fiddle and propose a sing-along. You thought the whole clan would weep with joy when you opened your wallet. Instead, you’re sitting with a ninety-pound ghost who’s still terrified of the husband who beat her for forty years.

  Shit.

  “I want to tell you how sorry I am about your son, ma’am,” I said, “and about Max’s mother.” I shifted my weight, took out my wallet.

  “Thank you.”

  “Tough row. For you. For Max. You’ve lost a lot.”

  “More than you know, sir.”

  I opened the wallet. The checks had been folded willy-nilly, but they were all there. One by one I removed them, smoothed each crease. Checks from Tinker, from Saginaw, from Tinker-Saginaw for Governor. There were four altogether, including the final one from Betsy Tinker, the one for three times the amount of the others.

  Pointed at a Bic pen on the table before me. “May I?”

  “Of course. What are those, sir?”

  “Call me Conway,” I said as I signed the checks over to Margery Lee.

  Then I straightened them up as best I could—the creases were stubborn—and handed them over. “For Max.”

  She shuffled through them once. Then twice.

  Then she put on the glasses that hung around her neck and shuffled through them again.

  Margery Lee kept staring and shuffling, like a Vegas virgin looking at his cards.

  I felt embarrassed all of a sudden at my Mister Big act. I didn’t want to sit here anymore waiting for gratitude to flow. Instead: stood, turned, looked out the picture window.

  “Sir … Conway … this is three hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Why are politicians giving you this kind of money?”

  “Long story. They’re legit. Deposit them. The taxes’ll be my problem.”

  “Why, Conway? Please stop looking out the window. Why?”

  I turned. “For Max, like I said…”

  My hesitation told her there was more. “And?”

  “And … Miz Lee. Margery. Your husband Vernon won’t be coming home, I’m afraid.”

  She was still for twenty seconds. Outside, traffic streamed.

  “Tell me more,” Margery finally said.

  “He just won’t. Trust me.”

  “Will you tell me how you know this?”

  “No.”

  We stared at each other.

  From the backyard came the sound of metal on metal.

  “If Max is playing around the car parts,” I said, “we ought to keep an eye on him.”

  “I believe you,” she said. At first I thought she was talking about Max.

  She wasn’t. Fifteen years fell from her face and she smiled, truly smiled. “Vernon is gone,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  Her shoulders loosened. She loo
ked an inch taller than she had a minute ago. “Never to return,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She had a nice smile.

  “Let’s introduce you to Maxie,” she said, and began to lead me back through the kitchen. Spotting my Mountain Dew can, she swiped it from the side table like it was a jar of piss. “And I’ll squeeze some lemonade. Maxie does like his lemonade.”

  As far as I could tell, Max was a good kid. He had a big bold jaw, like his father. But the eyes were all Savvy: nearly black, smoky, willful. While Margery and I sat on beach chairs he bulldozed around the yard playing with this and that, atop this and that, showing off for me, obeying—eventually—his gramma when she warned him away from dangerous piles of junk.

  “Are you going to be all right?” I said, looking at my watch.

  “He misses his mother,” Margery said. “He doesn’t say it, but he misses her terribly.”

  “He’s got you.”

  “Yes.” She started to say more. Stopped. Took a deep breath. “He would have me with or without your money, you know. Am I terribly rude to point that out?”

  “No. I knew it was true. The money’ll help if you use it the right way, and you will.”

  “Yes,” Margery Lee said. “I will.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  The sun was rising the next morning when I pulled up at Floriano’s. I killed the truck. The absence of engine noise seemed loud. I stared at the steering wheel a few seconds, trying to remember what came next.

  The key. You take it out. No, you have to push while you twist it. Like this.

  I was that tired. Rubbed my eyes. It’d been a hell of a trip home.

  As I stumbled up Floriano’s porch steps, a couple of cousins heading to work opened the front door. They took a look at me and began firing questions in both English and Portuguese. I stood on the porch and swayed.

  Maria rescued me. Heard the commotion, came out to the porch, shooed the cousins, took my arm, steered me to the basement.

  “Cops?” I said, staggering down the steps, glad Maria was guiding me. “Questions? Anything?”

  She knew I was talking about Vernon. “Nothing,” she said. “Is good. Sleep.”

  “Vote early and often,” I said, giggling. The sound of the giggle scared me.

  “Sleep,” Maria said.