by Sean Little
“I don’t think we’re going to find many other people with a scar like that. Sherry Franklin was very insistent about the jaw scar.”
Abe looked around the room, eyes darting left and right. “Do you think he might be here?”
“Might be.” Duff couldn’t know for certain. “He could also be dead. Who knows?”
On the stage, Marcus Stevens was taking over the microphone from his father. Even though Marcus was probably not blood-relation to his father he had still learned his father’s skill with a crowd. Marcus’s low, elegant voice was speaking passionately about the change the Democrats would enact in the next election cycle if enough people voted along the blue party lines. He told of the horrors that might happen if the other guys get into office. The crowd was entranced.
“Let’s spread out. We need to see if ol’ Scarface is here or not. If he is, we need to surveil him and figure out where he’s going.” Duff pulled out his phone and checked the settings. “Phones on vibrate. Call or text if you locate him.”
“Check.” Abe checked his own phone. It was set to vibrate. He put it back into his front shirt pocket where he would be sure to feel it if it went off.
“I’ll go this way; you go that way.” Duff pointed Abe into the mass of the crowd. “Work the room. I’ll go to the smoking veranda and see if I can sneak around to places I shouldn’t be.”
“Don’t get arrested.”
“Worst case scenario, I play dumb and they toss me out of here.”
“You are indeed exceptional at playing dumb.”
Duff was already walking backward toward the main doors. “Meet back here in fifteen minutes?”
“Should be enough time,” Abe said.
Duff and Abe split. Duff wheeled out of the large ballroom and into the hallway. Security was posted at the main entrances and exits out of the building, and they were posted at the entrances into the regular areas of the hotels, but the halls around the ballroom were still open and free to travel provided one did not try to force himself past a security checkpoint. Duff pulled out the lanyard with the badge on it he was given when they paid their tickets. He let it dangle outside his blazer to minimize contact with the private security agents.
Duff spotted one of the team of Secret Service guys attached to the event. The agent looked bored. The event was clearly going to be another one of those where no one even got unruly. The agent was leaning against the wall and watching from one end of the long hall to the other. There was a bathroom at the far end. Duff headed toward the bathroom. When he got near the Secret Service agent, he gave the traditional head bob of acknowledgment. Duff turned on his thickest Chicago accent. “Quiet night, eh?”
The agent returned the nod. “Yes, sir.”
“Bathrooms are down there, right?” Duff pointed at the alcove where the signs indicating a restroom were jutting out of the wall at a ninety-degree angle.
“Yes, sir.”
“Thanks.” Duff took a couple more steps. “Hey? Did you see a guy come through here recently? One of the senator’s guys?”
The agent shook his head. “I’m not at liberty to say, sir.”
Duff plowed ahead anyhow. “You’d recognize him if you’d seen him. Black guy, big-ass scar on his jaw.” Duff traced the scar line on his own jaw.
The agent remained dead-eyed. “I’m not at liberty to say, sir.” There wasn’t a flicker of recognition or interest in the man’s face. If he knew who Duff was talking about, he wasn’t giving anything away. Good agent. Well done.
“Well, if you see him, tell him I went to take a shit, would you?”
The agent said nothing. Not even a head nod. Either the agent was excellent at his job or the guy with the scar wasn’t in the vicinity and the agent didn’t know to whom Duff was referring. Ninety-nine percent of the time when Duff dropped a line like that, the party who was playing quiet would nod or say Sure thing! That gave it away. It meant he or she knew to whom Duff was referring and that person was nearby. This time the agent stayed mum and Duff couldn’t even read a glimmer of recognition. Scarface was likely not in the building.
Duff walked down to the bathroom and disappeared into a stall. He locked the door and texted Abe. Any luck?
The lack of 4G signal in the can made the text take forever. The little wheel that meant the message was sending spun for a solid two minutes before finally delivering it. There was another two minutes of waiting for a message to return.
No joy.
Duff thumbed in a response. He’s not here. I’ll be back in a minute.
Duff made a big production of washing his hands and drying them. He ran damp hands over his bald head. It felt weird to be out without his Brewers cap. At this point, wearing a hat felt like armor to him. His parents forbade the wearing of baseball caps because they were silly accoutrements of the uneducated. The second they took him to the facility to begin treatment as a teenager, he bought one—a Toronto Blue Jays hat at the time—and refused to take it off. Even now, he treated the Jays as his American League team of choice even though the Designated Hitter was an abomination and insult to the spirit of the game.
Duff hustled back to the ballroom, nodding and winking at the Secret Service agent as he did. He found Abe standing at the back of the room.
Abe shook his head and held up his empty palms. “If Scarface is here he’s hiding in a protected area.”
Duff jabbed a thumb out the doors toward the hall. “There was a Secret Service schmoe out there. He didn’t know who I was talking about. If he’s here he’s staying out of sight. Detective Gates might have been right about his mortality, too. He looked like a soldier, didn’t he?”
Abe wavered. “Yeah, I guess. Probably a little older than Stevens. You thinking Vietnam?”
“Timeline would be really tight. He might have been too young for the war. Maybe if he went at eighteen and got there at the end of the war.”
“Only takes a day to get a scar like that.”
Duff’s lip was still healing from the punch to the mouth at Wheels’s bar. “You’re telling me.”
“What if he’s not a soldier? Where do you get a scar like that?”
Duff remembered Betts that morning. “Gangs. Knife someone up.”
“That’d do it.”
Duff jabbed a thumb at the massive display of Stevens’s life. “The distinguished gentleman from Illinois grew up on the south side.”
“How do we find out, though? We don’t have a name.”
Duff thought about it for quite some time. On stage, Kimberly Stevens was wrapping up her remarks to an enthusiastic round of applause. She said something about taking a few questions. Duff felt like a window of opportunity was closing on them. He needed to do something bold.
“I’m going to do something stupid, Abe. Cover me.”
“How stupid?”
“Stupid enough to get us thrown out of here if it goes badly, but not stupid enough to get us arrested.”
“That’s a pretty good level of stupid, a safe level. I can live with that.”
Duff strode into the crowd using his size to assert himself and merge through bodies until he was at the front of the crowd.
Stevens was answering the first question, some inane piece of personal trivia posed by some middle-aged crunchy granola-looking woman in an expensive gown. Stevens took great delight in answering it though, lapsing into a long and humorous story. When the senator finished, there was a prolonged round of laughter and cheers. The senator drank it all in. “Next question?”
A gaggle of voices rose in unison but one powered to the front, a deep, throaty voice with a slight nasal twinge to it; Duff spoke above all the other voices. “Senator, how do you respond to the internet rumors that Marcus isn’t your real son?”
-13-
THERE WAS AN extended pause and the room grew quiet. Then the senator burst out laughing and a collective breath was taken by the audience before they joined in on the joke. Stevens slapped his thigh and mimed wiping a tea
r from his eye. “Oh, son. You gotta lay off the booze and the 4Chan message boards. I was in the room when Marcus was born. He’s as blood as blood gets! That’s a new one, though. Where’d you hear that?”
“Red State Press.” Duff gave the name of a noted biased blog trying to pass itself off as legitimate news, but instead spent a lot of time bordering on being real tinfoil-hat material.
Stevens burst out laughing, a deep belly laugh that encouraged the crowd to join in again. “Well, there you go. Our friends across the aisle trying to spread heinous rumors because they know they can’t win on character or policy. This right here, this is why we have to defeat the GOP in the next election, friends.”
Stevens moved on to the next question—something concerning campaign strategies for the presidential election, which set off a round of Run, Robert, Run! from the crowd imploring him to toss his hat into the ring for the Democrat nomination for president, something he’d repeatedly sworn he’d never do. Duff turned back to Abe and shrugged. They didn’t get thrown out.
Abe was not worried about getting thrown out, though. Not anymore. When Duff surged to the front to ask his question, Abe stayed in the back to observe. He had known the reaction to whatever Duff was going to ask was going to tell him a lot.
The senator reacted calmly, even laughing. There was no flinching in his face or voice. His posture opened up. It showed he had never heard rumors of that sort before. Even worse, it showed he honestly believed Marcus was his biological son.
Marcus Stevens processed the question in the same way. He was confused at first and then thought the question hilarious. His laughter was telling. He believed he was Robert Stevens’s biological son without a shadow of a doubt.
Kimberly Stevens, though. Kimberly Stevens was a different story.
The moment before Duff fired off his question, Kimberly Stevens had the firm, glowing smile of a politician’s wife in the public eye plastered to her face as she had for so many years. When Duff’s question was hanging in the air, Kimberly’s plastic mask faltered so badly that if she’d been sitting across the poker table from Abe he would have taken her for every chip in her pile. It was a horrible tell. The corners of her mouth flattened and went straight for a split-second. Her eyes enlarged slightly, and they darted to the corner where Tasker was standing. Her posture shifted slightly forward whereas Robert and Marcus went backward. Her fist clenched involuntarily. Tasker shifted, too. His head jerked up and he shot a look at Kimberly. Something unspoken passed between them. To Abe, they might as well have used to flags to signal in semaphore.
Duff’s puzzle was so close to being right. He had a lot of pieces of the puzzle, but some of the parts were backward. Kimberly was the one who arranged the adoption with Tasker’s help. If she arranged the adoption, then she must have been the one who accidentally killed the biological son. Abe suddenly felt cold. Sweat broke out on his forehead.
Abe pulled out his phone and used Google to do a search: Kimberly Stevens brother. The 4G connection whirred for too long.
Duff came back to Abe’s side. “Well, he took it well.”
Abe was scanning through links. He thumbed the most obvious one, Wikipedia. Kimberly Stevens’s page had her maiden name, Kimberly Lafferty. She had a sibling listed, Uriah Lafferty, an older brother. There was no hyperlink next to Uriah’s name, so Abe did another search, this time for Uriah alone.
“What are you doing?” Duff tilted his head and squinted at Abe’s screen.
“Give me a second.” Abe hit the image-search option. There were a couple of pictures of Kimberly standing next to Uriah as children. Then, the third picture was a picture of Kimberly next to a hospital bed. Her brother had been badly wounded in Vietnam, earning a Purple Heart. He was in the bed with a pile of bandages on his jaw and wrapped up over the top of his head. The fourth picture was a picture of Kimberly and Robert’s wedding. It was Uriah and Robert standing arm-in-arm before the ceremony. The big, puffy scar along Uriah’s jawline was unmistakable.
Abe spun the phone around and showed the picture to Duff. “We got it wrong, partner. Kimberly is the mastermind behind this, not Robert. Robert knew nothing about the baby-switch.”
Abe and Duff looked back at the woman on the stage. She still had the almost-unflappable smile slapped on her face. The grin was not reaching her eyes, though. The eyes were shark-like and staring. Abe knew she was looking through the crowd straight at Duff. Abe locked eyes with her. He saw the smile falter again for the briefest of moments. Kimberly Stevens walked over to Marcus, whispered in his ear, and left the stage.
Abe had a gut feeling he knew exactly to whom she was leaving to find. Ron Tasker fled the corner of the room, as well. He disappeared out a side door likely headed to the green room area. Abe was willing to bet Uriah Lafferty was in that room.
“Duff, old chum—I think we should leave. Now.” Abe thought of exactly how many times they had to show their identification and how many cameras were in the place. There was no doubt in his mind Uriah Lafferty would have their names and addresses inside a half-hour.
Duff slipped into his best Ralph Wiggum impression. “We’re in danger.”
“I think that’s an understatement. Let’s go.”
They duo hustled out of the ballroom and toward The Fucking Embarrassment. Six blocks was a long jog, especially in the heat. Duff shrugged out of his coat and carried it under his arm like a football. Abe yanked the knot of his tie away from his throat. They were both sweating in the span of a block. By the end of three blocks both men had sweat stains appearing on their backs and under their arms.
The Volvo protested being forced into action with a grinding huff and a short squeal from the timing belt. The good soldier the car had always been, it fired up properly after a moment of grumbling. Abe slapped the shift lever down into drive while stomping the pedal and doing a passable take on peeling out of the parking space. The Volvo was never going to lay rubber and tear concrete like the “Striped Tomato” Gran Torino from Starsky & Hutch, but it still gave a valiant attempt at pretending to have any semblance of torque.
The Volvo was an enigma in which it was simultaneously the best and worst car at blending into traffic. It was the best because it was a boxy Volvo wagon, just like ten thousand other family grocery-getters on the road, however it was also old, rusty, and lacked any real power for motoring down the highway, so in that regard it stuck out amongst all the newer SUVs and sleek sedans. It was also as tan as desert camouflage and impossible to make it blend in at night. Over its years of faithful service the tan seemed to get brighter from the fading from constant sun-wash, if it was even possible.
Abe jockeyed the car down the streets trying to drive inconspicuously. Duff got on the horn to Detective Betts, but he got voice mail.
“Betts, it’s Duff and Abe. We got your killer of that kid in the alley, we think. Check out the name Uriah Lafferty. He’s the older brother of Kimberly Stevens, the wife of the senator. Give me a call when you get this.” Duff ended the call and used his phone to access the records-search database they paid to use. It had an app to streamline things, as all things technical did these days. He looked up Uriah Lafferty. The 4G was slow to retrieve the info but after a few moments, it started spitting back results.
“Uriah H. Lafferty. Says the H doesn’t stand for a name. It’s just an initial. That’s cool. If I’d ever had a child, I think I would have done that. Maybe called him Charles S. Duff or something. People’d be like, What’s the S stand for? And I’d be like, Nothin’ fool! Know your place, trash! I’m high-class over here!”
“Keep reading.” Abe was trying to watch the rearview mirror and the road at the same time. A large, black cargo van was trailing a half-block behind them. Was it Lafferty? Was it nothing? He couldn’t tell.
Duff kept scanning the info. “Says he did a tour in Vietnam. Wounded. Purple Heart. Sent stateside and discharged. Worked with homeless vets for a time. Database shows he keeps two residences, one in Virginia near Was
hington D.C. and the other in Chicago not far from here, actually. His main residence in the one in Chicago.”
“How does he afford those residences? Does it list a job?”
“It does not.”
Abe frowned. “Want to bet he’s on the senator’s wife’s payroll in secret?”
“Are you saying she’s a Hillary?”
“I’m saying she’s a powerful Washington wife. She could have all manner of stuff going on behind the scenes.” Abe changed lanes. A glance in the rearview told him the van changed lanes, too. Was it coincidence or deliberate?
“Lafferty’s name is pretty quiet. There really aren’t too many stories about him. No criminal record. No social media.” Duff’s thumbs were spinning through search results on the screen.
“As long as he doesn’t get arrested, not much he does would be newsworthy. The press barely covers senators, let alone the extended families of senator’s wives unless they screw up. If they screw up somehow, then batten down the hatches because the walls will start to fall. Anything to expose a weakness.” Abe shifted lanes again. The black van switched lanes, as well. Abe’s stomach tightened. Why neither of them actively carried their pistols was beyond him at moments like this.
“Still, I can’t believe this guy is a hitter for a senator’s wife. How do you keep that under wraps?”
Abe was watching the rearview mirror hard. Two men were in the van, a driver and someone else. Both men were in deep shadow. There was no way to know who they were. “All we know for certain about Uriah Lafferty is he aided in the illegal adoption of a baby from a public hospital thirty-five years ago. We don’t know if he's a hitter.”
“C’mon, Abe. It’s too coincidental. That kid in Mindy’s apartment shows up dead later that night. Who else would have killed him if he was trying to tie up loose ends about the adoption?”
“Tasker, maybe. Kimberly herself. Who knows?”
“A Social Security-eligible U.S. senator’s wife would not be the triggerman on a back-alley hit. It’s just not likely.”
