Nothing but the Truth

by John Lescroart

  So Damon Kerry’s campaign was in the thick of the gasoline additive wars. Except one of the generals was ignorant of where he got his army.

  Baxter Thorne came to California to bolster Kerry’s campaign, but Kerry had rejected his advances. Fortuitously, Kerry’s campaign manager was a young man named Al Valens. Greedy, unscrupulous, devious, and skilled, Valens was more than happy to accept Thorne’s help as well as a little personal financial support. In the role of Kerry’s best friend, consigliere, and strategist, Valens in fact was a double agent. His role was to keep his candidate focused on the evils of Big Oil.

  All things considered, and up until last night when the cop called, Thorne had believed that things were going pretty well. Kerry had come from nowhere to get within spitting distance of his opponent, and with a couple of good spins and perhaps a trick or two, Thorne was confident he could eliminate that gap and bring his boy home.

  But suddenly, there was a problem. The damned Beaumont woman, and some homicide cop with an alleged connection to the Fuels Management Consortium that he wanted to talk about.

  Thorne looked at his watch for the fiftieth time. He was on time. Where was Griffin? What the hell did he think he knew?

  From long experience in the political arena, Thorne had learned to distrust first impressions. There were a host of fat, slovenly, boorish elected officials in this country who were powerful, decisive, and dangerous. He wasn’t sure where he was going to place Griffin just yet. From all appearances, the inspector was unimpressive, but the fact that he was sitting here at FMC meant that he’d made some unsettling connections. Something might be going on between the man’s ears.

  So Thorne was playing it close, as was his inclination in any event. He smiled in his benign fashion, spoke in kindly and professorial tones. “I’m afraid I don’t see anything sinister in Bree Beaumont having some of our literature at her apartment. She was in the combustion business, wasn’t she?”

  Griffin had stuffed himself into one of the secretary’s rolling chairs and now was hunched forward, one leg awkwardly crossed over the other, rocking as though maybe he thought the chair was a rocker. But Thorne didn’t think this was nerves. Under the working-class nonchalance, Griffin was intense as a surgeon. He didn’t bother with returning any smiles. “Yeah, we got your letterhead at the scene,” he said. “I got that. But then I got Valens.”

  “Al Valens?”

  This did bring a smile. “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Mr. Thorne. Al Valens. Your guy with Damon Kerry.”

  This was truly alarming, and Thorne had to struggle to retain his equanimity. There was no way anybody official—much less this oafish flatfoof—should know about Thorne’s relationship with Al Valens. If that became public, if Damon Kerry discovered that he was being deceived by his campaign manager, it would be the end of months of work, of a program that was on the verge of success.

  So, his brain now on full alert, Thorne smiled again, leaned back in his chair, brought his fingertips together over the tweedy vest that buttoned over his stomach. “How do you conclude that this Mr. Valens is my guy, as you put it?”

  “I got a better one,” Griffin replied. “How about if I ask the questions since that’s what I’m here for? In exchange I don’t bring you downtown.”

  Thorne tried a little humor, soften things here. “I’ve always considered that these offices were downtown.”

  Griffin’s face was a slab of meat. “What do you know about Valens, his relationship with Bree Beaumont?”

  There was nothing to do but stonewall until Thorne discovered a little more about what Griffin knew as well as the source of it. “I don’t know anything about his relationship with Bree Beaumont.”

  “But you admit that you do know him? Valens?”

  “I didn’t say that.” He certainly wasn’t ready to admit it, and Griffin had just cued him that he was fishing. Thorne reminded himself—the flip side of first impressions—that sometimes people looked and acted stupid because they were. “But you’ve obviously heard that I do.” He ventured an educated guess. “Jim Pierce?”

  Pierce was an executive vice-president of Caloco and, Thorne had heard, ex-lover of Bree Beaumont. When she’d left the oil company to join Kerry, there’d been hard feelings all around. Pierce had the money and the motivation to discredit Kerry, make Bree see the error of her new ways and come back to him and Caloco.

  Griffin looked at his notepad, and this verified Thorne’s suspicion. Poker wouldn’t be this inspector’s game. “Because if it was Pierce, you’ve got to seriously consider the source.” He held up a hand. “Now I’m not telling you what to think, but Jim Pierce? Jesus.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s Big Oil, is what.” Thorne sighed. “Look, Sergeant, I’m a consultant in this business. I know the players. And Pierce is a very big player. So here’s what happens. If Kerry gets elected, which isn’t looking too bad right now, Pierce’s people, the petroleum folks, they’re going to take the big hit on . . . you know about MTBE?”

  Griffin nodded. “Lately, yeah, I’ve heard of it.”

  “Well, take my word on it, that’s what this is about. Three billion a year goes down the drain if Kerry wins, so Pierce is trying to disrupt the campaign.”

  Griffin seemed to remember what his original position had been. “So you’re saying you’re not involved with Valens? That’s your story?”

  Another avuncular shake of the head. “I don’t have a story, Sergeant. All I know about Bree Beaumont’s death is what I’ve read in the paper. I’m especially saddened because, frankly, she was starting to make a real difference in the public’s perception of the dangers of MTBE, which are substantial. Also, quite honestly, several of my clients stood to benefit from her recent work. As did Kerry and probably Valens. Not only is there no motive there, there’s a positive disincentive.”

  Thorne was fairly certain he’d deflected Griffin again from pursuing his own relationship with Valens. But he thought he could push things even further. “Look, Sergeant, I don’t mean to speak out of turn, but let me guess what Mr. Pierce told you—be said that Al Valens hated Bree, didn’t he? That Al was jealous of all the attention Kerry was giving to Bree. Something like that, am I right?”

  An ambiguous shrug.

  “And who’s the guy who tells you all this? Only the guy whose business is in the crapper if Bree succeeds, who by the way just got dumped by her personally.”

  Griffin finally showed a spark. “You know that?”

  “Word on the street.” Thorne returned Griffin’s open look—he’d answered his questions, been straight with the police. If there was anything more, he’d continue to cooperate. But his message was clear—Griffin was barking up the wrong tree here.

  Finally, the sergeant straightened his body and grunted his way up out of his chair. “I know where to find you,” he said.

  A last smile. “I’m not going anyplace.” Thorne extended a hand and after a beat Griffin took it.

  “Listen to me, Al. The man was here. I don’t know for sure what Pierce told him, but it wasn’t news to him that you hated the woman.”

  Al Valens swore. Then, “Did he mention the report? Did he know anything about that?”

  “No. I don’t think he’d know what it was if it bit him. But he’d obviously been to her place, gone through her papers, some with my letterhead.”

  “How’d she get those?”

  Thorne’s voice took on a mild tone of reproach. “Well, Al, I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  Valens took it in silence. “So where’d you leave it?”

  “I sent him back to Pierce.”

  Valens was silent for a long moment. “How close was he to us?”

  “Way too. But now he’s looking at Pierce, who had every reason. More than every reason.” Thorne smiled thinly. “I think Sergeant Griffin will come to the conclusion that Mr. Pierce must have done it. And with no physical evidence, he’ll have to go to the strongest motive.” />
  But Valens didn’t sound convinced. “What if he comes back to us, though? After all we’ve—“

  Thorne cut him off. “Al, he wants to catch a killer. Our arrangement is not his area of interest. He won’t be looking this way.”

  Valens’s voice betrayed the panic Thorne knew he must be feeling. “But what if he does, Baxter? What if he does?”

  Thorne spoke in his most soothing tones. “Then he’ll have to be managed, that’s all.”

  The limousine bearing the Democratic candidate for governor pulled up to where a crowd of perhaps a hundredcitizens waited in the chill by the Union Square entrance to the St. Francis Hotel.

  In the backseat, Damon Kerry nodded appreciatively at the man next to him. “Good job, Al. Nice turnout.”

  Valens wore a distracted air. There was no doubt that the crowd here would be satisfactory. You tell semi-indigents that you’ll pay them twenty bucks to go someplace and stand around for fifteen minutes, you can generally get some good percentage of them to show up and do it. And since both sides did it, neither could snitch off the other to the media.

  Five months ago Damon Kerry had unexpectedly taken the primary after the two other Democratic contenders had vilified each other to death in a series of TV debates. Since that time, Valens found himself more and more coming around to the opinion that the system could be improved by simply eliminating the middlemen and paying people directly to vote.

  In a cynical moment—and there had been hundreds lately—he’d amused himself doing the math. He’d concluded that for about the same amount of money they’d already blown through on this campaign, they could have paid every registered voter in the state twenty bucks to go into the booth and mark the “X” next to Kerry.

  If he took the number of citizens who actually voted— somewhere near thirty percent of California’s adults— and wanted to ensure only a simple majority of fifty-one percent, he could up the ante to nearly a hundred dollars per vote. With that kind of incentive, people would take the whole day off with pay to “vote.” That was the way to do it. Hell, they’d even make money on the deal.

  “What are you thinking about, Al? You’re not here.”

  The limo had stopped at the entrance. He couldn’t very well answer honestly, but since that wasn’t an issue with him at any time, it didn’t slow him down now. A quick shift of the mental gears and he was back to strategy, the campaign, life, or his anyway. “Oh, sorry,” he said distractedly. “Bree, I suppose. This new angle with Bree. The woman in jail.”

  The television news had broken the story about Frannie Hardy only hours before, and it was already clear it was going to become large. Anything to do with damn Bree Beaumont was going to continue to have an effect on the campaign. Valens couldn’t get away from it.

  It had surprised Al to see how Bree had come from out of nowhere to be such a focal point in the campaign. Certainly it had never been Valens’s intention to get Bree and Damon together. She had been with the enemy. But then, after a radio program on which they had both appeared to defend their respective positions, things changed.

  Bree had always viewed herself as a pioneer against pollution. She took pride in the fact that her MTBE was really doing a great job of cleaning up California’s air. It wasn’t just science to her. She cared that she was doing good. She was, it appeared, altruistic. She wanted a better world. In this way she was very much like Damon Kerry, more so than Valens could have ever imagined.

  Valens didn’t understand principled people at all, but these two—the candidate and the scientist—connected to each other in a big way. Damon Kerry, passionate and personally charming, hadn’t attacked Bree on the program. He’d been either smart or lucky enough to zero in on their common concern—keeping poisons out of the environment.

  And what he’d made Bree do, which even Valens at the time had thought was brilliant, was to direct her attention downward, into the ground.

  Before this one radio show, Bree’s entire scientific life had been directed into the atmosphere. She had been cleaning up the air, defending how she did it. And that had kept her busy enough that she hadn’t looked too carefully at the ground. She assumed, and the corporate culture in which she’d been immersed had aided the assumption, that her stuff—MTBE—in the ground would act like regular gasoline. Eventually it would dissolve or evaporate out. Reports—even scientific reports—to the contrary were paid for by the ethanol industry, by SKO. Bree considered the source, and discarded the facts.

  So in her mind she had always been on the side of the angels, doing good work.

  And then, suddenly, Damon Kerry had made her see it all differently. And in the immediate aftermath of that conversion, she’d been the greatest thing for the campaign since the battle of the frontrunning mudslingers.

  But soon afterward, from Al Valens’s perspective she became a substantial liability. Something personal started going on with Damon Kerry. Before Valens knew it, Bree was showing up everywhere with his candidate. Late dinners, early lunches, fund-raising breakfasts.

  By the time of her murder, Bree had mutated from occasional irritant to constant influence. Kerry was paying more attention to her than to Valens—giving more credence to Bree’s idealistic, stupid advice than to his own campaign manager.

  As the relationship evolved, Valens saw that it was only going to be a matter of time before the opponent’s camp—to say nothing of the media—got wind of the story and used it to ruin everything he’d done. Valens had had nightmares about the headline: CANDIDATE IN AFFAIR WITH MARRIED MOTHER OF TWO.

  No, it wouldn’t do. Bree Beaumont’s death was not at all a bad thing for Damon Kerry, although it would probably be a while before he would see it.

  Now, in the darkened backseat of the limosine, Kerry’s face grew grave.

  In the immediate aftermath of Bree’s death, he’d gone into hibernation for three days. Valens had had to cancel all of his appearances, pleading a virus, the flu, something. For one terrifying moment it had even looked as though Kerry was going to stop campaigning altogether, to give it up.

  Valens had had to employ all of his wiles to get his client back on track, invoking Bree’s sacred name. Bree would never have wanted him to quit. He had to hold on, win the governorship for Bree if for nothing else. Fight the oil companies who had used Bree for their own evil purposes. If he didn’t go on, Bree would have died in vain. All that nonsense.

  But ultimately, it worked.

  Now Valens leaned forward, rolled the connecting window down and spoke to the driver. “Peter, take it around the block one time, will you? We’re a little early.”

  This wasn’t true, but Kerry wouldn’t know that, and now that he’d mentioned Bree, it wouldn’t hurt to solidify the spin. No doubt someone would question Kerry about it at the Almond Growers Association cocktail party tonight, and it would be bad luck to give an answer upon which they hadn’t already agreed.

  Valens laid a protective hand on his knee. The message bore repeating. “She and Ron were happy, Damon. The marriage was a good one. He had no reason to kill her. You have to remember that.”

  Kerry turned his face to the tinted windows.

  Valens continued. “If Ron and Bree were unhappy, she never mentioned it to you, okay? Right?”

  For an answer, Kerry blew out a long breath.

  “Look,” Valens pressed on, “let’s concentrate on the good news from this front. Look what’s happening on the talk radio shows.”

  Kerry snorted. “I hate those people.”

  “I know. I agree with you. But they don’t hate you. And Bree in the news is good for you.”

  Throughout the campaign, the talk radio campaign against MTBE had been one of his strongest weapons. Never mind that it was funded by Baxter Thorne’s client, SKO, or that several callers linked themselves to groups that had targeted oil refineries and corporate offices with bombings and other vandalisms. Valens didn’t mind terrorists, so long as they were his terrorists.

  V
alens patted Kerry on the leg. “But like these folks or not, Damon, they are doing you a lot of good right now. They’re getting your message out.”

  “My message isn’t just about gasoline additives, Al. It’s about the public trust, public safety.”

  Valens bit back his reply. There were worse things than a sincere candidate, he supposed. He tried to recall the great line—was it George Burns?—“The politician’s best friend is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it licked.” Instead, he said, “Yes, of course. I agree with you. Public safety, public trust. But the public has a handle on MTBE. They’re nervous around it . . .”

  “They should be.”

  “Granted. But my point is that these people are keeping the issue hot, and it’s your issue. You’re against this bad stuff.”

  “Damn straight.”

  “And the oil companies are making it.”

  “To the tune of a three-billion-dollar-a-year industry, Al. When only five years ago—”

  “Agreed, agreed.” Valens had to stop him or he’d go into his whole speech right there in the limo . . .

  . . . about how the oil companies had gotten together and decided that hey, maybe it was dirty-burning gasoline that was causing air pollution after all. They should do a study and if that radical theory turned out to be true, they should—out of the goodness of their corporate hearts—do something about it.

  And sure enough, that’s what the study—draft written by Bree Beaumont, Ph.D.—had found. Gasoline wasn’t burning cleanly enough. It needed an “additive” to more completely burn away the hydrocarbons that contributed to smog. The California legislature and the U.S. government’s Environmental Protection Agency fell all over themselves passing laws that mandated the use of this magical additive, if a good one could only be found.