“I suppose it is. Anything else, Mr. Biden?”
He still had a smile on his face, but he’d shut down. He had every right in the world not to trust me. If I was coming off too much like a cop, it was because I didn’t have the time for pleasantries.
I pulled my wallet out, but he waved me off. “This one’s on the house.”
My hand hesitated on a twenty, but I handed him a business card instead. Jill had designed them for me when we’d started our foundation, but I’d been slow to give them away. Too many strangers already had my number.
The Mayor fingered the card and glanced up at me.
“In case you guys need another card player sometime,” I said.
“What do you play?”
“Gin rummy.”
“Rummy,” he repeated. “You any good?”
I grinned. “It’s been so long, I can’t remember.”
He nodded, but I could tell from his skeptical expression that he was trying to figure me out. My mind was sharp as a switchblade. I remembered the last time I’d played gin rummy—just as I remembered the first time and every time in between. It was the only card game that had ever held my interest, because it was one of the few where memory and strategy weighed more than the luck of the draw.
I wasn’t interested in playing cards, though. I was interested in getting to the bottom of this whole business with Finn. So far, I wasn’t being quick to point fingers. That has a way of blowing up in your face. But I also wasn’t going to dillydally. Dan Capriotti had made it clear that the Wilmington PD was content to sit back and wait for the toxicology results.
That wasn’t good enough for me.
I grabbed a water bottle at the newsstand and joined the short line for the register. I didn’t recognize the cashier. That happened a lot more nowadays than it used to. People moved around the country more, especially the younger generations. They followed their jobs, their hearts. Their intuition. Picking up roots was easier to do than putting them down. Of course, my family had moved from Pennsylvania to Delaware once upon a time. We’d been outsiders. As much as I liked to think of Wilmington as my town, it had been someone else’s first. And someone else’s before that, all the way back to the first known settlers, the Lenni Lenape Indians.
My phone buzzed with a text. It was Jill. She was going to be late. Could I find my own way home and thaw out the chicken, she wondered.
“Is that all?” a voice asked.
I looked up. “Oh, sorry,” I told the girl at the register. “Just the water.” As she was ringing it up, the flower bouquets on the counter caught my eye. “And one of those.”
It was an impulse buy—an eighteen-dollar impulse buy. I couldn’t identify any of the flowers. Heck, they could have been weeds for all I knew. But they were pretty and I wanted Jill to have them.
Outside, I fired up Uber. My ride would be there in seven minutes—it was rush hour, but it was also Wilmington. Traffic never got as bad as it did in DC, thank God. I texted Jill, telling her I was on my way home, and the chicken would be thawed in time for dinner at six.
A black Cadillac Escalade pulled up to the curb in front of me. The truck-sized SUV sat there, idling. Was my ride early? If there was an Uber sign on the dash, I had no way of knowing—I couldn’t see anything through the heavily tinted windows.
Suppose this wasn’t my ride. Suppose it was some enemy of the state, some deranged lunatic fixated on a former vice president. Suppose Finn wasn’t the one who’d left the printout of my address behind on the train…
My heart rate began to ratchet up. I had no Secret Service protection anymore. No private security. I didn’t even have my pistol, because who brings a gun to a funeral? The vehicle just sat there, towering over me. There was nothing stopping a passenger from rolling down one of the windows and poking me full of holes. I was a sitting duck, with no wings to carry me away. I inhaled sharply and squeezed the bouquet tight. Water dripped out the bottom and onto the cement.
The tinted back window lowered.
“Need a lift?” Barack Obama asked.
10
I buckled myself into the seat across the aisle from Barack. There was one more row of seats behind us, all empty. The same talkative agent who’d been with Barack a few nights ago in my backyard was in the driver’s seat fiddling with the air-conditioning. Barack’s ever-present gaggle of aides and personal assistants were, once again, MIA. Couldn’t say I missed them.
“I thought the funeral was earlier this afternoon,” Barack said, eyeing the flowers.
“These are for Jill. I’m on my way home—”
“Those are lilies, Joe.”
“So?”
“So it’s a sympathy arrangement. The lily is a funeral flower. If you were going for romantic, you should have gone for roses.”
The Escalade eased into traffic. I stared at the flowers in my hand. They looked like regular white flowers. “They had some red roses, but they were three times the price.”
Barack made a little finger gun and pointed it at me. “That’s why they’re more romantic.”
I sighed. Barack was right. He was always right.
“Anyway, I was headed home, and—”
He patted me on my knee, the good one. “We’ll drop you off,” he said.
I leaned forward between the seats and pointed to the approaching on-ramp. “You’re better off avoiding the interstate this time of day, if you can. Stay on this road for another mile, until you hit the four-way stop. Turn left, and stay on Thirty East until you see the sign for the Christmas tree farm. Stinson’s. It’s closed during the summer, but if you ever need a Christmas tree, they grow ‘em big and tall. Unless you’re Jewish. Are you Jewish?”
“No, sir,” Steve said.
“You ever had matzah ball soup?”
“He already has your address, Joe,” Barack said, cutting in. “How do you think we got to your place earlier this week?”
I patted Steve on the shoulder, and he flinched slightly. Service agents were known to be a little jumpy. “Let me know if you need anything, pardner.”
I leaned back in the seat. Barack stared at me for a beat.
“You look like you’ve been playing football,” he said.
My shoes were shined, but the rest of my suit was filthy. “I tripped. It’s nothing, really.”
“Hmmmm,” Barack said. The president was always saying stuff like that to me: “Hrmph” and “Hrrrrrm.” Occasionally, a “Harrrumph.” Even after working together for eight years, I hadn’t decoded the meanings behind them. Barack was, at times, a fortress. At other times, a glass case of emotion, as Will Ferrell would say.
“How do you like the Little Beast?”
I raised an eyebrow.
“My new ride,” Barack said, patting his leather arm rest. His mood seemed much improved since Wednesday. He explained that the aftermarket-upgraded Escalade was as close to his armored presidential limos—the so-called Beasts—that Barack could buy on the open market. He’d had this one imported from Afghanistan. It had been his gift to himself, after completing the first draft of his presidential memoirs. When Michelle saw what he’d paid for it, she said, “You’d better have a couple more book ideas inside that thick skull of yours.”
“I’m guessing it’s not a coincidence that you’re in Delaware again,” I said.
Barack leaned forward between the front seats. “Could we get a little privacy back here, Steve?”
The agent turned the radio up. It was a newer rock ‘n’ roll tune. I missed the stuff you could dance to: Buddy Holly, the Four Seasons. Not that I’d ever been much of a dancer. I’d been known to trip over my own feet, even when I wasn’t on a dance floor.
“We saw you at the funeral,” Barack said.
“You’ve been following me.”
“We went to the cemetery to pay our
respects.”
“You didn’t know Finn.”
“I knew how much he meant to you,” Barack said. “We were going to flag you down afterward and say hi, but Steve and I saw you get in that van. It was all white. Generic. Perfect for an afternoon kidnapping. After finding that map, we didn’t want to take any chances.”
“You followed me?”
“For your safety.”
“I’m not a child, you know. You could have called me.”
He sighed. “You’re right, Joe. But I still think you should at least look into getting private security, like I suggested. If not for you, then for your family.”
“Leave my family out of this,” I snapped.
“Whoa, easy fella. It’s me, your pal. Barry. I’m not some bad guy.”
I unclenched my fists. I hadn’t even been aware I’d been clenching them.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t even know who the bad guys are anymore.”
“I’m sure Finn Donnelly wasn’t a bad guy.”
“You don’t know that. I don’t know that. Nobody knows that.” I told Barack about my meeting with my detective friend, Dan Capriotti. “The department’s working this as a possible overdose. The life insurance company is investigating it as a suicide. I don’t know who to believe. There are some strange guys around—”
“Strange guys?”
“Ran into some druggie at the facility, where his wife is living. Probably nothing, but…” I shrugged. “Did you know they found heroin on Finn? Can you believe that?”
“I was going to let you know. We just found out today, when the lieutenant faxed the case files to us.”
“You can stop doing that, you know.”
“What?”
I rolled my eyes. “What you’re doing. I know you think you’re helping me, but I’ve got my own contact on the force. Dan will let me know if they find anything important. Finn may have been mixed up with some dangerous people. For all I know, he was on his way to see me. To ask for my help. Now, do I believe he was on drugs? There’s nothing to say he wasn’t. I think the truth is going to be more complex, but there’s nothing you or your sunglass-wearing goons can do but get in the way. You’re free to go back to Bali or Cape Town or wherever and work on your tan.”
He stared at me with thin lips but didn’t say anything. What did he expect? He seemingly wanted to pick up right where we’d left off, like no time had passed since we’d left Washington. To be fair, it was exactly what I’d wanted.
Except it wasn’t. I’d expected we’d go out for drinks together. Maybe play a few holes, like in the line we’d been feeding to the press. Instead, we’d been reunited by tragedy. The specter of death hovered over us, poisoning the air we breathed. It didn’t help that Barack was his usual impenetrable self.
What did he get out of spending his energy and resources on something like this? He hadn’t known Finn. He was working an angle. I’d never known him to be underhanded, but his every move was choreographed. There was something about all of this that he wasn’t sharing with me.
The suspicion had been gnawing at me since Barack’s first visit.
It was gnawing at me even harder now.
I’d already come to the realization that the police might not be putting maximum effort into their investigation. Dan still hadn’t returned my call from yesterday. The trouble was, I’d also realized I couldn’t uncover the truth about Finn’s death on my own. I wasn’t a detective. I didn’t know what questions to ask, or how to ask them.
But that didn’t mean I needed Barack’s help.
“There’s no reason for you to get your hands dirty,” I told Barack. “The last thing we need is the Secret Service or the FBI or the NSA or whoever you want to call in complicating things.”
“Joe,” he said. His voice was flatter than Kansas.
“I’m serious. If I know you, there’ll be drones buzzing Wilmington within a week. This isn’t a war zone. I don’t want you to turn it into one.”
“That’s not fair.”
“You and I are private citizens now. There’s no way this ends well if we start swinging our dicks around—”
“Joe.”
“Don’t ‘Joe’ me,” I said. “I’m serious.”
“You’re serious.”
“As a heart-attack sandwich.”
“Well,” Barack said, “that’s that, I guess.”
For the rest of the way to my place, Barack busied himself on his BlackBerry. I stared out the window. There was more to refusing Barack’s assistance than my hurt feelings. The story behind Finn’s death was a time bomb. If and when it went off, there was no telling how many people would be affected by the blast. Keeping Barack—and Jill, and the rest of my family—as far away from my clumsy attempts to defuse it was the right thing to do. It was the smart thing to do.
It was a lie so well told, I almost believed it myself.
11
I punched the code on my garage keypad and the door lifted, revealing an empty parking space. I’d managed to beat Jill home. My shoulders relaxed. The last thing I wanted to do was answer a bunch of questions about why I was hitching rides from Barack Obama. She’d been on the receiving end of more than one rant about Barack. “Give him time,” she’d said, again and again. “He just needs some time to himself.”
Her explanation always made me laugh. Time to himself? He wasn’t spending time alone, or even with his family. He was hanging around with an endless array of celebrities, holding open auditions for a new best friend. And now that he hadn’t found one, he’d come crawling back to me. He didn’t have the decency to beg for forgiveness, or even say those two magical words:
I’m sorry.
And was that too much to ask?
I gave the Escalade a little wave once the garage door was up. Barack and Steve had insisted on waiting in the driveway until I made it inside. I’d told them not to worry, that I didn’t have my keys but I knew the six-digit code for the garage. They said, “Oh no, it’s no big deal, we’ll wait just to make sure.”
Make sure of what? That I hadn’t forgotten how to open my own garage door in my old age?
I didn’t wait around to watch them leave.
Inside, I stripped off my suit. My knee was beginning to swell. There was no telling how much I’d damaged it. All I knew was that I was lucky I could stand after that fall. Damned lucky. Jill wasn’t going to be happy with me. Even if I’d gotten her roses, they wouldn’t have made up for the growing list of transgressions I was going to need to apologize for.
I limped through the kitchen in my undershirt and boxers. I was about to open the freezer door when I noticed the phone on the wall was blinking. I think we were the last people in Delaware with a landline. The world was changing, but I wasn’t.
I picked up the handset. I figured it was probably Jill, with a reminder about the chicken. Or somebody risking an FCC fine to sell us cut-rate car insurance. But the message was from Selena Esposito. Lieutenant Selena Esposito.
A sales call would have been vastly preferable.
Esposito had the gravelly voice of a pack-a-day smoker. It was the first time I’d heard her voice, but it perfectly matched her reputation for being tough as a two-dollar steak. Her message said she wanted to “talk mano a mano.” I didn’t like the sound of that. Whatever she wanted, I had to nip it in the bud. I didn’t want to see this whole thing spiral out of control.
When I called her back, she picked up on the first ring.
“Didn’t think I’d hear from you so quickly,” she said. “I wasn’t sure I had the right number.”
“It’s me,” I said.
“Do you have a few minutes?”
“I just returned from Finn Donnelly’s funeral. I’ve got a minute or two.”
“Good,” she said. I heard the sound of paper rustling in the back
ground. “I hear you met with Detective Capriotti yesterday.”
“We didn’t discuss the case, if that’s what you’re worried about. Just two old friends, meeting for coffee.”
“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Joe. You don’t drink coffee.”
I didn’t say anything. If you don’t have anything good to say, keep your mouth shut. That’s what Mama Biden always told me.
“This is my department. I’m in charge here. Not your friend Capriotti, or anyone else down here you might know from preschool.”
“We’re all on the same team.”
She snorted. “I’m not going to let you or any of your Secret Service lackeys come through here and treat my detectives like errand boys. Now, Dan likes to show off—God knows that’s why he wanted this case—but he’s got a dozen other dead bodies in the morgue to deal with.”
“The Secret Service aren’t my…”
“They’re not your what?”
I’d been about to say that they weren’t my lackeys, but thought better of it. She obviously wasn’t aware that Steve had been bugging her at Barack’s behest, not mine. There was no love lost between Barack and me. That didn’t mean I wanted to see him dragged any deeper into this mess.
“You have to understand, Finn and I were friends,” I said, regaining my cool. I filled her in on the basics of our relationship, careful not to offer any unsolicited information. I had something of a reputation for being loose-lipped.
“You’re friends with a lot of people, it sounds like,” she said.
I ignored her. “Listen. A man lost his life here. All I want is to make sure justice is done. His wife is sick. His daughter is having a rough time handling this—”
“Every criminal has somebody who loves them,” she said. “They’re still criminals.”
“Finn wasn’t a criminal.”
“Then what would you call someone with a Schedule One drug in their pocket? A hero?”
“Drug abuse is a disease. We need to stop treating addicts like violent offenders. He’s not a hero, but it’s disingenuous to call him a criminal.”
Hope Never Dies Page 5
