by David Ellis
The room was a suite itself, with a spacious front room and then a bedroom. She’d done well enough so far, so I thought I would let her take the lead, at least for now. She closed the door behind her and placed her purse carefully on a small table.
She appraised me with those voracious amber eyes. Then she approached, placing her hands delicately on my jacket. “These silly costumes,” she said. She reached up and untied my bow tie.
“And I was so proud of how I tied that,” I said.
She pulled the tie off my neck and slipped it around hers. “Then tie it again,” she said.
So I did, best I could, anyway. I was having some trouble concentrating. She reached behind her and unzipped her dress. Before I’d put the finishing touches on the bow tie around her long, thin neck, her dress was at her ankles. A moment later her strapless bra and panties hit the carpet as well.
“We’ll need some privacy,” she said. I was only then aware of the window in the room, looking out over nothing but another hotel a couple blocks away. I watched her walk to the window, wearing nothing but high heels and the bow tie. She slowly pulled the curtains closed. Maybe a lucky someone got a nice peek. I was pretty sure that thought had crossed her mind.
Then she slowly walked back toward me, taunting me with each careful step of those high heels. She took my hand and led me into the bedroom. It was a queen-size bed, I thought, but it could have been a dirty tarp for all I cared. She put a knee on the bed, then another, and crawled to the center of the bed.
Still in the position, on her hands and knees, she looked back over her shoulder at me.
Maybe these fundraisers weren’t so bad, after all.
44
DEAR PENTHOUSE FORUM, I NEVER THOUGHT THIS would happen to me. . . .
A knock at the door. I put on a robe from the bathroom and answered. We’d ordered champagne and some finger food. I brought it into the bedroom.
The bedroom had been through a rough two hours. One of the lamps was knocked over. The clock radio on the bedside table had somehow taken a spill as well, standing in a vertical position on the carpet. The bedspread was on the floor, as were the sheets. Only two pillows remained on the bed and they were propping up Madison Koehler, who was checking her BlackBerry, wearing only three things: her glasses, my tuxedo shirt and satin panties.
“Did you, like, read a book about male fantasies or something?” I asked.
“I wrote it.” She seemed pleased with herself. She finished reading whatever email or text message was on her phone and looked up at me.
I poured the champagne into glasses, sat on the bed, and handed her one. “I hope this won’t affect our friendship,” I said.
She looked over her glasses at me and took the champagne. “Let’s promise it won’t.”
By my estimate, I had known Madison Koehler for a hundred and forty minutes, and I’d spent a hundred and twenty of those ravishing her body. Or maybe more accurately, she had spent it ravishing mine. She knew what she wanted and hadn’t been afraid to provide direction. And I was generally willing to accommodate, although I drew the line at the Russian accent.
“Am I your first?” she asked.
That question surprised me. I thought maybe I should be insulted.
“Since your wife, I mean.”
That surprised me even more. She’d done her homework. But on me? I wouldn’t have thought she’d even known who I was.
“Yes,” I said.
She put down her BlackBerry, got off the bed, and took some strawberries from the room service tray. I enjoyed the view. I was enjoying myself, generally. Maybe a little conflicted, but this day had to come. I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life celibate. And this was probably the way it was destined to happen, an impulsive urge without the opportunity for deliberation and second thoughts. Regardless, the dam had broken. In a small but meaningful way, I had moved on.
“How do you like working for Charlie?” she asked, sitting in a chair, tucking one leg under herself.
“I don’t.”
“You don’t like working for him?”
“I don’t work for him. I work for myself.”
“Oh, I see,” she said playfully. She pushed a strawberry into her mouth, what I would have found to be a somewhat provocative gesture had I not been completely spent at this point. “You’d do well to be clear with him on that point.”
I didn’t comment on that. Charlie had made it clear to me that he didn’t have a sense of humor about disloyalty. You fuck me, I’ll fuck you harder, he’d said. He’d even made a point of mentioning that guy Dick Baroni, someone who apparently had crossed him in some way and who wound up with broken bones and a torched office as a result.
Madison walked into the anteroom and returned fully dressed. She tossed my tuxedo shirt on the bed. “Carlton Snow is going to win this November,” she informed me. “He has the money and the incumbency label.”
“He’s not an incumbent. He fell backwards into the job.”
“Doesn’t matter. Everyone calls him Governor. Same difference.” She primped in front of the bedroom mirror, fixing her hair and her makeup. “We have enough money that we can win the primary without emptying our bank account. Edgar Trotter doesn’t have that luxury in his primary. He has to spend a lot. We’ll have a two-to-one advantage in money, and we’ll win.”
“Okay, so why are you convincing me of this?”
She finished with the mirror and grabbed another strawberry. “Charlie says you’re as sharp as they come. Hector thinks you walk on water.”
“And you listen to them?”
She thought about that. “The governor does. Absolutely.”
That seemed to be true. Hector had gotten me an interview for the job with the PCB in the time it would take me to blow my nose. I figured what Hector did for the governor was all about race. The governor needed the Latinos, and Hector was a celebrity for the time being.
“Do you?” I asked.
She angled her head. “What you did for Hector was plain for all to see. And Charlie, whatever else you might say about him, is cautious. He is very slow to trust. The fact that he trusts you tells me a lot.”
“Okay, so the governor’s going to win and I get a gold star.”
She still hadn’t reached her point. But I sensed she was about to, and I thought I knew what it was.
“I want you to work for me,” she said.
I didn’t know what that meant. My job was with the Procurement and Construction Board and, in a very real sense, with Charlie Cimino. It was a role that suited the FBI’s purposes. What would I be doing working for the governor’s chief of staff?
“Carlton Snow didn’t hire me to be his chief of staff,” she said. “He hired me to get elected to a full term. Everything I do is about that. I’m his chief of staff, but I’m also running the campaign. Do you—do you know anything about campaigns?”
“No,” I conceded.
She sighed. “I’m chief of staff to make sure that Carl doesn’t step on himself. I don’t do anything unless it involves the campaign in some way. I don’t worry about personnel issues or anything technical. I just make sure his policies are right. Otherwise, I’m on the campaign.”
“Okay, and I just told you I don’t know anything about campaigns.”
She shook her head. “I don’t need you for that. I need you to make sure that everything we do receives a lawyer’s blessing.”
Receives a lawyer’s blessing. Lovely, how she put that. Not legal.
“You must have people who do that,” I said.
She made a face. “We have campaign lawyers, obviously. People who can navigate the campaign finance laws. But on the state side? Government work? No, it hasn’t been a priority. Half the people in the office are from Governor Trotter’s staff. Republicans. Remember, Carl got thrown into this job on a week’s notice.”
I hadn’t thought about that. You have an entire staff for the governor, and then mid-term, the governor resigns and th
e lieutenant governor jumps in. He hadn’t been in office even a full year yet. He was probably stuck with a lot of Langdon Trotter’s people.
“Besides,” she said, “I need someone more . . . talented.”
More creative, she meant. More ethically flexible. Better able to take something illegal and give it the appearance of legality. Apparently, I’d come highly recommended in that regard. Quite the name I was making for myself.
“You and Charlie—you can still work with him, but I would take priority.”
I threw her words back at her. “You’d do well to be clear with him on that point.”
“Don’t worry about what I tell Charlie Cimino,” she snapped. “You worry about what I tell you.”
Sometimes I smile when I’m not pleased. This was one of those times. “I don’t recall accepting the offer to work for you. So you might want to take caution in your tone.”
She raised her chin and stared long and hard at me. “Charlie mentioned the attitude.”
“Did he? Good.”
“How long do I have to wait before you say yes?”
Now I was smiling because I admired her brass. “And why am I going to say yes, Madison?”
“You’re going to say yes,” she said, gathering her purse, “because Governor Carlton Snow will make you rich and powerful.”
She had no idea what she was doing. She didn’t know what I represented. She didn’t realize that she was inviting the federal government into the inner circle of the governor’s office.
She slipped a card out of her purse and left it on the bed. “Oh, and one more thing,” she said on her way out. “What happened here tonight? That doesn’t leave this room. Nobody can know about this.”
She didn’t want anyone to know about the sex? Fair enough. Wasn’t my style to kiss and tell, anyway. And since I wasn’t wearing a wire to this event tonight, not only would the feds not know what we did between the sheets, but they also wouldn’t know that she just asked me to work for her, either.
Not unless I decided to accept her offer. That one would require some thought.
45
I GOT BACK HOME AFTER MIDNIGHT. I COULDN’T SLEEP. My limbs were tingling from the reintroduction to sexual intercourse. I wasn’t interested in television. I wasn’t sure what to do with myself.
I didn’t know what to think about Madison Koehler’s offer, either. I’d gone after the PCB to learn about Ernesto Ramirez’s murder, and I worked with Charlie initially for the same reason. I was trying to catch a killer. And then Charlie and Connolly and the rest of them screwed me over with the doctored memos and handed Chris Moody a golden opportunity to pinch me, so my conscience didn’t bother me one bit in helping the government make a case against them.
But neither reason—solving a murder or payback—had anything to do with Madison Koehler, at least as far as I could tell. I didn’t know her. I had no agenda with her. If I accepted her offer, and the job was anything like what she’d subtly suggested, she was going to get into trouble as well.
I decided I would hold on to the idea for the time being.
Nothing better to do, I took a look at the documents I had taken from the state office regarding Starlight Catering. I figured I might as well make myself productive.
I knew two things about the company: They’d won a major contract with the state after Adalbert Wozniak’s company was disqualified, and Charlie Cimino had left them off the list of companies we were targeting. There was no chance it was a coincidence.
After I went through the documents, I knew a third thing about Starlight.
I knew the name of the owner.
Starlight Catering was a corporation whose sole principal officer was a man named Delroy Bailey. He had checked the box for “African American” in the form the state made you fill out to determine whether you qualified as a minority business enterprise. Sure enough, Agent Tucker had been right. Starlight Catering was an MBE.
But I didn’t recognize the name Delroy Bailey. I looked up the name on my laptop’s Internet and got a lot of hits, as the company had a website and had also catered some big events. There was a photo of him at one of the parties. He was a handsome, young, skinny black guy, which didn’t help me one way or the other, but hooray for him.
Here was another hit: Delroy Bailey and his wife, Yolanda, at a fundraiser for some alderman named Diaz. Yolanda looked a little older than Delroy, and she was Latina, not African American. Again, that didn’t really help me.
I froze. Wait. Yolanda.
I went to my bag and retrieved the computer that Paul Riley had lent me, with the database from the Almundo trial. The more I thought about it, the surer I was, but it took a few minutes to find the right spot on the computer, the background workup on the prosecution’s star witness, Joey Espinoza.
“Will wonders never cease,” I mumbled, something my mother used to say.
Joey Espinoza had a sister named Yolanda Espinoza Bailey.
Starlight Catering was run by Joey Espinoza’s brother-in-law.
“SO HOW’D IT GO last night?” Lee Tucker had a pinch of tobacco in his mouth and his feet up on the table. I’d barely walked through the door to Suite 410 in my office building before he was asking.
“It went.” I took a chair across from him.
“Anything good?”
I made a face. “A roomful of greedy jerk-offs.”
“You make any good contacts?”
“It was a pretty boring affair.”
Tucker watched me for a moment. “That it? Nothing else?”
“The martinis were good.”
He let that comment hang for a long time. Slowly, he nodded. “Okay, then.”
“Okay, then.”
His feet came off the table. “Today you have number sixteen.”
“Right. Hoffman.” Using our code, Charlie had identified the contractor denominated “16” on his master list, Hoffman Design and Supplies, as the next target on the list.
“Okay, and I’ve got the text,” he said, checking a box. The feds were downloading all of the text messages Charlie sent me. The texts were their lifeblood. It was how your basic, stateside fraudulent scheme became a federal offense.
He looked up at me. “So, if that’s it, then I guess you’re good to go.” He handed me the F-Bird recording device.
“Great. It’s been dreamy.” I pushed myself out of the chair. Sometimes these meetings took a while, but we were becoming much more efficient.
“Nothing at all from last night?” he asked me. “You meet the governor?”
“No.”
“Learn any useful information?”
“No.”
Tucker nodded for a long time. He looked disappointed. “Well, that’s too bad,” he said.
46
CHARLIE WAS IN A RARE GOOD MOOD TODAY. I DIDN’T know what market-driven event had lightened his capitalistic heart—maybe landing an anchor tenant on one of his commercial properties—but I thought it would be good to take advantage.
“Missed you last night,” he said. The Porsche was humming down the interstate to the south side.
“I was there.”
“Yeah? Well, that place was a mob house. So who are we doing today? Hoffman, right? Eric Hoffman?”
“Right,” I said.
“We’re blowing through that list.”
It was true. Knowing Charlie, he had the whole thing charted out. Someday, he might want to compare his chart with the one on a conference room in the U.S. attorney’s office.
“Hey, I was noticing,” I said. “I saw on the list that one of the companies didn’t have a number next to it.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Starlight Catering. Any particular reason we’re leaving them alone? Or was it an oversight?”
He didn’t answer right away. He was thinking about his response.
“Don’t worry about that,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
Charlie grew quiet. I had snapped
him out of his uncharacteristically good mood back to the angry, aggressive one. That told me something right there.
Charlie made an aggressive move with the Porsche, switching into the right lane and then swerving onto the off-ramp.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. We took a right after the ramp. He found the nearest gas station and parked at the far end, where we were alone.
“Get out,” he said.
I paused, but too long a hesitation could be lethal. I got out and met him at the rear of the Porsche.
“Open your coat,” he said.
My heart did some gymnastics. I had hit a nerve with Charlie.
And now he was going to search me.
I unbuttoned my winter coat. My suit coat, the left inner pocket of which was holding the F-Bird, was already unbuttoned. I raised my arms. Charlie put his palms on my shirt at the chest and then ran his hands down to my belt.
“Spread your legs.”
“Jesus, Charlie.”
“Spread your legs,” he repeated.
I did. He did a quick pat on my thighs.
“You want me to empty my pockets, too?” I asked with indignation. I wasn’t eager to do it, of course, but I knew that was his intention so it only made sense to appear willing. Better than unwilling. Indignant, insulted, offended was fine. But not unwilling.
I didn’t try to stall or talk him out of it. I pulled my car keys out of my right overcoat pocket and then turned the pocket out. There was nothing in the left coat pocket and I turned it out, too.
Charlie didn’t seem inclined to stop me. He threw my keys to the ground and put his hand out.
I didn’t want to think about what might happen next. I couldn’t seem the least bit apprehensive. I tried not to think about the fact that after my pants pockets, there was nothing left but my suit jacket and the F-Bird.
From my right pants pocket, I removed my cell phone and money clip before turning that pocket out. Charlie threw the money to the ground but held on to my cell phone.
One more pocket until we got to the suit coat and the F-Bird.
