The Whole Lie

by Steve Ulfelder

  The question surprised me. I thought Randall knew me better than that. “Hell no I’m not working for them,” I said, “if I ever was.”

  “You’ve got two checks from the man in your billfold.”

  “Sure do,” I said. “But as of yesterday afternoon, I’m working to find out who killed Savvy Kane. Barnburner once, Barnburner always.”

  “And if the path leads straight to Bert Saginaw’s front door?”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me at all. Look, I really need to take this other call.”

  I clicked over.

  “Where the fuck are you?” Krall said. “Where the fuck have you been? How many fucking messages do I need to leave?”

  “I’m in my truck. I’m coming to Cambridge to meet with you and figure out what comes next. But if you keep fuckity-fucking me, I might just pick you up by your throat and pound on you once I get there.”

  Krall took a deep breath that just about sounded like a sob. “I’m sorry, okay? Long night into a long morning. Into a long day, no doubt.”

  “Thanks to Chain Link Jesus.”

  “Drudge put the pics up at nine thirty last night. We’ve been all hands on deck ever since.”

  “Where’d those shots come from?”

  “Tell you later.”

  “They take you by surprise?”

  “We knew about them, and deep down I guess we figured they’d come out. But you get in a groove. You tell yourself maybe you got lucky this time. Know what I mean?”

  I said nothing.

  “Our internals, our eyes and ears, all the anecdotal stuff,” he said, “it’s brutal. The Catholics, the oldsters, and all the people who never liked Bert but had a hard time putting their finger on why … well, they can frigging well put their finger on the reason now. Our numbers are dropping through the floor.”

  “Go figure.”

  “Reason for this morning’s messages, there’s a big change in plans. Tinker and Saginaw are doing tag-team rallies all day. Maybe she can drag him up. We’re not sure, but we’ve got to try something.”

  “Doesn’t that torpedo Tinker’s too-dignified-to-campaign strategy?”

  “Bet your ass. But it can work in our favor, too. We’re hoping Betsy Tinker Coming Down from the Mountain pushes Chain Link Jesus out of the news cycle. Or at least aside.” Big sigh. “Like I say, we’ve got to try something.”

  “Where do I come in?”

  “This morning, we’re doing our first rally since the Jesus pics. Why don’t you come on up?”

  “What good will I do Saginaw there?”

  “Search me, but it was Bert’s idea. And it’s his nickel.”

  I thought about that. Decided a rally was as good a place to be as any. Randall would do his usual ultra-thorough job researching Saginaw, and I could get my first look at this Betsy Tinker. “Where are you?” I said.

  “Know where Braxton is?”

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later I exited I-495, drove west and south on back roads. This was apple country: hills, orchards, farm stands. Nice. Finally hit Braxton, found its newish high school, parked in a nearly full lot. The best parking spots had been swiped by vans from all the local TV stations plus Fox News and CNN.

  When I entered the gym, I got my first taste of big-time politics. Uniformed state troopers flanked the double doors. One of them saw something in me he didn’t like. Next thing I knew I was being elbow-walked toward a trailer serving as a mobile command post. That was bad: I figured I was in for a credential search and a serious pat down. And once my record came up, I’d be bounced or held.

  “Sax!”

  I’d lucked out: It was Krall. He nodded thanks to the trooper, who dropped my elbow but didn’t like doing it. Then Krall speed-walked us inside the school, fishing out a purple badge on a lanyard, telling me to wear it. “Just in time,” he said at the back of the gym, talking into my ear as a local poo-bah did the world’s longest introduction of Betsy Tinker. “Herself is about to descend from the heavens. The people love her.”

  He was right about that. The gym was packed, the roll-out bleachers SRO, plenty of homemade signs waving (CLASS AT LAST, WE LOVE YOU BETS), the Braxton Bulldogs marching band taking floor space, the media penned off to one side.

  The local poo-bah couldn’t decide whether he was introducing AC/DC or the pope, so he covered both. About the time even his wife was ready to give him the hook, he finally ran out of dumb things to say and waved an arm at a side door.

  In came Betsy Tinker, followed by Saginaw and a few flunkies.

  From the way people talked about her, I’d expected a cross between the queen of England and Aunt Bea. This woman was not that. Though, I decided as she walked and smiled and waved, she did have a royalty vibe about her. In a good way. The gracious, gliding way.

  She couldn’t be ten years older than me. Fit, pretty, shortish hair that wasn’t gray or silver or blond—but was somehow all three. She smiled at everyone, and though she seemed to make time for them all, she never stopped moving. That was a skill shared by natural politicians and NASCAR drivers.

  Tinker stepped to a miked podium; the others stood in line behind her and to her right, their rear ends brushing one of those hanging pads that prevent basketball players from slamming into cinder blocks.

  The gym went crazy. Bleachers vibrated. Signs waved. Krall grinned, hands on hips, soaking it in. The band played a song I was pretty sure was supposed to go with the president of the United States. Nobody seemed to mind.

  It was hard to decide whether Betsy Tinker was a natural at milking the moment, or just surprised by the intensity of it all. She stood, smiled, waved.

  Applause rolled, faded, returned. Each time the ruckus came close to settling, some dimwit would yell, “We love you, Betsy!” the way dimwits always do nowadays, and the applause would heat up again.

  Finally, the gym went quiet. “I’m Betsy Tinker,” she said into the microphone. Perfect pause. “And you must be the great unwashed.”

  The place went nuts again, this time with laughter that built to a standing ovation. “That’s my line!” Krall said into my ear, grabbing my arm like he wanted to break it. “I knew it would kill. I knew it!” Then he pointed all the way across the gym at one of the flunkies, who grinned and made a big thumbs-up.

  After that it was all downhill. Not because Tinker did anything wrong, but because she stopped being a folk hero and became a politician giving a stump speech. The magician’s reveal was over.

  I watched Saginaw. His face and body language didn’t give away much. He smiled and clapped when he was supposed to, just like everybody else in the gym. Once in a while he cut his eyes in various directions. When he spotted me next to Krall, he froze for a second or two.

  Then the speech was over—after only fourteen minutes, and God bless Tinker for that—and people got enthusiastic again as the pols and flunkies walked out the same door they’d walked in, media in hot pursuit.

  “What do you think?” Krall said.

  “Who cares what I think?”

  “I do. You’re my one-man focus group.”

  “I think your strategy of stashing her was smart,” I said. “The more you trot her out, the more people will see she’s just another politician pissing in their ear.”

  “For what it’s worth, I think you’re right. Obviously our hand has been forced. Look on the bright side. Nobody was hollering at Chain Link Jesus up there. People don’t want to be rude with sweet Betsy Tinker around.” He nodded and chewed a thumbnail, talking to himself now. “What we do, we do a handful more of these gigs, say two a day. Run out the clock that way, wait for the polls to settle. And nobody can say Betsy was afraid to face the public. Speaking of which, let’s go see how she does with the hacks.” He turned and moved away through the crowd.

  I started to follow, but felt looked-at. I don’t know how to describe it better—I just felt eyes on me. I’ve learned not to ignore the feeling, so I spun.

  And saw Vic Lacro
ss maybe twenty feet to my right.

  Double take. Vic Lacross?

  He used to be a state police detective. We’d met a few years back when a young Barnburner got shotgunned. Lacross had turned out to be the kind of cop I could work with: not quite straight, not quite dirty. Played everything his own way. I’d heard it bit him in the ass, that he wasn’t a cop anymore.

  His hair was still a 1974 bowl cut. He wore it that way to cover his missing ear. Acne craters still dominated his face. Maybe his crow’s feet were deeper.

  Maybe mine were, too.

  I wanted to make my way over, but the crowd was flowing against me, and Krall said my name. So I turned and moved away.

  Vic Lacross. Huh.

  I pulled my cell and shot Sophie a text asking for a quick Google on Victor Lacross, former statie. She texted back right away: Will do, mom’ll be thrilled I’m yr accomplice.

  It was packed in here, and the locals hadn’t thought through their traffic flow. The double doors Tinker and company had used to exit the gym were becoming a crush zone. The TV people had zipped through the same doors, and that had signaled the looky-loos and fame-sniffers that this, and only this, was the place to be, the other three sets of double doors be damned.

  The bottleneck grew nasty. Looking over people’s heads, I saw why. Just outside the doors, a wing of the school teed away and a concrete patio formed a natural stage. Tinker, Saginaw, and their handlers had stopped there. So had the reporters, and a handful of staties to boot. Now the crowd, Tinker’s great unwashed, was trying to press its way through the same doors, and there was nowhere to go.

  A toddler cried. Then another. Nervous parents began lifting small kids. Folks up front tried to make the staties understand there was a problem, but the troopers were doing their human-cordon thing. I swiveled my head: Behind me, people were getting the message and drifting to other doors. There was no threat of a Europe-style soccer riot, but we were sure looking at an ugly scrum.

  No more than thirty feet dead ahead, on that concrete patio, an oblivious Betsy Tinker talked, gesturing with her hands the way politicians do. The sun was climbing, but it was still chilly—I could see her breath. People were gravitating to her from across the parking lot and ballfields: sweaters, fleeces, a few parkas …

  … raincoats?

  Yes. Two people had materialized, stepped from the woods maybe. A man and a woman. They looked like kids to me, but these days that’s true of anybody under thirty.

  They wore secret-agent-style trench coats. Tan, belted.

  There was no rain. There was no threat of rain. There hadn’t been rain for a week.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The man and woman in raincoats also wore identical shades, the heavy black ones that always remind me of old-time movie stars. I’d heard they were hip again, for boys and girls alike.

  “Hey,” I said, wriggling toward the doors.

  “Cool your jets, Ace,” a man said. I thought about slapping him, then saw he had a hand on the shoulder of a ten-year-old.

  The trench coat twins’ hands were jammed in their pockets. They were walking straight, paralleling the wing of the school. They used the same gait though the man was four inches taller, and they looked neither left nor right.

  “Hey!” I said. “Trooper!”

  None of the cops turned.

  I wriggled through the crowd some more. People continued to wise up and drop away from the sides of the pack, so it was getting easier to move. A couple of women called me names beneath their breath. The trench coat pair were still forty feet from Betsy Tinker, but they were moving fast and nobody, including the staties, seemed to notice them.

  “Trooper!” My wriggle turned into a full-on thrash. I hollered the word over and over as I neared the door. They all ignored me.

  The trench coat twins were thirty feet away from Betsy Tinker. Hands in pockets, grim expressions, marching.

  “Trooper!” I busted to the doors and finally, finally, one turned.

  It was the one who’d grabbed me when I first got here. The one who didn’t like my looks.

  Shit.

  “That’s far enough, pallie,” he said, making a tight little smile when he recognized me. He was short but wide, big chest, big traps, like so many state cops. His name board said OBSITNICK.

  “Over there—” I started to say, pointing. But he bodied up to me. Even with three dozen witnesses standing right there, he had a move nobody could spot: He squeezed my upper arms and pulled me toward him in a weird little hug. To anybody else, it’d look like I’d charged him and he’d been forced to absorb me with his body. They couldn’t see he was squeezing my arms, pressing with his thumbs … doing his damnedest to hurt me, and enjoying it. “Easy there, sir,” he said, his voice no different than the fifteen times a shift he asked for license and registration. But the tight smile gave him away: The little prick was having a good time.

  The trench coat twins were twenty feet from Betsy Tinker. A print reporter noticed them, gave them an annoyed look, did a double take. The male trench coat stalled. The female did not. She was moving her hand in her coat pocket, the way you would to put your finger on the trigger of a gun.

  Or of a bomb.

  I stood watching, held up by a jerk cop fifteen feet away from the mess. I needed to move now. Fighting pain, I pretended to fall against the statie. It forced him to let go, to wrap my waist.

  I raised my right boot as high as I could.

  I slammed it to his left instep.

  His eyes crossed. He released my waist.

  I didn’t have room for a decent punch. Instead: grabbed a handful of love handle just above his Sam Browne belt, gave it one hell of a sharp twist. Felt things tear. He would bleed beneath his skin for a day or so.

  Good.

  He made a noise like a mouse in a cat’s mouth and stepped back. I busted through.

  Everything slowed then.

  “There!” I hollered, pointing at the trench coat twins. “Them!”

  The male trench coat, the one who’d faltered once already, spun and took off.

  I took off after him.

  The woman never took her eyes from Betsy Tinker. The right hand came out of her coat pocket. Her pinched face went savage, and she began to holler something. Just as I flashed past, focused on the man, I heard a beating-laundry sound. Whatever she’d started to say stopped. Something hit my hair.

  Running full speed, I touched my head.

  Blood.

  I ran. I focused on the man, thirty yards ahead and moving well. His trench coat tails flapped. He wore trail-running shoes and long, thick socks. Like he’d prepped for this getaway. Huh.

  He hit the woods. I was closing, but not quickly. We crunched through fallen leaves, the man knowing every twist and turn, and I flashed back to my own high school days: This would be the path kids ducked down to smoke a cigarette or a doobie, or to bail out of school after lunch. This would be the path the vice principal patrolled once in a while, making surprise busts.

  Closing. I was twenty yards behind.

  The man took a left. I did, too, and saw we’d popped from the path onto a packed-dirt road, high-crowned. A corner of my head guessed it would serve as both access to the high school sports fields and a fire road for the woods to my right.

  The man was fading, panicking. His gait, which had been fluid on the path he knew well, grew choppy and spastic. He looked over his shoulder every four strides.

  Me, I could go all day. Running in work boots feels ridiculous at first, but once you build a head of steam, they almost work in your favor, their weight pulling your feet along.

  Twelve yards, ten, eight. He was flailing. That was good. I had to assume that whatever his girlfriend had been clutching, gun or bomb, he had one too—but as long as he kept whipping his arms around like a kindergarten puppet, he couldn’t grab for it.

  Six yards. He breathed like a train leaving a mountain station. I clomped, felt the first sweat-trickle at the small of m
y back.

  When I got within three yards, I decided to end it. Exploded for a few fast strides, reached for the collar of his trench coat, jerked down and toward me.

  It wiped him out, as I’d hoped.

  What I hadn’t planned on: The trench coat slipped off his arms, came away in my grasp.

  Underneath it, he was naked but for the socks and shoes. So much for my suicide bomb theory.

  What the hell?

  It took me a bunch of strides to whoa down my heavy boots. When I did, and turned to walk back to the man, he lay in a fetal position clutching his side.

  I made my way to him, catching my breath. I stood over him, set hands on knees. “What the hell?”

  He was crying.

  That pissed me off.

  I kicked him in the back. Not hard. I just wanted to un-fetal him.

  It worked. He grabbed for his back like a little girl. He mewled. He cried and panted and looked at the sky.

  He had something written on his chest: FURDER.

  Written in red. Lipstick? Blood?

  I faked another kick just to keep him still and quiet. Then I rifled the pockets of the trench coat.

  What I found: an oversized vial of blood, corked with a black rubber stopper.

  I held it up, looked at the man. “What the hell, pal?”

  “Furder is murder,” he said.

  I looked at him maybe fifteen seconds. Finally I said, “You gotta be shitting me.”

  * * *

  “Gold,” Krall said. “Pure goddamn gold.”

  The school gym had been taken over by the staties.

  “The girl had bigger balls than the guy,” one trooper said to another.

  I leaned on a folding table while Krall rattled on about how perfectly things had played out. “From an optics standpoint only, of course,” he added, trying not to drool on himself.

  What I pieced together: Betsy Tinker wore fur coats once in a while, and her late husband had always voted not to cut funding for programs the animal-rights types hated. So a pair of local coffeehouse heroes, ten years out of Braxton High and still living in mom’s basement, had hatched a plan to toss vials of blood on Tinker while the cameras rolled. Then they would strip to reveal the big FURDER IS MURDER message. The sound I’d heard as I took off after the guy, and the blood I’d felt on my head, had resulted from a cop tackling the trench coat woman as she cocked her arm to splatter Betsy Tinker.