The Whole Lie

by Steve Ulfelder

  I looked at Charlene’s face, saw her seeing me figure things out. She smiled. She looked sad. “Sit,” she said.

  “We never talk,” she said a few seconds later. We were both on the big sectional. I leaned back. Charlene sat Indian style on the next cushion. She’d showered. She wore a tiny black T-shirt over blue sweatpants that said COLONIALS down one leg.

  “Well,” I said.

  She shook her head. “It’s me who never talks.”

  “It is?”

  “I make fun of your strong silent type routine, but … yes. When it comes to the important things, I’m as guilty as you. We skim. We glide. We get by. Days pass.”

  I said nothing.

  “You don’t send big-baby signals the way most men do,” Charlene said. “So I forget sometimes.”

  “Forget what?”

  “I forget about the B side of manly-man manliness.”

  “What’s the B side? What are you talking about?”

  “The sentimentality, the … fragility.”

  We said nothing for a while. We listened to a slow saxophone.

  I decided not to play dumb and make her connect every dot. “Except for the one parole job at the GMC dealership,” I said, “I haven’t made an honest living since I got out.”

  “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For knowing where I was going.” She lightly raked my cheek with a couple of nails.

  “What kind of man,” I said, ducking away from the nails, “lives off his girlfriend? What kind of man smiles every month while she pays the mortgage?”

  “The answer to that is ‘most of them, if they get half a chance.’ Sad but true.”

  “Not me.”

  “No shit, Sherlock.” Charlene smiled. Still looked sad, though. “The way you’re expressing the unhappiness isn’t doing either of us much good.”

  “I just want to pay you back.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “You want to have paid me back. It’s different. You are paying me back, starting this month, on the schedule we set up. Impatience is the problem.”

  “It’ll take years.”

  “What did I just say?”

  I swallowed. Hard. “Impatience.”

  “Men pay their debts,” she said. “Look at it that way.”

  Another song came on. This one had words. About a girl from Ipanema.

  “What did you mean before?” I said. “About men being the sentimental ones?”

  “There’s not much room for sentiment when you’re a woman, or a poor one anyway,” Charlene said. “Less when you’re … when you’re a…”

  I waited.

  “When you’re a whore,” she said, rasp-whispering it, eyes locked on the wall now.

  “Hell,” I said. She’d never used the word before. Not to me. I put my arms around her. I wrapped her up, held her, felt her buck and heave when she began to cry.

  Charlene cried hard while a girl sang about the girl from Ipanema. I said “Hey” and “Hell” and “Well” and stroked her hair. I kept my arms around her, let her soak the shoulder of my shirt with snot and tears.

  Time passed. Songs played on the TV.

  Charlene pushed off, rose, hid her face, pit-patted down the hall to the bathroom.

  She was back in five minutes. She stood before me, tears gone, makeup gone, sorrow gone, tiny fists on hips. “One promise, Conway,” she said. “One thing. It’s the one thing. It’s all I ask. What have I ever asked?”

  I sat. I looked up at her. I wanted to go along. I wanted to so bad.

  But my chest went hard.

  “One thing,” Charlene said. “One promise.”

  A jazz song flared, annoyed her. She grabbed the clicker, turned, flipped off the TV.

  Then it was quiet.

  My mouth was dry. I swallowed.

  “She was a Barnburner,” I said.

  Three seconds later, I was alone in the room.

  As Charlene stomped up the stairs, I killed the lights. I hit my knees. I prayed.

  I prayed so hard.

  I prayed things wouldn’t get worse.

  While I tried to sleep, they did.

  Somebody killed Blaine Lee.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  It’s an early household. Sophie’s middle-school bus comes at ten of seven, and she needs mucho bathroom time to do whatever girls do in there. I wake up at five every morning no matter what—wish I didn’t, but I do—and Charlene can’t wait to get to the office.

  So the next morning, Friday, at six twenty, Charlene was dressed and gone, Sophie was primping upstairs, and I was news-surfing on my laptop. I clicked over to the Metrowest Daily News Web site.

  The line above the pic read WESTBOROUGH PIKE FATALITY. The photo was one you’ve seen a hundred times: heavy-duty tow truck winching a totaled car from the woods off a highway. In this case, the car was red and the highway was Route 90, the Massachusetts Turnpike.

  The car, whose hind end was being dragged onto the road by a wrecker that wore BLACKSTONE VALLEY SALVAGE stickers, had an out-of-state license plate. I squinted behind my drugstore reading glasses and leaned in.

  North Carolina plates.

  Silent alarm in my head. I squinted harder, spotted the Lumina badge on the left side of the trunk.

  There was no real news story—just a long caption under the photo. Mass Pike eastbound, one thirty in the morning, one-car accident. One fatality, male, police withholding the identity until they notified family.

  “Blaine.” I said it out loud. I called Wu, the state cop, not caring what time it was. No answer. Left voice mail.

  The staties must have questioned Blaine and failed to turn up anything good. So they cut him loose. A few hours later, he was dead.

  Today’s plan had been to smoke out the unknown guy in the green Expedition, but that would have to wait: I needed to find out what happened to Blaine Lee. Hollered a good-bye up the stairs.

  * * *

  Forty-five minutes later I stood between two ranch houses that had the state’s busiest highway in their backyards. The day had turned up cold, but there was no wind and the sun felt good on my face. I wore black Dickies work pants and a gray Dickies work shirt, and my left arm crooked a long aluminum clipboard with a legal pad attached.

  When a sixty-something-year-old man stepped from the front door of the house to my left, I didn’t even look at him. I made notes instead. Let him think whatever he wanted to think. Let him stew.

  He glanced at my F-150. It’s plain-Jane white, an old landscaper’s long-bed. No frills. It may be the last vehicle in America with hand-cranking windows. Just for kicks, I’d recently swapped in a Mustang’s V8 and automatic transmission. While I was at it, I’d lowered the suspension some and dug up a set of wider-than-stock black steel wheels. Now the truck handled better than any pickup had a right to.

  I’d left it idling in the street, facing the wrong way, flashers on, to lay down an I’m-with-the-state-so-I’m-a-rude-prick vibe.

  The truck, the clipboard, the Dickies and my attitude all worked. The man—gray stubble, white sweater, berry-colored pants—didn’t like me standing on his property ignoring him. He worked up the stones to cross his yard.

  As he did, I dotted a final imaginary i harder than I needed to and pretended to notice him for the first time. I gestured with my pen. “Did you cut the chain link fence, sir?”

  He swung his head toward the back of his yard, which ended in the wooded embankment that rose to the highway. Then he swung back. “Hell no I didn’t!”

  “Because that fence belongs to the people in the form of the Mass Highway Department and the federal Department of Transportation, sir. And somebody’s going to have to repair the people’s fence.”

  “Jumpin’ Jiminy!” he said, his face going red, his voice stronger than I would’ve guessed. “The staties cut the fence to get to the wreck!”

  “What wreck is that?”

  He goggled. “Jesus H. Jumpin’ Jehosoph
at, aren’t you here about the wreck?”

  “Wrecks aren’t my department, sir. Fences are my department. Can you tell me which state trooper cut the fence? A badge or barracks number would be helpful. Otherwise…” I stood with pen poised.

  “Otherwise what?”

  Behind the man’s shoulder, someone raised a sticky window. I pictured his wife leaning to hear the commotion, fretful, a woman with a highway thirty feet behind her kitchen.

  He pointed. “Look, pal. Middle of the night last night, a car came off the road right there. Crouch some and you can see where the guardrail’s all effed up, pardon my French. The car angled down the bank and hit that elm hard, can you see it? Shook the house, I kid you not. Mother dialed nine-one-one and I lit up the floods. Had ’em installed a few years back, see ’em on the back corner there? Mother wanted the lights because when you’re this close to the Pike, you never know what kind of crazies are gonna come around. This is the first time I’ve needed ’em, and they worked great, lit the place like daylight. One red car buried in that elm, one dead kid. Next thing I know, two staties are driving a cruiser right through my side yard with an ambulance on their tail. A statie took one look up the hill, dug around in his trunk, came out with a big set of bolt cutters, and that, partner, is what happened to your goddamn fence! Pardon my French.”

  I pursed my lips, though the move didn’t come naturally to me, trying to look like a bureaucrat caught with his pants down. Made a hold on gesture with one index finger, pulled my cell, scrolled through my call list, made a face. “Now they tell me,” I said. “I’d call it a morning wasted, but the clock starts when they tell me to roll, so I just made two hours’ time and a half taking a nice drive.”

  He was staring at me.

  “Fact it was a statie makes it a whole ’nother thing, whole ’nother asshole’s problem,” I said. “Sometimes they’re slow getting the word out.”

  “Well, I’m … I didn’t mean to be…”

  “No sweat,” I said, waving off the apology. The jerk bureaucrat was gone; now I was a guy getting money for nothing, happy as a pig in shit. I gestured with the clipboard. “Between the cruisers and the ambulance, they tore up your yard pretty good, huh? I could give you the compensation form for that, the two-forty-six B, but like I said, the staties have their own process. Hell of a crash, huh? And just the one guy?”

  “Sure was. Red Chevy, an old heap. Like I told the other guy, they just about needed a shovel to get the kid out.”

  “Other guy?”

  He smiled for the first time, showing the brownest teeth I’d seen in ten years. “Sheesh, the left hand really doesn’t know what the right hand’s doing, does it? The investigator who showed up not half an hour after the wreck. He sure wanted to take a look at that car, but the staties were already swarming it. So he interviewed me instead.”

  “If he was an investigator, why didn’t he just wade right in?”

  “Well…” The man squinted. “That’s a good question, now you ask it. I got the feeling he wasn’t with the staties. Was with somebody else instead, and couldn’t do jack sh … couldn’t do a darn thing about the car til they were done with it. Pardon my French.”

  Time to take a chance. “Big guy, running to fat maybe? Longish hair? Drove a green Ford Expedition?”

  His face lit up. “Yes sir, yes indeed! I couldn’t tell you the exact color of the SUV, but it was dark. And you described the, uh, the investigator.” He said the last word like a question. The old man was getting nervous, wondering if he’d screwed up. His nerves were making him suspicious.

  “I know him all right,” I said. Who is this goddamn guy?

  Something in the old-timer had changed—his stance, his body language. I’d pushed my luck. One more question about the wreck would be one too many. So I asked instead where I could get a good cup of coffee around here, said he and the missus should get some shut-eye, and split.

  Headed for Blackstone Valley Salvage, the towing operation that had hauled Blaine’s Lumina away. I knew Blackstone Valley Salvage. Knew it well.

  * * *

  I pulled in just before nine and eyeballed the wrecks that had been dropped outside the gates to be pulled apart or crushed by Mikey Guttman, owner of Blackstone Valley Salvage.

  We go back. Mikey’s dad used to sell motors to a race team my dad worked for. I didn’t learn about the connection until I bumped into the dad at an AA meeting. Boy, did he have some stories about the way they used to run around together.

  Mikey’s dad made it out. He had fifteen years’ sobriety when I met him.

  He was sad when I told him my father’s story was different.

  Mikey Guttman was about my age and had inherited a perfectly round face, beefiness that seemed like fat if you weren’t looking hard enough, and the drunk’s gene. He and his dad went to meetings together. I’m not jealous by nature, but that struck me as pretty cool. I’d taken my dad to one AA meeting. But only one.

  Two years ago, Mikey’s dad died behind the wheel of his favorite Matsushita forklift. Massive heart attack. We were all happy for him: twenty-plus years sober, died working at the company he built.

  Mikey hadn’t slacked off. Blackstone Valley Salvage was ringed by the longest white fence I’d ever seen. There was brand-new signage, fresh gravel out front where the wreckers pulled in, a used-car superstore for a neighbor.

  Mikey and I called each other once in a while, pissing and moaning the small-business blues, so I knew the backstory. Launched when this was a farm village, the salvage yard had a full three hundred yards of frontage on Main Street. The town had grown up around it, had become one of these edge-city suburbs. Panera Bread, Barnes & Noble, Whole Foods. Like that.

  The commuters who paid $650,000 for their four-bedroom colonials weren’t thrilled that a junkyard owned the biggest footprint on Main Street. Some of them combed the zoning laws and the environmental regs and the traffic studies looking for a way to put the Guttmans under. Like his father before him, Mikey went to all the town meetings and smiled big and silently told his neighbors to pound sand. He could afford to jump through whatever hoops they set in front of him: He owned the property free and clear. He was making big money, much of which came from a no-bid contract with the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority.

  Which was why I was here.

  Blackstone Valley Salvage wasn’t especially near the Mass Pike—I could take you to a half-dozen junkyards that are closer—but every abandoned, seized, or crashed vehicle found on a thirty-five-mile stretch of that highway was, by rule, hauled to the Guttman place.

  And those wrecks were hauled by the Guttmans’ fleet of tow trucks and flatbeds.

  Talk about a license to print money.

  If you had a dozen lawyers and enough patience, you could track the sweetheart contract back to the time when Mikey Guttman’s dad and Moe Coover were AA buddies—the state police work very closely with the Turnpike Authority.

  See how Massachusetts works?

  Lucky timing: As I crunched to a gravel stop, Mikey stepped from the cinder-block office building and moved toward a new black-cherry-colored F-350 Crew Cab that had to cost fifty grand.

  I said, “Clocking out to play eighteen holes?”

  “Conway!” Moon face, big happy smile. “What the hell, brother? A round of golf sounds just about right, the bullshit I’m dealing with. Come see my new toy. It’s cool as hell. It’s also busted. Again.”

  We hopped into his truck, which I complimented, and thumped down dirt paths straight as city streets that were lined by stacks of dead cars. In less than three minutes we pulled up at what looked like the world’s biggest sewing machine on a flatbed trailer. In the center of the sewing machine was a sort of mouth, and in the mouth was an old Buick Roadmaster cocked at an ugly angle. One man was trying to unwedge the Buick with a forklift. He wasn’t having much luck. Another man looked on, occasionally pressing buttons on what must be a remote control unit.

  “Frick and Frack got their
tit in a wringer right now,” Mikey said, “but it’s a sweet new crusher from Granutech. Once we get the hang of it we can use it to bale four cars at a time, and it’s so quiet my pain-in-the-ass neighbors haven’t even griped.”

  He killed the F-350. We hopped out. Mikey got his workers’ attention and made a throat-slashing gesture. They stopped what they were doing. Mikey hopped on the forklift himself and took a long look at the Buick. Ninety seconds later, it was straightened out. In another thirty it was about the size of your living-room sofa.

  What happened next was, along with the no-bid Mass Pike deal, the key to Blackstone Valley Salvage’s success. Instead of telling the workers what assholes they were, or making some do-I-gotta-do-everything-around-here crack, Mikey called a huddle at the hydraulic controls. He let the guys tell him what had gone wrong, then made a few suggestions, mostly talking with his hands. I smiled at that: Race drivers talk the same way.

  “They’ll figure it out,” he said as we thumped back to the office. “We’ve only had it three weeks.”

  While he’d made a lot of concessions and improvements his father would have cussed at, Mikey had left one thing alone: The office at Blackstone Valley Salvage was still a single six hundred-square-foot building built from cinder blocks the father himself had buttered and stacked. There was a counter, a computer, a couple of mismatched teacher desks, a picture window looking out on the main yard, and not much else.

  That’s how it works in a small business, or a strong one, anyway. The office was ragged, but it was functional—so Mikey pumped his money elsewhere.

  He could afford to upgrade the office if he ever chose to, that was for sure. I’d heard he did $12 million gross revenue. The closest he ever came to bragging was one night at a poker game. College was the subject, and Mikey said none of his kids would ever worry about student loans, that was for goddamn sure. One was at Brown, one finishing up at Duke, the oldest at medical school in Illinois.

  Mikey Guttman was doing okay.

  Alice, the older-than-dirt admin, wasn’t in yet, so it was just the two of us in the office. Mikey brought me a black coffee. After five minutes, we’d run through all the small talk we had.