“Could he?”
I thought about Vernon Lee in the barbecue joint. I thought about the red mist. “Hell yes,” I said. “Besides, I’d bet he didn’t intend to kill Blaine. Just wanted to keep him from hightailing south. Have a friendly chat with him.”
“Father of the year,” Randall said, and thought awhile. “I didn’t get much of a look at these much-killed-over photos. Am I to assume they feature Mr. Hubert Saginaw and Ms. Savannah Kane? From back in the day?”
“Well, no.”
“What? Who, then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Explain.”
I explained.
When I finished, he held his head in both hands. “That doesn’t help your theory, though it doesn’t extinguish it. The question remains: How did Team North Carolina obtain the pictures in the first place?”
“I don’t know. But you know who might?”
“Who?”
“Margery Lee. Blaine’s mom, Vernon’s wife.”
“She might at that,” he said. “Something’s rotten in … where was it again?”
“Level Cross. Birthplace of Richard Petty. You’ll love it there.”
He froze, cardboard cup halfway to his lips, as the reason for the meeting sank in. I might have smiled. It’s not often I can surprise Randall Swale.
“Come on,” he said.
“I could use the help,” I said. “Flying’s not a good idea for me, you know that. And I’m slammed. I need to talk with Saginaw’s ex, just to keep Saginaw thinking I’m working for him. Then I’ll show my face at the Escutcheon, for the same reason. And I’m worried about my pal Moe. Vernon tailed me there, and now Moe’s not picking up his phone. Need to check on him.”
I expected Randall to kid around more before agreeing to head for the airport. But when I finished ticking off reasons on my fingers, he was staring at me with calm brown eyes. “Someday,” he said, “you’ll have to tell me exactly what Savannah Kane was to you.”
* * *
Sixteen years ago, Paducah. When night fell, I backed the Bonneville from the hotel room and we took off. The bike’s seat was more comfortable now that it wasn’t stuffed with money. “South or west?” I hollered over my shoulder to Savvy as we hit top gear. “Either one gets us out of state in an hour.”
“Surprise me.”
I aimed south for Tennessee.
Getting the hell out of Kentucky was job one. No cop—no straight cop—would stash money and cocaine in a motorcycle seat. So Savvy’s pal was either some freak poser who wasn’t a cop at all or, more likely, a dirty cop.
Dirty cops: cop resources, cop buddies, crook’s worldview.
Dirty cops scared me.
Heat slipped from the air as we rode south. Pines against the night sky seemed blacker than black, somehow. Savvy’s chin bounced on my shoulder as she dozed.
Union City, Tennessee: I found the part of town I wanted, slow-rolled the streets. I was looking for a junkie or car thief willing to trade his four wheels for my two. It was okay if he lied to me about who owned the car and where he got it—I would lie right back about the Triumph.
No luck. Either it was too early in the evening, or Union City didn’t feature the type of degenerate I needed. When a cop in a Winn-Dixie parking lot spotlighted me—out of boredom, I thought at the time, as he didn’t even put his Caprice in drive—paranoia hit. I stayed under the speed limit all the way to the city line, then opened the throttle and angled southwest on I-51. We’d spend twenty minutes slicing through Missouri, then hit Arkansas.
We would have made it, too. But I got lazy. I-51 became I-155, and when we neared the Mississippi, I just rolled across the bridge near Boothspoint like I was Fred Familyman with the missus riding shotgun and the littl’uns snoozing in back.
The staties lit me up when I was halfway across, humming past a clever sign that made some sort of pun about leaving Tennessee (Y’all Come Back Now)/welcome to Missouri (Set and Stay Awhile).
Troopers from both states, who must have been hiding and expecting us, came haul-assing up the bridge, closing on me like crazy.
Instinct took over: I pinned the Triumph’s throttle, waking Savannah.
The throttle didn’t stay pinned for long. When I cleared the bridge’s midpoint, I saw a roadblock at its end that would have been over the top in the Blues Brothers movie. Had to be a dozen cruisers down there. Like I said, that was the problem with a dirty cop: crook desperation, cop resources. Maybe the Union City cops had a BOLO on the Triumph.
“Hell,” I said, kicking the bike out of gear and coasting to drop speed without being run over by the hungry staties.
Savvy began to pound me on the back. “Don’t slow, don’t slow!” she screamed, thumping my back on each slow. “I did not make you for a pussy, dude. Go go go!”
“Go where?” I pointed, braking as we neared the welcoming committee.
“Go fucking go you pussy, you faggot, go!”
She was rocking now like she wanted to toss herself off the bike. If I hadn’t been a drunk, coked-up, motorcycle-stealing derelict myself, I might have wondered what was wrong with Savannah Kane. I might have wondered what a tough broad like her was so scared of.
But at that moment, stopping the Triumph without catching a load from one of the dozen pump-action police-spec shotguns aimed my way was all I could handle. The problem was that all the staties were yelling at once, and most were yelling to put my hands in the air, motherfucker, put ’em in the air. Which wouldn’t be smart for a man driving a motorcycle. But that’s what they were shouting.
Finally, with sirens whining and shotguns cocking and Savvy screaming and state troopers hollering, I got the Triumph whoaed up.
The dirty cop who owned it wasn’t but three feet away. He stood at the sharp end of the cop-wedge, arms folded across his down vest. He’d lost the gimme cap but not the half-assed beard.
I looked at him.
He looked at me.
I patted his motorcycle’s hot gas tank. “She pulls left just a little,” I said.
He took one step and hit me with a right that knocked me off and out.
* * *
Bert Saginaw’s ex lived in Cambridge. Initially, I’d wanted to talk with her because the blackmail shakedown felt ugly and personal, and from what I understood that summed up the divorce.
But that had been before Savvy died. Now I had a different idea: Maybe the ex could tell me something about the pictures. About Saginaw’s operation. About just how heavy he was willing to get to climb that ladder. Figure out the blackmail, figure out who killed Savvy.
I called Moe while I drove. No answer. Spent the rest of the twenty-minute ride calling a half-dozen Barnburners, trying to find someone who’d drop by and check on him.
No takers.
I grew pissed as I listened to their cheeseball excuses. They had doctor appointments, meetings, kids in town, grandkids too. I remembered a time when any Barnburner would drop anything to help any other Barnburner.
I sighed. Or did I? Had it ever been like that for anybody but me?
Finally, I made it to Cambridge. Among the Priuses and Minis, my F-150 was a mastodon. Lucked into a parking spot, walked.
I was looking for an address on the right side of the street, but something to my left—a vibe—made my head swivel that way.
A black dude leaned on the hood of a British racing green Jaguar XJ6. Shaved head. Shades. Turtleneck and jeans that he wore like a seal wears its skin. He was perfectly still, perfectly relaxed. He looked down the slight hill toward Massachusetts Avenue, the main drag. Maybe he was waiting for somebody. Or maybe not. He didn’t turn my way, didn’t acknowledge me.
But he knew I was there.
I finally spotted a house with the right street number. Looked over my shoulder a few times as I made my way toward it. I wasn’t sure why, but it seemed like a good idea to know where that dude was. At all times.
“Katherine Saginaw?” I said a minute later.
“Sorry about that. Ms. Saginaw?”
“It’s Katherine Stoll now, or Katy. And why are you here? As if I didn’t know.” She quickstepped down the seven steps of the antique colonial’s front porch as she said it—annoyed, not intimidated. “I need to get to class,” she said, glancing at her watch. She wore beat-up running shoes, jeans and a green hoodie that said LESLEY—but the watch was a chunky men’s Jaeger LeCoultre that cost eight grand if it cost a nickel.
“Like to talk to you for a sec,” I said as she began a fast walk that would, in thirty seconds or so, dump us into Mass Ave.
The black dude and his Jag were gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“No offense,” she said, looking up, hoping to catch a green so she could cross Mass Ave without stopping, “but you might as well have I’M FROM BERT stamped on your forehead. I have no old business with Bert, and God knows I decline to have any new business with him, and my seminar starts in … three minutes, and so away I go.”
She caught her light. Mass Ave traffic had done what it does: come to a grudging, honking, crosswalk-blocking stop that was never more than six inches shy of gridlock.
“What I’d like to talk about,” I said to Katy Stoll’s back as she strode away, “is pictures of Bert.”
“Old Chain Link Jesus? That train has left the station, my friend.”
“Not those,” I said. “Other pictures. Dirty pictures.”
It worked. She stopped, stood dead still, turned. The light changed before she could make it back to the sidewalk. A Toyota Echo with flower stickers on its doors honked at her.
“In here,” she said, pointing at a coffee place called Veni Vidi Beanie.
Sitting at a table not much bigger than a stool, I watched her order, then wait for, her VentiGrande-half-caff-Colombo-Mumbazo-latte-lighto-creamo. Or somesuch. I sipped a water. Its label said Mother Nature considered it an honor and a privilege to contribute this particular half-liter of purity to the cause of human enlightenment. A portion of the purchase price would be used to knit sweaters for tree-people.
Cambridge.
Katy Stoll reminded me of one of those brave actresses who hadn’t set up a tab with a plastic surgeon the day she turned forty. Stoll was clearly a rich woman who took good care of herself—but she hadn’t made a career of it. Longish brown hair parted (sort of) in the middle. Honest brown eyes, lips that were thin but not in a grim way, just-right crow’s feet. I tried not to look at her rear end—I was pretty sure you could get arrested for that in Cambridge—but failed.
Like I said, she took good care of herself.
The crow’s feet reminded me of Charlene.
I set that aside, focused on Katy as she sat.
“I assume that’s the blackmail fodder?” she said, chinning at the manila envelope that just about covered the table. “And who are you?”
I said my name. “You jumped to blackmail pretty quick there. Care to say why?”
“Don’t patronize me, Mr. Sax.”
“Conway.”
“I’m not a child, Conway. Five days before an election, what could dirty pictures, as you call them, indicate other than blackmail?”
She had me there. I tapped the envelope. “The photos are of Bert and somebody else.”
“Who?”
“Hard to say.”
“Because?”
“Whoever he’s doing it with is…” I spread my arms, looked around the tiny coffee shop. “I could use a little more privacy to explain. What are you smiling at?”
“‘Doing it’,” she said. “Very high school. Possibly endearing.”
She blew on her coffee, looked at me, smiling eyes framed by pretty crow’s feet. There was a better term. Charlene had drilled me on it the first time I said something—something nice, I thought—about hers. What the hell was that term?
I remembered. “Laugh lines,” I said, snapping my fingers.
“Pardon me?”
“Never mind. How about that privacy? Aren’t you curious?”
“Of course I am. But first, why are you inflicting this on me? You work for the campaign people, I assume? For Peter Krall? Did I not make it sufficiently clear that for the duration, I am the very model of a modern pol’s ex-wife?”
“I needed to see if you were behind these.”
“I’m not.”
“I know. Had that figured out before we hit Mass Ave.”
“In that case, the question again rears its ugly head. Why?”
“Habit. You always check the ex.”
“Whose habit? You’re not a policeman. Are you ex-police?”
“Hell no. The way I heard it, your divorce got ugly and stayed ugly.”
“Don’t they all?”
“Yes,” I said. “They do.”
“Aha,” she said, toasting me, maybe looking at me a little closer. “Common ground. Tell me about yours.”
“Long time ago.”
“Children?”
“A boy. He stayed with her.”
“Of course he did.”
“It was the right move. I was a drunk.”
“Of course you were.”
“I’m not anymore.”
“Be still my heart,” she said. “Look. It’s been years. I escaped an un-marriage and Bert’s freaky mansion in Framingham. He was not ungenerous, I’ll give him that. I’m not looking to squeeze additional shekels out of him, and I have no desire for the fifteen minutes of tabloid fame to which I am entitled. So whatever’s going on in those photos has nothing to do with me.” She rose and swirled her coffee.
I thought I’d lost her.
I wondered how she’d taken control of things.
I liked her.
This Katy Stoll wasn’t going to do a damn thing she didn’t want to do.
“But,” she finally said, sighing, “curiosity killed the cat. Let’s head back to my place. You’ll find sufficient privacy there.”
Checking her watch while I rose and drained my water, she sighed. “Looks like no class for me.”
“That makes two of us,” I said.
Three minutes later, she keyed the door she’d banged her head on and led me up.
The dark staircase with two 90-degree corners didn’t prepare me for her home: Nearly every wall, including load-bearing ones, had been ripped out, turning what looked from the outside like a vanilla colonial into a massive loft. Light came in from all sides. A black-iron spiral stairway led to what I assumed was her sleeping area.
“A complete gut job, courtesy of Bert,” she said, sitting on one of two identical white sofas that faced each other across a low table. “I rent the downstairs to two Syrians who pay a full year’s rent each January first, bless their hearts.”
I was admiring the way the loads that used to be borne by walls had been transferred to a few handsome posts. I was also running numbers in my head.
“Million five for the building, another seven hundred for the gut job?” I said as I sat across from her, tossing the envelope on the table.
“I’m proud to say I have no idea. As I mentioned, Bert did not skimp.”
“Still doesn’t,” I said. “You wouldn’t believe what he’s paying me to tag along with the campaign for a week.”
She sipped what was left of her coffee.
I said nothing.
The envelope sat between us.
A breeze caused a tree branch to scratch a window.
“Well,” Katy said.
“Well,” I said.
She leaned, unclasped, opened, sat back.
“Aha,” she said. “The, ah, the other party’s face has been covered by a red dot.”
“It’s more than that if you look close,” I said. “Underneath the dot, her whole head’s been scratched away. No way in hell to figure out who she is.”
“But these are just prints,” Katy said. “What about the negatives? Oops, I date myself. Everything’s digital now. What about the original images?”
“The way I hear it,” I said, “these are the only copies. Somebody snapped the shots and banged them out on a fresh-bought printer. Then they destroyed the camera and printer.”
“You’d be a piss-poor blackmailer to do it that way, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Piss poor.”
She caught me smiling. “If the woman in the photos can’t be identified,” she said, “what do you want from me?”
“Her face can’t be ID’d,” I said. “But do you see anything else that might help? In the room? Maybe in the woman’s, ah, shape?”
She flipped through a half-dozen shots. “She’s no spring chicken, is she? Bert would screw anything in a skirt, but he favored younger Implant Barbie types. And Lady Red Dot is certainly not one of those.”
“That’s what I thought. Anything else?”
“Oy, look at Bert go, with his famous Elvis lip-curl. He put her through her paces, didn’t he?”
“Like he was going for a record.”
She laughed. “The room is very generic, too.”
It sure was. The pictures hadn’t been shot in a hotel room the way you might expect, but in somebody’s home. In a bedroom, and a decent one—queen-size bed, two big shades-drawn windows, midsize flat-screen TV on the wall, highboy dresser in what looked like cherry—but not a master bedroom. It was too impersonal for that. It looked more like the primo guest bedroom in a rich man’s place.
I said, “Any chance it’s a bedroom at the Framingham house?”
“It’s been so long…” Katy squinted. “No, I don’t think so. Not from my time, anyway. We didn’t have any bedrooms with windows laid out that way.”
“Look at the high angle. I think they were shot through a peephole up near the ceiling. Maybe a dummy light fixture.”
“Whatever you say.” Her face was red. I realized mine was, too.
“I can’t help you,” Katy Stoll said.
“You did, though, in a way. Consider yourself eliminated as a suspect.”
“There it is again, the policeman talk. Which loops back to my question, which remains unanswered even now. Why are you here? What is your role?”
The Whole Lie Page 15
