Legwork

by Katy Munger

  It's hard to look respectable when you're built for trouble. I am a big girl and, since I have no choice in the matter, I try to make the most of what I've got. My grandpa explained it to me when I was twelve years old and brokenhearted over my treatment at the hands of the enlightened local youth during a disastrous school dance. Now, these young men were fated to grow up and possess an average of six teeth apiece, while I was fated to grow up to be strong enough to relieve them of those teeth. But at the time, I didn't know it. I just knew that I had stood against the wall of the school gym without having a single boy speak to me for a solid three hours, except to call me Refrigerator Butt. When I got home and confessed all to my grandpa, he sat me down and set me straight.

  "Casey," he said. "You're gonna be a big girl like your grandma was. No doubt about it. So you can either be one of those big girls that eats like a bird and looks like a corpse or you can work those muscles until you're strong enough to whip the tar out of anyone who takes offense to the good body that God has seen fit to give you. If you're willing to stop whining, I'm willing to show you how to get strong and stay strong. We can start tomorrow morning. Ain't nobody gonna be messing with you if you're strong."

  I chose door number two and Grandpa turned out to be right. By a year later, there wasn't anyone in the entire county that dared call me or my butt a name I hadn't chosen for myself. And I grew to like the feeling of being able to take care of myself. Today, I look chubby at first glance and stocky at second. Or strong as hell to those in the know. My shoulders are wide and my rib cage is a barrel. But I don't have to take any crap from anyone but the strongest of men and I feel it's a fair trade-off over all.

  I took off my jacket and hung it on the back of the door, where Bobby's greasy fingers were unlikely to wander. "Any messages?" I called out as I inspected my drawers for signs of snooping.

  "Hell, yeah I got messages," Bobby bellowed back. "Whole stack of 'em."

  "Why the hell didn't you tell me when I walked in the door?" I was once again struck dumb by his cheerful stupidity.

  "Well, babe, I was busy complimenting your personage," he said. He sighed and leaned back, folding his hands over his big belly. That meant he had some real news for me and could afford to make me beg. I smiled at him. He smiled back.

  "Give it," I demanded.

  "Half the triple fee," he countered.

  "Done." I was in no mood to bargain. "But it better be good."

  He consulted the tattered yellow legal pad he keeps by his phone. That pad ought to be designated as an historical marker. I don't believe he's ever used a fresh one since I've known him. "First of all, the SBI has dropped any action against your client. They announced that forensic tests prove that the Mary Lee Masters vehicle was not driven in the vicinity of the murder spot." He pronounced vehicle "vee-hick-el," like it was something I could suck on.

  "What a revelation," I remarked. "Damn, those guys are good."

  Bobby ignored me. "Instead, they are focusing on Ramsey Lee, the eco-terrorist fellow on account of he owns the land across the river from where this guy was shot."

  "Another big surprise," I said.

  Bobby regarded me coolly as he took a swig of Budweiser. "He also was involved in blocking that Neuse River Park project you asked me about. But I guess since you know all this, there's no need for me to run down the list of investors in it. I apologize if I have bored you this morning."

  "Give it, Bobby, or you die."

  He smiled in triumph and consulted his notes. "Just who you'd expect. Mitchell was the biggest investor, which is unusual because he likes to be the general partner and avoid putting his own cash on the line. A dozen or so smaller individual investors, the usual suspects from the ranks of local real estate hustlers. No one mentioned yet in connection with the murder, but there are two companies listed as investors. I've got someone down at the secretary of state's office looking into the ownership of them now. I think we're gonna find out what we need to right there. Follow the money, I told you. Always follow the money."

  "What was that about Ramsey Lee helping to block the project?"

  "I know a gal works at the city council meetings," Bobby explained. "She takes down notes, helps the T.V. crews tape the meetings, kisses the mayor's ass. She's the one who placed the microphone that caught that damn fool mayor calling the rest of the council a bunch of fuckin' idiots last week. Only thing he ever said I could agree with. Anyway, she says that there's some smart group of environmentalist types who are using the threat of court action to force developers to back down on projects around these here parts. They think Ramsey's part of it and that his family money is bankrolling their efforts."

  "That's not very specific," I pointed out.

  He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively. "I think a dinner or two will get me the details you crave. Rome was not built in a day."

  "Only because they failed to pay off the right senator," I assured him. "Anything else?"

  Bobby shook his head. "Nothing important. Guy named Adam Schmaltz called. Northern fellow. Kind of pushy. Talks through his nose. Works for that candidate guy."

  I stared at him incredulously. "Adam Stoltz?" I asked.

  He shrugged. "Sounds right." He rummaged in his upper desk drawer and drew out another pack of nabs, snapping open the cellophane wrapping with an expert twist of his teeth.

  "Bobby," I explained calmly, though my hand was itching to boink him over the head with his empty beer can. "Adam Stoltz is Stoney Maloney's media advisor. What time did he call?"

  "Well, hell, baby. Wasn't that long ago. I was still on my doughnuts."

  That meant Stoltz had called at least an hour ago. The doughnuts didn't last more than ten minutes after Bobby arrived. I wondered what the guy wanted. I also wondered if it was too late to weasel my way into a meeting before Stoney took off on another campaign tour.

  As it turned out during the course of my brief phone call with Stoltz, I didn't have to beg for an audience. Stoney Maloney wanted to see me. As soon as possible. I told the northern fellow who talked through his nose that I'd be over there before you could skin a squirrel.

  I got the feeling he had no concept of time because he hung up like I'd just belched in his ear.

  Chapter Seven

  Maloney headquarters befitted the Rock of Carolina. It was a square brick building in the middle of an asphalt parking lot about half a mile down Hillsborough Street from the capitol building. The lower floor was lined with plate glass windows plastered with MALONEY FOR SENATE signs. The joint had been a fast food franchise, one of those retro-fifties drive-in places with great milkshakes and nothing else you could stomach. It had folded about six months ago, just in time for the campaign. You could still see traces of the neon decor around the door and window frames, and the floor was a screaming yellow and blue check. I was tempted to keep my sunglasses on, but reminded myself that respectability was key. I wanted to get some answers and being a smart ass was not the best way to go about it.

  The air conditioning blasted me with full force. It was like getting slapped in the face with an icy wet towel. "Can I help you?" a perky young girl in a blue mini-dress asked before the door had shut behind me. She was perched at a huge reception desk stacked with bumper stickers and signs. A small break in the stacks accommodated her tiny frame. Her smile was stretched so wide it looked like a rubber band about to break. Maybe it was frozen in place.

  "I have an appointment with Stoney Maloney and Adam Stoltz," I told her in the undertaker tone of voice I reserve for perky people.

  She regarded me coolly. It was those black roots again. I was at least two months behind her in the Clairol.

  "You have an appointment with Mr. Maloney?" she repeated with disapproval. Her face pinched in on itself like she had just taken a bite of green apple.

  I checked my watch. "Yeah. And he needs to make it quick. I have to be somewhere in an hour." I fixed her in my high beam smile and she scurried into the back of the cavernous main room,
her plastic grin long gone.

  I never saw her again, but a lanky kid of no more than twenty-eight came hurrying out of the back rooms, his hands in his pockets as he jangled loose change nervously. He was over six feet tall and weighed just enough to keep his pants up. His skin had a perpetually flushed look, like he was having trouble making friends with the humid Carolina climate. His buzzed haircut confirmed that we were in conservative headquarters but he had been too busy for his weekly trim and a few loose curls wound hopefully toward the neon ceiling lights like he was starting to sprout. He had an angelic face, a lot prettier than my own: large brown eyes, a graceful narrow nose, and perfectly formed lips that stretched half an inch wider than normal as he tried on a professional smile and failed miserably. The grin slid off his face like melting ice cream. That was when I noticed that his suit was slightly rumpled and the collar of his white shirt was grimy.

  "I'm Adam Stoltz," he said, lanky arm outstretched. His voice was startlingly deep for such a childish face. It sounded like it was coming from a speaker embedded in his chest.

  I introduced myself and made a point to wring his hand dry during the handshake. I like people to know I could flip them over my back as soon as shake their hand. It helps to keep them in line.

  "This way." He gestured behind a stack of cardboard boxes and led me around tables full of campaign workers manning telephones and stuffing envelopes. Everyone looked like they had just popped out of the showers at a Mormon church retreat. Lord, what a well-fed and well-scrubbed bunch they were. Young, too. I was feeling like Methuselah by the time we reached the private offices in back. Old and gray and tired.

  Stoltz paused before a shut door that was marked PRIVATE. "I may as well be upfront," he whispered. "I think this is a bad idea. I don't know why Stoney wants to get involved with this mess at all. I told him to make a statement and leave it alone. But he won't listen to me. So if you can't help, say so and get out."

  "Nice to have your support," I told him, pushing past to open the door myself. And there he was: the Rock of Carolina. Stoney Maloney was sitting behind an enormous oak desk. He was framed by a wall-to-wall window that was carefully shuttered against the blazing Carolina sun. His head was bent low over a stack of papers and he was murmuring to a small older woman ensconced in an armchair by his elbow. Both looked up as I entered. The woman's eyes lingered on my hair and its black roots. The candidate's lingered on my bustline.

  "Ms. Jones, it's a pleasure to meet you. Call me Stoney," he said, rising to his feet with the kind of elegant grace you only find in men who really appreciate women.

  His hand was firm and smooth. I decided against the death grip, but let the handshake linger. A small electrical current ran through his fingers right to the center of my heart before proceeding in a southerly direction. No wonder he was raking in the female vote. I had seen him on many occasions, but I had always been busy scanning the crowd in my role as Mary Lee's bodyguard. I hadn't had the opportunity to appreciate him up close until now. He was taller than I remembered. And he was built solid, without an ounce of extra fat. His shoulders were wide beneath his tailored white shirt and his tie had been loosened half an inch. It hung down slightly as if inviting me to tighten it for him. He removed a pair of small gold-rimmed glasses and stowed them away in a breast pocket of his shirt, giving me a chance to check out his blue eyes. I'm usually a brown-eyed girl, but his were enough to make me change my mind. They were wide and clear, a deep blue, not those pale-eyed versions that make you think of serial killers and selfish hearts. His chin and cheekbones were wide for his long face and his nose fit the picture perfectly. His silver hair gleamed in the sunlight filtering through the blinds and was set off perfectly by his deeply tanned complexion. I got a little lost examining his candidate smile up close, but a sharp voice brought me back to reality.

  "I don't believe we have met, young lady. I am Sandra Douglas Jackson, Stonewall's mother." A determined hand poked me in the side.

  I retrieved my professional pride and tore my eyes off Stoney. His mother was a poor substitute. She was one of those tiny, inescapable women who hardly eat a thing but keep on ticking until well past midnight when the rest of the world is exhausted and just wants to go to sleep. Her nervous energy invaded the room, setting my teeth on edge. She was no more than five feet tall and wore an expensive designer pantsuit that could have fit a munchkin. The pantsuit didn't intimidate me. Hey, mine was Anne Klein. And I'd gotten it for twenty bucks at the PTA thrift shop while hers had probably set her back a grand. That made which one of us smarter? Her white hair was cut about thirty years too young for her age, which I put at sixty-five or so. She was a little young to be a senator's mother, that was for sure. Must of plopped out Stoney a long time ago, before she soured. Her head was too big for her fashionably emaciated body, making her look like a marionette when she moved too quickly. I guess they still haven't invented a weight machine that can reduce that pesky skull circumference.

  Her delicate features clashed with her disapproving expression as she scoured my face for signs of gullibility, cowardice, or any other exploitable weakness she might find. I wouldn't have called subtlety her strong suit. She was an operator, all right, and I believed all those stories naming her as the force behind her brother's decades of success and, now, her son's.

  I dredged up what I knew about her from my mental store of trivial knowledge. I didn't know much. I knew that she loved to play the southern steel magnolia in Washington, acting as hostess for her widowed brother. I knew that her own husband never seemed to be mentioned; he was either dead or long gone. I'd heard a rumor that he had died in the Korean War but, looking at her in person, I began to wonder if the battle hadn't been a little closer to home. Underneath all the expensive clothes, I suspected she was really just a tough old bird from a farm in Eastern Carolina. When I first moved here, I remember that she won the female division of the turkey shoot at the North Carolina State fair three years in a row. Which didn't intimidate me. I could shoot the eyes out of a snake at a hundred paces. And had. So I didn't mind bringing her down to size—and letting her know it.

  I touched her brittle hand as quickly as I could. "You're not Mrs. Maloney then?" I said.

  Her eyes narrowed. The gauntlet was thrown. "Stoney insists on using his father's name," she said a shade too politely.

  "Can't blame him," I admitted. "Stonewall Jackson seems a little heavy-handed, don't you think?"

  "Good point," the candidate said as he pulled a chair out and swept an arm over the back of it, indicating that I should sit if my pretty little feet were just too fatigued to continue standing. "I must think of all those northern transplant votes."

  I liked his style, especially when he turned to reclaim his seat behind the desk and let his hand brush slowly all the way across my wide shoulders, as delicately as butterfly wings fluttering past.

  "Can we make this quick?" a deep voice asked from the door. Adam Stoltz still stood there, determined to remind me that he was a lot more important than I was, at least in this room.

  Stoney smiled an apology. "You've met Adam?" he asked. "Adam is my media advisor, a necessary evil in these technologically advanced times." He shrugged. "I know when I'm out of my element and so I frequently take his advice on how best to communicate the issues I believe in."

  "Not frequently enough," Stoltz interrupted.

  Stoney turned his clear blue eyes on his advisor and Stoltz backed away slightly, as if some force were driving him into submission. "Adam is rather adamant that seeing you is a bad idea," Stoney said.

  "So am I," his mother snapped in her tightly wound southern drawl. "There is no need to go wading into the mud just because everyone else is."

  Stoney held up both hands. His mom looked away and Stoltz slid into a chair obediently. "We've gone over this enough," Stoney warned them. "Now that Ms. Jones is here, I think we can move forward as a team." He smiled at me and it was a curious sensation: I do believe he meant it. It was as if little
old me being there in front of him in his office made him happier than a herd of pigs storming an outhouse.

  "Why did you call me?" I asked him, meeting his gaze. I can bat my baby greens with the best of them and my eyelashes were working overtime.

  Stoltz grunted like it pained him to hear Stoney's reasons again while Mrs. Jackson abruptly crossed, then recrossed her legs. Jeeze, the two of them could have used a couple week’s worth of Prozac. It wasn't like I was from the campaign reform committee or something.

  "I understand you are working for Mary Lee Masters in the capacity of private investigator," Stoney said. His voice was much more mellow when he wasn't giving a speech. An undertone lingered in the room when he fell silent, as if he longed to say more to me in private but that such things would just have to wait until a better time. Wee doggies, but that was an effective technique that I didn't think he had learned in Speech 101. The boy had been born with charm that the squirming old biddy beside him lacked.

  "How did you find that out?" I asked.

  He shrugged. "People call me and tell me what they think I need to know."

  Mary Lee had been right, I decided. Someone in her camp was reporting to the Maloney campaign.

  "No point in hiding it," I said. "She's asked me to look into the Thornton Mitchell murder. She's anxious to clear her name and she doesn't trust either the SBI or the locals to find the solution."

  "Not trust the authorities?" Stoney asked. "Why, if we can't trust them… His voice trailed off regrettably and I couldn't decide if he was kidding or not. I decided he wasn't. Especially when I noticed his mother crossing her legs again and whipping out a cigarette to calm her nerves. Yeah, someone in Mary Lee's entourage was singing all right and I suspected Momma was the choir master.

  "So why did you want to see me?" I asked again, figuring he was unlikely to rip my clothes off and take me on the desk with his mother present, so I might as well get the ball rolling.