And now I had an opening.
I went to my office at the state building and pulled the contracts currently held by Starlight Catering. Then I returned to my law offices and got a motion on file in one of my new cases. At five o’clock, I went down to Suite 410 and used the key I’d been given to walk in.
Special Agent Lee Tucker, who had documents spread out all over the office he was using, seemed pleased to learn of my invitation to the fundraiser. From his perspective, it suggested potential. It could open new doors for me. But he didn’t ask me to wear a wire and I didn’t volunteer.
“Hey,” I said. “I have a question.”
“Wow. Usually you’re the guy with all the answers.” Tucker and I got along okay. We’d had a rocky start, but I was eligible for a gold star after these last two months. The government had solid evidence of twenty-three separate shakedowns by Charlie Cimino and me. That kind of success seemed to smooth over any differences. Plus it was part of Tucker’s job to manage me, and he’d come to realize that I didn’t respond to threats.
I dropped Cimino’s master list of major state contractors on the desk in front of him, a copy of which he’d had ever since I got mine. “Page two,” I said. “You see there, about a third of the way down. Starlight Catering. They don’t have a number assigned. Like they’re not one of the targets. Any idea why they get a pass?”
I watched Tucker’s eyes. If he didn’t really look, it meant that he’d already noticed it. If he did, it meant he hadn’t.
Tucker’s eyes followed down the page and stopped, presumably, at Starlight. So that probably meant he didn’t know. It could also make him a good bullshit artist.
“Why?” he asked.
“I’m asking
you
why.”
“But why do you care?”
“Why do you guys always answer questions with questions? I’m just curious.”
“Why don’t you ask Cimino?” Tucker was pleased with himself. Another question.
“You’ve been a font of information, Agent Tucker.”
He got a chuckle out of the whole thing. “That company—Starlight—is an MBE,” he said. “A minority-owned business. There are laws covering them, right? So even Cimino’s not dumb enough to start shit-canning the MBEs.”
That made sense, I guess. But Cimino wasn’t really planning to shit-can any of these companies. He wanted to strong-arm these contractors and was willing to push it to the brink if necessary, using me to threaten termination of their contracts, but I didn’t think Cimino was sold on the idea of actually pulling the trigger. Too messy. The threat, alone, had been enough so far.
Starlight Catering might have been a minority-owned business, but that wasn’t why Cimino had held off targeting them. There was something else there. I had to figure out what that was.
And the federal government wasn’t going to be any help. And I couldn’t use Joel Lightner to help, or any other private investigator.
So I would have to go to the source.
42
THE FUNDRAISER WAS HELD IN A DOWNTOWN HOTEL
in one of their extravagant ballrooms. A nice enough setting. Too nice, for my taste. I never really understood why things had to be so opulent. It always struck me as a waste of money and little more than a jerk-off to people’s egos. Couldn’t we all agree on less humble homes, hotels, offices, whatever—and just give the extra money to starving people in Africa or something?
Altruistic and philanthropically minded was I, in my tuxedo, nursing a martini.
I was more than a fish out of water. I was a fish who didn’t know any of the other fish. The place held about a thousand and it was near capacity, and I doubted that I had made the acquaintance of any of them.
I engaged in people watching for a while, but it wasn’t all that interesting. Everyone there was the same. They all wanted something. A job. A piece of legislation signed. If nothing else, to be seen. After about half an hour, I was working on a decent buzz from the martinis when the room seemed to shift. Nearly everyone turned in the same direction, something out of a Hitchcock movie, and then broke into applause.
So I looked, too, because I knew it meant the guest of honor had arrived, and if somebody from the crowd assassinated him, the FBI would review the tapes afterward and see that I was the one person who didn’t turn—like that guy who opened the umbrella on a sunny day before JFK was shot—and I’d be a suspect.
This is how my mind works when I’m bored and getting drunk.
He had entered through the main doors and was now inching along the crowd, shaking hands and waving. His security detail followed close by, several men in dark suits with earpieces attached to cords disappearing into their suits, which added to the overall effect.
From a short distance, I could say this much about Carlton Snow: He looked the part. He was rather tall and fit, with a nice head of hair and one of those robotically sincere smiles. He had all the movements down. He’d clearly been doing his politician’s exercises. Wave, thumbs-up, point at someone, shake a hand. Wave, thumbs-up, point, shake. Sometimes he overlapped his left hand so he could shake two hands at once. He mixed in different facial expressions, too. Pleasant surprise to see you. Familiar grin for the “old friend.” I wasn’t a lip reader but he seemed to have the phrases down, too. Hey-how-are-you-great-to-see-you-thanks-for-coming.
“Jason, there you are.”
I turned to see Greg Connolly, the chairman of the Procurement and Construction Board. A man who didn’t have as much going on these days, at least not of an illicit nature, thanks to me. Someday—like when the indictments came down, and he saw himself included in far less counts than Charlie—he’d thank me.
But, I suspected, not now.
“Greg,” I said, with some equivocation, like I wasn’t sure who he was, given that we’d only met once. We shook hands. He looked like me, in a penguin suit, but shorter and with a much thicker midsection. His bow tie was crooked but I didn’t point it out. Mine probably was, too.
“We miss you,” he said.
“Right back atcha.”
“Yeah. Yeah.”
Yeah. Small talk. I don’t like it.
“Charlie’s keeping you to himself these days.”
I had to play the role of the cautious confidant to Cimino, so I just said, “He’s a good man.”
“Sure. Sure.”
Sure. Greg didn’t seem too happy about my arrangement with Charlie. Charlie had mentioned it could be a problem, should Connolly run to the governor to complain. I didn’t really care if that happened. My reason for proposing the new and improved scheme to Charlie was to gain leverage and get Shauna off the hook. I’d already accomplished that. Shauna would now be free.
Free to come visit me in prison.
Unless I pulled a rabbit out of my hat. I was still working on that.
“Maybe there’s a way we could keep doing business?” he said to me. It was in the form of a question. I wasn’t sure if he had an idea or was looking for one.
I smiled. “You’re asking the wrong guy, Greg.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.” He patted my shoulder. “I think you have Charlie’s ear like nobody else.”
I wondered if that was true. I’d only known Charlie for a short time. But he didn’t seem to have a lot of people close to him, and I’d hatched a plan that was accomplishing his twin goals of enriching himself and getting the governor reelected, the latter purpose having the ultimate goal of enriching himself, too. I mean, it was all about money in the end. I was making him richer and more important to the governor, which in turn would make him richer still.
The governor ended up standing on a dais in the middle of the room that allowed him to see into and over the crowd. I didn’t recall ever hearing him speak, though I must have, at some point, over the last year that he had served as governor.
“Thank you, everyone. Thank you. I don’t want to—thank you. If I could just—I love you, too. Thank you.”
It took the man a while to calm the crowd, to snap them out of their feigned adoration. He started and stopped a few times, as people shouted sweet nothings to him. Actually, he didn’t try very hard to stop them. He was basking in the glow, standing in his crisp tuxedo, holding a microphone with one hand and raising a steadying hand to the crowd with the other like the pontiff in Rome.
“You go back with him,” I said to Greg Connolly.
“Oh, sure. Grew up with him on George Street. Took every class together from kindergarten to graduating from State.”
It sounded like a line Connolly had recited many times in the last year, his connection to the governor. This guy was a hanger-on if I ever saw one.
“I went to State, too,” I said.
“Yeah? When did you—” He stopped on that. It dawned on him and he looked over at me. “Jason Kolarich. Wide receiver?”
I nodded.
“Huh. I remember you. And you, uh—you broke that guy—Karmeier, right?”
I nodded.
“Broke his nose, right?”
“Jaw,” I said. “But he started it.”
“Jeez.” He chuckled. “He played a few years with the Steelers, y’know.”
I knew. Tony Karmeier missed the rest of his senior year after our altercation in the locker room. But he still went in the second round of the NFL draft and made millions, while I was kicked off the team, lost my scholarship, and narrowly avoided expulsion from the university. All in all, I think Tony had the last laugh.
“We’ve done some good things,” said Governor Carlton Snow to the crowd. “We’ve expanded health care for children. We’ve put a thousand more cops on the streets. And we’re not done. We’re just getting started. And that’s why what you’re doing tonight is so important.”
“I think there’s still a role for me,” said Connolly, leaning in to me close. “You can figure something out, right?”
I shrugged my shoulders. It wasn’t my problem. But all things being equal, I wasn’t looking to draw more people into the federal government’s spiderweb. Or, in Connolly’s case, more than he already was. “Talk to Charlie,” I said.
I was bored. I was going around in circles with a guy who, unbeknownst to him, was trying very hard to get himself into more trouble with the feds. And I had only come here at the behest of Charlie, who wasn’t anywhere to be found and, anyway, why the hell did I need to see him? I saw him all the time. It was time to leave, I decided.
“Hey,” said Connolly, “you want to meet some people?”
And then it got more interesting.
43
THE PARTY WENT ON ANOTHER TWO HOURS. I DRAINED
several martinis and did the dreaded small-talk dance. Turned out, I knew some of the lawyers in the room, and a couple others knew of me from the Almundo trial. Greg Connolly stayed pretty close to me, which was sort of creepy. He’d promised me a meet with the governor when the place cleared out some, not that I had requested the meeting or even looked forward to it. In fact, I realized that I was probably the only person in the room who
didn’t
want to meet Carlton Snow. But Connolly seemed to think it was a tantalizing prospect and he kept sight of me as the night drew on, as if to reassure me.
Greg was trying to curry my favor. He really seemed to think that I was pulling the strings. I didn’t know enough about the players involved—Charlie included, who still, in many ways, remained a stranger to me—to know why Greg would think that, but I had been elevated to a prominent status in his mind.
I looked over the shoulder of one of the lawyers in our conversation circle and saw a woman standing with Connolly. I didn’t recognize her, but she caught my attention. Greg eagerly waved me over and I excused myself.
“Jason Kolarich, Madison Koehler. Maddie’s the governor’s chief of staff.”
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” she said to me.
I extended a hand. “All of it good, I hope.”
“All of it,” she said. Her hand was warm. Hot, in fact.
Madison Koehler was well-packaged in a form-fitting cocktail dress, bleached-blond hair, and a healthy dose of makeup. I put her at a little north of forty, but she was clearly doing the best she could to keep her age a mystery. Her eyes were large, brown, and predatory; there was a severity to her overall look that told me two things—she didn’t take any prisoners and she was good in bed. Take a photo of her and she wouldn’t win too many contests. But there was something about her up close and personal, a confident, aggressive style that oozed sensuality.
Or maybe it was just that I hadn’t been laid in a year. I was beginning to have romantic feelings for my mailbox.
“All of it,” she repeated, keeping her eyes on me. Well, then.
“Maddie here directs the traffic, I like to say.” Connolly was still talking. He kept on doing that and we both listened, but I was feeling something and I wasn’t sure how to handle it. I hadn’t been with a woman since Talia. I hadn’t thought about a woman since Talia. I decided not to analyze it at all. I just listened to Greg Connolly sputter on about this woman’s résumé while I followed the outline of that sequined cocktail dress and wondered what was under it. My eyes moved up until they made contact with hers. She didn’t react, save a small fluttering of her eyebrows. She was telling me that she didn’t mind the tour my eyes had taken.