“Why’s he a part of this inner circle?” I asked. I’d had my own thoughts on this question. But I wanted to hear Moody’s.
He shook his head. “A Latino face for the Latino voters, I guess? Politics is not my game,” he added, using a tone he might normally reserve for mass murderers.
“We don’t know,” said Lee Tucker. “Chris’s guess is a pretty good one. He’ll be out front getting out the vote in his community. He’s not the brightest of the bunch.”
“He’s a political animal,” said Moody. “But his utility to the governor? Not clear.”
“Why does Snow need help with the Latino vote?” I asked. “I thought that was a reliable Democratic voting bloc.”
Moody shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you. But even if that’s true, there’s the primary.”
Right. That was a good point. Carlton Snow still had to win a primary. The secretary of state, a Democrat named Willie Bryant, was seeking the nomination as well. He had some money and he had name recognition. But nobody had ever called him Governor.
“Do you know what they have in mind for me?” I asked.
Moody took a seat. I could see that the answer was no. “Greg Connolly—you can probably imagine—he wasn’t the world’s greatest informant. He let on like he knew every step the governor took, but we were pretty sure he was left out of some of the meetings. The truth is,” he said, like it was a concession, “until you, we weren’t making much headway.”
I imagined that the federal government had entertained high hopes for Mr. Gregory Connolly, being one of the governor’s oldest friends. Seems that what they got instead was a tag-along, a hanger-on. He was perfect for the role he served in the administration, a loyal follower who wielded power over the awarding of state contracts exactly in the manner he was dictated. But dictated by whom? Charlie Cimino, to be sure—but the feds were hoping the direction came from higher.
“Greg couldn’t put the governor next to all those bogus contracts, could he?” I asked. “All the stuff the PCB and Charlie were doing. You can’t link the governor to any of that, can you?”
Moody paused. He hadn’t been particularly good about sharing. I understood his thinking to a point. I’d worked with undercovers. Sometimes, it’s better they not know certain things. I would be cross-examined heavily at Charlie’s trial. Everything that Chris Moody, Lee Tucker, and I discussed would be fair game. The less information I had from the feds, the better. But there were limits.
“Listen, guys,” I said, “you’re going to have to be a little more forthcoming with me. You didn’t tell me Greg Connolly was your guy, and it could have cost me my life. You want me to do this, I’ll do it, but I need to know what you know and what you have in terms of people and resources. I need to know that.”
Moody looked over at Tucker, but this was Moody’s call. Our relationship had defrosted a little over the last week. We’d lost an informant, and that wasn’t something they took lightly. And now I was volunteering to keep going at considerable risk to my ability to continue breathing.
Moody nodded to Lee Tucker, who left the room. That made sense. Lee Tucker would be a witness at trial. He’d be an especially valuable witness if I somehow didn’t survive through trial. So it was better that Lee not be a part of this conversation, on which he could be cross-examined.
“Start with informants,” I said.
“Just you,” Moody said. “You and Connolly. Now just you.”
“Bugs,” I said.
Moody shook his head. “We had a bug in Greg Connolly’s office with his consent. He locked the door when he wasn’t in there. We tapped his cell phone with his consent. He was the only one who used that phone. That’s it, Counselor.”
“Wires,” I said.
“F-Birds,” Moody answered. “You and Connolly.”
“Tell me what you have on these guys so far.”
Moody pushed himself out of his chair. “If Greg Connolly could put Governor Snow, or Madison Koehler, or any of those people next to those shady contract awards, you think I’d let you risk your life going in there?”
“Yes,” I said.
He watched for a beat before a reluctant smile emerged on his face. “Greg was a talker. A blowhard. He answered to Cimino. Not the governor. Not the chief of staff. He talked a good game to us, but he couldn’t give us anyone else. We had some decent stuff on Cimino before you arrived and now we have Cimino over a barrel, thanks to you. I still have half a mind to pinch him right now and see if he wants to deal. At least I won’t lose another cooperator.”
That cooperator being me. I was glad to see he was viewing me as a statistic on his scorecard, as opposed to, say, a living, breathing human being.
“I don’t have them,” he concluded, drawing circles on the desk with his finger. “Not the governor or anyone else. Just a gut call—which I’d take to my grave, by the way—that there was no way Charlie Cimino and Greg Connolly were doing all this stuff without the governor’s knowledge.” He looked up at me. “You don’t think Cimino would deal with us?”
“No,” I said. “Maybe eventually. I mean, most of them do eventually, right? But his initial reaction would be to tell you to go scratch, so you’d have to arrest him and make it public, and everyone would clam up. Down the road, looking over the charges and counting the number of months he’ll spend in the pen, he might decide to cooperate and finger the governor, but you’d have no tapes, no anything but Cimino’s word against the governor’s. And they’d hire a lawyer like me and argue that Cimino and Connolly were doing this stuff for personal enrichment, getting side consulting contracts and hoping to curry favor with the governor without his direct knowledge of what they were doing. The governor would do the classic ostrich defense and even if you got an ostrich instruction—which I’m not sure a judge would give you here—the defense would have a strong argument. Cimino’s damaged goods, looking at twenty years in the pen, versus the word of public officials who have no record. That, Christopher, is why you need me.”
I wasn’t telling Moody anything he didn’t already know, that he hadn’t already calculated twenty different ways. “That still doesn’t mean it’s a good idea that you do this.”
“One of those people ordered Greg Connolly’s murder,” I said. “And mine, if I hadn’t convinced them I was clean. As a general rule, I don’t take kindly to people who try to kill me.”
Moody still didn’t seem convinced, but he’d obviously decided to move forward with our plan. Because what I’d said was true. He was out of options. I was his best, and possibly only, way to move beyond Charlie Cimino.
“The minute it gets too hot, you tell us,” he said. “No foolin’.”
“You’ll be the first.”
Moody walked over to me and extended a hand. It was a gesture typically reserved for friendly acquaintances, so I wasn’t sure what to do. I decided to shake it.
“Don’t get dead,” he said.
65
THE FIRST DAY OF MY NEW JOB BEGAN WITH THE MIND
numbing rigmarole of filling out forms of every possible color. I was placed in an office that was standard government size, standard government décor. After an hour of providing the state a bunch of information I’d already provided when I signed up with the PCB, I was ready for a drink.
“There he is.” Hector Almundo waltzed through the door, beaming. Hector looked better every time I’d seen him since the trial, as his reincarnation continued. He was back on a winning team, climbing a ladder again.
And he looked the part, as always. He was wearing an expensive coffee-colored suit with an orange tie and another of those tiepins he always wore, even during his trial when we told him to dress down. Hector didn’t know how to dress down. Me, I was wearing my standard dark suit, white shirt, conservative tie. Expensive, admittedly, but not flashy. No tiepins or pocket squares or French cuffs, nothing extravagant, unless you counted the elaborate eavesdropping device I was wearing inside my coat pocket.
After we shook hands, he sat down next to me. “You’re getting here just in time,” he said. “Big things happening. We’ll need you.”
Because I couldn’t think of anything better to say, I asked, “How’s it going?”
Hector moved his head in virtually every direction, showing worry and excitement. “The thing with Greg. You heard about that?”
“Heard about it,” I said, which was an understatement.
“Yeah, that put everyone on their heels for a few days.”
I didn’t know who knew the truth about what happened to Greg Connolly. There was no chance that Charlie Cimino would be generous with that kind of information. But my working theory was that someone was in on it with him from above. Hector didn’t really qualify as “above” Charlie, as far as I knew. But the truth was, I didn’t know. That’s why I was here.
“But you can’t slow down, y’know?” Hector went on. “Willie Bryant’s been making some headway. He could hurt us downstate. He’s getting some money now, too. He was a slow starter, but he’s building steam. So it’s like, you feel terrible about Greg, but you have to move on. Bryant sure as hell isn’t going to slow down.”
Until last night, when I looked him up on the Internet, I couldn’t have picked Secretary of State Willie Bryant out of a lineup. Before his two terms as secretary of state, he’d been a state representative from a downstate county adjacent to the one where our last governor, Langdon Trotter, came from. He even looked a little like Trotter, the rugged hunter look, which probably shouldn’t matter but obviously did. From what I could gather, he fell into the category of conservative Democrat, which meant he liked guns as much as trial lawyers.
I looked up some polling numbers online and saw that Carlton Snow seemed to have an edge over Willie Bryant, 37 percent to 29 percent, with a healthy undecided vote.
A young woman appeared in the doorway and knocked gently on the door. “Excuse me. Mr. Kolarich, the chief of staff would like to see you.”
“I’ll take him,” Hector said.
The office of the chief of staff was at the corner of my hallway. The number of people filtering in and out of Madison Koehler’s office, while we waited patiently outside, could have filled a small convention center. Most of the people were young and fresh and ambitious. I envied them not because I lacked ambition myself but because I’d once had it in vast supply. It went off the cliff with my wife and daughter. I had something akin to ambition now, a mission to be sure, but not one of personal advancement. It allowed me a detachment that would probably serve me well.
The assistant outside Madison’s office called to me. “The chief will see you now.”
The chief?
You gotta be kidding me.
Hector stood up with me. “She likes being called Chief,” he whispered.
Madison Koehler had a spacious corner office, sufficient for a conference table at one end and windows showing the north and east side of our commercial district. She was seated behind a steel desk she must have imported because it wasn’t government-issue, or if it was, the taxpayers were spending too much money on such things and I might have to write a letter to my state senator. Or to my governor. Or to Charlie Cimino.
The desk was busy in terms of the sheer volume of paper but immaculate to a fault, everything neatly categorized and the stacks lined up with razor precision. I could live my whole life, and I’ll never understand how people can be so tidy.
“How we doing, Chief?” Hector called out.
“Good . . . good.” She looked up from whatever she’d been reading, wearing those glasses I had last seen when Madison was lying on a bed, wearing my shirt and her panties. “Jason,” she said.
“Madison,” I said.
“Sit, sit.”
She returned to the document on her desk. If she was still busy with whatever that item was, she could have kept us waiting outside. But she’d invited me in so I could sit, compliantly, while she showed me I wasn’t that important. I just love office politics.
“Senator, I’ll just need Jason right now,” she said. She momentarily looked up at Hector. “If that’s all right.”
Hector, no stranger to politics of any kind, looked a bit out of sorts, a clenched jaw and sullen expression. But he didn’t put up a fight. “Sure thing,” he said.
Having expelled Senator Almundo from the room in a probably unnecessary display of power, Madison kept working on the document in front of her for another few minutes. It was hard for me to look at her without recalling our last encounter. Nothing was going to happen in this office, but that didn’t stop my mind from traveling down salacious corridors.
“Okay,” she said, looking up. She appraised me for a moment, then slid a piece of paper across her desk. On a piece of stationery that reminded everyone she was the governor’s chief of staff was written a list of names down one column, across from each of which were job titles and names of various administrative agencies. Nine names, nine different jobs.
“Those people need those jobs,” she said.
I didn’t know what to do with this, so I just waited. Madison had returned to writing something but, after a healthy spell, looked over her glasses at me. “Those people,” she repeated, “need those jobs.”