The Whole Lie (15 page)

“Starving,” I said, spreading my jacket to show I had no gun, then waving the Pop-Tart. “And brown sugar cinnamon. It's my favorite.”

“It's everybody's favorite. Sit on the bed.”

I did. Lacross wore black boots, black slacks, a black fake-leather car coat. He sat in the desk chair, set his gun within easy reach even though we both knew he wouldn't need it.

We looked at each other maybe ten seconds.

“I'm a regular world-beater,” he said, spreading his arms. “I'm kickin' ass up here.”

“Why'd they throw you off the staties?”

He waved a hand, ignored the question. “You're here 'cause you spotted me at the Tinker thing. You're a hero. A dumb fuckin' hero.”

“Why were you there?”

He slipped a card from his shirt pocket and flipped it to me, but it didn't tell me anything new. “I know,” I said. “Research. That mean what I think it means?”

“Political stuff.”

“Oppo research. Dirty tricks.”

“Sure.” He shrugged.

“How's the pay?”

“Better'n you'd think from my, ah, situation here.” Pause. “Three divorces.”

“Say no more.”

“I'm working against your pal Tinker, working for Wilton.”

“I figured.”

“And it's the screwiest thing, Sax.”

I waited.

“I don't think Wilton wants to win.”

“Why?”

“I've worked three or four of these elections now,” he said, “and Wilton's people are pros, but they're doing everything wrong. They send me down blind alleys. When I
tell
'em they're blind alleys, they get pissy. They tell me shut up and cash your check. And when I
do
dig up something half-decent, they don't use it. Hell, I had the Jesus pics three weeks ago.”

“What happened?”

“When I passed 'em along, Wilton's top advisor patted me on the head, but the pics disappeared. The
Globe
got 'em from another source.”

“So what's going on?”

“I think Thomas Wilton got pushed into running by the country-club boys, the yacht-club boys. I don't think he wants to govern anything bigger than a gin and tonic, and I think the best moment of his life'll come Tuesday night when he makes his concession speech at the Copley.”

Huh.

We sat. A west-east train rattled the office windows.

“That was pretty loose of me,” Lacross said when the train was gone.

“What was?”

“What I just blabbed to you, about my own client maybe not really trying. Something like that gets out, it's firing-offense loose. It's you'll-never-work-in-this-town-again loose.”

“So?” I said. But I knew where he was going.

“So what have you got for
me,
Sax? Spill it. You saw me at the rally. Whoopy-doo. Takes more than that to make a man pull a B&E. 'Specially when he's still on paper.”

So he knew about my parole. “Keeping tabs?” I said.

“On everything and everybody.”

I knew I shouldn't tell Lacross any more than I needed to. He wasn't a guy you could ever trust. On the other hand, he was more or less an honest thief, like me. Aren't many of us left. And he sure had come through with dirt on his own client. I decided to take a chance.

“Tinker and Saginaw have this whole damn soap opera going,” I said. “Everybody hates everybody, everybody's screwing everybody. I can't say a whole lot about it, but there's blackmail.”

“The Jesus pics.”

“There's more.”

“Worse?”

“Yup.” I paused. “Somebody got killed.” I told him a bare-bones version of Savvy. Left out the personal stuff, but the way he looked at me said he knew there was more.

“Huh,” Lacross said when I finished. “Cops sticking with the accident scenario?”

“So far.”

“You're not buying it. You think she was killed. Over the blackmail.”

“I had to look at Wilton, had to see if he was the blackmailer,” I said. “Especially when I figured out you were working for him.”

He nodded. “I get it.”

“But when you tell me Wilton's not even trying, it fits. It makes sense. Everything about this blackmail deal feels … personal. It feels like an inside thing.”

“You take a look at Saginaw's ex?” I must have looked surprised when Lacross said it, because he half-smiled. “Oppo research, remember.”

“Haven't talked with her yet,” I said, “but I will. That's the vibe I'm talking about, that brand of meanness.”

“These other pics,” Lacross said. “Are they bad enough so Wilton might actually win?”

“I haven't seen them,” I said. “But judging by how nervous Saginaw seemed, and stacked on top of the Jesus pics, it's a possibility.”

Lacross whistled, nodded. “Well, I can make your life a little easier. No goddamn way is Wilton behind any of this. Trust me. If I'm wrong, I'll wear a pair of his pants all week. They're green with blue whales.”

“Bullshit.”

“My mouth to God's ear.” He looked at his watch. “I need you to scram now. Got some useless oppo research to do.”

I rose, started to leave. But thought of something: If Lacross was trailing around after Team Tinker-Saginaw … “A guy's been tailing me,” I said.

“Green Expedition. I wondered if you'd made him yet.”

“Who is he?”

“Wish I knew. I made him about a week ago, told my bosses there was a dude trailing around after Saginaw, sometimes Tinker. They told me not to worry my pretty head.”

“If I give you his plate number, can you run it?”

“Already did.”

“And?”

“And unless that big ugly dude is Dinah Wannamaker of Ludlow, Mass., the plate's stolen. What the smart guys do, they hit an airport parking garage, find a car just like theirs, and swipe the plates. The vic spots her missing plate, thinks it got knocked off in a parking lot, gets a duplicate. I know guys been running around three years on plates like that.”

Huh. That could work. And anybody smart enough to pull it off was also smart enough to pop a FAST LANE transponder out of any unlocked car in a parking lot, which would explain why the Expedition dude had a transponder that wasn't Velcro'd to his windshield.

But why had he done the plate-and-transponder bit in the first place? “Any way you could take a harder look?” I said. “Maybe visit Wannamaker, imply you're still with the staties?”

“That's a hell of a risk.” Lacross shrugged. “And Wilton's checks clear.”

“Three divorces,” I said.

“Yup.”

I sighed. “You should throw your dead bolt.”

“I guess so.”

“Thanks for the info,” I said, crossing the room. “It helps.”

“Hey Sax?”

I turned.

“You can take the rest of the Pop-Tart,” Lacross said. “I'm not gonna shoot you over it.”

*   *   *

“If memory serves, Lacross had something to do with your little stay at MCI Cedar Junction,” Randall said thirty minutes later, wiping away a tear. “How far do you trust him?”

“That was a long time ago,” I said. “And he was just doing his job. The DA was the one who was really on the warpath. If anybody hosed me, it was her.” I blew my nose into a napkin.

I didn't have a cold, and Randall wasn't feeling weepy. We were in the Chicken Bone Saloon, just a couple hundred yards from Lacross's office. The Chicken Bone is a dive. It's a blues bar. It serves the best wings in the state. It's perfect.

What we do, we order eighteen wings in garlic blaze sauce, which'll take the bugs off your windshield, and eighteen in thermonuclear sauce, which is about what it sounds like. Only hotter. We have the waitress mix 'em all up, and then we play roulette to see who gets what. Randall was having a tough run: three thermonuclears in a row. I'll attest that if a black man eats enough hot wings, you can watch his face turn red.

“Did you get the skinny on Bert Saginaw?” I said. Someone behind the bar turned up a Lucinda Williams record.

“Of course,” he said, dunking a celery stick in as much ranch dressing as it would carry. “But you go first, while I wait for my heart rate to recede.”

“No sympathy. At least you can wash yours down with beer.”

“I'll drink to that.”

While he did, I started to fill him in.

It took a while. As I worked through my day, its fullness surprised even me. By the time I was done we had a basket full of bones, my lips were numb, and Randall had about finished his second beer.

“That's a hell of a day,” he said.

“Packed,” I said. “Tell me what it means.”

“Gee thanks.” But he looked down at his lap and began twiddling his thumbs. He actually twiddles them, but only when he's thinking. I looked at the Chicken Bone's stage, which wasn't much bigger than a Ping-Pong table, and wondered how the hell the band that was trundling its gear through the door would make it all fit.

“Question,” he finally said. “Let's say Bert Saginaw
didn't
kill Savvy. Who benefits if Saginaw looks bad?”

“Thomas Wilton.”

“But you stipulated Lacross as a reliable source,” Randall said, “and he says Wilton would just as soon lose.”

“What about Betsy Tinker, then? They tell me she can still be elected with or without Saginaw. And it looks like she hates his guts and he hates hers.”

“
He
hates her guts? Or Sister Emily hates her guts?”

“Same thing. They're a team, those two.”

Randall grunted, either because he was unconvinced or because he'd just ripped into yet another thermonuclear wing. “Anyway,” he said, “can you picture Betsy Tinker tossing a woman from a trailer-sized A/C unit in Charlestown? In broad daylight?”

“Of course not. Someone who works for her, though.”

“That's worth looking at, but … it's hard to make the risk/reward work for a billionaire lady.” Randall paused. “Keep it simple, Conway. Blaine Lee.”

“I didn't get that vibe.”

“Vibe, schmibe. Anyway, we'll know soon enough. The state cops have him in the hot box right now.”

“They do?”

“You didn't hear? It was on the radio. They picked him up down in Attleboro, beelining south.”

“Nice work, Wu.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“What's bothering me…” Randall said.

“The guy in the green Expedition,” I said.

“So maybe that's your tomorrow project right there.”

“I guess.” I reached for a curly fry. “Tell me about Bert Saginaw.”

“I will, but first I have to ask: Why the curiosity about him?”

“The more I know,” I said, “the more I know.”

“Do you believe he's behind Savvy's murder?”

“I haven't run into anybody with a stronger motive. And even if Saginaw had nothing to do with it, there's a chance his background'll point us in a direction.”

Randall considered that, then made a
what the hell
nod. Or maybe he was clearing his sinuses. He organized his thoughts, tented his fingers. Charlene says he'll be a college professor someday. I don't disagree.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Hubert Saginaw was born in 1955 in Fort Morgan, Colorado, to a failed inventor and a nurse. Dad, Paul Saginaw, was smart as a whip and had made a little money during the Depression when he patented a clever locking mechanism for livestock gates.

But he made only a
little
money; the patent boosted his ego in a dangerous way, and Paul would spend the rest of his life handing out pricey business cards with his name over the single word
INVENTOR
. The sum total he made off his latch probably didn't pay for the supply of cards. By the time Hubert and his two sisters were old enough to understand, Paul was a wet-eyed dreamer who spent all day messing around in his basement “lab” and explaining to the kids that no matter how hard they tried, The Man would always screw them out of what was rightfully theirs.

Mom—Marion Saginaw nee Hartline from over in Hillrose—was the workhorse and the paycheck. She worked in the local hospital, one of those nurses who was liked by doctors but not patients. Marion didn't give a rat's behind who liked her: She had three kids and a useless husband to support. Wake up, get the kids off to school, work a shift, fetch groceries at the IGA on the way home (because Thomas Alva Goddamn Edison was too busy in the basement to be bothered with shopping), pull dinner together, listen to Thomas Alva Goddamn Edison whine while they ate, supervise homework, and maybe, just
maybe,
treat herself to a knock of so-so Scotch in the bathtub before falling into bed.

“Whatever it is you want me to know about Saginaw,” I said, “you're sure taking the long way around to it.”

“Getting there,” Randall said, pushing up imaginary glasses on the bridge of his nose. He was digging the storyteller bit, the professor bit, and I've learned to let Randall do things his way.

Bert Saginaw wasn't an especially good student, so it surprised the hell out of everybody—his parents, his teachers, and the guidance counselor who'd been pointing him at local voke schools—when he was accepted at Oberlin College in Ohio. It turned out he'd taken his father's rants about getting screwed by The Man, written them up in the form of an application essay, and impressed somebody in the elite school's admissions office.

In late August of '73, armed with a duffel bag, a stack of student loans and ten twenties his mother stuffed in his shirt pocket—warning him he was on his own other than that—Bert Saginaw hitchhiked from Fort Morgan to Oberlin.

I didn't know much about college, but I doubted many kids thumbed twelve hundred miles to their freshman dorm.