The Whole Lie (2 page)

I sipped. “What about him?”

Half a smile played across Savvy's lips. “Bert Saginaw has a little John Edwards problem. And I'm Rielle Hunter.” She read my eyes, sighed, put both hands on mine. “I asked you and Moe to disappear me seven years ago because I was pregnant with what the tabloids call a love child.”

CHAPTER TWO

Maybe ten seconds passed. “You were pregnant?”

“Everybody figured it out but you.”

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“You would have gone crazy jealous on me.”

“Bullshit.”

“You feel a twinge even now,” Savvy said. “Even though Charlene's got a ring through your nose. It might as well be stamped on your forehead.”

She was right. “We were close back then,” I said. “The way I remember it, we had something intense going. It felt … it felt exclusive, that's for sure.”

“It was intense, you've got that part right.” She brushed my cheek with her fingertips. “Seven years. A long time. Besides, you've got grim little Charlene. She cleaned up nice, I'll give her that. Back then she was a bitty bottle-blond crack ho, was she not? Social Services took her kids away, or am I misremembering?”

“She got her daughters back a long time ago,” I said, putting my hand on Savvy's left forearm.

“I always figured you'd wind up with someone,” she said, ignoring my hand. “You're a serial monogamist. You work the strong-silent-type routine and you work it well, but at day's end you need a woman to fix your dinner and wash your boxer briefs. What good is Brando-hood without someone to tell you what a cool loner you are?”

“They're eighteen and twelve, and I love them. Charlene built a good business from scratch. I live with her, moved in a while back. We've been through a lot together.”

She grabbed my hand with her free one. “You're hurting my arm.”

“Yes.” I kept the pressure on.

“You're
hurting
me.”

“Yes.” I held her eyes, held the pressure, watched fear bloom behind the pain.

Finally she said, “I'm sorry, ow, ow, I'm sorry, I'm sure Charlene is the cat's meow,
ow!
”

I released, stood. Left the coffee shop, walked back toward the garage. The smart move would be to work my ass off the rest of the day and clear Savannah Kane from my head. Charlene would be frosty for a few days—who could blame her?—but we'd get past it.

Yup. It'd be a mistake to try to explain. Talking doesn't always work out so well for me. I dig holes. Better to buckle down, work my tail off, let my actions show Charlene that Savvy was nothing to me.

She
was
nothing.

Right?

So why did I catch myself listening for footsteps? Why did I slow when I heard her trotting after me?

She grabbed my arm when I was half a block from the garage. “Some things never change,” she said, then held up an index finger and put hands on knees and panted.

“You still smoke,” I said. “Old Gold?”

“Seen the price of cigs lately? I smoke whatever's on sale at the gas station.” She straightened, caught her breath. “I was thinking, as I staggered after you clutching my ticker, how quickly we fell into the old patterns.”

I said nothing.

“Me tormenting you over things you don't know,” she said, rubbing the forearm I'd squeezed. “You hurting me back the way that comes naturally to you.”

“Charlene and I are a couple,” I said, fishing my cell from my pocket, flicking to the photos. “This is her younger daughter Sophie. The older daughter is Jessica, everybody calls her Jesse.”

“Cute. Quite a financier you found for the brand-new garage. I kid, Conway, I kid. I admit I wondered where you got the dough to launch this shop. Last I heard, banks weren't loaning mucho dinero to guys with manslaughter two on their resume.” Pause. “So I Googled. Why wouldn't I?”

“Why
did
you, though? Why are you here?”

“Brass tacks at last.”

“How's this for brass tacks?” I said, riffing, thinking on the fly. “This Bert Saginaw knocked you up. He voted abortion, you voted child support. After all, you weren't getting any younger. You had to play the long game. Saginaw must have looked like an ATM with legs.”

She slapped me hard.

I ignored it. “You made do with the child support, but it burned you up. When Saginaw went into politics, you couldn't take it anymore. You had to make a run at the big payday. You're here to squeeze him. Gold Digger One-Oh-One.”

Her eyes flashed. “You get in trouble when you try to act smart,” she said. “You obviously don't realize Bert's famous for blowing fortunes. He wasn't rich when I was with him, and my child-support checks prove it.”

“So you're here to renegotiate. And if talks don't go your way, you parade your kid for the reporters.”

She slapped my face again. “I would
never
do such a thing, and you're a prick for saying I would! Max is back home with his … in very good care.”

We stood. Traffic rolled. My face stung.

“You guessed partly right,” Savvy said, and I noticed she'd molded herself to me, breast pressing my arm, thigh on thigh. From face-slap to this in two seconds. Typical. “I did come to renegotiate. But a funny thing happened.”

“What?” I said, looking at the Shell station across the street.

“Bert and I hit it off. Rekindled, if you get my drift. And believe it or not, the campaign has kind of … adopted me, no,
absorbed
me. I'm part of Team Tinker-Saginaw.”

“They're hugging you close til the campaign's over. Then they'll brush you off.”

“No. I thought that too at first, but there's more to it. Trust me, I'm part of the sanctum sanctorum.”

“What's that?”

“Never mind. It was my idea to get your help. We were talking in the war room last night, and I mentioned the kind of thing you do for Barnburners.”

“Saginaw's not a Barnburner.”

“But I am.”

“I need to get back to work.”

“
Please,
Conway. Old times' sake.”

I stared across at the Shell. “What were you talking about in this war room?”

“Blackmail.”

“Not your blackmail?
Other
blackmail?”

“You bet. Weird, isn't it?”

What was weird, I thought, was the pencil-necked kid staring at us from the Shell. He stood by a red Lumina. He was looking death rays at me. Trying to puff out his chest, but he didn't have much of one.

I wouldn't have noticed him, but the Lumina had North Carolina plates.

Huh.

I filed the car away and took Savvy's elbows. “We had a thing a long time ago. You were a Barnburner. You asked for help, I helped. But you were supposed to vamoose and stay vamoosed.” She tried to interrupt, but I shook my head and something in my eyes told her to keep quiet. “You made your deal, and you'd best stick to it. Here's your smart move: call a cab, go to Logan, and grab the next flight south.”

“That's exactly what I'll do,” Savvy said.

I said nothing, knew there was more coming.

“All I ask,” she said, “is that before I go, you come see Bert in action. He wants to meet you. Just watch him, shake his hand, hear him out. Then give a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. You won't hear a peep out of me.”

I checked my watch, looked at the shop. Between a newspaper feature and some e-coupons, we'd gotten off to a good start. We were hip-deep in boring Japanese cars that needed boring service.

“When?” I finally said.

“Right now! Bert's doing a rally downtown.”

I sighed and led her to my truck.

CHAPTER THREE

“Now some people,” Bert Saginaw said, leaning toward the microphone like he was having a neighborly talk with a pal, “
some
people, even some people whose names are on ballots this year…” He waited for hoots and applause that didn't come. “Some people would defund the programs I'm talking about, programs that are helping Framingham bootstrap its way back, programs that help
good
people find
good
jobs at
good
wages…” He thumped the podium on each “good,” working himself into the Martin Luther King–wannabe rhythm that politicians love.

I stopped listening to the words. People who listen to the words of a man running for office deserve what they get. I looked around instead, knew I'd learn more that way.

Saginaw stood at the top of the steps to the Memorial Building, Framingham's city hall, speaking to maybe a hundred bored citizens.

Framingham's a funny place. A little too big to be a town, a little too small to be a city. Route 9, an east-west road that may be the original strip-mall hell, cuts it in half. North of 9, Framingham's a solid little suburb full of Boston commuters. South of 9, it's more of a has-been city. Railroad tracks, a long-closed GM plant, old-school small industrial, two-family homes. Salvation Army, methadone clinics, halfway houses, oldsters who missed their chance to move out. And wall to wall Brazilians, some of them legal. Fine by me: Every Brazilian I know works as hard as three of anyone else. If Saturday night knife fights and crazy soccer parades don't bother you, Brazilians make good neighbors.

We were on the south side of town. The Memorial Building squats on a three-way intersection whose rotary screws up traffic all day, every day. The rally was making things worse. Background noise: horn honks, siren-blats from ambulances forcing their way over to the hospital. Behind Saginaw stood a dozen people with signs reading
SAGINAW—LT GOV
in red, white, and blue.

I'd never seen a sign for a lieutenant governor that didn't mention the candidate for governor. I wondered what Betsy Tinker, his running mate, thought about that.

The sign holders were props for the TV news cameras, nothing more. I recognized a few of them. There was the gal who runs a soup kitchen, the preacher who shows up every time a kid gets shot in the projects, a couple guys with purple union T-shirts. Like that.

One woman behind Saginaw, jammed in with a half-dozen handlers in suits, looked so familiar it bugged me. Sandy hair, squared-off jaw, beet-colored suit that didn't do her any favors. I asked Savvy who she was. “Bert's sister Emily,” she said. “Faithful assistant, gal Friday, cast-iron-bitch gatekeeper. Take your pick.”

I looked from sister to brother, and saw it. They could just about be twins. Hell, maybe they were. I felt for Emily: The face she shared with her brother, with its compass-arrow nose and its Dudley Do-Right jaw, suited a man more than a woman.

I recognized a bunch of folks around me in the crowd, too. Half of them were Brazilian illegals—their bosses must have shooed them over to make a pretty TV picture.

Add it all up, you came away with an impression of a half-assed rally, a place nobody wanted to be. Except Bert Saginaw.

He was rolling now, wrapping up I hoped, doing dime store MLK until his voice cracked and his fist had to hurt from podium-thumps. Finally, in a nice touch, he snapped a white handkerchief from the breast pocket of his suit and wiped his forehead like he'd worked up a sweat. The crowd waited half a beat too long, wondering if he was finished, then finally clapped. A two-fingers whistle cut through. It was one of the handlers, a twentysomething boy whistling and stomping like he'd just heard the Gettysburg Address.

Savvy leaned into me, her breast pressing my arm. “Warning,” she said. “Potential disaster looms.”

“What do you mean?”

“Bert's supposed to lead a spontaneous march through town. Pressing babies, kissing flesh, primo telegenic shit. But the adoring masses appear to be sprinting back to work.”

“They don't look all that adoring.”

“Or that massive. Look. He's pissed.”

She was right. Saginaw had continued the man-of-the-people routine by taking his coat off even though it was late-October chilly. He now one-fingered the coat over his left shoulder, leaving his right hand free to wave and shake. But there was nobody to shake with, and the only thing to wave at were illegals' backs as they hustled to their shops or apartments.

Wearing what he probably thought of as a TV grin, but which looked to me like that old
Life
magazine photo of some poor sap riding a rocket sled, Saginaw whispered to handlers. One in particular gave off a boss-man vibe. He was letting Saginaw's rant roll off his back.

I checked my watch. “Well,” I said.

“You're not getting off that easy,” Savvy said, pulling me by the arm. “I said you need to
meet
him, remember?” We tucked into the hind end of Saginaw's parade, which now consisted of him, his handlers, the two guys with union T-shirts, and a pair of gals I recognized from the Brazilian bakery a block down.

As we crossed Concord Street, Saginaw pretended the cars were honking for him, not at him. Sure enough, the two gals slipped into the bakery—their manager flipped green aprons to them before the door even closed. Now I was three steps behind Saginaw.

You could plunk him down in any town, any state, and nobody'd be surprised when they heard he was running for office. He had that born-winner look. Straw-colored hair cut almost in a Boys' Regular, but not quite, like he'd been using the same barber since he was eight. High forehead, that unapologetic nose, smart blue eyes.

But something was off.

It hit me when I compared Saginaw to the campaign manager he was reaming out. The campaign manager—at least I assumed that was his job—looked a lot like Saginaw, a born winner. But he was a full seven inches taller.

Bert Saginaw was a shrimp.

I looked harder, first at him and then at the manager, and I saw he was a shrimp in an odd way: He had the torso and shoulders of a six-footer, but it looked like someone had sawed four inches out of his legs.