Penance (31 page)

“Hey, Freddie,” I said, tapping his foot with the barrel of the gun, amazed that anyone could sleep this late into the day. He did not respond so I tapped harder. “Hey pal, the sun is shining, the birds are singing …”

“Go ‘way, Taylor,” he mumbled and rolled over. That got me laughing and my laughter must have shot a load of adrenaline through him because he popped up, wide awake, looked me in the eye and said, “Oh, shit.”

“Man, it’s late afternoon. What are you doing in bed?”

“I was partyin’ last night.”

“Hanging out with your journalist friend?”

“What you want?”

I waved the Colt in his general direction.

“This ain’t your style, man,” he grumbled.

“You asking or telling?”

Freddie pulled the sheet tight around his throat like it was bulletproof and repeated, “This ain’t your style, man.”

“You never know,” I told him. “A man with a large bump on his head is liable to do anything.”

“I’m really sorry about that, Taylor.”

“Sure you are.”

“What you gonna do?”

“Depends, Freddie. Depends. I have a few questions to ask. You going to answer them?”

“Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.”

I smashed the toes of his right foot with the barrel of the Colt.

“Motherfucker!”

“Tell me about Dennis Thoreau.”

“Who the fuck is Dennis Thoreau?” he squealed, rubbing his foot.

“He’s an asshole, just like you.”

“Man, I don’t know no Dennis Thoreau.”

“I didn’t think so,” I said. I didn’t even bother asking him about Brown, Sherman or Amy Lamb. Freddie was a goon, a leg-breaker, a head-basher, maybe a killer, too. He killed the three Filipino thieves. But he could have killed me and he didn’t, which meant he probably hadn’t killed anyone. At least not recently. Something else. Freddie would not have kept the gun after doing Brown. Keep evidence? Of murder? Freddie was just not that careless.

Of course, I could be wrong.

“Pick up the phone,” I told him.

Freddie hesitated.

“Do it,” I said softly.

When he uncradled the receiver I asked him if he knew Marion Senske’s private number. When he nodded, I told him to dial it.

“Man, I don’t work for that bitch no more.”

Freddie’s statement infuriated me, although I couldn’t tell you why. I thumbed back the hammer on the Colt and screamed, “Call her or I’ll blow your fucking head off!”

Freddie proceeded to set the Olympic record for the seven-digit dial. The phone rang five times before Marion answered it. “Yeah, this is Freddie … No, man … Listen … I know that … Would you fuckin’ listen?” Freddie yelled. “Taylor’s here … Yeah, Taylor. He’s got a gun. He wants to talk to you.” I shook my head no. “He doesn’t want to talk to you … How the fuck should I know? … Yeah …Yeah, a gun …”

“Tell her the police found Joseph Sherman this morning,” I said.

“Who’s Joseph Sherman?”

“Tell her.”

“The cops found Joseph Sherman this morning,” Freddie repeated.

“Tell her he’s dead.”

“He’s dead … No shit?”

“Is that what she said?”

“No, that was me,” Freddie admitted.

“What did she say?”

“Nothin’, man.”

“Tell her it looks real good that the cops will pin Amy Lamb and Brown on Sherman and close the case.”

“Taylor figures the cops will … She heard you,” Freddie told me.

“Tell her that leaves Thoreau.”

“That leaves Thoreau.”

“Tell her I’m willing to make a deal.”

“He says he’s willing to make a deal … She wants to know for what.”

“She knows for what.”

“You know for what … How much?”

“I’m a reasonable man. Make me an offer.”

“He’s a reasonable man … Ten thousand?”

I shook my head no.

“He don’t like that,” Freddie said into the phone. “Fifteen?”

I shook my head.

“He wants more … Twenty is as high as she’ll go.”

“She’ll go higher,” I said.

“You’ll go higher … Twenty-five,” Freddie told me.

I shrugged.

“Yeah, he’ll go for that … Where? When?”

“Thirty minutes. C. C.’s office in the State Capitol.”

“He says thirty minutes … She says that’s unacceptable; she and Monroe are leaving for a fund-raiser in thirty minutes.”

“Hang up the phone, Freddie.”

Freddie hung up the phone.

“Now what?” he asked.

I gave him a telephone number and told him to dial it. He did. While it was ringing I had him pass me the receiver.

“They’re selling you out, honey,” I told the woman who answered.

“What are you talking about?” Meghan Chakolis asked.

“Looks like the governor’s office is worth more to them than you thought.”

“I don’t understand.”

“C. C.’s office in forty-five minutes,” I said and flipped the receiver back to Freddie, gesturing for him to hang it up.

“Aren’t we having fun now,” Freddie said.

I briefly contemplated the incredible damage I could inflict on his body. I could fix it so Freddie never walked again, never bent his elbow to raise a glass, to feed himself. Ahh, hell. Now we both knew how vulnerable we were.

“I don’t figure we’re even Freddie,” I told him. “I figure you still owe me big time. But I’m satisfied and I’m willing to let it go at this—busting your pad, letting you know I can take you out anytime I want. You don’t agree, you know where to find me.” Freddie watched me suspiciously, until the realization of what I said hit him. He smiled. Then he laughed.

“You got ’em,” Freddie told me. “You got ’em, that ain’t no lie. They may be white, but you got stones like a brother.”

“I have a few things to do, Freddie. I don’t want to see you around when I do them. Understand?”

He didn’t say if he did or didn’t. He just kept laughing.

THIRTY-ONE

T
HE ONLY SOUND
I heard in the State Capitol Office Building was the noise I made myself. I took the elevator to Blue and padded quietly down the corridor to C. C.’s office. C. C. was sitting in a chair in front of her desk. Marion Senske was sitting in C. C.’s chair behind C. C.’s desk, a shaft of light from C. C.’s desk lamp giving her face a hard edge to go with the scowl. She did not speak when I arrived, acknowledging my presence instead by sliding open the top desk drawer, withdrawing a thick, oversized envelope and tossing it on the desk. I went nowhere near it.

“I’m disappointed in you,” C. C. told me, turning in her chair. She was wearing a black silk shirtdress with a shawl collar, a long slim skirt that closed with four gold buttons and a jeweled belt. She crossed her legs, giving me a good look at her thighs. She was grinning.

“Marion letting you dress like a grown-up tonight?”

C. C. shot a hurt look at her mentor.

Marion ignored her. “We don’t have time for this,” she reminded me.

“Make time,” I said.

She nudged the envelope toward me. “Twenty-five thousand dollars,” she said between clenched teeth. “Not a penny more.”

“I don’t want your twenty-five thousand dollars,” I told her.

“You said…”

“There must be some mistake. All I want, let’s see, five days multiplied by four hundred … you already paid me for two days, plus expenses … You owe me, let’s call it twelve hundred bucks.”

Marion was confused as she ever hoped to be and admitted it.

“You hired me to find a blackmailer,” I reminded her. “I succeeded.” During the drive over I had planned to do a drumroll before making the announcement in a loud voice. But once I was there, I thought better of it. I merely pointed at Representative Carol Catherine Monroe and said, “Here’s your blackmailer. That’ll be twelve hundred dollars, please.”

“What are you talking about?” Marion demanded.

I cast an accusing glance at C. C., who uncrossed and crossed her legs again.

“Carol Catherine Monroe, Dennis Thoreau and Meghan Chakolis made the porno flick together. They did it to cause a scandal that would force C. C. out of the campaign.”

“But why?” Marion wanted to know.

“Yeah, tell us why,” C. C. added.

“My guess? They did it for two million dollars, for the money in the campaign fund.”

“I don’t think I want to hear this,” Marion moaned.

“I don’t blame you, Marion,” I told her. “Your protégée and her comrades made the tape and planned to release it to the media—anonymously, I assume. They made it last week, not six years ago like C. C. claimed. It was made between the time C. C. frosted her hair and you made her change it back.

“Once the tape was made public, the ensuing scandal would have forced C. C. to withdraw from the race. And, as you know, any money that remains in a campaign fund after the candidate’s bills are paid becomes the property of the candidate. She can do with it as she pleases—give it to other candidates, give it to her party, keep it for herself. C. C. was going to keep it. Weren’t you C. C.? And nobody would have bothered her about it, either. Hell, it’s unlikely that anyone involved in local politics would have even admitted to knowing her. Probably including you. She and her friends would have walked away … rich.”

Marion was watching C. C. now. Her expression did not change.

“How do you know all this?” she asked softly.

“The videotape. I was supposed to find it. That’s why I was sent to see Thoreau.”

“You were sent to pay off a blackmailer,” Marion insisted.

“Thoreau was already dead when C. C. said he called your campaign headquarters with his blackmail demands. My guess is that Thoreau was going to release the tape using the original cover story, that he was C. C.’s ex-boyfriend. Only someone killed him first. When C. C. and Meghan discovered he was dead, they decided to hell with it, they’d go through with the plan anyway. The blackmail nonsense was just a ruse to get someone over there to find his body and the tape—or to call the cops and let them find them.”

“Why would they want to become involved in a murder investigation?”

“Why not? They wanted scandal, remember? Besides, the tape wouldn’t have been much use as a motive for murder. Why kill Thoreau for the tape and then leave it? No, they weren’t worried about that. They just wanted to keep their hands clean. That’s why they came to you, so you would take charge. They wanted you to send someone over there to discover the body. If not your friend at the St. Paul Police Department, a private investigator would do just fine. There was only one problem.”

“The tape is missing,” C. C. said, rubbing a smudge of dirt off the toe of her shoe. “I put it in the camera. I figured that was the best place for it. I was really surprised when neither you nor the police found it. You think it could still be there?”

I shook my head no and C. C. sighed heavily.

“It was Meghan who found Dennis. She said the house had been ransacked and she was worried about the tape. Only I had it.” C. C. shrugged. “I was kinda watching it at home. She said we should put it back and let nature take its course. So I did, Saturday night, after I did the speech for the Teamsters.”

“Tell me something,” I said. “When Thoreau turned up dead, what did you think? Who did you think killed him?”

C. C. shook her head—there was a lot of head shaking going on. “We figured it was maybe one of Dennis’s girls from California.”

“What girls?”

“When he was down there he made movies of himself having sex with women without them knowing it—mostly married women. Then he would sell the movies back to them. He told us about it when he came back; that’s what gave us the idea in the first place.”

“Nice guy,” I said.

“Actually, he was kinda funny,” C. C. volunteered.

Marion slumped in her chair as if all the weight in the world had been dumped on her shoulders. I actually felt sorry for her. But not too sorry. Finally, she slowly rose and walked around the desk to C. C.’s side. The slap was lightning swift and fell on C. C.’s cheek so hard it knocked her to the floor.

“Oooo, I bet that hurt,” I told C. C.

“Have you any idea what you’ve done?” Marion asked C. C. in measured tones. “Have you any idea how badly you’ve hurt the movement, the state?”

“Fuck the movement, fuck the state and fuck you,” C. C. replied, baring her teeth like a dog. “I never wanted any part of this election.
I only wanted to be left alone.”

“Yeah, left alone with two million bucks,” I said.

“Carol Catherine, what do you think paid for the campaign headquarters and the telephones and the Buick?” Marion asked her. “What do you think paid for the flyers and the mailers and the signs and the bumper stickers? What do you think paid for the TV spots and the radio spots and the newspaper ads and the billboards? Why do you think we were attending a fund-raising dinner tonight? The two million dollars is gone! We spent it! You did all this for nothing!”

“Nothing? There isn’t any money left? There has to be! How about the money we’re supposed to take in tonight?”

Marion left her to puzzle it out, going back to the chair behind the desk.

“I can’t believe you spent all of it! I told you not to spend all of it! Didn’t I say that?”

“I’ll be damned,” I muttered.