Penance (7 page)

C. C. was outspoken and she was quotable, although the words were nearly always Marion’s. Plus, she had great legs; her obvious sex appeal always guaranteed a larger share for the TV news programs and talk shows she appeared on. So that particular year, when the governor, who was running for reelection, and the mayor of St. Paul, who was trying to unseat him, turned into a couple of mudslinging Neanderthals who didn’t give a damn about women’s issues—galvanizing issues like poverty, education, child care and world peace—C. C. was the logical choice to carry the feminist banner into battle as a third-party candidate. “Beauty versus the Beasts,” one columnist called it.

Still, no one had expected her to win, least of all C. C. Monroe. It was merely hoped that her presence in the race would force the governor and the mayor to address women’s concerns. Only the governor’s popularity was at an all-time low. Even his most ardent supporters on the Iron Range where he grew up—the Slavs, the Czechs, the Poles who worked the taconite mines—freely conceded that the governor’s third term in office was probably one term too many and were loath to give him another. Then there were the allegations that he was too cozy with the construction industry, a major contributor to his campaign. Two days before C. C. entered the race,
The Cities Reporter
broke a story accusing the governor of having an affair with the construction industry’s comely chief lobbyist; it ran photographs of him leaving the woman’s townhouse, supposedly after midnight. The governor, his ever-patient wife at his side, denied the allegation, claiming it was a vicious lie, saying it was based on false and misleading information. Before she resigned from her job and disappeared from view, “The Other Woman,” as she became known, also denied the allegations—I love that word, “allegation.” What was it Jesse Jackson once said? “I not only deny the allegation, I deny the allegator.”

In any case, the minority party quickly called for a formal investigation by the state senate, suggesting that impeachment might be in order. The senate, which was firmly controlled by the majority party, blocked the move. So, the minority party demanded a criminal investigation by the attorney general’s office. Only the AG was also a member of the majority party and he had political aspirations of his own. Rumor had it that he offered the governor a deal: He would squash the investigation if the governor would agree to withdraw from the race and allow the AG to replace him on the ballot. This raised questions not only of propriety, but also of finances. Who would get the cash in the governor’s well-funded campaign chest if he withdrew? The AG? The governor vowed no. Technically, the money was his to do with as he pleased once his campaign debts were paid, and he said he would sooner donate it to the Reverend Sun Myung Moon than give it to a backstabbing opportunist like the attorney general. Besides, he was the party’s nominated candidate and he was not going to withdraw.

Meanwhile, the mayor’s popularity had dropped like a stone. This is Minnesota, after all. We don’t like tattletales and nearly everyone believed the mayor was responsible for the mud dripping from the governor’s face. As a result, squeaky-clean Carol Catherine Monroe picked up a quick twenty percent of the voters in the newspaper polls when she entered the race and after a month was running dead even with the major candidates—plus or minus three percent, of course. More importantly, money was pouring in. It started as a trickle: five-, ten-, twenty-dollar bills from her admirers. But when it became apparent that her candidacy was legitimate, the trickle became a flood. Well-heeled donors and national PACs thought nothing of writing out sixty-thousand-dollar checks—the state limit for individual campaign contributions. And they bothered little over C. C.’s position on the issues. They cared only that she win and remember them afterward.

The receptionist was right, I decided after listening to the update. Carol Catherine Monroe could very well become the first woman governor in the history of Minnesota. Unless she, too, made a mistake. A mistake of biblical proportions.

“I had a boyfriend,” she began.

C. C. started pacing the office, reading her own campaign slogans off the posters on the walls. Marion continued to sit behind the desk, looking down, shaking her head.

“His name was—is—Dennis Thoreau,” C. C. added, casting a furtive glance at Marion. “We were in love. At least I thought it was love. I was much younger then. Anyway, when we were together, we made a videotape.” C. C. said the videotape showed her in bed, showed her in various stages of undress, mostly with Thoreau, both of them playing to the camera, filling the lens. I had only one question.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I thought it would be fun, kind of kinky; a lot of couples are doing it these days.”

“Really?”

C. C. was angry now. “Haven’t you ever done something stupid, Mr. Taylor? Something you regretted, something you knew you would regret even while you were doing it?”

I recalled jumping off the roof of my father’s house while holding a bedsheet over my head, only I reminded C. C. that I wasn’t a member of the Minnesota House of Representatives at the time.

“Neither was I. I wasn’t running for anything back then. I was still with the DOT. I still belonged to myself, not to the women’s movement. Anyway, it’s done. Now my boyfriend, my ex-boyfriend, is threatening to release the tape to the media unless we pay him ten thousand dollars. I doubt if the news stations would run it…”

“They’d love to acknowledge it exists, however,” Marion said. “Show a few discreetly cropped stills.”

C. C. nodded. “Especially Hersey Sheehan. It would be like winning the Triple Crown: first the governor, then the mayor and now me.
The Cities Reporter.
It’s a rag.”

“It claims to be an alternative to traditional newspapers like the
Minneapolis StarTribune
and
St. Paul Pioneer Press,”
Marion said. “So it prints what the other papers won’t touch. It’s the only way it can stay in business.”

“They should sell the damn thing at supermarket checkout lines,” C. C. said.

“If they could, they would,” Marion added, and then they both grew quiet, as if contemplating the possibility.

“So what do you want from me?” I asked when I became bored enough.

Carol Catherine Monroe looked at me expectantly with eyes that were wide and moist, with full lips slightly parted. The look said, “Help me.” Or maybe I was projecting. Stick her on a bar stool and put a cocktail in her hand and it might mean something else altogether.

“We want you to deliver the money, get the tape and run the bastard off,” Marion Senske said. “Isn’t that why Lieutenant Scalasi sent you?”

“I thought I was here to get a line on Joseph Sherman,” I said, not believing it at all. Sending me after Brown to help Monroe? Anne Scalasi, my Anne Scalasi, could never be this devious.

“I told you, we haven’t seen or heard from Joseph Sherman,” Marion assured me.

I looked into C. C.’s aquamarine eyes.

“That’s true,” she said. “But,” she added in a halting voice, “even if you did come for another reason, couldn’t you, wouldn’t you, do this one little thing for us? Please?”

Ahh, what the hell. Since I was already in the neighborhood …

C. C. had not seen or spoken to Dennis Thoreau for six years. Their relationship ended while she was running for her first term in the House. The reasons she gave me for breaking up with him were vague. “It just didn’t work out,” she said.

According to C. C., Thoreau appeared at campaign headquarters one afternoon just to say hi. He said he was moving back to St. Paul after spending some time in California. They had a pleasant conversation, reminisced about old times. The next day they did lunch. Over the next two weeks Thoreau visited headquarters frequently, even worked the phones a few times. C. C. had actually considered resuming their relationship.

“The man could charm the fish from the sea,” she said.

“Humph,” Marion grunted.

Then Saturday morning, Thoreau called C. C. and just as pleasantly as you please demanded ten thousand dollars in tens and twenties.

“I thought he was joking at first. I even laughed,” C. C. said. “Only he wasn’t joking. He told me he would make copies of the video and send them to all the TV stations and newspapers if I didn’t give him the money. I told him he was insane. I told him I had friends in the police department. I told him never to call me again. When he started to laugh, I hung up. Then I talked to Marion.”

Marion Senske shook her head and looked at C. C. with quiet disgust. C. C. pulled her butterscotch hair across her mouth like my daughter used to do when she was caught misbehaving.

“He called back an hour later,” Marion added. “He asked if we had come to our senses yet.”

“Did you speak to him?” I asked the older woman.

She shook her head and gestured at C. C.

“Should we pay him?” C. C. asked hopefully.

“It’s always easier to pay,” I told her. “Until the price becomes too high.”

“Your job is to make sure the price doesn’t become too high,” Marion told me.

“I get four hundred dollars a day plus expenses. I also like my clients to sign a standard contract stating that I am acting on their behalf and that…”

“Nothing in writing,” Marion insisted. “I’ll pay you cash. Right now. But we’ve never met. You don’t know me and Carol Catherine is someone you’ve only seen on television.”

“All right,” I agreed. It wasn’t the first time a client had made such a demand.

Marion Senske fished a bulging number-ten envelope out of a drawer, a thick rubber band holding the contents inside, and slapped it down on the desktop with so much force it seemed like the entire room shook. “I want the videotape,” she said emphatically. “Don’t give him the money until you get the tape.”

“Should I count it?”

“Do what you think is best,” she told me and took her purse from the desk’s bottom drawer. In it was another envelope. From that one she withdrew four one-hundred-dollar bills and handed them to me. I put the bills and the envelope in the same inside jacket pocket, the one over my heart.

I asked her about the money, whether it could be traced. She assured me that it could not.

“Candidates are required by law to report the sources of their income, all of it, along with all expenditures of one hundred dollars or more if the money is spent directly on an election campaign. However, no law requires a candidate to disclose where the money goes if it is not spent on an election. We simply list the expenditures in the ‘noncampaign expense’ category. We could use it to pay our water bills if we wanted to. It’s all perfectly legal.”

“I’m sure it is,” I told her. “Where can I find Mr. Thoreau?” Marion handed me a piece of paper with an address on it. I put it in my pocket and moved toward the door. C. C. took my hand as I started to pass. She held it lightly and then kissed it. “Thank you, Holland,” she said.

I don’t like the name Holland; Holly is worse and I have often bad-mouthed my parents for giving it to me. Yet, the way she said it…

I knew I was being used. That’s okay. All my clients use me. That’s why I get the big bucks. The question was: Was Anne Scalasi using me? I tried hard not to believe it. My Anne Scalasi would simply have called and said, “I know these guys who need a good PI.” She’s given me referrals before. Yet there was my guardian angel to consider. Only I couldn’t find him when I left C. C.’s campaign headquarters, which made me nervous. Maybe they replaced him with a tail who actually knew what he was doing. No way. I drove clear to my office, twice around the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, over to Como Park and then along the Mississippi River, first the Minneapolis side, then the St. Paul side. I was clean. That should have told me something. But it didn’t.

SIX

I
KNEW DENNIS
Thoreau’s neighborhood well. It wasn’t far from the College of St. Thomas, where I spent several years deciding what to do with my life. That was before it became the University of St. Thomas and turned the surrounding residential area into a parking lot. School was in session, and I was forced to walk three blocks to Thoreau’s house from the nearest open parking space.

The house was in the middle of the block. It was a small, weathered two-story in need of paint and surrounded by a neglected lawn. There was an unattached one-car garage in back facing a rutted dirt alley that must have been tough to negotiate in winter. I knocked on Thoreau’s door and waited. I knocked again and waited some more. I walked around the house, looking through the windows. The front windows showed me nothing. However, through a side window I could see a man wearing a royal blue bathrobe lying on the carpet between the front door and the bottom of the staircase. I went back to the front door and worked the lock with a pick and wire I keep hidden in the lining of my sports jacket—it’s illegal to carry burglary tools in Minnesota. It gave easily enough and I squeezed through the opening, trying not to disturb the body by bumping it with the door.

“Oh Christ!” I cried when the odor hit me, and I fought off a sudden urge to vomit. It was the kind of smell that you never forget, that you never confuse with anything other than what it is: the odor of decaying flesh, the smell of death. When I worked Homicide, I used to stick cigarette filters up my nostrils to mask the smell. Sometimes I would smoke a cigar; a lot of wagon men would smoke cigars. Unfortunately, I had long since given up smoking.