The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear (11 page)

“Right,” I said. “Of course. But you are running a little short of funds.”

“J.D.” He sighed. “I can make you only one promise.”

“What?”

“If you help your brother, you will feel better about your life.”

I started to object, but he held up his hand.

“You should go see Tyler,” he said.

“How bad is he?” I asked.

“Bad? How do you mean bad?”

“Nuts, for instance. Crazy racist skinhead nuts. How's that for starters?”

Tobias sighed. I was shocked that he actually looked pained. “I have always believed that Tyler had a good heart.”

“So that jackboot-wearing, skinhead, neo-Nazi shit was just his way of getting attention? Is that it?”

He shrugged. “He has love in his heart.”

“Yeah? You think so?”

“I will always stand up for your family.” He said it with solemnity, like he really meant it. But that was the thing about a guy like Tobias Green. He had been acting for so long it was hard to tell where the real person began and the act ended.

“Yeah? Well, maybe you'll get your chance,” I grumbled.

Tobias reached out and grabbed my arm. He looked hard right in my eyes. “Your brother needs help, J.D. He's had a rough time. If he can win this race, it will get him back on track.”

“Rough time? Like I've been on a cruise or something?”

“You were always the chosen one, J.D.”

“Me? That was Paul, for Christ's sake. He was the big football star, oldest son. He owned the world until he went and screwed it all up. Me, I was a geek.”

“Paul and your father were very much alike, J.D. Both were warriors on a great battlefield, and once the battles ended, they were lost.”

“Oh, for Christ's sake, Tobias. A lot of people did the right thing in the civil rights days and then went on and didn't fall apart and put their families through hell like Powell Callahan.” Tobias sighed and didn't seem to be listening. It was always that way with Tobias. He was so accustomed to just talking that he had forgotten how to listen. I leaned in close to him. “After all the women, all the times ignoring it, that's what broke my mother. You know that. He screwed the babysitter, Tobias. She was fourteen. Tyler's mother was fourteen. The great civil rights hero, my father, wasn't just a cheater, he was a child molester. And I've got a nutjob half brother. He's out there, and he never really had much of a chance.”

Now Tobias had heard me, and he looked so sad I thought he might start crying. “It's a terrible thing not to have any battles left to fight.” He looked around at the dingy office and the scurrying kids. Then he straightened himself up and tried to smile. “But the Lord works in mysterious ways. We soldier on.”

He hugged me. I could feel his skin moving over his bones.

“I'm praying for him, you tell Tyler that,” Tobias Green told me as I was leaving. “If you see him, you tell him I'm praying for him.”

“Right.”

“We are all sinners, J.D. We should never forget that.”

“But don't you think some of us are more sinners than others?” I asked. “Don't they have a scale for measuring just how sinful a sin is?”

“You three brothers be good to each other, you hear? You all you got in the world.”

“That's a depressing thought.”

I left him shaking his head and eyeing, with more than casual interest, one of the attractive young women working for the Citizens for Justice.

ON THE WAY TO THE STRIP CLUB,
I called Eddie and told him I'd be gone for an hour or so.

“What the hell, J.D., we've got a delegate-counting meeting in ten minutes and then a final walk-through at the Dome. The bastards are adding security.”

“I know,” I said. “I went there after I saw the veep last night. It's a shit show. Look, I just have to do something. It's stupid family stuff.” I could have come up with some elaborate lie for Eddie, but we had been through too much. And he probably wouldn't believe me anyway.

There was a long pause, and I could see Eddie holding his phone, pacing. He always paced when he was on the phone.

“Just tell me one thing,” he said. “Does this have to do with Sandra?”

“Jesus, no. Why the hell would you think that?”

“Why? Because you still have a thing for her and she saw you last night after the bombing and for Christ's sake, J.D. You don't think I know you better than yourself? Are you giving her some kind of scoopy scoops thinking it'll impress her?”

“Christ.” I sighed. “I would do something like that, wouldn't I?”

“For Sandra, hell-goddamn-hell yes.”

I laughed. “You do know me.”

“Better than you do,” Eddie said.

“That's not what I was going to do. But now that you brought it up, I think I will,” I said. I hung up while he was starting to shout into the phone. “J.D.!”

Sandra answered on the first ring. “Bitch? That Ginny girl called
me
a bitch?” Then she laughed. “I can't believe you are calling me. I'd like to think it means you are done hating on me, but I'm a big girl, so I know you're really calling because you want me to do something for you. So what is it?”

I almost hung up. But goddamn, she was so dead-on. “Off the record?” I asked. It was so weird to be asking a woman I'd lived with if we were off the record, but there were rules between reporters and campaign operatives, and sex and love past, present, or future didn't change the rules. It was what you learned in politics, particularly with reporters.

“Oh, good,” she said, with that excited tone she got whenever she thought there might be a story, “you do have something. Yes, of course, OTR.”

“In about an hour, the vice president of the United States is going to be making an unannounced drop-by at the Ochsner Hospital to see the bomb victim.”

“Does anybody else know this?” she asked immediately. I knew she would. Every reporter did. If you told a reporter like Sandra that it would cost her one of her kids for an exclusive, her reaction would be, “Can I pick the kid?” But of course Sandra didn't have kids, which I admired about her. “Who the fuck would want me as a mother,” she'd said the one time I asked her about it. I was so relieved by her answer that I never brought it up again.

“No, just you.”

“Thanks. Keep it that way.” She hung up.

“Bitch!” I yelled, banging the steering wheel. Why did I do this?

I found the club on the road to the airport in a stretch that I'd always found as depressing as any in America, a messy collection of dingy convenience stores, off-brand gas stations, tattoo parlors, and massage parlors. The Body Shop stood out like a UFO that had landed by mistake on Airline Highway: it was huge and brightly painted, with a flashing neon sign that towered over the strip.

I drove by three times before stopping, trying to make sure a reporter wasn't following me. It was doubtful, given the general laziness and pack mentality that pervaded the press covering an event like the convention. But there was always the remote chance that some hotshot had read
All the President's Men
one too many times and actually taken the initiative to shadow Hilda Smith's campaign manager for the entire convention. It was also possible that dear brother Paul had already put a word in some reporter's ear.

I parked in the rear, out of sight of the road. The asphalt of the parking lot felt sticky, as if on the verge of melting and swallowing me whole.

Inside it was twenty degrees cooler, a dark world of time suspended. Music blared, a medley of nineties hits. A large white man in a black turtleneck and blazer guarded the door.

“Where's Tyler?” I asked.

The big guy, who was perhaps thirty but looked older, with the overdeveloped muscles and thinning hair of a heavy steroid user, looked down at me with heavy eyes, a look that made it clear he was not interested in just another guy who wanted to see Tyler. Everybody wanted to see Tyler.

“Name?” he asked, in a thick country accent. This was not a New Orleans boy, probably from north Louisiana or maybe Mississippi.

I paused, thought about lying, and then just said, “Tell him his brother is here to see him.”

“That the truth?” he grunted, and looked almost awake for the first time.

“You get a lot of people here claiming to be Tyler's brother?”

He stared at me for a long time, then grunted again. “Ha. Ha.” He turned away to watch a pair of dancers walk by. One, a tall Asian woman, winked at him. She was easily one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen.

“I thought the women at these clubs were supposed to be skanky,” I said to my new friend.

He turned and did his long-stare thing. This was something he was quite good at, actually.

“Man, you can't be Tyler's brother if you that ignorant.”

“I'm the slow one of the family, that's all. Look, I really am his brother and really do need to see him.” This time I put twenty dollars in his shirt pocket.

He took the money out, looked at it. “Wow,” he said flatly.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” I mumbled, handing him two more twenty-dollar bills. We were in the midst of the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression in a town that had unemployment through the roof, and I couldn't get some good-ol'-boy thug to let me talk to my own brother for twenty dollars. What the hell was happening to this country, anyway?

The large man nodded his head toward a door across the floor of the club, where several women were doing their best to coax tips from the desultory crowd. I'd always avoided places like this, finding them sad and depressing, like a permanent bachelor party refusing to end for fear of the wedding. But I had to admit, these women were impressive. It wasn't the ones with the large, fake breasts that I liked. It was the taut, athletic women who looked like more sexual versions of pro volleyball players or gymnasts. Like the two dancing together in front of a pair of Asian businessmen in their fifties. It was an aerobics show with sex. This I liked. If only it weren't out here on Airline Highway in this dark cavern with lonely Japanese businessmen. What in the world were Japanese businessmen doing in New Orleans, anyway?

The door led to a drab hallway lit with bright fluorescents, the sort of hallway you'd see in any cheap New Orleans office building: brown carpet, Mardi Gras posters hanging on the wall, a row of plain doors. Somewhere very loud, grating music was blasting. Out of one of these doors stepped two women dressed in shorts. One wore a Loyola T-shirt, the other a New Orleans Saints jersey with cutoff sleeves tied at the waist. They looked like two young women headed for the Galleria Mall, which had been not too far away before it closed after the Crash. I realized that I had been watching them pantomime sex together a few minutes earlier.

“Do you know where Tyler's office is?” I asked.

“You hear that shit music?” the blonde in the Loyola T-shirt asked. “That's Tyler's shit.”

“He always had the worst taste,” I said, hoping they'd stop and talk. It suddenly occurred to me that I couldn't remember the last time I'd had a conversation with an attractive woman who wasn't involved in politics in some way. A stripper seemed like as good a way as any to break a bad habit. And they were both very attractive.

“Yeah?” She smiled, her mouth lifting up to one side, sort of an ironic smile. An ironic stripper. This was getting better. “You been knowing Tyler long?”

“All his life,” I said.

“No shit? You don't look like one of his friends. You got some tattoos under that suit? Some kind of ring-a-ding metal hanging? Huh?”

I blushed. So help me, I did. The women I talked to in politics, they didn't talk like this, at least not in the first two minutes of conversation. Not even Ginny. Or Sandra. And they were two tough women.

“He's shy,” the other said. She had red hair and the developed arms of a gym buff. “Cute.” She reached out and touched my cheek. “Blush, blush,” she said, peering at me with striking green eyes.

“He's here?” I asked, pointing toward the door, which seemed to vibrate with some of the worst music I'd ever heard.

“You're not a cop, are you?” the redhead with the strong arms asked me.

“Do you like cops?” I asked. “If you want me to be a cop, I'd be happy to be a cop. You want me to be a fireman, I'll be a fireman.”

“He likes you,” the other woman said.

“Sure he does. This one likes girls, you bet.”

I shrugged. In my pocket I could feel my iPhone vibrating madly. God knows what was happening while I was in here. Delegates could be changing sides right and left, more bombs going off, Armstrong George announcing he liked to wear a dress around the house to relax. But at the moment I didn't really care.

“FBI,” the red-haired woman said. “You could be FBI.”

The other girl pulled at her T-shirt. “Let's go.”

“Why FBI?” I asked. The way she said it and the reaction from the other girl struck me as curiously genuine. She didn't seem to be kidding.

The redhead raised her eyebrows. They were carefully groomed. “You never know,” she said.

“Does the FBI hang out with Tyler?” I joked, but they knew I wasn't joking and they had turned away, heading down the hall. The redhead waved behind her back without turning around. I waited until they were gone and then opened the door to Tyler's office.

It was a large, bland office, with only two notable features: a metal gun case the size of a large refrigerator and a tattered Confederate flag hanging behind the metal desk. The one photo was a framed picture of Tyler with army buddies. They were all wearing camo pants and sweaty T-shirts. This was before Tyler had been “blown to hell,” as he put it, in a training accident, and he looked impossibly young and, well, perfect. He waved when I came in but kept yelling into the telephone.

I'd seen him maybe three times since what he called his “accident.” He claimed it didn't really bother him, that it gave him “character.” But it still made me ache to see him. He was tall and thin and didn't look like a kid anymore. He'd always had an impossibly pretty, boyish face with an elfish sort of glint in his eyes. Now it was hard to look at him, at least if you had known him the way he had been before. The right side of his face was scarred a bright red that twisted his mouth into a permanent half smile. His right arm hung limply down from his shoulder. I knew when he stood up he would cant to the right, the muscles in his right leg not strong enough to support him equally with his left.

He hung up the phone and sat back, looking at me. Yes, you could still see a little of that sparkle in his eye. He wore a tight, sleeveless white T-shirt and black suspenders, just like the last three or four times I'd seen him. I knew that under the desk there'd be the same heavy black boots with the stacked wooden heels he'd worn since he was sixteen or so. He looked at me for a second, head cocked to the side so that more of his unscarred side showed—I wondered if he realized he did this—and then said to me, yelled at me, really, since the music was so loud, “You know the hottest businesses in this town? Security guards and dancers. You can't lose money in either no matter how stupid you are. And believe me, some stupid people have tried. Economy's gone to shit, got unemployment like forty percent, don't believe those happy-talk numbers, total bullshit, and people can't hire enough guards or girls.”