The Whole Lie (20 page)

A black dude leaned on the hood of a British racing green Jaguar XJ6. Shaved head. Shades. Turtleneck and jeans that he wore like a seal wears its skin. He was perfectly still, perfectly relaxed. He looked down the slight hill toward Massachusetts Avenue, the main drag. Maybe he was waiting for somebody. Or maybe not. He didn't turn my way, didn't acknowledge me.

But he knew I was there.

I finally spotted a house with the right street number. Looked over my shoulder a few times as I made my way toward it. I wasn't sure why, but it seemed like a good idea to know where that dude was. At all times.

“Katherine Saginaw?” I said a minute later.

It startled her. She dropped her key ring, then leaned to fetch it so quickly that she banged her head on the doorjamb. “Ouch,” she said, rubbing her head and finally turning. “What?”

“Sorry about that. Ms. Saginaw?”

“It's Katherine Stoll now, or Katy. And why are you here? As if I didn't know.” She quickstepped down the seven steps of the antique colonial's front porch as she said it—annoyed, not intimidated. “I need to get to class,” she said, glancing at her watch. She wore beat-up running shoes, jeans and a green hoodie that said
LESLEY
—but the watch was a chunky men's Jaeger LeCoultre that cost eight grand if it cost a nickel.

“Like to talk to you for a sec,” I said as she began a fast walk that would, in thirty seconds or so, dump us into Mass Ave.

The black dude and his Jag were gone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“No offense,” she said, looking up, hoping to catch a green so she could cross Mass Ave without stopping, “but you might as well have
I'M FROM BERT
stamped on your forehead. I have no old business with Bert, and God knows I decline to have any
new
business with him, and my seminar starts in … three minutes, and so away I go.”

She caught her light. Mass Ave traffic had done what it does: come to a grudging, honking, crosswalk-blocking stop that was never more than six inches shy of gridlock.

“What I'd like to talk about,” I said to Katy Stoll's back as she strode away, “is pictures of Bert.”

“Old Chain Link Jesus? That train has left the station, my friend.”

“Not those,” I said. “Other pictures. Dirty pictures.”

It worked. She stopped, stood dead still, turned. The light changed before she could make it back to the sidewalk. A Toyota Echo with flower stickers on its doors honked at her.

“In here,” she said, pointing at a coffee place called Veni Vidi Beanie.

Sitting at a table not much bigger than a stool, I watched her order, then wait for, her VentiGrande-half-caff-Colombo-Mumbazo-latte-lighto-creamo. Or somesuch. I sipped a water. Its label said Mother Nature considered it an honor and a privilege to contribute this particular half-liter of purity to the cause of human enlightenment. A portion of the purchase price would be used to knit sweaters for tree-people.

Cambridge.

Katy Stoll reminded me of one of those brave actresses who hadn't set up a tab with a plastic surgeon the day she turned forty. Stoll was clearly a rich woman who took good care of herself—but she hadn't made a career of it. Longish brown hair parted (sort of) in the middle. Honest brown eyes, lips that were thin but not in a grim way, just-right crow's feet. I tried not to look at her rear end—I was pretty sure you could get arrested for that in Cambridge—but failed.

Like I said, she took good care of herself.

The crow's feet reminded me of Charlene.

I set that aside, focused on Katy as she sat.

“I assume that's the blackmail fodder?” she said, chinning at the manila envelope that just about covered the table. “And who are
you
?”

I said my name. “You jumped to blackmail pretty quick there. Care to say why?”

“Don't patronize me, Mr. Sax.”

“Conway.”

“I'm not a child,
Con
way. Five days before an election, what could dirty pictures, as you call them, indicate
other
than blackmail?”

She had me there. I tapped the envelope. “The photos are of Bert and somebody else.”

“Who?”

“Hard to say.”

“Because?”

“Whoever he's doing it with is…” I spread my arms, looked around the tiny coffee shop. “I could use a little more privacy to explain. What are you smiling at?”

“‘Doing it',” she said. “Very high school. Possibly endearing.”

She blew on her coffee, looked at me, smiling eyes framed by pretty crow's feet. There was a better term. Charlene had drilled me on it the first time I said something—something nice, I thought—about hers. What the hell was that term?

I remembered. “Laugh lines,” I said, snapping my fingers.

“Pardon me?”

“Never mind. How about that privacy? Aren't you curious?”

“Of course I am. But first, why are you inflicting this on me? You work for the campaign people, I assume? For Peter Krall? Did I not make it sufficiently clear that for the duration, I am the very model of a modern pol's ex-wife?”

“I needed to see if you were behind these.”

“I'm not.”

“I know. Had that figured out before we hit Mass Ave.”

“In that case, the question again rears its ugly head.
Why?
”

“Habit. You always check the ex.”

“Whose habit? You're not a policeman. Are you ex-police?”

“Hell no. The way I heard it, your divorce got ugly and stayed ugly.”

“Don't they all?”

“Yes,” I said. “They do.”

“Aha,” she said, toasting me, maybe looking at me a little closer. “Common ground. Tell me about yours.”

“Long time ago.”

“Children?”

“A boy. He stayed with her.”

“Of course he did.”

“It was the right move. I was a drunk.”

“Of course you were.”

“I'm not anymore.”

“Be still my heart,” she said. “Look. It's been years. I escaped an un-marriage and Bert's freaky mansion in Framingham. He was not ungenerous, I'll give him that. I'm not looking to squeeze additional shekels out of him, and I have no desire for the fifteen minutes of tabloid fame to which I am entitled. So whatever's going on in those photos has nothing to do with me.” She rose and swirled her coffee.

I thought I'd lost her.

I wondered how she'd taken control of things.

I liked her.

This Katy Stoll wasn't going to do a damn thing she didn't want to do.

“But,” she finally said, sighing, “curiosity killed the cat. Let's head back to my place. You'll find sufficient privacy there.”

Checking her watch while I rose and drained my water, she sighed. “Looks like no class for me.”

“That makes two of us,” I said.

Three minutes later, she keyed the door she'd banged her head on and led me up.

The dark staircase with two 90-degree corners didn't prepare me for her home: Nearly every wall, including load-bearing ones, had been ripped out, turning what looked from the outside like a vanilla colonial into a massive loft. Light came in from all sides. A black-iron spiral stairway led to what I assumed was her sleeping area.

“A complete gut job, courtesy of Bert,” she said, sitting on one of two identical white sofas that faced each other across a low table. “I rent the downstairs to two Syrians who pay a full year's rent each January first, bless their hearts.”

I was admiring the way the loads that used to be borne by walls had been transferred to a few handsome posts. I was also running numbers in my head.

“Million five for the building, another seven hundred for the gut job?” I said as I sat across from her, tossing the envelope on the table.

“I'm proud to say I have no idea. As I mentioned, Bert did not skimp.”

“Still doesn't,” I said. “You wouldn't believe what he's paying me to tag along with the campaign for a week.”

She sipped what was left of her coffee.

I said nothing.

The envelope sat between us.

A breeze caused a tree branch to scratch a window.

“Well,” Katy said.

“Well,” I said.

She leaned, unclasped, opened, sat back.

“Aha,” she said. “The, ah, the other party's face has been covered by a red dot.”

“It's more than that if you look close,” I said. “Underneath the dot, her whole head's been scratched away. No way in hell to figure out who she is.”

“But these are just prints,” Katy said. “What about the negatives? Oops, I date myself. Everything's digital now. What about the original images?”

“The way I hear it,” I said, “these are the only copies. Somebody snapped the shots and banged them out on a fresh-bought printer. Then they destroyed the camera and printer.”

“You'd be a piss-poor blackmailer to do it that way, wouldn't you?”

“Yes,” I said. “Piss poor.”

She caught me smiling. “If the woman in the photos can't be identified,” she said, “what do you want from me?”

“Her
face
can't be ID'd,” I said. “But do you see anything else that might help? In the room? Maybe in the woman's, ah, shape?”

She flipped through a half-dozen shots. “She's no spring chicken, is she? Bert would screw anything in a skirt, but he favored younger Implant Barbie types. And Lady Red Dot is certainly not one of those.”

“That's what I thought. Anything else?”

“Oy, look at Bert go, with his famous Elvis lip-curl. He put her through her paces, didn't he?”

“Like he was going for a record.”

She laughed. “The room is very generic, too.”

It sure was. The pictures hadn't been shot in a hotel room the way you might expect, but in somebody's home. In a bedroom, and a decent one—queen-size bed, two big shades-drawn windows, midsize flat-screen TV on the wall, highboy dresser in what looked like cherry—but not a master bedroom. It was too impersonal for that. It looked more like the primo guest bedroom in a rich man's place.

I said, “Any chance it's a bedroom at the Framingham house?”

“It's been so long…” Katy squinted. “No, I don't think so. Not from my time, anyway. We didn't have any bedrooms with windows laid out that way.”

“Look at the high angle. I think they were shot through a peephole up near the ceiling. Maybe a dummy light fixture.”

“Whatever you say.” Her face was red. I realized mine was, too.

“I can't help you,” Katy Stoll said.

“You did, though, in a way. Consider yourself eliminated as a suspect.”

“There it is again, the policeman talk. Which loops back to my question, which remains unanswered even now. Why are you here? What is your role?”

I said nothing.

“Are you one of Krall's functionaries? No, that's the wrong word. One of his operatives?”

“Hell no.” I finger-traced the envelope's clasp. I didn't meet Katy's eyes. Knew I shouldn't say much of anything to her. But wanted to. Decided to. “Somebody I knew got killed. I'm going to find out why. And by who.”

“And this person was … someone to you? Something?” Katy's voice was different. Kinder.

“She was something, all right.”

I rose faster than I meant to. Strode through the big open room and clattered down the stairs louder than I meant to.

*   *   *

Savvy Kane was the one I betrayed. The last one.

Sixteen years ago, it had taken James Sebelius four days to break me.

That was the cop's name, it turned out. He was with the Kentucky Bureau of Investigation, and he was dirty as hell. He told me these things in a county jail in the middle of the woods somewhere. “If I take you to KBI in Frankfort,” he said the second day, cleaning his fingernails with a four-inch knife, “we got ourselves an official investigation.” He said it
OH-ficial,
not bothering to look at me curled on the floor, shaking and sweating. “We do it this way instead here in my buddy's cozy old jail, what we got is a nice little chat, nice little just-us conversation.”

Sebelius hadn't spoken with me my first day in the cell. I spent the day thinking he was clever as hell, letting me get sick, letting me start a nice case of the DTs.

If he was clever, it was by accident: It turned out he'd spent the first day focusing on Savannah Kane.

Because she was his girlfriend.

Had I suspected that? Sure. But when he told me, with a big smile on his face, he got my attention. I paused in mid-wretch, stared his way. The stainless-steel toilet felt cool on my cheek.

“Old Savvy forgot to tell you 'bout that aspect, didn't she? Miz Savannah is my intended, or was, as our future is looking less rosy by the minute.”

Sebelius, who'd been sitting on the cell's only bunk, rose, stepped to me, dropped to a knee, wrinkled his nose against my smell. “I'm gonna fuck her up good, Sax. She's a tough one, don't respond to an honest beating in the hoped-for fashion. Well, let's just see how she responds to a nickel up in Pewee Valley.”

I said nothing. If you don't know that sweat can burn and freeze at the same time, you've never been sick the way I was sick.

He moved his face close to mine. “What you do, Sax, you blame the whole goddamn mess on her. The theft of my beloved Triumph, the big-ass drug deal that netted all that money and cocaine, the whole enchilada. We clean you up and buy you a suit. You testify, I ain't gonna lie and say you don't have to. But you'll be clear of Kentucky by the end of the month, which I believe both you and I would enjoy, and you will be a free … fucking … man. How 'bout it?”

I turned my head 90 degrees to get a whiff of the toilet bowl. That was all it took.

Then I turned to him again, finger-beckoned, waited for him to lean close.