The Whole Lie (29 page)

“And until you're satisfied you've figured out the blackmail, you can't be satisfied you've truly figured out the murder.”

“Yup.”

“Any chance, any chance at all, you can view this as a job well done, thank God you're not in prison, and walk away?”

I stared at him.

“Sorry,” Randall said. “Dumb question.”

The other thing Randall and I had teased out—something that had bugged me, something even Katy Stoll had commented on—was Saginaw's confidence there was one copy and one copy only of the shots that could torpedo his career. “Why does he think that?” Randall had said.

“I got the vibe he'd been in contact with the blackmailer,” I said. “Had gotten the info firsthand.”

“Yes, but who believes a blackmailer?”

It was a good point, and the reason I was headed to Saginaw's place early. The idea was to get him alone before the day turned hectic, press him for more info on the blackmailer.

But before I even cleared downtown Framingham, my plan got kicked in the teeth. I was angling southeast when something caught my eye. Looked left, saw flashing headlights in a convenience store parking lot. Kept moving …

… had that been a black Crown Vic?

Sighed, spun a 180, pulled into the lot.

Vic Lacross.

He'd backed into a slot. I pulled in, put us window to window, rolled mine down. Chilly morning: I watched his breath as he spoke.

“Glad you spotted me,” Lacross said. “I put myself between Saginaw's house and where I hoped you were. We shoulda swapped cell numbers.”

We took care of that. I said, “What do you want?”

“I
told
you my guy, Wilton, wants no part of winning this thing. Didn't I?”

“Sure.”

“You maybe didn't believe me.”

I said nothing.

“I take no offense,” Lacross said, plucking something from his passenger seat. “Switch us around and you tell me the same thing about your team, I would've thought
you
were full of shit.”

I said nothing.

“Wilton's an early riser,” Lacross said. “A crack-of-dawn guy. Likes to watch the sun rise over his three-million-dollar slice of Scituate Harbor.” He held up a brown envelope, nine inches by twelve. “When he toddled out to his patio this morning, he found this on his favorite chair.”

He passed the envelope over.

I rested it on my steering wheel.

I undid the cheapo clasp.

I reached. I pulled. I flipped.

I looked.

At another copy of the dirty pictures.

“I'm on my way to see Saginaw about these,” I said. “He swore there was just the one copy. Guess he was wrong.”

Then I looked again.

My mouth fell open.

I looked
again
, held a shot close to my face, squinted, made sure. If I'd had a jeweler's loupe, I would've held it over the picture.

There was no red dot.

I flipped.

There were no red dots at all.

Just a woman's face.

My mouth stayed open.

“It's not a Photoshop,” Lacross said. “What do you think, uh?”

I couldn't stop looking.

You could see Saginaw's costar clear as day.

There was no doubt.

“When Wilton looked inside,” Lacross said, “he didn't know whether to shit or wind his watch. Woke me up, told me to haul ass down there.”

“Nobody else has seen these?”

“Not a soul. He gave 'em the hot-potato treatment. Said he didn't care what I did with 'em, but he never wanted to see 'em again or hear about anybody who did.
Now
do you believe Wilton doesn't want to win this thing?”

I looked at the pics again.

And believed.

“Holy shit,” I said.

“Have a nice day,” Lacross said.

He rolled up his window and drove away, leaving me to goggle at pictures of two adults banging away like barnyard animals.

Bert Saginaw.

And Betsy Tinker.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

It was a lot to think about. It could overwhelm me if I let it, cause me to lock up, keep me from doing anything productive. Analysis paralysis, Randall called it.

But analyzing things to death had never been my problem—Randall liked to point that out, too, the little bastard—so I kept moving.

Saginaw's place felt like a funeral home. The pollster flunkies huddled in a den, whispering to each other and pointing at their laptops.

“Like a wake in here,” I said when Emily clacked around a corner in a sensible tan pantsuit, laptop beneath one arm.

“There's a reason for that.” She plucked a
Globe
from a hall table, held it to her chest. Big-ass headline:

GOVERNOR'S RACE NOW VIRTUAL TIE

Below:

New poll shows Wilton within margin of error; Tinker campaign denies 11
th
-hour shake-up

“Ouch,” I said. There was another headline,
DEBATE DEBACLE
or somesuch, but she set down the paper before I got much of a look.

“And that's our friendliest poll. The others are
really
ugly. Did you see the undebate last night?”

“The hell's an undebate?”

“I'll show you, but fair warning: Bert's on the warpath. Pete Krall is on the hot seat, and I advise you not to let him off it.”

I wondered what she was talking about while she led me up the stairs, down the hall, into an office suite.

Saginaw: campaign-ready in a charcoal suit, light-blue shirt, red tie. He had tossed the suit's jacket across a chair, had rolled up his shirtsleeves. He kept firing a clicker at a flat-screen across the room like he was trying to shoot a hole in it. All the while, he fired commentary too—at Krall, who sat on the couch making no facial expression at all.

Saginaw fast-forwarded. “Here's a softball I could've hit out of the park …
if I'd been there!
” Fast-forward. “And here's where I would have hammered this clown on his Beacon Hill lobbying record …
if I'd fucking well been there!
” Fast-forward. “And here we have the crowning glory, the moment of pure gold … what say we watch it frame by frame,
numbnuts
? With popcorn, extra butter?”

By then, Saginaw was shrieking. A little drool sagged from one corner of his mouth.

I said, “You want to calm down there, Bert? And maybe tell me what's going on?”

The gratitude in Krall's eyes almost made me feel bad for him.

Almost.

The way Saginaw spun told me he hadn't even known Emily and I were there. “Finally,” he said, “someone with a set of balls, someone who's not just cruising til his next paycheck.” He pointed at Krall. “And last, I might add! Win, lose, or draw, Pete, you have fucked us royally. Your next gig will be with some crackpot running for selectman in Gill. I will see to it personally, boyo.”

Saginaw faded as he spoke, energy draining in a way you could truly see. He panted a few seconds, flung the clicker to the floor, and stomped from the room.

I said, “Fill me in.”

Krall gulped. All blood had drained from his face. He stood and tried his confident college-swimmer pose, hands on narrow hips, but it wasn't working—he'd been unmanned. “I, ah,” he said. “I may have made a mistake last night.”

“The Jesus pictures turned Bert into a liability on the campaign trail,” Emily said. “Pete made the call to pull him back as of yesterday.”

“That doesn't seem like a bad idea.”

“It was,” she said without looking at Krall. “Several of us tried to tell him so.” She plucked the clicker from the floor, aimed, fired. “You see, the one and only debate between the lieutenant governor candidates was supposed to be last night.”

“I decided not to send him,” Krall said. “I used the old scheduling-conflicts excuse.”

“Thus this,” Emily said, hitting play.

“Oh,” I said.

We watched a few seconds more.

“Oh damn,” I said.

Smallish stage. One podium on each side, both tagged
SUFFOLK UNIVERSITY
. At one podium: a soft, balding guy I'd never seen before, speaking into his microphone. He must be the other lieutenant governor candidate, Wilton's running mate.

Behind the stage-right podium: a cardboard cutout, life-size, of Bert Saginaw. Wearing a Saginaw Fence Co. polo shirt, a half-sneer on his face.

Emily hit the volume, and after a minute or two I figured out what Team Wilton had done. They'd made a comedy routine out of Saginaw's no-show. The opponent would ask a reasonable-sounding question, then cock his ear like he was waiting for Saginaw to answer. After a while, he would mug for the audience, who were eating it up, before rattling off his own position on the question.

“This was on
TV
?” I said.

“When Bert bowed out,” Krall said, “Wilton's folks swooped in, bought the time slot, and said they were ready for a debate, as promised. I knew then we were screwed.”

We watched some more. Every few questions, a couple of flunkies would come on stage, carry off the life-size cutout of Saginaw—and return with another that was even less flattering. The students would howl.

“Piece de resistance
,
” Emily said after a few minutes, clicker-jockeying.

“Oh no,” I said, knowing what was coming.

“Oh yes,” she said.

It came, to laughter and applause that shook the camera: Saginaw as Chain Link Jesus. The loin cloth, the sinewy muscles, the torqued torso, the tilted, tragic face. Propped behind the podium.

Hoots. Shrieks of laughter. The auditorium shook.

Krall heel-rubbed his eyes. “Bert watched all night. Made me sit here the whole time.”

“I need to talk with him,” I said.

“No way,” Emily said. “He needs to regroup. Big day today.”

“Where is he?”

Neither of them spoke.

“I'll find him,” I said, and left. Then stepped back into the room, grabbed Saginaw's jacket, and left again.

*   *   *

It took a while. I walked both wings of the ridiculous house, finally spotting him through a window. He sat on a tiny patio outside a study. I stepped through the door.

Saginaw had his face turned to catch thin sunlight. His arms were folded across his chest. He didn't open his eyes, didn't turn his head.

“Cold day,” I said. “And you stomped out of the room in a huff. Then you realized you'd left your jacket, but after that exit you were damned if you were gonna go back in.” I soft-tossed the jacket so it landed on his chest. Then I scraped a wrought-iron chair across flagstone and sat next to him.

Saginaw still hadn't opened his eyes. But he was smiling now. “Good guess about the jacket,” he said. “Cold out here.” The smile grew broad, became a chuckle as he slipped his arms through the sleeves. “It's hard getting a good mad on.”

“It's a young man's game,” I said. The words came to my head, flashed:
In cold blood
.

“Remind me why I wanted to be governor,” he said.

“
Lieutenant
governor.”

“Sure. What the hell am I supposed to do now, Sax? After the humiliation last night?”

“You do what everybody does. You get past it. You put on your coat, make your speeches, shake a few hands.” I scraped my chair closer to his, looked around some, pulled the folder that'd been tucked between my T-shirt and my flannel shirt. “But first, you need to look at these.”

“Those what I think they are?”

“You tell me.”

As it had with me, it took him a half-beat to realize he could see Betsy Tinker's face. “Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy shit.” He whispered it. “They were supposed to … she said…”

Bingo.
She
said. I jumped on it. “What did Emily say?”

“They told her they'd made only the single copy. That they snapped the pics, printed 'em, destroyed the camera and printer. Just like that.”

“You believed her.”

“We believed
them
, you mean.”

“Still haven't put it together?”

“The hell is
that
crack supposed to mean?”

“Your sister's the blackmailer, Saginaw.”

He moved quick, I'll give him that. Hit me with a decent right that rocked my chair. Followed with his body, trying to swarm me to my back on the patio. And he damn near did it, and then maybe he could've done a little damage.

Instead: My chair back wedged against the heavy wrought-iron table, which scraped but didn't move far. So as Saginaw tried to get an arm-bar across my throat, all I had to do was reach up and squeeze his.

The move cut both his air and his blood. His eyes went big. The fight went out of him.

Still holding, I stood. I rattled his throat to get his attention, eye-locked him. “Knock it off, you dumb fuck. There are a bunch of people around here I want to hurt. You're not one of them.”

Saginaw relaxed. Didn't have much choice.

We righted our chairs. We sat as if nothing had happened.

“Tell me what you think you know,” he said, rubbing his Adam's apple.

“The blackmailers have been dealing with Emily all along, right? Everything you told me you got from her?”

“Yeah.”

“Thought so,” I said. “Something about the amount of detail, and how sure you were that there was just the one set. Emily sold you that bullshit, didn't she?”

“Come on—”

“
Think!
She did, didn't she?”

Saginaw thought.

Then nodded. “She made it sound like a done deal. But why?”

“Blackmail one-oh-one,” I said. “The mark needs to believe he can make it go away with one big payout.”

“That's not what I mean.
Why?
What's mine is hers.” He spread his arms. “All of it. I'd do anything for Em. I do
every
thing for her.”