The Whole Lie (31 page)

“Easily done. And third?”

“You know that check you wrote me the other day?”

Betsy's nose wrinkled.

“I want you to write another,” I said. “But I want you to times it by three.”

She looked at me maybe ten seconds, nose still wrinkled. “
Really,
Conway? That seems out of character. It seems dreary in an unexpected way.”

“I could explain,” I said, “But I won't. Maybe there's a better reason than the one you're guessing.”

She said nothing. Her eyes said I'd lost her.

Tough.

“Have your bagman … what did you call them, your courtiers?… get the check to me real soon.”

Betsy sighed. “Of course.”

“Now you go on to church like nothing happened here,” I said, “while I have a little talk with Shep.”

Seven seconds later I was out the right rear door, around the back of the SUV, and up to the driver's door. Shep was just grabbing its handle.

When you're two feet from the next governor, and you've got an audience of three wise-ass skateboarders and a sharp young cop, you don't just lay a man out with a Sunday punch. No matter how bad you want to.

“Hey-hey, Shep!” I said it loud for the cop's benefit—me and old Shep, happy members of Team Tinker. I extended my right hand. His eyes told me he knew something smelled rotten, but what were his choices? His boss was right there. He pulled his hand from the door handle and extended it. I gave him one of those strange half-shake/half-hugs that men do these days.

Then I did my level best to break Shep's hand.

I had size, leverage, and surprise on him. In two seconds, his eyes crossed with pain. In two more, his legs began to quiver. Still in half-hug posture with my left arm crooked around his neck, I grabbed his left ear. “I'll tear it off,” I said, twisting it some, whispering, a grin plastered to my face. “Climb in my truck or I swear I will tear it the fuck off.”

He wobbled toward my truck.

I drove slowly past storefronts until we were out of the cop's sightline. Then I punched the gas, wanting to keep Shep off balance. Thought he might put up a fight, but he was meek as we drove around back of the stores. I drove faster than I needed to on the service road, flew to the back of a Chinese restaurant that wasn't open yet, chirped the tires while stopping, threw the truck in park, ran around to Shep's door. Pulled him out, slapped him six or eight times. Open hands. Humiliating. Like he was a schoolboy and I was a nun. Like I couldn't be bothered to hit him with a closed fist. Like he wasn't man enough to merit that.

“Conway!” he said between slaps. “Conway! What? Why?”

I stopped, faked one last slap—his flinch made for bonus humiliation—pulled the envelope from my shirt. “Here's why.” I showed him just enough of one pic. “I found the peephole you set up in Tinker's house, champ. You're Employee of the Month.”

Anything I hadn't already slapped or squeezed or threatened out of Shep left him then. He deflated against the side of my truck. He was done.

“Oh,” he said.

It stank back here. Maybe there's something smells worse than a Chinese restaurant's Dumpster after a busy Saturday night. But most likely there isn't.

“Why?” I said.

“Seventeen years,” he said. “Everything I lost. Everything she's got. Want to know what Tinker said when my house burned down? When my family died?”

“No,” I said.

“She said—”

“I said no.”

“But she said—”

I did punch him then. In the gut. To shut him up.

I gave him half a minute to catch his breath. “The big question, Shep. Who?”

“Who what?”

“Who've you been working with? You're not ambitious enough to put something like this together. Sure, you set up the shooting blind for the dirty pics, but I'm betting it was mostly the maids used that room. A little fuck pad for the household help. Am I right?”

He said nothing.

Give her up, Shep. If Emily Saginaw had
anything
to do with Savvy's murder, dime her out now.

Frustration. No red mist, no sweet fury. Just mucho frustration.

I slapped him. “And you got your rocks off watching. That's how it started. Am I right?”

He said nothing.

I slapped him again. “Somebody convinced you to use your little peephole for profit, Shep, not just pervert kicks. Who?” Nothing. Slap.
“Who?”

I saw I'd lost him. You learn to recognize the signs. Shep had curled into himself like a high school sophomore arguing with his father. My little slaps weren't working. If I wanted to stick with the physical route, I was going to have to deliver pain in more serious ways.

Hell, I didn't want to do that.

Plan B.

I put hands on hips, tut-tutted, shook my head, half-laughed. “This is some one-sided loyalty. She didn't have any trouble giving
you
up. No trouble at all.”

“She who? I mean, who? Who do you think you mean?”

“Duh,” I said. “Emily Saginaw. She fingered you so fast her knuckles cracked.”

“Bullshit.” But his eyes gave away the game.

“No bullshit,” I said, then cemented things with a guess that wasn't really a guess. “She told me everything, starting when she first came around to the High Steppers meetings.”

“Oh,” he said. “Emily. Oh, Emily.”

“Just tell it. Tell your side of it.”

He was quiet for a full minute. His eyes went wet.

“It started with the meetings, like she told you,” Shep finally said. “Typical stuff. Going on commitments, having coffee. I told her I worked for Tinker, maybe made it seem like I was a big wheel. Maybe I was trying to impress her.” Pause. “Maybe I was trying to get in her pants, okay?”

“When was this?”

“Two years ago? Three?”

Huh. That didn't fit. That was ancient history. “Did you date her? Get in her pants, the way you were trying to?”

“Not then. She stopped coming around. All of us High Steppers knew she would. Emily comes across as buttoned-down, very together. When you get to know her, though, you see she's a dabbler. She's done meditation, witchcraft, any religion you can name, goofy diets, all that. AA was just a flavor of the month.”

Now it was making sense. “So you didn't see her at the High Steppers for a couple years. Then she started coming around again. And not long ago, right?”

He nodded. “She bumped into me one day. I know what you're thinking, Conway. I'm not stupid. I knew it wasn't coincidence that Emily Saginaw tracked me down. By then, everybody knew Ms. Tinker was running, and the lieutenant governor rumors about Saginaw were hot and heavy. It wasn't hard to figure out Emily had something planned. I knew she was using me some way or another, but…” He shrugged.

“You still wanted to get her in bed.”

“Sure.”

I felt sad all of a sudden. Sad and tired. Knew I had to keep pressing Shep, poor dumb Shep who lost his wife and kid and just wanted to get laid. Money and sex. The only motives. Toss a coin.

“What about your dirty little setup in Tinker's house? Your peeping Tom rig?”

“I, ah.”

“You told Emily about it.” I thought for a few seconds. “This is important,” I said. “Did you tell Emily about the peeping Tom business when you first knew her? Or just recently?”

“When I first knew her,” he said. “We were doing sort of a mini Fourth Step during a BS session one night. You know, the Fearless Moral Inventory. Talking about rotten things we'd done while we drank. I, ah, I may have mentioned the peephole then.”

“But you weren't drinking when you set it up. You've been sober a hell of a long time.”

“I, ah, may have fudged that detail.”

The smell back here made me want to puke.

Or maybe it wasn't the smell.

“You were wrong about one thing,” he finally said. “It wasn't the
staff
used that room for a fuck pad. It was Betsy Goddamn Tinker, the Bay State Sweetheart herself.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Shep nodded like a bobble-head doll. “After her husband passed, she had me furnish that room. The maids knew better than to go in there except to clean up after.”

“After what?”

“Miz Tinker brought guys home once in a while. I won't say they were rough trade, but they sure weren't the same crowd she went to the opera with, get my drift? They were younger guys, oily guys. Car salesmen, hustlers.”

I thought about that. Nodded. It fit. Shep wasn't the only one in the house looking to get laid. But the guys who caught Betsy Tinker's eye, the Bert Saginaws of the world, were guys she didn't want to share her Beacon Hill master bedroom with. What would her adoring fans think about these creeps? Not to mention the late senator, watching from blue-blood heaven?

“You wanted to impress Emily,” I said. “You spilled Betsy Tinker's dirty little habits. Emily's eyes lit up. It was her idea to get blackmail shots of Tinker.”

“Sure. Emily had—
has
—this dumb-ass idea her brother's gonna be president someday. Me, I don't see it, but I played along. The problem was, just when we started cooking up this plan, Miz Tinker stopped taking guys to bed.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “She got tired of banging thirty-five-year-old telemarketers? She hit menopause? Maybe she knew it was a risk she couldn't take once she was running for office?”

“I'm guessing Emily got impatient,” I said.

“And how. She said I was missing opportunities, said maybe I'd been lying to her all along. She even, ah, cut me off.”

“Cut you off?”

“You know,” Shep said. “By then we were sleeping together. Until she cut me off.”

I said nothing. Felt tired. Sex and money. The only two motives.

“So when my alarm finally went off—I set up a little sensor in the door to that room, it dials my cell when somebody opens it—I was good and ready to do my thing, believe you me. Hustled into the room next door, set up my ladder, pushed the heater vent out of the way. Then I saw who Miz Tinker was rolling around with, and I don't mind telling you I nearly shit myself. So'd Emily, when I showed her the pictures.”

“That should've wrecked her plan,” I said. “She couldn't blackmail Tinker without dragging down her brother.”

“We talked it over,” Shep said. “Emily decided to print two sets of the pics. One would have Saginaw's face scratched out, and the other would have Miz Tinker's face scratched out.”

“What was the second set for, the one with Tinker scratched out?”

“Emily said she needed to make sure her brother took her seriously.”

I nodded. “There's a hell of a brother-sister power play going on. She's been blackmailing him anonymously, you know.”

“I know.”

“But why?” I said. “You know Emily better than most. What's going on there?”

“You answered that already,” Shep said. “Bert never took Emily seriously, from the first time he called and asked her to trade her life for being his secretary. In his head, she's an assistant. In her head, she's a fifty-fifty partner who makes everything run.”

“Saginaw didn't know it was her til I told him, and even then he didn't want to believe it. He tried to fight me over it.”

“That was dumb,” Shep said.

I checked my watch. We'd been here awhile, and I was worried about the young cop from the parking lot. The way I read him, he'd take a casual swing around this service road before he took off.

It hit me then. “Wait a sec. You said there were two sets. What about
these
?” I tapped the envelope. “Nobody's face is scratched out.”

Shep looked like a kid busted by his mom with frosting on his mouth. “That set might've been my idea,” he said. “Just in case.”

“That's about what I expected,” I said. “What I mean, though, why'd you take them to Wilton?”

“Wilton who?”

Sigh. “Thomas Wilton, the guy Tinker's running against.”

“
What?
Didn't you find those pics in my room when you were snooping around?”

I gave him the forty-five-second explainer on what I'd found, how I'd never even made it into his room, how the pics had turned up this morning on Wilton's patio.

“I have
no fucking idea
about any of this,” Shep said. “I swear to God.”

“This line I keep hearing,” I said, “about the dirty pics. I keep hearing they were shot with a new camera and printed on a new printer. Then the hardware was destroyed. True?”

“Smashed it all myself out in Miz Tinker's alley,” he said, eager as hell. “With a five-pound hammer.”

“I'm sick of being lied to. First there was only the one copy. Then there were two. Now there are three. Are any more going to pop up?”

“Absolutely not, on my dear wife's headstone.”

I believed him. It was in his eyes, the openness of his face. Shep didn't know what the hell was going on with this third set, the no-red-dots set.

Neither did I.

My head hurt with possibilities. Combos, shakedowns, double-crosses, triple-crosses.

My cell buzzed. Sophie. I didn't pick up. I had things to do.

While I thought about Shep, he did me a favor and read my mind. “What are we going to do here?” he said.

“In about three minutes,” I said, “that cop from the parking lot is going to roll through. He had me marked as wrong the second he saw me. What I ought to do, what I
want
to do, is hand you over to that cop. I'd tell him to pass you to a state police detective name of Wu. You'd have a ball, Shep. You'd spend the next two weeks blabbing.”

“But?” Shep said, reading my tone, knowing there was hope.