The Whole Lie (5 page)

I was ready for that. “Maybe that's why my girlfriend holds the note on my business. Maybe that's not the smart way to play it when you're my age. And your parole has a ways yet to run. And everything you own fits in two dresser drawers.”

Did Randall buy it?

Maybe.

Almost.

Probably not.

But if he knew there was more to it than the money, he didn't press. He sighed instead. “What's your move, then?”

“Meet Saginaw tomorrow morning,” I said. “See what they want with me.”

“Tomorrow morning.”

I nodded.

“Which would be,” he said, and made a big show of counting on his fingers, “the third day of existence for your nascent business.”

“What's nascent?”

“The point is, you're doing it again.”

He wanted me to ask what I was doing again.

I didn't ask.

“What you're doing,” Randall said as if I'd asked, “you're misdirecting your energy. Lighting into a wild-goose chase just when you've got something worth concentrating on.”

I patted my back pocket. “This isn't worth concentrating on?”

“That check's bullshit. It's not what's driving you. Whatever's going on here, it's not about any check.” He sighed, slapped his thighs, nodded in Charlene's direction. “What's milady think about your plan?”

“Haven't told her yet.”

“Remind me not to be here when that conversation takes place.” He raised his voice. “Give me a sec, sweetie, I'll come set the table.”

Then Randall hopped to the front hall to fetch his foot.

*   *   *

A few hours later, with Randall gone and the dishes done, I took my second shower since getting home. No matter what coveralls and gloves you wear, deep grease goes with the job. I hadn't felt clean since Sunday night.

I was rinsing shampoo when I heard Charlene slide the curtain a foot and a half and climb in. She said nothing, but pressed her front to my back, wrapped arms around me, worked the Irish Spring from my hand, and took up where I'd left off.

I froze, guilt-racked, Savvy thoughts flooding. I stiffened, but not the way Charlene wanted. Instead I hunched, keeping myself from her as much as I could. She picked up on my hesitation, but not on its cause. “Not to worry,” Charlene said. “She's buried in homework and wearing earbuds to boot.”

“It's not that,” I said. “It's just … long day, so much to think about.”

“A grand opening deserves a grand reward,” she said, giggling as she reached around.

“No!” I said, and twisted away harder than I meant to. “Dammit, now I've got soap in my eyes.”

When I opened them again, she was gone.

Charlene Bollinger wobbled into her first Barnburners meeting a little over a decade ago. She was three weeks sober, junkie-pale, weighed maybe ninety. Wore black eye makeup, looked like a raccoon. Tap her on the shoulder, she'd jump a foot. Her daughters—Jesse was eight and Sophie two at the time—had been taken away by the state Department of Social Services.

By then, I had a fair amount of sobriety and had worked my way into the hard core of the Barnburners: an under-the-table group called the Meeting After the Meeting. After Charlene's first night, when the basement of Saint Anne's emptied but for us Meeting After the Meeting types, we all agreed the shaky, pimply gal who looked like she cut her own hair with a butter knife wouldn't last a month.

We were wrong. We were so damn wrong. Charlene Bollinger had strength most of us could only dream about.

Over the next few years, Charlene bootstrapped like crazy. She got sober, stayed sober, got fit, got her girls back. Got a job typing transcripts in Westborough District Court. At work, she saw cases being thrown out for lack of translators. Non-English-speaking bad guys, guilty as sin, were walking. Prosecutors were pissed. The problem was even worse in federal court.

Charlene launched a business out of her living room: transcription and translation. She approached any woman in court who was obviously foreign. Asked can you speak English even a little? Can you read? Can you type? How about your sisters? How about your friends?

After a frustrating start-up year, business took off. Federal prosecutors had all the work Charlene could handle. They paid slow, but they paid big. Taxpayer bucks: Never mind the cost, just get it done.

Around then, Charlene and I started dating. I learned later the match had looked inevitable to all the Barnburners. There was a $250 pool on when I'd finally get around to asking her out. I don't know who took the pot.

We clicked. We dated. We fell in love. Along the way, I learned more about her past. At her low point, Charlene had paid for crack and crank by posing for pictures, she said. That was when the state took her daughters. There had to be more, I knew. But I didn't pressure her to tell me. She didn't. That was okay. There were things about my bad years she didn't know. And doesn't.

We dated. A year passed. Barnburners started a new pool: our wedding date.

Nobody won that pot. I screwed things up. Couldn't stand the happiness, made things hard when they could have been easy. I put Charlene in a spot where she had to dump me or be a chump.

Charlene Bollinger was nobody's chump.

Free of me, she focused on business. With broadband Internet spiderwebbing around the world, her hiring pool went global. She found astonishing workers, overqualified but grateful for the gig, in Namibia, Botswana, Colombia, Panama, Peru, China, South Korea, Azerbaijan, Ukraine. She paid wages that made the employees, nearly all women, local celebrities.

People noticed. Buzz built. Charlene got pressure to go national, franchise, or sell. She chose instead to stay regional, focusing on New England. Reporters liked her single-mom-succeeds-on-own-terms story even without the addict angle, which she hid. Charlene was profiled in local business journals, then local TV, finally in national business mags.

We got back together a few years ago. Since then we've had ups and downs, togethers and aparts. Truth be told, it didn't feel the same, even though I finally moved in a while back. The first time around, we were an
us,
a pair rolling toward marriage. It would have been my second, her first. Sophie and Jesse have different fathers. I was pretty sure Charlene had no idea who those fathers were, but that was one of the things I hadn't asked and she hadn't told.

Things were different in Conway and Charlene Take Two because after I abused her trust during Take One, she'd built herself a good solid shell.

Charlene Bollinger had rough luck with men when she was a junkie. I'd taught her even sober men could be two-timing assholes. If she had a hair trigger for Savannah Kanes showing up at the shop, there was only one jerk to blame.

CHAPTER SIX

“Tell me you're joking, Conway Sax,” Charlene said the next morning, cinching the purple towel that ran from her armpits to her thighs. It matched the one she wore turban-style on her head. “I want
so badly
for you to be joking.” Two towels for clothes, eight inches shorter than me, standing at her dressing table with little fists on hips—and she made me nervous.

“Savvy's a Barnburner who needs help.”

“Ha! She's a slut who took off when she got knocked up by God knows who.”

Huh. I hadn't said anything about that. Hell, I hadn't known myself. “You knew she was pregnant?”

Charlene rolled her eyes and glared.

“Everybody knew but me?” I said.

“Of course.”

I decided to see how much she really knew. “Who knocked her up?”

She shrugged. “Who has time to make a list that long? A bunch of us Barnburners assumed it was you.” Her eyes bored in. “Was it?”

“No.”

“But you're going to drop everything on
this
day, the third day of your grand opening week, to run around helping poor little Savvy.”

“I guess I am.”

“And you're not even helping her, really. You're helping some …
politician.
” Her lip curled. Charlene's a small-business owner, feels the same way I do about politicians: Never seen one do anything useful. “What would a shrink say about all this, Conway?”

“That I'd be nuts to turn down a fat check for easy work.”

“We've got all the money we need. I've got all the money we need.”

“
You've
got all the money.”

“A
ha
!” she said. “So that's it. We talked all this through.”

I said nothing.

We stood there maybe fifteen seconds. Finally Charlene sighed. “I'll call Floriano. We'll cover for you. I always had a feeling he was going to be the key player in this enterprise.” She turned to the mirror and looked at herself until I left.

*   *   *

The Escutcheon Hotel was in Cambridge on Memorial Drive, right across the Charles River from Boston. As I pulled in, I saw the joint was a construction beehive: Trucks, trailers, and heavy equipment crammed into the tight parking lot, guys in orange vests staring up at a ten-story crane, cops drinking coffee and shooting the shit with the orange-vest guys. It looked like they'd put up an office building next to an existing hotel and were tying the two together.

In the hotel lobby, construction chaos disappeared. Quiet, calm. Slate floors, big paintings of blobs. Two security guys in blue blazers, the biggest Middle Eastern dudes I'd ever seen. The setup was almost enough to make me self-conscious about my autumn uniform: Red Wing boots, jeans, flannel shirt.

Almost.

“Help you, sir?” One of the security dudes flowed to me. Polite smile, quiet voice—but he put himself between me and the elevators. And stayed there.

I let him funnel me to the front desk, then said why I'd come, using Savvy's name. A man in a turban who looked like he'd been tried by a thousand con artists and hadn't been taken yet pushed a button, talked into a phone, and said one word to the security dude: “Penthouse.”

The word changed everything. As he trotted, half-bowing, across the lobby, the security dude just about offered to give me a piggyback up the stairs. He could've done it, and I'm not small. In the elevator, he used a key card to get me going. He was still bowing and apologizing when the doors closed.

When they opened, Savannah Kane stood before me in a suite you could use for touch football. She wore no makeup, a white terry robe that said
ESCUTCHEON
on the left breast, white slippers with elaborate
E
s.

She said nothing. She stepped to me, kissed me hard, kissed me til my back thunked the closed doors of the elevator.

She was naked beneath the robe.

I started to melt into it. Into her, the room, the robe, the whole deal.

Then something clicked and I bucked her away, wiped my mouth. “Chrissake, Savvy.”

“Look who's here,” she said. “Vinnie Virtue. What the hell, lover?”

She moved in for another kiss.

I let her, dammit.

And remembered her ways, her bedroom trance. Something had happened there. To her, to me, to both of us. It was always dark enough, but not too. Candles, incense, Old Golds.

She spun us a 180, and then she was kissing me across the suite's white carpet, her hands shoved down the pockets of my pants. We staggered, our height difference making a wipeout inevitable as I tried to crouch and Savvy walked tiptoe, and finally I went over backward, pulling her with me to the bed.

The robe was mostly off now. The bed was the softest one I'd ever been on. The ceiling had a turquoise tapestry tacked to it—an old Savvy habit, she took some gypsy wherever she went. She was more or less naked, and working to get me there, too. It was nice. It was easy.

It was wrong.

Something inside me was grinding like a dump truck's transmission.

There was one way to make the grinding stop.

She must have sensed hesitation, because she kissed me in a way I'd long forgotten. A way I'd never forget.

Oh boy.

Oh hell.

I sighed. Savvy had my shirt unbuttoned. She was tugging at my belt.

Hell.

I sighed again and jackknifed until I was sitting. Savvy thought this was good.

But only for a second or two. I reached, got one hand high on her chest and one beneath her rump, and tossed her over my shoulder to the other side of the massive bed.

“Hey!” she said while I rose, buttoned my shirt, squared myself away.

“Charlene,” I said. “And Saginaw, for that matter.”

“Jesus!” she said, and unleashed some foul mouth while I found the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face.

When I came out, she wasn't on the bed. I followed my ears, found her watching a man set up a room-service cart in the suite's living room.

“Tip Marco,” Savvy said to me. It was Marco's lucky day: All I had was twenties. He bowed his way back to the elevator.

“Delicious delicious delicious,” she said, dropping silver covers willy-nilly on the rug to display chicken fingers, a bacon burger, a stack of pancakes. “Mine mine mine.”

Memories came at me, things that used to drive me nuts. She ate like a seven-year-old, always had. Cheeseburgers and chicken fingers at quarter of nine. She was a pig, the most careless person I'd ever known—she admitted part of the reason she loved hotels was that not only did the maids have to clean up after you, they weren't allowed to give you dirty looks while they did it.

“Why am I here, Savvy? If it's just to have you jump me, I'm flattered but I'll pass. I'll tear up Saginaw's check and split.”

“Delicious,” she said, spinning to me in the terry robe, popping a french fry in my mouth. “That will be my word of the day. As far as the check goes, don't flatter yourself, big boy.”

I had to laugh at that. Plucked a glass of ice water from the cart, sat in a sofa that felt like a billion feathers.