“Probably hired me. A man named Ossa James employs the woman posing as your wife. Ossa is a paid political adviser to Stoneman.”
Acres put his right hand up with the palm confronting his face; then he rubbed the center of the palm with the fingers of his left hand.
“I don’t understand,” the congressman said. “Why would they have you bring the evidence to me instead of making it public? Why would they allow you to identify them?”
“The dollar is my master, but I ain’t no slave,” I replied. It was something my father used to say. “When I realized that the woman who hired me wasn’t your wife I got kinda mad. I once had a woman lie about me and I didn’t like it one bit.”
Acres put both his palms flat on the table.
“Is this man bothering you?” a burly man asked Bob. By his white uniform I thought that maybe he was a cook. The authoritative way he asked the question meant that he was either a thug or a member of the Orelli clan.
“No, Chris, this is an aide of another member of Congress come to deliver a message.”
Chris turned his grizzled gaze upon me. He had more muscle but I probably had better training. I had a license to carry too, but I usually left the hardware at home, or in the trunk of my Bianchina; this because of the memory of that iron rod in my calloused hand.
After the self-appointed bodyguard left, Acres asked, “So what do you want? And what’s your name?”
“Whoever told you about me didn’t give a name?”
“No. She just said that there was a detective following me.”
She.
“I don’t need a name for this talk, Congressman Acres. And what I want is not a physical thing.”
“I will not resign,” he said.
“Look, man, I’m a Democrat and an ex-cop. Three people in a motel room in New Jersey don’t mean a thing to a cop, and you bein’ a right-winger doesn’t mean much either. I’m here because a halfway-decent detective could watch you, follow you, and get pictures like those without even having to work hard at finding a way in.
“I figure it like this—either you want to get caught or you’re just so hungry for it you kind of lose your mind sometimes. If it’s the first I know a good therapist. If it’s the second I know a woman named Mimi Lord. For a competitive rate she will set up rendezvous that Sherlock Holmes could not pierce.”
“That’s it?” Bob asked when I didn’t continue.
“I’ll call the second Cindy and tell her I couldn’t find anything. They’ve already paid me for half the work. I’ll tell her she’s wasting her money, that she doesn’t need to pay the rest. But you have to do something for me.”
“How much?”
“Not money. I need to know who told you about me.”
Acres had walnut eyes to go with the golden sports jacket he wore that day. Those orbs revealed the calculating heart of the debauched representative.
It came to me that detectives and politicians were somewhat similar. We dealt in passion while pretending to be objective, if not without sin.
“I don’t know a name. Whoever it was called the office. She told the switchboard operator that she was my girlfriend. That got her to my aide. She told her that she knew about a detective investigating me when I was in New York. Our system captured the number. I could send it to you from my office.”
I liked him, even when he was trying to find my identity.
“Sure,” I said. “Send it to [email protected].”
“What’s that?” he asked while writing down the e-mail.
“My electronic address,” I said, and smiled. “Tell me, Congressman, why did you go to that motel when you knew there was a detective on you?”
He looked down and then up. He shook his head and gave me the weakest smile.
“You said her name was Mimi Lord?” he asked.
I wrote down the number on a small piece of paper from a notepad I carried. Tearing out the leaf, I handed it to him.
“She’ll take care of you,” I said, and then I stood.
“What about those pictures?”
“What about ’em?”
“What will you do with them?”
“Erase them from my tablet and forget them after that.”
“How can I be sure?” he asked, reminding me of a very old popular song.
“There’s no reason for me to hurt you, Congressman. If I wanted to do that I’d either give these to Stoneman or double the price on you.”
“You said you were a Democrat,” he suggested. “Maybe you don’t like my politics.”
“Ever since Reagan busted the unions, both sides of Congress have become lackeys to the rich. They all get made, paid, and laid out of the picked pockets of men like me.”
Acres frowned a bit. Maybe he felt insulted, maybe not. At any rate he nodded at me and I returned the gesture.
I left Gucci’s Diner feeling better than I had in quite some time.
6.
I was back in the office at a few minutes past three. My good mood had subsided in equal proportion to the memory of solitary confinement and the ramifications of Beatrice Summers’s letter.
A letter.
Who sent letters anymore? The unlined paper was tinged pink and the ink was peacock blue. The writing was even and without blobs or cross-outs. There were no misspellings, and the written lines were straight and parallel to the top and bottom of the machine-cut sheet.
All these details said something. There was intention behind that letter. One or more rough drafts were written down somewhere else and then copied onto the good stationery with a sheet of bold lines beneath it to make the lines even; onward, Christian soldiers.
The NYPD database system, which I had access to because of Patrolman Henri Tourneau, had no Adamo Cortez working anywhere in the department. The Private Investigator’s Database, which I paid eighteen hundred dollars a year for, told me that for the past nine years Beatrice Summers had lived in Odumville Township, outside of Saint Paul.
I wondered what the former Nathali imagined when she thought of God or what the deity might have envisioned when considering his sinful, repentant acolyte.
For my part, whenever I closed my eyes I was in that lightless cell again. It smelled of piss and sweat. Fluttering insects flew through the darkness. Men groaned and complained beyond the sweating metal door of my detention.
A silver bell sounded.
Opening my eyes, I was looking out the second-floor window onto Montague Street again. It was November, but the cold hadn’t set in yet. The sun was shining brightly. A woman stopped across the street and, looking up, saw me.
The silver bell sounded again and I roused myself, turning away from the glare of the happenstance pedestrian. I ambled into the receptionist’s room, which my daughter occupied every day after school.
The front door to the office was locked, of course. I only ever felt secure behind locked doors.
The electronic eye above the hall-side doorsill transmitted an image to the small monitor panel on the wall. It was a slender young white woman, dressed in blues and whites. Her dress was only vaguely businesslike. She was carrying a brown leather briefcase and pulling a carry-on gray fabric travel bag.
Looking up at the lens, she had the beauty of youth…and the sorrow too.
“Who is it?” I said into the speaker system.
“Willa Portman. Is this the detective Joe Oliver?”
I pulled the door open and she gasped as if something shocking had happened.
“We had a four o’clock, right?” I said.
“Y-yes. I’m a few minutes early.”
“I have a friend who always tells me that whenever he gets there he’s right on time.”
She smiled and, pulling the wheeled travel bag, walked into the office.
“Right this way,” I said, gesturing toward my private door.
“Where’s Aja?” my prospective client asked.
“She’s a high school student, should be in any minute.”
Willa gave me a worried look but then went through the door to my office.
My workplace is a fairly small room with a high white plaster ceiling and one huge floor-to-ceiling window. The walls are brick and the floor dark wood. My desk is an ash table with no drawers. I don’t keep supplies or records in my office; Aja’s much larger room is the repository for files and office materials.