“Well,” she said with a smile of her own. “Maybe you’re right. Coffee does sound nice.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a card.
As he reached for the card, the sleeve of his white shirt extended from the cardigan. A French cuff. She held on to the card a few seconds to take a better look. A round silver cuff link. And was that a spot on the cuff link? Dark. Like a drop of something. Something like blood. She looked up at his face, at the deranged eyebrows and the lidded eyes that were hiding everything but their dementia. In a strange way, she wanted to hug him like a lost child even as she wondered where he was in such a hurry to get to.
Still holding on to the card, she stared into his eyes and said, “What’s your brother’s name, Bobby?”
He licked his lips. “Eugene.”
“Eugene Spangler of Des Moines, Iowa.”
“He’s in a home now, a hospice, preparing for his death. They overcook the green beans.”
“Please give Eugene my best wishes,” she said before letting go of the card.
“I’ll do that . . .” He glanced at the card, looked back up at her. “Lucia.”
“Give me a call when you get back,” she said in a voice as breathless as Marilyn Monroe’s. “I’ll be waiting.”
CHAPTER 45
A SENATOR WALKS INTO A BAR.
The amazing sight of Senator Francis Truscott IV walking into a joint like Bubba’s seemed so surreal to Kyle that it could only be the setup of a joke.
A senator walks into a bar. He orders ten martinis lined up in a row. “What’s the occasion?” says the bartender. “I’m celebrating,” says the senator. “I just raised a million dollars for my reelection campaign.”
Truscott, a tall man in his late forties, wore a pair of jeans, a leather jacket, and a baseball cap, trying hard to hide his senatoricity. But the jeans were pressed, and the leather of the jacket was butter soft, and it was a Phillies cap he was wearing, which was like a sign saying not from here. And of course there was the gaunt and severe face, chiseled by the gads of press coverage he had garnered over the years into something like a monument.
“Congratulations,” says the bartender as he lines up eleven martinis side by side. “Have another on the house.” “No thanks,” says the senator. “If ten don’t wipe out the taste of all the dick I’ve been sucking, I don’t think eleven will either.”
Or something like that.
Kyle was waiting for the senator in a booth, alone. But not entirely alone. There was Skitch at the bar, throwing dice with Old Tommy Trapp while keeping an eye on things. And Kat was parked in a car across the street, ready to call the police if something looked fishy. And there was Bubba Jr. himself, unhappy as hell that Kyle had volunteered his place for the meeting, but behind the bar all the same, with his shotgun oiled and loaded. They were all there just in case the senator had ideas of being a bit too clever.
And of course when did a senator ever not think himself a bit too clever?
The senator walked into the bar with a hesitant step, like a tenderfoot walking into a Wild West saloon, ready to duck if a spittoon were hurled at his head. While he looked around, Bubba and Skitch made an effort not to stare, but Old Tommy Trapp couldn’t help himself.
“Pussy,” said Old Tommy, in a whisper loud enough to have been heard in Cleveland.
Kyle raised a hand and nodded Truscott over to his booth. The senator swiveled his head guiltily, before slipping into the bench seat across from Kyle.
“Are you Kyle?”
Kyle nodded.
“Pleased to meet you, Kyle,” said the senator, smiling and holding out his hand as if the bar were a campaign stop. “I knew your father.”
Kyle looked at the proffered hand for a moment. It was the hand that had burned down his mother’s house. It was the hand that had tried to kill his father, sending him into exile and Kyle’s life into a tailspin. That it had also raped Colleen O’Malley and killed both her and Laszlo Toth were other, less personal reasons to let the hand hang there, its offer of reciprocal respect unreciprocated. “Can we get to it?” said Kyle.
“A man of purpose, is that it? Not unlike your father in that. Though not as I expected. Malcolm said you were—how did he put it?—‘a slacker dude.’ ”
“I slack with purpose, too,” said Kyle. “You k now that my mother’s house was burned down just two nights ago.”
“No, I didn’t. I’m sorry.” Pause, the fake political concern in his eyes replaced quickly with real concern, maybe even a touch of fear. “Wait, not that thing in Havertown with the fireworks?”
“That’s the one.”
“My gosh, I didn’t know it was yours.”
“Tell me about it,” said Kyle. “Before it burned down around me—”
“You were inside?”
“Can we not play our little games?” said Kyle. “The ‘My gosh’ and the ‘I didn’t know’? Before you set the fire—”
“You have it wrong,” said the senator, interrupting him calmly. “I didn’t set any fire, or have any fire set. I wasn’t involved, and I’m sorry about what happened. Was it arson? Are you sure? The papers said it might have been an accident. That maybe there was a cache of fireworks hidden in the property.”
“It wasn’t an accident. Check it out if you want to be sure. But what I’m trying to say is that before the fire I found an old file cabinet of my father’s hidden behind some drywall in the basement. And in the cabinet I found the file. The one you’ve been running from most of your life.”
“You mentioned the O’Malley file to Malcolm. Is that what you’re referring to?”
“That’s right. The one that shows conclusively that you raped the O’Malley girl when you were eighteen.”
Tr uscot t w inced.
“The one with her notarized affidavit inside,” said Kyle. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To make the file disappear?”
“No, actually.”
Kyle tilted his head. “It’s not?”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you, Kyle, but you can keep the file. Do whatever you want with it.”
Kyle examined the senator carefully, trying to find the trick. Because there had to be a trick. All the uproar and death over the file had to be coming from this one powerful man. So his nonchalance had to be a trick. But there was something in the senator’s face, a sort of rueful weariness that seemed to belie the possibility that any confidence game was going on. It was as if he really didn’t care.
“You don’t want the O’Malley file?”