“Do you?” I asked.
She angled her head. “What you did for Hector was plain for all to see. And Charlie, whatever else you might say about him, is cautious. He is very slow to trust. The fact that he trusts you tells me a lot.”
“Okay, so the governor’s going to win and I get a gold star.”
She still hadn’t reached her point. But I sensed she was about to, and I thought I knew what it was.
“I want you to work for me,” she said.
I didn’t know what that meant. My job was with the Procurement and Construction Board and, in a very real sense, with Charlie Cimino. It was a role that suited the FBI’s purposes. What would I be doing working for the governor’s chief of staff?
“Carlton Snow didn’t hire me to be his chief of staff,” she said. “He hired me to get elected to a full term. Everything I do is about that. I’m his chief of staff, but I’m also running the campaign. Do you-do you know anything about campaigns?”
“No,” I conceded.
She sighed. “I’m chief of staff to make sure that Carl doesn’t step on himself. I don’t do anything unless it involves the campaign in some way. I don’t worry about personnel issues or anything technical. I just make sure his policies are right. Otherwise, I’m on the campaign.”
“Okay, and I just told you I don’t know anything about campaigns.”
She shook her head. “I don’t need you for that. I need you to make sure that everything we do receives a lawyer’s blessing.”
Receives a lawyer’s blessing. Lovely, how she put that. Not legal.
“You must have people who do that,” I said.
She made a face. “We have campaign lawyers, obviously. People who can navigate the campaign finance laws. But on the state side? Government work? No, it hasn’t been a priority. Half the people in the office are from Governor Trotter’s staff. Republicans. Remember, Carl got thrown into this job on a week’s notice.”
I hadn’t thought about that. You have an entire staff for the governor, and then mid-term, the governor resigns and the lieutenant governor jumps in. He hadn’t been in office even a full year yet. He was probably stuck with a lot of Langdon Trotter’s people.
“Besides,” she said, “I need someone more. . talented.”
More creative, she meant. More ethically flexible. Better able to take something illegal and give it the appearance of legality. Apparently, I’d come highly recommended in that regard. Quite the name I was making for myself.
“You and Charlie-you can still work with him, but I would take priority.”
I threw her words back at her. “You’d do well to be clear with him on that point.”
“Don’t worry about what I tell Charlie Cimino,” she snapped. “You worry about what I tell you.”
Sometimes I smile when I’m not pleased. This was one of those times. “I don’t recall accepting the offer to work for you. So you might want to take caution in your tone.”
She raised her chin and stared long and hard at me. “Charlie mentioned the attitude.”
“Did he? Good.”
“How long do I have to wait before you say yes?”
Now I was smiling because I admired her brass. “And why am I going to say yes, Madison?”
“You’re going to say yes,” she said, gathering her purse, “because Governor Carlton Snow will make you rich and powerful.”
She had no idea what she was doing. She didn’t know what I represented. She didn’t realize that she was inviting the federal government into the inner circle of the governor’s office.
She slipped a card out of her purse and left it on the bed. “Oh, and one more thing,” she said on her way out. “What happened here tonight? That doesn’t leave this room. Nobody can know about this.”
She didn’t want anyone to know about the sex? Fair enough. Wasn’t my style to kiss and tell, anyway. And since I wasn’t wearing a wire to this event tonight, not only would the feds not know what we did between the sheets, but they also wouldn’t know that she just asked me to work for her, either.
Not unless I decided to accept her offer. That one would require some thought.
45
I got back home after midnight. I couldn’t sleep. My limbs were tingling from the reintroduction to sexual intercourse. I wasn’t interested in television. I wasn’t sure what to do with myself.
I didn’t know what to think about Madison Koehler’s offer, either. I’d gone after the PCB to learn about Ernesto Ramirez’s murder, and I worked with Charlie initially for the same reason. I was trying to catch a killer. And then Charlie and Connolly and the rest of them screwed me over with the doctored memos and handed Chris Moody a golden opportunity to pinch me, so my conscience didn’t bother me one bit in helping the government make a case against them.
But neither reason-solving a murder or payback-had anything to do with Madison Koehler, at least as far as I could tell. I didn’t know her. I had no agenda with her. If I accepted her offer, and the job was anything like what she’d subtly suggested, she was going to get into trouble as well.
I decided I would hold on to the idea for the time being.
Nothing better to do, I took a look at the documents I had taken from the state office regarding Starlight Catering. I figured I might as well make myself productive.
I knew two things about the company: They’d won a major contract with the state after Adalbert Wozniak’s company was disqualified, and Charlie Cimino had left them off the list of companies we were targeting. There was no chance it was a coincidence.
After I went through the documents, I knew a third thing about Starlight.
I knew the name of the owner.
Starlight Catering was a corporation whose sole principal officer was a man named Delroy Bailey. He had checked the box for “African American” in the form the state made you fill out to determine whether you qualified as a minority business enterprise. Sure enough, Agent Tucker had been right. Starlight Catering was an MBE.
But I didn’t recognize the name Delroy Bailey. I looked up the name on my laptop’s Internet and got a lot of hits, as the company had a website and had also catered some big events. There was a photo of him at one of the parties. He was a handsome, young, skinny black guy, which didn’t help me one way or the other, but hooray for him.
Here was another hit: Delroy Bailey and his wife, Yolanda, at a fundraiser for some alderman named Diaz. Yolanda looked a little older than Delroy, and she was Latina, not African American. Again, that didn’t really help me.
I froze. Wait. Yolanda.
I went to my bag and retrieved the computer that Paul Riley had lent me, with the database from the Almundo trial. The more I thought about it, the surer I was, but it took a few minutes to find the right spot on the computer, the background workup on the prosecution’s star witness, Joey Espinoza.
“Will wonders never cease,” I mumbled, something my mother used to say.
Joey Espinoza had a sister named Yolanda Espinoza Bailey.
Starlight Catering was run by Joey Espinoza’s brother-in-law.
“So how’d it go last night?” Lee Tucker had a pinch of tobacco in his mouth and his feet up on the table. I’d barely walked through the door to Suite 410 in my office building before he was asking.
“It went.” I took a chair across from him.
“Anything good?”
I made a face. “A roomful of greedy jerk-offs.”
“You make any good contacts?”
“It was a pretty boring affair.”
Tucker watched me for a moment. “That it? Nothing else?”
“The martinis were good.”
He let that comment hang for a long time. Slowly, he nodded. “Okay, then.”
“Okay, then.”
His feet came off the table. “Today you have number sixteen.”