“So, why are you here?” he asked me again.
I thought I caught his meaning, but I didn’t have a clever response. “Why does anyone want to be with a winner?”
The governor moved from the chair to the large window overlooking the north side of the city. The commercial district had gone dark but the area to the north was scattered with lights, the yuppie crowds enjoying late-night dining, theater, the bar scene. Profiled against the cityscape, and notwithstanding the oxford and blue jeans, Carlton Snow looked more like a governor than at any time I’d seen him.
“It’s hard to find people I trust,” he said. “Everyone wants something. Everyone has their own agenda. Mac, I trust him from going back, but he just needs someone to follow, y’know? Maddie and Pesh and Charlie-I trust them because their interests intersect with mine. They only get what they want if I get what I want.” He drank from his glass and looked out over the city.
He was a personable guy. I’d seen that in him from the start. It might have been practiced, but I didn’t think so. That, in fact, seemed to be his chief attribute. I didn’t see anything in him that particularly demonstrated superior intelligence, and certainly no great command of policy, but he could probably enjoy the company of just about anyone. That quality, in some ways, made him perfect for the job of governor, but in other ways made him wrong for it. If I was reading him correctly, he was longing for real relationships and not just lackeys who whisper sweet nothings.
But why was he sharing this with me?
“What about Greg Connolly?” I asked. It was a risk, of course, a cymbal crashing during the mellow music. But what the hell, the booze was making me impatient.
The governor did a quick turn in my direction before returning his gaze to the window. “Greg. Greg, he surprised me. He surprised me.”
“How so?”
“I didn’t know. None of us did.”
Know what? I wanted to say. But I held my tongue, because the governor was already preparing to elaborate.
“I knew that guy my whole life, Greg. He had a great family. He loved his wife. He had this other side to him, and it made him do things like-like skulk around in a park after dark?” He blew out a sigh. “Christ, what a way to go. I looked at Jorie later that day-she wouldn’t even talk to me. I mean, what is she supposed to think? What is she supposed to tell her boys?”
The governor seemed to be getting a bit emotional. And I was getting more and more confused.
After a moment, the governor cleared his throat. “He could have told me. I wouldn’t have cared. I mean, it’s one thing if you’re an elected official, right? But Greg? He was behind the scenes. He could be whatever he wanted, I wouldn’t have cared. He had a job with me for life. I wouldn’t have cared about his damn sex life.”
I didn’t know what to say. I surely wasn’t going to get an admission from him about Greg Connolly’s undercover role with the federal government. And it was becoming awfully damn clear to me that he had no idea about it. I mean, this guy was a politician, a bullshit artist, but he couldn’t fake what he was doing here. Not when he was half in the bag, at least, and not with me watching everything about him to look for signs of a lie.
Jesus Christ. Unless I had lost all ability to read people, neither Governor Snow nor Madison Koehler knew anything about Greg being a snitch. They couldn’t have been behind his murder. Where the hell did that leave me?
“Now Hector,” the governor said, turning to me. His voice had regained something, I wasn’t sure what. “Hector, I trust. He understands me. I can tell that guy anything. That’s a powerful thing, y’know? To know you can trust someone with a secret?”
I nodded. I was still a little flustered here.
He walked up toward the couch and stared at me. He seemed far removed from the guy mourning the loss of his friend only two minutes ago. Some people can turn on and off like that. “So, can I trust you, Jason? Like I can trust Hector?”
I felt some internal detector queue up. This wasn’t a throwaway question, but I didn’t quite get the drift. Regardless, there was no reason not to play along. Besides, I was still playing to a recording device in my pocket, and the feds would expect the same answer from me.
“Of course you can,” I said.
He sat down next to me and turned to me. “Like Hector?”
“You can trust me,” I said, getting annoyed now and more confused.
“So tell me what you want,” he said. “You want to be a judge? You want some director job or something?”
None of the above, but I wasn’t going to rock the boat now, though I wasn’t sure where that boat was heading. Someplace turbulent, I thought, but I was beginning to mistrust my instincts. Or I just was having trouble believing them.
“You just want to be with a winner,” he said, his eyes locking with mine.
I didn’t speak. Something told me I should say something. Or maybe hold up a stop sign. But I didn’t. Not in time, at least.
Not before he put his hand on my thigh.
81
I was a wide receiver in football, not a defensive back, despite the fact that I liked hitting people more than catching a ball, for one simple reason. I didn’t like to backpedal. I didn’t like the feeling of being off-balance as I pumped my arms and legs in reverse gear.
Maybe I’d missed my calling, because nobody, not an All-Pro cornerback in his prime, could have bounced off that couch and moved backward to the door of the hotel suite as quickly as I did.
Neither of us knew what to say. I thought that this was one of those actions-speak-louder-than-words moments. I’d made it pretty clear how I felt about what the governor had just done. I stood looking at the carpet. The governor, from what I could gather, had no idea how to proceed at this point.
“It seems to me, what we have here is a failure to communicate,” he said with an accent, parroting the famous line, hoping to ease the tension. Or just ease his embarrassment. He tried to laugh at his line, but the whole thing had fallen flat. I was hoping a phone would ring or something.
“Listen,” I finally said, “if I did something to make you-”
“No.” He raised a hand. “No need. My fault. I’m just drunk, that’s all. Let’s just forget about this.”
“That’s not a problem.”
The color had drained from his face. It seemed like the intoxication had drained from his body, too. He looked stone-cold sober and completely humiliated. The governor hadn’t just been rebuffed; he’d just revealed something extremely personal about himself to me.
“I should go,” I said, the understatement of the evening.
“Yeah, sure. We’ve got a big day tomorrow. The execution and all.”
I didn’t think I could subtract any more from the painful awkwardness, so I got my ass out of there. I kept a straight face as I passed by the governor’s security detail and essentially held my breath until I made it to the elevator. I ran my hand through my hair a few times, as if that would somehow remove the memory from my brain, and propped myself against the side of the car.
I wanted nothing more than to go home and take a very hot shower and bury myself under my covers, but I had to deliver FeeBee to Lee Tucker, which made me think about how those last couple of minutes in the suite would sound on tape.
Given the lateness of the hour some of these evenings, Lee Tucker didn’t tend to sit around Suite 410 in my building waiting for me. I knew that in advance and called his cell phone when I had a moment. We agreed to meet at my house, with Lee entering through the alley.
He was wearing a sweatshirt and torn jeans, a ripped green hat, and a plug of tobacco in his mouth. His eyes were puffy and his cheek bore the faint sign of a crease. He’d been roused from sleep recently-presumably when I called. He was catching his shut-eye when he could find it these days. His day wasn’t ending here at midnight; it was just beginning. These days, as things were escalating in the campaign and the end of the investigation drew near, these guys were taking the F-Birds and immediately scrutinizing them.