Framed newspapers lined the walls, not with Lyle’s impressive honors and projects, but with headlines from other papers that struck him as worthy:
IRAQI HEAD SEEKS ARMS.
TYPHOON RIPS THROUGH CEMETERY; HUNDREDS DEAD.
DISCIPLES OF CHRIST NAME INTERIM LEADER.
IS THERE A RING OF DEBRIS AROUND URANUS?
I blubbered uncontrollably in the bio-disaster chair while taking in the satirical Onion headline MIT RESEARCHERS DISCOVER EACH OTHER.
Lyle shut the door, fiddled with the string of the dusty vertical blinds, then rolled his desk chair around to sit next to me, a clear sign the world was turning on its axis, because his reputation wasn’t that of a touchy-feely guy. I hoped he wouldn’t pat me on the head and trigger another round. A hug or any form of sympathetic body contact is the worst thing you can offer a Southern woman in tears if you’re looking for her to stop.
Lyle kept several inches of distance and handed me a dusty box of unopened Kleenex resting on the top of his desk. Maybe journalists were all cried out.
“I’m sorry about your father. I didn’t get a chance to talk to you at the funeral. I’ll miss him. He had a way… with words.”
Lyle avoided my face, polite of him, because I could feel salty snot running down my nose into my mouth. Mascara bled into my eyes, stinging. I blurted out, “That’s not why I’m here.”
He watched impassively as I pulled my life’s portable accessories out of my purse: a greasy bottle of Water Babies 30 SPF sunscreen, a half-eaten Hershey’s bar, two mini-bottles of Germ-X (one empty), an envelope of outdated coupons, two sets of keys, a prescription bottle filled with Xanax (another of my discoveries in Daddy’s medicine cabinet), a new horse hoof pick with the requisite curved metal hook that I’d purchased on sale the day before leaving Wyoming, and, finally, before I hit bottom, the letter from Rosalina Marchetti.
In Lyle’s pudgy hands, the piece of stationery looked fragile. My life, in his hands. The cliché of all clichés. He read it quickly, read it again, then swiveled his chair back to his computer and spent a few minutes at the keyboard.
“She’s the wife of Anthony Marchetti,” he said thoughtfully. Not, What a nut or I wouldn’t worry about this.
But then, that’s why I was here. Daddy said that Lyle would always tell it like it is, that he had a way of shutting out anything but the truth.
“You know him?” My voice sounded weak. “Marchetti?”
“I know his history. Chicago Mafia, fraud, embezzlement, murder, up for parole. I know he’s sitting down the street in one of our jail cells. Part of a new prisoner exchange program with Illinois and four other states. They’re about to move him out to Odessa. Or at least that’s the crap my reporter is getting. This makes me wonder. I assume you’ve looked him up yourself?”
I nodded, thinking that Texas had few reasons to say yes to Anthony Marchetti. The Odessa facility was in hot demand, a cushy place to hold such a violent offender, especially one Texas didn’t have to take credit for.
Only two years old, the prison was touted as the most high-tech in the world, with room enough to hold five thousand male and female prisoners. The operation was funded by a complicated equation of state and federal funds, making it a hodge-podge of inmates and a political nightmare, especially since Texas governors didn’t play nice with Washington all the time. Or ever. One governor liked to remind everyone that the state could secede from the union at any time because that was the agreement in 1845 when Texas joined up, which, by the way, isn’t technically correct. (Yep, the same governor whose name rhymes with “scary” and who entered the presidential arena sounding like he jumped out of Bonanza.)
And then there’s Trudy Lavonne Carter, the billionaire widow of a Houston oilman, who offered to donate the $600 million and fifty acres on which to build the Texas spectacle, but with a tangle of controversial strings attached.
The Texas legislature almost rejected her financial gift “on moral grounds.” This was ironic like only things in Texas can be ironic. Trudy was a devout foe of the Texas death penalty and inhumane prison conditions. She informed her congressmen and state senators she’d only write the check if she could choose the architect and approve the plans. She insisted on skylights, air-conditioning, and enlarged cells. She’d once visited a distant cousin stuck in a suffocating Texas prison with no air-conditioning in the middle of July. It left quite an impression.
Trudy, bless her or not, won out.
“A guy named Jack Smith keeps… running into me,” I told Lyle. “He claims he is a reporter working on a story about Anthony Marchetti for Texas Monthly. He says Marchetti bribed his way here.” For now, I left out the encounter in the garage.
“Never heard of him,” Lyle grunted, dismissing Jack as he rolled through his mental address book of Texas journalists.
“He claims that my mother is involved somehow.” Lyle’s face was unreadable, as usual. “I also got this anonymous email. It’s probably nothing. But the subject line bothered me.” I pulled my phone out of an outside purse pocket and pressed on the screen. “The third email down.”
He took it from my hand and read the subject line from madddog12296 aloud: “Don’t let this happen to your loved one.”
“Click the attachment,” I said. “It’s a blur.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “it is.” He reached across to set the phone on the desk in front of me. I rummaged in my backpack, found the envelope from the bank, and tossed it across the desk.
“All of this is from a safe deposit box of Mama’s that she never told us about.”
“Tell me this is off the record,” Lyle said.
“Why? I don’t think you’d ever betray me.”
“Just say it.”
“This is off the record.”
“It’s like handing a dollar to a lawyer. Just a little safeguard for you that I can repeat to anyone above me. There’s Rupert Murdoch and then there are the rest of us, who will forever adhere to a code.” He slid over to his computer. “Forward that email with the attachment to llmat@fwstar.com.” I fiddled with my phone and we watched the email pop up on his screen in seconds.
“I’ll have someone check this out. See whether we can follow the IP address and get this picture in focus.”
“So you think it’s something,” I said.
He grunted in his characteristic Lyle way, which could mean yes, no, or maybe.
“Who will check it out?” I persisted. “One of your reporters? A photographer?” He didn’t answer. I knew from Daddy that Lyle maintained a few hacker contacts on the darker freelance side of journalism.
I inserted another question into the silence, this one personal.
“What do you think I should do next?” My voice wobbled a little.
“I think that you should sit here and tell me every burp and fart of what has happened to you, leaving nothing out, not even the damn color of Mr. Jack Smith’s eyes. I’ll start digging around. You could tell the police about all of this, but I’m not sure at this point that they’re going to be that helpful.”
He paused, taking in the tattered state of my being, the red eyes, the kidnapped Xanax bottle, the hair piled up on my head like an exhausted maid. I realized he was still considering my question.
“You should think about hiring bodyguards for your family, Tommie. Then get on a plane and grant Rosalina Marchetti her wish.”