Summer of the Dead (27 page)

“Sorry to hear that,” Bell said. “I understand that it's a heart problem.”

“Yep.” He closed his eyes and indulged in an aggrieved head-bobble. “Boy's been sick since the day he was born. Kinda makes you wonder why the Lord would saddle an innocent child with that kind of suffering and let so many worthless sons of bitches just run around without a care in the—” Jessup gave up on the sentence with a sigh. Looked down at his hands. He seemed genuinely stricken at the thought of his grandson's illness. “Back when I was first starting to comprehend just how bad off the boy was,” the old man said, his voice quiet and searching, “I had to wonder. Wonder if maybe the Lord was punishing me. I've had a lot of good things in my life, Mrs. Elkins. More than I ever coulda dreamed of, truth be told. And so sometimes it seems to me that maybe the man upstairs is saying—saying in that special way He has, the way that nobody can ignore—that it's time to ante up. Time to put things back in balance. What I mean is—maybe Montgomery's paying the price for all that's been given me. And you can understand, I'm sure, just how terrible that makes me feel. Just how it rips me up inside.”

Bell watched him. This wasn't the topic she'd come here to address, but she was fascinated. The governor had the spiel right at his fingertips. Was he sincere?
Damned if I know,
she thought. There was, she reminded herself, only one irrefutable truth about Riley Jessup: He was a politician. First, last, always.

“Now,” Jessup continued, “what can I do for you, Mrs. Elkins?” He had pivoted away from his ruminative slump and perked up, like a plant spotting the watering can. “Nice as it is to welcome you to my home, I'm thinking you probably didn't drive all the way over here from Raythune County just to say hello.”

“I appreciate that.” Bell decided to plunge right in. “Governor, I'm confused.”

“Howz that?”

“Well, I have some questions about a company called Rhododendron Associates.” She watched Jessup closely. No reaction. “I was hoping you could enlighten me.”

“And how might I do that, young lady?” he said, voice as soft and runny as syrup.

“By explaining why a company in which you're heavily involved would have employed a man named Jed Stark—who had, to say the least, a less than savory reputation. With all due respect, Governor, may I ask you just what the nature of that employment was?”

Jessup didn't seem alarmed or upset at her question. Instead, he looked thoughtful, just as he'd looked when discussing his grandson's ailments. His gaze wandered away from Bell's face, finding a temporary home in the center of the patterned gold draperies that spanned the long wall of floor-to-ceiling windows off to his left. He pressed a cupped palm over each knee. He smacked his lips a few times, as if there was a bad taste in his mouth that wouldn't quite go away. The tip of his tongue lolled too long on his lower lip; it gave him a slightly demented appearance that was, she knew, entirely misleading. He was a bright man—a brilliant one, really, in his own way. You didn't go from squalor to opulence, from Briney Hollow to this place, without a hefty dose of smarts. Yes, luck was involved, too, of course, and drive, and something more than luck and drive—call it a willingness to shift your gaze at the right moment, so as to preserve plausible deniability—but you had to have the native intelligence, the bedrock intellectual capacity, to do elaborate calculations on the fly. Riley Jessup sometimes played the buffoon, Bell thought, because it worked. He embraced the stereotypes of his profession and his region—he was fat, coarse, sloppy, and slow-talking, sipping his bourbon and slipping the bribes in his back pocket—and it did the trick. Even though he'd been out of office for quite a few years now, even though he looked old and harmless, he still radiated a faint red glow of danger, like a decommissioned nuclear power plant.

“Employ lots of folks,” he said. “You've seen the size of this place. And I've got some pretty complicated business operations as well. Not sure I know precisely what it is you're referring to, ma'am.” The warmth in his voice had been turned down by about half a notch. “Maybe you could elaborate just a teensy-weensy bit.”

“I'd like to know why Stark was being paid—and being paid quite well, as it happens—for his services to a company ultimately controlled by you,” she said. “And why a business card from a New York City attorney was found in his pocket. And why his widow is the recipient of an extremely generous payout from you, apparently in exchange for her promise not to divulge the nature of her husband's activities on your behalf.”

Jessup swung his big head around to face her. A cold steady fire was visible in the slits of his eyes, eyes made squinty by the upward thrust of pressure from his fat cheeks. Bell saw several things going on in those eyes—and none of the things had anything to do with words. Or with fancy drapes.

Jessup moved his lips again, wetly and aggressively. It went on too long to be just a nervous gesture. The smacking sounds conveyed the same sense of slow preparatory menace as would the noise of a knife being sharpened against a stone, rhythmically, ominously, back and forth. Finally he spoke, enunciating each word to within an inch of its life: “Can't really see as how that's any of your business, ma'am.” His voice had now completely shed the homespun hokeyness that had seemed to append a little curlicue to the end of his sentences.

Now she knew that Jessup had something to hide. She hadn't expected him to tell her anything. She'd just wanted to see how sensitive he was to her questions. Had he chuckled, grinned, and dismissed it, had he shaken his big head and flapped a fat hand in her direction and told a whopper of a tale about how Stark was looking into some land to purchase for him—to build an orphanage, no doubt, or maybe a hospice or an animal shelter, something wondrously noble and shimmeringly selfless and ready-made for the TV cameras—then Bell would have backed off, satisfied that whatever it was, no matter how sneaky and shady, it most likely didn't concern the recent events on her patch of West Virginia.

But he'd reacted. Overreacted, in fact. Revealed himself. Gotten angry. And he'd given her even more reason to keep poking around.

She stood up. Jessup didn't.

“Well, if that's your attitude, Governor,” she said, “there's no point in continuing this conversation. I may as well head back home. This place is a long, long way from Raythune County. But you already know that, don't you?”

“Hold on.” He still didn't rise. “I got a question for you, lady.”

She waited.

“My question,” he said, “is as follows. Why'd you run for public office in the first place? Tell me that.” The good ole boy tone, the one he'd deployed so expertly on that flatbed truck the other day at the hospital, the one that was like honey drizzled on a biscuit, still hadn't returned. His voice was hard. All business.

Bell said nothing. She could see that he didn't really care if she answered or not. This was about him, not her.

“Let me tell you why
I
ran,” Jessup said. “I ran because I'd figured out a few things in my life, okay? I finally got it. See, I grew up poor. Dirt poor.” Shook his head, jowls flapping in response like a Greek chorus backing up his point. “No—we were poorer than dirt. Dirt would've been a step up. Well, it didn't take me too damned long to notice that you gotta have money in this ole world. You can do without a lot of things, but you
gotta
have money. Lots of it. After you get it—and get it howsoever you can—then you can be nice to folks. Sweet. Polite. But without money, all that sweetness is about as useful as a big ole sack of shit.”

He shifted his large bottom on the couch. A bitter frown cut across his face, like a surgical scar slashing an ample belly.

“You gotta rise up, Mrs. Elkins.” Sounding canny now. And confident. Setting her straight, giving her the benefit of his wisdom. “You gotta rise up and up. And that's what I did. I did what the money boys done told me to do—so's I could rise up. You know 'bout the money boys, doncha? Everybody in any kind of public office anywhere knows about the money boys. Always hanging around. Always ready to lend a helping hand, once they can see that you're going places. Well, I used what they give me and I rose up high—higher than anybody from Raythune County ever did or ever will. You know what, though? Them money boys—they don't forget. They come calling one day. And they want what they want. You follow? So—yeah. Yeah. I made some deals. No question. Did some things I ain't rightly proud of. But in the end, if you look at it fair and square, Mrs. Elkins, I think you'll see that it all works out. Works out just like it oughta. I helped some folks. Still helping 'em. You were there the other day, right? At the hospital? Sure you were. You have to meet the folks, just like I do. All part of keeping your job, right? Yeah, you were there.” He squinted at her, as if trying to imagine her face in the context of a sweltering parking lot and a rowdy crowd in T-shirts and flip-flops. “Sure. Musta been. And you heard all about that MRI machine, the one I'm paying for. The one that Raythune County wouldn't have, 'cept for me. And so—”

“Your charitable activities are a credit to you, Governor,” Bell said, interrupting him. “But I think you did all right for yourself along the way. More than all right, it looks like.” She didn't bother pointing to any of the lush furnishings that surrounded them. She didn't have to.

“God's been good to me,” Jessup said. Piety oozed back into his tone. “Like I told you earlier, I ain't complaining. Which is why,” he went on, dipping his head with courtly humility, “I want to make things right. Want to be a positive force in this ole world. Want leave my mark on this here state before I go off to my heavenly re—”

“Bullshit.”

Jessup flinched as if poked with a stick. Nobody talked to him this way. Anger started to form in his face.

But Bell had heard enough. She was tired of being the one-woman audience for his platitudinous twaddle. “What I want to know,” she went on, “is why Jed Stark got a payoff from Rhododendron Associates. That's it.”

Now the anger moved from his face to his fists. He kneaded them fiercely, as if he were cracking walnuts in his palms. “I thought we could talk,” he said. “One public servant to another. I thought we had some common ground.”

“Just answer my question and leave the speechifying for another day.”

Jessup stopped grinding his fists and looked her squarely in the eye. “Go to hell,” he said.

Bell laughed. She'd been on the receiving end of that particular directive on many occasions—it was a standard line flung at prosecutors by disgruntled defendants. Still, she'd never managed to come up with a reply that satisfied her.
You, too
seemed childish.
Meet you halfway
was unimaginative.

So she nodded, as if that settled things between them, and turned and walked away. Headed back through the trio of expansive rooms toward the foyer and the ornate front door waiting at one end of it, acutely conscious with each step of how deeply her heels seemed to sink into the voluptuous carpet. Jessup's life, she reflected, had been just this cushioned for many years now, just this extravagantly padded with money and power and adulation. Whatever he was hiding was similarly swaddled, similarly buried under layers and layers of pretty things. Was it worth the effort to dig it out? She wasn't sure. Sometimes, she knew, when you finished a treasure hunt, the thing you held in your hand at day's end was worth far less than what you'd given up to get it.

*   *   *

Bell was almost to her car when she heard her name.

“Mrs. Elkins.”

It was Sharon. She'd emerged from the side of the voluminous house, following the long, shrub-bordered, serpentine curve of the brick lane, trying to get to Bell before she reached the Explorer. A security guard had spotted the governor's daughter and now began his own rapid trek up the driveway from the other direction, but Sharon waved him off.

“I've got this, Leo,” Sharon said.

The guard paused. With close-cropped gray hair and a deep vertical curve on either side of his mouth, he looked older than the other guard by a good three decades, but he was still fit, the tight black shirt stretching across the massive pack of muscle on his chest and shoulders.

“Hell of a security team,” Bell murmured.

“Only what's necessary.” Sharon gestured toward the house. “You'd be surprised at the trouble we have around here. People trying to break in and steal something. Or just wanting to get at my father to beg him for money. Won't leave us in peace.”

Bell obligingly looked at the house once more. Sharon seemed to want her to, as if the scope and beauty of the place would make an argument more compelling than mere words, answering every question and deflecting every judgment. In a window on the second floor, on the far right-hand side, Bell saw it: a boy's face. The features were fuzzy—he was too distant, the window was too high—but she could make out a fringe of pale brown hair, thin face, jug ears. Was he smiling? Maybe. Had to be Montgomery Henner. From even that fleeting and faraway glimpse, she sensed a kind of quiet yearning in the boy's face, in the way that face was tilted toward the front gate, as if he spent his days dreaming of what it might be like to rove beyond this place, unencumbered by illness and frailty and constant caution. To travel. To have adventures, like any other sixteen-year-old. To see the world—to see, Bell thought, recalling Carla's excitement, places such as London.

To be free.

“You know what?” Sharon said. Her voice implied that Bell had raised some moral objection to all of it, to the house and the grounds, to this blunt and forthright expression of wealth, even though Bell hadn't spoken. “My father worked like a dog for every dime he's got.” A hard crust of defensiveness—belligerence, really—had formed around Sharon's voice. “And he gave up a hell of a lot, too. Sacrificed. Put himself on the line, over and over again.” She recovered herself. Her tone softened. “Look. I don't know why you needed to speak with my father today, but it's clear that your conversation was cut short. I'm just asking you to remember what he's been through. Which is why he gets a little worked up sometimes. Kind of intense. Even rude.”