Playing Dead (14 page)

Sadie opened a large manila envelope helpfully provided by Sue Billington, gathered everything up, and placed it inside her backpack.

Then she pressed the red buzzer underneath the center of the
table as we’d been instructed, so Sue and Rex could release us from this prison of sleeping secrets.

Blood pounded in my brain, drowning out every thought but one.

Mama was a liar.

After a quick lunch with Sadie at a new sushi joint, we parted ways so she could pick up Maddie. Nothing like eating questionable raw fish on a hot Texas day chased by an icy Dr Pepper.

Ten minutes later, I stood nervously at the front desk of the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
, a venerable 106-year-old institution in mortal combat with iPhones and iPads like every other metropolitan newspaper in America.

One foot in front of the other
, I told myself.
Don’t trip
.

It was hard to say I trusted any newspaper completely, but I was counting on trusting one man inside this one with my life. He stepped off the elevator in a bright orange University of Illinois T-shirt stretched tight across his belly, barely topping sagging Dockers that displayed signs of the something Italian he’d had for lunch.

Lyle Matyasovsky, managing editor for print and new bullshit media (the “new media” was added in the publisher’s fit of modernization; Lyle added the “bullshit” in a fit of disgust), was old school all the way. I suspected that Lyle, nicknamed by reporters for his poofy Lovett-style hair and his poetic way with the language, bought his T-shirt wardrobe at the Dallas flea market.

He enjoyed letting Texans butcher his name before telling them that the first
y
and the
v
were “kind of” silent. His résumé included stints at
The New York Times
and the
National Enquirer
, where he made big bucks to write headlines like
DAUGHTER FINDS MOMSICLE DEAD IN BASEMENT FREEZER AFTER 20
YEARS
. No one knows why this Yankee chose to land here. It’s all part of the mystery of Lyle.

But the main thing: Lyle was an FOD. Friend of Daddy. Favors had been passed back and forth between the two for years. Daddy had insisted I carry Lyle’s card in my wallet since high school, along with W.A.’s and, of course, Victor’s. Like the spark that made the universe, no one knew how or why the relationship between Lyle and my Daddy began, just that it thrived.

“When you’re a McCloud in trouble, you need a friend in the press, a friend in the court, and a friend on a horse,” Daddy used to say.

Lyle, W.A., Wade.

As soon as I saw Lyle, my face crumpled. Lucky for me, Lyle was an old hand at face crumples, because 60 percent of newsroom journalists are currently on a cocktail of antidepressants.

He ushered me into the elevator to the third floor, past the prying eyes of reporters shocked and hopeful that the newspaper might be hiring again (but surely not someone who wore red boots), and into his office, located in a tiny space in the corner. Lyle required nothing fancy.

Although I’d met Lyle fifteen or so times in my life, I’d never been in here. The 1950s-era metal desk—at least the parts you could see under the reporter notebooks, memos, and press releases—looked like chickens had two-stepped across it every night for years. The fluorescent lights were off, and a small antique desk lamp on a corner table was on. A brown and pea-green easy chair of indeterminate age sat crunched into one corner, possibly containing the contagion that would take out the
Star-Telegram
before technology did.

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 [email protected].” 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.”

I
t was a quarter after six by the time I finished with Lyle and sneaked my way into a basement room in the downtown courthouse, about a five-block walk from the newspaper.

The room was crowded with the most diverse group of females I’ve ever seen outside of a baseball game. Baseball and fear, the great equalizers. Blacks, whites, Hispanics, senior citizens, teenagers, suburban housewives—all these women had one significant thing in common: They were terrified of something.

Hudson Byrd, the man at the front of the class, a military contractor who witnessed horror shows in Iraq and Afghanistan, who once melted his hard body around mine, was teaching them to respect that feeling.

I spent forty-five minutes in a folding chair in the corner while they took turns imitating Hudson’s simple defense moves on training dummies lined up at the front—slamming the chin with the heel of a palm, jamming the eyes with their thumbs, thrusting a knee to the groin.

Hudson roved around. “Come on, folks, we need a little less Jennifer Aniston and a lot more Angelina Jolie. Make damn sure he can’t continue his gene pool when you’re done with him.”