The Whole Lie (7 page)

I'd come to see Moe to compare notes on Savvy and learn more about Saginaw. In-person was best—Moe was past the age for long telephone conversations.

Besides, it'd been too long. Moe's mom had died what, four years ago? It was around then he'd started rooting for plane crashes, saying he was going to make a killing with high-quality pics and vids.

For a while, we Barnburners had assumed he was joking.

We'd been wrong. Moe pulled away from the group, especially after a couple of fender-benders made him stop driving at night. Barnburners dropped in on Moe now and then, and always reported back that he was sharp as a tack. But something in him broke when his mom died. I felt shame for not visiting myself until I needed info.

Moe kicked a second chair, indicating I should sit, and checked his watch. “If they don't wreck before the landing gear's stowed,” he said, “there's a ninety-nine-point-eight-eight percent chance they won't wreck at all.” He squinted at a black digital watch that looked big as a Frisbee on his thin wrist. “Now talk. You got thirteen minutes 'til the next busy stretch.”

His head reminded me more than ever of a walnut. He wore a sweatshirt that said
BERRY THE BEARS
. He also wore blue jeans that were oversized in a way that hinted at a diaper beneath. Big deal: He could wear ladies' underpants on his head without cutting my respect for him one bit.

Moe Coover, who had to be eighty-five now, was an original Barnburner. There weren't more than three or four left.

Short history lesson: After World War II, a couple million Moe Coovers streamed back to the U.S. They'd been raised Depression poor. Then they'd served two, three, or four years fighting in jungles or hedgerows. A lot of them had passed the time stuffing entrails back inside their pals, policing up arms and legs on day-after battlefields, watching each other burn to death in downed airplanes.

So it shouldn't have surprised anyone that when these vets were back Stateside, while some set down their rifles and started families, others drank. Drank like fish, matter of fact, and raised mucho hell—and got paid for it, twenty bucks a week for a year, GI Bill moolah. “Goddamn dream come true,” Moe had told a bunch of us years ago. “Twenty bucks a week? Back then that was a roof over your head, three hots a day, and drink yourself blind every night. With enough left over to go see a whore on Saturday.”

Meanwhile, this oddball group called Alcoholics Anonymous, launched in Ohio before the war, was gaining traction. Guys just like Moe, guys who for years couldn't get out of bed without a bracer, were walking around clear-eyed and employed, swearing by this AA. “I didn't trust it,” Moe said. “It smelled like a racket. It smelled like a tub-thumper's trap.”

But one Saturday, the promise of free eats lured him to a traveling AA road show—he still has a picture of himself with Bill W and Doctor Bob, claims he's turned down an offer of ten grand for the snap—and, like a lot of us since, Moe Coover heard something that clicked.

He sobered up April 28, 1946. Two nights later, he helped pull together the first meeting of an AA group that would become the Barnburners.

I was here now because Moe eventually wangled himself a plush civilian job with the Massachusetts State Police, running the staties' entire fleet. That brought power—the various barracks and subagencies were always competing for the newest vehicles—and smart-cookie Moe took his power in the form of knowledge. His specialty: buried bodies, closeted skeletons. If a trooper scored a blowjob from a drunk-and-disorderly teenager, badged his way out of a DUI in some burg at three
A.M.
, or bagged a few law-abiding citizens to meet his speeding-ticket quota, Moe knew about it. He had eyes and ears from Pittsfield to Provincetown.

In Massachusetts, the state police swing a big club: They can and have run governors out of office. And for thirty-five years, Moe Coover was the most powerful man on the staties' payroll. He didn't look so powerful now, this little no-eyebrows man, probably wearing a diaper, staring me down. But in his day, he'd been something.

He said, “Savvy Kane, huh?” Just like that. Typical Moe. I hadn't seen him for two, three years, hadn't been to this house since his mother's wake. Had spent three minutes on the phone asking him to dust off his Rolodex and dig dirt. “I had a feeling we hadn't seen the last of that one.”

“Why's that?”

“You knocked her up, didn't you?”

“I didn't,” I said. “But everybody seems to think I did.”

“How's Charlene?”

Moe Coover missed nothing.

I said nothing.

A jet took off, ripping over our heads, shaking the porch. “FedEx plane,” he said. “Pay it no mind. Those things never wreck, and even if they did there'd be no money in it.”

“Mother Teresa sends her regards.”

“Mother Teresa's dead. Me too, soon enough. Let's skip the bullshit, Conway.” He leaned toward me. “Let's say it wasn't you knocked up Savvy, and I believe it wasn't, or at least you
think
it wasn't, 'cause you never could lie worth shit. In that case, the proud papa's got to be Bert Saginaw, and
that,
amigo, is a very big deal.”

“Let me make sure you're saying what I think you're saying.”

“I'm saying it all right. Back then, just before we moved Savvy, she was banging him while she was banging you. Get over it. Hell, even if he's just the
alleged
proud papa it's a very big deal.”

“You're taking giant steps.”

“Don't insult me. I haven't talked with you in three years. You call me out of the blue, you ask about Savvy Kane. ‘Oh by the way,' you also ask, ‘I'd like to learn a little about this Bert Saginaw and his hatchet man Krall, if you get a chance.' You're clever like an eight-year-old angling for another cookie, Conway. It's what we like about you.”

What the hell was I supposed to say to that? The people who love you are the people who know all your moves.

I hate that about people.

“Okay, you're smarter than me. It's not a small club,” I said, shrugging surrender. “What'd you learn about Saginaw?”

“I learned, for maybe the ten thousandth time, that Fitzgerald may be the most misunderstood man in history.”

“Who the
hell
?”

“F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Moe said, leaning back, the big rush to photograph a plane crash gone now. Fine by me if he needed to be smug: It meant he had something juicy for me. He was savoring it.

“He was a writer, right?”

“And Jerry Rice was a football player,” Moe said. “And Ali was a fighter.”

I waited.

A small jet rattled the porch. Moe didn't even look up. “Fitzgerald wrote this line,” he said. “‘There are no second acts in American lives.'”

Moe looked to see if that meant anything to me. It didn't. He puffed his cheeks out, frustrated. “Everybody misses it,” he said. “They quote Fitzgerald like he meant there are no second
chances
. When a politician gets caught with a whore or a baseball player beats up his wife, the newspaper hacks and talking heads trot out the line to mean the schmuck is finished, kaput.”

“That's dead wrong,” I said. “It's the opposite. A pro football player can gut a koala bear in broad daylight. If he's any good, somebody'll still sign him.”

“Exactly!” Moe pounded his armrest. “Fitzgerald was talking about Act One and Act Two in a formal way, like in plays and novels. In Act One, the players get their intro, the problem is set up.”

“What happens in Act Two?”

From the way he smiled, I knew it was the right question.

“Depth,” Moe said. “Complexity, conflicting paths, difficult choices.”

We sat quietly.

Noise built. A US Airways jumbo jet rocked the house as it took off.

“You missed one,” I said.

“You've got me all engrossed,” he said, looking at the big watch. “You prick.”

“Just tell me about Saginaw,” I said. “No more writers. I'm beggin'.”

CHAPTER NINE

He jerked a thumb at the runway behind his shoulder. “If I miss my big payday bullshitting about Hubert Saginaw,” he said, “You're a frigging dead man. What do you know already?”

“Just that he made and blew two fortunes, then finally figured out how to hang onto his dough.”

“Fair enough. He dropped out of college twenty-five years ago. Sold some kind of high-tech flooring, European stuff. Did great for a while, then got too big for his britches. The Swiss parent company dropped him like a hot potato. Then, in the nineties, he went to San Francisco and scored big with a software company, like every other asshole out there.”

“And?”

“Made a paper fortune that dried up and blew away one day. Just like every other asshole out there.”

“Then what?”

Moe shrugged. “Little of this, little of that. I hear he tried the motivational-speaker racket. Didn't make any real money, but it's where he got a taste for public speaking. Decided he'd make a dandy politician if he ever got the chance.”

“How'd he end up in Framingham?”

Moe shrugged. “Everybody ends up somewhere. Funny thing is, Saginaw credits a Dunkin' Donuts in Framingham for starting his fence company. The one near the Ashland border, you've been there a thousand times.”

So had Moe—before he stopped coming to Barnburners meetings. I didn't say that. Instead I gestured for more on the fence business. Moe settled in and told it.

You had to hand it to Saginaw: After the software company fiasco, his wound licking hadn't lasted long. Each morning at five o'clock, on his way to the gym for a two-hour workout, he stopped for coffee and a bagel. And each morning, he spotted four or five guys farting around in the donut store while their big-ass flatbed trucks idled outside, burning diesel and their employer's time. From the trucks and uniforms, Saginaw learned the guys worked for a rental-fence operation headquartered a mile and a half from the apartment he and his then-wife shared.

Saginaw wondered if the boss knew his employees blew forty-five minutes every morning in Dunkin' Donuts. He began talking to the guys, doing a little friendly corporate espionage.

The way it worked, he learned, outfits doing construction and events rented fences. All kinds of fences, with chain link far and away the most popular. It was an easy business to get into but a tough one to make real money at: You wound up spending all your revenue to maintain your fleet and hire new assholes to take over for the old assholes who were constantly being convicted, deported, or sliced up in bars.

Bert Saginaw decided to jump in.

Three months after first noticing the Dunkin' Donuts slackers, Saginaw talked his mom into remortgaging her house. He used the dough to buy the very company that employed the slackers—it turned out to be a mom-and-pop outfit run by a sixty-eight-year-old guy who already had one foot in Naples, Florida, and pounced on Saginaw's first offer.

Moe sat.

I waited. The smell of the roast beef sandwiches I'd brought was driving me nuts—I hadn't eaten much of anything today. But Moe made no move for them.

“Well?” I said.

“Well what?”

“What happened next?”

“Like the man said, happy families are all alike.” He shrugged. “Happy businesses, too. Saginaw made money, bought more mom-and-pop fence-rental outfits, made some more. After a while he started manufacturing fencing himself. Which these days means he flies to China a couple times a year and they make the fences for him. Been at it ten, twelve years now, made himself a pile. Way I heard it, the sister was Saginaw's secret weapon.”

“Emily?”

“Yup. She took one of those super-quick MBA programs at Northeastern. Tore the place up, did so well there was no point in grading her. By the time Saginaw's fence rentals picked up steam, Emily was running all the day-to-day biz and most of the strategic stuff to boot. Sharp as a tack.”

“He's into more than rentals now,” I said. “He's gone into contracting, putting up buildings himself.”

Moe nodded. “Big-time stuff, too. Office parks and downtown midrises. Lot of money there. I guess Saginaw looked at the dimwits he was renting fences to and decided he could do a better job.”

We sat. Two planes took off, rattling Moe's windows. Neither of us looked up. I stared at the Royal Roast Beef sammies.

Moe leaned, smiled. “What I gave you so far, it's the Wikipedia stuff, the stuff you could've found on your own. But I still got sources, and one of 'em gave me something good.”

I waited.

“Something that might tie into a political campaign.”

I waited.

“Hell,” Moe said. “You're not gonna beg, are you? I shoulda known.”

I waited.

He leaned even farther, elbows on knees. “Saginaw posed for some pictures once.”

“He didn't pose, to hear him tell it. He got set up.”

He shook his head. “Nothing like that. Weird pictures. ‘The Jesus pictures,' my guy called 'em.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“According to my guy, you'll find out soon. Whole goddamn state will.”

We sat. Planes took off every minute or so.

Moe said, “I know why you're doing this.”

“Sure you do,” I said. “I told you about the checks, the dough these people spend without thinking twice.”

He shook his head. “I know why you're
really
doing it. I know why you can't say no to Savvy Kane.”

I said nothing.

“You were close to her when she was a Barnburner,” Moe said. “But
me
and her got close, too.”

I said nothing.

*   *   *

Sixteen years ago. Biker bar parking lot, Owensboro, Kentucky. I walked Savvy along. Beard-and-vest followed.