The Front (3 page)

“Had no idea you were such a cocky dude. So to speak. Arrogant, for sure. But wow.” She looks intently at him. Sips her soda.

Green eyes with flecks of gold in them. Nice teeth. Sensuous lips. Well, a little wrinkled.

“And here's another house rule,” she says. “I have two legs.”

“Goddamn. I haven't said a thing about your leg.”

“That's my point. I don't have
a leg.
I have two. And I've seen you checking.”

“If you don't want to draw attention to your prosthesis, then why do you call yourself Stump? For that matter, why do you put up with anybody calling you Stump?”

“I don't guess it might occur to you that I was called Stump before I had a bad day on my motorcycle.”

He doesn't say anything.

“Since you're a biker boy, let me give you a tip,” she says. “Try not to let some redneck in a pickup truck run you into a guardrail.”

Win suddenly remembers his soda. Takes a swallow. “And another word tip?” She tosses her empty can into a trash bin that's a good twenty feet away. “Stay away from literary allusions. I taught English lit before I decided to be a cop. Walter Mitty wasn't a lot of different people, he was a day-dreamer.”

“Why the nickname, if it's not about your leg? You've got me curious.”

“Why Watertown? That's what you should be curious about.”

“Obviously, because the murder occurred there,” he says. “Maybe because Lamont knows you—even if she acts like she doesn't. Or at least she used to know you. Before you got short and fat.”

“She can't stand that I saw her drunk, and know a lot about her because of what happened that night. Forget it. She didn't pick Watertown because of the case. She picked the case because of Watertown.”

“She picked the case because it isn't just any old unsolved murder,” Win retorts. “Unfortunately, it's one the media will love. A blind woman visiting from the UK is sexually assaulted and murdered. . . .”

“No question Lamont will milk it for all it's worth. But it's worth more than one thing. She has other agendas.”

“Always does.”

“It's also about the FRONT,” Stump says.

Friends, Resources, Officers Networking Together.

“In the last month, five more departments joined our coalition,” she goes on. “We're up to sixty, have access to K-nine, SWAT, antiterrorism, crime scene investigation, and most recently a helicopter. We're still making bricks without straw, but we're on our way to needing less and less from the state police.”

“Which I think is great.”

“The hell you do. State police hates the FRONT. Lamont most of all hates the FRONT, and what a coincidence. It's headquartered in Watertown. So she's siccing you on us, setting us up to look like the Keystone Kops. We have to have some superhero state police investigator come in and save the day so Lamont can remind everyone how important the state police is and why it should get all the support and funding. A wonderful bonus is she gets back at me, makes me look bad, because she'll never forgive me for what I know.”

“What you know?”

“About her.” It's obvious that's all Stump intends to say about it.

“I don't understand how our solving your old case makes you look bad.”

“
Our
solving it?
Unh-uh.
I keep telling you. You're on your own.”

“And you wonder why the state police doesn't like . . . Hell, never mind.”

She leans forward, meets his eyes, says, “I'm warning you, and you're not listening. She'll make sure the FRONT looks bad whether the case is solved or not. You're being used in ways you don't even know. Being set up in ways you can't even imagine. But start with this: The FRONT gets big enough one of these days? Then what? Maybe you guys don't get to be bullies anymore.”

“We're bound by state law just like you are,” Win says. “It's not about bullying, and you'll never hear me say the system's fair.”

“Fair? How about worst conflict of interests in the entire United States? You guys have complete control over all homicide investigations. Your labs process all evidence. Even the damn death investigators at the morgue are state police. And then the DA whose state police investigative unit works all this, soup to nuts, is the one who prosecutes the case. For you and yours truly here, that would be Lamont, who answers to the Attorney General, who answers to the governor. Meaning the governor de facto has control over all homicide investigations in Massachusetts. You're not dragging me into this. It's headed only one way—toward disaster.”

“Doesn't appear your chief thinks so.”

“Doesn't matter what he thinks. He has to do what she says. And he won't take the blame, will just pass it down the line. Trust me,” Stump says, “get out while you can.”

Lamont used her reelection last fall as an excuse to fire every member of her staff. Fresh starts are a compulsion of hers. Especially when it comes to people. Once they serve their useful purpose it's time for change, or, as she puts it, a
resurrection
from something that's no longer vital.

Although she doesn't waste energy on personal reflection, a remote part of her is aware that her inability to maintain long-term relationships might not serve her well as she ages. Her father, for example, was extraordinarily successful, handsome, and charming but died completely alone in Paris last year, his body not found for days. When Lamont went through his belongings, she discovered years of birthday and holiday gifts he'd never opened, including a number of expensive pieces of art glass from her. Explaining why he never bothered to have his secretary call or dictate a thank-you note.

The Middlesex County courthouse is a concrete-and-brick high-rise in the dreary, crime-ridden heart of Cambridge's government center, her office on the second floor. As she steps off the elevator and notices the detective unit's closed door, her internal weather turns overcast. Win won't be inside his cubicle anymore, not for God knows how long. His reassignment to Watertown will make it difficult for her to demand his presence whenever she pleases.

“What is it?” she asks, when she finds her press secretary, Mick, sitting on the sofa in her corner office, talking on his phone.

She makes her usual cutthroat motion, indicating for him to end the call instantly. And he does.

“Don't tell me there's a problem. I'm in no mood for problems,” she says.

“We have a little situation,” says Mick, still new at the job, but promising.

He's handsome, polished, shows well, and does what he's told. She settles behind her glass desk inside her glass-filled office. Her ice palace, as Win calls it.

“If the situation's
little,
you wouldn't be in my office, waiting to pounce on me the instant I walk in,” she says.

“I'm sorry. I'm not going to say I told you so. . . .”

“You just did.”

“I've been quite vocal about what I think of your reporter friend.”

He means Cal Tradd. Lamont doesn't want to hear it.

“Let me find a way to say this delicately,” Mick says.

It takes a lot to unnerve her, but she knows the warning signs. A tightness in her chest, a chilly breath on the back of her neck, an interruption in the normal steady rhythm of her heart.

“What has he said to you?” she asks.

“I'm more concerned about what you've said to him. Did you do something to make him spiteful?” Mike says bluntly.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Maybe you slighted him in some way. Such as giving that front-page story to the
Globe
last month instead of to him.”

“Why would I give him a front-page anything? He works for a student newspaper.”

“Well, can you think of any other reason he might have to get you back for something?”

“People never seem to need a reason.”

“YouTube. Just posted a few hours ago. Frankly, I don't know what we're going to do about it.”

“Do about what? And your job is to always know what to do about it—whatever it is,” she retorts.

Mick gets up from the sofa, moves next to her, commandeers her computer, and logs on to the Internet, on to YouTube.

A video clip.

Carly Simon's “You're So Vain” as Lamont walks into a ladies' room, stops at a sink, opens her ostrich-skin handbag. Begins touching up her makeup in the mirror, primping, studying every angle of her face, her figure, experimenting with buttons on her blouse, which to button, which to unbutton. Pulling up her skirt, adjusting her pantyhose. Opening her mouth wide, examining her teeth. A voiceover from her own reelection campaign reciting “Clamping Down On Crime. Monique Lamont, DA for Middlesex County.”

Instead of a handcuff snapping shut at the end of the ad, her teeth in the mirror do.

“Is this why you brought up Cal?” Severely. “Immediately assuming he's to blame? Based on what?”

“He's your shadow, practically stalks you. He's immature. It's something a college kid would do. . . .”

“Such a strong case you make.” Sarcastically. “Good thing I'm the DA, not you.”

Mike stares at her, wide-eyed. “You're going to defend him?”

“He couldn't possibly have done it,” she says. “Whoever recorded this clearly was in the ladies' room. A female, in other words.”

“And it would be easy enough for him to pass as a damn girl. . . .”

“Mick. He follows me like a puppy, was hanging around me the entire time I was at the School of Government. He had no time to suddenly become a cross-dresser or hide in the damn ladies' room.”

“I didn't realize—”

“Of course you didn't. You weren't there. But you're right. The first order of business always is to find out who betrayed me.” Pacing. “Most likely, some female student in a stall saw me through a crack in the door and recorded all this nonsense with her cell phone. The price of being a public figure. No one will take it seriously.”

Mick stares at her as if she just fell off a shelf and shattered—like one of her pieces of art glass.

“Further,” she says, “what matters is whether you look good. And I'm happy to say, I do.” She replays the clip, reassured by her exotically beautiful face and perfect teeth, her shapely legs, her enviable bosom. “Make a note of it, Mick. That's how it works out there.”

“Not exactly,” he says. “The governor called.”

She stops pacing. The governor never calls.

“About YouTube,” Mick says. “He wants to know who's behind it.”

“Let me see. I must have it written down somewhere.”

“Well, it's an embarrassment no matter who did it. And when you look bad, he looks bad, since he's the one who . . .”

“What did he say, exactly?” she asks.

“I didn't talk to him directly.”

“Of course you didn't talk to him directly.” Angrily pacing again. “Nobody talks to him directly.”

“Not even you.” As if she needs to be reminded. “And after all you did for him,” Mick adds. “You haven't seen him once. He never returns your phone calls. . . .”

“This might be our opportunity.” She cuts him off yet again, her thoughts like pool balls, scattering across the felt, clacking into pockets. “Yes. Absolutely. The best revenge is success. So what do we do? We turn this YouTube debacle to my advantage. My chance to have an audience with His Highness and get his support for my new crime initiative. He'll be interested when he sees what's in it for him.”

She instructs Mick to get the governor's chief of staff on the phone. Now. It's urgent she sit down with Governor Howard Mather immediately. Mick suggests she might have to “grovel,” and she reminds him never to use that word unless he's talking about someone else. However, she concedes, if she finally acknowledges Mather as her mentor, that will have an impact. She really needs his advice. She's suddenly found herself in a PR nightmare. She fears it could reflect poorly on him and doesn't know what to do. Et cetera.

“That will be hard for him to resist,” she adds.

“But what if he does? Then what do I do?”

“Stop asking me to do your job!” she erupts.

 

 

 

In a very different part of Cambridge is the run-down frame house where Win was raised by his grandmother, Nana. Overwhelmed by ivy, flowering shrubs, and trees, her yard has become a subdivision of bird- and bat houses, and feeders.

His motorcycle bumps and fishtails over the rutted, unpaved driveway, and he parks near Nana's ancient Buick. Helmet off, and his ears are filled with the fairylike music of wind chimes stirred by the breeze, as if magical sprites alight on trees and the eaves of Nana's home and decide not to leave. She says they drive off mean and niggling entities, which should include the neighbors, Win thinks. Selfish, bigoted, rude. Fighting over shared driveways and off-street parking. Staring suspiciously at the steady stream of people who show up at the house.

He pops the trunk of the old Buick, which of course Nana hasn't bothered to lock, places his motorcycle gear inside, opens her back door, steps over the line of kosher salt on the floor. She's sitting in her kitchen, busy laminating bay laurel leaves in wide strips of transparent tape, the TV tuned to a classical music station. Miss Dog—deaf and blind and technically stolen because Win sneaked her away from her abusive owner—is under the table, snoring.

He sets his gym bag on the kitchen counter, then a knapsack filled with groceries, leans down, kisses Nana's cheek, says, “As usual, your car wasn't locked. Your door wasn't locked, and your alarm isn't set.”