“So is Polly telling the truth?” Neal asked.
“I dunno,” Graham answered.
“The cops didn’t believe he raped me,” Polly said to Karen. “I mean, I was balling the guy for a year, right, and then I cry rape. But honest to God, the last time it was.”
Karen was helping Polly put her underwear away in the small guest room. This was no easy task. Polly had a lot of underclothes.
“Jack is no great shakes in the sack anyway, to tell you the truth,” Polly continued, “but who would be married to ‘Canned-Ice’-that’s what he used to call his wife. I mean, where would he get the practice, right? So he needed somebody, okay, and he was, like, nice to me? So every time he came to New York, we’d go back to my place and do it… and do it and do it and do it… but I got feeling bad about myself. I mean, this thing was going nowhere and there was his wife on the TV talking about how they had tried to have kids but couldn’t and I’m in bed with the guy watching this. He used to like to do it while they were on the TV together, which got really creepy. I mean, there they were together all sweet and lovey-dovey and there we were in bed doing it. Don’t you think that’s kind of creepy?”
“Definitely creepy,” Karen said.
“Even my best friend, Gloria, thinks it’s creepy, and she’s looser than I am. So anyway, after a while I said, ‘Jack, I’m not doing it anymore while “The Jack and Candy Family Hour” is on,’ and he got mad and we broke up, but then he came back and was really sweet and everything and so I took him back and we started doing it again, but not during ‘The Jack and Candy Family Hour.’ That’s on tape, not live, you know.”
“I kind of figured that out,” Karen said. She handed Polly a bra that looked like a postdoctoral project at MIT.
Polly held it up and said, “One of the things I’m going to do with the money is have my boobs done, because I’m thinking about trying Hollywood, and you need boobs. I mean, I have boobs, of course, but not boobs.”
She held her hands out to demonstrate what she had in mind.
Karen winced.
“I think you look great,” she said.
“Do you? Awwww,” Polly said. “Sometimes I think I look like a cheap tramp. I think that’s what the cops thought, like ‘She was asking for it,’ you know, but I wasn’t. I told Jack it was over. I was through with him and he asked for one last time and I told him no, but he wasn’t going to take no for an answer, and the son of a bitch held me down and did it and I think that’s rape, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do.”
“So do I, but try telling that to the cops. They look at you like you’re nuts or something, but we’ll see who’s nuts.”
Probably Neal after a month of this, Karen thought.
“So you decided to sue the son of a bitch,” Karen said.
“The only way to make him pay,” Polly said, “and I need the money, too, seeing as how I’m out of a job and I’m a shitty secretary anyway, to tell the truth, and I’m going to have a hard time finding a job because everyone in the whole country hates me.
“I don’t hate you,” Karen said. She felt goopy for saying it, but it felt like one of things you have to say. Anyway, she meant it. She kind of liked Polly Paget.
“You know the rest,” Graham said to Neal. “Polly goes to some sleazebag lawyer, whose first move is to call every tabloid in the phone book and tell them how to spell his name.”
Neal remembered seeing the headlines at the checkout counter in Austin’s only grocery store, I WAS RAPED, SCREAMS BIMBO. BOMBSHELL DROPS BOMBSHELL. HAPPY JACK CAUGHT IN LOVE NEST. POLLY GETS HER CRACKER. IT’S ALL A LIE, SAYS CANDY LANDIS. CANDY STANDS BY MAN. Then the networks picked it up-a more somber tone but the same voyeuristic thrust: “Family Network chief Jack Landis accused of rape by alleged longtime mistress. Financial improprieties also alleged. An unidentified board member said to be demanding an investigation.”
Then Jack responded. Media rivals were trying to destroy him. Filth peddlers wanted to drag him down into the gutter with them. The usually buttoned-up Candy broke into sobs on the show-who could be so cruel to do something like this? Polly Paget was a tool. The Family Cable Network will go on. Candyland will be built! Wild applause… audience members wept unashamedly. It was beautiful.
Then Polly’s idiot lawyer held a press conference. Polly made a statement. She looked awful on camera and sounded worse. The good gentlemen and ladies of the press shredded her during the Q and A. She came across as a hard, cold, calculating… bimbo. It was awful.
That, Graham told Neal, was when the minority owner called Ethan Kitteredge at the bank. Kitteredge paid off Polly’s lawyer, brought in a new firm, and arranged for Polly Paget to drop out of sight.
The press went crazy. A missing Polly Paget was much better than an all-too-present one. Delicious speculation seized the public. Where was Polly? Why had she run? Had someone threatened her? Did this prove she was lying? Where was she?
“We put a fake Polly on a plane to L.A.,” Graham explained, “and drove the real Polly up to Providence. She hid out at Kitteredge’s house for ten days while the lawyers grilled her. That’s when we decided we needed your dubious services. So we got on a private plane, flew to Reno, and here we are.”
Hiding Polly turned out to be a brilliant move. With Polly not there to open her mouth, the minority owner was able to fill the ravenous media void with stories of cost overruns, lavish expenditures, and shoddy accounting until the press, inevitably, dubbed the affair “Pollygate.”
And media magic struck Polly, too. Missing, she made the delicate transition from bimbo to sex symbol. Mysterious, she became a combination of Garbo and Monroe. Casual friends sold their stories for four figures. Grainy snapshots went for more. Offers came pouring into the new law firm and went unanswered-television interviews, magazine stories, a centerfold.
It was a feeding frenzy, a media circus. The only thing missing from Pollygate was Polly.
3
Where is she?”
Candy Landis asked this question as if she actually expected an answer.
Her husband, Jack, stood against the big floor-to-ceiling corner window she had specially built to give him views of both the River Walk and the Alamo. She thought he looked handsome standing there, his full head of hair still black, his back straight, his tummy hanging just slightly over his belt.
Charles Whiting cleared his throat and started again. “She left her New York apartment in the company of a tall, heavyset male Caucasian and entered the back of a black limousine with opaque windows.”
“Opaque? What’s opaque?” Jack asked.
“You can’t see through them, dear,” Candy Landis said.
“Opaque,” Jack Landis repeated to himself. “Go ahead.”
“The limousine proceeded to La Guardia Airport, where Miss Paget exited the vehicle in the company of the same male Caucasian. The subject then proceeded to a first-class counter at American Airlines-”
“What subject?”
“Miss Paget.”
“So what’s the subject?” Jack Landis asked. “Geometry… history? Are we back in junior high or something?”
“That’s an FBI phrase,” Candy explained. “Isn’t that an FBI phrase, Chuck?”
“It’s a general law-enforcement term, Mrs. Landis.”
“So then what did the subject do?” Jack Landis asked as he watched a young lady with legs longer than a deer’s stroll along the sidewalk.
Charles Whiting cleared his throat again. In his years with the bureau, he’d had occasion to brief the director several times and hadn’t been interrupted like this. But then again, Charles cut a distinguished figure. At fifty-four, his six foot three inches were still taut and ramrod-straight. Even under his gray suit, his shoulders showed the
