“Since Candy started this mess, let’s start with her, shall we?” Julia said. “My Harry had a fondness for young pussy, but what guy doesn’t?”
Had, I thought. That answers that, not that I thought Harry was still kicking around somewhere, still lying, shaking with his left.
“Including Leland,” Jeri said. “Which, against all logic would be you, Julia, considering your room-temperature warmth. Did you shed your skin several times a year, growing up?”
Silence from up front. Then, “I could pull over. Give that man of yours another whack on the head—harder. I’ve still got that hunk of wood I used in the garage. Just let me know, girl.”
Jeri remained silent.
“Thought so,” Julia said. “So . . . darling Candy. Jayson Wexel was Harry’s go-to guy when it came to rounding up girls. He’d been Harry’s right-hand man for nearly twenty years. Not many people knew Jay by sight, not like Harry. Jay had been supplying Harry for years. Harry was too scared and too well known to pick up girls on his own, so Jay became the middle man. He was good at it, not that picking up hookers requires great skill, but Candy was his crowning glory. She was a lovely thing, a hooker, true, but she wasn’t blown out and scabby like most of them get in no time at all. According to Jay, Harry was quite taken with her. She was twenty years old. A smart girl, but also stupid and greedy. She got seven hundred dollars for each of Harry’s visits, which would only run an hour or two, five minutes of which was the banging part since that’s all he was good for, but when he announced his candidacy she saw a million dollars. A million, like that was a magic number, like that would set her up for life. So right out of the blue she told him she wanted a million or she’d go to the newspapers, TV, maybe the police, she didn’t really know, but whoever she told, it would sink his bid for the presidency before it got an inch off the ground. She made a video during their last meeting, so it wasn’t going to be a ‘he said, she said’ deal. She showed him the video, even gave him a flash drive with the two of them on it to keep him terrified. She had him cold and she knew it.
“Harry freaked out. He told Jayson, his chief of staff. Then Jay told me, since we’d been seeing each other for a while. He wasn’t a bad lover for a guy closing in on fifty. He kept in shape, ran half marathons. We managed to keep our arrangement from Harry for the two years he and I were together.”
“Jayson,” Jeri said. “Who is dead. Murdered. Found burned to a crisp in his own house.”
“Yes, that was unfortunate but necessary,” Julia said. “But that would be getting ahead of things, so how about I come back to it?
“So—Candy and her blackmail scheme. We couldn’t undo it, not after she’d made that video. We couldn’t talk her out of it. Jay and I had to think fast to keep it under control. It wasn’t going to play itself out quickly, not with the kind of money involved, and Candy was a loose cannon, maybe with a loose mouth, so we had to do something about her. Years ago, Jay had been to an abandoned mine in the desert north of Gerlach. He was something of a rock hound, had a pretty good collection. We needed an out-of-the-way place and didn’t have time to find anything better. Jay went back, scouted the place, decided it was as good as any we were likely to find, so he checked ads in the paper and came up with a nice little travel trailer for cash, towed it out there, set it up.
“I talked to Candy, told her who I was—Jayson introduced us since he was the one who’d picked her up in a bar—and I convinced her she was on the right track with this blackmail thing, that Harry and I were finished and I wanted in on the money, too, but for it to work it needed our help, that she needed people on the inside to keep Harry calm, keep him rounding up the money without doing something that would blow up his bid for the presidency, which would mean no one would get a dime, including Candy.
“Jayson wasn’t a fool, either. When Harry said he was going to announce his candidacy, Jay knew it wasn’t going to happen. Harry wasn’t going to quit with the girls. He was eventually going to get caught. Like Clinton, he couldn’t keep it in his pants. I could just see him in front of a bunch of microphones telling the world ‘I did not have sex with that woman’. Last thing I wanted was for anyone to think I should do some sort of wretched Hillary apology—which I wouldn’t have. Before doing that, I would have set Harry on fire. I mean literally. Gasoline and a match.
“But none of that was going to happen. Harry wasn’t going to be president unless a miracle of some kind happened. I knew it, but he didn’t. He was a self-deceiving, self-aggrandizing fool who often believed his own lies. In their desire for power, politicians can be some of the dumbest halfwits in the country.”
Jeri was still working on the knots around my wrists. I thought I felt them loosen a little. My shoulders were burning with the effort of holding my wrists up to where she could reach them.
“But back up,” Julia said. “One way or another I was going to leave Harry. I had to. I mean, First Lady? Seriously? What if that miracle did occur? Who the hell with even half a brain would want
