community service. You could have given them a two-hundred-dollar fine.’
‘Those kids are all from families living out at Port Leo Country Club, and community service will make a bigger impression than scribbling a check. They ought to get their hands slapped and a little dirty.’
‘Well, we could debate the rightness of that real easy,’ Buddy said with satisfaction.
Whit watched Buddy eyeing the black robe hanging in the corner. ‘Buddy, don’t you already have a good job down at the nursing home?’
‘Sure do.’ Buddy was an administrator at Port Leo’s one nursing home, down in a crook of St Leo Bay.
‘Well, then why do you want my job? It can’t possibly pay you as well as the nursing home does.’
Buddy’s florid mouth worked. ‘I want to make a difference in people’s lives.’
‘Buddy, I frankly don’t know what we would debate about. I sentence to community service – you’d do a fine. Big effing deal.’
Buddy’s smile tightened at the brush with profanity. ‘How about debating moral fiber?’
‘Moral fiber? I’m opposed to it. Unless it fights colon cancer.’
‘I’ve heard you’ve been keeping company with a woman of less-than-sterling repute.’
‘Are we talking about Pete Hubble’s friend?’ God, not Faith, he thought.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I heard,’ Whit said, ‘that you were keeping company with Pete and his friend Velvet as well.’ A junior high refrain: I heard she heard you said they said.
Buddy’s smile died a natural death. ‘You better not be spying on me.’
‘Is it true?’
‘Why not just have me testify at the inquest?’ Buddy asked, and Whit smelled a stinky political ploy.
‘Buddy, I’m not subpoenaing you when we’re running against each other.’
Buddy tugged at his lower lip, like a reluctant tattletale. ‘Well
… I was out campaigning and Pete stopped me. He wanted to know how he could get close to his family again. He had been a disappointment to them and he wanted to make amends.’
‘And what did you tell him?’
‘To leave town. No one wanted him here at all.’
16
State Senator Lucinda Hubble kept a collection of heads on the top shelf in her study. Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton represented the presidents; for the governors of Texas she had George W. Bush, Ann Richards, Mark White, Bill Clements, and Dolph Briscoe. All grinned like decapitated clowns, rubbery skin sagging without bones. Their false-lipped mouths gaped, caught between mirthful smile and slackened grimace. Lucinda also had one of herself, complete with trademark puffy red hair and big azure-framed eyeglasses.
Whit had arrived ten minutes ago, a little past four. The housekeeper, a dour Vietnamese sparrow of a woman, told him Faith was out, Lucinda was on the phone, and would he mind waiting in the senator’s study? Anything to eat or drink? she offered. The kitchen and dining room tables creaked under the weight of the collected casseroles and salads and pies brought by neighbors and churchwomen and by the Democratic power elite. But only a few mourners stood gathered, nodding with awkward sympathy.
He wondered if the truth about Pete was leaking, like a slow hiss from a balloon. Faith had stood him up, perhaps off conducting damage control. What would people say to Lucinda? Sorry your son’s dead or sorry he turned out so badly? The Democrats in the living room looked fretful. He followed the housekeeper and sat, studying the study.
Underneath the political gallery of plastic masks stood an old pinball machine themed BIG SPENDER, with a fat cat tossing bills to an admiring crowd of 1920s zoot suiters and flappers. Prominently behind her desk were her framed nursing certificates, yellowing with age. On the wall hung an array of photos: Lucinda Hubble with President Bush, with President Clinton, with Willie Nelson and Ann Richards, with a steady parade of Texas celebrities. In each picture Lucinda gave a thumbs-up, as though marking another successful conquest. Lucinda’s office was almost too relaxed for a politician.
Warm, friendly. Where the senator could meet with the common folk, show she was just a good old gal.
There were no pictures of her sons. A couple of Faith and Sam, both formal portraits, the kind given as Christmas gifts in gold frames. Faith smiled, but only like she’d just passed a CPA exam. Sam looked like he’d wandered out of a National Honor Society meeting, serious and bespectacled and boring. The perfect political grandson. Certainly the two sons had been failures in that regard.
A small stereo sat in the corner, playing soft solo piano music. Whit wandered over to the stereo, picked up the CD’s jewel box. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, played by Glenn Gould.
‘I find Bach a great comfort,’ Lucinda Hubble said from the doorway. She looked sunken and diminished. She wore a faded olive-green cardigan and a pair of old khakis, as though she might be loafing in a library or tending winter pansies in her flowerbeds.
‘Hello, Senator,’ Whit said. ‘I’m so very sorry about Pete.’
‘Thank you, honey.’ She cleared her throat and dabbed her eyes with a monogrammed handkerchief. ‘These wells have just about run dry. I’m sorry to keep you waiting, but that was the governor and his wife on the phone.’ She said this with only the slightest hint of superiority.
She came and stood by Whit, her fingers playing air piano. ‘Do you hear Gould? He hums and breathes along as he plays. All that careful structure Gould builds, note by note, each one a key brick in a musical house, each note, each rest, played to his own exactitude, but still he can’t contain the passion he feels for the music.’ She switched the music off.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Whit said.
‘Pete hated classical music,’ she said. ‘He hated anything touched by beauty.’
Lucinda Hubble gestured at the chair on the other side of the desk, and he sat. She eased herself down into a heavy leather armchair.
‘Your daddy’s already called, and he and Irina have brought us a lovely casserole. It’s something Russian and quite unpronounceable, but I’m sure it’s delicious. So thoughtful. You thank them again for me, honey.’
‘Yes, ma’am, I will. And I won’t keep you long now. I just need to ask you some questions so I can make a determination on cause of death.’
‘Of course.’ She placed her hands, palm down, on the expansive smooth teak of the desk.
He wondered if she knew about him and Faith. She had given no sign – no sly smile, no slight frown of disapproval.
He led with a suggestion for suicide. ‘How would you describe Pete’s state of mind in the past few weeks?’
‘Depressed,’ Lucinda said. ‘He felt he had wasted his life because of the… particular career he had chosen.’
‘You knew about the porn?’
Lucinda flinched at the word but nodded. ‘I found out a couple of years ago. I called Pete at his home. He was apparently in the middle of shooting a film.’ She crumpled the handkerchief. ‘I could hear the women in the background. Laughing at me. Hollering about which one would get to appear in a scene with my son first.’ She touched at her blue eyeglasses. ‘Not what a mother ever wants to hear. I hung up. I told Faith. She already knew, she’d been shielding my so-delicate feelings. I was devastated, of course. I didn’t speak to him again until he came back to town.’
‘I think the press will find out,’ Whit said quietly.
‘Not from me, they won’t. And if they find out from you or from Detective Salazar, or any member of either of your offices, I will hath more fury than hell,’ Lucinda flared. ‘I can’t have Sam knowing about this. I just can’t.’
Not to mention the voters. ‘Do you think Velvet is going to stay quiet?’
‘I can’t control her.’
‘Did Pete say why he was coming home?’ Whit asked.
‘He said he no longer wished to pursue his acting career.’ Whit believed the words adult films or dirty movies
