Linwood Barclay - Trust Your Eyes

“I’ve got a job, too,” I said. “You’ve got yours, and I’ve got mine. I’ve got calls to make, and I may have to bring back some of my stuff from Burlington-”

“Vermont.”

“Right, from Burlington, Vermont, so I can work here while we sort things out.”

“Sort things out,” Thomas said quietly.

“That’s right. I’ll walk you through it. How to put the oven on, all that stuff. But you’ll need to come down around five.”

I treasured Thomas’s shell-shocked expression as I closed the door.

Almost on cue, my cell rang. It was my agent, Jeremy Chandler, who’d been fielding job inquiries for me for the last ten years.

“I’ve got three jobs here for you but it’s not like the Sistine Chapel is asking you to paint a ceiling and you’ve got forty years to do it. These are magazines and one Web site, Ray, with deadlines. Looming deadlines. If you can’t do the work, I need to know now so I can farm these jobs out to other artists who, while not nearly as gifted as yourself, are clearly much hungrier.”

“I told you, I’m at my father’s place.”

“Oh shit, yeah, I forgot. He died, right?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what he did.”

“So, the funeral and all that stuff, is that over?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’ll be back in your studio when, exactly?”

“I have some stuff to deal with, Jeremy. I might have to set up a makeshift studio here temporarily.”

“Good idea. Otherwise, I’ll have to get Tarlington for these illustrations.”

“Oh, God,” I said. “The guy paints with his feet. His Obamas look like Bill Cosby. Every black guy he does looks like Bill Cosby.”

“Look, if you can’t take the job, you don’t get to criticize. Did I tell you, I heard from Vachon’s people?”

“Jesus.” Carlo Vachon, a noted Brooklyn crime family boss, was facing a slew of possible indictments on everything from murder to unpaid parking tickets. I’d been commissioned by a New York magazine to do a drawing of him in which I’d exaggerated all his physical features, particularly his girth, as he held a gun to the Statue of Liberty. In my version, she had both her arms in the air.

I was breaking out in an instant sweat. “Is there a hit out on me?”

“No, no, nothing like that. Apparently he loved the illustration and he wants to buy the original. The thing is with these mob guys, they love the attention, even when it’s not exactly positive.”

“You have the original?”

“I do.”

“Send it. No charge,” I said.

“Done. But that’s not even why I called.”

“What is it?”

“There’s a new site about to start up. It’s got backing from some very big people, and they want to take on HuffPo, but they want something different, and I said to them, what about an animated political cartoon, kind of like those ones on The New Yorker Web site. Ten seconds long, but the animation is actually kept to a minimum. You create movement by panning across the image and-”

“I get how it could be done,” I said. “You mentioned me?”

“I didn’t even have to. They came to me. This woman who’s setting it up, her name’s Kathleen Ford. Got financial backing like you wouldn’t believe. Lots of media money. She wants to have a sit-down with you ASAP.”

“Okay, but right now I-”

There was a knock at the front door. A solid, purposeful, somebody-means-business kind of knock. I hadn’t heard a car pull up, but Jeremy did tend to talk as though he was trying to drown out a 747, even when there wasn’t one in the vicinity.

“Someone’s here,” I said.

“Ray, this is huge. You’ve got to meet with this woman. It’s major bucks.”

“I’ll get back to you.”

I left the phone on the kitchen table and went to the door.

There were two of them standing there on the porch, a black sedan parked behind my Audi, blocking it in, I supposed, should I decide to make a run for it. A man and a woman, both in their forties, both dressed in shades of gray. Both in suits, although his came with a narrow, businesslike tie.

“Mr. Kilbride?” the woman asked.

“Yes?”

“I’m Agent Parker, and this is Agent Driscoll.”

“Huh?”

“FBI,” she said sternly.

Bridget Sawchuck believes that if she’s going to have to discuss her situation with her husband’s closest friend and chief adviser, Howard Talliman, it better be in a public place. Maybe he’ll be able to resist the temptation to throttle her if there are witnesses, although she isn’t one hundred percent sure that will save her. She invites him to lunch at the Union Square Cafe, booking a table for one o’clock.

Talliman has been Morris Sawchuck’s best friend since God was a boy. They went to Harvard together, got drunk together, practiced law together, vacationed together, probably even got laid together on a joint trip to Japan a couple of years after Geraldine died. Howard, very early on, began working behind the scenes on political campaigns-Republican, Democrat, didn’t matter. Only winning mattered. If a hockey player could be traded from the Rangers to the Bruins, then slam his former teammates into the boards, Talliman could formulate strategy for any party that was willing to pay his price. He’s never wanted to be the candidate. He is short and paunchy, and says he has the sex appeal of a garden gnome, but he knows how to play the political game from behind the bench and turn others into winners.

“You can take this as far as you want to go,” Howard told Morris more than a decade ago. “The only thing that limits you is your own ambition. If you’ve got enough of it, it’ll take you right to the top. But you have to build in increments. A tough prosecutor, then an attorney general-you start drawing a line and see where it takes you. It takes you right to the fucking top, that’s where it takes you.”

Howard Talliman mixes the Kool-Aid, and Morris drinks it.

All the hard work is paying off. Big time. Morris is surely headed to the governor’s mansion, and who knows where the hell he’ll go after that?

As proud as Howard is of shaping his best friend into a political star, it was finding him a new, beautiful young wife to stand at his side during victory speeches that really puffs him up. He’d encountered Bridget at the PR firm he had hired on behalf of another client, a circuit court judge who’d found himself with his nuts in a vise after his son was arrested for running a meth lab out of the judge’s summer place in New Hampshire. The moment Howard saw her he knew she’d look perfect standing next to Morris at every campaign stop across the state of New York. She was sexy in a Michelle Obama-Jackie O kind of way. Statuesque, long neck, nice figure but not too busty. Poise to spare.

Howard, Bridget realizes now, maneuvered Morris and her together without their even knowing it at the time. He brought her in to organize that kids’ baseball diamond fund-raiser, which put Bridget and Morris together at the same place at the same time. Howard made the introductions, whispered into each of their ears that the one was interested in the other.

Machiavelli with a little Cupid’s arrow, that’s what Howard was.

But there was something there. Within a week, Bridget found herself sprawled across the backseat of Sawchuck’s limo, belts unbuckling, snaps unsnapping, a would-be governor’s head between her legs.

A lot of fun, even if Bridget has not always been, strictly speaking, exclusively heterosexual. But what the hell. Once she found out the kind of life she was looking at, hooking up with someone like Morris Sawchuck, she figured she could play on just the one team forever.

Didn’t turn out to be the case, but that realization didn’t dawn on her until after she and Morris were married.