Rachel Lee - With Malice

Karen was discomfited by Grant Lawrence’s breakdown. It wasn’t that she hadn’t seen them often during her years on the force, especially since it was so often her job to break the bad news.

But Grant Lawrence was different. To her he had somehow always seemed a magical being, his footprints gilded as he strode through life. She knew about his wife’s tragic death, of course, and remembered how he had emerged from that period with the first gray showing in his hair. The story of the horrific childhood injury that had left him with an almost imperceptible limp was the stuff of political legend. But these potholes in an otherwise star-kissed life had only seemed to strengthen him.

Now she was faced with the fact that the mythical being, the possible next president of the United States, was only human after all. His grief was deep and raw, and she had to battle an urge to put an arm around him and try to comfort him.

Instead, she did what she was trained to do. She walked away, looking out the sliding glass doors of Abby’s room onto a balcony that had a view of the gardens, delicate and vital, carefully-sculpted paths among splashes of azalea and bougainvillea, orchid and mum, bamboo and palm, disparate and yet melding together into a whole that spoke volumes about the man who sat behind her, sobbing.

These people, she thought, had more money than she could imagine. Most of it had come from his film tycoon parents, although she knew he had managed to make some of his own fortune, both before and since his ascension to the Senate. But regardless of where it came from, it was more than she could imagine having.

It was a world so different from hers that she found it difficult to connect with. Unlike many, she didn’t begrudge the wealthy their good fortune; she simply couldn’t imagine what their world must be like. Standing here now, she felt she was looking through a window into places where the ordinary woes of life never intruded.

But that wasn’t true. The roses in that garden had thorns, and she had no doubt that a gardener had to pull the same kinds of weeds she struggled with in the tiny plot beside her own home. Behind her a very powerful man was weeping like a baby over the death of his nanny. Reality intruded here, too, in its ugliest forms.

“I’m sorry.”

His voice, sounding raw and thick, reached her.

“Don’t apologize, Senator,” she said, without turning. “You’re entitled to your grief.”

“Yes, but I’m sure your job is already difficult enough.”

She started a little, surprised by his perception. Surprised by his kindness. Very few people in his position were ever aware of hers. Very few considered that she might find it almost as difficult to be the bearer of bad news as they found it to receive it. But this was the quality she’d always found admirable in him, she reminded herself: his ability to put himself in the shoes of others.

“It’s okay,” she said, a little too quickly. “I’m used to it.”

“Really? Somehow I doubt it.”

She heard him blow his nose. Then the rocking chair creaked. He must be rising.

“I don’t see anything disturbed here,” he said. “It’s…obvious she climbed out of bed when she heard something.”

“So it would appear.” She turned to look at him again and felt a tug on her heart when she saw the redness of his eyes. “Tell me about Abby.”

“What do you need to know?”

“The kind of person she was.”

Grant came to stand by her at the doors and looked out on the garden. “Tough. She was very tough. When I was a child, she protected me fiercely. I remember once she chased some paparazzi away from the windows of my parents’ house.” A faint smile curved his mouth. “She grabbed up a broom and went after them. They never came back.” He turned his head, and their gazes met. “She protected my children the same way.”

“She was getting old.”

“Yes. But she was family. I know people tried to make an issue out of her race years back, but she’d come into this family when she was fifteen years old, and by the time I was born, there was no question but what Abby was family. Part of us, made so by love.” He paused for a moment. “You know, a former advisor once said I should get rid of her. Said her presence in my life harkened back to an ugly period in the history of the south. I fired him on the spot. I’d sooner have thrown out my mother.”

“What about her family?”

“She had none. She was an orphan.” His gaze grew distant and drifted back to the garden. “Do you know how she came to my family?”

“No.”

“My grandfather took Abby in after her entire family was killed in a church bombing. The Klan. The bomb killed seven people, including Abby’s parents and her older brother. Abby was sick that night. She’d stayed home.

“So my grandfather took her in. At this late date, I’m not sure of what he intended, but I do know he was outraged by the event. Anyway, my dad was five, and Abby seemed to take to caring for him. And that’s where it began.”

“And she never wanted to leave?”

“She never gave any indication if she did. She had a romance once, this really dapper guy my dad still has pictures of. But then one day she announced he was shiftless, and that was the end of that.”

“Why was he shiftless?”

His gaze saddened, and he closed his eyes. “I guess I’ll never know now.”

“Thank you, Senator,” Karen said after a moment. “You’ve been a great help. Where can I reach you when I need to?”

“At my parents’ place.” He gave her the number. “I’d appreciate it if you’d keep that under your hat. My girls are there, too, and I don’t want them…exposed.”

“I understand.”

She watched him leave the room and thought that his shoulders looked less square and his limp a bit more pronounced.

It was sad.

“Jerry, where the hell are you?”

Jerry Connally’s hand shook as he held his cell phone to his ear and heard Grant Lawrence’s voice. “I’m in the car, Grant. On the way home from the police station.”

He heard the pause before his friend spoke. “What have you told them?”

“I told them the truth. I came over to pick up the files you needed and found Abby. I checked out the house, called you, then called them. Straight, simple and to the point.”

And true, although not the whole truth. He had, of course, left out the part about lifting Stacy’s lifeless remains, fighting back the sheer revulsion at what had been done to her, gagging at what he himself was doing, carrying her to the trunk of his car and placing her in that alley.

He hadn’t approved of Grant’s relationship with Stacy, but he couldn’t help but admire and even like her. She was a tough, no-nonsense woman who’d fought off the demons of an abusive childhood. Some would say she hadn’t gone far, working as a stripper. That was how she’d made her living, but it hadn’t been who she was.

She would have been death for Grant’s career, and still might be, but there was no way she deserved what he’d done to her, to be left without dignity in a dark, dirty alley. He would live the rest of his life with the memory of that. But he’d done what he had to for his friend.

“What about Stacy?” he heard Grant ask.

Yes. What about Stacy? “She wasn’t there. And I won’t say anything more. For your sake.”

“Plausible deniability? Jerry, you know I’ve always thought that was bullshit.”

“And you’re right. It is. But sometimes bullshit is the best option available.” Jerry stopped at a red light and realized his arm ached from the tension of his grip on the wheel.

Grant Lawrence was as brilliant a man as Jerry had ever known. But sometimes even the most brilliant men needed a trusted friend to lay it out for them.