shoes. He read the men’s fashion magazines, of the serious kind, and spent some time every spring and fall looking at suits. When he and his wife traveled to Manhattan, she went to the Museum of Modern Art, he went to Versace.
Today he wore a French-blue shirt under a linen summer jacket, lightweight woolen slacks, and loafers; and a compact .45 in a Bianchi shoulder rig.
Lucas’s smile came and went, flashing in his face. He had crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes, and silver hair threaded through the black. In the morning, when shaving, he worried about getting old. He had a way to go before that happened, but he imagined he could see it, just over the hill.
WHEN THEY FINISHED the Diet Cokes, Sloan went and got two more and then said, “What about Burt Kline?”
“You know him, right?” Lucas asked.
“I went to school with him, thirteen years,” Sloan said. “I still see him around, when there’s a campaign.”
“Good guy, bad guy?” Lucas asked.
“He was our class representative in first grade and every grade after that,” Sloan said. “He’s a politician. He’s always been a politician. He’s always fat, greasy, jolly, easy with the money, happy to see you. Like that. First time I ever got in trouble in school, was when I pushed him into a snowbank. He reported me.”
“Squealer.”
Sloan nodded.
“But what’s even more interesting, is that you were a school bully. I never saw that in you,” Lucas said. He scratched the side of his nose, a light in his eye.
Sloan made a rude noise. “I weighed about a hundred and ten pounds when I graduated. I didn’t bully anybody.”
“You bullied Kline. You just said so.”
“Fuck you.” After a moment of silence, Sloan asked, “What’d he do?”
Lucas looked around, then said, quietly, “This is between you and me.”
“Of course.”
Lucas nodded. Sloan could keep his mouth shut. “He apparently had a sexual relationship with a sixteen-year-old. And maybe a fifteen-year-old—same girl, he just might’ve been nailing her a year ago.”
“Hmm.” Sloan pulled a face, then said, “I can see that. But it wouldn’t have been rape. I mean, rape-rape, jumping out of the bushes. He’s not the most physical guy.”
“No, she went along with it,” Lucas said. “But it’s about forty years of statutory.”
Sloan looked into himself for a minute, then said, “Not forty. Thirty-six.”
“Enough.”
Another moment of silence, then Sloan sighed and asked, “Why don’t you bust him? Don’t tell me it’s because he’s a politician.”
Lucas said to Sloan, “It’s more complicated than that.” When Sloan looked skeptical, he said, “C’mon, Sloan, I wouldn’t bullshit you. It really is more complicated.”
“I’m listening,” Sloan said.
“All right. The whole BCA is a bunch of Democrats, run by a Democrat appointee of a Democratic governor, all right?”
“And God is in his heaven.”
“If we say, ‘The girl says he did it,’ and bust him, his career’s over. Whether he did it or not. Big pederast stamp on his forehead. If it turns out he didn’t do it, if he’s acquitted, every Republican in the state will be blaming us for a political dirty trick—a really dirty trick. Five months to the election. I mean, he’s the president of the state senate.”
“Does the kid have any evidence?” Sloan asked. “Any witnesses?”
“Yes. Semen on a dress,” Lucas said. “She also told the investigator that Kline has moles or freckles on his balls, and she said they look like semicolons. One semicolon on each nut.”
An amused look crept over Sloan’s face: “She’s lying.”
“What?”
“In this day and age,” he asked, “how many sixteen-year-olds know what a semicolon is?”
Lucas rolled his eyes and said, “Try to concentrate, okay? This is serious.”
“Doesn’t sound serious,” Sloan said. “Investigating the family jewels.”
“Well, it is serious,” Lucas said. “She tells the initial investigator…”
“Who’s that?”
“Virgil Flowers.”
“That fuckin’ Flowers,” Sloan said, and he laughed. “Might’ve known.”
“Yeah. Anyway, she tells Virgil that he’s got semicolons on his balls. And quite a bit of other detail, including the size of what she calls ‘his thing.’ She also provides us with a dress and there’s a semen stain on it. So Virgil gets a search warrant…”
Sloan giggled, an unattractive sound from a man of his age.
“…gets a search warrant, and a doctor, and they take a DNA scraping and examine Kline’s testicles,” Lucas said. “Sure enough, it’s like they came out of Microsoft Word: one semicolon on each nut. We got the pictures.”
“I bet they’re all over the Internet by now,” Sloan said.
“You’d bet wrong. These are not attractive pictures—and everybody involved knows that their