Justice Lost (Darren Street #3)(30)
“Danger? What does he want?”
“I think you should discuss it with him.”
“When does he want to meet?”
“He said he can fly in day after tomorrow. We’ll talk here, at my house.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
The senator was seventy-one years old, Granny told me, and had grown up about two miles from her house where his family scratched a living out of the mountain on a farm, raising cattle and tobacco. She knew him from both church and the one-room school in which they were educated. He excelled at academics, was charming and personable, and she knew early on that he was destined for things far beyond the Smoky Mountains.
They were also attracted to each other, she said.
“It was physical,” she told me. “The kind of thing that happens when people are young and hormones are raging.”
They’d sneaked off on occasion and spent time together. I would never have been so impolite as to ask Granny whether they ever had sex, and she didn’t volunteer any information on that front. They’d drunk moonshine together, which Granny’s father had made, and “fooled around some.” That was as far as she would go.
Granny’s father had taught her his recipe, and she believed herself to be one of a very small number of young women in or around Sevier County, Tennessee, who’d known how to make corn liquor. When the time came for Roger Tate to go off to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, he’d proposed to her, but her parents had been in ill health and she hadn’t wanted to leave them or her mountains. She’d turned him down, and he’d left.
“He wrote me letters over the years, and he stopped by to see me a couple of times,” she said. “He worked his way through college in only three years and then went to law school at Vanderbilt in the late 1960s,” she said. “When he graduated, he got a job as general counsel at a medical supply company that was being started by one of his friends. They didn’t have much money, so he took most of his salary in stock options. They built the company steadily, and five years later it went public. Roger became an instant multimillionaire that day. He eventually bought controlling interest in the company and still owns it, I believe. He’s one of the richest men in the United States Senate, if not the richest.”
“Where did his political career start?” I asked. “Did he represent Sevier County?”
“No, he was beyond us at that point. He had established a home in Nashville by then, where his business was, so he ran for one of the Nashville district seats. Won big, too. He served three terms in the Tennessee Senate and then ran for the big time, the United States Senate. By that time, he had more money than any of his competitors. He basically bought the seat, which is how it’s done routinely these days, from what I understand.”
“And he’s been in the United States Senate for what, forty years?”
“I suppose that’d be about right.”
“Wow, people think these little local offices are powerful,” I said. “Head of the appropriations committee? Control over the purse strings? That’s real power.”
“It hasn’t gone to his head,” Granny said. “I think you’ll like him.”
“I’ll see you in a couple of days, then,” I said. “What should I wear?”
“Just be yourself,” she said. “Roger doesn’t much care for fancy.”
CHAPTER 16
I spent about an hour filling out the forms for Claire Tate after I hung up the phone. They were routine questions that asked whether I’d ever been convicted of a felony, whether I owed a bunch of money to the government, how old I was, how long I’d been a resident of the state and the city/county, and whether I was a licensed attorney.
When I was finished, I went for a run. I’d found that the running did me a lot of good. It helped me clear my head, and it made me feel better. I talked to Grace a lot during the runs—not out loud but in my head—and I would try to imagine her answering. I hoped she approved of the direction I was headed, and I hoped she thought I’d make a fine district attorney. But Grace hadn’t appeared since she’d stepped through the veil. I had the feeling she’d abandoned me, that she’d moved on to another plane and had put me behind her. I tried talking to my mother, too. I also imagined that she seemed pleased about me going after the district attorney’s job, but like Grace, my mother had faded far off into the distance.
I ran for an hour and got back to the apartment, intending to take a shower and then go get some lunch. Something felt wrong as soon as I entered my apartment. I couldn’t quite grasp what it was, but I felt it the second I walked through the door. I stepped through the foyer, and there, sitting at my kitchen counter, was a large man in a uniform wearing a cowboy hat. I recognized him from television and from the few times I’d seen him in court: Sheriff Clifton “Tree” Corker. I stopped and stared at him.
“I believe it’s a crime to break into people’s homes without their permission,” I said.
“You gonna arrest me?”
“You pick the lock?”
“Never met one I couldn’t.”
I walked to the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of water. “You want one?” I said.
“Nah. Don’t drink much water. You got a beer in there?”