Spin (Songs of Corruption #1)(28)

“Is he here?” I asked.

“Nope. Wanted you to meet him at his office downtown. Said it was important and apologies for the imposition et cetera. New polls show he’s getting beaten on the east side. Badly. Might be about that.” Tap tap tappa.

Running for mayor was an eighty-hour-a-week job. I’d known that from the beginning. “What do I have this afternoon?”

“Staff meeting at one. Procedure and protocols touchbase with Wanda’s team at two.”

Taking an afternoon jaunt downtown was undoubtedly ten times more appealing than either of those events. “Tell him I’ll be there.”

***

The DA’s office was in a 1920s stone-carved edifice a few blocks from my loft, so I parked at home and walked. The heat weighed on me. The streets, though not crowded, were populated.

The DA’s building was set back from the street with an expanse of lawn utilized by birds, squirrels, and urban picnickers. The tweedy grey brickwork matched the flat city sky, and as I got closer, I saw the stonework from a lost era. Like Roman reliefs, granite men carried logs, fished in a pebble sea, built houses from petrified wood, all immortalized with the toil of a sculptor’s sweat.

The lady at the front desk knew me, but I still needed to sign in and get a sticker. I was spared the thumbprint. I saw Gerry, Daniel’s top strategist, in the hall.

He stopped short and put out his hand. “Theresa, thank you for going to Catholic Charities.” When he shook my hand, he also kissed my cheek and patted my back.

“I was afraid I did more harm than good,” I said.

“No. Even a failed tactic can serve an overall strategy. Don’t forget that.”

“So I’m a failed tactic now?” I said with a smile and a lilt. “I thought I meant more to you than that.”

He pressed his lips together. “You’re perfect. You have politics in your blood. If I could, in good conscience, ask you to take that stupid bastard back, I would. He can’t lose with you by him.”

I had a few answers, none of them politic or kind. I chose the most bland. “He can win just fine without me.”

“Maybe, but it’ll be close.”

“Any idea why I’m here?”

“Come,” he said.

I let him lead me down the hall to Daniel’s office. A married couple he used for promotion was just leaving. They greeted me, then suddenly I was alone with my ex-fiancé.

He had a biggish office by 1920s standards. The windows slid up and down with rackety tickticks, and the walls were molded in every place molding could be placed. Over the last ninety years, it had been painted bi-annually, rounding out the edges until the room looked like the inside of a wedding cake.

“Found her wandering the halls,” Gerry said before ducking out.

Daniel had on a thin blue tie and white shirt with the cuffs rolled to the elbows. His wooden chair was dressed in his jacket, and he was every bit the good-looking, hardworking crusader for justice. “Theresa, thank you for coming.”

“After the election, this beck-and-all thing is over,” I said.

He approached a chestnut table that must have come with the building and pulled out a chair for me. I sat. He leaned on his desk and crossed his arms instead of sitting with me. I crossed my legs and faced him.

“It’s been a tough few days here,” he said.

“I have a protocol review I can still make if you don’t have something to say to me.”

“I know how much you love those.” He smiled his big, natural white smile.

“There were threats something would actually get done at this one.”

“Then it’s not really a protocol review.”

I sighed. “This is about Antonio again? Just say it.”

“I need to know what he is to you.”

“Oh, God. Really?” I stood. “Dan, honey, you’re so far out of line.”

“It matters. It matters to my campaign, and it matters to me. I need your help, and in order for me to even ask, I need to know the nature of your relationship with him.”

“It’s nothing.”

“Have you had sex with him?”

“Daniel!”

“I need to know.”

“Is this a deposition? Are you taking notes? Where’s the court reporter?”

He sighed and dropped his arms. “We’ve reached a wonderful pause in a war that’s been going on for a few decades. We have the Carlonis for all manner of shit, and I’ll file charges when everything’s in order. But the other side? The Giraldi family? I have nothing. I have accounting files we got from the NSA, but everything looks clean. I need them looked at by someone with your eye.”

“And you don’t have a team of people?”

“They have skill. You have talent.”

“I think this is about more than my talent.” I couldn’t hold to that line for long because he’d asked me to look at the Carloni files months ago. He’d switched to their rivals, but his ideals about my talents were well known.

“We got Donna Maria Carloni on embezzlement thanks to a mole. Good mole. I got nothing with Spinelli,” he said.

“Who you can’t even prove is the head of any kind of crime organization, much less the Giraldis.”

“He’s committed a few murders to get to where he is, Tink. Just because I can’t prove it doesn’t make it any less true. And yes, I’m terrified of you being anywhere near him, and yes, this is two birds with one stone. I get your eyes on his books, and I get you to tell me where his malfeasance is. But if you’re sleeping with him, I can’t use you. I’ll have to fly a guy in from Quantico, and that’ll alert everyone that I have the NSA docs. They’ll be questioned and possibly yanked.”