The Saint Page 3

  “What else are you working on?” Tom asked.

  “I’ve got five hundred words on O’Neill testifying for his mother in a criminal case ten years ago.”

  “Are you kidding?” Tom asked. “You’re turning into a one-trick pony here, Jim.”

  “You’ve got a hole on page three,” I said with a shrug. “I can fill it.”

  “Damn,” Tom sighed. “Okay, Jim, but let’s remember what we’re here to do. Tell news, not stories.”

  CARTER

  * * *

  I didn’t wait for the emergency Saturday-morning meeting to officially begin. I stormed into Amanda’s office and caught her shoving the last of a doughnut into her mouth.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked.

  “Knock?” she asked, around a mouthful. “Learn some manners?”

  I sighed and slapped the Gazette on her desk. The picture of the pregnant elf on that chair stared up at me, mocking me. Jim Blackwell had found out the woman’s name—Zoe Madison. It was right there in the caption, and I had spent most of the morning finding out what I could about her.

  Her address on a scrap of paper burned in my pocket, and I wanted nothing more than to go over to Beauregard Town and strangle her. Of course, that wouldn’t do much for my image. Maybe I’d be better off parading her around town and making her tell every single person we met that she’d lied about me.

  “He’s calling me Deputy Deadbeat Daddy,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “Actually,” Amanda said, swallowing and standing, as she gathered a stack of papers in her arms, “so are the Houston Chronicle, and the New Orleans Sentinel and—” She tossed the papers on the desk, each one hitting the mahogany with a flat thud like a nail in my coffin. “The real kicker, the pièce de résistance, if you will—”

  “Amanda. We don’t need any more theater.”

  “Third page in USA Today. They’re all calling you Deputy Deadbeat Daddy.”

  I hissed as if burned. And it felt that way; my anger was so hot I had to stand up and walk to the window, looking down on St. Louis Street, quiet and slick with rain.

  This was going to be my legacy. I could clean up every neighborhood in this city, but I’d still go to my grave as Deputy Deadbeat Daddy.

  I was, at this point, the opposite of Bill Higgins.

  Bill Higgins, who came out of retirement last year after the previous administration was finally exposed in its corruption, and who was reelected Mayor-President. It was a quirk of Baton Rouge politics that the Mayor of Baton Rouge was also the President of the Western Baton Rouge Parish, but it hardly mattered. Bill Higgins was king in this city. Hell, in this state.

  And I wanted to align myself with such a man.

  I needed to, if I had any hope of becoming mayor in eighteen months.

  But I should have known better. I was an O’Neill, after all—scandal was practically my middle name. I thought that I could keep the dirty part of my life away from the clean part.

  “How do we fix this?”

  “Well—” Amanda leaned back in her chair “—we can get them to retract, but I’m not sure we can ‘fix’ what’s really the issue here, Carter.”

  “Of course we can fix this. Anything can be fixed.” I knew this for a fact. A lifetime of bribery and extortion, holding the worst of my family at bay like wolves in a storm, had taught me that everyone could be bought and anything worth fixing could be fixed.

  Amanda stared at me as if I was something wiggling under a microscope.

  “What?”

  “Sometimes,” she said, “you look like a different person. You get this expression and it’s like I’ve never seen you before.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Amanda.”

  “I’m not. I’m telling you, the mask you wear every damn day slips and the guy underneath it freaks me out a little bit.”

  I sighed. “What are we going to do about Zoe Madison?”

  “The pregnant lady?” She waved a hand. “I can fix that. I can fix that in my sleep. What’s got me worried is what’s happening with your family. The postponement of your father’s arraignment is hurting us in public opinion. And you didn’t tell me you testified for your mother ten years ago in a criminal case.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said, picking up the papers and dumping them in the recycling beside Amanda’s desk.

  “Worrying about it is kind of my job, Carter. I need an answer when those questions start coming up again, and they will if you’re going to announce your candidacy for mayor after Christmas.”

  The sentence hung there, unanswered.

  I was going to do that. That was the plan. The goal.

  Yesterday, before my mother’s resurfacing, it seemed like the fruition of years of hard work. The only likely outcome for my life.

  Today, it seemed ridiculous. Announcing my candidacy for mayor while my father went to jail, my mother was snooping around in the shadows, and there was a missing ruby kicking around somewhere?

  “That is still the plan, right?” Amanda asked.

  “Yes,” I said, because I still wanted it.

  “Then don’t put your head in the sand. We need a strategy and I need the truth.”

  “Our strategy,” I said in a tone designed to remind her that she worked for me, “is that you say ‘no comment.’”

  “The public—”

  “The attention will die down. It always does. We just need to stay the course.”

  “Stay the course?” She watched me dubiously. “This can’t be you talking.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you haven’t backed down from a fight once since taking this office. And now you want to stay the course? You think that’s gonna work?”

  “When it stops, if it stops working, we’ll come up with a new strategy.”

  Amanda blew out a long breath, said, “You’re the boss,” and leaned back in her chair, kicking her feet up on the desk. “Now,” she said, her eyes alight, “about Zoe Madison. We’ve got three choices. We can issue a statement saying you’ve never seen the girl and you are not the father.”

  “Will that work?”

  “In time, but in that time, Blackwell’s going to be going through your family’s dirty laundry, of which there seems to be plenty. And sure, we can fight for some retractions, but it’ll be like fighting a forest fire with a squirt gun.”

  “We need a distraction.”

  “Exactly. We can dig up a whole bunch of dirt and annihilate her in the press.”

  “Annihilate?”

  “But she’s practically picture-perfect. If we go after her, it’ll make us look like baby kitten killers.”

  “Okay, what’s our second choice?” I asked, sorry to see annihilation off the table.

  “Well, I’ve got an idea, and frankly it should take the heat off your shady family.”

  “Good,” I said, ready for anything.

  “Don’t be too eager,” she said. “This might hurt a little.” There was something about Amanda’s smile that made me nervous.

  Very nervous.

  ZOE

  * * *

  The pregnancy cravings were not to be messed with.

  They were primitive and so strong they could last for days, taking me places no sane woman should go.

  I’d learned that the hard way in month three when I’d left the house in need of ice cream and had systematically torn the head off every person that had crossed my path. I’d made a four-year-old cry for accidentally riding her bike over my foot.

  A four-year-old! I was going to be a great mother.

  Now, I stayed home and rode the cravings out like I was tied to the saddle of a runaway horse. Or I called in reinforcements.

  “You sure you’re all right?” Mom asked, wrapping one of my scarves around her neck. “That thing in the paper—”

  “A huge misunderstanding, Mom,” I said, lying through my teeth. My picture in the paper this morning had been a shocker, and that little trickl
e of guilt I’d been ignoring all night had turned into a geyser. I was on the front page of the paper and the story made it seem as though Carter O’Neill was one step down from an axe murderer.

  Deputy Deadbeat Daddy. It was awful.

  Well, some cold, no-nonsense voice in my head whispered, what did you expect, standing on a chair like that?

  “The mayor’s office will handle it, I’m sure,” I insisted, wanting my mother out of the house with such force it was hard not to just open the door and stand there, waiting for her to get the hint.

  But Mom had brought salsa.

  So I was trying to be polite.

  “You sure you don’t mind if I take this?” her mom asked, looking down at the green-blue ends of the scarf. “It looks so pretty on you.”

  It did. It does. It was my favorite scarf, but Mom needed to leave so I could dunk my fresh batch of ginger cookies into the salsa in peace.

  There were parts of this pregnancy business that required privacy, and this newfound obsession with ginger cookies and salsa was my own little secret.

  “Absolutely, wear it in health. It goes great with your new hair,” I said, and as if cued, my mom smoothed a hand down the back of her new short silver bob.

  “It does look good, doesn’t it?” she asked, preening slightly in the mirror beside the door.

  Go. I thought. Leave. Please.

  “You look much younger,” I said instead.

  Mom beamed, tossing the scarf around her neck with a little flair, and I smiled. “You don’t look like you’re about to be a grandmother, that’s for sure,” I said, feeling tubby next to my mom’s hard-won thinness. Seven years ago, Mom had sworn she wasn’t going to turn fifty in a size fourteen and she hadn’t. She’d put her mind to it and lost twenty-five pounds. But that was Penny Madison for you. Once her mind was made up, that was it. Done. Deal. The weight had no choice but to leave in defeat.

  “Okay,” Penny said. “I need to get to work, but I’ll see you tonight? We can go get a new slipcover for that couch.”

  “What’s wrong with the scarf?” I asked, pulling on the pretty black fringe of the Spanish-style scarf that was draped over the back of my blue velvet couch. It had been part of a costume from a La Bohème adaption I’d done in Houston a few years ago.

  “It looks a little trashy, sweetie. We’ll get you something in a nice tweed.”

  I didn’t get a chance to say over my dead body, because Mom clasped her hands over my face, squeezing my cheeks just a little so that my lips pursed. An old routine Mom refused to let go of, despite the fact that I was thirty-seven and five months pregnant.

  You will always be my little girl, Penny was fond of saying. And somehow she always made it sound like a jail sentence.

  “Okay,” I said, the words distorted by my squished face. “My last class is over at seven.”

  “I’ll pick you up here at seven-thirty,” my mom said, and pecked my pursed lips. “Remember,” she said, her eyes flicking over to my kitchen counter, where a batch of ginger cookies sat getting cold. “Every pound you gain now is one you’ll have to lose after the baby gets here.”

  Was it illegal to punch your mother? Or merely immoral? Because immoral I had no problem with. I was, after all, a political scandal in the making.

  “Bye, honey,” Penny said before I could even curl a fist, and then I was gone. The Craving-Goddess-turned-nightmare walked out the door, my favorite scarf trailing behind her.

  “Oh, thank God,” I muttered and turned back to my cookies.

  I cranked the lid off the jar of salsa and poured some into a chipped china bowl, because I wasn’t a heathen, and then dunked the nearest cookie into the tomato mixture.

  It was still disgusting, not a good fit at all. Salsa required salt, not sugar. Seriously, what possessed me? I eyed the cookie in my hand and dunked it again.

  And why couldn’t I stop?

  A knock on the door practically shook the windows loose, and I quickly put down the cookie and slid the salsa into my fridge.

  Wiping my hands and any stray crumbs from my face, I opened the door.

  “Mom—”

  But it wasn’t my mom.

  It was Carter O’Neill, in a suit and tie, dwarfing my doorway, his hands braced on the frame as if he were holding himself up. Or back.

  Lord, he was big. Those muscles filling out his fine gray suit hard to ignore. And so were the blue eyes blazing through the distance between us.

  It was Carter, all right. And he was pissed.

  He stepped into my apartment without a word and slammed the door shut behind him, turning my spacious apartment into a linen closet.

  “We need to talk,” he said.

  3

  “Talk?” I squeaked, because the look on his face said that what he really needed was to take me out back and chop me into pieces.

  He nodded, curt and decisive. His jawline was like the marble bust of a Roman emperor—all he was missing were the laurel leaves in his hair.

  The truth was—my secret, hidden truth was—that there was something about a man in a suit. I had a history with men in suits. And this man wore a suit like no one else.

  I pulled my faded silk robe tighter around my ballooning waist, as if to compensate.

  He didn’t say anything, didn’t even acknowledge that he had in fact barged into my apartment uninvited. He just looked around as if he smelled something far worse than ginger cookies.

  Anger trickled down through my spine, but the baby fluttered against my hand as if to say, Hold on a second. He is Deputy Deadbeat Daddy because of you.

  “How did you get in here?” I asked. Someone had to buzz him in the main door.

  “I helped Tootie Vogler with some groceries.”

  “I…ah…guess this is about the newspaper?” I asked.

  His blue eyes burned like acid.

  “Can I apologize again?” I asked. “I’m really, really sorry.” He didn’t respond, and my apology sat there between us like dog poop on a carpet.

  “How…ah…did you find me?”

  “Did you think you were hiding?”

  “No.” My laugh was awkward, and I wanted to take myself out back and end this misery. “Of course not.”

  The silence was awful. It pounded between us, pulling my skin tighter, sucking out every molecule of air.

  He was terribly out of place in the middle of my chaos, a dark spot, leaking menace like a fog into the center of the glitter and beads, the embroidered silk and pillows.

  “Would you like to sit down?” I asked, pulling a bunch of pointe shoes and one of my more salvageable tutus off the pink-and-green watermelon chair. It was this chair or the velvet couch, with the much-maligned scarf.

  His sharp blue eyes made me so nervous, so aware of the frivolity of my home, that I actually patted the seat in enticement.

  Carter O’Neill, the cold fish, didn’t even crack a smile.

  “How about something to eat?” I asked. “I have ginger cookies. I just made them and there’s some salsa in the fridge. Not that you’d want that together, obviously. But I have some chips. Somewhere.”

  He tossed the newspaper on the coffee table, carelessly knocking my favorite pig mug onto the rug. Luckily it was empty. I leaned over to pick it up and caught sight of myself, right there on the front page of the paper.

  On a chair, a little blurry, but obviously pregnant. And frankly, the look on my face was pretty good, if I did say so myself. It managed to say it all—I loved you, but you hurt me so much that I can never forgive you.

  All those acting classes my mother insisted on had really paid off.

  Carter cleared his throat.

  Right. Matter at hand. Political scandal.

  “Are you involved with someone?” he asked.

  “Involved?” I asked, yanked sideways by the question.

  “Yes. Dating, or—” he heaved a big sigh, as if all this were a distasteful job “—whatever.”

  “No,” I said.


  “The father?” he asked, gesturing vaguely toward my stomach. “Is he around?”

  “How in the world is that any of your business?” I asked, horrified.

  “They’re calling me Deputy Deadbeat Daddy,” he said. “You kind of made it my business.”

  “I know,” I whispered, guilt choking me. “I saw.”

  “Papers in Houston, New Orleans and USA Today,” he said. “Did you see those, too?”

  I shook my head.

  “All right, then how about you answer my question. The father—”

  “Not…ah…” I got lost for a second in the absurdity of this conversation. “Around.”

  “That will make things easier.”

  Things like disposing of my body?

  “Look, I didn’t know there was a photographer there. Or that any of this would happen.”

  “Clearly,” he said, his tone dubious.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I believe. Or what you thought when you stood on that chair like a child and made up lies about me.”

  I gasped. I couldn’t help it, it just came out.

  “Don’t you dare,” he whispered, his voice and eyes, everything about him so suddenly menacing that I collapsed backward in the watermelon chair. He was gigantic; his hands could palm my head. He could make mincemeat out of me in a second. Not that I thought he would, but still…

  “Don’t pretend for a moment that you are in any way the injured party in this situation. You put us here.” He pointed to the front page of the paper. “And you’re going to do whatever I say to get us out.”

  My eyes narrowed. Whatever he said? Not likely. “I can write a letter to the paper,” I said. “Tell people that I made it all up. Or we could just tell the truth, that someone paid me a thousand—”

  “No,” he said, his laugh not sounding like a laugh at all. “We won’t be telling anyone the truth. Jim Blackwell is all over this like a dog on a bone.”

  “So…ah…what are we going to do?” I asked, suddenly light-headed with nerves.