Silken Prey

grassy backyard, spotted with old oak and linden trees.
    Lucas was met at the door by a young woman who said she was Smalls’s daughter, Monica. “Dad’s up on the sunporch,” she said. “This way.”
    Lucas followed her through a quiet living room and down a hall, then up a narrow, twisting stairway. Lucas noted, purely as a matter of verifying previous information, that she was both big-titted and big-assed, as well as blond, so Henderson’s description of Smalls’s sexual preferences were showing some genetic support.
    At the top of the stairs, she said, “Dad’s out there,” nodding toward an open door, and asked if Lucas would like something to drink.
    Lucas said, “Anything cold and diet?”
    “Diet Coke,” she said.
    “Excellent.”
    “Is Mrs. Smalls around?” Lucas asked.
    “If by ‘around’ you mean the Minneapolis loft district with her Lithuanian lover, then yes.”
    “Maybe I shouldn’t have asked,” Lucas said.
    “No, that’s all right,” she said cheerfully. “It’s been in the papers.”
    •   •   •
    S MALLS WAS SITTING ON a draftsman’s stool on the open sunporch, looking out over the lake through a four-foot-long brass telescope. He was wearing faded jeans and an olive-drab, long-sleeved linen shirt under an open wool vest.
    Lucas thought he looked less like a right-wing politician than like a professor of economics, maybe, or a poet. He was a small man, five-seven or five-eight, slender—no more than a hundred and fifty pounds—and tough-looking, like an aging French bicycle racer. He wore his white hair long, with tortoiseshell glasses over crystalline blue eyes.
    Lucas knocked on the doorjamb and said, “Hello,” and Smalls turned and said, “There you are,” and stood to shake Lucas’s hand. “Elmer said you’d be coming around.”
    “You want me?” Lucas asked.
    “I’ll take anything I can get, at this point,” Smalls said. He pointed at a couple of wooden deck chairs, and they sat down, facing each other. Before going to the telescope, Smalls had apparently been reading newspapers, which were stacked around the feet of his chair. “What do you think? How fucked am I?”
    Lucas thought about Weather and said, “My wife was watching TV this morning, as she was getting ready to go out, and the story came up, and she said, ‘Smalls is truly fucked.’”
    Smalls nodded. “She may be right. She would be right, if I were guilty. . . . Your wife works?”
    “She’s a surgeon,” Lucas said.
    “And you made a couple of bucks in software,” Smalls said.
    “Yes, I did. You’ve been looking me up?”
    “Just what I can get through the Internet,” Smalls said. He reached down, picked up an iPad, flashed it at Lucas, dropped it again on the pile of paper. “You think you can do me any good?”
    “If I proved you were innocent,
would
it do you any good?” Lucas asked.
    Smalls considered for a moment, staring over the lake, pulling at his lower lip. Then he looked up and said, “Have to be fast. Nine days to the election. If you don’t find anything before the weekend, I couldn’t get the word out quickly enough to make a difference. I need to be at the top of the Sunday paper, at the latest. My opponent has more money than Jesus, Mary, and Joseph put together, along with a body that . . . never mind. Of course, even if I lose, it’d be nice if I weren’t indicted and sent to prison. But I don’t want to lose. I don’t deserve to lose, because I’m being framed.”
    “The governor tells me you didn’t do it,” Lucas said.
    “Of course I didn’t,” Smalls snapped, his glasses glittering in the sun. “For one thing, I’m not damn fool enough to leave a bunch of kiddie porn on an office computer, with all kinds of people walking in and out. The idea that I’d do that . . . that’s
insulting.
”
    “We talked about that,” Lucas said. “The governor and I.”
    “And that rattlesnake Mitford, no doubt,” Smalls said.
    Monica came out with a bottle of Diet Coke and a glass with ice. She’d overheard the last part of the conversation, and said, “I promise you, Mr. Davenport, Dad’s
not
a damn fool.”
    Lucas poured some Coke, took a sip, said “Thanks” to Monica and asked Smalls, “What do you know about this volunteer? Has she got anything against you? Did you have any kind of personal involvement with her?”
    “No. That’s another thing I’m not damn fool enough to do. Not since Clinton. If I were going