19

TOMMY ARNEY PRIDES himself on being no snitch, on having never consorted with snitches, on having held snitches in the deepest contempt all his life. He isn’t so much resolved to tell the government nothing as he is biologically incapable of doing otherwise.

But then comes a meeting with federal prosecutors at which they play a card he doesn’t anticipate. If you don’t cooperate, they tell him, we can’t guarantee that we won’t pursue charges against the nominee borrowers you enlisted to get loans from the bank. If you don’t talk to us, “R.A.” and “A.A.” could be facing indictments of their own.

Arney is aware that he’s done his son and daughter no favors by involving them in his financial misadventures, but until that moment he has not recognized that their actions might be criminal. After all, they didn’t even know what they were signing. They put their names on the loans because he told them to. Clearly, it was all on him.

But the feds characterize his children’s roles differently. Their signatures enabled Arney to defraud the bank’s shareholders, and by extension the American taxpayers. Witting or not, the kids were players in a criminal conspiracy. Arney has a choice: cooperate, in which case the government will agree not to prosecute Ryan and Ashlee—or don’t, and court incarceration as the new family business.

And so it comes to pass that Arney agrees to plead guilty to three of the charges against him, and in so doing becomes a witness for the prosecution in United States v. Edward Woodard, et al. He admits to conspiracy to commit bank fraud, to participating in an unlawful monetary transaction, and to making false statements. In all, he faces up to twenty years in the penitentiary, $750,000 in fines, and restitution that could exceed $2 million.

The written agreement he hammers out with prosecutors calls on him to forfeit to the government all properties he derived through his criminal acts, including Moyock Muscle and the Arney Compound, plus the contents of twenty-three bank accounts. He must provide “full, complete, and truthful cooperation” to Katherine Lee Martin, Melissa O’Boyle, and the FBI.

If he does so, the government’s lawyers may petition the court for leniency, though they make no promises about the sentence he’ll receive; federal guidelines suggest that as things stand, he’s looking at sixty-three to seventy-eight months. More important, so far as Arney is concerned, the agreement states that they “will not criminally prosecute the defendants’ children, R.A. and A.A., in the Eastern District of Virginia.”

Still, his mind is not entirely settled when the agreement is signed. Slick has received a target letter in recent days. She, too, should receive immunity from prosecution, he tells the prosecutors, because the blame for anything she did in connection to the bank lay with him or his codefendants—she was his employee and simply did what she was told to do. By his account, he tells the feds that he’s willing to plead guilty to an additional charge, if that’s what it takes to clear Slick’s name. The feds opt to stick with the three charges he has already agreed to.

On Friday, August 25, Arney presents himself before U.S. District Judge Raymond A. Jackson to make the pact official. The judge questions him at length to establish that Arney’s guilty plea has not been influenced by drugs, alcohol, mental illness, threats. He notes that Arney will forfeit a lot of property, not necessarily limited to that listed in the plea agreement. Arney, who is the picture of law-abiding conservatism in a pinstripe gray suit and muted olive and gray tie, says he understands.

Jackson asks whether Arney has ever been convicted of a felony. Once, the defendant replies, back when he was a teenager. The judge peers at him from the bench. “You appear to have done well, notwithstanding that previous conviction,” he says. He asks Arney how he pleads. Arney answers “Guilty, your honor” to each charge.

“The court accepts your plea and hereby finds you guilty,” the judge says. “You’re now a convicted felon waiting to be sentenced.”

Arney walks out. Ryan and I meet him in the courthouse lobby. He cannot leave the building, he informs us; the feds want him to provide a urine sample, so he’ll have to catch up with us later. We watch him enter an elevator with prosecutors and federal agents.

HIS FATE IS now assured. Arney will be sentenced within a few months, and go off to the penitentiary a short time later. He has a great many pieces of business to resolve in the interim, and a month after his plea, he focuses on one of the longest-running: He and Slick pick out an accent color for the Chevy, a companion to the Tangerine Twist, and buy the selection in quantity. It’s called Timor Beige, and it’s a deep tan, almost a café au lait—a far darker shade than one might expect to partner with bright orange.

Painter Paul is vocal in his dislike for the choice after applying the paint to the car’s dashboard. It looks like shit, he tells the boss—the contrast between main color and accent is insufficiently pronounced. Arney, who alternates between calling his selection “golden” and “cocoa,” encourages Paul to accept the selection, because “that’s the color it’s going to be.”

I see it myself a few days later. The wagon, sitting high and upright on the rotisserie, has been “cut in” with paint on its doorjambs, hatch, and engine compartment—orange below the beltline, the Timor Beige above. The combination does, indeed, take some getting used to—at first inspection, the beige seems too brown, too murky. Arney is certain of his own taste, however. “Once the chrome’s on it,” he assures me, “it’s going to look fucking great.”

My visit is prompted by a milestone in the Chevy’s restoration: the reunion of body and chassis, which Arney has assured me will happen by day’s end. That seems unlikely at noon, when I enter the Quonset to find half the showroom occupied by a chest-high heap of machinery and junk Arney has removed from a building he’s rented out. Included in the pile are battered weed whackers, a couple of industrial safes, several bucket seats, a broken wheel-balancing machine, a pallet stacked high with Ryan’s childhood toys, hundreds of bad electronic dance music CDs, and a five-foot, soft-bodied Big Bird statue chewed by mice and bleeding desiccated foam rubber from its wounds.

It takes the crew more than three hours to relocate the stuff. Some of it winds up in a truck bound for one of Arney’s vacant buildings and some of it is thrown away; a few large pieces are simply pushed against the showroom’s walls. The boss seems stressed throughout the operation, betraying his nerves with frequent harangues at Skinhead, who seems deeply aggrieved by the attention. When Skinhead returns one salvo with a muttered crack, Arney erupts. “You smart-mouthed motherfucker,” he booms, then adds to the room: “Every day he tries to do something to piss me off. Every day he wakes up thinking, ‘Today I’m going to fuck with Tommy Arney.’ ”

Skinhead sinks into wordless gloom, and I’m reminded of conversations I’ve had with each man about the other in recent days. Arney has hinted that Skinhead must have said something to the feds or the grand jury that he shouldn’t have, though he isn’t specific about what that something might have been. Skinhead has voiced dismay that Arney seems angry with him but won’t say why, or much of anything else.

That Arney’s rage might spray wide and messy is understandable. The bank’s leadership took advantage of him. The feds “didn’t care about my life. They didn’t care that they destroyed me,” he’ll complain. He has a lot to be angry about, and a lot of people to be angry with.

But it’s distressing to witness a rift widening between him and Skinhead, of all people—his constant companion, his loyal friend and lieutenant, whom he’s told me he regards as “more of a brother to me than any of my real brothers.” Who, Arney’s cousin Billie Ruth says, “loves Tommy and would do anything for him.” To whom Arney gave a new Harley-Davidson a few Christmases ago, and whom Arney has defended against all comers. “My brother Billy told me one day that he was going to whip Skinhead’s ass,” Arney confided to me a while back, “and I told him: ‘I don’t think so. You try to whip Skinhead’s ass, you’re going to have to whip mine, too.’ ” The silences and blowups of the last month haven’t been the bitchy but harmless back-and-forth that typically characterizes their conversation. This new style of exchange has prompted Skinhead to consider the unthinkable—leaving.

“He won’t talk to me,” Skinhead told me at Havana a few nights ago. “I ask him what’s happening, and all he says is that everything is going to be all right. Well, everything isn’t all right. You’ve seen what’s on the list of shit they want to take. The car lot is on it.

“What I don’t want to happen is for him to say, ‘Everything’s going to be all right’ up to the day it all shuts down.”

“So what do you do?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not too old to start over, doing something else.”

Now, as Skinhead sorts through a pile of old tools, Arney snatches up a light plastic hammer and raps him twice on the head with it. The blows make loud knocks. Skinhead stares at him in shock. “Have you lost your fucking mind?”

“What?” Arney says, smiling.

“Have you lost your fucking mind?” Skinhead says again. “That hurt.”

“It ain’t nothing but a little plastic hammer,” Arney says. “Feel how light it is.” He offers it handle-first, but Skinhead, glaring, refuses to take it. Arney gives himself a couple of light taps on the skull. His eyes widen. “God damn. That thing does hurt.”

It’s not an apology, but it’s close enough to usher a truce as the day’s main event arrives: We troop over to the body shop and push the rotisserie and Chevy out of the building and across the concrete pad and down a dirt drive to the front lot. The new fences prevent our crossing the property to the Quonset, so instead the team steers the rotisserie onto Route 168, rolling south against the northbound traffic, appointing me to serve as flagman to wave away oncoming cars during the brisk, hundred-yard transit to the lot’s main entrance.

Once outside the Quonset, we make a discovery that seems par for the afternoon: The Chevy sits too high on the rotisserie to pass through the building’s garage door—to eyeball it, about eight inches too high. The load can be lowered by almost exactly that distance, so it promises to be close. If it still doesn’t fit, we might buy an inch more clearance by deflating the rotisserie’s tires, but beyond that, we’re out of luck.

Lowering the rotisserie is not a casual undertaking, because the spit must be unbolted as it was when we rolled the car several months back, with all the attendant hazards that involves. Three of us now line up on each side of the wagon to keep it from flipping or from dropping too far, too fast. As we clasp the wagon by its rockers, Painter Paul unbolts the spit and we ease the car’s tail down a few inches—just a few, lest we twist the body, bend its metal, or crack the putty in its flawless skin. He retightens the bolts, runs to the car’s front, and loosens that end, and we drop it by an equal amount.

It’s not as much work as rolling the body was, but the Chevy hasn’t gotten lighter since then, and we do a lot of grunting and yelling as Paul refastens the bolts. It takes two more loosenings at each end to hit bottom, after which we very slowly edge the contraption to the Quonset’s door. The wagon sneaks through with an inch to spare. The showroom fills with whoops.

The afternoon is almost spent by the time the crew transfers the Chevy from the rotisserie to the showroom’s hydraulic lift. Skinhead and Painter Paul roll the chassis below and jockey it a foot this way, a few inches that, to properly align the engine and transmission, the frame rails, the bolt holes, as Arney works the lift’s switch to lower the body, raise it again to enable adjustments on the floor, bring it back down. They finally get it right after half an hour, and for the first time in almost a year, on this Saturday late afternoon—September 29, 2012—what rests on the Quonset’s concrete floor is recognizable as a ’57 Chevy.

Arney is optimistic about the speed and ease of the restoration from here. “I’d like to get it operable and drivable by the end of November,” he announces. “I’d like to do some driving in it.”

IS HIS OPTIMISM well-placed? Well, over the succeeding eight weeks, Arney and Skinhead rebuild the brakes, hang a new master cylinder on the firewall, and paint the engine block in Chevrolet orange. They install new brake lines and fuel lines. They bolt new inner wheel wells and a freshly painted radiator support to the front end. They strap dual exhaust pipes and the new gas tank to the wagon’s belly, and attach a sound-deadening firewall pad on the toe boards under the dash. They rebuild the steering box.

In other words, they achieve significant progress on the Chevy’s salvation. But come Thanksgiving, the car is nowhere near ready for the street, and that remains the case for a long while, because Arney’s legal and financial woes dominate his time through December and January. The feds release their freeze on his real estate, which opens the way for his creditors to pursue foreclosures on his loans that have fallen into delinquency. One by one, his properties are wrested from his hands until just a few remain, Moyock Muscle among them. Only a lifeline from a well-heeled friend saves his house and the rest of the Arney Compound.

The properties he stubbornly holds on to include the erstwhile Hells Angels clubhouse, which is still plastered with stickers applied by Norfolk inspectors. Arney’s plan is to finish its plumbing and electrical work, then have those inspectors back to sign off on the improvements, which will enable him to rent to a new tenant. But the inspectors won’t do it: Municipal attorney Cynthia Hall has assumed oversight of all official action regarding the building, and she puts the kibosh on any inspections or approvals. Arney’s feud with the lawyer becomes a consuming fixation. “I have never, ever in my life had anyone dislike me as much as that fucking cunt,” he tells me. “And I can’t figure out why she doesn’t like me.”

He orders parts for the Chevy and has Painter Paul install the spare tire well, but it’s early February 2013, four months after the reunion of body and frame, before Arney returns to the car himself. I pull into Moyock Muscle one Saturday morning to find Skinhead and Paul laboring to reattach the wagon’s right fender. They’ve placed thick rubber pads and anti-squeak gaskets between the big steel panel and wheel well, which tightens the fit and complicates the already difficult task of mating the unwieldy fender to several parts of the car at once—to the grille, the firewall, the ductwork for the fresh air vent, and a brace that backstops the front bumper.

They manage to connect it to the grille and bumper, but struggle to force it back far enough to bolt to the firewall. Both take up positions on the fender and shove. “Push it!” Paul grunts. “Push it! Harder!”

“Goddamn,” Skinhead croaks. “It’s like a fat girl.”

“You need to know how to handle those grizzlies,” Paul says. The fender and firewall meet, but Paul sees that their bolt holes don’t align. He enlarges the attachment point on the fender with a die grinder, a pneumatic tool with a spinning cylindrical head slim enough to fit into the bolt hole, until the opening’s edge matches that on the firewall. He threads a nine-sixteenths bolt through both and tightens it halfway.

He slips under the car to fasten a second bolt low on the firewall. I can hear him muttering, “Come on, motherfucker,” as I chat with Skinhead, who sounds as if he has barbed wire for vocal cords. “I aspirated my right lung,” he explains. He went out to dinner a few nights ago, went to bed with indigestion, and “threw up in my sleep, and choked on it.”

“Damn,” I say.

“Happens to Tommy all the time,” he shrugs. “He’s nearly died twice. First time it ever happened to me.”

Painter Paul scrambles to his feet, having threaded the lower bolt halfway, and examines the alignment of the fender and cowl. The fender sits a quarter inch low, so he taps a stack of three slender metal shims onto the upper bolt. Most cars hide these space-makers at their attachment points, he tells me; without them, even modern models fail to achieve the proper fit.

The shims overcorrect the problem, so he pulls one of the three back out and ratchets the bolt down. The panels comes into line until he further tightens the lower bolt, which shifts the fender high. Paul trades one of the shims for one half as wide. Everything lines up. “Okay,” he announces. “The fender’s on.”

Arney arrives then, as Skinhead prepares to install the wiring harness, a bundle of color-coded cords that supply juice to a car’s electrical devices—its lights, horn, gauges, radio, and not least, the components under the hood that make the whole business move. It’s simple and straightforward compared to the harnesses of modern cars, in that the Chevy lacks the computer modules that control today’s engines, their airbags and overamped stereos. Even so, diagrams of the wagon’s electrical system cover a four-by-eight-foot worktable, and Skinhead eyes them carefully before crawling into the car with a shop light and a drill to install the fuse box.

Arney, clad in his standard black wifebeater despite the February chill—it’s sixty degrees, tops, in the Quonset—is in a quiet mood this morning. He stands for a long minute at the Chevy’s nose, gazing at the engine, before murmuring that he’ll have a radiator installed within three days, and “the motherfucker running next week.” He asks Skinhead, who is sprawled on the car’s floor, drilling holes in the kick plate, whether he needs help. Space under the dash is tight, Skinhead complains, but no, he’s fine. Arney wanders over to Painter Paul, who has encountered a problem hanging the right rear door: New rubber trim on its edges has made it too big for its frame; when he shuts it, the door wedges metal-on-metal against the C pillar.

Okay, Arney says, get inside the car and loosen the hinges, and I’ll hold the door in the proper position while you screw them back down. Paul points out that the adjustments have to be made with the door open wide, so that he can get to the hinges, so Arney centers the loosened door in its frame, then tries to keep it from shifting as they slowly swing it open. Paul fiddles with the bolts. When Arney closes the door, it’s centered, but its lower rear corner juts out.

Paul loosens some bolts, tightens others. Now the door’s lower edge is flush, but the window frame tilts a half inch outboard. More fiddling. The top is in line, the gaps between door and frame are perfect, but the bottom rear corner again sticks out.

Over the next hour they experiment with a dozen different hinge adjustments, each of them failures—either that one corner doesn’t align, or their attempts to bring it flush knock the rest of the door out of true. “Well, fuck,” Arney finally says. “We’re never going to be able to get this motherfucker to hang right, because the problem ain’t the fucking hinges, it’s the fucking door.”

They pull it off the car and set it on a shopping cart parked a few feet away. “That’s what it is,” Arney confirms, pointing to the door’s bottom edge. When Paul replaced the steel in its skin he used lip welds, the new metal overlapping the old, rather than butt welds, which would have fused the pieces edge to edge. In mudding the door to smooth the joint, he made its bottom a quarter inch too thick. Chances are, they’ll encounter the same problem on one or more of the other doors, which Paul repaired the same way.

“So we can either get a new door, or two doors,” Arney says, “or we can take these quarters off the bottom of the doors and replace those.”

Paul favors the latter option, and begins the unhappy task of grinding his carefully applied and lovingly sanded finish from the door. The Quonset fills with the earthen smell of ground putty. Paul and the door are enveloped in a beige cloud.

The missteps will take two weeks, maybe more, to correct. And before Paul is far into the job, Arney decrees that the left quarter panel—the bulging fin that mystified Chris Simon fifteen years ago, and which still looks slightly swollen despite Paul’s past efforts to straighten it—has to be replaced, too.

When I hear about all this, it occurs to me—for perhaps the hundredth time—that the wagon’s restoration might never end.

IF THERE’S A happy sidebar to this latest setback, it comes one Saturday when I’m hanging around in the workshop at the rear of the Quonset, chatting with Arney and Skinhead as they work on a ’71 Corvette convertible that belongs to Slick. Arney’s sister Freda is visiting, too, and we talk about their Carolina hometown, which gets us onto their kin thereabouts, which narrows to a discussion about their cousin Billie Ruth, which prompts me to repeat an observation Billie Ruth made when I visited her in Lenoir: She never fails to end her phone calls to Arney with “I love you, Tommy,” to which he usually responds, “You’re crazy as shit, Billie Ruth.”

“That’s true,” Arney says. “I like Billie Ruth probably best of all my cousins. I think Billie Ruth’s a good person. But I don’t understand why some people say they love people they don’t know. Billie Ruth knows me, but she doesn’t know me well enough to say she loves me.”

He looks at his hands as he wipes grease from between his fingers with a paper towel. “I tell my children that I love them every day. And I know they love me, because I’m their daddy,” he says. “I don’t remember the last time I told my wife that I love her, but she knows that I do, and I know she loves me because she’s tolerated all the crazy bullshit I’ve done over the years.” Skinhead, bent over the Corvette’s engine compartment, looks up and nods.

“I used to think Skinhead loved me,” Arney says, glancing at me, rather than him, “but lately I’m confused. I don’t know. I think he probably does.”

“You’re like a brother to me,” Skinhead tells him.

Freda chuckles and says, “That’s not necessarily a good thing.”

“No,” Arney allows, “but I think he looks to me as somewhat of a brother figure, and maybe as something of a father figure.”

“You do remind me of my dad,” Skinhead says. “He was always calling me a stupid motherfucker, too. And he was fat.” He adds quietly: “Although he had hair.”

“I’ve been giving this a lot of thought lately,” Arney says, still wiping his hands with great concentration. “I think Skinhead appreciates the fact that I can get things done. And I think that Skinhead knows from experience that I will take care of him, no matter what happens—that I will protect him, that I would never let anything bad happen to him.” He looks my way again. “And I think that’s important to him.”

“That’s true,” Skinhead says, eyes on Arney. “Loyalty is very important to me.”

“He knows,” the boss says, “that as long as Tommy Arney is alive, Tommy Arney will take care of him. And I think that’s kind of a nice thing. That’s why I worked so vigorously—is that the right word?—to try to get Skinhead to quit smoking for twenty-two years. Because I did not want to see him die of that nature, because as we got older, I thought we’d have some fun together.”

Skinhead: “But now you don’t have fun no more.”

“That’s true.” Arney sighs, still not looking at him. “But I do like to see Skinhead have fun. I like to see Skinhead enjoying himself. I like to see him with his prostitutes, his whores.”

Freda, shocked, turns to Skinhead. “Is that what you do?”

Skinhead, still sprawled across the Corvette’s engine, says matter-of-factly: “Yes, it is. I don’t have much time for relationships, Freda. But I do have needs.”

“So I don’t know,” Arney says, “why Billie Ruth goes on about all that ‘I love you’ shit.”

I point out that his cousin is religious. Arney shrugs. “I think all religious people are pretty fucking weird, because they believe in something that isn’t there,” he tells me. “I believe in food, money, pussy—something I can put my hands on.”

The exchange seems to recalibrate the interplay between Arney and Skinhead. When I ask Arney about it, he says he’s done a lot of reflecting of late, and has come to see that he’s in debt to a few people for “assisting me in creating Tommy Arney.” And “part of the mechanics of me,” he says, “is to be loyal to the people who have been good to me.”

So things seem back on somewhat sturdier footing when, in early March, I receive an unsigned text that reads: Tues is Tommy’s birthday and I’m having a lil get together at Havana around 7. Would love to have you there. May be last one for a couple years. :(

I don’t recognize the number. I figure it’s from Arney’s wife, so I text back: Krista?

The reply: No. Victoria. :)

Slick’s party proves to be an upbeat affair attended by a wide range of Arney’s friends, family, and business associates—including Norfolk patrol cops in civvies—and distinguished by enthusiastic alcohol consumption. Arney closes his fifty-seventh year in fine spirits, regaling us with tales of his youthful indiscretions late into the night. “They weren’t fast, and they didn’t know where to hit,” he says of some college football players he took on as a teenager, “but they were so fucking powerful. When they hit you, it was more like they were pushing you, know what I mean? Only they were pushing you in the fucking face, with their fists.”

It’s a good party.

The trial starts a few days later.

WE’LL NOT GET bogged down with all the details of Arney’s testimony, which occupies a day and a half of the court’s time. Suffice to say that under the direct questioning of prosecutor Katherine Martin, he says he had a “lending relationship” with the bank for eight or nine years and got “monies any time I needed them.” That he “got special treatment,” explaining: “You did things for them, they’d do things for you.” That he didn’t prepare the loan documents he signed—“I never really looked at these things”—and thus didn’t know that his purported buddies at the bank arranged for terms that were not to his advantage, financial or otherwise.

On cross-examination, he testifies that he alone, of his family and crew, is guilty of any wrongdoing. His children signed documents because he told them to. Slick served as a nominee borrower after a banker suggested the arrangement. It was he, Tommy Arney, who needed and got the money. It was all his doing.

He tangles with one of the defense lawyers, a brusque fellow out of Chicago named Vincent “Trace” Schmeltz III, whose aggressive approach is precisely the wrong one to take with this particular witness. Schmeltz’s first words to him are “Mr. Arney, my name is Trace Schmeltz. Can you hear me?”

To which a serene-looking Arney, outsized for the snug witness booth, replies: “I can hear you just fine. What did you say your name was—Smells?”

In his subsequent parries with the lawyer, he remains so cool and friendly that it almost seems he’s enjoying himself. In summary, it’s a bravura performance. It will prove key to the multiple convictions that crash down on Stephen Fields and Ed Woodard several weeks later.

And it will reverberate beyond that, because he testifies that he bribed a Norfolk city councilman, paying the man’s girlfriend twenty-five thousand dollars in exchange for his promise to deliver the votes Arney needed to open his gentlemen’s club. Arney paid the money, he says, but the votes never materialized. The revelation appears on the front page of the newspaper.

That is not, it turns out, the most sensational part of the trial for Arney or those closest to him. The first hint of what’s coming occurs during Katherine Martin’s direct examination, when she asks about Slick’s role in Arney’s businesses. “She did everything,” he replies. “She paid the bills. She did all the paperwork.”

Martin asks whether they’ve had a personal relationship. “Yes,” Arney says.

An intimate relationship? “Yes,” Arney says.

That doesn’t make the newspaper, but late the following morning the prosecution calls its next witness—Slick herself, who is testifying in exchange for the immunity Arney insisted she get. She tells the court that she and Arney had an on-and-off affair that lasted nineteen years. That does make the paper.

As Arney tells it, he and Ryan are having lunch that day when his son, surfing the Web on his cell phone, comes upon coverage of the morning’s testimony. “Ryan turned his phone to me and he said, ‘You had a nineteen-year affair with Victoria?’ And I said, ‘I’ll explain it to you later.’ ” Arney drives home and goes upstairs to the bedroom to relax his mind for a while, and so fortified calls the family together in the living room. It is a difficult meeting. Tears are shed.

Later, in a long, late-night phone conversation, I ask Arney how the news could come as a surprise. He and Slick spend a lavish amount of time together. She hauls around a purse stuffed with his various must-have supplies: emery boards, with which he files his nails several times a day; antiseptic wipes and hand gel; toothpicks, nail clippers, and ibuprofen; the hot sauce he applies to most everything he eats. She is his go-to source for advice and hard data. She tells him, as no one else will, when he’s out of line. As Arney acknowledges, “I’m sure that anyone who ever saw Victoria and me together suspected.”

I certainly wondered, though I never witnessed anything to confirm the notion, and any circumstantial evidence I encountered was flimsy. To wit: When I spent a Sunday afternoon with the Arneys more than a month before the trial, poring through their scrapbooks and a mountain of family snapshots, Krista gave me a brief tour of the boss’s home office, during which she plucked an old newspaper clipping from a pile and announced: “This is my favorite picture of him.”

The clipping was the story I’d written nearly twenty years before about his tussle with the Alcoholic Beverage Control people. In the accompanying photo, Arney was seated and wearing a grin that suggested he was the luckiest man on earth. Standing just behind him were two bikini-clad, hard-bodied dancers, visible from bust to thigh. I knew that one was Slick—because she’d told me so—and pointed to her midriff. “That right there is Victoria.”

Krista stared at the picture for a moment. “Oh,” she said, her voice suddenly small. “I didn’t realize that.” She folded the clipping, returned it to the pile, and we left the room.

Suspicions or no, Arney tells me on the phone, “not a human being knew” of the affair. Yes, Skinhead thought something was afoot shortly after it began, and others caught a whiff of it later. “I just denied it,” he says. “I just said, ‘I don’t think so.’ ”

Krista might have asked him point-blank about Slick a time or two, but “I’m thinking that I lied,” he says. “She probably said something like ‘You’re probably fucking her,’ and I probably told her she was crazy or just laughed. She would never press it. My children never asked me.”

Ending the affair was Slick’s decision, he says. Every few months she’d have an attack of conscience and tell him she couldn’t continue. She loved Krista, Ryan, and Ashlee, and fretted about hurting them. Sometimes he and she went on hiatus for months. Eventually, he says, Slick decided it had to end for good.

But back to the scene in the living room, as he shared the details with the family. “I asked them not to take it out on her, because it was my responsibility,” Arney says. “I said that when she came to work for me she was twenty years old. And because of my age, and my experience, and what I knew about women, and my ability to manipulate women, she didn’t stand a chance. I took advantage of her. I completely took advantage of her.

“I told them I had been with so many women it would be impossible for me to ever count them up, even with a calculator. I had become addicted to sex. I almost felt like being involved with Victoria was almost like a cure for me, because I went into a semiretirement program in my mind.

“I told them that if they were mad at me I understood,” he says, “and they could stay mad at me as long as they liked. And I told them that if they had any questions I’d try to answer them. But I told them that if they had any questions they needed to ask them, because I wasn’t going to keep answering questions after that day. As far as I was concerned, it was in the past. I was moving on.

“Krista asked me why. I said simply my mother was that way, my aunts were that way, my brothers and sisters were that way. I don’t know if it was something in the blood. It was how we were.

“I’m not blaming it all on that, because I enjoyed myself,” he says. “If I had to do it all over again, would I do it again? Yes. I told Ryan, Krista, and Ashlee that. Krista said, ‘You don’t have a guilty bone in your body, do you?’ I said, ‘No, ma’am. If I told you I did, I’d be telling you a lie, and I’d rather not tell you any more lies, if you don’t mind.’

“Now I don’t have any lies anymore. Everything’s out in the open for the whole world to see. And I’m never going to lie again.”