Oliver’s plan was taking shape, but he still needed to run some things by Lane. He got a chance a couple of days later. The girl was in her room, out of the way. She’d been subdued since Graffitigate, the little criminal.
He found Lane in the kitchen. She seemed lucid enough.
“I checked into that thing with Art Guidry,” Oliver said.
“What thing?”
“The car wreck, the accident.”
“That’s ancient history.”
“I know, I know. It’s shitty that he got away with it, though. Makes me want to not vote.”
Lane laughed, like actually laughed. “Like you were going to? They don’t want you to vote, anyway. Nobody wants you to.”
“He killed that guy, didn’t he? Out in Chalmette.”
“I wasn’t there,” she said. “I didn’t see anything.”
“But you know what happened, don’t you?”
Lane sighed. With Bert gone, there was no one left to protect. It had happened so long ago.
“I knew about Chalmette,” she said, “but not the rest. Bert went out there to deal with the car, left the boy with me.”
“Bert his dad?”
“Yeah.”
“You were mixed up with him?”
“What’s with the questions?”
“Fuck, Lane. Must have been a nightmare, is all. And he got away with it.”
“Sure he did. Course he did.”
“Think if something like that happened to me. Or Little Prairie Girl. They’d put us in jail and throw away the key, don’t you think?”
Lane shrugged. “He had rich parents, powerful parents. And they loved him. That’s how it was.”
“But what about the poor dead guy?”
“What, you think I should have called the cops?”
“No. I would have done what you did.”
“Then what are we talking about?” she said, and walked away, back to her studio.
On his errands that afternoon Oliver detoured past Artie’s headquarters, parked and strolled past the storefront festooned with campaign posters. Staff people and volunteers were sitting at desks with piles of posters. The pretty blond wife the guy had found back east, the one on the postcard, she was in there with her little girls, a toddler and an older one, maybe five or so.
The wife was chatting to a lady at one of the desks, and then the man himself came out of an inner office. Oliver watched Art Guidry kneel down and hold out his arms, and the two little girls ran to him, jumped on him, and he scooped them up. These types. Oliver considered their blond heads and their little pink embroidered overalls, and the wife in her flats and skinny jeans and on-trend utility jacket. If he experienced any hesitation about the plan, it dissolved once he got a look at the family. They had everything.
He figured a simple note would do. Back at Lane’s, he paid some bills, returned a few calls and emails to her potential clients, balanced the checkbook. He waited for Ava to leave on her bike and made sure Lane was busy. Not that he was worried about Lane, she didn’t notice anything he did.
He typed out the instructions—leave $10,000 in a backpack in the alley behind this closed-down sandwich shop in the Warehouse district. He’d be able to watch from the window of the bar across the street. He typed a date and time, and the threat. If the money wasn’t there when he asked, he’d go to the media, he’d tweet about it. He implied that he knew the whole story, that he had evidence. Oliver had never done anything like this before, blackmailed somebody. The ease with which it was happening seemed to undercut its shadiness. He thought of it as an experiment. Maybe it would work.
He deleted the document once he had a hard copy. He remembered at the last minute not to touch the paper—could paper hold fingerprints? It could have Lane’s or Ava’s fingerprints on it already, but Oliver figured that was unlikely, since nobody touched every single piece of paper in a stack when they put it in the printer. The edges, maybe. But the thought gave him pause. He figured it was a low-risk situation—worst case, the guy wouldn’t come through with the money, and that would be that. Oliver was sure he wouldn’t go to the cops. But to be on the safe side, he put on the yellow rubber cleaning gloves from under the kitchen sink and opened a new pack of paper.
He printed out an envelope, too, which took forever to figure out how to do. He printed the address on the wrong side twice before getting it right. He addressed it to the campaign headquarters and marked it PERSONAL. Last thing he needed was some campaign volunteer opening this shit. He got it sealed and stamped, though not neatly—the ill-fitting gloves made it tricky to handle the paper. He put it in his back pocket, gathered the misprinted envelopes, and burned them outside on the balcony. He touched the note in his pocket, felt the weird energy coming off of it. His heart started skipping beats, pounding hard. He steadied himself with a shot of bourbon.
In the car, he headed toward the mailbox on Henry Clay, but then changed his mind. He shouldn’t mail it from Lane’s neighborhood. He thought about where to go, and then the idea hit him. Chalmette. Near where it happened. It was out of the way, but there’d be no traffic at this hour. WWOZ was playing decent music and he kept it on that, rolled his window down.
He drove along Tchoupitoulas, feeling the heavy body of the river on his right, before turning lakeward. He took I-10 East and came down Paris Road, searching for a mailbox to drop the letter in. He finally saw one, pulled over, stuck it in the slot. He pictured little Artie out driving in the middle of the night, and wondered what it must have been like for him. He was what, fourteen? No license, sneaking out, doing god knows what out here. Hunting for drugs, meeting a girl, planning some dumb prank. And then a guy comes out of nowhere, jumps in front, or the kid lost control of the car, or something. In order for him to be covered in blood, he must have parked and got out and touched the guy. Maybe even held him, watched him die. Something like that would fuck with a person.
Oliver took Judge Perez Drive back to his neighborhood. It was done now. All he’d have to do is wait. Guidry wouldn’t get the letter for another two days. He thought about where he could go, what he could do with the money. Too jumpy to stay home, he walked up to the bar and drank whiskey. An older couple who’d been there for hours started talking to him. They were the kind of sunburned white people who were way too into reggae, but they bought him a couple of rounds. When the woman started asking him to dance, Oliver split. Part of him felt like he was still driving—the letter wrinkling in his pocket, passing under one Chalmette light pole after another, thinking about car crashes.