Silken Prey

governor, or somebody, had left a newspaper blocking the doorjamb, and Lucas pushed open the door, picked up the paper, and let the door lock behind him. He was standing in a darkened outer office and the governor called, “Lucas? Come on in.”
    •   •   •
    T HE GOVERNOR WAS A tall, slender blond named Elmer Henderson, who might, in four years, be a viable candidate for vice president of the United States on the Democratic ticket. The media said he’d nail down the left-wingers for a presidential candidate who might prefer to run a little closer to the middle.
    Henderson might himself have been a candidate for the top job, if he had not been, in his younger years, quite so fond of women in pairs and trios, known at Harvard as the “Henderson Hoagie,” and cocaine. He certainly had the right pedigree: Ivy League undergraduate and law, flawless if slightly robotic wife and children, perhaps a half billion dollars from his share of the 3M inheritance.
    He was standing behind his desk, wearing a dark going-to-church suit, open at the throat, the tie curled on his desktop. He had a sheaf of papers in his hands, thumbing them, when Lucas walked in. He looked over his glasses and said, “Lucas. Sit. Sorry to bother you on a Sunday morning.”
    “It’s okay.” Lucas took a chair. “You need somebody killed?”
    “Several people, but I’d hesitate to ask, at least here in the office, on the Lord’s Day,” the governor said. He gave the papers a last shuffle, set them aside, pressed a button on a box on his desk, and said, “Get in here,” and asked Lucas, “You’ve been reading about Porter Smalls?”
    “Yeah. You guys must be dancing in the aisles,” Lucas said.
    “Should be,” said a voice from behind Lucas. Lucas turned his head as Mitford came through a side door, which led into his compact, paper-littered office. “This is one of the better political moments of my life. Porter Smalls takes it between the cheeks.”
    “What an unhappy expression,” the governor said. He dropped into his chair, sighed, and put his stocking feet on the desktop. “But appropriate, I suppose. He’s certainly being screwed by all and sundry.”
    “And it kills the Medicaid nonsense,” Mitford said, as he took another chair. “He was carrying that on his back, and anything he was carrying is tainted.
You want to pass a bill sponsored by a kiddie-porn addict? What kind of human being are you?
”
    “Grossly unfair,” the governor said. He didn’t seem particularly worried about the unfairness of it. He’d been looking at Mitford, but now turned to Lucas. “You know what the problem is?”
    “What?”
    “He didn’t do it. Wasn’t his child porn,” the governor said. “I talked to him yesterday afternoon, over at his house, for a long time. He didn’t do it.”
    “I thought you guys were blood enemies,” Lucas said.
    “Political enemies. I went to kindergarten with him, and knew him before that. Went to the same prep school, he went to Yale and I went to Harvard. His sister was a good friend of mine, for a while.” He paused, looked up at the ceiling, and smiled a private smile, then recovered. “I tell you, from the bottom of my little liberal heart, Porter didn’t do it.”
    “He could’ve gone off the rails somewhere,” Lucas suggested.
    The governor shook his head. “No. He doesn’t have it in him, to look at kiddie porn. I know the kind of women he looks at. I can describe them in minute detail, and nobody would call them kiddies: he likes them big-titted, big-assed, and blond. He liked them that way in kindergarten and he still likes them that way. Go look at his staff, you’ll see what I mean.”
    “Can’t always tell . . .” Lucas began, but the governor held up a finger.
    “Another thing,” he said. “This volunteer said she walked into his office and put some papers on his keyboard and up popped the porn. If it really happened like that, it means that he had a screen of kiddie porn up on his computer, and walked away from it to a campaign finance meeting, leaving the door unlocked and the kiddie porn on the screen. The screen blanked for a while, but was still there, waiting to be found. Vile stuff, I’m told. Vile. Anyway, that’s the only way her story works: the screen was blanked when she walked in, and popped back up when she put the papers on the keyboard. Porter was near the top of his class at Yale Law. He’s not stupid, he’s not a huge risk-taker. Do