I had no response.
“All I was doing,” he said, “was explaining how simpleminded it is to think this was all my fault.”
“How about we don’t talk right now. Let’s just be quiet, both of us, until Nolan comes back.”
“Fine with me.” He tested his teeth again with his tongue. Marie caught my eye and looked away. Had she seen the punch? If so, it would only confirm her fear that sooner or later, something brutal was coming her way.
“Anyway,” Jeffrey said, “I didn’t see either of you guys rushing to set her free.”
“We were trying to protect you.”
“Yeah, well if you really wanted to protect me you would’ve ended this as soon as it started. You could’ve stopped the car or driven—”
“Just shut up,” I said. “I don’t want to hear it.”
Jeffrey winced, then reached into his mouth with his thumb and forefinger, and tugged. “This one’s loose. I can wiggle it a little. Man, he’s going to pay for that.”
I couldn’t sit there any longer. “I’m going to see what’s keeping him.” Jeffrey seemed more interested in his face than my immediate plans. From the doorway, my voice under control again, I said, “I’m sorry about your tooth. But Jeffrey?” I waited until he was looking at me, his fingers still in his mouth. “Write the fucking confession. And make it good.”
The bathroom looked like it was straight out of a 1950s high school. Blue tile, two stalls etched and inked with graffiti, stained urinal. Part of my job was to keep the bathroom clean. Now and then we’d hire an intern for minimum, some college dropout with fantasies of recording platinum records at the Hit Factory, and the first thing I’d delegate was bathroom duty. The interns never complained, because their fantasy always began with paying their dues in exactly this manner.
Nolan was leaning over the sink, splashing water on his face. “Hand me some paper towels, will you?”
I did. He stood up and wiped his face. Balled up the towels and pitched them into the trash. “I don’t blame you for sending Evan home, by the way. It was a decent thing to do.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but maybe it was decent and stupid.”
“This is really something, huh?”
I agreed. It was something.
“Think he’ll write the confession?”
“After the punch you threw?”
“Oh, come on. He’d made up his mind already.”
“You knocked one of his teeth loose.”
“Good.” He was studying himself in the mirror now. Even after a full day—this day—his hair was perfectly in place. His shirt looked freshly ironed. He could’ve walked up to a podium and given a speech, and nobody would know he had concerns beyond his constituency. Still, he must have seen some nuance I’d missed, because he frowned at his reflection and turned away. “Why now?” he asked. “That’s what I don’t understand. I was going to be a United States senator, Will. I was going to win that election. I had him beat.”
It seemed likely. His rival was an aging baby boomer with unnaturally white teeth and the angry tan of a pro golfer. Before becoming a congressman, Stan Byers had run an insurance company into the ground. He called his state Missoura, winked a lot, and warned his God-fearing constituents that without his stewardship, they could kiss the Second Amendment good-bye. Which was nonsense—Nolan was hardly some urban liberal. He was born and raised in Missouri farm country and had won marksmanship trophies in high school. At Princeton he’d been head of the debating society, where he’d learned skills he’d put to good use in his current position as state senator for the Twelfth District.
In a sense he’d been working toward this election for as long as I’d known him—paying his dues, working to perfect the strange art of becoming a national figure. The election was still half a year away, but his lead in the latest polls was more than the margin of error. Surely he’d begun letting himself imagine the confetti falling and the marching band playing in his victory parade.
My own dreams lacked that sort of spectacle. But they were mine, and I’d been working toward them with quiet diligence. For a moment I entertained the idea of recording Jeffrey without his knowledge. Maybe I could coax him into a confession that exonerated Nolan and me. It wouldn’t be hard. The band this afternoon had left in a hurry, so the main recording room was already miked. If I could get Jeffrey into the recording room, and if I were in the control room alone and could load up the reel-to-reel …