“Dos Equis,” says Lon.
She orders two, thinking this is still on Sam’s dime.
Rob orders carne asada and ribs, and a stack of home-cut fries. “Beer too.”
He watches the girl’s backside as she walks away, then opens the front flap of his bag, pulling out a handkerchief. He wipes his nose, digging in deep.
“You wanted to talk,” he says. “Talk.”
“A. G. Hathorne,” Jay says.
Rob thinks on this a moment and then shrugs. He slides the handkerchief into his pocket. “I don’t have anything to tell.”
“Oh, I think you do.”
“We know Sam asked for a report on his own son,” Lonnie says.
Rob shakes his head, “Huh-uh,” he says.
Jay leans across the picnic table. “Look, I know you may have thought you had to protect Neal in some way. Nobody wants to hear shit about their dad, no matter how bad the stuff you’ve been imagining about the man for thirty years, but this is a potentially life-or-death situation for Neal. You want me to sugarcoat anything for him, I can. But I need to know what was in that report, what made him drop everything to go talk to his father that night.”
“You don’t understand,” Rob says. “There was no report, or rather there was nothing in it, certainly nothing that Sam didn’t already know.”
“Like what?”
“Drugs,” Rob says, matter-of-factly, as if he’s stunned that Jay hadn’t come to that conclusion on his own. “Guy’s a musician, after all,” he says, as if it were a medical condition, a curdling in the blood that can’t be helped.
“What are you talking about? Weed? Pills?”
“Cocaine. Used to smoke the stuff before anyone else knew you could do that. Ruined his voice, his hands. You watch ’em close now, you can still see them shake, fifteen years or so after he got clean for the last time. Shame, really.”
“And you’re saying Sam knew all this?”
“Yes,” Rob says. “There isn’t much that gets past the old man. I get the idea he’s kept an eye on his son all these years, even from afar.” He smiles at the pretty waitress when she returns with their drinks, fumbling awkwardly with his wallet, all just to press two sorry singles into her palm. Jay notices Rob isn’t wearing a wedding ring, no tan lines on the ring finger either. He tries to imagine what fifty must feel like, marginally employed and without a wife, before realizing if he just waits a few years he can find out for himself.
“So why use you?” Lonnie asks Rob. “I mean, if Sam already knew about his son, why the ask? I know you were doing other work for the campaign–”
“Like Wolcott’s affair with the cop,” Jay says.
Rob smiles, pleased with himself for that particular unearthing. “That’s right,” he says.
“Which Sam doesn’t want to use.”
“No, he’s strangely squeamish about the whole thing.”
“Maybe because of his own Johnetta Paul problem.”
“Maybe,” Rob says. “But does anyone really care who Sam Hathorne is fucking?” He downs half his beer, running grateful fingers along the sides.
“Or maybe Wolcott has something better on Sam?”
“Makes more sense,” Lonnie says.
“Something maybe,” Jay adds, “to do with his younger son.”
Rob considers this a moment, sipping his beer. “Like what?” he says. “There’s the estrangement, sure, for whatever Wolcott could wring out of that. But she’d sure look like a petty bitch for calling out his drug addict son, a man who has, for all intents and purposes, turned his life around. And anyway, it’s Axel running, not Sam. I got the sense that Sam just wanted to cross every t and dot every i where A.G. is concerned, wanting to go over anything about his son that the other side could use. I think mostly he was worried that if A.G. was using again, he might be vulnerable, that he might say anything for a five-spot or a promise of something more. But I’m telling you, there was nothing there. A.G.’s recovery, it’s real this time, at least that’s my two cents on it.”
“So that’s it?” Lon says.
“That’s it. I read most of what I had to Sam over the phone, asked him if he wanted me to type something up. He said no, and that was the end of it.”
“When was this?” Jay says, reaching into his pocket for a pen. On the back of an alehouse napkin, he writes down the facts as they come.
One: Rob spoke to Sam at length last week, sometime after his initial call to the campaign on election night, the call that Neal intercepted.
Two: Sam, in the end, didn’t want any of it in writing.