Too Close to Home

Sure, Finley had alienated most of the unions in town, mocked them, accused all of their members of sitting on their collective ass. Promise Falls, with a population of forty thousand, wasn’t the biggest city in New York State, but you still needed a fair number of people to keep the water running through the pipes, staff the fire department, and collect the trash, and Finley had managed to get under the skin of all of them at one time or another. And there weren’t many on the city council who’d piss on Finley’s head if it were on fire, but still, the guy was an unlikely target for an assassin. You had to get him through the odd picket line, the occasional protest outside city hall, but nobody was scoping him out with a rifle from the top of the observatory (if we’d had an observatory). I got plenty of free meals out of it, all the banquets the boss had to go to, and he rubbed shoulders with the mildly rich and famous when they came to town on official business. Once, when Promise Falls had been chosen for a movie shoot, I got within five feet of Nicole Kidman. The mayor shook her hand and, even though I was standing right next to him, he neglected to introduce me. I was the hired help.

I’d known long before that my boss was a complete dick. I think that sunk in about an hour or so after he hired me to drive for him, when, while we were stopped at a light, a homeless man approached the mayor’s window for some change. Finley buzzed down the window and, instead of tossing the guy a quarter, said, “Here’s a tip, pal. Buy low, sell high.”

The incident where he wandered into the unwed mothers’ home and threw up all over the front hall carpet was a little more spectacular than his usual stunts, but still very much within his range of talents. Yet it wasn’t that hard to account for his popularity. He had that “average guy” thing about him. He’d rather be duck hunting than attending the opera. One might have thought, in a town that supported a college and had its share of snooty intellectual and artsy-fartsy types, Finley would have limited appeal, but a majority of Promise Falls’ regular residents, the ones unaffiliated with the college, saw him as their guy, and voting for him was a way to stick it to all those campus snobs who thought they were better than everybody else.

Yet Finley was politically savvy enough to know how to play to the university crowd as well. Thackeray College, while small, was highly regarded across the country. Over the years, the annual literary festival Ellen organized had attracted the likes of Margaret Atwood, Richard Russo, and Dave Eggers and drew several thousand tourists to town, and Finley wasn’t about to mess with that. The local merchants-who’d managed to hold on in the face of Wal-Mart-depended too much on it. He was always there for the official opening, and it must have killed him to take second billing to Thackeray president Conrad Chase, whose ego gave Finley’s a run for its money. Chase considered himself right up there with the stars the festival managed to score, having had a bestseller eight years ago, a critically acclaimed one-hit wonder he’d been unable to repeat. The onetime English prof hadn’t simply failed to write another hit. He’d not written another book, at least not one for public consumption.

But I’d never punched Conrad in the nose, although I’d been tempted over the years to do much more than that.

So back to the mayor.

He had asked me to drop him at the Holiday Inn on the north side of Promise Falls. It was far enough from downtown that it had an air of anonymity about it, but it was hardly Vegas. What happened at the Promise Falls Holiday Inn did not necessarily stay at the Promise Falls Holiday Inn.

I learned early not to inquire too persistently about the mayor’s purpose in any of his trips. Most I knew without having to ask. I was privy to Finley’s meetings with his administrative assistant. I’d get a copy of his daily schedule, then hear him blathering away in the backseat into his cell phone.

But occasionally there were meetings that did not show up on his agenda, and this was one of those.

There was always a chance that these off-the-agenda meetings were arranged by Lance Garrick, the mayor’s backup driver and all-around gofer. Lance was known by plenty of folks around Promise Falls as the go-to guy if you wanted an after-hours card game, booze when the stores had all closed, a hot tip on a horse at Saratoga, or even a girl.

I wasn’t much interested in gambling or booze or hookers, and I felt the mayor’s association with Lance was ill-advised and likely to bring him grief someday. But then, I was his driver, not his political strategist. He could do whatever the hell he wanted.

When Finley said he wanted to go to the Holiday Inn one night after the end of a council session, I said nothing, even though I hadn’t seen any kind of hotel meeting listed on his itinerary. I put the Grand Marquis in drive and headed that way.