The Girls He Adored: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

inappropriate. It occurred to Irene that when she next saw her therapist, they would have something juicier to discuss than they'd had in weeks. Months. Years. She took a hard pull on her cigarette, and inhaled a mouthful of burning filter.

5

    “P ENDER, YOU GOT MORE BALLS than Hoover had high heels,” said Aurelio Bustamante. The longtime Monterey County sheriff was seated behind an enormous desk crowded with awards and mementos. “First you interrogate—”
    “Interview.” Pender slouched in his chair so as not to tower over the sheriff, a short round man in a brown western-cut suit and a sunny white Stetson. Pender had started to remove his own hat— he rarely wore it into a room—but changed his mind: when in California . . .
    “You interrogate one of my officers, an injured officer, let me add, without my knowledge or permission. Now you want to interrogate one of my prisoners, but you don't want to share what you got? Unh-unh, I don't think so. You gonna fuck me from behind, my frien', you goddamn well better give me a reach-around.”
    When dealing with local law enforcement officials, FBI agents could count on a range of reactions from hero worship to bitter resentment, depending on how much contact the locals had had with the bureau. The sixtyish Bustamante was clearly no virgin.
    Nor was Pender—he decided to see if he couldn't turn the sheriff's animosity to his own advantage.
    “Believe me, Sheriff, I sympathize completely with you. I started out as a sheriff's deputy in upstate New York. And if I'm fucking you, then it's a daisy chain, because I've got my boss so far up my ass he has to wear one of those coal miner hats with the little flashlight on top.”
    The crow's-feet at the corners of Bustamante's eyes deepened almost imperceptibly at the piquant image.
    Pender pressed on. “Sheriff Bustamante, if you think the FBI is piss-arrogant to you and yours, you should see how they treat their own—especially old-timers like me. I'm two years short of mandatory retirement, they're trying to force me out early, my last fitness report referred to me as the worst-dressed agent in the history of the bureau, my personnel file's been flagged for so many petty bureaucratic violations it reads like a rap sheet, and if I have to get a court order to interview your prisoner, his lawyer's gonna be on it like stink on shit, and I'm gonna go home with nothing.”
    “Now I'm suppose' to feel sorry for you because you're a fuckup?” scoffed Bustamante. “I let you in to see this guy without his lawyer present and he walks on account of it, it's gonna be my ass on the line, too.”
    “Sheriff, I give you my word I won't ask him a single question about the current case.”
    “Then you're not gonna get anything out of him anyway—he claims to have amneeesia.” Bustamante weighted the word with contempt.
    “Just give me a shot, that's all I ask.”
    “And if I do that for you, what do you do for me?” Bustamante spread his hands out, palms up, and waggled his fingers toward himself in the universal fork-it-over gesture.
    Pender picked up a foot-long brass nameplate—AURELIO BUSTAMANTE, SHERIFF—and placed it in the middle of the desk, facing the sheriff. Then, in a semicircle behind the nameplate, he arranged a Kiwanis Club man-of-the-year pen-and-pencil set in an engraved marble holder; a baseball autographed by the last roster of the now-defunct Salinas Peppers; a gold-framed photograph of the sheriff and Mrs. Bustamante, a smiling Hispanic-looking woman with upswept white hair, standing behind a passle of children and grandchildren; and a silver badge engraved with the words GRAND MARSHALL, SALINAS RODEO, mounted onto a fourinch-high wooden plaque with an angled base.
    “This is you at your next press conference.” Pender tapped the nameplate, then each of the other items in turn. “And here's your valiant Deputy Jervis, here's the mayor and the DA and whoever else in your department you'd like to