The Chairman - A Novel Part 25

"Ah, you don't know anything," Stiles muttered. "Listen, I've got a couple of updates for you."

"Oh? What?"

"First, Kyle Lefors is definitely from Louisiana. He grew up in a little town outside of Baton Rouge called McMa.n.u.s."

"Right. What else?"

Stiles hesitated. "Yesterday, Paul Strazzi met with Senator Stockman in a warehouse office up in the Bronx."

Gillette's eyes narrowed.

"Is that important?" asked Stiles.

"Oh yeah." Hiring Stiles was turning out to be one of the best moves he'd ever made. Even if the guy was stubborn as a mule. Maybe because of it.

"Why?"

"I'll tell you later." He was d.a.m.n glad he'd ordered Stiles to put one of his men on Strazzi's tail. "What about that e-mail? The one I got right before I was attacked the other night in New Jersey."

"Not much yet," Stiles answered. "We know it was sent from an E-coffee store. You know, the chain that offers five minutes of free Internet time with each cup. We just don't know which of the company's five thousand locations it came from. You have to get to their servers to figure that out. I'm trying to run it down through a couple of contacts, but I don't know how far I'll get. And I'm not sure it would do us much good even if I could identify the outbound location. There'd be no way to know exactly who the sender was because customers don't pay for specific terminals."

"Try to figure out which location it came from," urged Gillette. "You never know. It might help."

"Okay, I'll stay on it."

"Good." Gillette tossed the notepad into his briefcase and relaxed into the leather seat. "Tell me about your childhood, Quentin."

Stiles looked over at Gillette. "Why?"

Gillette shrugged. "Looks like we're going to be spending a lot of time together. I'm interested."

"No, you're not."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You're just making conversation."

"Quentin, I'm a busy guy. I don't 'just make conversation.' "

"What do you want to know?" asked Stiles after a few moments. He was staring ahead intently at a street vendor pushing his cart.

"Where'd you grow up?"

"About sixty blocks north of here." Stiles relaxed as they pa.s.sed the vendor without incident. "In Harlem."

Gillette broke into a grin. "So, you probably know that pool hall where you picked me up pretty well."

Stiles nodded. "Wasted more hours in there than I care to count."

"Are you really that good?"

"Oh yeah."

"Got any brothers or sisters?" Gillette asked, wishing he had time to play Stiles right now. It would be a h.e.l.l of a lot of fun to take him for five grand.

"A half brother and a half sister. That's all I know about, anyway."

"Do you keep in touch with them?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I just don't."

It was clear Stiles didn't want to talk about it. "Did you go to college?"

Stiles snickered. "I didn't even finish high school. Dropped out junior year."

But he had excellent grammar, Gillette realized. In fact, he spoke more clearly and concisely than a lot of people Gillette knew who had paid hundreds of thousands to play in the Ivy for four years. "But how did you-"

"My grandmother," Stiles interrupted.

"What about her?"

"She's the reason I'm where I am today. The answer to what you were about to ask."

"What did she do?"

"She raised me. She was my mom, my dad, and my best friend. She's a great person. I owe her a lot."

"Why did she have to raise you?"

Stiles was quiet for a while. "My mother was strung out most of the time," he finally answered, his voice barely audible. "She'd be gone for weeks at a time. We had no idea where she was. Then suddenly she'd show up at the door looking like s.h.i.t and spend a couple of weeks on my grandmother's couch. Sleeping most of the time. Then she'd leave again without even saying good-bye. It was a constant cycle.

Gillette grimaced. "That must have been h.e.l.l."

"It made me cry when I was a kid. When I was a teenager, it just p.i.s.sed me off."

"Did you ever talk to her about it?" Gillette asked, thinking about the day he'd approached his mother about her drinking. He was sixteen, and he'd tried to talk to her calmly one afternoon in the kitchen. Getting out only a few words before she'd erupted in a violent rage, hurling pots and pans at him until he ran. His father had warned him that night not to try again, and he never had. He'd never told his father about how he'd saved her life that day she'd fallen in the pool, either. "Ever try to help her?"

"Once."

"What happened?"

"She pulled a gun on me, told me she never did drugs," Stiles replied. "Told me she'd kill me if I ever told anybody she did."

"Jesus."

"After that I joined a gang and dropped out of school."

"I doubt your grandmother was happy."

"She wasn't, but she couldn't control me when I was a teenager. n.o.body could."

"Then why is she responsible for where you are today?"

"You know," Stiles said, pointing at Gillette. "You're like a dog on a bone. You just won't let things go."

"Thanks."

"Some things are personal. Sometimes you need to know when to back off."

"You want to tell me," Gillette said calmly. "We all want to tell our secrets to someone," he said, repeating what Tom McGuire had said.

"What are you, some kind of amateur psychiatrist?"

"I a.n.a.lyze people all the time, Quentin. It's the most important skill I have. I have to motivate people. You can't motivate them until you understand them."

"Don't you mean manipulate them? Isn't that really what you do?" Stiles looked over at Gillette. "Yeah, I've been watching."

"Call it what you want," Gillette said sharply, "but I have to be able to make people believe in themselves even when everything is falling down around them. If that takes a certain amount of manipulation, so be it. In the end, they're better off and so am I. Which is all that matters."

"Just because you think you can get inside other people's heads doesn't mean you can get inside mine."

"You told me about your mother's drug problem."

"Yeah, I did," Stiles murmured, looking out the window. "I haven't told anyone about that in a long time."

"So," Gillette pushed, "why is your grandmother responsible for where you are?"

Stiles checked the intersection while they waited for the light to change. "One day me and my boys get into it with a gang from a neighborhood a few blocks over, and I end up getting shot in the chest."

"One of the scars you showed me," Gillette said, pointing to the spot on his own chest. "Right?"

"Yeah. When I'm better, my grandmother has two neighbors drag me down to the Army recruiting office in Times Square and make me enlist. I was cursing and screaming all the way down in the cab, but it was the best thing that ever happened to me."

"They might have dragged you down there, Quentin, but they couldn't make make you enlist. You had to do that yourself." you enlist. You had to do that yourself."

"True. But, while I'm standing there looking at this hard-a.s.sed-looking white guy with a high and tight haircut and a mean-motherf.u.c.ker stare, I realize I have to get out of Harlem. Even though I hate the guy, I know he's my best shot at making something of myself. Otherwise there'll be another gang fight, and I'll end up getting shot again. Things might not have turned out all right that time."

"Is your grandmother still alive?" Gillette asked.

"Yup. She still lives in the same projects."

"How old is she?"

"Seventy-two."

"What about your mother? Do you keep in touch with her?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"She was killed a week after I left for basic. Shot by a cop in a drug bust at a crack house a few blocks from my grandmother's place."

Gillette looked away.

"What about you?" Stiles asked after a long pause. "Where'd you grow up?"

Gillette turned back around. He hadn't expected Stiles to be interested. "Beverly Hills."

Stiles groaned. "A 9-0-2-1-0 brat."

"You know it," Gillette said unapologetically. "Spent most of my time in high school at the beach playing volleyball and surfing."

"And chasing girls."

"Yep."

"What does your father do?"

Gillette looked out the window. "He's dead."

"Oh." Stiles hesitated. "How?"

"Plane crash."

"How long ago?"

"Fourteen years."

They were silent for a while.

"Before he died," Gillette finally spoke up, "he ran an L.A. investment bank. Made a killing when one of the big New York houses came in and paid way too much for it. Stayed on to run it for the New York people for two years after the deal, then went into politics. Won a seat as a United States congressman in his first campaign, then became a senator after one term in Congress."

"Never went without very much did you?"

"I can't remember ever going without anything, anything," Gillette admitted matter-of-factly. "Christmas was just another day." Until he was twenty-two, anyway.

"I didn't know there was was a Christmas until I was six and one of my friends told me about it." a Christmas until I was six and one of my friends told me about it."

"That's tough."

"Got any brothers and sisters?" Stiles wanted to know.

Gillette took a deep breath. He'd lied to Faith about this one, too. Not because he didn't trust Faith. He just didn't want to talk about it. But Stiles had revealed some painful things, and it wouldn't be fair to hold back. "I have an older brother and a younger sister."