“Apparently so,” the man said.
“May I have your name?”
“Tyree. You need me to spell it?”
“No.” Lisa June Peterson was floored. “Is this some kind of a joke?”
“Anything but.”
“You’re Governor Tyree—no bullshit?”
“Since when do fine young ladies use that word in formal conversation? I am shocked to the marrow.”
Lisa June Peterson already was on her feet, collecting her purse and car keys. “Where are you now?” she asked the caller. “Pay phone down on Monroe.”
“Meet me in front of the capitol. Ten minutes.”
“Why?”
She said, “I drive a Taurus wagon. I’m wearing a blue dress and glasses.”
“And no panties, ‘member?”
Nothing in Lisa June Peterson’s experience prepared her for the sight of Clinton Tyree. First his size—he looked as big as a refrigerator. Then the wardrobe—he was dressed like a squeegee man: boots, homemade kilt and shower cap. As he got in her car, the dome light offered an egg-white glimpse of shaved scalp, a ruby Clint from a prosthetic eye. But it wasn’t until they were seated side by side on upturned cinder blocks in front of a campfire that Lisa June Peterson got a good look at the lush cheek braids and the bleached bird beaks adorning them.
“Buzzards,” the former governor said. “Bad day.”
His face was saddle-brown and creased, but it opened to the same killer smile Lisa June remembered from her research; from those early newspaper photographs, before things went weird. The inaugural smile.
She said, “It’s really you.”
“Just the chassis, hon.”
They were in a wooded lot outside of town, near the municipal airport. The ex-governor was skinning out a dead fox he’d scavenged on the Apalachee Parkway. He said it had been struck by a motorcycle; said he could tell by the nature of the dent in the animal’s skull.
“What should I call you?” Lisa June Peterson asked.
“Let me think on that. You hungry?”
“I was.” She turned away while he worked at the haunches of the dead fox with a small knife.
He said, “This is my first time back to Tallahassee.”
“Where do you live now?”
“You know what’s tasty? Possum done right.”
Lisa June said, “I’ll keep my eyes peeled.”
“Tell me again what it is you do for Mr. Richard Artemus.”
She told him.
Clinton Tyree said: “I had an ‘executive assistant,’ too. She tried, she honestly did. But I was pretty much an impossible case.”
“I know all about it.”
“How? You were just a baby.”
Lisa June Peterson told him about the research that Governor Artemus has asked her to do. She did not tell him the scheme that had been kicking around her head, keeping her up nights; her idea to do a book about Clinton Tyree, Florida’s lost governor.
“Did your boss say what he wanted with my files?” The grin again. “No, I didn’t think so.”
“Tell me,” said Lisa June.
“You poor thing.”
“What is it?”
“Your Governor Dickie has an errand for me, darling, and not a pleasant one. If I don’t oblige, he’s going to throw my poor helpless brother out on the street, where he will surely succumb to confusion. So here I am.”
Lisa June felt a stab of guilt. “Doyle?”
Clinton Tyree raised a furry eyebrow. “Yes. My brother Doyle. I suppose that was in your damn research, too.”
“I’m so sorry.” But she was thinking: Dick Artemus isn’t capable of such a cold-blooded extortion.
The ex-governor speared the sliced pieces of fox on the point of a whittled oak branch, balancing it over the flames. “The reason I came to see him—your boss—is to let him know the dire ramifications of a double cross. He needs to be aware of how seriously I regard the terms of this deal.”
Lisa June Peterson said: “Isn’t it possible you misunderstood?”
Clinton Tyree gazed down at her with a ragged weariness. Then he dug into a dusty backpack and brought out a brown envelope crookedly folded and dappled with stains. Lisa June opened it and read the typed letter that had been delivered to Clinton Tyree by his best friend, Lt. Jim Tile. It didn’t matter that there was no signature at the bottom—Lisa June recognized the bloated phrasing, the comical misspellings, the plodding run-on sentences. The author of the threat could only be the Honorable Richard Artemus, governor of Florida.