Read Online Penance by David Housewright - Free Book Online

thought it was love. I was much younger then. Anyway, when we were together, we made a videotape.” C. C. said the videotape showed her in bed, showed her in various stages of undress, mostly with Thoreau, both of them playing to the camera, filling the lens. I had only one question.
    “Why?”
    “I don’t know. I thought it would be fun, kind of kinky; a lot of couples are doing it these days.”
    “Really?”
    C. C. was angry now. “Haven’t you ever done something stupid, Mr. Taylor? Something you regretted, something you knew you would regret even while you were doing it?”
    I recalled jumping off the roof of my father’s house while holding a bedsheet over my head, only I reminded C. C. that I wasn’t a member of the Minnesota House of Representatives at the time.
    “Neither was I. I wasn’t running for anything back then. I was still with the DOT. I still belonged to myself, not to the women’s movement. Anyway, it’s done. Now my boyfriend, my ex-boyfriend, is threatening to release the tape to the media unless we pay him ten thousand dollars. I doubt if the news stations would run it…”
    “They’d love to acknowledge it exists, however,” Marion said. “Show a few discreetly cropped stills.”
    C. C. nodded. “Especially Hersey Sheehan. It would be like winning the Triple Crown: first the governor, then the mayor and now me. The Cities Reporter. It’s a rag.”
    “It claims to be an alternative to traditional newspapers like the Minneapolis StarTribune and St. Paul Pioneer Press,” Marion said. “So it prints what the other papers won’t touch. It’s the only way it can stay in business.”
    “They should sell the damn thing at supermarket checkout lines,” C. C. said.
    “If they could, they would,” Marion added, and then they both grew quiet, as if contemplating the possibility.
    “So what do you want from me?” I asked when I became bored enough.
    Carol Catherine Monroe looked at me expectantly with eyes that were wide and moist, with full lips slightly parted. The look said, “Help me.” Or maybe I was projecting. Stick her on a bar stool and put a cocktail in her hand and it might mean something else altogether.
    “We want you to deliver the money, get the tape and run the bastard off,” Marion Senske said. “Isn’t that why Lieutenant Scalasi sent you?”
    “I thought I was here to get a line on Joseph Sherman,” I said, not believing it at all. Sending me after Brown to help Monroe? Anne Scalasi, my Anne Scalasi, could never be this devious.
    “I told you, we haven’t seen or heard from Joseph Sherman,” Marion assured me.
    I looked into C. C.’s aquamarine eyes.
    “That’s true,” she said. “But,” she added in a halting voice, “even if you did come for another reason, couldn’t you, wouldn’t you, do this one little thing for us? Please?”
    Ahh, what the hell. Since I was already in the neighborhood …

    C. C. had not seen or spoken to Dennis Thoreau for six years. Their relationship ended while she was running for her first term in the House. The reasons she gave me for breaking up with him were vague. “It just didn’t work out,” she said.
    According to C. C., Thoreau appeared at campaign headquarters one afternoon just to say hi. He said he was moving back to St. Paul after spending some time in California. They had a pleasant conversation, reminisced about old times. The next day they did lunch. Over the next two weeks Thoreau visited headquarters frequently, even worked the phones a few times. C. C. had actually considered resuming their relationship.
    “The man could charm the fish from the sea,” she said.
    “Humph,” Marion grunted.
    Then Saturday morning, Thoreau called C. C. and just as pleasantly as you please demanded ten thousand dollars in tens and twenties.
    “I thought he was joking at first. I even laughed,” C. C. said. “Only he wasn’t joking. He told me he would make copies of the video and send them to all the TV