Payback

by Mike Lupica

He had a nice smile. Definitely cute. Maybe I had been spending too much time alone after all, whatever Susan Silverman said.

  “I read up on you before I came over here,” Lawton said.

  “Then we’re even,” I said.

  He grinned. “So, as a trained detective,” he said, “I’m sure you’re aware that I signed an NDA with Alex after we dissolved our partnership.”

  “Whose idea was that?” I said.

  “His,” he said.

  “Why did he need one?” I said. “Unless he was worried about some really bad juju you had on him.”

  “There are all sorts of reasons for nondisclosures,” he said.

  “Almost all of them involving having bad juju on someone,” I said.

  I looked out at the seagulls over the water, struck again by how many different kinds there were, black-backed and black-tailed and the white-and-gray common gulls. My dad knew a lot about gulls. He knew a lot about a lot of things. Most of which he had taught me. But, as he constantly reminded me, not all.

  “So why the NDA?” I said.

  Lawton turned to face me. “Other than him being a paranoid narcissist?” he said.

  “I thought for a narcissist paranoia only came into play in intimate relationships,” I said.

  “With Alex Drysdale,” Christopher Lawton said, “there is nothing more intimate than his relationship with his money.”

  “Were you any different?”

  “No,” he said, “I was not. Once you start making it the way we were making it, it’s like a drug. I was never into drugs, not even in college, but it was like whatever the guy was making in Breaking Bad. The more money we made, the more we wanted. And as hard as he was pushing at the time, I was pushing just as hard.”

  It was as if he were talking to the water now.

  “But over time,” he continued, “I came to hate myself, and what I’d become. And came to hate us in the process. I finally decided I didn’t want to spend every single one of my waking hours running with the big dogs. I told Alex I wanted out, and I got out. Took a year off. Got divorced, after my wife left me. Hell, I could have taken the rest of my life off. Now I’m back in the game, building something on my own from scratch again. We’re hopeful that The Carmody is going to be the first of a chain.”

  “Good luck with it,” I said, resisting the urge to say that it was what the world needed, another high-end hotel chain.

  “At least I don’t feel like a robber baron any longer,” he said, “like my old friend Alex.”

  “Explain to me again why you’d sign an NDA,” I said.

  “Because it got me better parting gifts,” he said.

  “That only explains why you’d sign one,” I said. “But what did you know that he didn’t want everybody else to know?”

  Lawton shook his head.

  “I’d like to help you and I’d like to help your friend, because it sounds like he got royally fucked,” Lawton said. “But if I even come close to violating our deal, his lawyers will be coming over the hill like the First Army. I’ll be the one hanging over the side of Old Ironsides by my balls.”

  “Narcissists are cruel, too,” I said.

  He took in a lot of sea air and let it out.

  “Another reason I got out,” he said.

  “After you did, he pretty much lost everything,” I said.

  “Not everything. But close enough.”

  “But he came back.”

  “He sure did.”

  “I did a lot of reading on him yesterday,” I said. “But it remains unclear how he managed to get whole again.”

  “You know what he always says,” Lawton said. “‘Luck and day-trading.’”

  “You believe that?”

  “Not even a little bit,” he said.

  He stood. I stood. He shook my hand, almost in a courtly way.

  “I wish I had been more helpful,” he said.

  “May I call you with further questions about him?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” he said.

  “Are you scared of him, Mr. Lawton?”

  “Put it this way,” he said. “I’m wary.”

  I thanked him for taking the time to talk to me. Told him he’d probably be hearing from me again, whether he liked it or not.

  “I can’t be your Deep Throat,” he said.

  “Follow the money,” I said.

  TEN

  Lee Farrell had used a lot of his inheritance money to buy his new apartment, a couple blocks over in Fort Point from where Rosie and I had lived.

  It had two bedrooms and a large study that had once been a recording studio, soundproofed, for the drummer who had owned the place before him, where Lee could crank up his classic rock collection as loud as he wanted. He told me that even people next door couldn’t hear Robert Plant wailing away when he was in a Led Zeppelin mood. He had lots of windows, lots of light, maple floors that gave me floor envy for the first time in my adult life, even one wall of red brick in the study, which was actually bigger than his living room.

  When he’d shown me around the first night he’d moved in I’d said, “Do you ever worry you gay guys are getting a little too hip?”

  “Getting?” he said.

  He shared his new digs with his Scottish fold cat, Westley. I wasn’t a cat person. But if Westley and I hadn’t developed a friendship over time, I felt that we had at least achieved an understanding. I was in charge of feeding him and cleaning his litter when Lee was out of town, having a key to the place the way Spike had a key to my house when I needed him to look after Rosie.

  “If only cats were more like dogs,” I’d said to Lee once.

  “He’s like me that way,” he’d said. “He didn’t get to pick a lane.”

  When Emily opened the door she said, “I tried one last time to get him to tell you not to come.”

  “He’s a little stubborn, your uncle,” I said.

  “Like a deer tick,” she said.

  “He just cares about you,” I said.

  “And I care about him. But right now I just want you and him and everybody else to just leave me alone.”

  But she stepped aside and reluctantly let me in, as if this were a dorm room and I were here for a spot inspection. I noticed her backpack next to the door, locked and loaded, some kind of vest on top of it.

  “Going somewhere?” I said.

  “Back to Taft.”

  “Would you like me to drive you?”

  “A friend is picking me up in a few minutes.”

  She moved slowly and lowered herself with great care onto the couch. First Spike had gotten worked over this week. Now her. Every time you thought the universe had gotten as mean as it possibly could, it somehow got meaner.

  Other than some slight bruising along the hairline next to her left eye, you wouldn’t have known what had happened to her. She must have used the apartment before, or left clothes here, because everything she wore looked clean, plain white tee and distressed jeans. Her hair was wet, as if she’d just gotten out of the shower. She was very pretty, tall, sandy-colored hair, a Taylor Swift quality to her, great figure. You could learn to hate college girls if you spent enough time around them.

  “I know Lee wants you to try to find out who did this,” she said. “But I don’t. It won’t change anything even if you do.”

  She pulled up her knees in front of her.

  “Obviously I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do,” I said. “But before you go, do you mind if I ask you a few questions? That way I can at least tell your uncle I tried.”

  “Just tell him I’m fine,” she said. “Try that.”

  “But you’re not,” I said. “Fine, I mean.”

  “I was just at the wrong place at the wrong time, is all.”

  I let it go, at least for now.
But this wasn’t a grand jury, and I didn’t want it to sound like one.

  “You’re the victim here, Emily.”

  “I’m not a victim!” she said, with force that seemed to surprise her. “I’m just an idiot.”

  “Could your attacker have been somebody you know?”

  “No.”

  She pulled out her phone and checked it. I hadn’t even been there five minutes, but even going that long without checking her phone must have felt like a lifetime.

  “I’d very much like to be left alone,” she said. “You want to help? Help by doing that.”

  She gave me a sullen look that I wondered if I’d perfected at her age. Or maybe kids were getting more sullen these days, now that they saw the world turning into a dumpster fire.

  “If you want to talk to someone,” I said, “I know a good therapist.”

  “You’re just going to make it worse!”

  She looked as if she were about to cry. Drawing people out. Sometimes it was like a gift with me, like painting.

  “Make what worse?” I said.

  I heard her phone buzzing now. She looked at it again, nodded, stood, wincing again as she did, and stuck the phone in the back of her jeans, though I wondered where there might be room back there.

  I stood as well, reached into the bag I’d dropped next to my chair, pulled out a pen and one of the business cards I’d had printed up to go with my new office, wrote my cell phone number on the back, handed it to her.

  “You call me if you need anything,” I said.

  “I won’t.”

  But she took the card, stuck it in the pocket of her T-shirt, put on her sleeveless vest, and picked up her backpack. She looked as if she might be about to say one more thing, but must have thought better of it, just gave me a quick wave of the hand and left before I could offer to walk out with her.

  I walked over to one of the floor-to-ceiling windows and looked down to the street. Lee lived on the fourth floor. The elevator must have been waiting for her, because I saw her on the sidewalk a minute later. A tall young guy with long hair and wearing a navy vest of his own was waiting for her next to a red Mazda, motor running. But before they got in, they engaged in what was a very animated conversation. At one point, Emily started to walk away. He held her arm. She yanked it away.

  As I wondered how quickly I could get down there, the standoff ended. She tossed her backpack into the backseat, got into the passenger seat. Her boyfriend, or whomever he was, was pulling into traffic before her door was closed. The Mazda was too far away and gone too quickly before I could even try to take a picture of the license plate.

  The only thing left to do then was turn to Westley the cat, staring at me from across the room, and tell him I could show myself out.

  ELEVEN

  I was back in my office and had just opened the top right-hand drawer of my desk to get reading glasses that I wore only when alone when a guy came in without knocking. I left the drawer open, comforted by the sight of the Glock.

  “Good afternoon!” he said, and sat down without invitation in the visitor’s chair across from me.

  I said nothing, just watched him with mild curiosity, as if having watched a fly pick a landing spot.

  “Gun in that drawer?” he said, smiling.

  “You bet,” I said.

  “You won’t need it,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said. “But pretty sure I’ll be the one to make that determination.”

  “The door was open,” he said.

  “Unlocked,” I said. “There’s a difference.”

  He wore an expensive-looking black suit, open-necked shirt the color of a robin’s egg, one of those cuts where his hair was buzzed short on the side and longer on top, as if there were a couple floors of it. He crossed his legs, paying attention to the crease in his pants. No socks. That look. Men’s fashion could wear my ass out when they tried too hard. He looked to be about my height. And maybe my new weight.

  “Do you treat all potential clients this brusquely?” he said.

  I smiled.

  “Brusquely,” I said.

  “Something funny?”

  “Just to me,” I said. “Happens a lot.”

  He smiled back at me. I wanted to tell him that the whiteners were working.

  “Do you have a name?” I said.

  “I do,” he said.

  “But one you’re unwilling to share?”

  “No point,” he said. “You’ve probably ascertained by now that I’m not really a potential client.”

  “I’m a trained detective,” I said. “And an armed one. Now telling you that you need to leave.”

  “And you need to stop harassing Alex Drysdale,” he said. “Jump ball.”

  Guys and their sports references. Like security blankets.

  “I wasn’t aware that I was harassing him,” I said.

  “But you’re about to,” he said. “It’s why we need to get out in front of this now.”

  “‘We’?”

  “You and me,” he said.

  “Not to make too fine a point of things,” I said. “But there is no ‘you and me.’”

  He ignored that.

  “Are you a business associate of his?” I said.

  “In a manner of speaking,” he said.

  “Good to know,” I said.

  “Alex has made his business associates a lot of money in his current incarnation,” he said. “And is in the process of making even more. So, as you might imagine, when he feels threatened, the we who are his business associates begin to feel threatened as well.”

  There was a clipped precision to his words, to his cadence, that made me wonder if English might be his second language, and he had gone to great lengths to bury his first, whatever it was.

  “Something else good to know,” I said.

  “So, again, just in the interest of getting ahead of all this, I have come here to discourage you from continuing down that path and making trouble for all concerned,” he said. “Mostly for yourself, truth be told.”

  “So you’ve come here to threaten me?” I said.

  “I have come here to offer you friendly advice,” he said. “Just walk away from this now.”

  “No,” I said.

  I casually reached over to the open drawer, showed him my phone as I pulled it out, stared down at it as if a message had just come in, tapped the camera icon, held it up, said, “Smile,” and took his picture.

  I placed the phone back in the drawer but left my hand there, my eyes on him the whole time. There was an expression I had once heard Dr. Silverman use, “affective presence,” about an aura that a person could bring with them into a room, good or bad, but one you recognized on an instinctive level. The point she was making was that even charming psychopaths are still psychopaths. I had nothing more to go on at this point than the affective presence of the skinny suit across the desk from me. But all of my own clinical observations were telling me that this was a bad man.

  He shook his head, sadly, and sighed, and stood.

  “You have now been warned, in a civil way, to back off,” he said.

  “Or?”

  “Or the next time we meet,” he said, “I will be the one, as you put it to Alex, up in your shit, Ms. Randall. And as good as you think you might be, I am much better at it.”

  He gave me a one-fingered salute, turned, walked out the door, leaving it open behind him. I hadn’t met all that many hedge-funders or investment bankers in my life. Or any kind of bankers, for that matter, or accountants. But if he were a legitimate businessman, I was one of those Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

  I closed my gun drawer, made sure the snub-nosed .38 was in my shoulder bag, set the alarm, and was careful not to touch the knob on the open door, not wanting to take the time to dust it until tomorro
w. Then I used my key and locked the office from the outside, walked down the steps and across the Common, on my way to Charles Street and home, looking over my shoulder only a couple times. As always, not being paranoid. Just alert.

  TWELVE

  I told Spike he needed a new lawyer who was more like James Bond.

  “Last time I checked,” Spike said, “he was a British Secret Service agent.”

  “But licensed to kill,” I said.

  It is how I came to meet Rita Fiore of Cone, Oakes in the street bar at The Newbury. When I was a kid, the hotel was the Ritz, before it was sold and became Taj Boston. Even then I still thought of it as the Ritz, and called it the old Ritz the way my father did, only because there was a new Ritz-Carlton on the other side of Boston Common, on Avery Street. Now they had closed down the old one for a couple years and renovated it, and reimagined it, this time as The Newbury.

  But they had been smart enough to mostly leave the bar alone, just because it was one of the great bars on the planet, everything a good bar should be, just dark enough, a perfect view of the Public Garden across Arlington Street if you could score a window table, generous pours from the bartenders, good appetizers if you wanted them, a great bar menu, just the right amount of noise. There was also a set of permanence to it, and timelessness, as if wanting you to imagine what it had been like to come here for a drink as far back as the 1930s.

  Rita and I had managed to score a window table. From the greeting she’d gotten upon our arrival, I imagined the bar staff throwing people through plate glass to get us our table.

  “When you called and said you wanted to meet for a drink,” she said, “I assumed you’d killed somebody but had not yet been arrested.”

  “Because of our shared history?” I said.

  “Well, not history,” she said. “We just shared Jesse.”

  “Not to parse things with the best lawyer in town,” I said, “but my recollection is that it wasn’t as much ‘history’ with you and Chief Stone as a bit of a fling.”

  “But,” she said, taking a healthy swallow of her martini, “extremely well flung.”

  I sipped some chardonnay. I wasn’t in a martini mood. Maybe it was because my visitor had given me the creeps. By now I had emailed Rita a copy of Spike’s contract with Drysdale, and she’d already had one of her corporate partners go over it.