by Mike Lupica
“I’m always happy to have somebody else buy my vodka for me,” she said, “but I could have told you over the phone that your friend is screwed.”
“Did your partner know much about Drysdale?” I said.
“I asked,” Rita said. “He does.”
“What kind of reputation does he have?”
“Do you mind if I use a somewhat technical legal expression?”
“Have at it.”
“He’s a dick,” Rita said.
“I was actually able to figure that out without benefit of a law diploma,” I said.
“Aaron—that’s the partner I showed the contract to—also said that your friend Spike isn’t the only one Drysdale vultured in on during the virus,” Rita said.
“Were there other restaurants?”
“A couple,” she said. She named one in the North End, another in the seaport. “And a hair salon. And a gym.”
“He ended up owning their businesses, too?”
She nodded.
“Aaron only heard this secondhand, from a friend of the gym owner,” Rita said. “But when the owner threatened to beat the living shit out of Drysdale, he got a visit from a couple of Drysdale’s ‘friends.’”
She put air quotes around friends.
I told her then about my visitor earlier in the afternoon.
“Maybe Wharton is turning into a new crime family,” she said.
She wore a short green dress that showed off her amazing figure and amazing legs. She had so much red hair I imagined a team of colorists working on it. I knew she had to be older than she looked. But, then, who wasn’t? And if she’d had work done on that face, as I believed she had, it was the best since some of the legendary sculptors I’d studied at BU.
“Spike should have called our firm before he signed,” Rita said. “Remember how in less-enlightened times these people used to say women didn’t have a head for business? Maybe it’s gay guys now.”
“Wait, what about Geffen?” I said. “And the Apple guy.”
“And Armani,” Rita said. “Okay, you got me.”
She waved at our waiter and pointed to our drinks.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You’re about to turn this into a crusade, aren’t you?” Rita said.
“Spike would do the same for me.”
“I have a friend in your business a lot like you,” she said.
Now I smiled. I knew who she meant.
“How good a friend?” I said.
“Not the kind I wanted him to be, which means with unlimited benefits,” she said. “Not even once, despite my very best efforts.”
We sat there in silence for a minute or two, the room around us beginning to become more crowded, the way the bar area was. In an impermanent world, this bar really was forever.
Finally she said, “So how is the chief, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Kind of do mind,” I said, “if you’re seriously asking about us.”
“So there’s still an ‘us’,” she said. “Seriously?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Damn,” Rita said. “I was afraid of that.”
But she toasted me with her glass and I toasted her back.
“So you want to take this guy down,” Rita said.
“Big-time,” I said.
“Dealing with these people really can be like dealing with the Mob,” she said. “They end up with all this money. But it’s almost as if as soon as they’ve got it, they start worrying about losing it. Or somebody taking it away from them. And it scares their things right off them.”
I laughed. “Things?”
She threw back her head and laughed. “I sometimes think of them as accessories,” she said.
“Not what I heard,” I said, and then told her that I could handle myself around any kind of gangster, that over the past few years my interests had occasionally been aligned with Tony Marcus’s. She said she’d heard about that.
“What about when your interests weren’t aligned with Tony’s?” Rita said.
“He’d talk about the balls on me,” I said.
Rita sighed.
“Men always think that’s a compliment,” she said.
I offered to pay the check. Rita let me, telling me it was a lot cheaper than a billable hour. I asked her if she could ask her friend to get the name of the gym owner who wanted to put Alex Drysdale down and to call me with it in the morning. She said she would.
Her Uber was waiting on the street when we were back out on Arlington Street. Tom, one of the veteran bellmen who was still around, who had been out in front of the place since my father used to take me to the old Ritz for special-occasion lunches when I was a little girl, was already holding the door open for her.
“Give my best to Jesse,” she said.
I told her that it sounded as if she already had.
I cut across the Public Garden and thought about picking up a small pie at Upper Crust Pizzeria on my way up Charles Street, but then changed my mind, mostly because of an iron will, deciding that if I got hungry later I would make myself a salad. When I got home I walked Rosie and got into my sweats and decided I wasn’t hungry after all. I fixed myself a small Jameson and took it with me into the living room and called Jesse Stone and told him I’d just had drinks with Rita Fiore.
“How is old Rita?” he said.
“Old Rita seems to be just fine,” I said. “By the way? She wanted to know how you were doing.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That will have to stay between us girls,” I said.
“I was hopeful it would, truth be told,” he said.
He asked why I’d met with Rita. I told him, and took him through the whole story: what had happened to Spike, the guy who’d visited my office, what I’d learned about Alex Drysdale, and how I wanted to separate him from his thing.
“‘Thing’?” Jesse said.
“It’s a word Rita used to describe the male organ.”
“One of many words she has for it,” Jesse said.
“Hey,” I said.
“Where do you go next?”
“First thing I’m going to do is dust my doorknob when I get to my office. I didn’t have time today to do it right because I was going to meet Rita.”
“You have the kit?”
I told him I did.
“Then I’m going to visit a dear friend I have in law enforcement and ask him to have the state police run the prints for me,” I said.
“Must be a really dear friend,” he said.
“Maybe I just want an excuse to see you.”
“You don’t need an excuse,” Jesse said. “It’s in the benefits package.”
He asked if I wanted to talk dirty for a while. I told him I did and that Rita Fiore could eat her heart out. When we finished talking dirty I neglected to mention before we ended the call that I was going to see my ex-husband in the morning, feeling it would spoil the mood.
When I got up in the morning to take Rosie outside, the unmarked envelope was on the mat in front of the door. When I opened it there was a photograph inside, clearly taken at Legal Sea Foods the day before.
It was a close-up of my father.
With a red dot superimposed on his forehead.
THIRTEEN
When I called Phil Randall and told him about the picture, he said it made him feel like a cop again, somebody trying to threaten him this way, even though whomever it was clearly was trying to threaten me.
“I can take care of myself,” I said.
“And I can take care of myself,” he said.
“You’re not a cop anymore, Dad,” I said.
“Once you were, you are,” he said, and then told me to call him if I needed him.
“Always h
ave,” I said.
When I got to the office in the morning I called Lee Farrell first thing. When he actually picked up for a change I told him about the picture. He asked who I thought had left it. I told him about my visitor the day before. He asked if I wanted him to dust for prints and I told him I was about to do that myself, I was a dusting fool today, but I doubted I’d find any prints on the envelope or the photograph.
Then I asked for an update on Emily. He said he hadn’t heard from her since she’d left his place. Had tried calling, but always went straight to voicemail. I asked if he knew she was attending classes today. He said he knew more about where Carly the influencer was than he did about his niece’s course load. She was a math major, he knew that, with a minor in econ. That was about it. He knew her campus address even if he hadn’t been there yet this semester, and that the house in which she lived was within walking distance of the library.
“Is this your passive-aggressive way of getting me to take a ride over to Taft?” I said.
“Only passive,” he said. “You called me, remember?”
I told him I might have someone I needed to see on Spike’s case, and some laptop detecting to do at the office, but I would try to go out to Walford sometime in the afternoon.
“I know I keep saying this,” he said, “but she’s family.”
“I feel the same way about you,” I said.
I then set to work on dusting both the inside and outside knobs to my door. It was highly unlikely that anybody had tried the door since I’d left the day before. But even if someone had handled the outside knob, the last person to touch the one inside was Skinny Suit when he was leaving. A good thing. The cleaning woman had been here for the first time the previous Friday, and had polished everything except my gun. Including the knobs. It would make my job a lot easier.
I didn’t know if every hotshot detective in town had their own dusting kit, the way I didn’t know how many could pick a lock the way I could. But I had one, and there had been times in the past when finding a usable print had helped me more than somewhat.
Another fine art they had not taught at Boston University.
I used black fingerprint dust that came in a small container roughly the same size as a nail polish bottle. The brush I used resembled the one I used to apply blush, just smaller, and with even finer bristles.
I tapped some powder on white printer paper, lightly spinning the brush on it. Then I carefully walked across the room, set the paper down on the floor, and spun the brush again before lightly depositing the powder on the doorknob.
After that, and as gently as I could, I used the brush again to clear away the excess powder, clearly exposing a couple clear prints. One had to be mine.
The other had to be his.
The last part of the job was lifting the print. I liked to use what was called a hinge lifter. It basically looked like clear tape cut up into two-inch strips. I applied one strip to each print, then gently laid them into their own flat containers. Jesse said he couldn’t get down to Boston in the next couple days, and I’d told him I wasn’t sure I could get up to Paradise. I offered to overnight the prints to Brian Lundquist at the state police, but Jesse said that it would be better if he dropped them off.
“Brian likes me,” I said.
“Not nearly as much as you think,” Jesse said.
“Is such a thing even possible?” I said.
I bubble-wrapped the containers with the prints in them, filled out the FedEx air bill, and called in the pickup, then headed over to the statue of George Washington to meet Richie.
If the chief of police in Paradise couldn’t help me identify Skinny Suit, at least not yet, maybe a son of the Irish Mob could. No one had a more wide-ranging support system than I did.
With or without benefits.
FOURTEEN
We still got together occasionally, and when we did it was always as the family Richie had hoped we would be: him; his son, Richard; me. He hadn’t moved off that. When Richie Burke made up his mind about something, you had a better chance of moving the Hynes auditorium.
It wasn’t as if either of us had lost our feelings for each other. It wasn’t that I hadn’t come to love the little boy, because I had. I loved him, he loved Rosie, I really did still love Richie. But I knew enough about myself to know that if we had ever tried to make the situation permanent, if Richie and I had remarried, as I knew he wanted us to, and really tried to become one big happy family, I would have lost myself inside it. Or lost myself, period. Everyone had talked about the new abnormal during the virus. Now this was ours, mine and Richie’s, and the son his second wife had given him, before Richie realized that there was no happy family for him without me as a part of it.
The equestrian statue of George Washington was in the Public Garden at the Arlington Street end, as if the father of our country was guarding Commonwealth all the way down to Kenmore Square. It was a slightly longer walk for Richie than it was for me, since he’d moved again, to a new condominium within walking distance of Fenway Park, high up over Beacon with a view of the Charles. Even though his boy had spent a lot of his growing-up years in London, his father had now turned him into a baseball fan, something at which he’d failed, rather spectacularly, with me.
I beat him to the statue and saw him before he saw me, collar of his tan windbreaker pulled up, pressed jeans even though hardly anybody wore pressed jeans anymore. I smiled at the sight of him, the grace he brought to something as simple as crossing Arlington Street. Much had changed for us over the years since our divorce, and then changed back, and then changed again. But one of the things that had not was this:
Every time I saw him it was still like the first time.
The last time we’d been together had been a couple weeks ago, when he and Richard and I had walked Rosie up here from River Street Place and then down to the Ben & Jerry’s on Newbury.
We hugged each other tentatively, kissed each other chastely on the lips. When he stepped back he said, “You lose weight?”
I grinned. “I think my heart just skipped a beat,” I said.
We sat down on the bench next to George.
“Unless you want advice on opening a bar,” he said, “I assume you need help with criming.”
He still owned his bar on Portland Street, the only thing in the world he loved as much as his son. Or me. His father, Desmond, now in his eighties, was still the head of what was left of the Irish Mob in New England. Whitey Bulger was gone, killed in prison. It really meant all the old Irish were gone except Desmond Burke. Not only had he survived the virus, so had his operation, the foundation of which was still loan-sharking. It was another reason why I had called Richie, beginning to wonder how my former father-in-law felt about someone such as Alex Drysdale—and his associates—operating off his playbook.
I showed Richie the picture I’d taken in my office, told him about the picture of my dad left at the front door, told him about Drysdale and Spike and how Spike wasn’t the only one Drysdale had squeezed.
“You’ve been busy,” he said.
“Idle hands.”
“But you don’t know who this guy is,” Richie said.
“Not who,” I said. “But got a strong feeling what.”
He nodded.
“All I’ve got is that picture,” I said.
“Gonna send it to my phone,” he said, and did.
“You think he left the one of Phil?” Richie said.
“Who else?” I said, choosing not to quote Jesse to him on the subject of coincidence.
“It would mean he has now threatened you at your office and at your home,” Richie said. “We can’t have that.”
“I was hoping you could show the picture to your father, and have him show it around in his crew,” I said. “I can’t even get into the game with this guy until I know who he is.”
“You
could have called Desmond yourself,” he said.
I smiled.
“There have always been certain protocols in place,” I said, “even when we were still married. Too late for either your father or me to change now.”
He knew all of the protocols with his father, and his father’s business, one Richie had somehow managed to avoid, even as Desmond’s only son. Or perhaps because he was his only son.
“We could always just have my father have a talk with this Drysdale guy,” he said. “Just to move things along.”
“Not there yet,” I said. “Not even close. Just looking for information Desmond might be able to provide.”
“Not like you two haven’t teamed up effectively in the past.”
“Albeit reluctantly,” I said.
“You’ve always had an interesting code,” Richie said. “You have always been willing to cross over to my father’s side of the street, or Tony Marcus’s, when it suits your purposes.”
“My therapist calls it a form of duality,” I said.
He grinned. “I’ll bet she does.”
“She has a lot of interesting observations about me.”
“You ever try to compute how much you’ve spent on her?” Richie said.
“I don’t like to play this game,” I said.
He told me he and Richard were having dinner with Desmond Burke later, and he would show him the photograph. Then gave me a long look with eyes that had always reminded me of black ink.
“You need protection, just in the short run?” he said. “I could mention that to my father as well.”
I told him what I’d just told my father, that I could take care of myself.
“Until you occasionally can’t,” he said.
“Somebody has to know who this guy is,” I said.
“If he and this maroon Drysdale have found what my father would call a lace-curtain way to shake people down, Desmond might already know who he is,” Richie said.
