Payback

by Mike Lupica

  “Before long our Russian prince was living the life in Los Angeles,” he said, “and organizing poker games for the rich and famous. Actors. Professional athletes, even from the fucking Lakers. Movie moguls. Now Jalen believes he’s doing the same thing in Boston.”

  “I take it he’s not just doing it for the love of the game,” Jesse said.

  “Not so much, according to Jalen,” Richie said. “He thinks money laundering might still be the family business, especially for rich foreigners.”

  “You said it was a little murky how Drysdale got back up on his feet,” I said. “Maybe less murky now.”

  “You’re saying it could be something other than a passion for Texas Hold ’Em that brought them together here?” Jesse said.

  “Texas Hold ’Em?” I said.

  “I still watch ESPN sometimes when there’s no baseball,” he said.

  I looked at Richie.

  “What does Desmond think about Eddie Ross, now that he knows what you know?” I said.

  “He thinks that perhaps one of the rich foreigners might be running Eddie the way Eddie runs games,” Richie said.

  “Desmond find any of this troubling,” I said, “just in the area of criming?”

  “Not yet,” Richie said.

  I got up from the table, went into the living room, came back with my wine, and drank some.

  “Jesse doesn’t believe in coincidence,” I said to Richie.

  “Who the hell does?” Richie said.

  “Ross went to Stanford,” I said. “Drysdale went to Stanford. Drysdale’s former partner went to Stanford. Drysdale stole Spike’s restaurant out from underneath him. Eddie Ross came to see me. I saw him with Drysdale coming out of the brownstone, along with young Emily Barnes.”

  “Maybe it’s just the gambling that’s the connection,” Richie said.

  “Gonna find out,” I said.

  “I’ll bet,” Richie said, without a hint of irony.

  He pushed back his chair, then he was the one disappearing into the living room. When he came back, he said, “I did not feed Rosie off your plates.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “For lying about not feeding the dog?”

  “For the intel on Eddie Ross,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “You asked,” he said.

  He turned to Jesse and said, “Nice to finally meet you.”

  “Same,” Jesse said.

  Richie nodded.

  “Now we’re both lying,” he said.

  “Speak for yourself,” Jesse said.

  Richie said that he’d call when Jalen came up with more on Eddie Ross, which Richie said he most certainly would. Then he gave me a long look and said he knew his way out.

  When I heard the front door shut I said to Jesse, “Well, that was kind of a mood killer.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Jesse said again.

  He walked across the kitchen and told me to drink up, then took me by my hand and walked me through the living room and up the stairs to my bedroom and the bed that Melanie Joan Hall had left behind, one as big as a helicopter pad.

  “You know,” I said, as I slowly began to undress, “I’m still worried about the mood thing.”

  “Makes one of you.”

  “I read somewhere once that a good mood is like a balloon,” I said, “and that all it takes is a good prick to ruin it.”

  Jesse Stone smiled and then came over to the other side of the big bed to speed up the undressing process.

  “I’ll risk it if you will,” he said.

  And we did.

  It was after midnight when my cell phone buzzed from the table on my side of the bed, and Frank Belson was telling me that somebody just shot a guy who had one of my cards on him, two to the chest, close range, center mass, dead.

  I took a very deep breath, in through the nose, out through the mouth.

  “The guy named Alex Drysdale by any chance?” I said.

  “However did you know?”

  “Women’s intuition,” I said.

  “Are you even allowed to say shit like that anymore?” Belson said.

  “When you got it, flaunt it,” I said, and then asked him where he was before calling Spike to tell him that ding-dong, the bitch was dead.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Jesse said that the last thing Frank Belson wanted or needed was some small-town cop mucking up his crime scene. I told him he was about as far from being just another small-town cop as I was from being the next Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He said I knew what he meant and he was just going to head back to Paradise.

  “Never dull hanging with you,” he said when we were outside next to our cars.

  “I am truly blessed,” I said, “in so many ways.”

  He grinned.

  “And look at me,” he said, “making a new friend tonight.”

  “It was all a cruel deception,” I said. “Like when Rosie actually acts as if she likes other dogs.”

  I got into my new Prius and drove the few blocks to where Alex Drysdale used to live, saw that the cops had already blocked off Ashburton at the corner of Somerset. I parked and walked the rest of the way, explaining to the first uniform stopping me who I was and that Belson had called me. He let me pass. There was another Ford Expedition parked next to another Crown Vic at the other end of Somerset. The bus with Drysdale’s body inside was already gone. There was a perimeter of yellow tape at the entrance to The Archer. Chalk outlines were strictly for old movies now. I saw Belson standing where Drysdale must have been shot, out on the sidewalk.

  Another uniform tried to stop me, but when Belson saw me he called out.

  “Tragically,” he said, “she’s with me.”

  He took one more look around the immediate vicinity, but not the last he would take tonight, and nodded for me to follow him into the courtyard. I could have sworn he was wearing a new raincoat, to replace the one he’d been wearing the first time I met him. No tie tonight. Belson looked as if he’d last shaved a couple days ago, but he always looked like that, and was still carrying an unlit cigar. Even as we’d moved away from the street, his eyes were taking in everything around us at once. If I called him in the morning after he’d gotten a few hours’ sleep, he would be able to provide an astonishingly detailed description of the scene, down to what kind of sneakers I was wearing.

  As always, it was as if he had started the conversation between us a few minutes before I had arrived.

  “He gets dropped off at the front entrance,” Belson said. “His car pulls away. Doorman is behind his desk. But as soon as Drysdale is inside, doorman says he gets a call. Turns out the service isn’t great in the lobby. Drysdale says to whomever he’s talking to, ‘Wait, let me go outside.’ Doorman sees him walking toward the sidewalk, waving his free arm, looking agitated. Next thing the doorman hears is boom boom, sees a car heading toward Somerset, runs out. There’s our vic, flat on his back, bleeding out. Doorman calls nine-one-one. By the time the paramedics show up, guy’s dead as a doorstop.”

  “You have his phone?” I said.

  Belson shook his head. “Gone.”

  “Security camera?”

  “In here,” Belson said. “Not out where he got it. A woman at the other end of the block was walking her dog. Heard the shots, saw the car pull away. Says she thinks it was a Lexus. Could have been an Audi. Said the noise was very upsetting to Mrs. Miniver.”

  “Mrs. Miniver?”

  “Her Yorkie,” Belson said. “Lady said the car was pulling away a few seconds after she heard the shots.”

  “There goes the neighborhood,” I said.

  “You care to tell me what your card was doing in the front pocket of the guy’s sport jacket?” Belson said. “I didn’t even know you had cards.”

  “I even have my own office now like
a big girl,” I said, and then told him about what Drysdale had done to Spike, and what Spike had done to him, and how I’d gone to Drysdale’s office and left a card on his desk, and how he must have stuck it in his jacket and forgotten about it.

  “Kind of a bad guy, Frank,” I said.

  “Ran into a worse guy,” he said.

  He jerked his head back toward the street.

  “That’s Russian-style, getting it like that,” he said. “Not even a drive-by. They like to pull up, walk right up to you, look you in the eye, spit on you when it’s done.”

  Belson told me he’d talk to Spike tomorrow, it was too fucking late tonight to act like he was a person of interest, then turned and walked back toward the street, pulling out a notebook and a pen as if he were about to write me up. I watched him go, thinking, Russian-style.

  I knew a Russian.

  Boom.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Spike and I were having coffee at my office the next morning. He stopped at the downtown location of Kane’s on Oliver Street to get the donuts fresh out of their oven. He’d called to ask if I wanted gluten-free. I told him I’d lost some weight, not my mind. He’d gone to Kane’s after visiting with Frank Belson at One Schroeder Plaza.

  “You know I don’t scare easily,” Spike said. “But the idea of getting on the wrong side of Frank Belson scares the balls off me.”

  I smiled. “Same,” I said.

  “I didn’t tell him about the former Eddie Rostov,” Spike said.

  “Only because I told you not to.”

  “Only because you held that back,” Spike said.

  “Not ready to show all of my cards,” I said.

  “I see what you did there,” Spike said.

  He took a bite of his honey jelly, washed it down with some coffee, licked his fingers.

  “I can’t believe he’s dead,” Spike said.

  He’d spoken to Rita Fiore before she’d even gotten to Cone, Oakes, asking what Drysdale’s death might mean about the ownership of Spike’s, now and going forward. Rita said that she knew as much about contract law as she did celibacy, but did ask if Spike had signed the transfer papers. He said he had not, that he’d been putting it off until the last possible moment. Rita said it was a good thing, that it might take a while for accountants to go through Drysdale’s books, and that the ownership of Spike’s restaurant, no offense, might not be their principal focus in the short run. Spike asked what he should do. Rita told him to go over to the place in the late morning and open it the hell up for lunch.

  “Then what?” Spike asked her.

  “For the time being you go back to playing the part you were born to play,” Rita said. “Yourself.”

  Before she’d hung up, Spike told me, she’d asked once again if he was absolutely certain he was gay.

  “I’m not sad he’s dead,” Spike said.

  “I know.”

  “I tried to be after you called last night,” he said. “But I couldn’t.”

  “You don’t have to explain yourself to me,” I said. “I’m not your shrink.”

  “Bullshit you’re not.”

  “So now we ask ourselves who killed him, and why,” I said, “unless somebody just took it upon themselves to rid the world of one more hedge-funder.”

  “Russian-style,” Spike said.

  “But the Russian I met came to my office and told me to back off his friend Alex,” I said, “and with vigor.”

  “And you saw them leaving what you believe was a poker game with their friend Emily the night before somebody shot him,” Spike said.

  “Get out of here now,” I said. “You’ve got a restaurant to run.”

  “For the time being.”

  “Better than the alternative,” I said.

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Spike said.

  He nodded at my own half-eaten donut, a plain, and raised his eyebrows. I gladly slid it across the desk to him. Those five pounds weren’t coming back without a fight.

  Spike said, “Will Lee tell Belson about seeing Emily and Drysdale and Eddie Ross together?”

  “Only if asked,” I said. “He’s more worried about Emily than ever and would very much like me to locate her. I told him the best way for me to do that was to find Eddie Ross first. Find him, find Emily, maybe even find out who shot Alex Drysdale.”

  “And find out who beat the girl up,” Spike said.

  “Yup,” I said.

  “And I’m just guessing that you haven’t forgotten that picture somebody left of your dad,” Spike said.

  “I’ll forget when I’m the one who’s dead,” I said.

  He came around the desk, kissed the top of my head, and said, “And Russians think they’re badass.”

  I told him to stop before he embarrassed me.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I met Christopher Lawton for an early lunch at The Bell in Hand Tavern on Union Street, a short walk from where Alex Drysdale’s office had been at One Financial.

  The Bell in Hand advertised itself as the oldest tavern in America, and as the most famous alehouse in Boston. I had liked the place from the first time Richie had taken me there to meet his father, which is why I’d always taken it on faith that they were offering a legitimate version of their history.

  Lawton said he didn’t have a lot of time, he had to get back to The Carmody. I told him the Lobster BLT was great. We ordered two of those, and iced teas.

  “When did you hear about Alex?” I said when the waiter had walked off with the menus.

  “Saw,” he said. “Early this morning on Twitter.”

  “Ah,” I said, “the paper of record.”

  “Isn’t that The New York Times?” he asked.

  “Not anymore.”

  We had scored a table by one of the front windows. Lawton stared outside.

  “It sounded like an assassination,” he said.

  “Not sounds like,” I said. “Was an assassination.”

  “It’s not as if Alex was one of the most popular boys in class,” he said. “And I know better than anyone else the bullshit things he’s done to people, your friend being the most recent evidence of that. But what did he do to make somebody get out of a car and shoot him on the street?”

  The question hung in the air between us. I had no answer for him and so let it go.

  “I’m actually only here to talk about Alex tangentially,” I said.

  “‘Tangentially?’” he said. “Are you sure you’re a private detective?”

  “Me talk pretty,” I said.

  I sipped some strong iced tea, freshly brewed Bewley’s, over ice.

  “Eddie Ross,” I said when I put my glass down.

  “Eddie Ross,” Lawton said.

  “Or Rostov, as they called him back in the mother country.”

  We briefly hit the pause button as our food was delivered, Lawton looking down at his plate and saying, “Looks delicious.”

  “Eddie Ross,” I repeated.

  “What about him?”

  “He was at Stanford when you and Alex Drysdale were at Stanford,” I said. “I called to make sure. He graduated a year ahead of the two of you, and then, lo and behold and all this time later, he shows up at my office, slick as spit, and tells me to lay off Alex. Called himself a business associate and told me that when Alex was unhappy, so was he. Not terribly long after that, a photograph of my father with a red dot on his forehead is delivered to my doorstep.”

  I took the top piece of bread off my sandwich and picked off a chunk of lobster meat and ate it.

  “That Eddie Ross,” I said.

  “Don’t know what I can tell you,” Christopher Lawton said. “I haven’t thought about Eddie much lately.”

  “Think about him now,” I said. “I’m buying lunch.”

  “Alex was alwa
ys closer to him than I was,” Lawton said, “all the way back to college. I always just thought he was a shifty little mutt on the make.”

  Now we’re talking.

  “In addition to him coming to my office,” I said, “I saw Alex and your old classmate Eddie walking out of a brownstone on Comm Ave the other night, and intuited that they had just played poker together inside.”

  “‘Intuited,’” he said.

  I sighed.

  “Christopher,” I said, “we have now established that you think I am a silver-tongued devil.”

  Now he sighed.

  “I know his father ran a sports book back in Russia,” he said, “and was regarded as a very bad man.”

  “One who eventually got disappeared, as they say over there.”

  He pushed his plate to the side and leaned forward. The BLT was listed at “market price.” Shame, I thought, for it to go to waste. Maybe I could bring it back to the miniature fridge in my office.

  “He really was Alex’s friend, not mine,” Lawton said. “Alex started hanging with him in college because he thought Eddie was dangerous, because of his father. For the drama of it. Alex loved drama.”

  “When you and Alex were still together,” I said, “did some of Eddie’s daddy money find its way into your business?”

  “No,” he said, perhaps a bit too firmly. “Eddie was living in Los Angeles by then, trying to be the thing he’d always most wanted to be in the world: a celebrity. He was in the process of figuring out that you could achieve a level of celebrity in the modern world just by hanging around with some.”

  “And playing cards with them?”

  “Apparently so.”

  “So when might he have become an ‘associate’ of Alex’s?” I said, putting air quotes around associate.

  “Well, it had to be some time after Alex and I had dissolved our partnership,” Lawton said.

  “Could he be one of those who provided the mysterious infusion of capital to save Alex’s ass at that time?”

  He sipped some iced tea now, and winced. “This will put hair on your chest,” he said.

  “Hoping not,” I said.

  “Could Eddie have used some of his old man’s money and given Alex a boost?” Lawton said. “Perhaps. But I honestly don’t know. What I do know is that Alex was so desperate to stay out of bankruptcy he would have taken money from the Taliban at that point.”