Payback

by Mike Lupica

  “I don’t just need to know who killed Drysdale,” he said. “I need to know why. Working back from that and not him taking Spike’s place and you getting involved.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “even though that might have gotten him killed.”

  “You don’t know that,” Jesse said.

  “Well,” I said, “it’s not as if I did much to keep him alive.”

  “Love or money,” he said. “Comes back to one or the other most of the time.”

  “How about love of money?” I said.

  “You said that this guy Drysdale had a lot of money, lost a lot, made it back,” he said. “And that the guy who might have helped him get it back is Eddie Ross.”

  “Who’s Russian,” I said, “and who sent Russians after me tonight.”

  Jesse said, “You think that Russians might have been running Drysdale?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, “I do.”

  “And you said you talked to Drysdale’s old partner,” Jesse said.

  “Lawton, his name is. Not a big fan of our Alex.”

  “You believe him?” Jesse said.

  “I believe he liked what he’d become as much as he liked Alex Drysdale,” he said. “He sounded like a drunk who’s gotten sober, no offense.”

  “None taken.”

  “Drysdale, Lawton, Eddie Ross,” I said. “They went to college together, and all this time, some form or fashion, end up together in Boston.”

  “You know what I think about coincidence.”

  I smiled. “People in outer space know by now.”

  “So who was really in charge?”

  “Be nice to know,” I said.

  Rosie stirred, stretched, poked her nose up over the coffee table in her endless quest for treats. Jesse got up and went into the kitchen and came back with a Ritz cracker that he fed her after breaking it in two.

  “If you have to pay her to get her to love you,” I said, “doesn’t that cheapen your relationship?”

  “Damn right,” he said.

  He sat back down and pushed my glass and his mug aside, picked up the small pile of magazines and placed it on the floor. I knew what he was doing, I’d seen him do it before. It was as if the top of the coffee table had become a blank canvas.

  “Trying to see all the pieces,” he said.

  I told him I knew that already.

  “Spike and Drysdale and Ross and the goon squad he sent tonight,” he said. “And the Russian dude who owns the gym, at least for the time being. And Lee’s niece.” He was still staring at the table.

  “I know I’m leaving people out.”

  “Lawton,” I said. “Old partner. And the kid Matt Dunn, the dealer.”

  “Right,” he said. “Tea must have gone to my head.”

  He leaned back now.

  “Time to go talk to Eddie Ross,” Jesse said.

  “Maybe,” I said, “Drysdale did something to get sideways with him. Or with his master.”

  “Maybe get him talking about these poker games,” Jesse said. “The only thing that connects Drysdale and Ross to the girl.”

  “You’re reading my mind,” I said.

  Now he smiled, fully. “Hope so,” he said.

  Then he said, “Listen, I’d take a few days off and watch you myself, but I have to go to L.A. tomorrow afternoon. An old teammate of mine, in Albuquerque, died. If Vinnie can’t cover you, I know some people who can.”

  “I’ve got Spike,” I said.

  “How come you called me tonight and not him?”

  I stood and, with just a bit of a hip swing, headed for the stairs.

  “Can’t go to the mattresses with him,” I said.

  “No, you certainly cannot.”

  Over my shoulder I said, “Two birds, one Jesse Stone.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  Jesse left a little after seven. His flight to Los Angeles was departing at noon and he needed to get back to Paradise and pack. He told me again that if I needed anything while he was away that I was to call Molly Crane.

  “She owes you one,” he said.

  “No,” I told him, “she does not.”

  After he left I went for a run along the Charles, free and easy, no longer being chased by men with guns. Or maybe they hadn’t chased me once I was out of the car. But I hadn’t been willing to take any chances, and had been prepared to run all the way to Wellesley if necessary. Jesse liked to quote some old ballplayer who’d said one time not to look back, because somebody might be gaining on you.

  He quoted a lot of old ballplayers. I’d just grown more accepting of it over time.

  I showered and dressed and sat at the kitchen table and read the Globe and decided that before I went looking for Eddie Ross again I wanted to have another conversation with Matt Dunn. It bothered me, and more than somewhat, that he couldn’t locate Emily Barnes.

  He’d told me that he’d call if he learned anything. Didn’t mean that he would. Didn’t mean he’d been telling me the whole truth, and nothing but, about her and Eddie and poker and cheating and the whole damn thing. Nobody ever told the whole truth, or all that they knew. Before he’d left, I hadn’t even gotten to ask him about Alex Drysdale, to whom Dunn had been dealing cards, honestly or dishonestly, before somebody had walked up and shot Drysdale dead on the street where he lived.

  It wasn’t so terribly long before I had continued to be enough of a nuisance that I had been threatened again, this time in spades.

  Good one, Sunny, I thought. In spades. Look at you.

  A friend of mine from Boston College had lived in an apartment on Foster Street in Brighton her sophomore year. The street, feeding off Commonwealth, was more gentrified than I remembered it, mostly old two-story houses, some of them brick, some with big lawns in front, stretching all the way down past St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center. Matt Dunn’s was smaller and more run-down than the ones on either side of his. For a full-time dealer and at least part-time cheat, it wasn’t as if the kid was living on the margins.

  There was no sign of the red Mazda parked on the street in either direction. There was no bell for me to ring. The mailbox next to the front door was empty.

  I knocked, and waited, and heard no voice or stirring from inside. I knocked again, much more emphatically this time. If Dunn was inside, and unless he was in the shower, he had to have heard. If not, I had wasted a trip down here. Maybe the early cheat caught the worm. I was considering another round of lock-picking, despite the foot traffic on the sidewalk heading in both directions, when I decided to try the knob first.

  The door was unlocked.

  I knocked one last time before opening it and stepping inside, taking my gun out of my bag as I did. No idea that it was needed. Perhaps force of habit. Perhaps the Russians had made me do it. Or just a feeling. I’d had them plenty of times before and been wrong.

  Just not always.

  Dunn could have just forgotten to lock the door on his way out. One way looking at things. The other was that he’d been at the table with Alex Drysdale and Emily the other night and now Drysdale was dead and Emily was missing.

  And I had been taken for a ride the previous night by men with less-than-honorable intentions.

  Only a fool, I told myself, would be less than vigilant.

  “Matt, it’s Sunny Randall,” I called out. “You here?”

  My voice sounded as loud as a bullhorn.

  The only thing I heard in response was the hiss of an old-fashioned radiator in the front room, speaking to the age of the house. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen one like it.

  The small living room, furniture looking older than the radiator, was to my left. The same Taft hoodie he’d been wearing in my office was draped over one of the chairs. An acoustic guitar was on the couch. There was an ashtray on the coffee table, a half-smoked joint i
n it. Those were the days, my friend.

  The kitchen was beyond the living room. There was a Mr. Coffee machine, half-full. I touched the pot. It was still warm, the brewing light still lit. There was a piece of toast, uneaten, on a plate next to it. An empty mug next to the plate.

  If he’d left, he’d left recently, and in a hurry.

  No sound of a shower running from upstairs.

  I could hear my own breathing now.

  Something wrong here, I told myself. Something wicked this way comes. Who’d written that? Wait. I knew that one. Ray Bradbury. Jesse was right. The things you remembered when you least expected to.

  I started up the narrow stairway almost directly across from the front door, startled by the loud creak of the first step, and then the second.

  I could see the open door to the bathroom at the top. What looked like bedroom doors to my left and to my right. I gently pushed open the one to my right. There was an open canvas overnight bag on a twin bed, made. I looked inside. A couple women’s T-shirts, a pair of jeans, a few bras and panties. I held up the jeans. Long enough to fit Emily. Didn’t mean they were hers. This wasn’t sleepaway camp. She hadn’t written her name into her undies. Or, now that she was gone, maybe Dunn had already found a replacement.

  The other door had to be the master bedroom, if there were such a thing in the small house. The door was ajar. I pushed it open and there was Matt Dunn, on his back on the floor next to the queen-sized bed, eyes wide open, the front of his gray T-shirt covered in blood, another gunshot wound in the center of his forehead, the blood spreading in both directions from behind his head.

  There was a queen of clubs stuck in his mouth.

  I put away my gun and took out my phone and called 911 right before I called Frank Belson.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  The crime scene people, who always looked to me like a small invading army, were gone. So was the body of Matt Dunn.

  It had taken the first car right around eight minutes to get to the address I gave them on Foster Street. Belson had been there in twenty. By now his people were canvassing the neighborhood. The elderly couple who lived next door were still standing on their porch. They looked to be in their eighties. Frank Belson had walked over and talked to them when they’d first come outside. When Belson was done chatting with them, he told me they hadn’t heard anything resembling gunshots.

  “How would you rate their hearing?” I said.

  “Not sure they would have heard a small plane hit the guy’s house,” he said.

  He took out one of his cigars and actually lit it this time.

  “Well,” he said, “you are on some fucking roll, aren’t you?”

  I looked behind me, and did my bad De Niro.

  “You talkin’ to me?” I said.

  He blew some smoke in my general direction.

  “A noted wit,” he said, “day and night.”

  By now I had taken him through it, step by step, from the moment I’d found the door unlocked until I found the body. I told him about first seeing Matt Dunn with Emily outside Lee’s place. I told him about their relationship and how they appeared to have occasionally been working as a team to cheat people at poker and how Dunn had come to my office when he was concerned that Emily had disappeared.

  I didn’t tell him Emily and Alex Drysdale had been in the same game at Eddie Ross’s place, at least for now.

  “Maybe he cheated the wrong guy,” Belson said.

  “Or they did,” I said. “It had happened before.”

  “Tell me,” he said, and I did.

  Belson walked over and sat on the bottom of the three steps leading up to Matt Dunn’s front door. He held up the cigar.

  “Don’t tell Lisa,” he said.

  His wife.

  “Not unless I absolutely have to,” I said, and sat next to him, despite the smoke.

  “Tell me again why you were here,” he said.

  “I thought he might know more about Emily and her possible whereabouts than he’d let on,” I said.

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it,” I said.

  He took the cigar out of his mouth and stared impassively at me. I knew the look. I had seen it before and felt it before. It made me feel as if he could see secrets stretching all the way to the backseat of Brian Foley’s Firebird when we were in high school.

  “I told Lee I’d find out who beat up his niece,” I said. “I can’t do that if I can’t find her.”

  “People generally disappear, or try to, when they’re afraid of something,” Belson said.

  “Or somebody.”

  I knew I should be telling Belson that there was a connection between Dunn and Alex Drysdale, if a tenuous one. I was certain of how he’d react when he found out. But to give that up meant giving him Eddie Ross, and Eddie was mine, at least when I finally caught up with him.

  I felt Belson staring at me again.

  “No phone on the dead guy here,” he said. “No phone on the other dead guy.”

  “The shooters appear to be very thorough,” I said.

  “Interesting, though,” Belson said, “that the only person who’d been in contact with both of my vics is you.”

  “What are the odds?” I said.

  I told myself that I would tell him about Eddie Ross eventually. Just not yet. And not until I had to. It made this just one more time when I did so many contortions involving right and wrong that I was surprised I didn’t pull a muscle.

  Belson got up and nimbly stepped between the yellow crime scene tape across the door and went back inside. When he came back outside, I told him that I had an appointment downtown.

  “Try your best not to get whoever it is killed,” Belson said.

  He told me he’d be in touch. I smiled my most winning smile and told him I’d be counting the minutes. Then I pointed at him and said that cigars could kill you, too.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Jalen Washington called right after I’d walked into my office.

  He said, “Checking in.”

  I asked if he had anything to report. He said that he was starting to think any financial link between Eddie Ross and Alex Drysdale might turn out to be a dead end.

  “But I’m still gonna do a deeper dive,” he said.

  I giggled.

  “Something funny?”

  “I always get a kick out of somebody talking about deep dives,” I said. “Not quite sure why.”

  “Good for a brother to know,” he said.

  “Could there be a money trail from Eddie to Drysdale that’s just well hidden?” I said.

  “All right to that,” he said. “Hedge-fund returns supposed to be private, way it’s supposed to work. Now, there’s some services try to report performance numbers. But if Drysdale was lying his ass off about his returns and how he was getting them, it’s like I say, a dead end. But I’m trying to ask around with people who know investors who might know who his were, you follow. But most of those investors are about as likely to tell the damn truth as whores.”

  “You mind staying on it?” I said.

  Now he laughed out loud.

  “I’ll get off this shit when the Burkes tell me to get off it,” he said. “But it might end up like trying to find a damn buried treasure, with your LLCs over there and your offshore accounts over here, and that’s before you maybe bring your Swiss banks into it. Then, if they is money laundering, that’s a whole ’nother rabbit hole. I hear some of these people doing the laundering got money stashed in lockers at airports all over the world.”

  “Maybe if I want to start putting money away for a rainy day,” I said, “I should think about Logan Airport.”

  “We done?” he said.

  “One more question,” I said. “Could there be big enough poker games that Eddie could have funneled money to Drysdale tha
t way?”

  “Hell, yeah,” he said. “That’s where I’d be looking, I was you. You ever watch The Wire?”

  “Picked it up late,” I said. “Never went all the way back to the beginning.”

  “Well,” he said, “I like to have that shit memorized.”

  Jalen was more street today. I wondered if it was conscious with him or not.

  “Season four,” he continued, “they was this one guy running for mayor, and he was inviting some of his big-ticket donors to play poker with him. Talking about dudes maxed themselves out on legal donations. Then they’d pretend to lose to the guy running for mayor, and then he’d be the one, guy running, putting the money back into his campaign. So if you’re asking me if Eddie could do something like that, I’m telling you he could. But I just don’t see if there’d be enough money in those games to make it worth his while.”

  “Maybe I need to find out just who the players are in these games,” I said.

  “Could look into that for you,” Jalen said. There was a pause and he said, “You talk to Eddie yet?”

  “On my way over to the brownstone right now, as a matter of fact,” I said before we ended the call.

  Spike was at the brownstone already, watching it from across the street in his car. If it turned out Harvard and his friends were inside when I went calling, I wanted Spike with me this time.

  I called Spike and told him I was about to walk over.

  “Nobody in or out?” I said.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Don’t ‘ma’am’ me,” I said.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I forget how sensitive women of a certain age get about their age.”

  “Blow it out your ear,” I said.

  “See there,” he said.

  I was making the turn onto Commonwealth from Arlington when Spike called me back.

  “Somebody just came out,” he said.

  “Eddie?”

  “Woman,” he said. “Young. Tall. A knockout.”