by Mike Lupica
“Working tonight.”
“For you?”
“Who better?”
Then he said, “Seven o’clock.”
“I’ll count the minutes.”
I heard him snort.
“Yaytsa,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“Russian for ‘balls,’” he said.
There was no need to tell him that was a recurring theme of my life, so I simply ended the call. Then I called Spike and told him where we were going and who we were meeting and made him promise not to turn the former Eddie Rostov into a piñata when we got there.
I made one more call after that, since Vinnie Morris was still out of town.
Jesse Stone was the one who liked to brag that he’d been a Boy Scout.
Didn’t mean a girl couldn’t be prepared, too.
FORTY-SIX
We met near the sandbox, surrounded by a low concrete wall, at the children’s playground. Even at seven you could see night coming fast.
Spike wore an L.L.Bean sweater with a Henley collar I had given him. It had been form-fitting once. Now it just reminded me of how much weight he’d lost since the start of COVID, and was baggy enough on him now to hide the Glock 26 in his belt holster.
“Promise me again that you’re going to be nice,” I said as he walked toward the playground from 1st Avenue.
“I promise.”
“This is a fact-finding mission, if Eddie is capable of giving us actual facts,” I said. “Maybe even an Emily-finding mission.”
“Are you still worrying about that ungrateful bitch?” Spike said.
“Is that being nice?” I said.
Ross was sitting on the concrete wall, alone. But just because I hadn’t seen any backup as Spike and I closed in on him didn’t mean there wasn’t any.
“You didn’t need to bring him,” Ross said, and stood up. Looking as he had in my office. Skinny black suit, red pocket square this time. White shirt. He hadn’t appeared to be much of a threat that day, as tough as he’d talked to me. By now, the threat level had increased exponentially.
“I come in peace,” Ross said.
He put out his hand to Spike. Spike ignored it.
Spike said. “You and the KGB.”
“There isn’t a KGB any longer,” Eddie Ross said.
“Yeah,” Spike said. “Go with that.”
“You need to know I didn’t try to burn down your restaurant,” Eddie said.
“And you need to know that if you annoy me I am going to stick your head in this sand,” Spike said.
I smiled at Ross. “My friend’s having a bad month,” I said. “It’s better that you don’t annoy either one of us.”
He sat back down. I sat, too, but as if social distancing were still in place.
“So talk,” I said.
“Where would you prefer I start?” he said.
“Your partnership with Alex Drysdale,” I said. “Whatever brought us here started there.”
“It was a partnership,” he said. “Just not the way you might think. I had the poker, something he had a big jones for all the way back to college. He had the hedge fund. And they were connected. But, like I said, not the way you think.”
“Eddie?” I said. “You are going to annoy me if you don’t stop telling me what you think I think.”
Spike was slowly circling the sandbox, and was behind Ross now.
Ross said to me, “He’s not really going to try anything, right?”
“The night is young,” I said. “And so you know? He’d be doing more than trying.”
I made a motion with my hand, as if telling him to carry on.
“I was his recruiter,” he said. “The kind that maybe you don’t find at the Boston Preservation Alliance.”
“Bad guys with money,” I said.
“So much money,” he said. “And a lot of them liked playing poker as much as Alex did.”
“You’re telling me that you were the roper?” I said.
“You know what a roper is.” He smiled. “Look at you.”
“And Matt Dunn and Emily Barnes helped you when you wanted to turn the games into a grift,” I said.
“We had a system,” Ross said. “We decided who needed to win on a given night. Usually, the way we worked it, Alex would win big the first night. Then he would lose even bigger the next time we brought one of the whales back. And you want to know something? Sometimes we had to sit on him when he needed to lose.”
“Even knowing it would benefit him in the long run,” I said.
“All the way back to college,” Eddie Ross said, “he just fucking needed to win.”
“And Emily let you use her that way?” I said.
“She didn’t look at it that way,” he said. “And she wasn’t sleeping with the whales. Or Alex, as hard as he kept trying. She thought she was using us. In her mind, she was really only whoring herself out to poker. She really is a hell of a player, in a legit game. I’m not bullshitting her when I tell her she could make it in Vegas. I’ve been looking at players half my life.”
“So who killed Drysdale?” I said.
He took out a pack of cigarettes from inside his jacket pocket and lit one, blew out some smoke, almost exasperated.
“Alex turned into a pig,” he said. “The money wasn’t disappearing in the fund. Wasn’t like that. But it was going down, so he was grabbing for every buck. So he took that guy’s gym. He took the restaurant. Just to feel like a winner. But the bottom line is when he tried to fuck over your friend, he brought you into his business. And mine.”
“Little old me,” I said.
“It didn’t take much investigating by me to find out you were a professional pain in the ass,” Ross said. “I had a deal with him, after all the recruiting I did. I got paid when he cashed out. Not enough to live off the rest of my life. But more of a pot than I’d ever had.”
He put his head back, closed his eyes.
“But then you weren’t just up into his shit, like you promised. You were into mine, too.”
Almost like he was talking to himself.
“Who killed him, Eddie?” I said.
“He’d started to organize his own games, with Matt as his dealer,” Ross said. “Strayed outside the parish, so to speak. And I believe he cleaned out the wrong guy one night.”
“Who?”
“An old friend of my father’s,” Ross said. “Ivan Kuznetzov. Owned art galleries in Ukraine, but they were just a front for money laundering. He was in town talking to people about opening a ‘gallery’ here.”
He put quote marks around gallery.
“He called when he got to Boston and asked if I could find him a game,” Ross said. “I told him there was always a game. This one was legit. But one of the guys at the table knew Alex and hooked Ivan up with him. Matt was the dealer. Ivan ended up losing big. The number I heard was half a million. He was sure he’d gotten cheated, even if he couldn’t prove it. But Ivan was never the kind who required much proof.”
He shrugged.
“By the next week, Alex and Matt Dunn are dead,” he said.
He blew some smoke into the air.
“Where’s Kuznetzov now?” I said.
“He could be anywhere,” Eddie Ross said.
“But you believe he had it done?”
“If he thought somebody cheated him?” he said. “He might have done them himself. But more likely, he’d use his own shooter, if the guy’s still with him. My father used to talk about him. The shooter. Boyko. You don’t forget a name like that, right? My father said he was seven feet tall if he was an inch.”
I stared out at the water, wondering how much of this, or if any of it, might be true. It all sounded quite plausible. Hustlers like Eddie Ross had a way of doing that when they were trying t
o sell you something. Or get you off their backs.
I knew this: I wouldn’t automatically believe him if he told me the water at which I was staring was wet.
“You talked about getting paid,” I said. “Where’s Alex’s money going now?”
“No one knows,” he said.
“Why should I believe you?” I said.
“You made enough trouble for me already,” he said. “I’m trying to do you a solid here so you don’t make more.”
“Where’s the girl?” I said.
“You don’t give up.”
“Hardly ever.”
“She’s crashing at one of my places,” he said.
“There are more than one?”
He tossed the cigarette butt to the ground and stepped on it.
“Moving target,” he said.
“I need an address,” I said.
“What’s in it for me?” Ross said.
Spike stepped forward then, so quickly it startled me as much as it did Ross, and grabbed him by his skinny lapels and lifted him up into the air as if lifting a child. When he had him high enough, he put his face close to Eddie’s and spoke quietly to him.
“Were you under the impression that I was joking when I talked about burying your head in the sand?” Spike said.
In that moment the guy with the Harvard cap was walking across the playground, gun pointed at Spike, saying, “Put him down.”
Eddie smiled, but only briefly. “That’s Vadim,” he said.
“As you know,” I said, “we’ve met.”
“Put him down,” Vadim said again. “Now.”
“You put that down.” Phil Randall said from behind him. “Or I will shoot you dead.”
My backup plan, just in case I needed one.
Without looking at me, my father said, “Thanks for calling.”
“Thanks for coming,” I said to him.
The situation resolved itself in a rather straightforward fashion after that.
FORTY-SEVEN
The address Eddie had given me for Emily Barnes turned out to be at the Washington Square Apartments on Comm Ave in Brighton. Spike had driven us to the shipyard in his car. I asked if he minded swinging by her apartment before we called it a night.
“Why wouldn’t we want to seek out a young woman who has no use for you and doesn’t want you coming to her rescue and whose last known job wasn’t college student, but rather allowing herself to be poker-pimped by a lowlife like Eddie Ross?” Spike said.
“Well,” I said, “when you put it like that.”
“She is Lee’s problem, not yours,” he said.
“I’m thinking that if we can get her to open up,” I said, “maybe we can find out if this Kuznetzov dude really does figure into all this.”
“Great!” Spike said. “And then maybe we can get ourselves into more trouble with the Russian Mob than we already are! What could possibly go wrong with a plan like that, Nancy Drew?”
“I knew you’d come around,” I said.
Spike found a parking spot in front of the building. He called it his parking karma. I told him there was no such thing. He asked me how many times I’d ever had to walk more than half a block when he was behind the wheel. I had no answer for that.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
She didn’t answer the bell. There were no lights on inside. I banged on the door. Still no answer. It was nine o’clock by now. Maybe Ross had been telling the truth and Emily was at a game. Maybe he’d sent us here just to mess with us, knowing she wasn’t home. Or maybe she didn’t even live here at all.
“You could break in,” Spike said. “Everybody knows what a passion of yours that is.”
“Been there,” I said, “done that. I break into her residence twice and I move up into the stalker category.”
We were back in the car by now.
“Gotta ask you something,” Spike said.
“I know what you’re going to ask me,” I said. “Why are we really here?”
“It’s practically existential,” Spike said.
“Bottom line?” I said. “I want to know who killed those people.”
“Neither of whom you knew was on the planet before last week,” he said.
“And if I can find out who killed them, we can find out who blew up your restaurant.”
“My money’s still on the little weasel we just left,” Spike said. “I think he told us that tale just to deflect your attention.”
“The thought did occur.”
“He cops to some of it so you don’t think he’s responsible for all of it,” he said.
“And the bad Russian boss turns out to be him.”
“The thought did occur,” Spike said and grinned. “And just because he says he didn’t have his fingers in the hedge-fund pie doesn’t mean he didn’t.”
I put my head back and closed my eyes as he started the car.
“Nancy Drew would probably have figured it all out by now,” I said.
Normally we would have stopped first at Spike’s for a drink. Or two. But Spike’s was still being rebuilt, even as he was preparing to open back up for business before the job was finished. So we stopped at the bar at The Newbury. He had a martini. I had half of one. When he finally took me home I opened my laptop and tried to learn more about Ivan Kuznetzov, born in Kiev but raised in Moscow. The biggest stories about him were out of the past, the biggest being the one from fifteen years ago that Ross had referenced, when he was one of the people accused of providing backing for what was described as a “massive gambling operation” that stretched from the back of his gallery in Moscow to similar galleries in Spain and London and New York. There were a dozen men charged. Seven ended up doing time in this country. Ivan Kuznetzov wasn’t one of them. For all intents and purposes, despite the flurry of news stories and headlines after that bust, Kuznetzov had gone off the grid.
Until he had shown up in Boston looking for a poker game, at least according to Eddie Ross. And had not only found one, but had apparently been cheated out of a shitload of money at one where Alex Drysdale was a player and Matt Dunn was dealer.
Both now deceased.
When I finished my research, such as it was, I was suddenly in need of an Upper Crust Pizzeria fix. And needed some air. Upper Crust stayed open until eleven. It was still only ten-thirty. I called in an order for a medium mushroom-and-green-pepper pie, small Caesar salad with extra anchovies.
“We could deliver if you want, Miss Randall,” Brian, the kid who answered, told me.
“Walk’ll do me good,” I said.
For some reason, just the simple act of grabbing a pizza felt like a brief return to some sort of normalcy, something that would take me out of what was starting to feel like a bad Russian novel. I explained to Rosie that I was going it alone, but then told her my destination. She loved the crust from Upper Crust. I inferred that she wanted me to get back as quickly as possible.
I stuck my backup .38 into the back pocket of my jeans. The gun was like my security blanket, even though I knew it wouldn’t do me a lot of good if my intended target was outside of spitting distance.
As I walked up toward Charles Street, I thought about how few times in my life I had discharged any of my weapons outside a shooting range. But I practiced a lot, with all of my guns. I knew what a good shot Phil Randall was, and how he’d saved my life by putting down the Spare Change Killer, Bob Johnson, before Johnson could shoot me. My father hadn’t hesitated. He knew what kind of shot he was. And knew he wouldn’t miss.
Now somebody had put down two men involved in my case.
But was it my case?
How much skin did I have in this game, really?
I knew I’d left too soon. My pizza wasn’t ready when I got there. I went outside and checked my phone. No messages, which meant no new
calamities involving dead bodies or firebombings or college girls on the make.
Maybe this really was a time to just turn the whole thing over to God and let Her figure it out.
The Beacon Hill Hotel, right across the street, had closed down during COVID. Now they were giving the old girl a makeover. I loved the food there. I loved the rooftop terrace. Another place in Melanie Joan’s neighborhood that felt like one of mine.
I walked across Charles Street to maybe peek through a window and survey the progress. They had vaguely said something about opening in the fall. The main entrance was on Charles. Branch Street ran alongside, another narrow cobblestone street that wasn’t much wider than a driveway. Beacon Hill, to the max.
I was leaning under some scaffolding and looking in a side window when the car pulled up at the end of Branch.
A man got out.
He either had a long revolver in his hand or was just glad to see me.
Even in the dim light, he looked very tall.
FORTY-EIGHT
Nothing good for me on a side street empty except for him and me. I turned and started to run back toward Charles, where there was light, and traffic, and people.
Another man was walking toward me from that direction.
The basketball player who’d gotten out of the car was closer.
As casually as I could, considering my current circumstances, I reached back and felt my hand on the .38 and pulled it out of my pocket.
The tall guy was getting closer. Unless I missed my guess, and I knew my guns because of my father, it was a Colt in his hand, likely single-action. And a lot bigger than mine.
I’d never shot at anybody with the .38, though I’d put it on people a few times.
They’re no longer just trying to scare me.
It was quiet on Branch Street. When the hotel was still open, when the place wasn’t a construction site, there was plenty of foot traffic out here, even at night. Not this night. If these were Kuznetzov’s men, it somehow meant he knew I had talked to Eddie. Or Eddie had told him.
Maybe there was some kind of convention for Russian baddies this week.
Both of them kept closing in on me, both about fifty yards away.
