by Mike Lupica
“Has something happened to him?” I said.
“Not him,” Richie Burke said. “Jalen.”
FIFTY-TWO
Two of Desmond’s troopers, neither of whom I recognized, were stationed at his front door. I knew there was at least one other between the back of the house at Flagship Wharf in Charlestown and the water. The property was on the old Navy Yard. From the top floor of the place you could see both the Bunker Hill Monument and the USS Constitution.
Desmond was in the living room, wearing an old-fashioned wool cardigan. I could have sworn that he was wearing the same sweater the first time I ever met him. The sweater was gray. So were his pants. So, I often thought, was he.
Jalen Washington was sitting up on Desmond’s couch, his left arm in a sling, a bandage wrapped around his upper arm. Richie had pulled up a chair next to him.
“What happened?” I said.
“Got myself shot, is what happened,” he said. “Done a lot of things in my life. Had a lot of things happen. Never took a bullet.”
“Coming after one of my people is like them coming after me,” Desmond Burke said, looking at me. “What is this shite you’re into, for fook’s sake.”
The Irish in his conversation, I knew by now, came and went, as if the language he were speaking was Desmond Burke.
“It’s complicated,” I said to Desmond.
“What isn’t with you?” he said.
I turned to Jalen.
“What happened?” I said.
He had, he said, been visiting his lady friend over in Blue Hill.
“There’s more than one,” he said. “But Kerry is my main situation.”
He had decided not to stay the night, but said they’d had some wine and what he described as “whatnot,” which he knew was going to happen before he got there, so he’d taken an Uber over to her house, a couple miles from his own.
“But I had myself a nice buzz going,” he said, “and it was a nice night, so I decided to walk a little bit, see if I had it in me to make it all the way home. Maybe even have myself a nightcap at Reggie’s. You know Reggie’s?”
“I do,” Richie said.
“Anyway,” he said, “I headed up toward Franklin Park.”
He shifted slightly on the couch and grimaced. There was what looked like whiskey on the coffee table in front of him. He started to reach down for it. Richie picked it up instead and handed it to him and Jalen drank and handed the glass back to him.
“Then this car, coming the other way, stops about fifty yards up,” he said. “Maybe a little more. Big guy gets out the passenger side and I see his hand come up, but just as he does, I hear somebody yell, ‘Gun!’” He shook his head, and smiled. “Probably some kid doing the same kind of lookout business I used to do over there. Probably saved my life, ’cause I make a move toward the park as he shoots, so he only gets me where he got me.”
“But didn’t put you down,” I said.
He shook his head.
“Hurt like a mother, though,” he said. “You ever been shot?”
“I have,” Richie said quietly. “Guy back-shot me one time.”
“Dude fires off another one,” he said, “but I’m running now into the park, and then I hear people yelling from in there. I’m still running when I hear a siren. When I got to the other side of the park, I got my sweater off and took off my T-shirt and wrapped it ’round my arm and called Richie and he came got me, and brought me here.”
Richie said, “Desmond called a doctor he has on call.”
“One who wouldn’t report treating a gunshot victim,” I said.
“Not bloody likely,” Desmond Burke said.
“How big was the shooter?” I said.
“What bloody difference does that make?” Desmond said.
“Might be important,” I said to him.
“Big enough to be a big man for my Celtics,” Jalen said.
“Somebody like that tried to shoot me last night,” I said. “Couple blocks from my house.”
Richie’s head whipped around.
I said, “Tell you about it later.”
I pointed at Jalen’s drink and said to Desmond, “Could I get a taste of that?”
Desmond walked over to the wet bar near the door to the kitchen. I saw him reach for the bottle of Midleton Very Rare. He poured some and came back and wordlessly handed me the glass.
I drank. It was, as always, quite fine.
“Who have you been talking to about Drysdale since we last spoke?” I said. “Could there have been a precipitating event for things to escalate like this, for both of us?”
“Was getting to that,” he said. “I’d been over to Drysdale’s office this afternoon. Just see who was around. See if I could get somebody talking, just on account of how I’m good at getting people talking.”
“Who was there?” I said.
“Practically nobody,” he said. “Hot shit of a woman still sitting outside Drysdale’s office. Some mouth on her.”
“Gina,” I said.
“Other than her, it was just a couple traders,” he said. “Both of them looking like they were clearing out their desks, boxing up their stuff. I asked one of them what was shaking and he said, ‘Circus is about to leave town.’ Then I asked the guy, coming out of the men’s, if I could ask him a few questions about the fund and he said he couldn’t talk.”
“NDA,” I said.
“There you go,” Jalen Washington said.
He gently rubbed his shoulder, wincing as he did. “Maybe somebody made a call after I left,” he said.
“Apparently so,” I said.
“So you’ve now dragged us into some shite with Russians, is that it?” Desmond said to me.
“Apparently so,” I said again.
I knew I could explain it all to him, and it might even make some sense to him. But I knew he didn’t care whether I made sense of it or not. And I was tired of explaining how we’d all gotten here.
Wherever that was.
“I’ve always got wars being fought on various fronts,” Desmond Burke said. “I don’t need another one, Sunny, not with Russians.”
“Trust me on this, Desmond. Neither do I.”
“I was glad to help Sunny out, Mr. Burke,” Jalen said.
“I asked him to help,” Richie said.
“It was supposed to be about somebody’s fooking money!” Desmond said now. “And now these men send pictures of my grandson and shoot at you and shoot at Jalen and I want it to fooking end.”
“Jalen,” I said, “I am so sorry.”
“Cost a doin’ business,” he said, forcing a smile. “I just wish I knew what the damn business really was.”
Now he reached over and picked up his own glass and finished his Midleton and slowly got to his feet.
“I need little more of Kerry’s weed,” he said.
Richie said he’d drive him home, and asked me if I wanted one of Desmond’s men to follow me home.
“I got this,” I said.
“Obviously,” Richie said, “you don’t. You need someone watching your ass.”
“Like you always did,” I said.
“This isn’t funny,” Desmond snapped. “None of it.”
I walked with him and Jalen out to Richie’s car. When Jalen was inside and had fastened his seat belt with his right hand, he said, “We’re out now, right?”
“So out,” I said. “This ends here, and now.”
Richie looked over at me across the roof and said, “You mean that?”
“I do,” I said. “I can’t have the next person the big Russian doesn’t miss be someone I care about.”
“Good,” he said.
He drove off. I saw the black Audi pull out behind him and watched until the taillights of both cars disappeared toward Bunker Hill. I took it as a ma
tter of faith that Richie knew I had been lying when I’d said I was out.
Having known me as long as he had, it was frankly on him if he didn’t know.
FIFTY-THREE
I sat with Spike and Gled at a Russian bar in Cambridge actually known as The People’s Republik. It was hard to miss, with the mural of a nondistinct Communist man out front, the guy wearing one of those classic green caps with a red star squarely in the middle. I’d always assumed that the Guinness sign over the front door was just their way of being more free-market capitalists.
I hadn’t been inside for years, but once we were, I saw that the place hadn’t lost its sense of irony about the Red Menace. There were red walls and a black-and-white portrait of Lenin and an army boot above the bar and a drink on the menu called the Bloody Trotsky. Spike was the one who had first brought me here. At the time he said the place was cheeky, in a Commie sort of a way. He loved the fact that the house specialty, at least food-wise, was a Philly cheesesteak.
I said to Gled, “I don’t see anybody in here who looks like the guy Harrison Ford threw off the plane in Air Force One.”
Gled nodded. “Gary Oldman. Playing Ivan Korshunov.” He grinned. “Get off my plane,” he growled.
I turned to Spike. “Gled likes his movies.”
“The truth about this place is that the crowd is mostly grad students who get the joke,” Spike said.
“I haven’t spotted you or any of your guys following me,” I said to Gled.
“And you are sounding so much surprised about this, huh?” he said.
“I’m usually good at spotting tails,” I said, “whether they’re on my side or not.”
“We are better at not being spotted,” Gled said.
Our drinks had arrived. We were all having Beluga Noble. It was forty dollars a glass. I told him he was well worth it. He said it was difficult for him to disagree. He’d called and said he wanted to talk about Kuznetzov, and had picked this place for the fun of it.
“Is Kuznetzov still in town?” I said.
He gave a quick shake of his head.
“Not only are my sources telling me he is not in town,” Gled said, “they are telling me that they do not know that he ever was.”
“So Eddie was lying?” I said.
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Gled said. “I just cannot nail it down that he is telling the truth.”
He threw down what was left in his glass and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and motioned for the bartender to bring him another.
“You good?” he said to Spike and me, nodding at our glasses.
“I’m trying to get out of here without having to take out one of those reverse mortgages,” I said.
“So you’re saying that the guy we thought sent a shooter after Sunny and one of her friends isn’t the guy we thought it was,” Spike said.
“Or maybe it was like a poker bluff,” I said.
I drank some of the Beluga. It wasn’t as icy cold as when my glass had been set down in front of me. But it still went down quite smoothly and tasted as powerful as a speeding bullet. I imagined that if I had another one Spike would have to use a fireman’s carry to get me to his car.
“If Kuznetzov isn’t the one behind this, then who?” I said.
“Maybe is not a Russian at all,” Gled said. “Maybe another bluff from Eddie.”
“There were three guys at Stanford back in the day,” Spike said. “Maybe you need to have another chat with Drysdale’s old partner. Maybe it turns out he’s the one who knows more than he’s telling.”
“Or is the best liar of all,” I said.
Gled had already finished with his second vodka, then looked at his watch and said he had to meet somebody in the North End.
“Another source?” I said.
“Woman friend,” he said. “A smoke, like you say.”
“Before you go,” Spike said to him, “I just want you to tell me straight up that you and your guys can keep Sunny safe.”
“I told her we would,” Gled said. “So we will. That is it and that is all.” He paused. “‘A deal is a promise, and a promise is unbreakable.’”
“Another movie line?” I said.
Gled smiled now, fully.
“Wonder Woman,” he said.
FIFTY-FOUR
I had left several messages for Christopher Lawton throughout the day. He had not responded to any of them. So a little after five the next afternoon I was parked up Comm Ave across from what Eddie Ross had said was Emily Barnes’s new crash pad, employing a variation of one of my investigative fundamentals: When you don’t know what else to do and don’t know which lies you’ve been told or who sent Russians to shoot at you and your friends, go back to following somebody.
I’d followed the late Alex Drysdale and learned a lot, until he had ended up dead. But I had been able to link him to Eddie and poker and Matt Dunn, at least until Dunn ended up dead with a playing card stuffed in his mouth. Now I knew Eddie was lying to me, I just didn’t know about what. Maybe he’d even lied about where Emily Barnes, who had turned out to be something less than the Queen of the May, currently resided.
I could just ring the doorbell and see if Emily was home. Or break in. Or I could do what I was doing and wait for her to come out and take me somewhere I wanted to go.
And if I ended up somewhere that was a less-than-happy place, at least for me, I was banking on Gled or his guys to make everything a fair fight.
Theoretically.
I had come to think of Gled as “My Russian Vinnie.”
As in Morris.
With all that, I needed to make something happen. Move the line. I had brought a couple apples with me this time, but no water, because hydrating properly also meant bathroom breaks. I didn’t want to miss Emily. Talking to her again seemed less meaningful to me, at least for now, than seeing the places she might go.
No audiobook tonight. I was listening to the Stones. The Let It Bleed album. Singing along loudly with Mick, windows closed, on “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
I sat behind the wheel and continued to belt out the lyrics in my shower voice.
She finally came out at seven-thirty, looking as if she were on her way to a slutty prom. Extremely short black skirt, tight pink V-neck sweater cut low. Hair loose and hanging to her shoulders. Thigh boots, also black. Leather clutch that I was betting was Tory Burch.
What I assumed was her Uber arrived a minute later. She leaned forward to talk to the driver, then got into the backseat. The car pulled away. I waited and pulled out behind it. The car went west for a block, then made a left across what I still thought of as the trolley tracks to make a U-turn on Commonwealth, and then a right toward Cleveland Circle. We both stopped at a light there, the new Marriott in front of us, the Boston College reservoir off to our right.
The Uber took a left on Beacon. So did I. I stayed close, because there was no good reason for Emily Barnes to think she was being followed. It might turn out there was no good reason for me to be following her. At least nobody had shot at me tonight. It was what passed for progress.
As we approached Kent Street the driver put on his left blinker, waiting for the light, and made the turn, as did I. When I saw the car begin to slow, I pulled over and waited, with a full view of the block ahead of me.
Emily got out, checked her hair in one of the car windows, gave it a fluff, straightened out her skirt.
Then she walked into The Carmody.
Owned now by none other than Christopher Lawton.
“Oh, ho,” I said.
FIFTY-FIVE
She could be here, I decided, for only two reasons.
Either she was here to play poker or she was meeting the new boyfriend about whom she had spoken of, and whom Matt Dunn had referenced, for a night of unbridled passion. Maybe she was dressed for both.
But if there was a game here, Lawton would know. He struck me as the type who would want to know everything going on at his hotel. And if it were a game being run by Eddie Ross, his old Stanford pal, he’d know that, too. Maybe Eddie had called, one Stanford guy to another, and had Lawton book him a suite for one of his movable feast games.
And what were the odds that Emily Barnes, who once played poker with Alex Drysdale, would just happen to end up at a game being played at a hotel owned by Drysdale’s former hedge-fund partner?
I was tired of not knowing things I wanted to know, about her and all of it. My concealed carry of choice, the M&P9, was in my bag. I got out of my car and locked it and walked underneath the lemon-and-white awning and into the lobby of The Carmody.
The concierge was tall and silver-haired, wearing a tight blue suit that featured what I was pretty sure the fashionistas called a shadow plaid. Underneath was a dark blue shirt with polka dots, buttoned to the collar. He reminded me of Anderson Cooper. It was just him on one side of the lobby and the woman working the front desk on the other. Somehow the concierge managed to look busy. And officious as all get-out without saying a word.
I stood in front of him until he was forced to notice me.
“May I help you?” he said.
He was trying to sound vaguely British. I nearly told him that we both knew better.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said. “But I forgot my phone and I’m late, so I was wondering if you could tell me what room the game is in?”
“Game?” he said.
“The poker game,” I said. “The one that the girl with no clothes on who just walked through the lobby is on her way to.”
I took notice of his nameplate for the first time. Mr. Gaylord.
“Young lady,” he said. “I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.”
I sighed. Almost a mournful sound.
Then leaned forward.
