by Mike Lupica
“Here’s how we can do this,” I said. “You can either tell me the room number where tonight’s poker game is being played, and I head on up there.” I smiled. “Or,” I continued, “I can call my father, the former police detective, and have him call some of his old friends in Vice and tell them that there is a high-stakes poker game going on at this establishment, perhaps one that includes some extremely sketchy characters. At which point they will head on over here and you will then be forced to tell them where the goddamn game is. Then they, and the Good Lord, can sort things out.”
He picked up the fountain pen in front of him, put it down. He stared at me. I stared back, still smiling.
“Actually,” I said, “there’s a third option. We can call Mr. Lawton. I assume you have the same number for him I do.”
I took my phone out of my bag.
“You said you didn’t have your phone,” he said.
“Well, Mr. Gaylord,” I said, “I lied.”
We stared at each other a little more. I had gotten close enough to his stand-up desk that I got a whiff of his cologne.
Finally he reached into his drawer and came out with one of his cards and picked up his pen and wrote something on the card before sliding it across to me.
I looked down and saw “842” under his name and title.
“Top floor,” he said. “To your right after you come out of the lift.”
“Lift?” I said. “Really?”
He shrugged.
“You didn’t get this from me,” he said.
“Do people ever tell you that you look like Anderson Cooper?” I said.
Now he sighed, an even sadder sound than I had made.
“More than you could possibly imagine,” he said.
I took the elevator to the eighth floor, took the right as he’d told me to, walked down to the end of the hall to 842, knocked on the door.
Christopher Lawton was the one who answered.
“Room service,” I said.
FIFTY-SIX
I walked past him before he could even attempt to stop me.
It was a large suite, tastefully decorated, more old Boston than new. Beyond the living room was a dining room, dominated by a round antique table. That’s where the players were. Emily Barnes was one of them, looking at me as if a swamp creature had just entered the room.
“What up?” I said too brightly.
No one at the table answered. There were three men at the table with Emily, and a much younger guy with an unopened deck in front of him. All of the players had chips in front of them. One was much older, bald, overweight, his belly stretching against a cashmere sweater. The other two were both lean and hard-looking.
“Hey, girlfriend,” I said to Emily.
Still no answer. Lawton still hadn’t spoken, or moved far from the door. The air in the room felt suddenly brittle. So I reached into my bag, came out with my wallet, and took out all the cash I had in there, counting it out in front of them.
“I’ve got eighty-six dollars here,” I said. “Is that enough to buy me a seat?”
The big guy was closest to me, seated to Emily’s left. He jerked a head at Lawton now.
“What the fuck kind of shit is this?” he said.
If it wasn’t a Russian accent, it was from the same neighborhood.
Lawton finally closed the door and walked over to where I was standing.
“What are you doing here, Sunny?” he said.
“Funny,” I said, “but I was about to ask you the same thing.”
“You know I own this hotel,” he said.
I gestured toward the table.
“Which means you sort of have to own this, too, am I right?”
“Enough,” the hard guy with the accent said, and stood up. “Enough.”
“She goes now or maybe you find somebody’s money whose is better than mine,” he said to Lawton.
“You need to go,” Lawton said to me. “I don’t know what you think is going on here, so I’ll tell you: just a game with some friends.”
“These people friends of yours, Emily?” I said.
“I don’t have to tell you shit,” she said.
“Well put,” I said.
She stared at the stacks of chips in front of her, just as a way of looking anywhere except at me.
I turned back to Lawton.
“This is one of Eddie’s games, isn’t it?” I said.
“No,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “But you gave me the impression, rather earnestly, as I recall, that you and Eddie weren’t all that close anymore. So you were being less than honest with me, weren’t you?”
The hard guy with the accent was standing now. His focus was where everybody else’s was, on Christopher Lawton and me.
“Which,” I continued, “makes me wonder if you’ve been lying to me about, oh, I don’t know, everything.”
“Eddie and I have an understanding,” Lawton said. “I’d be happy to explain it to you, I’d just rather it wasn’t here.”
“I’ll bet,” I said.
“Enough,” the guy with the accent said again.
He covered the distance with surprising quickness for somebody his size, and before I could do anything grabbed me roughly by my left arm, his grip hard enough that it hurt as he pulled me toward the door.
I didn’t let him, even with his size advantage. Instead I planted my left foot, and pivoted with a move I’d learned a long time ago at the police academy, and kneed him as hard as I could in what Spike still insisted on calling his junk. I’d now bitten one Russian and kneed another and was generally folding the Marquis of Queensbury rules into a party hat.
He let go of me and fell to the floor on his side and rocked gently, while I pulled my gun out of my bag and pointed it at him.
“Hey,” Lawton said. “Hey. Everybody calm down here.”
“Him first,” I said. “I’ve had a rough week,” I said to the guy on the ground.
“Sunny,” Lawton said, “you’ve got to calm down.”
“The one with the gun,” I said, “is generally quite calm.”
“Let’s you and I go somewhere and talk,” Lawton said.
“You’re in on this, aren’t you?” I said to him.
“Downstairs,” he said. “In the bar.”
“Does this mean we’re not going to play cards?” the bald man said.
I backed toward the door, nodding at Emily.
“I’ll be in touch,” I said.
“Don’t count on it,” she said. She shook her head and looked at me as if she’d finally identified the sucker in the room. “You think you’re so fucking clever,” she said. “And you don’t even know what the game is, you stupid bitch.”
Lawton opened the door. I walked out first. He followed me. We went down to the lobby and into the small bar next to it. There was only one occupied table in the dimly lit room, a couple leaning forward over glasses of white wine, close enough to kiss. Maybe they were the ones here for unbridled passion, the lucky ducks.
The only other customer was Gled, sitting alone at a table to the bartender’s right.
Lawton asked if I wanted to sit at a table. I said the bar would be fine.
“You’ve got this all wrong,” he said.
I told him I’d been hearing a lot of that lately.
FIFTY-SEVEN
The bartender, a young redheaded woman in a white shirt and a black vest, greeted Lawton as if he’d just returned safely from a tour in the Middle East. Lawton asked for a Johnnie Walker Blue, straight up. She had it in front of him in what I thought might be record time. When she asked what I wanted, I said I’d pass.
Lawton took a sip of his drink and angled his barstool so he was facing me. He kept his voice low.
“First off,” he said. “What is it that you t
hink I’m in on?”
“You, Eddie, Alex, poker, Emily, Russians,” I said. “Did I miss anything?”
“I understand that you’d think a confluence like that suspicious,” he said.
“No kidding,” I said.
He drank.
“After COVID,” he said, “actually, during COVID, I was about to go under here. The bigger hotels downtown, they were always going to make it. Ritz. Four Seasons. Westin. Omni. But we’re off the beaten path here, even though we’re not that far from Kenmore Square. I’d finally gone through what I got from Alex when we split up. Stimulus money wasn’t going to cut it. I needed somebody to throw me a life preserver.”
“And Alex wasn’t an option,” I said.
“I couldn’t make myself go begging to him,” he said. “If I’d needed it now, maybe.”
“Why now?”
“Things got better with us,” he said. “Right before he died. He called me up and took me to dinner and said that he didn’t have any family heirs and that even with everything that had gone down between us, that I was as close to family as he had, and he wanted me to be the trustee of the fund if anything ever happened to him.”
“So you’re inheriting the fund?”
“No,” he said. “It’s not like that. He basically wanted me to oversee its deconstruction. Paying out any outstanding financial obligations, unpaid bills, taxes, things like that.”
“Where’s the money go?” I said.
He grinned. “I asked him that,” Lawton said. “He said he was going to surprise me. Now there’s a meeting at the bank in a few days to sort it all out.”
He drank some scotch. I was starting to second-guess myself about not having ordered a drink of my own.
“So back when you needed an infusion of cash, you went to your old friend Eddie.”
He nodded.
“Did you know when you did that Eddie was in business with Alex?” I said.
“I thought it was just the poker,” he said. “I didn’t know that Eddie was going to inherit some money when Alex did close down the fund.”
“Explain closing down the fund,” I said.
The bartender asked if Lawton wanted another. He said he did not. She asked if I’d changed my mind.
“Not about anything,” I said.
“What a successful fund does at the end, if it’s not completely crashing and burning, is transition to what is called a family office,” Lawton said. “They don’t make an announcement in the Journal, but the guy running the fund sends letters to his investors and the regulators. And what he basically tells them is that they’re going to get their original buy-in back, plus one last big, fat return. And then the guy who’s been managing their money—Alex, in this case—is only going to manage his own money going forward.”
“And that makes everybody happy?”
“Depends on what the returns have been,” Lawton said. “Nobody ever questioned old Bernie Madoff because his returns were as regular as the tide. Until they weren’t, of course. But, yeah, if the returns have been good, the investors walk away happy, as long as there’s no fraud involved.”
“Was there fraud involved with Alex?” I said.
“Not that anybody ever heard of,” he said.
“But you don’t know,” he said.
“And frankly don’t give a shit,” he said. “I went to Eddie because I was the one who needed investors, even if they weren’t people you’d see having lunch at the Harvard Club.”
“Like your friends upstairs?” I said.
He shrugged, almost apologetically.
“And what was in it for Eddie,” I said, “other than the chance to reconnect with an old college pal?”
“Some of The Carmody,” Lawton said. “You want to know what I was in on? That’s what I was in on. It’s funny how these things work out. In the end, Eddie had a little piece of Alex and a little piece of me.”
“And you both got to make new friends from the Eastern Bloc.”
“Old friends, in Eddie’s case,” Lawton said.
“Care to share some names?” I said.
Lawton gave me a long look.
“Not unless I want to end up like Alex,” he said.
“You think it was a Russian who killed Alex?”
“Don’t you?” Christopher Lawton said.
I looked past him. Gled was still at his table, studying his phone.
“Why did you lie to me?” I said to Lawton.
“I didn’t think of it as lying,” he said. “More self-interest. Or self-preservation.”
“The financial aid you got from your Russians,” I said. “What kind of strings were attached?”
“None that I couldn’t live with,” he said. “Put it that way.”
“Do you have an NDA with them, Christopher?” I said. “Or was the NDA that you said you had with Alex Drysdale just more of your bullshit?”
“That was real.”
“Why in the world should I believe any of this?” I said.
“There’s an old line, Sunny, maybe you’ve heard it,” he said. “From an old boxing promoter who got caught in a lie. When they called him on it he said, ‘Yesterday I was lying. Today I’m telling the truth.’”
He finished his drink and threw a twenty on the bar, then stood up.
“Who was the guy I put on the ground?” I said.
“One of my investors,” Lawton said.
“I’d like a name,” I said.
“And I’d like to stay alive,” he said. “If you’re going to get his name, you’re not getting it from me. I promised the guy privacy until you came walking through the goddamn door.”
“Maybe I’ll ask Emily,” I said.
“Only if you can find her,” he said.
Then I said to him what I’d said to Emily upstairs, that I’d be in touch.
“Only if you can find me,” he said, and walked back into the lobby and toward the elevators.
When the elevator doors opened, the guy with the accent was standing there. He stepped outside and let the doors close and nodded in the direction of the front door. He and Lawton left together. I was standing next to Gled by the time they were outside.
“You want to follow them?” Gled said.
I told him I tried to limit myself to one tail job a night, and walked outside myself and got into my car and drove back to River Street Place. On the way home I called Spike and told him about the festivities at The Carmody.
By then I was passing Arlington Street.
“You ever read Crime and Punishment?” I said.
“College,” he said.
“Same,” I said. “Now I’m just trying to figure out in my version who’s Raskolnikov.”
“Beats the hell out of me,” Spike said.
When I’d parked my car in my spot in back of the house and walked around to the front, I saw something taped to my front door.
FIFTY-EIGHT
I had just come around the corner and stopped about twenty yards away when I saw it, thinking that this was really where I’d come in, the envelope with the pictures of my father inside.
But this looked to be just a piece of paper, something written on it. I still wasn’t close enough to see.
I pulled out the M&P9 for the second time tonight.
I walked over to the door and saw that it was a note.
From Jesse.
“I’m inside,” it read, but then he’d always had a minimalist style. In just about everything.
He had a key because I’d given him one. When I’d told him I wanted him to have it he’d said, “Does this mean I have to give you my letter sweater?”
I told him that it was somehow comforting that occasionally his references were more dated than my own.
He was on the couch with Rosie,
watching The Godfather Part II. He usually watched only westerns, but I knew he practically had the first two Godfather movies memorized. He liked to say that as bad as the cops were, he was surprised the Corleones didn’t end up running the whole freaking world.
I saw a glass of club soda on the coffee table, a coaster underneath it, of course. He was as fastidious as my father. Richie was like that, too. If I mentioned that to Dr. Silverman, she’d probably treat it like she’d unearthed buried treasure.
I realized I still had the gun in my hand when he said, “I think it’s safe to put that away.”
“I thought you might be a Russian,” I said.
“I never even liked vodka,” he said.
He got up and came across the room and kissed me. I noted, and not for the first time, that for a professional tough guy he had very soft lips.
When I finally, and reluctantly, pulled back, still in his arms, I said, “To what do I owe the pleasure, Chief?”
“Had to see a guy about a case,” he said. “And then I was closer to your place than my place.”
“You impulsive devil.”
He smiled the way he did, mostly with his eyes. “Not so much,” he said.
We were still in the foyer, still holding on to each other.
“Would you like to hear about my day, dear?” I said.
“Always,” Jesse Stone said.
I told him that first I needed a drink.
He was still smiling.
“Who doesn’t?” he said.
I knew roughly how long he had been sober, once he’d gotten himself to rehab. And knew he knew the exact date, and how many days since his last drink. Recovering alcoholics knew things like that the way they knew their birthday.
I came back with a glass of Chardonnay and sat next to him. He had shut off the television. Rosie was now between us as I told him about The Carmody.
“You trust Lawton?” Jesse said when I finished.
“Thought I did,” I said.
“Poker and hedge funds,” he said. “Different games of skill and chance, connected by a bunch of assholes.” He shrugged. “But what do I know?”
“A lot,” I said.
He asked if I’d eaten. I told him I had not, I hadn’t even eaten the apples I’d brought with me on stakeout duty. He suggested the Gourmet Dumpling House this time. The food, still hot, was delivered a half-hour later. We spread it all out on the coffee table and ate on the floor, like we did, and made gluttons of ourselves.
