Payback

by Mike Lupica

  While we ate he asked questions about the scene at The Carmody, from the time I’d walked into the suite until Lawton left with the Russian.

  “The one you kneed in the balls?” Jesse said.

  “That be the one,” I said.

  He speared an oyster pancake off my plate. I said, “Hey!” And he told me he was a seasoned investigator and could tell I was full.

  “I think Lee’s niece knows a lot more than she’s telling,” he said.

  “Even without me knowing how much of what she’s told me is the truth,” I said.

  “But she remains the player who knows all the players,” Jesse said. “Alive and dead.”

  “I plan to take one more run at her,” I said. “Try to get her alone. Even though she keeps finding different ways to tell me to get lost.”

  “Maybe Lee should be the one to take a run at her,” Jesse said. “Or Belson. See how she likes being sweated as a person of interest, if Frank hasn’t done that already.”

  We were both full by now, even though we’d overordered, as usual. He leaned back against the couch. I did the same. We both knew it was only a matter of time before we headed upstairs. But it was going to be a while. He was fully engaged now, bringing the full intensity of his curiosity and instincts and orderly mind to my case. By now I knew he was as good a cop as my father had been. As good as Belson. Or Lee Farrell. Probably better when you added it all up.

  “You mind if I have another glass of wine?” I said.

  He grinned. “Neither one of us is driving,” he said.

  When I came back from the kitchen he said, “You need to know more about Lawton, too. Just because he says he doesn’t stand to make out now that Drysdale is gone doesn’t mean he won’t.”

  “You think he’s some kind of gangster?” I said.

  “I’m not saying he’s Hyman Roth from Godfather,” he said, nodding at the television. “You know, the Meyer Lansky character. But the subject of money laundering does seem to keep coming up.”

  “Rinse and repeat,” I said.

  “The illegal process of concealing the origins of money obtained illegally,” he said, “by passing it through banking transfers and legitimate commercial transactions.” He recited it like a schoolkid in glass. When he finished he grinned and said, “I looked up the exact definition.”

  “You deserve some sort of prize.”

  “Soon,” he said.

  “Didn’t Lansky use casinos?” I said. “In real life, I mean.”

  “But he used hotels, too,” Jesse said. “Even if it goes nowhere, it might be interesting to see if you can find out if Lawton actually owns that hotel free and clear.”

  I picked up my glass, but then put it back down.

  “Like an LLC owns Eddie’s brownstone,” I said.

  “‘Zackly,” Jesse said.

  “You’re saying that Lawton might be the middleman for a lot of dirty money?” I said. “Or the head man?”

  “All the way to Drysdale’s hedge fund,” Jesse said.

  “Which is apparently about to be closed down,” I said. “With him as trustee.”

  “Be nice to know what Drysdale knew,” Jesse said. “At least before he got popped.”

  Something pinged on the periphery of memory then. I just didn’t know why. Or where. Something there, and then not.

  “What?” Jesse said, staring at me.

  “I thought I had something,” I said. “But then it was gone.”

  “Why don’t you sleep on it?” he said.

  I took his hand and pulled him up off the floor.

  “When I’m tired,” I said.

  FIFTY-NINE

  Richie called in the morning, after Jesse was on his way back to Paradise. I was pleased that I was alone, especially pleased that he hadn’t tried to call about an hour earlier, when Jesse and I were back to tiring each other out before he left.

  “I gave Jalen a couple days off, in case you were looking for him,” Richie said. “I blame myself for him getting shot, and ordered him to take some vacay on me.”

  “You didn’t get him shot.”

  “I got him into this,” Richie said.

  “Not nearly as much as I did,” I said. “The vacay ought to be on me.”

  “I asked him what I could do and he told me he wouldn’t say no to a little R&R with that Kerry lady. He talks about her like she’s better-looking than Kerry Washington. I told him to pick a spot. He said he always wanted to check out South Beach.”

  “And you sent him to The Delano,” I said.

  We both knew he had taken me there one time.

  “Get a good thing, stay with it,” he said.

  “Cool area,” I said.

  “Not that we saw much of it,” Richie said.

  There was an awkward pause.

  “How’s Richard?” I said.

  “Safe,” he said, “at home.”

  “Good.”

  “You stay safe.”

  “Trying.”

  “Try harder,” Richie Burke said.

  When I’d had some yogurt and showered and dressed and done my face and hair and essentially looked like everything a young businesswoman carrying a concealed weapon should, I drove over to One Financial Center to talk to Gina Patarelli, former assistant to Alex Drysdale, after having left her a voicemail that I was on my way.

  When Jesse had fallen asleep last night and I had not, I remembered what had been just out of the reach of memory: Gina having suggested the first time I met her that she knew everything that her boss did.

  She wasn’t at her desk once I was off the elevator. There wasn’t anything on her desk, including her computer and what had been her office phone. There didn’t appear to be anybody around. No people, no phones ringing. Nothing. Her chair was still there. I went and sat down and started opening the drawers. Nothing there, either.

  “Can I help you?”

  The voice startled me. I looked up to see a tall African American guy, lot of hair, twist-out style, khakis, polo shirt. Dress-down day, at what was left of Sale Riche.

  “I was looking for Gina,” I said.

  “By looking through her desk?” he said.

  “If there’s nothing in it or on it,” I said, “is it still really hers?” I smiled. “Asking for a friend.”

  “Who are you?” he said, and I told him. He asked me for some ID. I showed him. I asked him for his name. He said Darrell Dawes. I didn’t ask to see his driver’s license.

  “Where’s Gina?” I said.

  “She doesn’t work here anymore,” he said. “The last time I saw her she was practically sprinting through the lobby with a box of her stuff, practically like she was being chased.”

  “You talk to her?”

  “I don’t even think she saw me.”

  “It appears nobody works here, Darrell, except you,” I said.

  He smiled.

  “Last days of the Roman Empire,” he said. “Or maybe I’m the last of the Mohicans. Take your pick.”

  I asked him what his job was, or had been, with Sale Riche. He told me he had been a trader until the decision had been made, after Alex Drysdale’s death, to close down the fund.

  “Whose decision?”

  “What?”

  “The decision to close down the fund,” I said. “Who made that decision?”

  “Alex’s investors, I assume.”

  “Who are they?”

  Other than the two of us, the entire floor was as quiet as the creep of time.

  “Well, I don’t actually know,” he said finally.

  “Could you find out for me?”

  “No,” he said.

  “You say you were a trader,” I said.

  “And operations manager,” he said with pride.

  “And
you don’t know who had money with Alex?”

  “Maybe some of them higher up the food chain did,” he said. “But you’d be amazed at how secretive guys like Alex are. Or were.”

  “So who told you that you no longer had a job here?” I said.

  “Gina did, actually,” he said. “She said that Alex’s prime broker had informed her that Alex had started a full liquidation before he got shot, and had provided a mechanism for all of us on the floor to get one last month of salary.”

  “Bonuses?”

  He shook his head.

  “We were entitled to them,” he said. “But what were we going to do, take a dead guy to court?”

  “Who’s the prime broker?” I said.

  “He’s got a London office now,” Darrell Dawes said. “He’s Russian, actually. Feodore Pozdey. Alex referred to him as Fred.”

  I smiled.

  Of course he was Russian. What else would he be, Chippewa?

  “What’s the name of his company?” I said.

  “As far as I know, and I don’t know much about the guy, the company is him.”

  He looked at his Apple Watch.

  “Listen,” he said, “good luck with whatever it is you’re doing here, but I’ve got to go, I’ve got an interview over on State Street in about forty-five minutes. Another fund. It’s been a while since I was between jobs.”

  “Just a couple more things,” I said. “Did Alex ever have business meetings here?”

  “Never,” Dawes said. “Always out of office. He was very secretive that way, too.” He made a gesture that took in the expanse of empty cubicles.

  “Now he’s gone,” he said. “It’s all gone.”

  “Did he ever mention that he’d made his old friend Christopher Lawton the trustee of the fund?”

  Dawes chuckled. “We didn’t have that kind of relationship.”

  “Do you have contact info for Gina?”

  He reached into his pocket for his phone, came out with it, tapped the screen a couple times, asked me for my number. I gave it to him, and he texted me her information.

  “Anything else you can think of that might help me?” I said.

  “Help you do what?”

  “Find out who killed him,” I said.

  He shrugged. “I told you everything I know,” he said. “Or don’t know.”

  But then he held up a finger.

  “Except for this,” he said. “I just remembered it. It was a day or two before he died. I needed to ask him a question, and Gina wasn’t at her desk. But before I got to his office, I heard him yelling, just not loud enough to make out what he was saying. When it stopped, I knocked on the door and went in. He was standing at his window, looking at that kick-ass view. I asked him if everything was all right. He didn’t turn around, just kept staring out the window. It was like he was talking to himself, saying, ‘You never think you’ll get this high. But once you do, all you start thinking about is what the fall would be like.’”

  Then Darrell wished me luck and turned and walked toward the empty cubicles, and into the quiet. Sale Riche. Filthy rich. Not that it did Alex Drysdale a whole hell of a lot of good in the end.

  I took the elevator back down to the street and was about to call Gina Patarelli when Frank Belson called.

  “Didn’t you tell me that Alex Drysdale’s former partner was a guy named Lawton?” Belson said.

  I had been walking to the Government Center lot, where I’d parked my car. I stopped then. Knowing what he was going to tell me before he did.

  “Talk to me, Frank,” I said.

  “He ate a gun last night,” he said.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “You didn’t let me finish,” he said.

  “There’s more?” I said.

  “It was your gun,” Frank Belson said.

  SIXTY

  Lawton had lived in what I knew was a cool section in Cambridge, on Garden Street, a few blocks away from Dr. Silverman’s combination of home and office. I thought about popping in to see her on my way to meet with Frank Belson, just to maybe work through the fact that people attached to my case kept dying on me. If I could even think of it as a case, since I had no client.

  I didn’t know when Belson had caught the call, but the crime scene people were mostly gone by the time I arrived at the narrow three-decker on Garden. I saw Belson’s car parked at an angle facing the house. He was seated on the steps leading up to the front door. He told me, without preliminaries, that the housekeeper had found Lawton a little after nine. He was at his desk, in his leather chair; my .38, SR on the handle, was on the rug next to him.

  Belson patted the area next to him.

  “Please come sit,” he said. “I just wanted to thank you in person for almost single-handedly keeping me in the game.”

  I sat down.

  “I’m just curious,” Belson said. “Did the poor bastard tell you he was going to end it all and ask if you could loan him a gun?”

  “I forgot to mention that the Russian took it off me when they took me for a ride that night,” I said. “I didn’t think to ask for it as I was diving out of the backseat.”

  “Forgot or withheld?” he said. “Such a fine line with you.”

  “Come on, Frank,” I said. “As you recall, I downloaded you a lot of information when we had coffee the other day.”

  “The Russian you bit?” he said.

  “Yup.”

  “He have a name?”

  “Vadim,” I said.

  He took out his spiral notebook and wrote that down.

  “First or last?”

  “Don’t know,” I said. “All I do know is that he’s one of Eddie Ross’s troopers.”

  Belson took his cigar out of his mouth. “Vadim,” he said. “Maybe a first name, maybe last. Hell, I’ve practically got him booked already.”

  “I don’t understand how my gun ended up in Lawton’s hand,” I said.

  “Look at you,” Belson said. “You’re like a mind reader.”

  “You know there’s an old line about being rude and sarcastic,” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said. “‘I’m not always rude and sarcastic, sometimes I’m asleep.’”

  “I don’t think he killed himself,” I said, “for what it’s worth.”

  Belson said, “We’ve got a new mobile scanning system. The only fingerprints on the gun are his.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “I was with him last night, before he left with one of the Russians from a poker game upstairs.”

  “What poker game?”

  I told him about busting in on the game, and my drink with Lawton later, and him telling me about getting money from Russians, and repairing his relationship with Drysdale before he died.

  “The Russian who walked Lawton out, he have a name?” Belson said.

  I told him what Lawton had said when I asked the same question, about wanting to stay alive.

  “So he thought that Russian, but not your Russian, was some kind of threat to him?” Belson said.

  “I’m just telling you what he said.”

  “We’ll pull the security video from his lobby, if they’ve got it,” Belson said.

  “Somebody wanted this to look like a suicide,” I said.

  “The ME will tell us if there was a blow to the head,” Belson said. “Or the tox screen will tell us if somebody drugged him to set this shit up.”

  He asked me to take him through it again, from the time Eddie Ross came to my office. I did. I told him about how the poker games were a connection to Drysdale’s hedge fund, and how Lawton had used the games to get investors for The Carmody. And how I couldn’t turn around without running into a Russian. Belson said he’d gotten that sense, yes.

  “You sure that all Lawton was looking for was invest
ors?” Belson said.

  “You think he lied about that?” I said.

  “I think what you think,” Belson said. “That somehow they keep trying to spin you around as a way of keeping you dizzy. Trying to get you to take your eye off the prize.”

  “Whatever the hell the prize is,” I said.

  Belson stood.

  “We gotta stop meeting like this,” he said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  He asked me for Emily Barnes’s address in Brighton. He wrote it down in his notebook as I gave it to him. Old school, all the way.

  “I sent a car to Ross’s brownstone,” he said.

  “I don’t think he lives there, even though the dealer, Matt Dunn, told me he did,” I said. “And the phone number Eddie gave me has been disconnected.”

  “My guys already went in,” Belson said. “Probable cause. A beautiful thing. The only clothes they found in any of the closets were a woman’s.”

  “Probably Emily’s,” I said.

  “Girl gets around,” he said.

  “I needed a class schedule like hers when I was in college,” I said.

  I walked him to his car.

  “You got into this because of Spike, who has his restaurant back,” he said. “And from everything you’ve told me, the girl keeps giving you the middle finger.”

  “Your point?”

  “My point is that I don’t want the next body I find to be yours,” Belson said. “And don’t give me one of your smart remarks.”

  I didn’t. Jesse always said that he’d never gotten into trouble keeping his mouth shut when he had nothing to say. Belson drove off. I got into my car and drove to the North End to see if I could find Gina Patarelli.

  Preferably alive.

  Just as a change of pace.

  SIXTY-ONE

  I loved everything about the North End.

  Loved the people, loved walking the streets, loved the old-Boston feel of it, as if you’d entered some kind of time machine, just one that served what I considered the best Italian food this side of Little Italy. Or maybe including Little Italy.