Payback

by Mike Lupica

  The address I had for Gina Patarelli was on Hanover Street, in what turned out to be a third-floor walk-up over Bricco, a restaurant I knew, and Caffe Paradiso, whose pastries I knew far too well. Richie and I used to walk over here from his saloon and sit outside when the weather was warm enough and even sometimes when it wasn’t, and eat cannoli and drink Italian espresso with maybe just a splash of Hennessy in it and watch the world go by.

  On the ride over here from Cambridge, I’d tried the number Darrell Dawes had given me, but my calls kept going straight to voicemail. I left just one message, reminding her who I was and referencing our conversation at Sale Riche, and that I needed to talk to her as soon as possible. I didn’t say it was urgent. Too much.

  It was a red-brick building set in the middle of a busy block, full of people and chatter and life. I rang the buzzer for 3B. No response from the speaker. No click of the door. Rang it again. Same thing.

  I sat then on the top step and considered my limited options, none great. I could sit here and wait and hope that if she was inside and simply not answering the buzzer, she’d eventually come outside. Or that if she’d gone out, on a job interview of her own or to do some shopping, she’d come back sooner or later.

  Or maybe she was gone and was never coming back, because she really did know everything that Alex Drysdale had known, and I wasn’t the only one she’d ever mentioned that to.

  I was about to get up and ring the buzzer again when an elderly white-haired woman, small and sturdy, started up the stairs with a couple grocery bags from the Star Market I knew was on Causeway Street near North Station.

  She looked a bit out of breath. I knew the market was probably a mile away if you walked it.

  “May I help you?” I said.

  She smiled. “May,” she said. “Not can I help you. May I help you. I used to teach English. Still appreciate the finer points of the language.”

  She had periwinkle-blue eyes and a face full of lines that was somehow still beautiful.

  “I’m Betty Cafaro,” she said, handing me one of the bags as I introduced myself. It was heavy.

  “That’s a good walk from the Star,” I said.

  “I can go more than that if I have to,” she said.

  We were still at the bottom of the steps. I could see her discreetly trying to get her breathing under control.

  “You waiting for somebody out here?” she said.

  “I was hoping to see Gina Patarelli,” I said. “But she doesn’t appear to be home.”

  “Sure she is,” Betty Cafaro said.

  She started up the steps, pulling her key out of the side pocket of her windbreaker with her free hand.

  “By the way,” she said. “I could have managed those bags myself.”

  “I have no doubt,” I said. “You said you think she’s here and just not answering?”

  “Unless she left while I was out,” she said. “She was coming up the stairs with a new suitcase when I went to do my shopping. A big one. The kind with roller skates on them? I asked her if she was going somewhere, and she said something odd back to me.”

  “What was that?”

  “She said she was about to be quarantining again,” the old woman said.

  She narrowed her blue eyes.

  “You got any idea what that might have meant?”

  “Can I trust you, Betty?” I said, lowering my voice and trying to make it sound conspiratorial.

  “Just because I’m older than water doesn’t mean I’m some kind of busybody,” she said.

  “There’s a possibility that Gina might be in some danger,” I said.

  She put down her bag. I did the same.

  “You here to do something about that?” she said. “If you were with the police, I have a feeling you would have already shown me a badge.”

  “Private detective,” I said.

  “Well, no shit!” she said, so loudly it made me laugh, and led me inside, telling me as we climbed the stairs that she was in 3H.

  When we got to the third floor, she walked over and banged on Gina’s door with surprising force and yelled, “Gina, it’s Betty Cafaro and I need your help.”

  It took only a few seconds for Gina Patarelli to open the door. When she did, she saw me standing next to Betty.

  “Fuck,” she said, then immediately said, “Sorry, Mrs. Cafaro.”

  “I’m eighty-seven years old, missy,” she said. “I’ve heard worse. Now let this woman in, she makes it sound like you might be up to your ass in alligators.”

  SIXTY-TWO

  She had no choice but to do what Betty Cafaro had just told her.

  So she did. She wore a West Wing T-shirt and tight white jeans I was pretty sure were Athleta even without any branding on them. Nike running shoes with some miles on them. Maybe about to get more.

  The new suitcase was near a door I assumed led to her bedroom.

  “Going somewhere?” I said.

  “You’re the one who needs to go,” she said. “You need to leave me alone and leave this alone.”

  She sounded like Emily Barnes, standing in the middle of the living room, arms crossed, having made no indication she wanted me to sit.

  “Define this,” I said.

  “Alex’s death, the hedge fund, me,” she said. “I told your guy, the black guy, the same thing. Just please leave me the fuck alone.”

  “What has you this scared?” I said. “Or who?”

  “They . . . It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I just need to leave Boston for a while.” She paused. “Maybe forever.”

  I wanted to keep my own voice calm, hoping it might do the same for her, if that were even possible.

  “Gina,” I said. “Who’s they?”

  “You know who they are!” she said. “It’s not even a they! It’s that Eddie Ross.”

  “He came to see you.”

  Now she seemed to be hugging herself.

  “He thought I knew more about Alex’s business than I do,” she said. “I told him I didn’t, that all’s I did was talk a good game.”

  “Where was this?”

  “The office, after Alex died,” she said. “Then he told me that just to be sure, he was taking my computer. He had some big guy with him, never said a word, just stared at me the whole time. He took Alex’s computer. The big guy. Eddie took mine. Out they went. When I got home later, the big guy was waiting for me outside. He pulled back his coat and showed me some little gun he had in his belt and told me we were going up to my apartment, he was here to pick something up. I just kept looking at the gun. I asked him what he wanted. He said my laptop.”

  “That was it?”

  “Before he left he said he had a message from Eddie,” she said. “Told me that Eddie wanted him to tell me that if I knew what was good for me, I’d stay out of his business.”

  “Eddie came to my office one time and basically told me the same thing,” I said.

  “You have a gun?” Gina said.

  “I do,” I said. “I think the little one the big guy showed you might have been one he took from me and maybe used on Christopher Lawton.”

  “Alex’s old partner?” she said. “He’s dead, too?”

  I nodded.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” she said. She shook her head. “Just leave so I can leave, okay? I didn’t sign up for any of this shit. I’m just a smartass girl from Revere whose old man owned a pizza place over by the beach.”

  “Did you know Alex had made Lawton the trustee of the fund?”

  She shook her head, very quickly, side to side. I thought she might cry.

  “I thought if anybody was going to be in charge, it would be his prime broker, this guy Fred from London,” she said. “Or maybe not even him. Alex was getting more and more tight-lipped lately, like he was scared of something.”


  “Obviously with good reason,” I said.

  “Listen,” she said, “I’m telling you I don’t know everything Alex was into, and whether or not it was what got him killed. I just know that I don’t want it to get me killed, if that’s just the same with you.”

  There was no telling her that at this point in the proceedings, I happened to feel the exact same way.

  “Could there be something more going on here than just turning the fund into a family office?” I said.

  “You know what that is?” she said.

  “Barely,” I said. “So could there be something more going on with Alex’s money now that he’s gone?”

  “That’s for you to find out and for me to no longer give a shit about,” Gina said.

  She walked over to the window and pulled back the draperies and looked down on Hanover Street as if afraid she were being watched. Probably wondering how she had ended up here. Not in her apartment. In what she had called “this.” A few weeks ago her world had been Alex Drysdale’s fee structures and payouts and pairs trading and even the alpha and beta that Jalen Washington had told me about, all part of a language I was trying to learn on the fly.

  Now she lived in fear of the same goon squad I did. But she was right about something. I had signed up for this. She hadn’t.

  “Where will you go?” I said.

  “Somewhere they can’t find me.”

  “Hard to do.”

  “Watch me.”

  Then: “Please leave now.”

  “You must have some idea about what might be about to go down,” I said. “You’re too smart not to.”

  She hesitated.

  “I’m telling you I don’t know,” she said. “Alex knew. Didn’t help him very much, did it?”

  “I can help you,” I said.

  Somehow I did feel as if I were talking to Emily Barnes all over again, all the way back at the beginning, at Lee’s place. Now Gina Patarelli didn’t want my help, either. Sunny Randall, ace private eye. Starting to detect a pattern here.

  I reached into my bag and came out with a pen and one of my cards and wrote my cell number on the back, and my address, and handed it to her.

  “If you need anything,” I said.

  “Just to be left alone,” she said.

  She walked past me and opened her door. I didn’t say anything. Neither did she. I walked toward the stairs. As I did, I was pretty sure I heard a door close at the other end of the hall. It was probably my friend Betty Cafaro.

  At least she’d wanted my help.

  Whatever happened to girl power?

  SIXTY-THREE

  I was back home and had walked Rosie and was prepping for a much-needed run when Jalen Washington called.

  “How’s the arm?” I said.

  “The Sox think I can be ready by Opening Day,” he said.

  I asked how the vacation was going.

  “Itching to get back up there and get back in the damn game,” he said. “I like being a private eye.”

  “You’ll get over it,” I said.

  He asked me to bring him up to date. I did, telling him about my conversations with Darrell Dawes and Gina Patarelli.

  “She tell you more than she told me?” Jalen said.

  “Hostile witness,” I said, and told him she’d told me she was about to disappear, I just had no idea where.

  “Sounds like Eddie and the boys got her attention,” I said, “the way they got yours.”

  “Sounds like you don’t know any more’n me about what they got going with old Alex’s money,” he said.

  “But maybe getting closer,” I said. “Let me do a little forensic sleuthing of my own and get back to you.”

  “Call you when I’m back.”

  “In the meantime,” I said, “try not to get yourself shot down there.”

  “Only if someone at Joe’s Stone Crabs is packing,” he said.

  I found myself wishing that I had a sit-down with Susan Silverman today. But I often felt that way. If she wasn’t able to solve interior problems for me, she was always useful helping me organize my brain, especially when I was processing what felt like an overload of new information.

  Like now.

  Like finding out that Lawton and Alex Drysdale had mended fences before both of them had ended up dead, and left Eddie Ross the only Stanford guy still standing.

  “You don’t even know what the game is,” Emily Barnes had said, before calling me a stupid bitch. Another reason why I wanted to see Dr. Silverman. She never called me stupid, though she had to have thought it from time to time.

  I changed my mind about a run, because sometimes it didn’t take much to do that, and went upstairs to paint, hoping to clear my brain of everything except trying to capture the lighthouse in Paradise I had frozen in time. I needed to use all of the overhead lighting in the room today, because we’d just changed over to Daylight Savings Time, and the late-afternoon light that I loved up here was mostly gone by the time I got to my studio.

  When I was done, after a good long session, I went to the window and stared out at the lights of Back Bay, watching darkness chase away what was left of the afternoon. Then I moved to the front window and looked down at the street, taking it on faith that Gled was out there somewhere, or someone working for him, even though I had never seen nor met any of his sidemen. Someone to watch over me. I smiled. I loved that song, particularly Ben Webster’s version of it.

  I could activate the sound system from anywhere in the house. I put on Ben Webster now as I cleaned my brushes and took off my Dodgers sweatshirt and went downstairs and poured myself a glass of wine and lit a fire and listened to Ben. It was the See You at the Fair album, the last one he recorded in the States before moving to Europe.

  I sat and stared at the fire and wondered all over again what secrets Alex Drysdale had died with, and now Lawton, two Stanford guys who were going to own the world.

  Yesterday I was lying. Today I’m telling the truth.

  Somebody ought to put that to music.

  When I had first met Christopher Lawton we had sat and looked out at the ocean and he had talked about Drysdale as if they’d gone through a shitty divorce. But not long after, Drysdale had chosen Lawton to oversee his fund if something happened to him. Which something sure had. Then the same thing had happened to Lawton.

  So who was the trustee now? The prime broker about whom Darrell Dawes had spoken might now be the executor himself, but it was the middle of the night in London even if I’d had his number, which I sure did not. Maybe Gina knew. Or could find out. Maybe I should have asked before she literally showed me the door.

  The more I found out, the less I knew. Not the first time it had happened that way.

  What secrets had Lawton died with? Belson said he might have the tox report in a couple days, to see if Lawton had been drugged before he died. Could he have killed himself, because of his secrets? Of course. I was no expert in depression. I had read enough stories about suicides to know how often even those closest to the victims said they had seen no signs. Was it as often as friends and family talked about all the signs they had seen? I had no way of knowing. Maybe Dr. Silverman would know that, too.

  But I was a trained detective, even if I once again felt like one trying to find my way out of a deep and dark forest, and I had sat at the bar at The Carmody the night before he was found dead in his study on Garden Street. Not only had I not seen indicators of a possible and imminent suicide, I would have bet my own life that they didn’t exist. This wasn’t Richard Cory at the end of the poem, going home and putting a bullet in his head.

  I drank wine and called Spike.

  When he answered I could hear the restaurant in the background. He was still only using half of the old space while the other half was repaired. But customers were again coming through the door.

>   “Do you think I’m a stupid bitch?” I said.

  He laughed. It sounded good. He was Spike again.

  “Neither,” he said. “Stupid, nor a bitch. Who said you were?”

  “A mean girl,” I said.

  He asked if I wanted to come over and sit with him and talk things out.

  “Not tonight,” I said. “I just want to sit here and feel stupid.”

  “You know there’s no talking to you when you’re like this,” Spike said. “You stupid bitch.”

  Now I laughed.

  For some reason, I thought about calling Richie. I still felt that way sometimes, at this time of night, sitting in this room, listening to jazz and drinking wine and having a fire going, Rosie the dog next to me on the couch. But I didn’t call Richie. Or Jesse. Sometimes the only companionship I needed was Rosie, even when things were going well with Jesse, the way they were now. But they had been going well with Richie until they weren’t.

  I had gotten into all of this to help out two friends. Now three people were dead. All of them shot, most likely by the same shooter. Perhaps the tall Russian I’d shot outside the Beacon Hill Hotel when all I was doing was picking up a pizza.

  I had managed to live this long not knowing any Russians, not really, and yet now my life was crawling with them, like I was an election they wanted to hack.

  I still wasn’t sure if Eddie Ross was Raskolnikov.

  Or what his real game was.

  My doorbell rang. Rosie growled. I walked into the foyer and even knowing that the door was locked and that I didn’t think someone intending me harm would ring the bell I still reached into the drawer of Melanie Joan’s antique console table and took out my gun.

  I slid back the opening to the peephole and saw Gina Patarelli.

  When I opened the door she said, “There’s something you need to look at.”

  Then she handed me a thumb drive.

  “I took this when I left,” she said.