by Mike Lupica
When I turned I saw Eddie Ross crouched near the other couch in the room, aiming his own gun at Gled.
“Gled!” I yelled, but I was a moment too late. Gled had put himself between Ross and me and Ross shot him now and Gled went down as Ross turned his gun on Richie.
I shot Eddie Ross with Vadim’s bull-barreled gun and then Eddie was the one on his back, and the room was finally still. I looked around for Emily Barnes. But she was gone.
Richie was kneeling next to Gled, who was bleeding in the hip area but very much alive. Richie called 911 and then went to find a towel to apply to Gled’s upper leg.
When Richie came back I said, “Did Gled call you?”
He grinned.
“Jesse,” he said. “We had the nice visit the other day before he went to see you, the lucky bastard. He thought your backup might eventually require backup.”
“Clearly the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” I said.
“Not bloody likely,” Richie Burke said.
Then I heard Eddie Ross say, “Hey?” in a voice that sounded as if it were coming from another room.
His jacket had fallen open. I could see the blood spreading on the white shirt. Richie went and got another towel and brought it back and I pressed it to where I knew the wound was. But it had been a center-mass hit, the way Phil Randall had taught me before the academy had.
In the distance, I heard the first sirens.
“Was this all you?” I said.
He coughed. A crackling, wet, terrible sound.
“You want to hear the funniest part?” he said. “It was her idea. She played poker with us that night, and after Alex left she said, ‘We can take this guy.’”
He waved me to get closer, trying to tell me something else before his eyes closed.
From across the room Gled said, “Ever notice how sooner or later everybody comes across somebody they shouldn’t have fucked with?”
I couldn’t help myself, despite everything around us in the room, everything that had just happened. I smiled at him.
“Eastwood?” I said.
He winced as he looked down at the towel in his hand.
“Gran Torino,” he said. “Except he was talking about himself. I was talking about you.”
SIXTY-NINE
This was late the next afternoon, at the Pilgrim National Bank on State Street, a conference room on the fortieth floor. I had brought Gina Patarelli with me.
Ms. Dietrich, one of the bank’s lawyers and also a notary public, was seated at one end of a long table. She had silver hair pulled back into a bun, thick black glasses at the end of her nose, and looked like every teacher I’d ever had who sat behind her desk and knew just by looking at me what I hadn’t studied the night before. Next to her was a vice president from Wharton, Tim Fox. He had taken a commuter flight from Philadelphia that morning after I’d called him and told him what we thought was going on.
Now Gina and I were standing with our backs to the huge window at the opposite end of the room from Ms. Dietrich, a very sporty view of downtown Boston behind us. Not as good as Alex’s view of the water had been at One Financial Center. Just the city, looking like a brilliant black-and-white photograph against a gray sky. Maybe I’d paint it like that one day.
Ms. Dietrich opened up a folder and shuffled some papers inside it as if paper-shuffling were something she had learned at banker school.
“Are we ready to begin?” she said.
“Not quite yet,” I said. “We’re waiting on the star of the show.”
She looked over her glasses at Gina and me as if she’d just noticed we were in the room. I smiled at her. She did not smile back.
“And you are?” she said.
“With the band,” I said.
The meeting had been scheduled for four o’clock. It was only five past, but I could tell that Ms. Dietrich was the type who wanted the plane to pull back from the gate on time. She had been drumming her pen on top of her folder for the past five minutes. She kept checking her watch.
It was then that the door behind her opened, and Jalen Washington came walking in.
SEVENTY
He tried to stay cool, I had to give him that. I thought perhaps his arm might still be in a sling. It wasn’t.
Just his ass.
“Heard you had some excitement last night,” he said, as if we were still buds. “Heard also that our friend Eddie didn’t make it.”
Now I smiled at him.
“You heard wrong,” I said.
He might have looked a couple degrees less cool now. Swift, subtle drop in temperature.
“That’s what Richie told me,” he said.
“Richie can be an even better liar than you are,” I said.
Ms. Dietrich said, “As fascinating as this all sounds, can we get started here?”
“Not quite yet,” I said again.
“May I ask who put you in charge of this meeting?” she said, putting some snap into her voice now, as if she were about to foreclose on the family farm.
“Since I represent the institution that is the beneficiary of Mr. Drysdale’s fund,” Tim Fox said, “I guess you could say I’m the one who put Ms. Randall in charge.” He smiled. “It’s the old one about the golden rule. He who has the gold, rules.”
“But I’m the trustee now, soon as we get the paper Chris Lawton drew up before the poor man killed himself,” Jalen Washington said. “Signed over his trustee rights to me. I got the right to distribute those funds however I want.”
“Why?” I said.
“Why what?” Jalen said.
“Why would Lawton do something like that?” I said. “Unless somebody had a gun to his head.”
“Got no idea what you’re talking about,” Jalen said. He patted his jacket where the inside pocket was. “All I got is that paper, waiting for me to sign it and this nice woman to notarize it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Go with that.”
“I’m here for my money, long story short.”
“Not if Ms. Dietrich doesn’t stamp that piece of paper in your pocket,” Fox said.
“But I’m the trustee now,” Jalen said.
“You don’t listen, do you?” Tim Fox said. “You’re the trustee when Ms. Dietrich says you are. Until she does, what you think is your money is actually going to Wharton.”
Gina Patarelli whispered to me, “Alex loved watching things get stamped. If they’d done this with a DocuSign, they might have gotten away with it.”
Dawk-u-sign.
Jalen Washington, wearing what looked to be one of Eddie Ross’s extra slim suits, was still standing, just inside the door, to Ms. Dietrich’s right.
“Eddie gave you up, Jalen,” I said. “And I’m pretty sure that when I explain to Ms. Dietrich how you really came into possession of that trust agreement, you can probably wait forever for her to go all notarial on you.”
“This is bullshit,” Jalen said.
Tim Fox leaned forward and tented his fingers under his chin.
“I’m curious,” he said to Jalen. “Where’d you get your MBA, Mr. Washington?”
“Orchard Park Houses,” I said to Tim Fox. “Eustis Street. Roxbury, Mass.”
“You don’t think I can’t get me a fancy lawyer, when I tell them how much money’s in play?” Jalen said. “Would’ve brought a couple today, thought I needed them.”
“Mine are better,” Tim Fox said.
“We’ll see about that,” Jalen said.
“When?” I said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jalen said.
I walked down to his end of the room then, his eyes on me the whole time, walked past him, walked past Ms. Dietrich, opened the conference room door.
“Check it out,” I said.
There, bookended by two of his troopers,
stood Desmond Burke.
Before Jalen Washington left, more than somewhat reluctantly, I told him to make sure and say hello to his girlfriend.
He turned to look at me one last time.
“Eddie really alive?” he said.
“Not even a little bit,” I said. “But if it’s any consolation, he was talking about you when he died.”
SEVENTY-ONE
Before Tim Fox had left the conference room, I had explained the situation with the restaurant, and Victor Morozov’s gym, and how technically I thought they might still belong to Alex Drysdale.
“I’ll take care of it,” he said.
“How?” I asked.
He smiled. “Don’t worry your pretty little head about it,” he said, then quickly added, “Kidding!”
The next night I was sitting next to Spike, at Spike’s, at the head of a long table he’d had set up in the back room. The front room was still a work in progress, because of the bombing. But the new front window had been installed, the bar had proved that it might be able to survive a nuclear attack, and the back room had needed far less repairs, and painting, than the front. Best of all? The dominant smell was food again, and not bomb.
Gled was there, still needing a cane to get around. Gina Patarelli was sitting next to Gled, as Gled had requested. Jesse was sitting next to me. Richie was across from Jesse. I’d thought about sitting between them, but decided against it. I didn’t want to feel like Switzerland, even with them engaged in what I imagined as an armed truce.
“All along I thought of it as Crime and Punishment,” I said. “And what it really turned out to be was The Grifters.”
“They were all lying,” Jesse said.
“Out the ass,” Richie Burke said.
Richie knew a lot of it, mostly because, as he said, Jalen Washington had been more than forthcoming once he’d gotten to Desmond’s house, about everything that had begun after a poker game at Eddie’s brownstone one night about six months ago.
“How did Jalen get a seat?” I said to Richie.
“You know that lady friend of his that Jalen talked about? Kerry?” Richie said. “Turns out her place of employment was, no shit, one of Tony Marcus’s high-end escort services. And Alex was one of her friends. She was the one who put them together. Or maybe it was destiny.”
When the game was over that night, Eddie and Jalen and Emily went for a drink. It really was Emily who told them, “You can take this guy for everything.”
Meaning the late Alex “Ace” Drysdale.
That was how it began.
It was a lot of talking from Richie, but he took us through the rest of it as quickly as he could. How old Russian friends of Eddie’s father had been using Drysdale’s fund to launder money, some of it from arms sales in Africa, more in lithium, which Richie said was big on the black market these days. The cash kept Drysdale afloat at the same time. But Eddie and Jalen convinced Drysdale that they could get him out from under the Russians once and for all. Clean out the fund and split up the money before all of them rode off into the sunset.
“Eddie’s Russian himself,” I said. “He thought they could get away with that?”
Richie said, “He and Jalen had something in common: They both thought they were the smartest ones in the game.”
“So Alex was in on it,” I said.
“Till he wasn’t,” Richie said. “He’s in bed one night with this Kerry, and he runs his mouth, not knowing she’s Jalen’s lady.” He shrugged. “That was that. They were about to have control of the fund, they didn’t need him anymore. Eddie had him taken out. Now there were only two people cutting up the pie. They just had to speed up the process. Lawton told Jalen about the meeting at the bank before he died.”
“They were never going to let Drysdale live,” Jesse said.
“It wasn’t just him opening his big mouth to Kerry,” Richie said. “By then he’d brought you into their lives.”
Jalen and Boyko went to Lawton’s house and told him that if he didn’t sign over his trustee rights, they were going to kill him. If he did sign, they’d let him live, maybe even give him a cut.
“He bought that?” I said.
Jesse said, “Sounds like he didn’t have much choice at the time.”
“Then they drugged him and made it look like a suicide, just to buy themselves the last bit of time they needed to get to the bank,” Richie said.
Belson had told me that morning that they’d gotten the tox results back on Lawton, and found chloral hydrate in his system, and that Lawton’s death was now being classified as a homicide.
Just not for long.
“They were banking, pardon the pun, on Wharton, being Wharton, not wanting to rush in with their hand out so soon after Drysdale died,” Richie said. “But they knew the power a trustee has. The document Jalen had Lawton sign mirrored the one Drysdale and Lawton signed.”
He paused.
“And, not for nothing?” he said. “Jalen believes that Lawton would have done the same thing he tried to do if he’d gotten the chance.”
“Walk into the bank and walk out with the money,” I said. “Like one more grifter.”
Gina smiled.
“But only if they could get the sucker notarized,” she said.
Suck-ah.
“Who shot him in the arm?” I said.
“One of the Russians,” Richie said. “I can’t keep them straight.”
“I gotta hand it to him,” Jesse said, “he was smart enough to nearly pull this off. But there’s an old-school cop word for guys like him. He’s a ‘skell.’ And being one caught up with him in the end.”
“I still don’t understand why they didn’t try to kill me sooner,” I said.
“They really did do it as a last resort, at least according to what Jalen told Desmond,” Richie said. “I told you one time that the only thing that scared Jalen was my father. He apparently kept telling Eddie that he didn’t want to be rich and happy on a beach somewhere and have me or my father’s men come looking for him.”
Richie smiled again. “Go figure,” he said. “He still loves you like a daughter.”
We drank to Gled then, and to Gina Patarelli, and to Spike having Spike’s back, free and clear. Jesse was having club soda with a twist. When the toast was over, he looked over at Richie.
“Where’s Jalen now?” Jesse said. “Or do I not want to know?”
“Not dead,” Richie said, “if that’s what you’re asking. What happens from here is between him and my father.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” I said.
“Probably so,” Richie said.
I took a small sip of champagne from one of the bottles Spike had just ordered up for the table.
“I was all that was standing between him and fifty million dollars,” I said.
“Well, yeah,” Gina said, “before taxes.”
SEVENTY-TWO
A few minutes later I got a call from Lee Farrell, who had indeed found the unsinkable Carly Meme alive, even if he said he now wanted to murder her himself.
“Emily called,” he said.
I told him to hold on, and walked over to the small hallway where the restrooms were located.
“Where is she?” I said.
“She called on a burner,” Lee said. “Told me that this was goodbye, she’d already told her mother the same thing, she was about to disappear.”
“Vegas?”
“She didn’t say,” he said.
“That was it?”
“Not quite,” Lee said. “She asked if I’d be talking to you, and I said I would, and then she told me to give you a message.”
“That doesn’t sound welcoming,” I said.
“Not so much,” Lee Farrell said. “She told me to tell you that it wasn’t over between the two of you.”
“Tony Marcus has said the same thing to me, on more than one occasion,” I said.
“And yet here you are,” Lee said.
He said that if he did hear from her again, even though he didn’t expect to, he’d let me know.
“I know how you hate loose ends,” he said.
“I just don’t shoot mine,” I said.
I ended the call. Came out from the hallway, stopped and looked across the room at our table. I smiled as I saw the way Gled was looking at Gina Patarelli. Jesse and Richie weren’t smiling at each other, but they seemed to be engaged in polite conversation. The two men in my life. I kept wanting it to be just one, as a way of untangling things. But I knew it would always be two. And things would always be complicated as hell, having both of them prominently in my life. Which both of them had just had a hand in saving. Somehow, as hard as I tried to make it otherwise, I was still living in a man’s world.
So often theirs.
They didn’t overanalyze things the way I did, whether in Susan Silverman’s office or not. Jesse’s life was hardly uncomplicated, as he continued to try to stay sober a day at a time. But when the two of them confronted a problem, they were generally about as uncomplicated as a punch in the mouth.
Now here the three of us were, in the same loud room at Spike’s.
Spike got out of his chair now and walked over to me and said, “How come you look like you’ve lost your best friend?”
“You’re my best friend,” I said.
He put his arm around me and squeezed. “You saved me, friend,” he said.
“You’ve saved me plenty of times,” I said.
“Kind of our deal,” he said.
I went back with him to the table. Jesse and Richie stopped talking.
“Think I’m gonna call it a night,” I said.
They both looked up at me.
I smiled. “Sometimes I just need to be alone.”
