by Ed Gaffney
When the coffee was ready, Anthony poured them each a cup, and they went into his office. He sat down behind his desk, took a sip, and said, “So, I’m guessing that you’ve come to tell me that you’ve found another job.”
Nothing like getting off on the totally wrong foot. He couldn’t have been further off if he’d tried. Maria didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. She took a sip of coffee, and her hand was shaking. This was a little harder than she’d thought it was going to be.
“Oh no, that’s not it,” she said. “I, um, actually, I wanted to talk to you because I was afraid that one of these days you were going to tell me that I had to go look for another job.”
A puzzled look came over Anthony’s face, and then he smiled, a little carefully. “So, then, just so we’re on the same page. As I understand it, right now, we are on two completely different pages.” His smile grew a little broader. He put his mug down and sat back in his chair. “Tell you what. Let’s make a deal. You tell me what you wanted to tell me, and I’ll try not to blurt out any stupid guesses about what you’re going to say. How’s that sound?”
Maria smiled. One thing about Anthony that she really liked was how he could be humble about his mistakes and still seem like he was totally confident about himself. It was a trick Maria hoped to learn herself. She hated making mistakes.
“Okay,” she said. “Here’s what I wanted to say.” She looked over at him and hesitated. He seemed so sure of himself, so under control. What right did she have to question whether he was running his business into the ground?
Then an image of Felix and her mother packing their things and moving out of their new place back into the old neighborhood came into her head, and whether Maria had the right or not, she had to speak up. She took a deep breath and blurted out, way too fast, “I wanted to say that I’m afraid you aren’t earning enough money to keep the business going.”
Anthony just sat there, waiting. He might have been nodding a little. At least he wasn’t firing her. Yet. So she continued. “And I’m scared when you spend all your time, and even some of your own money, on cases where people don’t pay you, and I’m afraid that one of these days you’re going to go to the bank and find that there isn’t any money left, and even though you’re a really good private investigator, and even though I’ve worked really hard for you, you’re going to have to fire me because you can’t afford to keep paying somebody to work for you when you don’t have any money coming in.”
Anthony still sat there, looking at her like he didn’t know that she was finished. Maria couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Well, it was too late to take any of it back, even if she’d wanted to, which she didn’t. So she just kept on talking. “And I know I shouldn’t have said all that, but I like it here, and I really need the job, and I hope you won’t fire me for saying all of this, but I just figured if I was right and the company was in trouble, and I didn’t say anything, you were probably going to have to fire me anyway, so…” Her voice trailed off. She had started to babble. The message was delivered. If he was going to fire her, this was the time. She took another deep breath and prepared for the worst.
Anthony took a sip of coffee, cleared his throat, and put the mug back onto his desk. “Okay. First of all, I just want to tell you that I really appreciate the fact that you shared all of that with me. It was, well, I’m a little surprised, but I probably shouldn’t be. Anyway, it sounded like it wasn’t the easiest thing you’ve ever done. So thank you for that.”
That sure didn’t sound like an introduction to getting fired, but there was obviously much more to come. Maria tried to sit still while Anthony paused before speaking again.
“I started this business on September 8, 1998. I can remember the exact date because it was the one-year anniversary of my partner’s death.”
It took a moment for Maria to process that, mainly because it didn’t make sense. “You started this company a year after your business partner died?”
“Not my business partner,” Anthony said, with a sad smile. “My life partner.” He reached around and took a framed photo from its place on the credenza behind his desk and handed it to her.
“I thought that was a picture of your parents’ wedding anniversary,” Maria said, looking at the group shot. An older couple was at the center of six people who stood smiling, shoulder-to-shoulder, arms around each other’s waists. Anthony was at the end on the left side of the photo. He looked no different than he did today. Well, okay, he had more hair.
He was standing next to another young man with a great smile wearing a button-down striped shirt. On the opposite side of the group a college-aged boy and girl stood beside each other. Those two looked a lot alike.
Anthony came out from behind his desk to stand next to her. “It is. My parents are in the middle, and my brother and sister—they’re twins—are on one side of them. I’m on the other side, and this,” he said, pointing to the smiling man with the striped shirt, “that’s Joe. My partner, Joe Hillary. We met in our last year in business school, and we started living together after we graduated.”
“Wait a minute,” Maria blurted out. “You’re telling me you’re gay?”
“That’s right,” he replied. He had an odd smile on his face. “Gay as a banana daiquiri.”
Talk about surprises. Anthony was gay? He sure didn’t look gay—at least not like her cousin Emilio, who didn’t listen to anything except show tunes and Barbra Streisand CDs and wore skintight pink pants and pastel scarves 24/7. An image of Anthony punching that guy in the face in the parking lot came into Maria’s mind. It was hard to image Emilio getting into a fistfight.
Whatever. The fact that Anthony was gay actually explained an awful lot. Why the best-dressed private investigator in the world would have no girlfriend. Why he treated Maria like a perfect gentleman. Maybe why he wanted purple legal pads in the office.
But it sure didn’t explain why he needed to bankrupt his business.
“Joe and I had been a couple for seven years when that picture was taken. Five days later, he was killed by a drunk driver on the Mass Pike. That was on September 8,1997.”
“Oh my God, that’s terrible,” Maria said. Her head was spinning. Anthony was gay. And a widower. Widow. Whatever a gay person was. How awful.
“Anyway, Joe and I had a lot of money,” Anthony explained. “We hit it big in the dot-com investment boom.”
“You worked on the Internet?”
“Not exactly,” Anthony responded. “We were investors. And we were really good at it. We made millions speculating on high-tech stocks, and we also predicted when the bottom was going to fall out of that market, so by the time it crashed, we’d already pulled most of our money out and put it in a much safer portfolio.”
Maria was dying to ask her boss about a thousand questions, and she was ashamed that way up on the list was: Can you teach me how I can hit it big as an investor? But she forced herself to stay quiet.
Anthony sat down in a chair across from her, inhaled deeply, and began again to speak.
“Joe was a really organized person, and one of his favorite things was to plan”—Anthony cleared his throat. His eyes looked a little wet—“to plan for our future together. What we would do, where we would live, how we could have enough money to travel wherever we wanted when we got older—that kind of thing.” He smiled sadly. “We had this plan to go to Australia. Joe had a thing about kangaroos. I told him that all we had to do was go to the zoo to see one, but that didn’t count. He had to experience one in the wild. That was one of his life goals. See, he kept this list…”
Anthony shook his head and laughed softly. “Sounds like I might not have talked about this stuff enough, huh? Hard to believe. Anyway.” He cleared his throat and started again, in a slightly louder voice. “Anyway, Joe did a lot of research on various financial products that would set us up for a comfortable future. We both bought annuities, we set up significant SEP investments….” Maria must have looked as confused as
she felt, because Anthony shook his head again and said, “It doesn’t really matter. The bottom line is that we were pretty much set for life.”
He looked off into the distance for a minute. “Most of Joe’s relatives weren’t comfortable with the fact that he was gay, but he was one of those guys that just loved the idea of being in a big family. So even though it was sometimes a little awkward, he never missed one of their functions—weddings, christenings, reunions—he went to them all. So naturally, when he found out that his cousin was having his thirtieth-birthday party in Boston, he drove in to be there.”
Anthony took another sip of coffee. “But that night, on his way back home, just as he was passing the Newton Corner exit on the Mass Pike, this drunk driver crashed right into him. Head-on. He had actually managed to get on the road going the wrong way. Joe never had a chance.”
Once when Maria was driving Felix to Sears to get back-to-school clothes, they’d been rear-ended in the parking lot by a teenager who wasn’t paying attention. It was a minor accident, thank the Virgin Mary, and nobody was hurt. But Maria had nightmares about Felix for weeks afterward. She couldn’t even imagine what she would have done if something serious had happened to him.
“After that, I just wanted to disappear. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, I didn’t want to see anyone, I didn’t even want to think about anyone. I remembered that my sister’s college roommate told me that her honeymoon on Bali was the most isolated experience she’d ever had, so I packed a bag, drove to the airport, and caught the first flight out. First stop, Hawaii. What a mistake that was. Everybody on the plane was going on a vacation—it was like a gigantic party. I plugged myself into the headphones and half hoped that the stupid plane would just crash into the sea.
“When we finally landed, I didn’t even leave the airport. I just took a nap in the terminal, and then flew to Bali. Where I rented the most isolated cabin I could find on the island. For about five weeks, I didn’t do anything except walk around on the beach and stare out into the ocean.”
Maria tried to picture Anthony as a beach bum. She couldn’t do it.
“Anyway, when I finally started to feel like myself again, I realized that thanks to all of Joe’s planning, including a ridiculous life insurance policy he had gotten a few years before the accident, I had so much money that I could pretty much do whatever I wanted for the rest of my life.” He stood up, returned the picture of his family and Joe to the credenza, then sat back down behind his desk. “And even though I knew I’d never get over Joe’s death, I also knew that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with sand in my shorts. So I came back home.”
He took another sip of coffee. “I know it sounds silly, but ever since I saw Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, I’d always had this secret desire to be a private eye. So I did some research and, long story—well, not exactly short, I guess.” He shrugged. “Here I am.”
Maria shifted in her seat. He was coming to the money part. She could tell. She held her breath.
“As far as your concern about the business,” Anthony said, leaning forward and clearing his throat, “I hope this isn’t a problem for you, but whether or not I make money doing this job is completely irrelevant to me.”
Maria’s heart sank. So it really was only a matter of time before this whole thing crashed. She felt a little queasy.
“I take the cases I want to take, and only the cases that I want to take, but it doesn’t have to do with whether the clients can pay me a lot of money, or even if they can pay me anything at all. That’s because, well, I have enough income from a lot of other sources to take care of myself, and to take care of any money that I might lose in this business, with plenty to spare.” He made a point to look directly into Maria’s eyes. “So I hope you believe me when I tell you that you are working here because I want you to work here. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s the way it’s going to stay. Naturally, I’ll understand if your situation changes and you have to leave. But if you like it here, you should feel as secure as you can that you will have a job here. As long as you keep doing the work you’ve been doing, there’s no way I’m going to fire you.”
Maria wasn’t quite sure, but she thought she was either on the verge of a terrible headache or maybe she was just going to burst into tears. When she exhaled, it felt like she’d been holding her breath for about ten minutes. She tried to take a drink of coffee, and it felt like she hadn’t moved her arm for a week.
But before she could even think of something to say, the phone rang. She picked it up, and an obviously disguised male voice said, “Keep fucking around with the Gardiner case, and you and your punk boss will be real sorry.”
ATTORNEY ZACK WILSON WAS OPENING THE morning mail.
But what he was really doing was still trying to digest yesterday’s meeting with Justin’s kindergarten teacher. She wasn’t worried about the fact that Justin seemed more interested in drawing than in the alphabet, or that he was terrible at sports, or that he happened to enjoy singing with his eyes closed. In fact, she wasn’t worried about much of anything. She thought Justin was doing great, and would enjoy first grade very much.
Was it really going to be that easy?
Without any warning, Terry burst through the door, plopped his large frame down onto the sofa at the opposite end of the office, and announced, “You’re not going to believe what happened when I was watching Lovell yesterday at court.”
Assistant District Attorney Louis Lovell was the prosecutor in the Babe Gardiner case, and although he had a good reputation, he was relatively new to the area. So Terry had attended a hearing in one of Lovell’s cases to get a feel for the way he worked.
Zack opened a letter from a bank offering him a credit card that displayed a television show’s logo. He dropped it into the garbage. “Judge Park throw you in jail for contempt?” Zack asked. A while ago Terry had had a run-in with another judge in a different case that had resulted in Terry spending some time in the courthouse lockup. He loved being reminded of it.
“No,” Terry said from the sofa. He was now completely stretched out on his back, eyes closed, probably about fifteen seconds from unconsciousness. “But maybe he will after I come over there and beat you like a Christmas drum.”
Zack opened the next envelope. This would wake Terry up. “Hey. Did you know that there’s a new foreign-car dealership opening up in Springfield this summer? Could be time for that Ferrari.”
Terry got up and came over to the desk. “Porsche, nimrod. Here.” He took the mailing from Zack. “Give me that before you hurt yourself.” He looked it over, shook his head, wadded it up, and fired it into the garbage. “Andy Inverness already has too many dealerships. He’s a crook.” Terry returned to the couch. “Speaking of crooks, are we going to talk about that hearing yesterday, or what?”
Zack opened up the next envelope. Judge Harold Baumgartner was hosting a statewide criminal justice ethics seminar. “Just a sec. Harry Baumgartner is doing another ethics thing.” He flipped the envelope over to Terry. “It’s your turn to go.”
Terry grabbed the envelope, opened it, and sighed. “Fine. It’ll be a miracle if fifteen people show up. I hate those meetings. And the dinners are always really shitty, too.” He lay back down on the couch.
“You want a tissue to wipe away your tears?”
“You want to talk about the hearing, or you want a whupping?”
“A ‘whupping,’ Elvis?”
“Shut up. And don’t call me Elvis.”
“Okay,” Zack said. “What happened at the hearing?”
Terry opened his eyes and sat up. “Well, I wasn’t expecting much. It was just a motion to suppress, right? But two minutes into it, and I was seeing things I’d never seen before in my life.” He shook his head and laughed softly. “It started when Lovell was asking this cop about a search where they found all this cocaine in the defendant’s apartment. By the way, this was a bad search. They went to this guy’s apartment, busted in with no wa
rrant, no emergency, nothing. They didn’t even have probable cause—”
“They just broke into the guy’s home?” Zack interrupted, starting to tear open the last envelope. He’d heard of dumb cops, but this sounded beyond dumb. “How did they justify that—or maybe I should say, how did they try to justify that—in the police report?”
“They said that they thought they’d find a gun that had been used in a shooting around the corner ten minutes before.”
Whoa. Besides being totally wrong, it was a little alarming. Memo to law enforcement: Please be advised that, effective immediately, the sound of a weapon firing in a neighborhood suspends all constitutional rights in that neighborhood.
“So what happened?”
Terry got up and began to pace the room. “Well, obviously somebody told this cop that if he didn’t make up something good, the judge wasn’t going to let the D.A. use the drugs as evidence in the trial. So the cop starts going on and on about how the defendant looked like he was hiding something as he went into his place, and how it sounded like he was doing something sneaky after the cops knocked on the door. You know. ‘He was putting his hand in his pocket.’ ‘He was acting in a furtive manner.’ ‘He said a bad word.’ You name it. And Lovell keeps flipping through the police report like the cop is insane.”
“Really?”
By now, Terry had completed a circuit of the room and had returned to the couch. “Yeah. At first I thought he was playing along. I was expecting—you know—‘But, Officer, it doesn’t reflect that in your report. Can you explain the discrepancy?’ And then the cop would go: ‘Why, as a matter of fact, I can, Mr. Assistant District Attorney. It just so happens that when I wrote the report, I left out some information which I later discovered in my notes….’ But it turns out that Lovell really was caught off-guard by this cop. He’s fumbling around, trying to make sense of the whole thing, probably without trying to make the cop look more like an asshole than he already did, when all of a sudden, totally out of nowhere, the cop testifies—get this—that he heard a gunshot inside the apartment.”
