Dead Irish

by John Lescroart

  He smiled at himself in the mirror, and his stomach answered him with a growling cramp.

  He grabbed his robe from the bathroom door and padded out to the landing, down the stairs through the alcove by the front door, and into the living room.

  “How are you doing, Sam?”

  He nodded and swallowed. “Alphonse,” he said, and seeing his daughter now behind him, “Linda.” He tried to smile. “What’s going on?”

  “I was kind of wondering the same thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Alphonse was taller—far taller—than Sam, but he had an economy of movement, a swift jagged way of acting that made him all the more of a force. He was absently cleaning his fingernails with a pocket file, and Sam saw the quick flick outward before he checked himself.

  “Today’s payday, man.”

  Linda popped in. “Remember? You were gonna come in to sign the checks. I mean, Alphonse really needed the money. . . .”

  Alphonse smiled all around. “I don’t do charity, man,’cept my own.”

  Sam, feeling the sweat start to run down under his arms, tried to sound calm. “Right. No problem there.”

  “See, Daddy,” Linda was saying, “so I figured it would be cool if we just came by. I mean, I knew where you were, so—”

  Sam held up a hand. Sure, Linda, he thought. Take the man I most want to avoid and walk him inside my face. His daughter, he thought, was hopeless.

  “No, it’s a good idea. Why don’t you go make yourself a drink while Alphonse and I go in the office?”

  She seemed to look to Alphonse for permission. He definitely gave her some message before she started moving back to the bar off the kitchen.

  “Linda?”

  She turned.

  “Would you mind telling Nika I’ll be out in a minute? She’s in the hot tub.”

  “Nice place,” Alphonse said as he entered the office. Then, as the door closed, “What the fuck’s going on, Sammy?”

  Sam, his stomach now a jumbled mass of razor blades and ice picks, leaned against his desk. “I think we’d better leave it Mr. Polk, Alphonse. Okay?”

  Reestablish that old authority, he thought. Alphonse took the knife, and before Sam had seen it move, his arm was bleeding through the slash in the white robe.

  “We do business and it’s Mr. Polk,” Alphonse said most reasonably as Sam felt the blood draining out of his face. “You fuck with me and it’s whatever I want.”

  Sam looked down at his arm, registering the blood as interesting. He felt no pain, except in his stomach.

  “I’m not fucking with you.”

  “You didn’t come to work today. Fact, you didn’t come to work this week.”

  “I didn’t know Ed Cochran was going to get killed Monday night.”

  “You didn’t?” Alphonse had turned around and was running his hand over the leather on the back of one of the chairs.

  “No, of course not. Why would I?”

  Sam considered getting to the desk drawer and pulling the gun on Alphonse, who was getting way ahead of himself, Sam thought, probably thinking about his future riches. But then he remembered that until the deal was done, he needed him.

  Suddenly his arm throbbed, and he looked down to see the blood. He lifted a thigh over the corner of the desk and slumped against it.

  “I feel bad about Ed,” Alphonse said. “I really do. I liked the guy.” He turned back to his boss. “But, like you and me, we had business. Hey, you all right?”

  Sam was feeling himself going over. Alphonse snapped the knife closed and crossed to the front of the desk. He held Sam upright, pulled the arm of the robe up roughly. “Come on, man, get a grip. You ain’t hurt.”

  “Let me get in my chair. Go ask Linda to get me a drink.”

  Force of habit, Sam thought. Alphonse still obeyed orders when they were given like orders. That’s the way to keep control—never show your own weakness. He was in his chair, the terry cloth now pressed tightly against the wound.

  “Nothing. We’re just talking,” he heard Alphonse say to Linda.

  Then he had the drink, a water glass filled with bourbon. He drank off half of it. “All right,” he said.

  “All right what?” Alphonse swung his legs, heels tapping the front of the cherry desk.

  “What did you want me to do? The place was crawling with cops. Didn’t you tell that to your people?”

  Alphonse sucked at his front teeth. “My friends, the time thing is, like . . . it’s like critical with them.”

  “I understand that.” The booze was working. He took another drink. “What’s the matter, Alphonse? This got you nervous?”

  The boy had evidently worked his way up and past his earlier bravado. Now the rush was wearing off. “I’m not nervous. My friends got contracts they gotta fill.”

  Sam forced a cold smile at his employee. “Don’t give me any of this pseudobusiness bullshit, Alphonse. They got a buncha junkies they gotta keep high—squeeze all the money they can out of them before they die.”

  “That money’s your money.”

  “A very small percentage, Alphonse. Very small.”

  “But a nice package.”

  Yeah, Sam thought. Four hundred twenty-five thousand dollars cash. A nice profit for his one-twenty investment. But only if it worked. If it didn’t, he was basically tapped out. He couldn’t think much about it if it didn’t work. Tapped out could be the least of it.

  His stomach was arguing with the bourbon, but it felt so good everywhere else he ignored it. “My guys wouldn’t deliver. Not there, and not on that particular Tuesday. That’s all there was to it.”

  “So where and when?”

  Sam put his head back against the firm leather. This wasn’t going to fly very well, and he knew it. “They’re gonna let me know.”

  “Shi—”

  “What can I tell you? They said this weekend, tomorrow maybe. They want to find a better place.”

  Alphonse pushed himself off the desk, walked nearly to the door, turned around. “So what do I do meanwhile?”

  “What I’m doin’, Alphonse. You wait.”

  He came right up under Sam’s nose, and Sam thought he could smell the fear. “I can’t wait, man, they’re on my ass. They been holdin’ their money a week now.”

  Well, Sam thought, I know what a good time that is. “Couple more days. Tell ’em by Monday night.”

  “I’m wrong again, they’ll cut my nuts off.”

  Sam finished the bourbon. “Every business has its risks, Alphonse. Point is, you gotta trust me. ’Cause if I’m scamming you, you’re meat anyway. You’re the one sold me to them, remember?”

  He’d been in distribution his whole life. Buy something from one source, move the merchandise, and sell it to another for profit. That was the American way.

  The only hitch was, in this cocaine business, you had people who were not entirely trustworthy. That was fine, Sam knew, as far as it went. People cheated wherever they could, at solitaire even. But it would be especially stupid to forget it here.

  And he had done that with Cruz—forgotten that cardinal rule. After playing straight for all those years, the bastard had just walked away from the deal. Keep Cruz in mind, Polk told himself, if ever again you’re tempted to trust somebody in business.

  The arm had stopped bleeding. Alphonse had been right—it wasn’t a bad cut, maybe four inches down the front of his arm.

  Since he wasn’t about to trust anybody on this deal, he thought he’d set it up smart. He still thought so. The connection had been from years before. An importer, a businessman. Never touched drugs himself. They’d talked at a party—it must have been the early seventies, when cocaine was just starting to catch on.

  But at the time, Sam was doing fine with newspapers—who wouldn’t in San Francisco with the Free Press, Rolling Stone and the other hippie rags, to say nothing of the majors? He hadn’t needed to risk anything back then.

  “Hey, anytime. I mean it. Seed m
oney’s always in demand,” the connection had said.

  So now the newspaper business had gone belly-up, and Cruz had hung him out to dry, cut off using him for distribution, just when he couldn’t afford to go broke. Nika wasn’t the kind of woman to go betting on the come. He’d promised it up front, had delivered up to now. That was their deal. If he broke it, he wouldn’t even blame her for walking.

  Who could? A woman who looked like her, who could do what she did, she could have it all, and right now. She could demand it anywhere and get it, and he knew it. More important, she knew it.

  So he’d made the call to the old connection. One hundred twenty would bring him between three fifty and five, or, if he wanted to step on it himself and peddle the street, maybe a million or two.

  No, he didn’t want that. He wanted in and out. What he wanted was to put up the money to make delivery worthwhile. Then unload the stuff. Deal with buyers and sellers individually—to groups of guys who didn’t know each other, who wouldn’t be likely to get to each other and set him up. Everybody makes a profit and everybody needs the middleman, so he’s safe.

  That was the theory.

  The only problem was he had to take delivery himself. He needed Alphonse for when it was time to pass the trash and deliver him his money, but he didn’t want anybody else involved with the actual delivery. For that, the canal behind Cruz’s had been ideal. He’d gone down last weekend, cut the fence, set it all up perfectly. By all rights it should have been over already.

  Goddamn Cochran, he thought. God damn Ed all to hell.

  “Jesus, Sammy, no robe even?”

  “I don’t notice much on you. Move over.”

  Nika looked at her husband with approval. He didn’t have a great body, but he was hung like a peeing horse. And for an old guy, he sure wanted to use it a lot. Well, as long as he didn’t try to pull any more of that holding out her allowance he’d tried last week. Two could play the holding-out game. As she’d taught him.

  She reached over and touched the cut on his arm. “What happened?”

  She ran her finger along the cut.

  “A lamp got broken. Linda tripped on a cord.”

  “What was she doing here, anyway?” Nika asked.

  Sam shrugged. “I forgot to sign some checks, that’s all. She’s gone.”

  “Does it hurt?” She moved next to him, thigh to thigh. He felt a hand come to rest above his knee.

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “Can’t even feel it.”

  16

  HARDY HAD NEVER heard of the town of Gonzalez. His first inclination after he got the call was to think that for some reason Cruz had wanted him out of Dodge and had asked one of his workers to call him.

  But that would have made no sense coming from Cruz. After he hung up, Hardy went to his map and found the place—south of Salinas on 101. It was a real place.

  On the way down, he thought he should have made some calls before getting in his car. He almost pulled over in Redwood City, but then thought it would be better not to worry anybody needlessly. What if it wasn’t what he thought it was?

  Also, he was reasonably certain that someone—possibly Cavanaugh, especially after their heart-to-heart yesterday—would have tried to reach him earlier.

  He hadn’t been down the Peninsula in nearly a year, and it hadn’t changed. What was left to change? The whole thing had been developed so the only possibility of something new was a face-lift on a business park, a Tastee Freeze turning into a Burger King, Astro-turfing a gas station.

  Around Palo Alto, the Bay and the flats struggled for the natural look for a few miles along the freeway before widening out into Moffett Field, with its airplane hangars so big that it rained inside them, and then the other Santa Clara fun parks—the minigolf courses, batting cages, go-kart tracks.

  Hardy kept his eyes on the road. His head hurt just slightly from too much beer. Really from getting up too early, he had told himself. Really from too much beer. The old not-enough-sleep routine as the reason for his hangovers was wearing thin, even to himself.

  South of San Jose the countryside began to open up, the foothills still green from the spring rains, the scrub oaks starting to bud. Man, he thought, when California doesn’t screw with itself, it is some kind of beautiful place.

  He was speeding and knew it, but didn’t care. The road was all but empty, and he had always had a knack for spotting the Highway Patrol. Besides, he would say he was on a summons from Sheriff Munoz of Gonzalez and probably get off with a warning anyway.

  But for some reason—maybe the thickness in his head—he found he couldn’t concentrate for long on the reason for the trip. It made his headache worse.

  Getting into Steinbeck country, he rolled down the car window to Gilroy and the smell of garlic. The sun was higher now, though there were still wisps of mist over the occasional patch of water. It was getting on toward ten o’clock.

  A sign at the town limits told Hardy that Gonzalez was the home of the Tigers. “They sure kept the move from Detroit a secret,” he thought as he passed the one-story high school with its faded billboard.

  His destination was a square concrete emergency clinic painted an institutional yellow, set two streets back behind what passed for downtown.

  Sheriff Munoz greeted him at the door. With a head of balding gray hair and a deep soft-spoken voice, he had all the authority of the small-town cop with, apparently, none of the arrogance. Maybe he’d been in the job a long time. His uniform was lived in, his body solid and big but with no flab. The face was square, clean-shaven and worried. “Is this your card?”

  Hardy nodded.

  “It’s the only thing we had tying him to anything.”

  “No wallet?”

  Munoz just looked at Hardy—not glared, looked—but his eyes were saying that they’d already covered that.

  “Is he still alive?”

  “Physically. He hasn’t come up yet. He’ll come around. Now he’s sedated.”

  There were only two rooms behind the open reception area. Steven Cochran was in the second one.

  Hardy swallowed hard, remembering the vision of the brother, Eddie, less than a week ago, on a similar gurney. Jesus, they look alike, he thought. He hadn’t noticed it before—Steven had initially struck him as much thinner. He forced himself to look. Maybe because the damage appeared so similar. The right side of Steven’s face was covered with a bandage, his right arm in a sling with a bandaged hand sticking out of it.

  “What happened?”

  “Do you recognize him?”

  First things first. Munoz was right. “We gotta call his folks,” Hardy said.

  “If you don’t mind, sir, what’s your connection to this boy?”

  They were in the other, empty, examination room, drinking 7-Eleven coffee brought in by the nurse receptionist. Hardy’s headache was gone. He explained how Steven had come to get his card.

  “Funny that’s all he had.” It was a statement, not meant to be accusatory.

  “Where was it?”

  “Front pocket.”

  “Maybe he lost his wallet.”

  The sheriff nodded. “Maybe.”

  “Listen,” Hardy said, “I’m not any kind of official, but you mind if we talk about it? I’ve got a reference you might . . .”

  Munoz struck Hardy as a thorough cop, so it didn’t surprise him much when he got up to make the call to Glitsky’s home number. When the sheriff returned, he seemed satisfied. “Okay,” he said, “you think this is related to what you’re working on?”

  Hardy drank some coffee and asked him what exactly had happened.

  Munoz had his elbows on his knees, hands out in front of him holding the nearly full cup. His black sunken eyes focused unblinking on the wall over Hardy’s head. Hardy thought they were about the saddest eyes he’d ever seen.

  The sheriff said, “Lady named Hafner grows ’chokes maybe six miles south. She and the family were on their way up to the farmers’ market in Salinas. They
usually leave before dawn and try to get a good place, you know. So they’re turning onto 101 and one of the kids sees what he thinks might be a deer by the road. Anyway, that’s food, you know, so Momma stops and it’s . . . Steven’s the name, huh?”

  “Steven.”

  “So she got here and the doc called me.” There was a long pause, as though Munoz was trying to fathom how things like this could happen. “I figure—and the doc says it makes sense—he was thrown from the vehicle already unconscious. That’s probably why he lived, he was so loose. Just pretty much peeled the right side of his body, broke his arm, collarbone, couple of foot bones.”

  “Could he have just fallen? Bounced out of the back of an open pickup maybe?”

  “Yeah, he could’ve. He didn’t, though.”

  Hardy waited.

  “He was,” Munoz paused, “sexually molested. Maybe the rest of the injuries—that look a hell of a lot like a beating—maybe they could have come from the impact hitting the ground at sixty, but the one . . .”

  “Got it,” Hardy said.

  “Just once I’d like to catch up with somebody does something like this. Not after a trial or anything, but catch ’em red-handed.”

  “It would be a great joy,” Hardy agreed.

  “Your friend Glitsky in the city, he gonna call missing persons, you think? Let ’em know?”

  Hardy thought that he probably would—Glitsky believed in following through, but Hardy didn’t feel right making the commitment for him. After all, Glitsky dealt in homicides. Lost and found children were not his problem, and if somebody in San Francisco had the bad grace to get killed on this fine Saturday morning, it’s possible he might forget.

  “It wouldn’t hurt if we called,” he said, though he let Munoz do it officially.

  Warm and drowsy. Smell of fresh linen. Had Mom finally made his bed?

  Steven tried to open his eyes. They didn’t seem to work. The eyelids were too heavy, his whole body too weak.