by Ray Daniel
“That’s not what I mean. Someone else is looking for Maria.”
“Who?”
“Who was with you on Hanover?”
I reached down, picked up Lee’s Fudgsicle by the stick, and handed it to him.
“Please don’t litter in front of my house.”
Lee took the Fudgsicle.
I said, “I have to go.” Turned and walked up my front steps.
“Tucker,” Lee said.
I stood at the top of the steps, looking down at Lee’s greasy windblown hair. “Yeah?”
Lee climbed the steps, stood next to me. It was so cold that the Fudgsicle didn’t even drip in his grasp.
“That night when you found Pupo’s body, there were Boston cops at the end of Holden Court. They were having a discussion with Bobby Miller about shoving Boston’s citizens.”
“Okay.”
“Nobody ever came out of those buildings.”
“So whoever shot Joey disappeared with Maria?”
“Or he was dead before you got there. You were the only one who claimed to have heard a shot.”
“What are you saying?”
“Did you kill Pupo too?”
“Thanks for the help, Lee.”
I slipped through my door and shut it in his face. He probably threw the Fudgsicle into my bushes.
Thirty-Three
Caroline had changed into call-them-on-the-carpet clothes, replacing her fantastic green dress with a severe black business suit. She sat behind her desk, glowering at Bobby Miller, Frank Cantrell, and me as we sat in a line like naughty schoolboys.
“When are you fucking morons going to get your act together?” she asked.
I said, “What did I do?”
“You shut up.”
I crossed my arms and pouted.
Caroline pointed at Bobby. “I thought we had a deal.”
Bobby said, “We do have a deal.”
“Then why is Frank Cantrell trying to get a different deal?”
Bobby looked at Frank. “Jesus, Frank. You could have told me.”
“I don’t work for you,” Frank said.
“It’s a little thing called teamwork.”
Caroline said, “This is like the Three Stooges.”
“I didn’t do anything,” I said.
“Shut up.”
I crossed my arms again.
Caroline said to Bobby, “Sal’s more valuable to you out than in. Make it happen.”
“I can’t just make it happen,” Bobby said. “The DA thinks we have Sal on an airtight murder charge.”
Caroline said, “Well you don’t.”
“She’s right,” Frank said. “We don’t have a case against Sal.”
“Why not?”
“Because our star witness, Pupo, is dead.”
“Yeah, probably because one of Sal’s guys killed him.”
Caroline said, “Idle speculation. Do you still want to keep your deal with Sal?”
“What deal?” I asked.
“Shut up, Tucker,” Bobby said.
“Screw you, Bobby. What deal?”
“Sal has been informing against David Anderson,” said Caroline.
Frank turned to Bobby. “What? You could have told me.”
Bobby said, “Shut up, Frank.”
“You know? Teamwork?”
“Sal told me he’d never turn,” I said.
“He’d never turn against his guys,” Caroline said. “Anderson isn’t one of his guys, and Sal hates Anderson’s guts.”
“I think Anderson figured it out on his own,” Bobby said.
“Just fucking great,” said Caroline.
Frank asked, “Then why didn’t he just kill Sal?”
“Because that would be too easy,” I said.
“What?”
“Those private equity guys are ruthless.”
“Anderson wants to destroy Sal as a warning to others,” Bobby said. “Kill his wife, take his daughter, show that he’ll play dirtier than any of them.”
I said, “I think the plan was to kill Maria too.”
“Jesus,” Frank said. “That’s cold.”
I said, “It’s just lucky I had taken her to the Common.”
“So who took her from you?” Frank asked.
“Must have been Pupo,” I said.
“Who has her now?”
Silence hung in the room.
I asked, “How did Anderson find out Sal was an informant?”
“Pupo,” Frank said.
“What?” Bobby asked.
“Pupo had turned on Sal. He told us that Sal killed Marco.”
Caroline said, “Pupo was a lying piece of shit.”
“Yeah,” Frank said. “But I think he was a lying piece of shit who worked for us and David Anderson.”
“He was playing all sides?” Bobby asked.
“Yeah. If Sal said it, Pupo blabbed it.”
“And you think that Sal told him about our Anderson deal?”
“Why not? Sal and Pupo were friends, at least until the end.”
“What do you mean, until the end?” Caroline asked.
Frank said, “The Boston cops tell us that they had an argument at Marco’s funeral. Sal walked out.”
“I don’t see how this changes anything,” I said. “I still need to find Maria.”
“I don’t think we’re going to find Maria.” Bobby said.
“You still think Anderson killed her?”
“Anderson has people for that.”
I thought back to Anderson’s comment about “security services.” “Why not just arrest him?” I asked.
“Because we have less on him than anyone else in this thing.” Bobby nodded at Caroline. “This one would have him out in a day.”
Caroline said, “Screw you, Miller.”
“You saying you wouldn’t take the case?” Bobby asked.
“That’s got nothing to do with this. Let’s focus on Sal.”
“That’s your job, Caroline. It’s not mine. Sal probably didn’t kill his best friend and his wife, but he sure as hell has killed someone somewhere.”
I had watched Sal kill someone. It was the day he saved my life. I stood.
Caroline said, “Where are you going?”
“It seems to me that Anderson is the crux to this whole thing,” I said. “I’m going to find out what he’s doing.”
“The hell you are,” said Bobby. “I’m running this investigation.”
“Really?” I asked. “You still wasting time tracking my GPS?”
Frank Cantrell chortled.
Caroline, Bobby, and I said in unison, “Shut up, Frank.”
“Fuck you all,” Frank said.
Caroline said, “The three of you, get out of my office.”
We gathered our winter coats and left.
Outside Bobby said, “I’m serious, Tucker, don’t mess with Anderson. You’ll get yourself killed.”
“Well, then, you’ll just have to use your GPS tracker to find my body,” I said.
“You don’t know who Anderson’s got working for him.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“When I find out, I’ll let you know.”
Thirty-Four
After two days of getting dragged into tablecloth restaurants, I had finally found my way to Bukowski Tavern, a place where I could sit at the bar, eat a burger, and snigger at the boob jokes in the menu. I have simple needs.
Those needs didn’t include sitting next to a backstabbing scumbag from the Boston Globe, but there he was: Jerry Rittenhauser, enjoying a spiced winter ale and eating a gigantic hot dog. I tweeted:
Don’t you have some place to be? #imaginedbartalk @bu
kowskiboston
“This bar is outstanding,” said Rittenhauser.
“It’s my happy place,” I said.
“You get happy often?”
“Not lately.” I pulled up the Maria article on my phone. “I read your story. Good list of gangland warriors. I know most of these guys: Hugh, Oscar, Pistol—”
“Well, Oscar and Pistol are out of the running.”
“Who is this guy Vince Ferrari?”
“Great name, huh? Love to have him win the war.”
“How did you find out about him?”
“Um … a source.”
“I see.”
“Seriously, you don’t want to know.”
“I do want to know.”
“Well, I’m not going to tell you.”
“I’m looking for guys who might have grabbed Maria.”
“I can’t help you.”
“Right. That’s what they all say.”
We sat for a moment, eating comfort food and drinking beer. Actually, come to think of it, a good stout is a comfort food. Hell, if monks could live off it … my beer was empty.
Mikey the bartender pointed at the empty glass. “Dude?”
“Sure,” I said.
“That’s your third,” Rittenhauser noted.
“My mother’s dead. You want the job?”
Rittenhauser went back to his beer. “Don’t be a dick.”
I let the question of Rittenhauser’s source rattle around in my head. The answer fell out like a gumball.
“What else did David Anderson tell you?” I asked.
“Who’s David Anderson?”
“He’s your source.”
“You mean the one at Battery Street Private Capital?”
“I thought you didn’t know him.”
“He’s not my source.”
“Of course he is. He’s the only guy who’s in this fight but not on your list.”
Rittenhauser said nothing. Drank his beer.
I said, “Okay, that’s settled. What can you tell me about him?”
“I can tell you that he’s a private equity guy who lives on Battery Street.”
“Yeah, I knew that.”
“Well, there you go.”
“You must have something else.”
“Apparently, he picks a lot of losers.”
“I only know about one. You ever hear of PassHack or Jarrod Cooper?”
“Yeah, I heard of him. What a horrible idea. I don’t want my passwords hacked.”
“What you’re probably saying is that you don’t want to know it’s possible.”
Jerry took a big swig of beer. “Is it possible?”
“Of course it’s possible. Somebody steals a database of encrypted passwords, cranks at them for a few days with a fast computer to pull the passwords out.”
“They can decrypt the passwords?”
“No, they can’t. But they guess and encrypt the guesses. Then they compare their encrypted guess to your encrypted password. If they match, then you’re cracked.”
“Does guessing work?”
“Depends on your password. It’s like cracking a safe. Richard Feynman, the physicist, used to crack a lot of safes at Los Alamos.”
“What did he do?”
“He’d come into a guy’s office with a stethoscope and go to work.”
“He’d use the stethoscope to listen to the tumblers?”
“No, he’d use the stethoscope to look cool. It had nothing to do with safe cracking.”
“Then how would he crack it?”
“First he’d try the default combination that shipped with the safe. That worked a lot.”
“Oh.”
“Then he’d try variants of the owner’s birthday.”
“That seems obvious.”
“If those didn’t work, then he’d just try all the combinations. There were a lot fewer than you’d think because the safes back then weren’t precise. They were like the combination lock you use for your gym locker. You could be off by one number and they’d still open, so there were fewer real combinations. Feynman could get through them all pretty quickly. Jarrod was doing the same sort of thing at PassHack.”
“Yeah, but guessing my password would take millions of years, right?”
“If your password is only six digits long, Jarrod wouldn’t have to guess. He could crank through all the combinations in two minutes.”
“But mine is longer than six digits.”
“Good for you. So then Jarrod would start guessing. First he’d see if someone else in the world had used your password. Then he’d use words in the dictionary, then combinations of words.”
“He wouldn’t use my birthday?”
“He wouldn’t know your birthday, or your kids’ names, or where you went to school. That stuff’s ridiculous. He just uses words. But, you know, Boston and Globe are words, right?”
Mikey brought my new beer. “Thanks, man.” I turned back to Rittenhauser, who had stopped eating. “Hitting close to home, right?”
Rittenhauser said, “But he probably doesn’t have a database with my password, right?”
“You got a LinkedIn account?”
“Yeah. Everyone does.”
“Then he’s got it. Or at least an old one. They got hacked a year ago. Have you changed your passwords this year?”
“Oh, shit. What would Jarrod do if he cracked my password?”
“If Jarrod cracked your password, he’d call you and tell you that it was crackable. That was the whole point of PassHack. If someone else cracked your password … well.”
“Well, what?”
“It depends on whether you use the same password on all your websites.”
Rittenhauser pushed his plate away.
“You didn’t do that, did you?” I asked. “Tell me you didn’t use the same password for LinkedIn as you did for your bank.”
“Well, Jesus! How am I supposed to remember a bunch of different passwords?”
I drank my stout, smiled a beer-mustache smile. “They have software for that.”
“I have to go.” Rittenhauser got up and threw a twenty on the bar. He shrugged on his coat and turned to leave.
I called after Rittenhauser, “Remember! Don’t use real words, throw in some numbers and an exclamation point or two.”
He didn’t turn back. Instead he charged out into the cold, racing an imagined hacker to his bank account.
Thirty-Five
The light from my monitor splashed through my office and spilled into the dark apartment. Click and Clack were asleep. The Bruins weren’t playing. Nothing was left for me to do but poke around on the web and do research on PassHack. My screen displayed some old PassHack advertising, nothing recent; the company had dropped off the face of the earth. Tweeted:
Trapped in the dark midnight of the Internet #sleepwhereareyou
I stopped typing and listened to my silent condo. In the distance, a siren spoke of someone else’s emergency. A door closed. A mother yelled at her kid, “For the last time, go to bed!” I leaned back. My chair creaked. Silence. Darkness. Time for a drink.
I padded into the kitchen by the light of my monitor. Reached up over the fridge and pulled down a bottle of WhistlePig Rye, distilled in Vermont. Poured a triple or so of WhistlePig into a rocks glass, didn’t add any ice. Took a slug of rye, felt the burn of the attack, and let the strong rye esters travel through my nose. The alcohol nibbled at my consciousness, rounding the harsh edges.
I slumped in front of the computer. Old PassHack information glowed on the screen. Jarrod started it, Anderson invested, he invested again, then it crapped out. I saw no mention of selling the assets. No product discussions. No news stories. Nothing.
Well, that wasn’t quite true. There w
as an address, PassHack’s last known location. I copied the address into Evernote, decided to visit it the next day, and gave up for the night.
I sat in front of my browser, doing the random clicking that has replaced mindless TV watching. Clicked on Gmail: nothing. Clicked on Stumbleupon: nothing. Considered joining Facebook again, decided against it again. Went over to Twitter and found a random article retweeted by a celebrity, read it while ignoring it—something about a movie star who had sworn off drinking. The fool.
I considered World of Warcraft, decided against it. I didn’t want to be that guy, sitting alone in his apartment, drinking rye whiskey and killing orcs. Opened the holiday pictures I had taken with my old phone. Watched a movie of Maria unwrapping her sled. “Finally!” she had said.
The rye dug into my brain, slipping between the folds, creating fuzz. I watched Maria open the sled again. Sophia sat on the couch, cradled in Sal’s gigantic arm. Sal’s hand covered Sophia’s thigh, her hand rested over his. They grimaced in unison as the sled emerged from the wrapping.
I flipped through other pictures. Sal raising a glass of wine. Sophia, in an apron, serving the lasagna that had followed the soup and would be followed by the ham. An old crèche sitting at the base of a Christmas tree, Jesus lying in his bassinet, Mary praying next to him. Joseph lying on his side, having been knocked over by a large gift. Maria horsing around on an iPad, Sal yelling at her to put that damn thing away and be social.
The video had it all: the food, the gifts, the uncles and aunts. It was A Child’s Christmas in Boston. No videos of me, of course. I was behind the camera, reveling in the chance to be part of a family again. Recording all so we could look at it in the future. I hadn’t realized that I was capturing Maria’s last Christmas with her mom, that the family was about to be blown apart. If I had known, I’d have taken better videos.
I poured myself more rye and looked for something technical to do, something to occupy my hands before I drank myself into a coma. My Droid lay on the counter. It still had its stupid “Droid” ringtone. Picked up the phone, poked around in Settings, surfed the web, bought a ring tone: the Bruins’ foghorn. Whenever the Bruins score a goal, the Garden blasts a foghorn. It’s one of the world’s best noises and it made a great ringtone.
My ringtone foghorned. It was as if the gods themselves wanted to test my phone. I answered: Angie.
