Payback

by Mike Lupica

  At the front door Lee said, “Who the hell is this kid?”

  “We’re going to find out eventually.”

  “We have to find her first,” Lee said.

  I went back into the kitchen and sat with Spike. He looked tired, and had clearly lost weight. Or maybe just looked lost. It made me want to smack Alex Drysdale all over again.

  “I was thinking about something,” he said. “Maybe I should have just borrowed the money I needed from Richie’s old man.”

  “Even with the vig?” I said.

  “Maybe he would have given me a family discount because of you,” he said.

  Then he said he was off to start investigating Boston poker, saying that it would feel like old times, him doing some legwork for me this way.

  “See,” I said, “I still need you.”

  He said, “Not as much as I need you,” and then asked what my next move was.

  “I’m doing what any self-respecting gumshoe would do,” I said. “Going to see my shrink.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Even when I was meeting with Dr. Susan Silverman only by Zoom during COVID, having learned to live with Zoom the way I once had braces, her office on Linnaean Street still felt like a safe place for me from the chaos of the virus, fifty minutes at a time, in a world that had otherwise gone batshit crazy.

  I mentioned that to her now. She smiled. Or nearly smiled. Sometimes her changes of expression were as imperceptible as light beginning to fade in the late day.

  “‘Batshit crazy,’” she said. “I believe one of my professors in cognitive psychology occasionally referenced that.”

  She had somehow become even more beautiful in the years I had known her, without any visible signs that she was getting any older. I knew that eventually it would make me come to hate her the way I was hating on college girls these days, even the ones who weren’t card cheats. Her dark hair gleamed, as always. Her makeup was both discreet and flawless. She wore a charcoal-gray cutaway blazer, black jeans, a white shirt with a gathered-neck collar. She folded her hands on the desk in front of her. Even her hands showed no signs of aging. What the hell?

  “So,” she said. “What’s new and exciting in the world of Sunny Randall?”

  I told her most of it then, about Spike and Drysdale and Emily, about seeing Emily with Drysdale the night before, and how what had seemed like a two-front war had suddenly become one somehow.

  “Spike’s still my number-one priority,” I said. “I like Lee a lot. But I love Spike.”

  “And are motivated to avenge the loss of his restaurant,” she said.

  “Highly,” I said.

  “Slay the dragon,” she said.

  “If not slay him, then at least kick the shit out of him,” I said.

  “The knight errant,” she said, “just as a woman.”

  “What,” I said, “girls can’t be knights, too?”

  “I believe they’re called dames,” Susan Silverman said. “And you do happen to be a great dame.”

  “Not feeling like one at the moment,” I said.

  “It sounds to me,” she said, “as if you are experiencing the same emotions you did after Richie was shot that time.”

  “I honestly believe that Spike is more damaged right now than Richie was,” I said, “and Richie took a bullet.”

  “Which will motivate you even further.”

  “Fuckin’ ay,” I said.

  I was sure only her steely will prevented her from smiling. Instead she leaned forward, tenting her fingers underneath her chin. Why hadn’t the backs of her hands started to get veiny?

  “How is Richie, by the way?” she said. “And Jesse?”

  Somehow, I told her, I’d managed to ask both of them for help on the same day.

  “That must have been interesting,” she said.

  “I guess interesting would be one way of describing it,” I said.

  “It actually makes perfect sense,” she said. “Asking two men you love for assistance because another man you love is in trouble.”

  “You know how it is with us dames,” I said. “Whatever it takes.”

  “You could have it printed on your new business cards,” she said.

  She forgot no details of my life, no matter how minor they might have seemed to me when I shared them with her.

  “But,” she continued, “being willing to do whatever it takes has enabled you to do what you do as well as you do it.”

  “Except when I get spun around the way I did when I saw Lee’s niece and Drysdale together,” I said.

  “As a friend of mine likes to say, it just means the game’s afoot,” she said. “Which is something that has always brought out the best in you.”

  “You’re saying I like this?”

  “You certainly don’t like Spike being in pain,” she said. “And don’t like watching what Lee is going through with his niece, being spun around this way himself. But you are back in the arena. I know what you sound like, what you are like when you feel the work doesn’t matter. But this work clearly does.”

  Now she smiled. It was a truly luminous smile.

  I thought, Was that so hard?

  “You’ll figure this out, Sunny,” she said. “You always do.”

  “Is that my Ph.D. pep talk for the day?”

  “Just an observation based on past experience.”

  “Are you as confident I’ll eventually figure things out with the men in my life?” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, “them.”

  “Always in the room somewhere,” I said, “hiding in plain sight.”

  “We’ll save them for next time,” she said.

  She nodded at the new clock on the wall to my left.

  “One last question?” I said.

  “Of course.”

  “Who do you think is more likely to get me to where I want to go, Alex Drysdale or the girl?”

  “Drysdale,” she said. “He sounds like the factor affecting all other developments.”

  “Is that you thinking like a cognitive psychologist?” I said.

  “More like a detective,” she said.

  “You’re very good at it.”

  “You have no idea,” she said.

  TWENTY-TWO

  When I was back from Cambridge I went for a run along the Charles, a long one, more interval work today after getting dusted the way I had by Emily Barnes the night before.

  I finally came back across the river on the Mass Ave Bridge, made my way back up Commonwealth to the brownstone I’d seen Drysdale and his friend and Emily exiting the night before, walked up the steps and rang the doorbell. Waited a few minutes. No one came to the door. There was an old-fashioned brass knocker. I knocked it.

  Nothing.

  No one home. That was one possibility in the middle of the day. The other was that there was a security camera attached to the peephole and whoever might be inside just wanted me to think no one was home.

  I went to the bottom step and sat down. Perfectly normal for a runner at rest, especially in Boston, the runners’ capital of the world, whether you lived here or not. I had bought myself one of those water bottles you could attach to a wristband. I drank some water and decided to wait, hoping someone would come walking out or pass me on the way in. But no one did. My phone was in a zippered pouch on my running belt. There was a voice message from Lee saying he was on his way to Taft. There was a missed call from Spike. No message.

  I was about to jog home when Jesse called.

  “What’s good?” I said.

  “Keeping the streets of Paradise, Massachusetts, safe from marauders,” he said.

  “Are there marauders in Paradise?”

  “Not at this particular moment,” he said. “But I’ll be ready when there are, don’t worry about me.”

 
He asked where I was.

  “A stakeout,” I said.

  “What are you wearing?”

  “Seriously?”

  “I’m an officer of the law,” he said. “We take all lines of questioning seriously.”

  “Sweaty sweatshirt and running pants.”

  “The tight spandex kind?”

  “How old are you?” I said. “We talk about Lycra these days.”

  I told him where I was, and why, but that I was about to give up, head home, take a shower. He told me how quickly he could get to downtown Boston if he used the flashing lights and siren. I reminded him how often he said that.

  “Do you have dinner plans?” he said.

  “I do not.”

  “I can be down there by seven,” he said. “You pick the place.”

  “How about King & I for takeout,” I said.

  “Sold,” he said. “I want the Paradise Beefcake.”

  “It’s called Paradise Beef on the menu,” I said.

  “You call it what you want,” he said, “I call it what I want.”

  We had spread out the food on the coffee table in the living room. I had put pillows on the floor for us to sit on. It was understood that he would stay the night. Over the last couple months he had taken to leaving a change of clothes in a spare bedroom that had never been used, at least not since Rosie and I had moved here, and leaving a dopp kit in the bathroom attached to it. It made us, I felt, a lot more official than an Instagram post.

  I was drinking Riesling, which I’d decided went perfectly with Thai food. He was drinking Coke out of the small bottles that he liked. It had long since become a nonissue that I drank in front of him.

  “You drinking doesn’t make me miss it any more,” he finally said one night, before grinning and saying, “or any less.”

  As we ate I took him through everything that had happened, Spike and Lee, from the day Drysdale had come to Spike’s until last night. He interrupted only one time.

  “You slapped him?”

  “I did.”

  “Badass,” he said.

  I told him it had just felt quite natural in my badass biker jacket.

  “How quickly could you model that for me?” he said.

  “Please try to stay on point.”

  “I thought that’s what I was doing,” he said.

  I told him what Dr. Silverman had said about keeping my focus on Drysdale.

  “There’s a lot of ways to go at this,” he said. “But I think she’s right. There’s a baseball expression that covers him.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “He sounds like the straw that stirs the drink,” Jesse said, and reached over and effortlessly picked up some of my duck with his chopsticks. I used a fork.

  “I watched the two of them walk out last night,” I said, “and felt like the girl had walked in from another movie.”

  “It will all make sense,” he said, “when you find out why.”

  “You sound as confident as my shrink.”

  “I tell you all the time,” he said. “If this shit were easy, everybody would do it.”

  He put down his chopsticks, leaned back against the couch, and closed his eyes. I knew he was reviewing everything I had just told him. There was almost a kinetic energy when he was like this, his cop’s mind at work the way it was now. Like a river flowing. Mass plus velocity. The first thing he’d told me when he arrived was that he’d just gotten off the phone with Brian Lundquist, who had come up empty on the fingerprints we’d sent him.

  Now he said, “Until we get a name, or some background on the fuckwit who came to your office, I would definitely keep digging on Drysdale.”

  Most of the food on his plate was gone. He reached over and handed one last small piece of beef to Rosie.

  Somehow he had gotten closer to me.

  “So it’s a hard pass on the biker jacket?” he said.

  I tried to wink at him in a saucy way, worried as always that it simply looked as if I had something in my eye.

  “Who said it was?” I said.

  He leaned over and kissed me then. I kissed him back. It went like that for a few minutes, and very well, I thought, even though I knew I was hardly an impartial judge.

  It had been decided that we could clear the coffee table later when my doorbell rang. Rosie beat me across the foyer, barking and wagging her tail.

  Dogs knew things.

  When I opened the front door, Richie Burke was standing there.

  “Surprise,” he said.

  I told him he didn’t know the half of it.

  TWENTY-THREE

  By now Jesse and Richie probably felt as if they knew all about each other, especially Jesse, who had heard all about my relationship with my ex-husband when we first became intimate with each other. It was mostly because he was having even more issues about letting go with his ex-wife, Jenn. Lots more. But as deep as my feelings for Richie were, and still were, and always would be, I was never obsessed about him the way Jesse obsessed about Jenn, really until she finally remarried. She had always been enough, sometimes literally, to drive Jesse Stone to drink.

  It was different with Richie. Most of the time his position was that he didn’t want to know what he didn’t want to know about Jesse Stone, even if he knew me well enough to understand that what I felt for Jesse was serious.

  You could see all the way from the front door into the living room, where Jesse was now standing. As Richie knelt down to greet Rosie he said, “Well, well, the gang’s all here.”

  Then he looked at me and said, “I can come back.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said, even though the whole thing felt as far from silly in the moment as if we all were from the Great Barrier Reef.

  “It’s just that I just got off the phone with my father,” he said. “Call lasted all the way from the North End to here. One of his troopers knows the name of the guy who came to your office. And a lot more than that.”

  “I want to hear all of it,” I said, and walked back into the living room, Richie and Rosie following me.

  I felt like an idiot formally introducing them. But I did, anyway. They shook hands. It was Jesse who attempted to break the ice, grinning and saying, “Should we just go ahead and skip the parts about how I’ve heard a lot about you?”

  “The Irish have an expression that covers situations like this,” Richie said, grinning. “No use gurnin’ about it.”

  Then he nodded at the food on the table and said to me, “King & I?”

  “None better,” and then I said I’d clean up later, and said we could go sit at the kitchen table. I absently ran a hand across my lips, hoping Richie wouldn’t notice, glad I’d worn my favorite pale lip gloss tonight and not something more colorful.

  First Spike and Lee had been here in the morning. Now Jesse and Richie. My kitchen was starting to feel like a conference room. Jesse was to my right, Richie to my left, as if they’d gone to neutral corners.

  “The guy’s name is Eddie Ross,” Richie said. “But turns out that’s short for Rostov. He’s Russian.”

  “Oh, ho,” I said.

  “You still say that?” Richie said.

  “Only when I feel as if a clue has presented itself,” I said.

  “There are times when it happens less than she’d prefer,” Jesse said.

  Richie nodded. I knew him, sometimes better than I knew myself. He was not here to banter with Jesse, or bond. Or like him.

  “One of Desmond’s top lieutenants, a rather brilliant young hotshot from Roxbury named Jalen, recognized him,” Richie said. “He told my father that he became aware of Eddie Ross several months ago, when a friend of his ended up at one of Eddie’s tables.”

  “So who is he, really?” I said, “other than the former Eddie Rostov?”

  “Ja
len did his homework,” Richie said. “Or does his homework. It turns out Eddie’s father once operated the biggest sports books in Europe, one that primarily catered to your basic oligarchs in Russia and Ukraine.”

  “I’ve always just thought ‘oligarch’ meant they steal bigger than everybody else,” I said.

  “In Russia and Ukraine they do,” Richie said.

  “They’re fucking gangsters is what they are,” Jesse said, then looked at Richie and added, “No offense.”

  “None taken,” Richie said.

  Richie told us more of what Jalen had learned, about Rostov’s father having been the king of gambling, not just in Eastern Europe but all across the continent, and money laundering across the globe. At one time, he had also organized, almost on the side, the biggest and richest poker games in about a dozen countries.

  “Jalen found all this out?” I said.

  “When my father wants information,” Richie said, “he doesn’t fuck around.”

  “Young Jalen sounds like an up-and-comer,” I said.

  “He has quietly started to fill the role at Desmond’s right hand that Uncle Felix once filled,” Richie said.

  He told us the rest of it about Eddie Ross, occasionally checking his phone to look at the long email Jalen had sent him. Vasily Rostov, Eddie’s father, had disappeared a couple years ago, Richie said, under circumstances that would have been considered unusual, except for the fact that it was Russia. By then his son was long gone, the father having kept him away from their family business and sent him to America to college twenty years earlier.

  “As thorough as your father’s man Jalen clearly is,” I said, “I’m sure he knows what college.”

  “Stanford,” Richie said.

  “Oh, ho,” I said again.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I told them that Alex Drysdale and his former partner had also gone to Stanford, and I was willing to bet that if I checked with the alumni office, they were all there at the same time.

  I saw Richie scroll down the email.