by Mike Lupica
“Victor Morozov,” he said.
“Sunny Randall,” I said.
He smiled. “I am already hearing much about you,” he said. “Spike tells me that your real first name is Sonya. Russian, you know.”
“My dad just always liked it,” I said, “and he’s more Irish than Guinness. He says my name means ‘wisdom’ in your country.”
“In your case it should mean ‘beauty,’” he said as we sat down.
Spike winked at me and said, “I know what you were thinking.”
“Do not.”
“Not gay,” he said. Grinned and said, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course.”
I decided to stay with wine. When the waiter was gone Spike said, “Drysdale took Victor’s gym the way the fuckmonkey tried to take this place. And still might, dead.”
He looked over and said to Victor Morozov, “You tell it.”
He had been a boxer in Russia, and on his way to the Sochi Olympics before he lost a fight that just turned out to be against the son of a government official.
“Would have been what you call a controversial decision,” he said, “but that is only if I had complained about it.”
He tried again four years later. But he was, he said, past his best boxing by then. It turned out he had a cousin who lived in Allston. He came here and thought about opening a boxing gym, and heard about Henry Cimoli’s. But Henry told him there was no money in boxing, that all he had left of his original gym for fighters was one room. The rest of it, Victor saw, was Peloton machines and a Pilates room and what Morozov described as a sea of blue yoga mats, and the biggest room of all, filled with weights and machines and more exercise bikes.
“I have some money,” he says. “My sister and her husband have more. I opened my own gym on Front Street.”
“It’s not far from where my ex-husband owns a bar,” I said.
I told him the name. Morozov smiled. “My home away from home,” he said.
He drank what looked like straight vodka.
“Then the COVID comes,” Victor Morozov said, “and suddenly in my new life I am starting to die a little, day at a time.”
“Guess who worked out there before Victor had to close the doors?” Spike said.
I nodded. “I didn’t know your name, Victor,” I said. “But I heard about what happened to you from a lawyer trying to help out Spike.”
“They beat up Victor, too,” Spike said. “But I think he got in more good shots than I did.”
Victor held up his left hand, which was still swollen to twice the size of his right. Which was saying plenty.
“I followed Drysdale to the gym at lunch the other day,” I said, and Victor Morozov said, “Сукин сын.”
“Translation?” I said.
“Son of a bitch,” he said, and drank. “The last thing they said to me after they had me on the ground and stomped on my hand was that if I went near Drysdale again they would beat up Ilsa next. My cousin.”
“Did you shoot him, Victor?”
“Did you ask that of Spike?” he said.
“I know what Spike is capable of,” I said. “And not.”
Morozov leaned across the table and gave me a long look, close enough for me to see the scarring around his eyes.
“If I am killing Alex Drysdale,” he said, “I am doing it with my bare hands.”
“I had to ask,” I said.
“And now you have been answered.”
I looked around Spike’s. It was crowded and noisy and there were half a dozen people standing near the hostess stand, waiting for a table. I heard a burst of laughter from a large table of young women in the front room, who appeared to be celebrating something, maybe being young. I’ll drink to that, I thought.
“Has anybody yet come to claim ownership of the gym?” I said to Morozov.
He nodded at Spike.
“Am in the same boat as him,” he said. “I am waiting for somebody to walk in and tell me it is time for me to leave.”
“But not yet,” I said.
Morozov said, “Now I die a little when a stranger comes walking in.”
“What neither of us can figure out is why a hedge-fund guy would want to pick off his place or mine,” Spike said.
“Been asking myself the same thing from the start,” I said. “Maybe guys like Drysdale can’t stop themselves from being complete pigs.”
“Or maybe it is something different, I have been maybe thinking to myself,” Morozov said. “What if he was not really as rich as we think he was?”
“Or maybe,” Spike said, “the people propping him up are the ones with the real money.”
“I’ve got a guy might be able to help find that out,” I said, and told him about Jalen Washington.
“Desmond hired a brother?” Spike said. “Seriously?”
“Might have been the last frontier for inclusion,” I said.
Victor Morozov said he had to get back to his gym, and left. Spike and me now. He asked if I had any leads on Emily. I told him about the visit from Matt Dunn, dealer and card cheat, and how he’d told me the brownstone belonged to Eddie Ross.
“It seems like a lot of this runs through those poker games,” Spike said.
“I just have to figure out how, and why,” I said.
I sighed. “Fuckety fuck,” I said.
“When are you going back to the brownstone?” Spike said.
“Tomorrow,” I said.
“Please take me with you,” he said.
I told him I would. He went to work the front room. I went outside to wait for my Uber. The car was eight minutes away. When I got home, I told myself, it was time to get out one of my yellow legal pads and make one of my famous lists and see if writing down everything I knew would make more sense when I saw it on the page. Then I was going to call Jesse and run it all past him. I’d told him once that he was a far more linear thinker than I was.
He’d grinned and said, “In certain areas more than others.”
I was scrolling through emails when the car showed up early, switching screens to make sure I had the right make of car and license plate. I was still looking at my phone when car doors opened in front and back and two guys got out and had me by the arms before I could scream or stop them and then I was in the backseat with the bigger of the two and the car doors were shut and the car was pulling up Marshall Street.
The guy in the passenger seat, turning to face me, was the one who had his gun pointed at me.
Now he was the one smiling and saying something in Russian to me.
“Means now we are being up in your shit,” he said.
THIRTY-THREE
The car made a series of quick turns. I wasn’t paying much attention to where it was going because my attention was focused on the gun. Mine was in my bag, on the seat between me and the man next to me. He reached in there now and quickly rummaged around through my stuff, easily found my .38, the new one Jesse had given me, with my initials engraved on the handle, stuck it into his pocket.
“If you want lip gloss,” I said, “all you have to do is ask.”
“Funny girl,” he said to the men in the front seat right before he backhanded me across the face, snapping my head to the side and nearly putting me on the floor, my bell fully rung.
I leaned back against the seat, angling my body so I could see him and the gun at the same time.
“Eddie send you guys?” I said to the man next to me.
He was big enough to remind me of Tony’s man Junior. Full black beard. Wearing a crimson cap with an H on the front. Harvard. I resisted the impulse to ask what his major was. The side of my face still felt raw and hot and hurt like hell.
“We are told not to kill you,” he said. “But make sure you are not tempting me, ha?”
I took a closer
look at his gun. A Glock. I had not yet heard the slide racked. A good thing. It didn’t mean he wasn’t going to shoot me, Russian-style or otherwise. Ever hopeful.
“You guys leave the envelope at my house?” I said.
No answer.
“One of you shoot Drysdale?”
No answer.
“What do you want from me?” I said.
“Not what we want,” Harvard said. “We are told to tell you that this is maybe your last warning. You walk away now and nothing, no more bad shit happens.”
“To me?”
He reached into the side pocket of his windbreaker and came out with his phone.
“Not right away,” he said, touching the screen with his index finger.
Then he held up the screen so I could see. It was another picture of my father. But he wasn’t with me this time. He was walking out his front door, my mom standing on the porch behind him.
“Did whoever it is who sent you mention that he’s a cop?” I said.
“Old cop,” Harvard said.
He pulled the phone back and swiped the screen. Showed it to me again.
The next shot was of Richie standing at the end of his bar.
“You know his father is a gangster, right?” I said.
Harvard chuckled now.
“Old gangster,” he said.
“Is that the end of the slide show?” I said.
He shook his head and swiped the screen again.
“Best for last,” he said.
This one showed Richard Burke with what I knew was a Boston Bruins backpack standing in front of The Advent School.
Son of a bitch, Victor Morozov had said in a language I knew the sons of whores in the car with me would understand.
“So here is thing,” Harvard said. “Is up to you whether something happens to them, or no. I am to tell you that includes the college girl. Your queer friend even keeps his restaurant. Just walk away from it.”
“From what?”
“Our business, you stupid cow,” he said.
“Ask you something else?” I said. “How come none of you are wearing masks? You use them all up during the pandemic?”
Harvard chuckled again.
“Because next time you won’t seeing us,” he said.
“Maybe we shoot your dog first,” the guy with the gun said. He winked at Harvard. “Unless maybe we are doing that already.”
The driver slammed on the brakes then. I heard him yell something in Russian. The guy with the gun turned his head around to see what had happened. Either another car or a pedestrian.
Made no difference to me.
I leaned back harder into the seat and pushed forward, giving all praise to Pilates as I flipped my legs up and kicked the gun out of his hand.
Now he growled something in Russian as he scrambled to bend down and get it.
Harvard raised his hand and was about to hit me again. This time I was ready for him, grabbing his wrist and biting down as hard as I could on his hand as I reached for the door handle, hearing him scream and hoping at the exact same moment that the door was unlocked. It was. Why not? Three of them, one with a gun. What could go wrong?
A lot was happening now, at once. The guy in front probably had to have his gun back by now. I didn’t think he’d shoot now that the whole thing had turned into a shit show, but wasn’t going to hang around to find out. Even if the guy wanted to take a shot at me, Harvard was between me and the gun, Harvard clumsily trying to get himself out of the car behind me, head and shoulders first. It gave me just enough time to turn and slam the door as hard as I could into his face. Ringing his bell. Me. The funny girl.
I stumbled over the curb now, pitching forward onto my hands and knees, scraping my right hand as it hit the sidewalk first, rolling to my feet as quickly as I’d landed, starting to run in the opposite direction from the direction the car was facing.
Thinking as I did how dumb it had been for the guy in back with me not to have locked the doors.
And him a Harvard man.
THIRTY-FOUR
The car had stopped near City Hall Square, on Congress Street. I kept going up Devonshire, glad I hadn’t changed out of my running shoes before heading over to Spike’s. I didn’t think the sluggers had any chance of catching me on foot, but still wasn’t taking any chances, keeping up a good pace as I went past the old Granary Burying Ground, and finally passed the King’s Chapel before I was finally on Beacon.
I had never taken my bag off my shoulder, even when Harvard was taking the gun out of it. It hadn’t fallen off as I’d gotten myself out of the car. Maybe he thought, maybe they all thought, I’d faint with terror at the sight of their guns. Or being outnumbered.
As I made the turn past the Meeting House, I knew I was hardly in the clear. If they were the ones who had left me the picture of my father, it meant they knew where I lived. If they thought I was going home, they knew where home was.
They could be there waiting for me. One possibility. Another was that even though I showed their asses up by getting away from them, right after showing them I was a biter, they had delivered the message they’d been instructed to deliver, by Eddie or somebody else who was pulling Eddie’s strings.
I stopped halfway down River Street Place. I didn’t see their car. Didn’t mean they hadn’t parked it somewhere else. Didn’t mean they weren’t inside the house. There was an app on my phone that would theoretically alert me if the alarm system that Ghost Garrity himself had installed after the place had been broken into last year had been breached.
There was no such alert.
They could still be inside. Or waiting outside to grab me again. Still three of them. Jesse had always said that being overly cautious had never gotten anybody killed. But a lack of caution could. So I circled around to Mugar Way and came at 4 River Street Place from the back. Their car wasn’t in sight. Neither were they.
Still didn’t mean they weren’t waiting for me.
I reached into my bag for my .38, then realized it wasn’t there. I had backups, but they were all inside the house, the first available in a drawer in the foyer.
Front door or back?
I decided on back.
I made my way along the side of my building, got my keys out of my bag, opened the back door, hearing the beep of the alarm as I did, punching out my code on the pad next to the door.
I heard Rosie the dog then, barking happily as she came running and skidding through the kitchen. Alive and well. I couldn’t remember who had first written or said that their vision of heaven was all the dogs you’d ever loved running for you when you got there. But whomever it was sure was right.
I went into the back bathroom and checked my face. Still some redness. No swelling. No bruising. Maybe the guy who hit me wasn’t as tough as he thought he was.
I fixed myself a big pour of Jameson and sat down in the living room and called my father first. Then Jesse, who said he was on his way. I told him that wasn’t necessary.
“For you, maybe,” he said. “Feels very necessary for the chief.”
He was at the front door half an hour later. I told him he clearly hadn’t been lying about the kind of time he could make with the lights and sirens about which he frequently bragged.
When he had his arms around me I said, “Thinking it might be time to go to the mattresses.”
He pulled back, grinning, and said that first we needed to talk about the case.
THIRTY-FIVE
Jesse wanted to know what my father had said.
“You mean after I told him that he and my mother might want to head down to the small house on the Cape they’d bought about ten years ago?”
“After that,” he said.
“He wanted to know if I was going to leave town,” I said. “I told him I was not. He said that neither was he, go
od night.”
“What about Richie?”
“Richie said that he was going to have Desmond’s men watch him and Richard,” I said. “And that they could do the same for me.”
“How did you respond to such a generous offer from the Irish Mob?”
“I told him I could take care of myself,” I said.
“Wow,” Jesse said, “didn’t see that coming.”
We had pushed back the coffee table and were sitting on the floor, legs stretched out underneath the table, Rosie between us, me holding my whiskey, Jesse with a mug of high-test black tea that he liked to sip on late at night. He was still wearing his old Dodgers cap. I told him he could take it off now, nobody else was going to be calling him out of the bullpen tonight.
“You don’t call shortstops out of the bullpen,” he said. “You call pitchers.”
I drank some of my whiskey and then smiled at him.
“So much about baseball I don’t care about,” I said. “So little time.”
It was past midnight by now. Rosie was snoring. Jameson usually leveled things off for me, especially at this time of night. Just not this night. I was still running hot.
“Don’t you think you do need somebody watching your back?” Jesse said.
“Wasn’t that what I was doing not so terribly long ago with Deputy Chief Crane?” I said.
Molly. Not just his deputy, but Jesse Stone’s best friend. I’d always wondered what would have happened between them if they had both been single when they met, instead of Molly being the happily married mother of four.
“Didn’t answer my question,” he said.
“Is this an official police interview?”
“Ish,” he said. “What about Vinnie Morris?”
“I called him on another thing a few weeks ago,” I said. “He was in Miami, on a thing of his own.”
“I assume there weren’t many specifics on the thing,” he said.
“Vinnie deals less in specifics and more in absolutes,” I said, “as you well know.”
He put his arm around me and pulled me closer to him. I put my glass on the table and told him I was glad he was here. He said that he knew that already. I said I wanted to talk more about the case. He said he knew that, too.