by Mike Lupica
I described Emily Barnes.
“Could be,” Spike said.
“Follow her,” I said.
“Already am,” Spike said.
“Where is she right now?” I said.
“Newbury Street,” he said.
“Don’t lose her before I get there,” I said.
“Gonna be hard to do unless there’s a back way out of Cartier,” he said.
THIRTY-NINE
Where is she now?” I said to Spike as I was passing the Arlington Street Church.
“Max Mara,” he said. “You know where it is?”
“Like I know my alarm code,” I said.
He was waiting for me at the corner of Newbury and Berkeley, near the side entrance to Brooks Brothers. Max Mara was on the other side of the street, half a block down. It was one of my favorite stores. I sometimes thought that if I even tried to walk past without going inside, a saleswoman would come running outside and tackle me.
“She hasn’t spotted you?” I said to Spike.
He was wearing an old leather bomber-type jacket and a black cap that I’d given him, with BU written in red on the front. Jeans. High-top red Converse sneakers. It was about as incognito as Spike could manage.
“Did she spot me?” he said. “I’m going to have to ask you to take that back.”
“I apologize.”
“Doesn’t make the hurt go away,” he said.
I nodded across the street, both of us watching the entrance to the store.
“She either doesn’t know her old boyfriend got shot up this morning,” Spike said, “or doesn’t care.”
“Maybe we’re about to find out,” I said, and pointed.
Emily Barnes had just come back outside carrying a shopping bag. But before the light changed and we could get across to her, she had walked into Vince. I had no idea what her real story was, or what she was doing at Eddie Ross’s residence, or what her current relationship had been with Matt Dunn before somebody shot him. But I liked the girl’s taste in stores.
“We just go grab her,” Spike said.
“Or we could wait patiently, Mr. Impatient.”
“Look who’s talking,” he said. “By the way? You did tell me that Eddie Ross liked them young, right?”
“Tony Marcus told me he liked college girls,” I said. “And she’s a poker player and Eddie’s been a poker impresario on both coasts. Maybe it was destiny that brought them together. That and marking cards.”
Emily took her time in Vince. I would have done the same. She came out a half-hour later, carrying another shopping bag, and took a right and then another right on Dartmouth, heading back toward Commonwealth. Spike and I jogged after her now. When she got to the corner of Dartmouth and Commonwealth she waited on a red light and checked her phone. It was a two-way street, separated up here in the middle by a walking mall. After the light changed she was nearly to the other side when Spike was suddenly on her right and I was on her left.
“What did you get at Max?” I said. “I’ll bet it was a sweater. I got a cotton turtleneck on sale there a couple weeks ago that is to die for.”
“Well, not literally,” Spike said.
She looked at him and then at me and started to pick up her pace. Spike put a hand on her forearm.
“I’ll scream,” she said.
“And I’ll call my friend Frank Belson at Homicide and tell him about your relationship with Matt Dunn,” I said.
“Homicide?” she said. “What are you talking about?”
“You don’t know?” I said.
“Know what?” she said.
“I found Matt Dunn shot to death at his house earlier this morning,” I said.
She opened her mouth and closed it.
“Matt’s dead?” she said.
“Comprehensively.”
I don’t know what reaction I was expecting, shock or surprise or actual grief. None of the above.
“Well, I didn’t do it,” she said.
“No one said you did,” I said.
We were only a block now from Eddie’s brownstone. But we weren’t going there. Emily didn’t know that yet. But I did.
“You hadn’t heard?” I said.
“Where would I have heard?” she said. “On my uncle’s police scanner?”
I let that one go.
“I want you to leave me alone,” she said.
She looked down. Spike’s hand was still casually on her arm.
“Not until we talk a bit,” I said. “Matt told me you two had been together once.”
“Told you when?”
Then she said to Spike, “You can let me go now.”
He did.
“But if you do a runner,” he said, “I will catch you and we will take you directly to the cops.” He nodded at me and said, “I’m faster than Sunny.”
“Are not,” I said.
To Emily I said, “So were you and Matt an item at one time?”
“Item?” she said. “Jesus, how old are you?”
Here we go again.
She said, “We were hooking up when we first met. Briefly. When a game would run late and I didn’t want to go all the way back to school, he’d let me stay in his guest room.”
“That’s what he told me.”
“Gee,” she said, “there’s a relief.”
I asked Spike where his car was parked, and then for his keys, telling him to stay with Emily until I pulled around. It would be easier than each of us taking an arm and walking her down there.
“I’m not going anywhere with you two,” she said.
Spike smiled his customer smile.
“Oh, sweetie,” he said, “of course you are.”
“Eddie’s not going to like this when he finds out,” she said.
“May I handle that one?” Spike said to me, still smiling.
“Have at it,” I said.
“Emily,” Spike said, “Ms. Randall and I are well past the point where we give a flying funt what Eddie Ross does or doesn’t like.”
FORTY
We sat in my living room. Emily Barnes, hair pulled back into a ponytail and looking even younger than she was, acted like a kid who’d been forced to sit in the principal’s office.
“This is like kidnapping,” she said.
“It would require a broad definition,” I said, “since we will shortly let you go.”
“You’re saying that if I tell you the stuff you want to know, you’ll let me leave?”
“Yes,” I said.
She took the couch. Spike and I sat across from her.
“You had no idea Matt was dead,” I said.
“I already told you I didn’t.”
“He said the last time he saw you was the night I chased you into the park,” I said.
“I was late for another game,” she said. “You made me later by being a pain in the ass.”
“Kind of her thing,” Spike said. “One of them, anyway.”
“A game was starting up at that time of night?” I said.
“You really don’t know shit about poker, do you?” she said.
“Apparently not.”
“There’s always a game somewhere,” she said.
“I’m wondering when you still have time to be a college student,” I said.
“I’m not going to be one for much longer,” Emily said.
Rosie was at my feet. I reached down and scratched the back of her neck. Every once in a while she would look over at Emily and emit a low growl. My girl.
Rosie, not Emily.
“You’re quitting school?” I said.
“In my mind I quit a long time ago,” she said.
“And what are your post-higher-education plans, if you don’t mind me asking?” I said.
&nb
sp; “Become a professional poker player,” she said. “Or marry a rich guy. Whatever comes first.”
“Wow,” Spike said brightly, “I didn’t know you could cheat your way into the World Series of Poker.”
“Fuck you,” she said.
“As you wish,” Spike said.
“‘As you wish’?”
“It’s from The Princess Bride, Buttercup,” he said.
She gave him a blank look, as if he’d just spoken to her in Cantonese.
“Spike is referring to the fact that I found marked cards and your special decoder glasses in your room at Taft,” I said.
“You broke into my house?” she said.
“It was nothing, really.”
She stood up. “I’m leaving,” she said. “You searched my room? Fuck you, too.”
Spike was out of his chair and over at the door in a blink, arms folded in front of him.
Emily sat back down.
“You said I could leave,” she said.
“After I get a little more information.”
“Fine,” she said. “But I’m not dishing on Eddie. You want to get sideways with him, go right ahead. Not me.”
“Who beat you up?” I said.
“You don’t give up, do you?” she said.
“Hardly ever,” Spike said from across the room.
“Somebody Matt and I had cheated,” she said.
He had been telling the truth about that, too.
She smiled, almost smugly. “Let’s just say that he won’t be doing anything like that to me ever again,” she said. “Or anybody else.”
“Why’d you lie to your uncle and me?” I said.
She smiled again. “Kind of my thing,” she said. “One of many.”
College girl, I thought. Lee’s niece, one he treated like a daughter.
“Why did you need to steal ten thousand dollars from your mother?” I said.
“A previous debt that needed to get paid off,” she said.
“If Eddie’s your boyfriend,” I said, “why couldn’t he pay it off for you?”
She looked at me quizzically. “Is that what this is about?” she said. “You think Eddie’s my boyfriend?” Her eyes widened. “It’s not just poker you don’t know shit about.”
Her phone buzzed. She checked it.
“I need to go,” she said.
“Soon,” I said. “How well did you know Alex Drysdale?”
“I was just at the table with him a few times,” she said, “when Eddie wanted him to win.”
“Why did Eddie want him to win?”
“Ask Eddie,” she said.
“He told me he was in business with Drysdale.”
“Eddie’s business is Eddie’s business,” she said. “He just wanted Alex to feel like the big player he wanted to be, even when he wasn’t.”
“Emily,” I said, “listen to me. Two people you played poker with a few nights ago are both dead. You need to get away from Eddie Ross.”
“Are you insane?” she said. “He’s helping me get to where I want to go.”
“Homecoming weekend?” Spike said.
“I told you,” she said. “Vegas.”
I nodded.
“How did you go from Taft to this?” I said.
I knew she was there on a math scholarship.
“This?” she said.
“Poker, Eddie, Matt Dunn,” I said. “The whole damn thing.”
“You want to know the truth?” she said. “Well, check it out: You get to college and you think you’re some kind of math whiz. Only then you look around the classroom and everybody is a math whiz, and most of them are smarter than you. One day somebody asked me if I wanted to play some poker. And I did. And I found out I wasn’t just good at it, I was awesome. And just like that, I was the smartest girl in class.”
“Where’s Eddie right now?”
“Somewhere,” she said.
She stood up again. “Now can I leave?”
“Sure,” I said. “But first, one last question.”
“Fine,” she said.
“Why did you tell me as much as you did?”
“Because this is the last time I am ever going to tell you anything,” she said. “About anything.”
“I can help you,” I said.
“Go help somebody who thinks they need it,” Emily said.
She walked over to where Spike was standing and he just hesitated briefly before stepping aside and opening the door for her. As she went past him he said, “Good luck with midterms,” but I knew that was more for my benefit than hers.
It happened a lot.
FORTY-ONE
Before Spike left he said, “I know you’re a bear for saving wayward girls. But pretty sure you could throw this one back with no regrets.”
“You mean just walk away?” I said.
“Yup,” he said.
“That’s the same advice I got from that Russian ape Eddie Ross sent after me,” I said.
I went upstairs to paint then, thinking it might be good for the soul after what I’d just heard from Emily Barnes. I got out my paint set and brushes and put on an old gray Dodgers sweatshirt Jesse had given me. Rosie was on the floor, snoring, in what I constantly assured her was a very cute way. The light in the late afternoon was nearly perfect, as if this were a different world, a different space, from the one Emily Barnes inhabited. Different, better, cleaner air. Had she been telling the truth about who had beaten her up, and why? I had no way of knowing.
Was Eddie, who liked college girls, her boyfriend even though she said he wasn’t?
You came up here to paint, I told myself.
So paint, girl.
I did. The lighthouse began to take real shape now, and the sky around it became the color it had been that day, more gray than blue, almost like the color of the ocean in what had been a late afternoon like this, time frozen between day and night. I painted and at least felt some sense of form, and order, on the board in front of me.
It was past seven o’clock when I finally finished. I had taken a picture on my phone of where I had been before I started today. I pulled it up now and saw much how good work I had done. I put the tops back on the paint cups and my brushes in water. Even the simplest tasks in this studio made me happy. I was happy here, Rosie seemed happy here, at least when awake. Sunny Randall, in an uncomplicated state. Not my natural state, not by a long shot. But close enough. Painting made me happy. Jesse made me happy, even when we were apart. Forever? Who knew. Just for now. Of course, that made Richie unhappy. But then it had been an ongoing problem, keeping all the men in my life happy.
I picked up Rosie and we walked down to the bedroom.
Spike was right.
I could walk away.
If Emily had been telling the truth, I had done what Lee had asked me to do. He wanted to know who’d bounced her around. Now she herself had told me. Someone she’d cheated at cards, if she had been telling the truth. The Russian who’d grabbed me had told me Spike could keep Spike’s, free and clear, if I’d walk away from him, them, Eddie.
So why not walk away from all of it?
I knew the answer, and so did Spike, just because of how well he knew me.
They had threatened me, and people I loved, because they saw me as some sort of threat to them. But why? And a threat to what?
I wanted to take a shower. It could wait. I walked back up to my studio and picked up one of my oversized drawing pads and brought it downstairs and put it on the kitchen table and fixed myself a glass of Jameson, even though I hadn’t eaten yet, and told my dear friend Alexa to play Carol Sloane singing the songs of Ella and Louis with Clark Terry playing trumpet behind her. It was one of my favorites, recommended by Susan Silverman, who said a friend had recommended it to her.
I then began writing down everything that had happened since Alex Drysdale had showed up at Spike’s that day and ripped up his check. Everything that involved Drysdale and Christopher Lawton and Drysdale’s hedge funds, past and present, was on one side of the page. And Drysdale trying to screw over Victor Morozov the way he had Spike.
And Eddie.
Emily and Matt Dunn and poker were on the other side, starting with the night Lee drove Emily back to his place from Taft. And then Emily and Drysdale together on the sidewalk that night, not long before Drysdale got shot. Russian-style. Eddie was Russian. I’d talked to him only one time, in my office. I still felt as if I couldn’t turn around without bumping into him.
He said he was working with Drysdale. Now dead. Matt Dunn had worked with Eddie, and was also dead.
Was Eddie the big boss here?
Or was there a bigger one?
Or an equal partner?
I drank my whiskey. Carol was singing “Don’t Be That Way.” I stared at everything I’d written down. I felt as if I was looking down at one of those five-hundred-piece puzzles. There was something nagging at me. Something Emily had said.
Then there it was.
About Alex Drysdale.
He just wanted Alex to feel like the big player he wanted to be, even when he wasn’t.
What had she meant by that?
I wrote down what she’d said and circled it, finished my drink, closed the pad, took it back upstairs in case I wanted to add anything to my lists before I went to sleep, put Rosie’s leash on her, had her secure the perimeter one last time, came back in, locked the door, set the alarm in case any bogeymen with accents came back.
I put Rosie on the bed, cleaned up, took one last look at my notes.
Out loud I said to Rosie, “Who’s the boss?”
As always, what she seemed to hear was “Should I run downstairs and bring back treats?”
So she was up on the bed, doing one spin, tail wagging, ever hopeful, my adorable treat ho.
“And if it’s not Eddie, then who is it?” I said. “A Russian to be named later?”
I found an emergency bag of treats in my bedside table and gave her one, and asked her one last question knowing I had her at a disadvantage now.