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Payback Page 15

by Mike Lupica


  “And maybe here’s the biggest question of all, Rosebud,” I said. “Why are they so worried about a nice Boston University girl like me?”

  In the middle of the night, a little after three a.m., somebody firebombed Spike’s.

  FORTY-TWO

  They had the fire under control by the time I got to Marshall Street a half-hour later.

  The fire truck, which had barely had enough room to squeeze onto Marshall and was now parked out front, had Engine 8, Ladder 1 written on the outside. The guys from the BFD had stopped hosing the interior of Spike’s, but the place was still full of smoke. I saw firemen talking to cops and cops talking to firemen. There were a lot of flashing lights on Marshall, and two television trucks parked at the north end of the block, even in the middle of the night.

  The front window, with Spike’s in flowing, cursive script, had been shattered by whatever kind of goddamn incendiary device somebody had thrown into my best friend’s goddamn restaurant.

  I found Spike sitting on the opposite side of the cobblestone street, staring at his phone.

  “Hey,” I said, sitting down next to him.

  He held up his phone.

  “Bet you didn’t know that Molotov cocktails were named after a Russian foreign minister during World War Two,” he said.

  “No,” I said, “I did not know that.”

  He was Spike. He’d get to it when he got to it.

  “Actually,” he said, “it was the Finns who came up with the name. Apparently the Molotov guy was talking some shit about cluster bombs and acting as if the Russians were doing the Finns a favor by dropping them. But the Finns, being bad sports, decided to return the favor, and called their bombs Molotov cocktails.”

  “Ironic,” I said.

  “Right?” Spike said.

  He put away his phone and made a sound that was like some sad note he’d blown on a trumpet.

  “What the fuck,” he said.

  “My sentiments exactly,” I said.

  “I believe I might have to kill Eddie Ross,” he said.

  “Not,” I said. I put an arm around him. “Because I might have to do it first,” I said.

  “And both of us normally such peaceful souls,” Spike said.

  “Not,” I said again.

  I had brought goggles with me, ones I’d kept from when I’d been with the cops, just in case I needed them. I didn’t, because I had no plans to go inside. And for now, just the smell of burning plastic made me want to stay right where we were.

  I looked across the street and saw fire marshals coming outside with evidence containers that looked like empty paint cans, and sample bags. Two arson inspectors were staring at what was left of the front window. They were wearing Tyvek suits and white Tyvek booties and breathing apparatuses. I knew a fair amount about arson investigators, having dated one right before I met Richie.

  “We actually don’t know this was Eddie’s doing,” I said, “as much as we both want to make him for it.”

  Spike said, “And we don’t know for certain that he sent those Russian sluggers after you. Or that he had Drysdale and the poker kid taken out. Or that he threatened not just your family but your extended family. But you know it’s him, and so do I. Know why? Because it can’t be anybody else but him.”

  “They’re after me, not you,” I said. “Only now they’ve dialed it up like this to get at me. It’s why I keep asking myself the following question: If I’m such a threat to whomever is doing this shit, why not just take me out?”

  “Maybe they know it would be the same as killing a cop,” Spike said. “Or they’re worried about bringing the wrath of Desmond Burke down on them. Or both.”

  “So they continue to try to back me off,” I said.

  “And you,” Spike said, “continue to show the inefficaciousness of that.”

  “‘Inefficaciousness’?”

  “They blew up my restaurant,” Spike said. “Not my vocab.”

  I kissed him on the cheek.

  “No, they certainly did not,” I said.

  “What do we do about this?” Spike said. “Because we sure as shit have to do something.”

  “You are going to think about rebuilding, as soon as you get some sleep,” I said.

  “I’m not entirely sure whose insurance covers this,” he said.

  “Call Rita Fiore,” I said. “If she doesn’t know, she knows somebody who will.”

  I smiled at him. “That would be the efficacious thing to do, in my opinion.”

  Spike nearly smiled back.

  “And after I have gotten some sleep,” I said, “I am going to make it my mission to have a conversation today with Eddie Ross. Who can run, but not hide.”

  “You know that’s a boxing expression, right?” he said.

  “You mean Phil Randall isn’t the one who came up with it?”

  “Joe Louis,” Spike said. “An old sportswriter once called him a credit to his race. The human race.”

  “As are you,” I said.

  “Not feeling it,” he said. “At least not presently.”

  The arson guys kept going in and out. The odor from inside, coming from everything that had burned up, had become far more pungent in a predawn breeze. One police car left. Another remained. I did not recognize any of the cops. I stood up, goggles in hand. Spike said he’d walk me to my car.

  “I could end this,” I said, “with a full retreat.”

  He stopped. I stopped. He put his arms around me. He was as strong as anybody I had ever known. But he had been tested during COVID and now he was being tested again. First somebody took Spike’s. Now somebody had bombed the holy hell out of it.

  “You know you’re not going to do that,” he said.

  “And why is that?”

  “Because you’re the one who’s a credit to her race,” he said.

  “Me and Joe Louis.”

  “He did like blondes,” Spike said.

  FORTY-THREE

  You have to know that what happened to Spike, and at Spike’s, isn’t your fault,” Dr. Silverman said.

  I had called when I knew she’d be at her office and asked if she had an opening. She did. Now here we were. I was wearing a square-neck Ann Taylor dress, navy, that looked more expensive than it was. Sling-back heels. Considering how little sleep I’d gotten, I thought my makeup, at least upon last check before I got out of the car, was providing me stellar coverage.

  She never looked as if it took any effort whatsoever to look as spectacular as she did. Hair. Makeup. Oversized blazer with the sleeves pulled up to her elbows. She’d even looked like a million damn dollars when we’d Zoomed during COVID. When I’d look at my own face during those sessions, I thought I looked as if I were cutting a hostage tape.

  “That’s nice of you to say,” I said. “But I was specifically told that if I stopped making a nuisance of myself, those near and dear to me would be left alone.”

  She offered one of those tiny smiles that made me speculate about how few muscles she actually used.

  “You making a nuisance of yourself is practically a mission statement, wouldn’t you say?” she said.

  “Them’s still the facts,” I said.

  “But ask yourself a question,” she said. “The people who told you they’d back off if you backed off—why would you trust anything they said?”

  “I don’t trust them,” I said. “But if they can go after Spike this way, what’s to stop them from going after my father, or Richie and his son?”

  “So many people to protect,” she said, “for just one woman.”

  “Are you being ironic?” I said.

  “Trying to quit,” Susan Silverman said.

  “Maybe a therapist could help with that?” I said.

  Now she smiled, fully. The force of it, as always, was something. Like t
he force of her. “Didn’t this all start with you trying to protect a young woman who really didn’t want your protection?”

  “End of the day?” I said. “She’s near and dear to Lee, not me.”

  She reached for what appeared to be an expensive pen and took a note. Every time she did that during one of our sessions I wished that I had the ability to read upside down. Jesse did.

  Sometimes I felt myself wanting to pull out a notebook and take notes of my own. That would show her.

  She said, “I referenced a mission statement just now. What do you see as your own mission right now? To find out who committed these murders? To avenge what happened to Spike? To discover if this Eddie Ross fellow is the man behind the curtain?”

  I sighed, so loudly that it surprised me.

  “I want to know what Eddie Ross and Alex Drysdale were up to,” I said. “Or into. I want to know why it got Drysdale killed. And how the death of Emily Barnes’s old boyfriend factors into all of this, and why him talking to me might have hastened his demise. And why I pose such a threat to whoever is behind it all.”

  I looked down at my hands, folded in my lap. I needed a manicure, but felt as if Dr. Silverman wouldn’t be much help in that area.

  “Something Alex Drysdale was doing, or about to do, or had just done, got him killed,” I said. “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

  “So find out what?” she said.

  With just a slight inflection, she turned it into a question.

  “It would certainly make me feel better about everything.”

  Time up.

  “But then you wouldn’t need me, would you?” Susan Silverman said.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Jalen Washington was sitting on the floor next to my office door when I got back from Cambridge.

  “Think I got something,” he said. “But I wanted to tell you in person.”

  I made us both coffee. He sat in one of my client chairs. He still had impossibly white sneakers, skinny jeans so faded they were on their way to white. A dark green hoodie with Harmony written on the front. He looked like a Gap ad.

  “Drysdale’s fund is officially a dead end,” he said.

  “Do tell.”

  “First off,” he said, “I got it on solid that he wasn’t working off nearly as big a number as he used to.”

  “Wouldn’t something like that get around?” I said.

  “Not necessarily,” Jalen said. “They’re all playing a shell game, some form or fashion, even the big ones. Look over there, not over here. Like that.”

  “But wouldn’t the people entrusting their money to him know the numbers?” I said.

  He smiled. Lots of white teeth, too. Extremely white.

  “All’s they care about seeing are returns,” he said. “Returns keep coming in, they don’t wanna know what they don’t wanna know. How you suppose old Bernie Madoff kept the line moving, leastways till he got caught?”

  “You’re telling me that Drysdale was running a Ponzi scheme?”

  He shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “But even though the returns was still coming in, he was about to run dry. Boy had kept that shit up as long as he could. Guy I know who knows people like him told me he was pretty sure Drysdale was about to cash out. Get out while the getting was still good. Pay out and hold on to what was left.”

  “Who told you this?”

  “A guy who doesn’t want people to know he knows what he knows,” Jalen said. “And knows he shouldn’t even have been talking to me.”

  “Jalen,” I said, “not sure if you’re aware of this, but you’re not the one bound by a client confidentiality agreement.”

  “May work like that in your world, Sunny Randall,” he said. “But not in mine, if your motivation is to stay aboveground.”

  He shrugged. “Anyway,” he said, “Alex Drysdale was about to take what toys he had left and disappear. Maybe go collect whatever money he had stashed offshore and go live the life where nobody could find his ass.”

  He shrugged.

  “Hard to keep all the plates spinning the way he did, long as he did,” Jalen Washington said. “Especially after he reinvented himself.”

  “Were the people in the fund going to get paid in full?”

  “Thinking no,” Jalen Washington said.

  “Could one of them have found that out beforehand and been a bad sport?”

  “Still looking into that piece,” he said. “But if I was a betting man, be the way I’d bet.”

  “But you’re not a betting man.”

  “I prefer fixed income investing,” he said. “I don’t need the thrill of chasing money. I want it right where I can put my hands on it.”

  “You sure you didn’t go to Harvard Business?” I said.

  He smiled again. “What I learned,” he said, “I learned at the Orchard Park Houses, Eustis Street, Roxbury, Massachusetts. Finally worked my way all the way up to working for Mr. Desmond Burke. Help him invest his money a little better than he was ’fore I came along.”

  “That a long-term play for you?” I asked him.

  He paused and frowned, as if considering his options about what to say next.

  “Speaking freely?” he said. “Like I was the client?”

  “Desmond and I have a complicated relationship,” I said. “But it doesn’t mitigate in any way what people tell me in confidence when they sit in that chair.”

  “You got a nice way of conversating,” he said. “Anybody ever tell you that?”

  “I try to hang around with people smarter than me,” I said.

  “Here’s the deal,” he said, leaning forward, eyes bright. “I’m not just learning his business. You understand what I’m saying? I look at what I’m doing for him as my own management training program.”

  “That include helping me?”

  “That’s just more networking on my part,” he said. “Maybe someday I might be the one needs a favor.”

  “The money Drysdale did plan to cash out on—where’s it going now?”

  “Efforting that,” Jalen Washington said.

  “I keep asking myself if Eddie could have been the one running Drysdale, and not the other way around,” I said.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “Everything I hear is that Fast Eddie was always more of a fixer than a boss, whether it was his poker games or something else.”

  “Drysdale was in his games,” I said.

  “Probably recruiting players to be players in his fund until the end,” Jalen said. “That’s my opinion. Maybe hoping to screw them on his way out the door.”

  “Sounds like there was a lot of money in those rooms,” I said, “and not just on the tables.”

  “You know them frisky one-percenters.”

  “Before you go back to your day job,” I said, “maybe you could poke around a little more and find out who put Drysdale back up on his feet when he was about to go under. And how much money might have been in the fund when he was still Alex ‘Ace’ Drysdale.”

  “And you still want to know where it might have gone.”

  “Bingo,” I said.

  “Bingo?”

  “I’m older than I look,” I said.

  He was gone about twenty minutes when my phone buzzed.

  The screen said Unknown Caller.

  But the voice wasn’t unknown, at least not to me.

  “We need to talk,” Eddie Ross said.

  “That’s my line,” I said.

  Then he said, “You got this all wrong.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  I waited. He waited. It felt like a stare down, just over the phone.

  “You still there?” he said.

  “Waiting to hear what I have wrong about you,” I said. “Two people you know are dead. Some of your people took me fo
r a ride. My friend’s restaurant got firebombed last night.”

  “You knew the dead guys, too,” he said.

  “Really, Eddie? You called me for bullshit like that?” I said. “Not gonna lie. You’re starting to give the mother country a bad name. And we both know how hard that is to do.”

  I was up and pacing the office as I talked to him.

  “Listen,” he said. “I admit I wanted to scare you off.”

  “Scare me off what?”

  “My business,” he said.

  “What might that be, exactly?”

  “Business that never should have had anything to do with you,” he said.

  “Does now.”

  “I had nothing to do with killing those guys,” he said.

  “I have a friend who has an expression he likes to use about coincidence,” I said. “No way God would leave that much to chance.”

  “Let me write that down.”

  I said, “There’s only one person in this bit whose business involved both Alex Drysdale and Matt Dunn. And that’s you.”

  “I can explain,” he said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “In person,” he said. “That’s what you’ve been looking for, no? A face-to-face? No way you’re turning that down.”

  “I’m at my office,” I said. “Come here.”

  “You’re the one wanted this meeting,” he said. “I get to pick the place. Charlestown Shipyard. Seven o’clock. Just the two of us.”

  “No,” I said.

  “No, you’re not coming?”

  “Not coming alone.”

  “Trust me on something,” he said. “We wanted you dead, you’d already be dead.”

  “‘We’?”

  “Figure of speech.”

  “Be that as it may,” I said, “I will be accompanied by my friend Spike. And by the way, Eddie? Spike wants you dead.”

  “I didn’t do his restaurant.”

  “You can tell him that yourself.”

  “There’s a playground at the shipyard,” he said. “Meet me there.”

  “Where’s Emily Barnes,” I said. “Just out of curiosity?”

 

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