by Ace Atkins
I slipped into a pair of jeans, a blue pocket T-shirt, and Nikes and went back to the laptop propped on the kitchen counter. I ran Welles’s name through the Department of Motor Vehicles and a LexisNexis search. Nothing. Connie Kelly had passed on one of Welles’s business cards for a company called EDGE. I ran the company through the Secretary of the Commonwealth database and found an address in Cambridge. Tally-ho. I slipped my .38 just below my right hip, reached for my Braves cap, and grabbed my car keys.
Pearl and I were off to Central Square. Her long brown ears blew in the wind as we drove along Memorial Drive against the Charles. Rowers rowed, joggers jogged, and bench sitters sat. It was mid-September and the air had turned crisp. The leaves had already started to turn red and gold, shining in Technicolor upon the still water.
The address led me to a narrow, wedge-shaped building where Western Avenue joined with River Street. There was a directory by a locked door with Lilliputian type. Undeterred, I slipped on a pair of cheaters and searched for any mention of Welles or EDGE. Nothing. Two real-estate firms, a lawyer, and a classic-car broker. I slipped the cheaters back into my shirt pocket and called the building’s management company from my cell.
Twenty minutes later, a heavyset woman in a dark blue pantsuit crawled out of a small silver BMW. She had a cell phone screwed tightly into her ear and wore an abundance of gold jewelry. I knew her name was Joanne D’Ambrosio and she had an office in the North End. I told her I was a prospective renter.
“Alfred LaRue,” I said. “Friends call me Lash.”
“And what’s your business, Mr. LaRue?”
“I vanquish foes.”
She was half listening, looking at the number of someone who was calling. “We have three units available,” she said. “How much square footage do you need? And how soon do you need it?”
She unlocked the front door and we walked down a narrow hallway. The carpet was beige, threadbare, and spotty as a Dalmatian. The walls were scuffed with black marks and badly in need of paint. I ran my hands along some uneven spackling.
“The landlord looks to make improvements at the first of the year,” she said. “The building had been in bankruptcy. That should all be worked out soon. Do you live in Cambridge?”
“No,” I said. “But I keep a toothbrush here. I heard about this building from my old pal, Brooks Welles. He said it was quiet and reasonable.”
If she recognized the name, it didn’t register. She stood in the hall, checking messages on her phone.
“Is he still on the first floor?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “What’s that again?”
“M. Brooks Welles,” I said. “He runs a company called EDGE.”
Her eyes narrowed. She lifted her chin and took a more solid glance my way. She was inspecting me.
“I thought I might pop in and say hello.”
“How friendly are you?”
“Well,” I said. “To be honest, I only just met him.”
“He’s no longer in this building,” she said. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but Mr. Welles left with four months of unpaid rent.”
“Say it ain’t so.”
“Oh, it’s so,” she said. “And he left all his garbage for me to clean up. He left me a goddamn Post-it note saying we could have his furniture. Gee, thanks. A Salvation Army desk and a chair with a broken arm. You met him? Did he ever tell you what he did for a living?”
“A little of this,” I said, “a little of that.”
“A four-flusher,” she said. “That’s what my father called people like him.”
“Did he leave anything else in the office?”
“Like I said,” she said. “Garbage.”
“Any bills?” I said. “Files? Documents?”
“What did you say your name was?” she said, eyeing me. She crossed her arms and checked me out from ball cap to Nikes. I shrugged, reached into my pocket, and handed her my business card, the real one with the skull and crossbones to let people know I was serious. I offered her the full-wattage smile.
“Are you looking for a place to rent? Or are you full of it, too, Lash?”
“I could have used you a few months ago,” I said. “I was burned out of my apartment.”
Her eyes flickered around a bit, studying my face. She bit her lip, nodding.
“If you find the SOB, will you let me know?” she said. “That guy really stiffed me.”
“Deal.”
“Come on,” she said. “Come on. This is where I keep the deadbeat’s crap.”
We walked to the end of the hall, where she opened up a small office. As promised, inside we found a cheap metal desk, a broken chair, and a few old milk crates filled with mail. Joanne D’Ambrosio stood back and watched as I dumped out the mail and sorted through the letters and envelopes. She returned to checking her phone.
“At first I thought he’d gotten sick or something,” she said, tap-tapping away. “He wasn’t here. He didn’t answer the number I had. I kept his mail for about a month after I noticed it piling up. I was about to just toss it.”
I separated the wheat from the chaff, made a neat pile on the desk, and wrapped what I found with a rubber band. Two electric bills and six credit card statements. Score.
“He said he was in the movie business,” she said. “Said he was making a picture with Marky Mark. Some kind of spy action thing. Said he’d been a spy and they needed him as an adviser. That’s not true. Is it?”
“Probably not,” I said. “But you never know what a Wahlberg will do next.”
“He flirted with me,” she said, placing her hands on her wide hips. “Said I was real funny. A real character. He asked me if I kept any headshots. So stupid. I sent him the photo I used on my flyers.”
“Did you e-mail him?”
“Yes.”
“Did he respond?”
She nodded.
“I’d like that address and any phone numbers.”
“You know, it makes me feel dirty,” she said. “I don’t know why. I’ve known a lot of deadbeats. But usually I can tell. Makes me feel stupid that I bought into it.”
“He’s fooled others for a lot more.”
She smiled and nodded. “Yeah?”
“Almost three hundred grand,” I said. “That make you feel better?”
“Some,” she said. “But I still want what I’m owed.”
“Lot of that going around.”
3
I walked over to the Mariposa Bakery on Mass Ave with Pearl and found a comfortable table by the window to look through Welles’s mail. Pearl lapped up a bowl of water while I drank a cup of black coffee and made notes in a little black notebook. The first two envelopes showed Welles was six months late on his credit card payments and well over his limit. The bills were accompanied by a professional but unpleasant letter.
As I worked, two young women in yoga pants and thin tank tops over sports bras walked past my table. I looked up and smiled. They pretended not to notice the rakish middle-aged man and his charming dog. Restraint.
The third envelope contained a full bill from the last two months and a list of charges. Aha. The women moved to the counter and debated between maple and blueberry scones. They continued to ignore me.
I took out a pen and circled the charges that told me more about Welles or showed a pattern. Most of the charges had been made in the Greater Boston area, but at least ten had been made in Atlanta and Greenville, South Carolina. From the Boston numbers, I noted he was a fan of the Whole Foods on River Street, the Neiman Marcus at Copley Place, and the Four Seasons’ bar. Couldn’t be all bad if he liked the Four Seasons. I thought about organizing a stakeout at the bar with Hawk but then noted Welles had more recent, and frequent, visits to a spot in Eastie called Jimmy’s LLC.
A quick search on my phone got me an address for Jimmy�
��s Lounge, on the water by Logan.
It was nearly two o’clock, late for lunch and early for cocktail hour. However, drinking beer during the day was part of the job. Not to mention I was good at it. I wasn’t sure if Jimmy’s had the same open policy on dogs, but Pearl could nap in my cool backseat while I made inquiries.
A half-hour later, I sat at Jimmy’s Lounge eating a soggy grilled chicken sandwich with a side of stale chips. The beer was Sam Adams Octoberfest and very cold. It almost made the sandwich tolerable.
“Sorry,” the bartender said. “I don’t know a guy named M. Whoosis Welles.”
I showed him a photo I’d printed from one of his many TV appearances.
The bartender, a short, paunchy kid in a red T-shirt reading Jimmy’s, Where the Elite Meet, shook his head. He studied it some more and scratched at his ear. “You want another beer?”
“Twist my arm.”
Jimmy had really embraced the whole nautical theme at his bar. Lots of fishing nets filled with plastic crabs and starfish. A metal diving helmet and reprints of old diving charts lined the walls, along with beer babes in bikinis and grinning sports stars. I sipped on the draft and read back through the charges, cross-referencing the dates with days of the week. I whistled, “Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life for Me).”
“Who works Tuesdays and Thursdays?” I said.
“Phil.”
“Would you mind calling Phil and asking him about Mr. Welles?”
He shrugged. “I don’t want to get in the middle of some crap with his old lady. Are you in the repo biz?”
“Of a sort,” I said.
“Phil comes in today at five,” he said. “If you want to wait.”
I drank some more beer, laid down a respectable tip, and drove over to a dog park by Logan. I made some phone calls and tossed a tennis ball around until Pearl grew tired. I kept some treats in the console of the Toyota Land Cruiser I was driving this year. It was a plain model from the late eighties with less than fifty thousand miles on it. Nice and roomy for dog and master. The four-wheel drive helped getting to the cabin I’d built some years ago in Maine.
At five, I was back at Jimmy’s Lounge waiting for Phil, who walked into the bar at 6:20. He and the day shift talked for a bit and the earlier guy nodded with his chin toward me. I raised an Octoberfest in his direction; he looked away and headed back to the bar. He was a tall, lean guy with thick black-framed glasses, closely cropped dark hair, and a lot of tattoos. He didn’t look my way as he busied himself with the liquor bottles, stooping down to check the levels on the taps. After a few minutes, he pointed to my beer and asked if I’d like a refill.
“No, thank you,” I said. “Just waiting for my pal, M. Brooks Welles.”
“You mean Mikey?”
“Sure,” I said. “Ol’ Mikey.”
“Are you trying to jam him up?” Phil said.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I said. “He’s an old friend.”
“Hah.”
“Do I look like a repo man?”
“No offense,” he said. “But you look like a leg breaker.”
I nodded in appreciation and took a slow sip of beer. I reached into my wallet and pulled out a fifty-dollar bill. Three for the beer and a little something extra for Phil’s cooperation. The flash of green got his attention. He looked me in the eye and smiled.
“Need change?”
“Nope.”
“He owes you money,” Phil said. “Right?”
“Why do you say that?”
“He owes a lot of people money,” he said. “Like I said, he’s a nice guy. He has a ton of personality and all that. Looks like a freakin’ old-time movie star. Tan. Silver hair. Makes friends with everybody. He told me that I needed to quit this job and go back to school. He said I had a real mind for business, the way I ran the bar. One night, he got me so damn into it, I was filling out forms online. He has a way of getting you excited about things. Maybe I trusted him because he was a vet.”
“Army?”
He flashed a couple tattoos on his forearm. “You?”
“Long time ago,” I said. “Different war.”
He nodded. “Mikey came in here maybe three weeks ago, buying everyone drinks, saying he’d just landed some big military contract. And then he disappeared out the back door. I took all the freakin’ blame. Jimmy about exploded. He wanted to fire me, but he’s keeping me on until I pay him back.”
“How much?” I said.
“Almost four hundred bucks.”
“Jumping Jehoshaphat,” I said. “That’s a lot of overtime.”
“Bet your ass.”
“So,” I said, glancing out the window. I spotted Pearl’s snout sticking out the back window, sniffing at the salt air. “You don’t really owe Mikey a thing. He owes you.”
“Yeah.”
“How can I find him, Phil?”
He rubbed his hand over his short hair. Phil looked tired, worn-out in his mid-twenties. He walked over to a coffeepot and poured out a cup. He picked up the crisp fifty and studied it. The tattoos on his arm looked like a map from Road to Zanzibar.
“Won’t do you any good,” he said. “He’s big buddies with Mr. Gredoni. I tried to run him down through Gredoni, and Gredoni told me that Welles was back overseas. Some kind of classified work. He promised me that Welles was good for the tab. He said he’d probably just drank too much that night.”
“Mr. Gredoni pay you?”
“Nope.”
“And where can I find Mr. Gredoni?”
“You don’t quit, do you?”
“It’s an ingrained character trait.”
“John Gredoni?” he said, as if I should know the name.
I shrugged.
“Gredoni’s Gun World?” he said. “Like the billboards by Fenway. He runs a big range on Route One in Lynn. It’s a mile past the Golden Banana. There’s a big neon gun outside. You can’t miss it.”
Most red-blooded men in the Greater Boston thought of the Golden Banana as a historic landmark. “And Mr. Welles and Gredoni are friends?”
“Big buddies,” Phil said. “Gredoni said Welles once saved his life in Iraq. He called him the real deal. An absolute American patriot.”
“What did you think?”
“I was with the Tenth Mountain Division,” he said. “I did three tours. Something about the way he talked was off. He didn’t talk like a military guy.”
“What’s Welles talk like?”
“Like someone who tries to talk the fucking talk,” he said. “But never walked the fucking walk.”
“Oh.” I smiled. “One of those.”
4
So,” Susan said. “Can you help Connie?”
“My pleasure,” I said. “I just learned the trail of bread crumbs will lead me right past the Golden Banana.”
“Will you be able to restrain yourself?”
“I have a weakness for donuts and naked women.”
“But some naked women more than others.”
“I do prefer educated Jewish women who can’t cook.”
“I can cook,” Susan said. “I just prefer not to.”
“Without us, half of Harvard Square would go broke.”
She toasted me with her vodka gimlet as we sat next to each other at the bar at Harvest, a high step up from Jimmy’s. Dim lighting, mod furnishings, delicious food. I had the Harvest burger. Susan had ordered a kale salad with pears. Pearl was back at her house, sleeping off her hard day’s work of detecting.
“Do you believe he’s really out of the country?”
“I’ll know more after meeting Mr. Gredoni tomorrow.”
“I’ve seen his billboards,” she said. “They are repulsive. The ones that say ‘Bring on the big guns.’ Women in bikini tops holding assault rifles. I never thought he could actually be a r
eal person.”
“Welles leaves quite a mess behind him,” I said. “He owes a lot of people money. And this was just the first day. I’m waiting to hear back from several inquiries.”
“What did Connie tell you?”
“That they met through a respectable Internet dating site,” I said. “Apparently she bought into his stories because she’d seen him on TV. She said he was slow picking up the check but fast in the love department. I guess she’d really fallen for him.”
“An understatement,” she said. “I wish I could tell you more.”
“Patient/shrink confidentiality?”
“There’s a reason I get two hundred an hour.”
“She told me Welles pried open that alligator-skin checkbook of hers and she made an investment into some kind of real-estate scam,” I said. “Then he made like Elvis and left the building.”
“Did she show you the actual agreement?” Susan said. She took a minute sip of the gimlet and toyed with a thin sliver of lime.
“Yep,” I said. “I thought I’d run it by Vince Haller and see what he thinks.”
Susan nodded. She set down the glass. It was still very cold, frosty at the edges.
“No details,” I said. “But it did a real number on her?”
Susan nodded again. “She wasn’t ready for a relationship,” she said. “Her marriage ended badly. She has self-confidence issues and desperately seeks approval. Welles presented himself as the perfect man.”
“For some, that’s just second nature.”
“Ha,” she said. “So, can you deliver Mr. Perfecto?”
“Like I told Connie, I can’t promise any legal action,” I said. “But I can find him.”
“And perhaps turn him upside down to shake out what he has left?”
“That’s a crude, but accurate, summation of my services.”
The bartender brought my burger and Susan’s salad. We ate and I talked to the bartender a little bit about the Sox’s disappointing season and my high hopes for the Pats. I dropped the name of a recent Pro-Bowler named Kinjo Heywood. Heywood seemed a shoo-in for Canton. His once-kidnapped son was now an honor student.