The Mather Triad: Series Boxed Set (Chloe Mather Thrillers)

by Lawrence Kelter

  “Wasn’t that about a hundred years ago?”

  “Don’t I wish. October 2012, but it’s still a problem. FEMA really screwed the pooch on that one. The government wastes money on every manner of useless crap, but when and where it’s really needed …”

  “You going to ride to their rescue on your white stallion, my brave knight?”

  “I think you’re reading too many romance novels and you’re having delusions of grandeur.” His shoulders rose and fell. “I’ll do what I’ve always done … make well-intentioned promises that’ll never be kept.”

  “That’s m’boy. You’re such a spectacular fraud—they’ll never doubt you. Once they’re under your spell, they’ll think the sun shines out your hind parts.”

  He gave her a confident thumbs-up. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, darling.”

  “Stuff a sock in your pants,” she said with a smirk. “It did wonders for Tom Jones.”

  “Oh? Dissatisfied with my equipment, are you?”

  “Never, darling. But it never hurts to put your best foot forward.”

  He chuckled. “You’re too much. Do all women think like you do?”

  “I believe they do. They just don’t have the balls to admit it.”

  “I see. Do you suggest dress socks, or should I go full tilt and roll up a pair of bulky wool hunting socks?”

  “I’m tempted to go with the hunting socks, but all that scratchy wool, it might irritate your plums. I wouldn’t want that to happen.”

  “Dress socks it is, then.” He leaned over and kissed her. “Don’t worry. I’ll do my best.”

  “I hope you’ll do better than that,” Bairre Donovan said in his thick brogue as he awoke from his nap. “This is your last trip to the rodeo, my boy.”

  “Well, look who’s awake,” Scarlett announced in a sweet voice. “Have a good nap, Dad?”

  “Yeah.” He yawned as he rolled over to face his son. “You’ve become a little too cynical, Jim boy. I know you’re a pretty good bullshitter … I was myself, but … well, people may not call you out on it in the town square, but they sure enough know when someone’s pissing on their boots and telling them it’s rain. Sincere politicians have become as rare as hen’s teeth.”

  “I do so love your old-world expressions,” Scarlett said. “I find them absolutely enchanting.”

  “Is that what you like about your crusty old father-in-law?” Bairre replied. “Or is it that I don’t need to stuff socks in my knickers?”

  “How long have you been listening to us?” she asked with a sly expression on her face.

  “Long enough. Anyway …” He turned back to his son. “Jim boy, we were talking about lying to the people.”

  “You got away with it long enough,” Donovan countered.

  “That could very well be true, but that was a different day and age, Jim. I was a local politician, and I didn’t have to lose sleep worrying that every word I said was going to be memorialized on the worldwide web. Most of my deals were struck behind closed doors without the media present. Nowadays every two-bit reporter is up your arse with a candle, mining for gold. Besides, I always tried to do right for my constituents. You’ve got your sights on the White House, Jim boy. People expect more, and they’ve got every right to get it.” He sat up and made the back of the lounge chair upright. “Case in point, you said that you’d make well-intentioned promises to the people of Long Beach, promises you said would never be kept.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well hell, boy, how can you win over three hundred million people if you don’t even believe the lies you’re selling? It’s fine to make promises, but if you don’t have the conviction to see ’em through …” He sighed. “Well then, you’re just pissing into the wind, Jim boy.”

  Jim Donovan was fifty-eight, and Bairre a mere eighteen years his senior. James Donovan sometimes found it difficult to take criticism from his father, but he let his advice wash over him and settle in. “You’re right, Dad,” he said in a deprecating voice.

  “Oh, stop whimpering like a whipped puppy,” Bairre complained as he rose from his lounge chair. “I was only putting a boot in your arse. Be a man. Go out there, win the election, and show the good people of the US of A what we Donovans are made of.” He began to walk away from them. “I need to hit the jakes; got to pee like a racehorse.”

  Donovan watched his father disappear through the door of the lavish home.

  “Jakes? He needs to hit the jakes?” Scarlett asked with a bemused expression on her face.

  “It’s like saying outhouse.” He locked eyes with her and they laughed.

  Chapter 20

  Unbelievable! Wednesday’s owner recognized Al after almost two decades and welcomed him back to his restaurant like he was a long-lost brother. He went so far as to bring us hot coffee and a basket of freshly baked mini muffins on the house. I eat breakfast there at least once a week and … nothing. There wasn’t even the slightest glimmer of facial recognition until Al introduced me as his daughter, and then he began to gush over me as if we were kin. Christ, the whole thing makes me nauseous.

  We were early for lunch and the place was pretty much empty. We took a booth in the rear so that we’d have a little privacy. We both ordered eggs over easy without looking at our menus.

  I settled in for our family reunion.

  “Geez, what a good guy,” Al began. “Do you believe he remembered me after all these years?” He was stirring his coffee but paused to look up at me. “There’s something wrong when a man gets a warmer reception from a luncheonette owner than from his family.”

  “Ya think?”

  “Aw, come on, little girl, give me half a chance, would ya?”

  “I am giving you half a chance—I’m here, aren’t I?”

  He grimaced. “I suppose. Say, try one of those muffins. They look fantastic,” he said and seized one of the free bakery items.

  “Let’s cut to the chase, Al. You haven’t been around in God knows how long, and you wouldn’t have come back now if you weren’t in trouble and needed my help.” I didn’t want to make any more conversation than was necessary, but my animosity had been bottled up for so long … I just couldn’t hold back any longer. “How could you do it?” I asked contemptuously. “How could you run out on us the way you did? Didn’t you love us even the slightest bit?”

  “Of course I loved you and your mother, little girl. I loved you like crazy.” He averted his eyes, and when he looked back, he seemed remorseful. “I don’t need you to remind me what I did. I know I made some God-awful mistakes, mistakes I’ve got to live with the rest of my life. I know I screwed up big time, but …” He gazed down at the table while he thought of what to say. “Geez, it’s hard to explain it, but sometimes when a man goes that far off the reservation, well … he just can’t find his way back. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

  I actually kind of did. There’s that mythical point of no return, which apparently Al was unable to return from, but in my mind it all boiled down to shame, and he was the one responsible for it. “You’re a man, aren’t you? You should’ve handled it like a man, but you didn’t. You turned tail and ran away.”

  “I’ll repeat. I don’t need you to tell me what I did.”

  “Oh no?” I grabbed a muffin, popped it into my mouth, and ground it into mush. “My entire adult life has been about loyalty and integrity. So help me out, would you, because I’m just trying to understand how you think. I can’t for the life of me figure you out. You had a life and a family and you flushed it down the toilet. You took off with some tootsie and left Grace broke and alone to bring me up on her own.”

  “You turned out okay.”

  No thanks to you! I didn’t need a mirror to see the icy stare that was on my face. I could feel it.

  “Look, Chloe, you went off and joined the marines. You did what you felt you had to do, didn’t you? Well, I did the same.”

  “I went off to serve my country. How dare you? How dare you
equate what you did with me spending four years putting my life on the line to defend democracy?”

  He looked at me sheepishly. “I thought you’d be a little more understanding.”

  “Did you? Did you really?” I felt my blood pressure spike. “Look, tell me about the trouble you’re in so that I can get the hell out of here.”

  He pushed his coffee cup away and reached for his wallet. “Forget about it,” he grumbled. “I’ll take care of it myself. A man brings a child into this world and she treats him like some kind of criminal.”

  “You are a criminal. You think that just because you’re not in jail that you’re some kind of saint?”

  He stood up. “All right I’m going. I won’t bother you no more. Have a nice life.” He walked away.

  Yeah? Screw you!

  True to form, he left the check for me to pay. Despite all that had just transpired, he had succeeded at what I’m sure he had intended to do all along. He’d made me feel guilty.

  Chapter 21

  “Hey, wait a minute.” I caught up with him out on the street just as he was about to get into his rental car. I freely admit that I wasn’t thinking clearly. I couldn’t put a finger on my exact motivation, but something inside me just wouldn’t allow me to let him walk away.

  He held up his hand like a stop sign. “I’m not a charity case, Chloe. I don’t want your help anymore. I’ll take care of my problems on my own like I always have. I’ve had enough of your mother’s holier-than-thou attitude all these years, and I don’t need any more from you.”

  “I’m not here to forgive you, Al. That’s not something we’re going to work out over eggs and coffee, but I want to know why you think someone is trying to kill you.”

  He looked at me disparagingly. “Found your conscience?”

  “Don’t push it, Al. Just give it to me in broad strokes.”

  “Huh. You sure you want to hear this?”

  “No. Not really, but I asked you to tell me, so let’s hear it.”

  He weighed my response for a moment before opening the driver-side door and hitting the door lock switch. “Get in.”

  As you wish, my liege. In for a penny, in for a pound—let’s hear what the old letch has to say.

  He began the moment I pulled the door shut. “The old company.”

  “You mean Grace’s old company?”

  He grimaced unpleasantly. “Is that the way it’s gonna be, Chloe? Because if it is …”

  “All right, cool your jets, Al. I didn’t mean anything by it. I was just trying to get clarification. I was barely a teen when you left. Go on.”

  “Well, you remember what kind of business it was, don’t you?”

  “Construction.”

  “Yeah. Construction, demolition, carting … anything that had to do with building and building materials.”

  “And?”

  “Well, you’ve heard about the toxic dumping at Francisco Desicero Park, haven’t you?”

  “It’s hard to turn on a TV or radio and not hear about it. But what does that have to do with you? You haven’t had anything to do with that business for almost twenty years.”

  “Correct, but while I was in business …”

  I braced myself for the news. I couldn’t imagine what he was about to tell me. Prepare for the worst, hope for the best, I told myself. I’ve got a feeling this is going to be really bad.

  “Well, before it was a park it was sort of a landfill, and we used to dump all of our crap over there.”

  “Still, that was ages ago. Why is it a problem after all these years?”

  “The problem is, little girl, that the town, the state, and the DEC have very strict laws about what you can dump and where.”

  My blood began to boil. Christ on a cross, here it comes. “And?”

  “Well, the stuff you can’t dump is supposed to go to special containment sites in unpopulated areas where it won’t harm anyone, only it costs a fortune to do that.”

  “So you figured you’d save a little money and mix the toxic crap in with the not-harmful materials. Is that it?”

  “Close but not exactly.” He shook his head regretfully. “I figured I’d make a little money—a lot actually.”

  “How?”

  “By taking a risk. That’s how. Some of this stuff is so bad you can’t even dump it here in the states unless you want to go out of business from the expense. So it gets shipped to China and India, where the governments don’t give a rat’s ass what kind of harmful crap the people are exposed to. Like mercury, for example—that shit is so toxic that none of the dumps want to take it. The stuff causes cancer, big time. It’s in thermostats and batteries … fluorescent light bulbs and medical waste. Back then they wanted like fifty bucks a pound to dispose of that crap.”

  “And you did it for less.”

  “A hell of a lot less. I dumped that shit for everyone in a two-hundred-mile radius and made a pretty penny from it, let me tell you.” Al pulled a pack of gum out of his pocket and offered me a stick before pushing one into his mouth. “Word was that the town was supposed to cap the landfill, and I figured what the hell, problem solved, why not make a little scratch. Once the landfill was properly sealed, it would be like nothing was dumped there at all.”

  “You said someone wanted to kill you. This sounds more like you’re trying to avoid a jail sentence.”

  He got comfortable in his seat and put his head back against the headrest. “Nah. That ain’t it.” He turned to me and his eyes became softer, almost vulnerable. “I’ve got cirrhosis. I had one of my kidneys removed a few years back. I’ve been having some pain, so the doc made me take a PET scan last month and it lit up like Times Square on New Year’s Eve.”

  Oh Christ. My throat tightened. I was stricken by the thought of his death. Suddenly all of his appalling transgressions didn’t matter anymore. “What do the doctors say? How long?”

  “Who gives a shit what the doctors say? I know the end is coming; I just don’t want to take a bullet between the eyes.” He pointed at me suddenly. “Hey! This is between you and me. Your mother doesn’t need to know. Agreed?”

  “Not right now, anyway.”

  “I’ll be the one to tell her but only when the time is right,” he insisted.

  I drummed my fingers on my leg. “What’s going on here, Al? Who wants to kill you and why?”

  “You think I know?” He shrugged.

  “Christ, don’t play games with me. Spill it already.”

  He moistened his lips. “Two of the guys who did work for me are dead, and I don’t mean from old age. One of the guys, Mike Otho, got his throat slit in Queens, and the other …” He wet his lips again. “Well, it wasn’t very pretty—son of a bitch got carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey.”

  “And you’re sure these deaths are related to the dumping?”

  “Has to be, little girl, because someone came after the third man in the crew in the last few days. I figure the only reason they didn’t get to me already is because I live thirteen hundred miles away. Monte, the guy they just came after, warned me all about it, but I had a hunch that something was up way before then, when I heard that Mike had been murdered. That’s why I called you, only … I didn’t know you were in the process of taking a bullet. How’s your back feeling, anyhow?”

  “Not great. I guess it must be healing.”

  “The feds got a line on the guy who did it?”

  Listen to him, calling the FBI the feds like he’s Bugsy Siegel or something. “We’re still looking. We’ll find him, rest assured.” I reached over, turned the key to the accessories position, and opened my window. “You should go to the police.”

  “And cop to the dumping charges? There’s no statute of limitations on an offense like that. The DEC will cook me like a rotisserie chicken. Yeah, right—are you kidding? Like I’m going to walk into the police station and tell some shit-for-brains detective about two related murders and a toxic dumping cover-up. Little girl, I thought you were brigh
ter than that.”

  “What am I supposed to do? You want me to hunt down some nebulous hit man on the QT? I’m a federal law enforcement officer. Do you really think I’d risk my career to keep you out of jail?” I was incredulous. “You already ruined our—”

  “Oh, there it is,” he blurted defensively. He looked as if he had been mortally wounded. “I ruined the family, didn’t I? So it’s okay for me to rot in a federal penitentiary.”

  I rubbed my eyes. “Jesus Christ, Al. What am I supposed to do? You’ve already implicated me in your crime. I’m legally obligated to inform the police.”

  “Ah, horseshit, Chloe. What the police don’t know won’t hurt them.”

  “You’re a real dick, you know that?” I pulled the handle and jumped out of the car.

  Al Mather had returned to finish the job he’d begun when he destroyed the family all those years ago. Grace and I had been lucky enough to survive that ordeal, but that wasn’t good enough for him, and I knew he wouldn’t be satisfied until the Mather clan had been reduced to ashes.

  I closed the door and spoke to him through the open window. “You need to back off and give me some space. I don’t know what to do about this, and I need time to think.”

  Chapter 22

  Rossetti wiped the safety on his automatic and peered through the peephole before undoing the door chain and letting Al Mather into his hotel room.

  “How do I look?” Al asked as he strutted into the shabby room, preening like a peacock to show off his new brown leather blazer. “What do you think, gorgeous? Feel the leather, Monte—it’s as soft as a virgin’s thigh.”

  “You’re a fucking psycho,” Rossetti sniped as he latched the door. “Someone’s trying to put us both in the ground and you’re worried about your appearance? You should’ve spent the money on Kevlar body armor and a forty-five-caliber Sig.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said in an offhand manner. “I spoke to my kid.”