Suspicion

by Joseph Finder

  Telling Abby the Italy trip wasn’t going to happen would feel a bit like that.

  “Dan,” Galvin said by way of greeting as he came out the front door, lowering his BlackBerry.

  Danny approached and said, in a low voice, “I can only accept this if you’ll let me pay you back.”

  Galvin’s eyebrows shot up. He nodded solemnly. “If you don’t, I’ll send my goons after you.” He gave Danny a wry smile.

  “I mean, no offense, but it’s a little awkward. We don’t even know each other.”

  “Which is crazy, right? Given how close Abby and Jenna are? Listen, come over for dinner tomorrow night, wouldja? The boys are home from college, and they love Abby, and Celina is making her famous arroz con pollo.”

  What could he say? The guy was shelling out for his daughter’s trip to Italy. Dinner with his family was the least he could do.

  Much later, he’d replay that moment over and over again in his head.

  He thrust out his hand and smiled. “Sounds great,” he said. “Thanks a lot.”

  3

  When Danny opened the door of the two-bedroom on Marlborough Street, he was greeted by the loud thumping of a dog’s tail against the floor. Rex, their arthritic chocolate Lab, struggled to get up from his bed near the kitchen.

  “That’s okay, buddy, no need to get up for my sake,” he said, coaxing Rex back down onto the plaid dog bed, stroking his graying coat, massaging his haunches. Rex was thirteen years old, which was old for the breed. His muzzle had gone silver, his amber eyes clouded with an opaque cataract haze. He’d belonged to Sarah, went with her after the divorce, and then had moved in with Abby. The old boy, profligate with affection, had heroically gotten Abby through her mother’s death.

  The red message light on Danny’s phone was blinking.

  Eight voice mails. Seven from one particularly odious and persistent collections agent named Tony Santangelo of Asset Recovery Solutions, who seemed to have trained at the Bada Bing school of debt collection. His “solution” was to “garnish” Danny’s wages.

  Garnish. Such a benign-sounding word. Like parsley sprigs and radish roses.

  And what wages?

  He’d replayed, over and over, that odd exchange with Tom Galvin. Thanks for letting me kick in on that Italy thing. Who was the guy, really? In the age of the Internet, the information had to be out there, and Danny, if nothing else, was an ace researcher.

  Sitting at his desk in the small alcove off the living room that was now his “study”—his office had become Abby’s bedroom—Danny opened a browser on his old MacBook Pro. LinkedIn had a long list of Thomas Galvins. Halfway down that roster was a Thomas X. Galvin who’d graduated from Boston College, worked for Putnam Investments, and was the founder, chief executive, chief investment officer, and managing director of Galvin Advisers on Saint James Avenue in Boston.

  Bingo.

  Rex, who was now curled atop Danny’s shoes, heaved a long soulful sigh and nuzzled even closer.

  Galvin Advisers of Boston, Mass. The website was nothing more than a secure portal, a page showing an overhead view of Boston’s Financial District, and a log-in box that asked for user name and password. Above it, the words: This website is intended solely for the employees and investors of Galvin Advisers.

  • • •

  Danny’s girlfriend, Lucy Lindstrom, arrived with dinner in a white plastic bag. Takeout from a place on Newbury Street: a salad for her and linguine with shrimp scampi for him. He could smell the garlic, the warm olive oil, oregano, a vinegary bite.

  She leaned over to stroke Rex’s face, causing him to close his eyes in bliss. Then she gave Danny a squeeze and a kiss. Her hair gave off a faint whiff of cigarette, which told Danny she’d spent the day doing outreach. She was a psychiatrist for the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, and she spent two days a week on the streets of Boston, trying to bribe and wheedle homeless people to come in and get treated.

  She wore a pale gray turtleneck under a blue V-neck sweater with black jeans and a great old pair of black leather boots that Danny loved seeing her in. She was wearing her chunky black glasses, which Danny was convinced she used to make herself plainer, and thus less vulnerable, at work. It gave her a sort of winsomely studious look.

  They’d been going out for three years, but they’d known each other since freshman year at Columbia. Back then, before life had kicked them both around, Lucy Lindstrom seemed unattainable. To Danny, she was the It Girl of his college class. She had blond hair that came down in unruly ripples to her shoulders, a sharp nose and chin, blue-gray eyes, a dazzling smile, an endearing overbite.

  Back then, she’d been way out of his league. Frankly, she still was.

  The two decades since college had etched faint lines around her mouth and vertical worry lines between her pale eyebrows. It wasn’t just the years; she’d also survived an unhappy first marriage.

  Danny knew she was overly sensitive about the signs of aging, indoctrinated like most women by fashion magazines.

  Danny couldn’t care less. He thought Lucy was more beautiful now than when she was a freshman.

  She set the round foil take-out pans on the dining table and eased off their cardboard lids.

  “Hard day?”

  “Mostly a lot of walking around. I need a shower.” Lucy never complained about her work. He admired that.

  “Glass of wine first?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  He pulled the cork out of a chilled bottle of Sancerre and poured them each a glass. They clinked. The wine was crisp, citrus and chalky.

  “Street outreach?”

  She nodded. “There was this guy at South Station today, sleeping on a bench. He looks like he’s seventy, but he could be ten years younger—you know how the street ages them. Well, the police tried to take him to one of our day shelters, but he refused to go. Really fought with them. So I tried.”

  She looked pained, as if reliving the moment. And at the same time tender, transported. She felt a deep connection with the homeless guys. As far as Danny was concerned, they were vagrants and bums, but they were Lucy’s children, her wards, not her patients.

  “I told him it’s getting to be really cold at night and he should sleep at the Night Center, not out on the street. But he said people were tampering with his food and they’ll get to him if he goes to sleep. He started babbling—all kinds of nonsense. Word salad.”

  He nodded. “Paranoid schizophrenic.” He found her work fascinating but also fundamentally baffling: How could she bear taking care of people who didn’t want her help?

  “Probably. We need to get him on Risperdal, but first I need to get him to talk. So I asked if I could sit with him and he said no. I said I just wanted to help. He said, ‘What the hell can you do for me?’ So I said, ‘Well, I have cigarettes.’ And he said, ‘Oh, okay.’” She took a sip of wine.

  Danny laughed. “Suddenly you couldn’t shut him up.”

  “I gave him a five-dollar gift certificate for McDonald’s, a cigarette, and a pair of white tube socks.”

  “So he’s coming in to see you?”

  She shook her head. “Later, maybe. First I have to get him to trust me. But you know, there’s something really . . . moving about this guy.”

  “How so?”

  “There’s an intelligence in there. A really great, interesting mind locked away, deep inside. It’s sort of heartbreaking.”

  The phone rang.

  No, he thought. Don’t let it be Tony Santangelo from Asset Recovery Solutions again. He was about to let it go to voice mail when he checked the caller ID: 212 area code and the name of his literary agency, Levitan Freed Associates.

  His agent, Mindy Levitan, rarely called except when she was in the middle of negotiating a deal for him.

  It couldn’t be good news.

  “H
ow’s life in the salt mines?” Mindy said. She had a raspy voice from years of smoking, which she’d only recently been able to quit with the help of a Russian hypnotist.

  “Excellent,” he lied. “Deep into it.” For several years now, he’d been working on a biography of a nineteenth-century robber baron named Jay Gould.

  “Good, good. That’s what I like to hear.” She said it without enthusiasm. “So listen, Danny. Sorry to call you at suppertime, but I just got into my country house and checked my messages. And I got a call from Louisa.” Louisa Penniman was Danny’s editor. She was a legendary editor of “serious” nonfiction. She’d made her bones on “inside the Beltway” books about politics and a couple of presidential memoirs. She was widely feared and even more widely disliked.

  “You’re breaking up,” Danny said. “I’m losing you.”

  “Nice try. We’re both on landlines. Listen, this is serious, Danny. She wants to cancel the book.”

  4

  Danny felt his mouth go dry. “She wants to cancel because I’m a few months late?”

  “First, kiddo, it’s not ‘a few’ months, it’s fifteen months—”

  “Okay, but—”

  “You know how bad things are in the industry. Publishers are all freaking out about e-books. They’re looking for any excuse to cancel contracts these days.”

  “Was there ever a time when things weren’t bad in publishing?”

  Mindy gave a quick, rueful laugh, more a bark. “Louisa Penniman doesn’t screw around.”

  “This isn’t just a threat? I mean, you think—she’s actually serious?”

  “As cancer,” Mandy said. Then, quickly, she added: “Sorry. Bad choice of words.”

  • • •

  Mindy Levitan had gotten him a bigger advance for his biography of Jay Gould than he’d ever expected. It helped that his first book, The Kennedys of Boston, had been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, even though it didn’t sell particularly well. Or actually win the Pulitzer, for that matter.

  Also, he had to admit that his proposal had been damned good. Even better was Mindy’s pitch to publishers: No one knows who Jay Gould is anymore, she’d written in her cover e-mail. Yet no one had heard of some Olympic track star shot down in World War II, but Unbroken was a massive bestseller. Nor had anyone heard of a serial killer who menaced Chicago during the World’s Fair, which didn’t stop readers from buying The Devil in the White City: It’s all in how the story is told.

  And Danny knew how to tell the story. Jay Gould was a railroad speculator and a strikebreaker and one of the richest men in America, an inside trader and a virtuoso at bribery, a scammer and a liar who actually bragged about being “the most hated man in America.”

  Random House, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster had all bid, but Louisa at Triangle had topped them all. The money sounded good at first—until you subtracted Mindy’s fifteen percent and spread the payments out over the three years, at least, it would take him to write the book. Plus, a big chunk of the money wouldn’t come in until the trade paperback was published, at least a year after the hardcover. Not that he was complaining: He got to do what he loved, and if he lived frugally and didn’t go on any trips to the Caribbean, he could have made it.

  But then came the call from Sarah.

  His ex-wife had just gotten the results of a biopsy. There’d been no lump, nothing on a mammogram. Just a little warmth and redness in one breast she noticed one day. The skin felt different, hard and taut like an orange. Her lymph nodes were enlarged. Her doctor had told her it was probably an insect bite, and he’d prescribed antibiotics.

  Her doctor was wrong.

  The survival rates for inflammatory breast cancer weren’t great. She was a single mom, and she was frightened.

  One minute Danny was researching the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886, and the next he was Googling estrogen receptors. Sarah’s second husband had taken a job at a firm in Manhattan, and their eventual breakup had been acrimonious. And the guy was a jerk, as Sarah had finally come to realize. She needed Danny’s help.

  He began eating a lot of cafeteria meals at the Dana-Farber cancer center.

  For the first time in years, his daughter actually seemed to need him around, too. She needed a steadying presence. She also needed someone to drive her to dance practice and play rehearsals and sleepovers. While he waited in the cramped back room of the dance studio, he researched chemotherapy and radiation and hyperthermia and raw apricot seeds and vitamin B17.

  And Jay Gould moved to the back burner.

  Because Mr. Gould, as fascinating as he was, wasn’t as important as Danny’s daughter, or his ex-wife, whom he’d never stopped loving even when she stopped loving him.

  “Danny?”

  “What?”

  “I said, we need to figure out what’s next. How soon can you get me a hundred, hundred fifty pages? To see if we can keep them on the reservation. Keep her from canceling.”

  “You think that’ll do it?”

  “Might. Who knows? It’s the only card I have to play. So you’ll do it?”

  Danny wasn’t even close to having a decent hundred-plus pages, and he wouldn’t be for at least a month. But if the book was canceled, there went his entire income stream.

  Danny swallowed hard. “No problem,” he said.

  5

  Lucy looked at him, arched her brows, and smiled sadly. “How bad?”

  “Very.”

  He told her what Mindy had to say. And about his meeting with the head of school.

  And then about the surprise loan from Thomas Galvin.

  “Oh,” she said. “That’s generous.” She didn’t sound enthusiastic.

  “Lucy.”

  She avoided his eyes.

  “Let’s hear it,” he said.

  “Well, are you sure that’s really a good idea?”

  “Why not?”

  “I just think it’s weird for this guy who doesn’t even know you to pay for your daughter to go on a trip.”

  “It’s unusual, I’ll give you that. Though he invited us over for dinner tomorrow night.”

  “I work tomorrow night. I mean, if I was even invited. Does Abby know about this?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Never underestimate teenage girls. They notice everything. And they can be manipulative. Believe me, I used to be one.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I just think it’s not a good idea to borrow money from this guy you barely know. It just—well, it sends up a red flag.”

  “You know what’s not a good idea? Charging five thousand bucks for a friggin’ school trip to Italy. The way this school just takes for granted that parents can shell out that kind of money.”

  “You’re just figuring this out?”

  “No, but it still annoys me. What it’s doing to Abby.”

  “So we’re really talking about Abby’s new friend.”

  “Abby gets driven home from the Galvins by a Hispanic servant wearing a chauffeur’s uniform, okay? There’s something wrong with that.”

  “I wouldn’t mind it.”

  “She’s a kid. And it’s not her life. It’s someone else’s.”

  “Exactly. That’s not her life, and she knows it. That kind of thing isn’t going to turn her head.”

  “How could it not? It’s like when someone says to you, ‘Doesn’t that tag inside the neck of your T-shirt bother you? Doesn’t it itch?’ And all of a sudden, what do you know?—it does itch. That tag starts driving you crazy.”

  “The itch being—what? Living with a father who adores her but doesn’t happen to be a zillionaire?”

  They heard the squeak of the front-door hinges, the thud of Abby putting down her backpack, the thump-thump-thump of Rex’s tail against the floor. Abby was talking to the dog as if he were either a
young child or a moron. “How was your day, Rex? Have you been a good boy? Oh, why is your collar still on?” The dog’s prong collar jingled. “Let’s ask Daddy if he remembered to take you out for a walk.”

  When she walked to the kitchen, she looked more like a woman, less like a girl. In the couple of months since she’d become best friends with Jenna, she’d started dressing differently. Instead of her everyday uniform of light blue Juicy sweatpants and a plaid fleece-lined flannel shirt, untucked, she’d wear preppy-looking twin sets and leggings. She’d started using makeup. He wanted to tell her to stop, slow down. You have your whole life to be a grown-up. You only get to be a girl for a few years.

  “For you.” She pulled an envelope from the pile and dropped it on the table. He recognized the cream-colored paper stock of a Lyman Academy envelope. “Looks like another bill,” she said. “Are we behind on the tuition again?”

  “We’re fine,” he said. “Nothing to worry about. You have dinner yet? I’ve got some shrimp and linguine left, if you want it. Or I could make, I don’t know, macaroni and cheese?”

  “No, thanks,” she said, her tone softening a bit. “I ate at the Galvins’.”

  “Great,” he said, trying to sound upbeat. Lately she’d been having dinner most nights with Jenna and her family. Who could blame her? Dinner with just the two of them was often strained, punctuated by long silences. But still . . .

  “I guess I get to meet them tomorrow night.”

  She nodded. “I know. You’ll like them a lot.”

  “Hey, Abby,” said Lucy, coming up from behind and giving Abby a quick peck on the cheek. “I love those flats. Tory Burch?”

  Abby looked uncomfortable but, at the same time, pleased. “I guess.”

  Danny used to worry about how his daughter would get along with his girlfriend. But she and Lucy seemed to be friends. Maybe it was because Lucy never tried to take Sarah’s place. Maybe it was because Abby wanted another mother figure in her life. Maybe it was because Sarah had married a man Abby didn’t like.