Suspicion

by Joseph Finder

  But he didn’t dare take it out and reposition it. There wasn’t time—with every second the chances that someone would catch him in here increased—and taking it out and mashing it down one more time might mangle the red velvet noticeably.

  Then he realized that he hadn’t paid any attention to how the medal had been placed in there originally. Maybe it was turned one way or another. He had no recollection.

  But would Galvin notice a tiny detail like that? It seemed unlikely.

  He let out a long, silent breath. Backed away from the desk.

  And heard the familiar raspy voice.

  “Can you believe Grill 23 was closed tonight?” said Tom Galvin.

  21

  Danny felt his entire body jolt. He let out an involuntary cry, a sort of strangled yip.

  Galvin laughed. “Didn’t mean to startle you like that.”

  “Hey. You had—I thought you had a dinner with a client.”

  “The guy had his heart set on Grill 23—some friend of his said they serve the best steak in Boston—and I kept telling him, you know, Abe & Louie’s, you can’t go wrong there, I like their steaks even better, and you can’t go wrong with Capital Grille, either. But no, he says his wife won’t let him do red meat more than once a month, and he’s not wasting his monthly allotment on any steak except Grill 23’s. So we had a drink and rescheduled.”

  “Well, since you’ve caught me skulking around your office, I might as well come out and ask.”

  “Ask . . . ?” In the gloom, Galvin’s eyes were inscrutable.

  “I wanted to surprise you. Those amazing cigars—what are they called again? I wanted to get you a box of them. Least I could do to thank you.”

  Galvin switched the overhead lights on and took a few steps into the room. He gave a small, crooked smile. “They haven’t moved.” He gave a casual wave toward the overstuffed leather chairs in front of his desk. Danny glanced. On the end table next to one of them was the black lacquer box, COHIBA BEHIKE in gold letters on its lid. The gold glittered in the overhead spotlight. “I appreciate the thought, but you don’t really want to spend half the money I lent you on cigars, now do you? That box cost close to twenty thousand bucks, Danny boy. It was a gift—I wouldn’t spend that kind of money on cigars. Come on.”

  “O-o-oh, I see. No, I don’t think so.” He chuckled.

  “Appreciate the thought, though. I hope you’re staying for dinner.”

  Danny couldn’t decide if he was pleased or dismayed at how smoothly he’d just lied. Maybe both.

  But that strange feeling was quickly overwhelmed by a low hum of anxiety. He was certain Galvin knew he was lying.

  22

  “You left the lights on,” Abby said.

  As he put the key in the lock, he noticed the spill of light under his apartment door.

  Then he remembered. Yesterday, Lucy had offered to pick up sushi for the three of them—California roll and such for Abby, no raw fish—for dinner tonight.

  “Oh, shit.”

  Lucy was on her laptop at the dining table. Arrayed around her were clear plastic trays with decorative green plastic blades of grass and rows of sliced sushi rolls. The remains of a glass of white wine.

  “I’m guessing you guys already ate.”

  “I screwed up. My bad, Lucy. I’m sorry.”

  She didn’t look angry or even particularly annoyed. She smiled as if secretly amused, shook her head. Maybe a little annoyed. “There’s plenty left. But it won’t be any good tomorrow. Unagi, Abby? It’s cooked.”

  “I’m good,” she said. “Daddy, you didn’t tell her you were at Wellesley College?”

  “Why Wellesley?” Lucy asked.

  “Yeah, there’s an archive there . . .” His voice trailed off. Another lie.

  “The Jay Gould archive,” Abby announced.

  Thanks, kid, he thought. You basically have no idea what I do for a living and suddenly you’re doing the play-by-play color commentary?

  “There’s a Jay Gould archive at Wellesley?” Lucy said. “You’re kidding. That I never would have expected. The letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Jay Gould, together under one roof. Who knew?”

  “It’s just the letters between Gould and one of his wives,” Danny said, and added hastily, “How was your day?”

  “It was fine,” Lucy said distantly, but the way she furrowed her brow made Danny’s stomach do a little flip. She knew him too well.

  • • •

  With both his daughter and his girlfriend at home, there wasn’t much privacy. He waited until Abby had gone into her room and Lucy was in the shower, then he sat down at his desk in the living room, loaded a program the DEA agents had given him called Adium, and signed on to the JayGould1836@gmail.com account.

  He composed a text to AnonText007@gmail.com. Just three words: device in place. He stared at it for a few seconds.

  A window opened: OTR FINGERPRINT VERIFICATION. The encryption “fingerprint” for the DEA agents. A box of gobbledygook popped up on his Gmail page. Fortunately, he didn’t have to know what the hell he was doing to make it work. He assumed it meant that his text messages to them were automatically encrypted, and theirs back. He clicked ACCEPT.

  ENCRYPTED CHAT INITIATED. In other words, the text had gone through successfully.

  Then he remembered about the pictures. He e-mailed to himself the photos he’d taken of Galvin’s desk. Saved them to his computer’s desktop. Then sent them to AnonText007@gmail.com.

  And he was done.

  The DEA boys would get the evidence they needed to arrest Tom Galvin. They’d arrest Celina’s husband, Jenna and Ryan and Brendan’s father.

  He didn’t want to think about that, though. It came down to a very simple choice: Galvin’s family or his. That wasn’t exactly a difficult decision, was it?

  Not that he cared about what might happen to Galvin. He hardly knew the guy. Even the man’s wife and kids—he didn’t know them, either. If Galvin were truly involved in criminal activity, he deserved to go to prison.

  He signed off.

  • • •

  But he hated lying to the two women in his life.

  He hadn’t lied to Abby since Sarah’s death. And then he’d had no choice. Sarah had insisted.

  Sarah had wanted Abby to go to Camp Pocapawmet, on Cape Cod, that last summer, just as she’d gone every summer since she was eleven. And he’d gone along with it, but he’d said, You don’t want her around for . . .

  Tearfully, Sarah had shot back, This is not the way I want her to remember her mommy. I don’t want her to remember me as a sick, dying woman. I want her to enjoy being a kid. A couple of weeks of just being a kid. Carefree and happy. Because when I go, everything will change for her.

  But he didn’t want to lie to her.

  Call it protection. Call it protecting her childhood. I don’t want a shadow to fall over that girl until it really has to.

  So he’d lied, of course. Mommy had an infection in her lungs. She had to spend a little while in the hospital, and then she’d get better.

  Meanwhile, Sarah went through round after brutal round of chemotherapy. Anthracycline and taxane. The chemo had to come before surgery. But it was stage-four cancer. The cancer had spread to the lymph nodes. The prognosis was poor.

  There wasn’t even time for surgery. It all happened too fast.

  And when everything turned for the worse at the beginning of August, when it had become clear that Sarah had days left, not weeks or months, Danny had picked Abby up at camp and told her Mommy was sick.

  Abby lay in the hospital bed next to her mother, her arms around her mother’s belly as Sarah slept, the machines wheezing and beeping, both of them crying. For two days.

  Danny knew that Sarah waited to die until Abby had gone home for the night. Danny knew she couldn’t bear to depa
rt this earth in the embrace of her child.

  So Abby’d had four worry-free weeks at camp before the shadow fell over her life.

  At the time it felt like the right thing to do.

  • • •

  Danny loathed being trapped in this pointless lie about Jay Gould: one more lie he’d have to keep track of. But he decided not to speak of it again unless and until it came up.

  Which of course it did, later that evening, as they lay in bed. Danny was rereading—well, reskimming, actually—an old book by Gustavus Myers called History of the Great American Fortunes, and Lucy was working on her laptop.

  “He was married only once,” she said.

  “Huh? Who?”

  “Jay Gould. You said ‘one of his wives,’ but he married once, to Helen Day Miller, who died like three years before he did.” Wikipedia’s page for Jay Gould was open on her computer screen. She gave him a sidelong glance.

  Why had he told her such an idiotic, sloppy lie? It was just the first thing that had sprung to his mind. He hadn’t given it a thought. “What made you look that up?”

  “I remember when you first started working on the book, I read something about him, I was wondering why he was considered such an evil jerk, and I noticed he only married once. Not six times or something, which you’d expect. These days, anyway. And I thought, well, I guess the times were different then. Or maybe he was a good husband at least.”

  “Did I say ‘one of’ his wives’? Long day. I misspoke.”

  She flipped the laptop closed. “No, you didn’t, Danny. There aren’t any Jay Gould archives at Wellesley and—”

  “Sweetie, listen. I told Abby I was doing work out there because I wanted to take her home myself. That’s all. I’m not comfortable with her being driven around by a chauffeur.”

  “So why not just tell her that?”

  “Obviously, I should have. I didn’t feel like setting off another argument.”

  “God forbid you should get into an argument with someone.”

  He shrugged. If you don’t want to be psychoanalyzed, don’t date a shrink. Lucy understood, long before he did, that he had a problem with anger. His problem was something that he never thought could possibly be considered a problem: He never gave in to anger. He felt it, sure, plenty of times. But he prided himself on his ability to suppress it. When an argument began, he’d always de-escalate. Holding anger in this way required great self-control, but he’d taught himself that self-control since childhood.

  He’d learned by example. For years he’d thought that his father, Bud, had a short fuse.

  But putting it that way, so bland and benign, made it sound normal. Bud Goodman in fact had no fuse. He was one of those chemical compounds, like liquid nitroglycerin or mercury fulminate, that would explode on impact. Danny had learned how to avoid the triggers that would set his father off, and there were many of them. Disobedience was one. Dishonesty. A raised voice.

  Bud, who was a great carpenter, a fine craftsman, was constantly losing subcontractors. He’d tell them off, or just go after them in a hot flash of anger, until they quit. He lost plenty of clients that way, too. One lumberyard in Wellfleet refused to do business with him because he once tore into the yard manager, though Bud insisted that they were selling him short lots.

  If you listened only to Bud Goodman’s side, his subs were a capricious and moody bunch, every last one of them. Danny learned quickly that there was always another side of the story, usually involving a Bud Goodman tantrum that ended in a mushroom cloud of rage.

  Even when Sarah moved out, he didn’t understand that maybe he’d gone too far in the opposite direction. “For God’s sake, what’s wrong with you?” Sarah had snapped one day. “Do you not care what happens to us? Do you not even give a shit?”

  “Come on,” he replied, making her point. “Let’s talk this through reasonably. No need to shout.”

  Lucy once told him about a psychologist and marriage therapist named John Gottman who had identified what he called the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. These were the four most destructive behavior patterns that, if exhibited by a spouse, spelled doom for the marriage. This psychologist claimed that within the first three minutes of observing a couple, he could tell with ninety-four percent accuracy whether they would be divorced in the next five or six years. One of the most destructive of the Four Horsemen was “stonewalling”—tuning out, evading, avoiding conflict.

  Didn’t all men do that?

  No, Lucy had insisted.

  • • •

  “Well,” he replied, “I’m not the angry sort. Sorry about that, but I’m just not.”

  “What are you not telling me?” she asked.

  “Lucy, come on, you’re making a whole lot out of nothing.”

  “Are you still worried Abby spends too much time at the Galvins’?”

  He shrugged. “Not especially. I mean, I wish she spent more time with her other friends. Given how volatile friendships between girls this age can be.”

  “So you’re no longer worried about her head being turned by their wealth?”

  “Their kids seem to have a good set of values. . . .”

  They’re good people, he almost said. Nice family. But he caught himself.

  He didn’t know what to think about the Galvins.

  • • •

  “Maybe I’m not as concerned about them as I used to be,” he said.

  He slipped out of bed—dressed in an old pair of gym shorts and a Bruce Springsteen T-shirt (Tunnel of Love Express Tour, 1988, purchased at the concert at the Worcester Centrum)—and went out to the kitchen to grab a glass of tap water.

  Abby was still awake—no surprise; she was a night owl—and was standing against the refrigerator, spooning Ben & Jerry’s Red Velvet Cake ice cream out of the container. She held out the spoon. “Want some?”

  “No, thanks.” He gave her a quick hug. “I love you, Boogie.”

  “I love you, Daddy.”

  He took a water glass from the cabinet over the sink, held it under the faucet, and lifted the handle.

  “That ice cream won’t keep you up?”

  She shook her head.

  “Don’t forget to take Lactaid.”

  “I know.” She paused. “Hey, um . . . you didn’t go to BC, did you?”

  “Boston College? I went to Columbia. You know that. But BC’s an excellent college.” Was she actually thinking about which colleges she might go to? This was a historic moment.

  “I know, I thought . . . I mean . . .” She hesitated a beat. “So why do you have a Boston College medal? I don’t get that. Did they give that to you or something?”

  He froze. He watched the water brim over before he remembered to pull down the lever to shut off the flow.

  He’d left his jeans on the floor outside the bathroom, setting, as always, a lousy example for his daughter. But why was she going through his pockets?

  “Did I drop that thing somewhere?” he asked.

  “My pen died, so I wanted to borrow one of yours and I didn’t want to knock on your bedroom door, you know, and disturb you guys.” An artful roll of the eyes. “So how come you have it?”

  He shook his head vaguely. He was too weary to concoct a plausible lie and didn’t want to come off as defensive or angry and provoke her suspicion. “It’s a long story,” he said. “Boring and complicated. Now, come on, isn’t it your bedtime?”

  “What?” she protested.

  “And, Boogie—let’s not poke around in each other’s things, okay?”

  23

  Two days later, at a few minutes after five in the morning, Danny was awakened by the triumphal tritone plink of a secure text message on his iPhone. Lucy stirred in her sleep, mumbled, “What?”

  “Sorry,” he whispered.

  He grabbed the iPhone from the bedside
table. He slid it unlocked, saw that the message was from AnonText007. MEET 9AM 75 WEST BROADWAY, SOUTH BOSTON. TAKE T.

  Another meeting? He’d thought he was done with them. Now what was the problem?

  The T was, in Boston slang, the subway. For some reason they didn’t want him to drive. What was that about?

  He was too keyed up to go back to sleep, so he went into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee.

  By the time Abby awoke, he was wide awake and jittery.

  She sat in silence in the front seat during most of the ride to school. Every half a minute or so, she’d change radio stations, dissatisfied with all of them. Her favorite hip-hop station was all talk. When she wasn’t changing radio stations, she was busy texting.

  Ever since she’d become a teenager, Danny had given up trying to read her moods in the morning. She could be pouting or seething, or she could be just fine. She wasn’t a morning person. Anyway, sixteen-year-olds weren’t biologically programmed to get up at six thirty. He’d read that somewhere.

  She hadn’t said another word about the Boston College medal she’d found in his jeans. Of course not. What had struck such fear in Danny’s heart was just one more minor scuffle between Abby and Dad, another one thrown on the pile, already forgotten.

  “I hate this!” Abby said suddenly.

  “What do you hate?”

  The length of the drop-off line at school they’d just pulled into?

  “This . . . stupid piece-of-shit flip phone!”

  “Hey. Language.”

  “Sorry. Piece of crap. It’s so hard to text on this thing. How come I can’t get an iPhone?”

  “You want a Mercedes-Benz with that?”

  “No, I’m serious. I hate it! None of my friends have flip phones anymore.”

  “I know, life can be so cruel. First there’s that genocide in Darfur, then there’s the famine in Somalia, and then, worst of all, Abby Goodman is forced to use a last-year’s-model LG flip phone.”