Little White Lies

by Ace Atkins

  I pulled a small notebook out of my pocket and wrote out the new addresses for EDGE Corp, the home address for Gredoni, the name of Kostas’s attorney, the amount of swindle, and the home address for Kostas. I quickly found a phone number, got his wife, and then got another number to their rock-hauling business in Lynn. I called that number, left a message with a secretary, and walked over to a vendor for a cup of coffee.

  I returned with sore legs back to my seat on the steps. I spent the next fifteen minutes watching women of all ages, sizes, and colors walk past me. I liked the way most women walked. I liked the way they dressed. And talked and smelled. I was pretty damn sure I was a fan of women in general. Did this make me a sexist or a feminist? Or somewhere in between.

  I drank some coffee and felt better about myself. I stretched my legs. It was an overcast day in Boston with a hint of rain. A cold wind came off the water, and for the first time in a long while, I wished I’d brought my jacket.

  I thought about how Susan never seemed to care about my appreciation of other women. I knew I hadn’t given her a reason to worry. Not in a long, long while. For Connie Kelly to have invested financially and so personally in a con artist must have hurt like a son of a bitch. Whoever Welles turned out to be, he must have been a shrewd operator. In the few times I’d met with Connie, I found her to be a highly intelligent and professional woman. A view Susan shared with me.

  I drank some more coffee. It began to sprinkle on Government Center. The rain felt like cool mist. I folded the filing in a square and placed it within my jean pocket. Connie Kelly, Nick Kostas, John Gredoni, EDGE Corp. The amount I knew about the ghost man M. Brooks Welles could fit within a thimble.

  Could Lundquist have been right? Could Welles actually have a connection to the CIA? That still wouldn’t make him a great boyfriend or the kind of guy who wouldn’t stiff a bartender. Maybe he was a real-life Jason Bourne . . . but only if it turned out Jason Bourne’s biggest skill was being an asshole.

  I called Nick Kostas back. The secretary said he was still out. I didn’t believe her, and for a lack of anything better to do, drove up to Salem.

  13

  I found Nick Kostas eating a meatball grinder on the hood of his white pickup truck. The pickup truck had four wheels on the back axle and looked as if it could haul the Statue of Liberty from New York to Miami Beach. Kostas was substantial-looking, too, an older Greek guy with a lot of gray hair and calves as large as my thighs. I told him what he needed to know. At first he’d tried to walk away when I mentioned John Gredoni.

  “You want me to throw up my lunch?” Kostas said, wiping some red sauce off his chin. “I’ve been talking to my priest about all that crap. Trying to let it go and move on. Gredoni really fooled us on that deal. He acted like we could double our money in a year. What do they say about conning an honest man?”

  “That you can’t?”

  “It was greed,” Kostas said. “I took a risk. I got screwed. Wasn’t the first time. Wasn’t the last. Are you working for a lawyer or something? ’Cause I already got a good one. If Gredoni doesn’t pay up, I’ll be in the gun business soon.”

  A four-foot stone wall squared Kostas’s business. Mountains of field gravel and sand rose behind him. Large sections of marble, granite, and pavestone sat on pallets around a white trailer office. A dump truck rumbled through the front gate, loaded up with sand and gravel, and sped away. Kostas wore a wide gold chain around his thick neck. The chain swayed forward as he worked on the last bit of the grinder, trying not to splatter his shirt.

  “Did you know he filed a restraining order against me?” Kostas said, wadding up the napkins and sandwich paper. “What am I going to do? Throw rocks at him? Ha. Mr. Big Fucking Guns is scared of Nicky Kostas from Salem. I never owned a gun in my freaking life.”

  “Ever meet a guy named M. Brooks Welles?”

  Kostas shook his head, placed a fist to his mouth, and belched. “There it goes,” he said. “The indigestion again. First you talk Gredoni, and now his flying monkey, Secret Agent Man.”

  “How’d you meet Welles?”

  “Because they were joined at the freakin’ hip,” Kostas said. He moved away from his truck and toward the trailer. I followed. He yelled at a couple guys moving some pavestones to be careful and then headed up the steps into the trailer. Inside, he turned to me. “Every meeting we had about the land thing, Welles was there. You know who he is? Right?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Don’t you watch television?”

  “Mainly PBS,” I said. “I’m a sucker for Downton Abbey. I like the costumes. The manners.”

  Kostas snorted. “Yeah? Well, Welles is always on the news. He’s freakin’ famous. He was writing a book about his adventures. He told us out at the gun club that he’d be bringing the best of the best to Boston. He said all this terrorism shit was only going to get worse.”

  “Making the range a wise investment?”

  “Yeah,” Kostas said. “Sure. Hey. You want a Coke? Or some water?”

  I shook my head. Kostas sat down at a small desk and flipped through a stack of pink message slips. “This,” he said, “is why I had my head up my ass and not paying attention to getting screwed. Have you met Gredoni? You see how he is?”

  “Yep,” I said. “I’ve had the displeasure.”

  “He’s a cocky little bastard,” Kostas said. “But he can really turn on the charm when he wants. You should’ve gone out to one of his wild-game cookouts. They had an open bar, a rock band, and all the bird, fish, and shit you could eat.”

  “How many investors?”

  “We were told it was a limited thing,” he said. “Twenty. But now? I’m not so sure. It was all great until, you know, it wasn’t. I went to his place out in Lynn and he threatened to have me arrested. That’s when he got the restraining order. Said I’d threatened his life.”

  “Did you?”

  “I said if he didn’t come up with my dough I’d knock his fucking head off,” Kostas said. “But you know. I was just talking. I get excited sometimes. What the hell.”

  “Did he threaten you?”

  He shook his head. “He told me to talk to Welles. Said Welles handled the money and he was an investor like everyone else.”

  “Wait a second,” I said. “Did he allude that Welles cheated him, too?”

  “He didn’t allude shit,” Kostas said, staring hard at a slip and then back at me. “He told me he’d been screwed like everyone else. He said, and I will quote direct to you, that fucking Welles had left him with a burning pile of dog shit before he jetted off to parts unknown.”

  “You believe him?”

  “No, Ace,” he said. “That’s why I freakin’ sued him.”

  “How many times did you meet Welles?”

  “No more than two or three times.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Are you sure you don’t want a Coke?”

  “No, thank you,” I said. “Caffeine makes me jumpy.”

  He stood up, walked to a mini-fridge, and got himself a can of Coke. He sat back down heavy in the chair. Despite his care, some of the grinder had spilled on his T-shirt. “He looks like a Washington guy. He was always dressed to the nines. Never saw him without a suit and tie. Gray hair, mustache. Gold government-looking glasses. Kind of closemouthed. But man, when he talked, you listened.”

  “How so?”

  “I don’t know,” Kostas said. “I don’t know how to put this. He was always so, you know, fucking sure of himself. No doubt important people would come to train in Concord. He threw out a lot of Revolutionary War history and bullshit. Said he’d majored in history at Harvard. Never said CIA, only said ‘the Company.’ Told us he was an insider to the way the modern world would be shaking out. Made us feel like if we didn’t invest we were bad Americans or something. I believe in this country. My dad immigrated here fr
om Athens. I see this guy on TV. And I’m thinking, you know, if this guy worked for our government and did the shit he’s talking about, then I should trust him.”

  “And Gredoni said he took all the money.”

  “Yep,” Kostas said. He punched the tab on the Coke and drained it quick. “I’ll tell you another thing. Fucking two-gun Gredoni is scared shitless of the guy.”

  “How so?”

  “He told me,” Kostas said. “He told me that I needed to write this thing off and look the other way. He told me that Welles was black ops. One of those fucking guys. He said Welles did shit off the books and I didn’t want to cross him.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him I didn’t give a crap and he needed to make this thing right.”

  “How did he respond?”

  “He said he was in over his head,” Kostas said. “He said he’d done some business with this Welles guy in Iraq and thought he could trust him. But he said it turned out that this Welles guy was one bad seed.”

  “I think he’s a fake.”

  “I’ll say this for Gredoni,” Kostas said. “His fear was real. He didn’t even like to mention the guy’s name. But I hold Gredoni responsible for bringing a snake like this into a business deal. I knew Gredoni for a long time. We both had fishing boats at the club in Revere. We fished. Drank a lot of beer. I figured he was all right. He was always straight-up. But boy, was I wrong, and my wife won’t let me forget it. That’s why my stomach has been giving me problems.”

  “Can you put me in touch with some of the other investors?”

  “You really think you can do something about this?”

  “If it looks like a duck and talks like a duck,” I said. “You better look under the feathers.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I’m making this up as I go along.”

  Kostas gave me a few names for the growing list. I thanked him and headed back to Lynn to take a second run at Gredoni. When at first you don’t succeed, keep bugging the hell out of people and see what shakes out.

  14

  I was halfway to Lynn when Connie Kelly called me.

  “He called.”

  “Welles?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He told me he was sorry. He said he never intended for things to go like this. Everything was left in a mess because of Johnny Gredoni while he had to go overseas.”

  “To fight the war on terror.”

  Connie didn’t laugh. She was silent for a moment while I navigated the traffic on Route 1. I turned down WBUR to hear a little better. I could hear a nervous sigh.

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him I’d hired someone to find him,” she said. “But he already knew. He knew your name.”

  “I’ve handed out a lot of business cards.”

  “He was upset,” she said. “He said I was making a mess of things and had every intention of straightening things out.”

  “Good for him,” I said. Traffic began to move. The man in front of me didn’t. I honked my horn and passed him.

  “He wants to have dinner.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Oh, God,” she said. “I didn’t know what to say. Or to do. I tried to call Dr. Silverman but only got her answering service.”

  “She’s in session all day.”

  “I know,” she said. “I know. I’m just such a mess. He said he’d take me to dinner and explain everything. He blamed everything on Gredoni. He said it was all tied to some international business that Gredoni didn’t understand. He said he was a local yokel without any knowledge of the people he’d crossed.”

  “What people?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you meeting him?”

  Connie didn’t answer. She breathed heavily into the phone. My progress to Lynn had slowed. Someone behind me honked his horn and passed with his middle finger raised. I didn’t respond, keeping my dignity.

  “Are you meeting him?” I said.

  In a soft, small voice she said, “He said he still loves me. I’m so damn screwed up.”

  “Where?”

  “Let me give him a chance,” she said. “Maybe he’ll explain. Maybe I’ve just been paranoid. I’ll call you tomorrow and explain. I just wanted you to know and maybe put a hold on things to see if I plan to follow up.”

  “He’s conning you.”

  “You haven’t even found out where he lives,” she said. “How can you be so sure?”

  She had me. I kept on driving. I was enjoying the older car. It had a V8 and a nice bit of pickup. In the fall, Susan and I planned to take a trip to my cabin, leave the city behind and get back to nature. The back hatch was long enough to lie down with sleeping bags and neck. Do people still neck if the kids don’t say it anymore? If one tree falls in the forest and no one hears it . . .

  “I have to go.”

  “Where?” I said. My voice had more edge to it than I meant. I remembered the crying woman in the Common who’d taken out a loan for Welles’s scheme.

  “You might make trouble,” she said. “I need to talk to him about us. I need to face him on my own terms.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But I’d like to at least say hello. That way if you decided to follow up, I’ll know a bit more about him.”

  “Will you threaten him?”

  “Not if he plays nice.”

  “Will you make light of him?”

  “Probably.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “You’ve already taken this thing pretty far,” I said. “And you’re not the only one now. There are at least a dozen people he cheated. Don’t you want to help them?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m somewhat conflicted about this whole thing.”

  She started to cry. I figured maybe I’d rather meet Welles than spend another precious moment with Johnny Gredoni at Gun World. It started to rain a bit, the skies darkening, a long line of taillights headed back into Boston. I turned on the wipers.

  “The Blue Ox.”

  “Come again?”

  “It’s a restaurant in downtown Lynn,” she said. “Do you know it?”

  “I haven’t been there,” I said. “But a guy I know said they make terrific old-fashioneds. He once had six.”

  “Oh, God,” Connie said. “What have I done?”

  15

  It had been a long while since I’d been to downtown Lynn, Lynn, City of Sin. The old mill town had the charm of both a hipster paradise and London during the war. Coffee shops, yoga studios, and hot new restaurants shared space with windowless buildings and vacant shoe factories. It didn’t take much to find a parking place, but getting a seat at the Blue Ox wasn’t easy. It was packed.

  I arrived early, found a spot at the bar, and, good to my word, ordered an old-fashioned. My buddy was right. It was excellent. I drank slow, spaced with a couple ice waters, and ordered the lobster tacos. Again, the Ox didn’t disappoint. I could see most of the tables from where I sat and hoped I’d have a good vantage point for the meet.

  One more old-fashioned and an ice water later, Connie Kelly arrived. I watched her being seated and after a few minutes, caught her eye. She nodded in my direction. I nodded back. As a communication expert, I figured we might communicate in Morse code. Assuming she could hear me knocking my glass against the bar. And assuming she knew Morse code.

  She ordered a drink. She crossed her legs. Connie fussed with her hair, took in deep breaths, and downed a couple glasses of white wine. She wore a very short red floral dress and black tights with black suede booties. A purple cardigan hung loose off her shoulders. She had never told me, but I figured she was somewhere in her late thirties, early forties.

  I sipped on my cocktail. An extra-large ice cube rattled the glass with a slice of o
range and two Luxardo cherries. Good cherries could make or break a cocktail. Sometimes the amount I knew about cocktails astounded me.

  After a bit more of preening and sipping, Connie turned her head and stood. A silver-headed man in a tailored navy suit, a crisp white shirt, and a dark tie strolled into the room. He offered a toothy smile, thanked the hostess, and turned to Connie. He opened his arms. She turned into him, sideways, and he kissed her on the cheek. I wanted to spit out the cherry.

  I could not see much or hear a whisper of their conversation. I finished the tacos but refrained from another drink. A good hour passed. The Blue Ox bustled with energy and good food coming fast and hot from the kitchen. I talked with the bartender about cocktails, beer, and movies. We decided that our favorite opening scene was in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, when Sundance refused to leave the card game unless he was asked to stay. The young bartender knew all the good lines. I liked him.

  Connie and Welles ordered dinner. It looked like she had a salad. At one point, she laughed and then covered her mouth. To any other patron at the Blue Ox, they were having a wonderful romantic dinner. A summer/autumn romance. Take my hand. I’m a stranger in paradise.

  I grew impatient as dessert arrived. I had my feet planted firmly on the floor, waiting for a plate to drop on Welles’s head. No such luck. I tried to catch Connie’s eye. She averted my gaze. As I settled up with the bartender, ready to make my own introductions, she stared at me. Put me in, Coach. She nodded. It was time.

  I walked over to the table. Connie bowed her head and studied the napkin in her lap. I asked a table next to us if I could borrow their chair. I turned the chair around and sat with my arms resting on the back. They had yet to touch their desserts. Two pieces of cheesecake with fresh blueberries.