Little White Lies

by Ace Atkins

  I shook my head. My coffee was still too hot to drink. I took off the lid and blew across the black surface. “Gredoni said the men who tried to harm Welles were former employees,” I said. “He said they were guns for hire who put on these tactical dog-and-pony shows for the locals.”

  Lundquist nodded.

  “I’ve been checking into these guys,” I said. “But coming up with more aliases and questionable résumés. They get off on all this secrecy.”

  “I thought you just wanted a refund for a jilted woman?”

  “It seems Mr. Welles has misplaced the cash,” I said. “Some of these guns for hire might know where to look.”

  “I can press some of the cops I know for names,” he said. “But you don’t want to be anywhere near this shit show when it blows. We’ll be shutting it down hard and fast. This is a lot bigger than just Boston. It’s a lot bigger than just Gredoni and this asshole Welles, too. We’re talking about crossing state lines. Cargo containers filled with enough ammo to take over some third-world country.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Yikes.”

  “Fucking right ‘Yikes,’” he said. “No one wants to screw this thing up. I just was hoping you’d heard something. Or knew something.”

  “I know Welles is fake,” I said. “I know some of his employees were probably fake, too. I know some of them want Welles dead or disabled. I know that Johnny Gredoni wants me to back off until my client gets her money. Other than that, it’s pretty dark.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Us, too. Wiretaps aren’t what they used to be.”

  “Can I interest you in an orange scone with your Malawi blend?”

  “I’ll stick to stale donuts and the gas-station crap,” he said. “It’s more honest.”

  I saluted him with my coffee and Lundquist turned to leave. I bought a blueberry scone and walked back to my office.

  21

  Feet up on my desk, scone crumbs scattered on my shirt, I finally got a call back from Rachel Wallace. “It always amazes me when the person I’m calling actually answers the phone,” she said.

  “My personal assistant is on vacation.”

  “Since when did you get an assistant?”

  “I thought about it,” I said. “But my office is one room. I get an assistant and then I’d have to get a bigger office. I upgrade and then I have to get a partner. I get a partner and then comes the vengeance when the partner is killed.”

  “Spenser and Archer.”

  “Strangely unfamiliar.”

  “I’m no Effie,” she said, “but I did track down a few details about your globe-trotting boogieman. For a while, during the Arab Spring, he was extremely popular. More than fifty bookings. He had his dance card punched a lot.”

  “So to speak,” I said.

  “And then it seems he went off the radar,” Rachel said. “I had a friend at CNN find out just who had booked him and what credentials he’d produced. But that producer was gone.”

  “And then you tracked down the producer for me?”

  “You did offer a bottle of Blanton’s.”

  “Only if you share it,” I said. “We could sit around and pretend to be Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.”

  “That would involve sex.”

  “Sometimes with multiple partners,” I said. “And a lot of existential discussion between the sheets. In that spirit, what have you learned?”

  “Besides one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Besides that.”

  “There apparently is a man in Florida, a real former Navy SEAL, who spends a great deal of his day outing fakes,” she said. “It’s become his life’s mission. He called the producer and reported Welles for not only not being a SEAL, but also never being a seaman who ever buffered a balustrade.”

  “I found no naval record, either,” I said. “But Welles promises to be so top secret that even the Navy doesn’t know.”

  “To quote the SEAL debunker,” Rachel said, “Welles is completely full of shit. And a disgrace to everyone who served in Vietnam. Do you wish to talk with him? He was very nice and very direct and helpful about how SEAL records were public and easily accessed. He says he outs about thirty fakes a day.”

  “No,” I said. “I only wondered how Welles was ever put on television.”

  “These people would put a tap-dancing llama on the news to boost ratings,” she said. “They don’t care. According to the producer, Welles appeared distinguished with the silver hair and all. And he looked good in a suit.”

  “That’s all it takes?”

  “And absolutely supreme confidence in your subject matter and what you wish to defend.”

  “Hence the word confidence in con man.”

  “Precisely.”

  “When was his last appearance?” I said.

  “Four months ago.”

  “That coincides with the failed land deal in Concord and skipping town with my client’s money.”

  “His house of cards is tumbling.”

  “It certainly seems that way,” I said. “Thank you for looking. Maybe when this is over, I can deliver the bottle in person.”

  “You know you still have a little credit for that thing you did for me that one time.”

  “I only had to walk through most of Boston in a snowstorm,” I said. “No biggie.”

  “Hold on,” Rachel said. “Hold on. There’s one last thing.”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “Welles once climbed Mount Everest.”

  “Let me get this straight,” she said. “Your man has been outed by his lover, his business partner, and half of Boston.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Where does a disgraced con man go to find refuge and solace?”

  “The YMCA?”

  “Or the publishing industry.”

  I set my feet on the ground and rolled the chair up close to the desk. I reached for my legal pad and a pen. “Give it to me straight, Effie.”

  “Late last year, your Mr. M. Brooks Welles signed a six-figure deal with a major publishing house.”

  “I take it the book will be illustrated with lots of rainbows and gumdrops of Never Never Land.”

  “No,” she said. “It was billed as a hard-hitting account of Welles’s time in the Vietnam jungle, the mountains of El Salvador, and on the front lines fighting terrorists in the Middle East.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I never joke about my work, 007.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “American Patriot.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “Many things irk me about this,” Rachel said. “Mainly that my last book advance was for considerably less.”

  “How much less?”

  “Considerably.”

  “Who’s the editor?”

  She told me. I didn’t know a lot of New York City editors. We ran in different circles.

  “Do you know him?”

  “I do.”

  “And?”

  “Let me put it this way,” she said. “He just gave a multimillion-dollar advance to a first-time author, a blogger who’s promised to have written Gone Girl meets Harry Potter.”

  “Poor Harry,” I said. “I guess this guy isn’t much of a fact-checker.”

  “There are no fact-checkers in the publishing business.”

  “I thought you had people running through every word you write.”

  “For magazine pieces, they will rake you over the coals,” she said. “No one checks a word in book publishing besides basic copyediting.”

  “That’s insane.”

  “This editor in question considers himself the modern Maxwell Perkins,” she said. “But Marlin Perkins would do a better job.”

  “And more appropriate,” I said. “Wo
uld he speak to me if I came to New York?”

  “Probably not,” she said.

  “I can be persistent.”

  “I know,” she said. “But I would bet he already knows considerably less about Welles than you do.”

  “True.”

  “Everybody’s pulling a con in this world,” she said. “Aren’t they?”

  “It will drive a man to drink.”

  “A woman, too.”

  I stood, thanked her, and hung up. After meeting with Lundquist and following up with calls, I’d nearly forgotten lunch. I called Hawk and told him to meet me for a late lunch at Trade.

  “What’s the price, babe?”

  “I need you to introduce me to some of your friends.”

  “Stepping out on Susan?” he said, laughing.

  “Gunga Din stuff,” I said. “Guys who get you work overseas.”

  “Oh, that.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Lunch,” he said. “Then I’ll introduce you to an old friend.”

  22

  I always liked Army/Navy stores. When I was a kid, not long after we’d moved from Wyoming, it’s where my uncles would pick up used winter coats, old boots, camping gear. They also reminded me of my short stint in the Army. GI Surplus in Roxbury had been around since I’d been in Boston. They advertised with a bright red decommissioned missile out by Blue Hill Avenue. The owner of the store was an older black guy everyone called Sergeant. I didn’t know if it was meant as in York or Shriver. I didn’t ask.

  Hawk gave the introduction. Sergeant had a bald head ringed with gray hair and a gray beard. He kept an office way back behind the mountains of pants, boots, T-shirts, and cases of guns and knives. He sold flags for every country you could imagine. He sold ammo. He sold cigarette lighters that looked like hand grenades. And according to Hawk, he also traded a lot in men who’d travel for the right price. When we found him, he was seated at a small table, painting little tin soldiers.

  “I heard of you,” Sergeant said.

  I nodded.

  “Hawk said I could trust you.”

  I nodded again.

  “Don’t know much about this white dude, Welles,” he said. “He’s not one of my people.”

  “He had a company called EDGE,” I said. “He trained cops in Lynn and BPD SWAT. He claimed he was a Navy SEAL and instructed on shooting and tactics. I heard he brought in some real pros to fill out the bill.”

  Sergeant shook his head. He set one of the tin soldiers under a large magnifying glass and bright lamp. The finished soldiers looked to all be redcoats. “Can’t help you, man.”

  “This guy started the company with Johnny Gredoni.”

  “Two-Gun Gredoni?”

  “Damn,” I said. “I thought I’d coined that phrase.”

  Hawk shook his head, finding a nearby bin full of old Life magazines from the 1960s. He pulled out an issue with Sophia Loren on the cover. From a quick glance, she seemed to be wearing some kind of see-through negligee. Behind his dark glasses, Hawk gave a wide grin.

  “You don’t need to be messing around with that son of a bitch,” Sergeant said.

  “Why?”

  “Can’t trust him,” he said. “He’s a goddamn cheat.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Got two prices,” Sergeant said. “Two shops.”

  I looked to Hawk. He was engrossed in Sophia and her nightie. He licked his finger and turned the page.

  “How’d that work?” I said.

  “He’s got the store up in Lynn,” he said. “But he sells most of his shit off the books. Out the back door. Cuts all us honest gun folks off at the knees.”

  “Who is his supplier?”

  “If I knew that, I’d have a fancy-ass shop on Newbury Street.”

  “That’s hard to imagine,” I said. “You’d have to compete with Diane von Furstenberg.”

  Sergeant shrugged, picked a fresh soldier, and examined it under the magnifier. Hawk put down the magazine and strolled forward. Hawk had a way of moving that made cats seem clumsy. He had on a pair of black jeans, a black silk shirt, and black cowboy boots.

  “You get us a line on these EDGE people?” Hawk said. “Find out some names. Who they are. What they do when they ain’t stateside.”

  “Sure,” Sergeant said, now adding a bit more red to the red coat. “What’s in it for me?”

  “How long I know you, Sarge?”

  “Long time.”

  “I do what I say?” he said. “Made you a lot of money.”

  Sergeant took off his half glasses and set them aside. He turned off the light on the magnifying glass, folded his arms, and studied Hawk. It looked more like he was appraising him. After a long moment, he nodded.

  “Sure,” Sergeant said. “But you ain’t the one asking. Are you? He is.”

  “Same thing,” Hawk said. “You deal with him. You deal with me. You understand?”

  “I get some people in trouble it’s my black ass,” he said. “You understand that?”

  “Spenser ain’t the law,” he said. “He one of us.”

  “You ain’t never brought him in here before.”

  “He ain’t never asked.”

  I smiled and tried to look modest. Sergeant began to arrange his figures on the table before him, the precise lines of a British regiment, stacking them in neat order to be mowed down by the colonials hiding behind trees and rocks.

  “You friends with Quirk?” Sergeant said.

  I nodded.

  “I don’t like that son of a bitch,” he said. “He been hassling me his whole life. He tried to shut me down since I came to town.”

  “Spenser is Spenser,” Hawk said. “He look like a cop?”

  “Yeah,” Sergeant said. “He do.”

  “Don’t rush to judgment,” I said. “Those aren’t donut crumbs on my shirt. I actually had a scone.”

  “Damn, man,” Sergeant said. “You trying to ruin me, Hawk. You bring a man like that in here? After all we been through.”

  “I promise you,” Hawk said. “Me and Spenser been through much more.”

  Sergeant stared right at me for a long while. He did not blink but finally nodded. Hawk turned and headed out of the store. I offered my hand. Sergeant ignored it and went back to working on the British Army. I followed Hawk back outside.

  “That’s it?” I said.

  “That’s it,” he said. “If those men are in the life, he’ll get you names.”

  “Gee,” I said. “He must’ve really taken to me.”

  “Haw,” Hawk said. “Sergeant don’t like nothing but the green, babe.”

  23

  Two days later, as Susan and I enjoyed our traditional lazy Sunday, someone knocked on my front door. I left Susan in bed reading a book by Karen Abbott about women spies of the Civil War. She had cold coffee at her side and a warm Pearl snuggled nearby. I set aside the sports section of The Globe, put on my robe, and answered.

  Frank Belson and Captain Glass stood on my stoop. A visit from Belson rarely implied good news.

  “Can we come in?” Captain Glass said. She was a tall, lean woman with short black hair and a chiseled, sharply drawn face. Today she sported something from her endless supply of navy blue suits and white silk tops. She had on sensible black shoes and smelled vaguely of cigarettes. Or perhaps it was Belson’s cigars.

  “I wondered when I might see you again, Captain,” I said. “Apologies on the arson case aren’t necessary. But if you have an accommodation . . .”

  “Spenser,” Belson said. “Open the damn door. This ain’t a social call.”

  “It almost never is,” I said, opening the door. “Coffee? I’m making a fresh pot.”

  Pearl wandered into the room and started to bark. Belson got down on one knee and offered an open hand. Pearl snuf
fled it and started to wag her tail. She walked a wide circle around Glass, sniffing and exploring, while Glass tried to ignore her.

  I washed out the coffeepot and filled it with cold water. Belson stood at the tall counter of the open kitchen. He looked freshly shaved, although his jaw still shone with a blue-black beard outline.

  “Johnny Gredoni’s dead,” he said. “Someone spotted a leg sticking out of a dumpster in Chinatown.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t a large pot sticker?”

  “Pretty sure,” Belson said. “It had on a combat boot.”

  “Natural causes?” I said.

  “Sure,” Belson said. “If you call being shot in the back of the head natural.”

  “Damn it, Frank,” Glass said. “What are you doing? You don’t need to discuss any details with him.”

  “Spenser would’ve asked anyway,” he said. “And I would’ve told him. Oh, you didn’t shoot him, did you?”

  “When did it happen?”

  “Sometime last night,” he said.

  “I guess not,” I said. “I was at home.”

  “Do you have a witness?” Glass said. She had her hands on her hips and an unpleasant look on her face. Her blue suit was without a wrinkle. Quirk’s replacement, after he’d been kicked up to assistant super, possessed many of his traits.

  “Pearl,” I said. “We were watching a William Powell marathon on TCM. She’s a big fan of Asta.”

  “And who the hell is Pearl?” Glass said.

  I nodded to Pearl. “Her.”

  “A dog,” Glass said. “Come on. Get dressed. You’re coming with us.”

  Susan opened the bedroom door and walked out in my big gray sweatpants and a T-shirt that read Bang Group. Her hair was twisted up on top of her head. She joined us in the kitchen area. I finished adding the scoops of coffee and pressed brew.

  “I’m not Quirk,” Glass said. “I don’t give special favors.”

  “We haven’t been introduced,” Susan said. “I’m Susan Silverman.”

  Glass introduced herself, emphasis on Captain, her eyes never leaving me. I couldn’t blame her, knowing I looked absolutely stunning in my blue terry-cloth robe.