Robert B. Parker's Broken Trust [Spenser #51] E-Book

Mike Lupica

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 405

Beschreibung

Spenser investigates the past secrets of an elusive tech billionaire in this latest instalment of Robert B. Parker's beloved series, and the first written by celebrated writer Mike Lupica. The beautiful wife of one of the world's richest men comes to Spenser in the hope that he can find out what skeletons lurk in her husband's closet. Though he is a generous philanthropist and loving family man, she is concerned - he has recently become secretive, bordering on paranoid, and she wants Spenser to find out why. As Spenser digs into the billionaire's past, he realises that the man may have done terrible things to rise to the top - but he also may have had good reason to. What he discovers will cause him to question his own views on morality - and place him in grave danger.

Leseprobe

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR ROBERT B. PARKER

‘Parker writes old-time, stripped-to-the-bone, hard-boiled school of Chandler… His novels are funny, smart and highly entertaining… There’s no writer I’d rather take on an aeroplane’ Sunday Telegraph

‘Parker packs more meaning into a whispered “yeah” than most writers can pack into a page’ Sunday Times

‘Why Robert Parker’s not better known in Britain is a mystery. His best series featuring Boston-based PI Spenser is a triumph of style and substance’ Daily Mirror

‘Robert B. Parker is one of the greats of the American hard-boiled genre’ Guardian

‘Nobody does it better than Parker’ Sunday Times

‘Parker’s sentences flow with as much wit, grace and assurance as ever, and Stone is a complex and consistently interesting new protagonist’ Newsday

‘If Robert B. Parker doesn’t blow it, in the new series he set up in Night Passage and continues with Trouble in Paradise, he could go places and take the kind of risks that wouldn’t be seemly in his popular Spenser stories’ New York Times

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR MIKE LUPICA

‘Lupica, an award-winning sports columnist, author of 40 books, and longtime friend of the late Parker, nails the Sunny Randall character and the Boston criminal milieu that Parker created’ Booklist

‘Lupica does justice to the work of MWA Grand Master Robert B. Parker in this splendid continuation of the late author’s Sunny Randall series’ Publisher’s Weekly

‘Mike Lupica mixes a heavy dose of suspense with a shot of nostalgia, effortlessly delivering a relentless thriller that might just be the best book in the series so far’ The Real Book Spy

‘Lupica mimics the heroine’s voice, much less distinctive than those of Parker’s other leads, with ease’ Kirkus Reviews

This book is for my friend James Patterson

1

I was sitting at my desk drinking my third cup of coffee of the morning. I was doing this guilt-free, having read that two to five cups a day not only prevented a long list of diseases, but also helped you live a longer, if more caffeinated, life. But then you can always find somewhere on the Internet that tells you what you want to hear, about almost anything.

I was certain that if I looked long enough, I could find a site promising a reasonably priced way for me to look like Bradley Cooper.

By now I had already made short work of the second Boston Kreme I’d picked up at the Dunkin’ just down Boylston from my office, the one near the Public Library. Two blocks down, two blocks back. But I had walked briskly, telling myself it was exercise, even if the prize had been the donuts, which didn’t extend your life, just made it more worth living.

Dunkin’ Donuts had long since rebranded and was just calling itself Dunkin’ now. I had considered doing something similar, but knew it was too late for that. And when it came to branding yourself with just one name, I had frankly been way ahead of the game.

Carol Sloane’s voice was coming out of the tiny speaker near the Keurig machine and I was methodically making my way through the print edition of The Globe, as I still did every morning, front to back, section by section, saving sports for last. The man who owned The Globe also owned the Red Sox. The paper was having a far better September than his baseball team was.

But then just about everybody was. It had reached the point where I was no longer certain that the two guys who were supposed to be our top starting pitchers were actually still right-handed.

‘Maybe you should think about finding a new hobby,’ Hawk had said the other day after listening to me bitching again about the local nine.

‘I’ve got too much time invested in them,’ I said. ‘It’s the same reason I’m still with you.’

‘You’re with me,’ Hawk said, ‘because I don’t have no bad years.’

We had just finished moving the last of my furniture that we could carry ourselves into my new apartment, which just happened to be a few doors down from the one I’d been burned out of a few years ago. It was the event that had prompted my move away from Marlborough Street and all the way to the Charleston Navy Yard.

At the time Susan Silverman, trying to mitigate my loss, had said that while it had been the equivalent of a forced eviction, it might have been time for a change, even though she knew better than anyone that I liked change about as much as I liked TikTok.

‘Most people do move sooner or later,’ Susan said.

‘The Red Sox haven’t,’ I said.

She had promised that I would embrace the new place once I was in it, and proceeded to move in and decorate it like an invading ground force. And eventually I had grown both fond and familiar with my new surroundings, the neighborhood, the proximity to the Navy Yard, even the younger vibe over there, as if I were the one who was young and had moved to Boston all over again.

But recently I’d done some work for a man named Kevin Boles, who owned great big chunks of property in Back Bay, getting Boles’s son out of a jam with Tony Marcus that involved substantial gambling losses that Tony had decided required more than just money in payment. Tony wanted real estate favors from Kevin Boles, specifically involving a particular building he hoped to use for a new escort service on Charles Street now that COVID was over and the sex trade was booming again.

Boles had come to me and I had gone to Tony, reminding him that he owed me a favor. Tony told me that he didn’t owe me shit and get the fuck out of his office. But being as transactional as he’d always been, an accommodation had been reached and he got the building he wanted. Kevin Boles considered it a small price to pay to get his son clear of Tony, and even after he’d generously settled up with me, he said that he was the one who now owed me a favor.

About a week later he’d called and told me that an apartment on Marlborough near the corner of Arlington had opened up, having remembered me mentioning that I’d lived on the same part of that street before what I called the Great Boston Fire. Boles said that the apartment hadn’t yet gone on the market, and asked if I might be interested in moving back to the old neighborhood. I surprised myself at how quickly I said that I was. He said he could give me a break on the rent. I told him that wasn’t necessary. He insisted. A month away from the end of my lease in Charlestown, I signed the lease that day, put down a deposit, and just like that Daddy was home.

‘Do you know how much I’ve missed walking to work?’ I said to Susan the first time we stepped into the empty apartment.

‘At this point, people in outer space know that.’

She asked me just how much Kevin Boles had paid for my services, and how much of a break he was giving me on the rent. I told her. At which point she had smiled, wickedly. Susan has a lot of smiles, most of which make me feel light-headed and oxygen-deprived when directed at me.

This one, I knew from experience, was going to cost me money.

‘I know that look,’ I said.

‘What look is that?’ she asked innocently.

‘The one where you can’t wait for the stores to open.’

She’d kissed me then and said, ‘Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.’

The new apartment, about the same size as the old one, didn’t actually feel like home yet. But I was getting there. Pearl the Wonder Dog had already settled in quite nicely when she and Susan would be there for sleepovers. Pearl hadn’t come right out and said how much she liked it that she could walk to work with me, too, when Susan would leave her with me. It was more something I had intuited.

Now I just needed work, as there hadn’t been any since I’d saved Kevin Boles’s son.

‘If you can walk to work but there ain’t no work,’ Hawk had said, ‘answer me something: What’s the fucking point?’

I was pondering that, and whether I should walk back down to Dunkin’ for more donuts before I got too close to lunch, when there was a knock on my door and the wife of the sixth-richest man in America came walking in.

2

Laura Crain was a friend of Susan’s from a couple charity boards they both served on in Boston, one of which – the Jimmy Fund – was as famous a charity as there was in the city, aligned with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and deeply connected to the Red Sox all the way back to when Ted Williams had first gotten involved.

Susan and Laura Crain shared a Pure Barre class a couple times a week and would meet occasionally for lunch. I knew that Susan liked her very much, as rich and famous as Laura and her husband were, and not just in Boston.

Laura had met Andrew Crain when they were both students at Harvard. Laura was an English major. He was a full-fledged, card-carrying Division of Science nerd, along with his best friend, Ethan Lowe. I knew the general outline of their shared biography, because by now most people in America knew it. Five years after Lowe and Andrew Crain graduated, working out of a small rented lab in Dorchester, they had invented a synthetic form of lithium that had reimagined the world of batteries forever.

Susan had mentioned in passing a few weeks earlier that I might be hearing from her friend Laura about a problem she was having, one she’d shared in confidence with Susan.

‘Are you treating her now?’

‘Not professionally. Just hearing her out as a friend and offering advice when she’s asked for it.’

‘And she has a problem that you can’t solve?’ I said. ‘What is it, the melting of the ice caps?’

‘She’ll tell you when the two of you meet,’ Susan said, ‘if she doesn’t lose her nerve.’

‘Couldn’t she buy some nerve?’ I’d asked. ‘I assume she can afford it.’

‘Let’s just wait and see,’ Susan said. ‘She should be the one to tell you what’s happening in her life. But I told her that if anybody could help her, it’s my cutie.’

Now Laura Crain sat across my desk from me. Tall. Honey-colored hair hanging to her shoulders. Blazer, white jeans that fit her the way God intended jeans to fit women with legs as long as hers, ankle boots. Whatever her actual age was, I had already decided she looked younger. She reminded me of a slightly younger version of Julia Roberts, not that I would ever say that to Julia.

A knockout by any measure. It was something I knew I couldn’t verbalise without sounding as if I were objectifying her, and being on my way to Weinstein Island.

But Andrew Crain, I could see, hadn’t just gotten stupidly rich. He had even gotten the girl.

‘So you’re Spenser,’ she said, crossing one long leg over the other.

‘I am he,’ I said.

I had come around the desk to greet her when she’d arrived. In the post-pandemic world I’d first asked if she wanted to shake hands before extending mine. She’d said she’d risk it if I would.

‘People often say “I am him,”’ I said. ‘But that’s ignoring the fact that “he” is actually supposed to be a predicate nominative renaming the subject.’

She smiled. It was, by any measure, a high-wattage dazzler, if not of Susan quality, at least in the conversation. Susan had prepared me for how lovely Laura Crain was. I was certain I would be cross-questioned later about just how lovely I thought she was.

‘Susan told me about you,’ she said.

I ducked my head in false modesty.

‘The rugged good looks?’ I said. ‘Or devilish charm?’

She shook her head slowly from side to side, as if in the presence of a precocious child.

Which, all things considered, she was.

‘She actually told me how hard you’d try, almost immediately, to show me what a literate detective you are,’ she said. ‘And that if I didn’t acknowledge that fact you might get the bends.’

‘I can also diagram some sentences if you want,’ I said.

‘Maybe when we know each other better.’

Now I smiled at her.

‘Want to can the small talk?’

‘I’d be willing to pay you,’ she said.

I asked if she wanted coffee. She said thank you, but she’d pass, she was trying to quit caffeine. I told her I didn’t want to live in that world. She managed to contain her laughter, but I sensed it was difficult for her.

‘Might I offer just one last tiny bit of small talk?’ she said.

‘Okay, but just one.’

‘You really are as big as Susan said you were.’

‘Well, sure, but I come by it naturally.’

We sat there in silence for a few moments, as if each of us were waiting for the other to make the next move. It often went this way with potential clients, like an awkward first date, and just how much they wanted to drop their guard.

‘So how can I help you, Mrs Crain?’

‘Please. Laura.’

‘So how can I help you, Laura.’

Her blue eyes were so pale as to be as clear as glass.

‘That’s the thing,’ she said. ‘You probably can’t.’

3

It was always best to let them tell it their own way, at their own pace, editing their own narrative as they went along. Editing just how much of their own truth they wanted to share with a complete stranger.

There was another long silence now as she stared down at hands as lovely as the rest of her, as if suddenly remembering they were there. The nails were clear, no color to them. A single gold wedding band, no other jewelry of any kind. She clasped her hands tightly now in her lap.

When she looked up again she said, ‘Susan said I could trust you, even if you choose not to take me on as a client.’

I smiled at her now. Not my big one. She was clearly having a hard time with all of this, and hitting her with my big smile, what I thought of as the Whopper, might cause her to lose control. Or, at the very least, her train of thought.

‘I have to be honest, Laura,’ I said. ‘The only thing that might dissuade me from taking you on as a client is if you put a cigarette out in one of my eyes.’

Now she laughed, even if the sound seemed to die somewhere between us and land on the paper plate where the donuts had been.

I wanted to get up and make myself another cup of coffee, but we finally seemed to be getting somewhere. In moments like these I tried to pretend I was Susan, who had once told me that people in her line of work who talked too much with patients or interrupted too frequently should perhaps think about finding another profession.

‘It’s my husband,’ she said.

I waited for her to elaborate. She did not, at least not right away. Maybe she thought telling me would be as easy as it had been for her to tell Susan, whatever she had told Susan.

Either way, she’d get to wherever we were going when she did and I had no desire to speed up the process.

‘We love each other very much,’ she said finally.

‘I think I’ve seen you referred to as the planet’s power couple,’ I said, ‘now that Bill and Melinda…’ I shrugged helplessly, with palms up, a gesture that seemed to take in their breakup and divorce, and the whole damn thing.

‘So sad about them,’ she said. ‘I thought they’d be together forever.’ She shrugged. ‘But I guess that’s what people always say when it ends for people like them.’

‘Not just people like them.’

‘But they’re both still friends of ours. Melinda and I are making another Africa trip next spring, as a matter of fact.’

She made it sound as simple as a donut run.

I wanted to ask her if the alimony that Bill Gates had to pay in his divorce might have enabled her own husband to move up on the money list, but knew better. It was only the two of us in my office. Hardly a challenge for me to read the room. I could already see how hard this was for her.

And Susan had made me promise, if Laura Crain did indeed end up here, that I would do my best to behave.

‘When you say your husband, are you referring to your marriage?’ I said. ‘Are the two of you having problems?’

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘That most certainly isn’t the problem that brought me here, Mr Spenser. Oh, God, no. No two people could love each other more than we do.’

I knew two others. But telling her that wasn’t going to do either one of us any good.

All I had so far was her husband. I remembered a story now about a well-known novelist spitballing possible movie ideas with a producer. Finally the producer, excited, said, ‘I’ve got it. World War Two!’

‘What about World War Two?’ the novelist had asked.

And the producer said, ‘Hey, you’re the writer.’

Her husband was the problem.

I was the detective.

‘He’s in some kind of trouble,’ she said, ‘and it’s making the most kind and gentle man I’ve ever known suddenly behave erratically, almost like he’s having some kind of breakdown. He routinely flies off the handle into these fits of rage over nothing at all, or what seems like nothing at all to me, even though that’s never been his nature, all the way back to when I first met him in college.’ She sighed. ‘And there are these awful nightmares, sometimes waking him up screaming.’

‘You’re his wife, you must have some idea about what’s bothering him. Some sort of indication. Or have at least asked.’

She shook her head.

‘I did ask, repeatedly, until I finally gave up,’ she said. ‘He just said he’s going through some things, but will work them out himself. At one point I even suggested that he see Susan. That only made him erupt again. He screamed at me that he didn’t need a shrink, and stormed out of the room.’

‘Has he thought about seeing someone besides a friend of yours?’

‘He won’t even consider it. It’s why I’m the one seeing you.’

I waited now, the way I knew Susan would have. It had occurred to both of us, on multiple occasions, that our chosen professions possessed remarkable similarities, especially in the sometimes artful way we had to draw out our clients. Susan’s work just didn’t involve her having to shoot people from time to time, or punch their lights out.

I waited as long as I could before finally saying, ‘You sound as if you’re in pain yourself.’

‘It’s why I’m here,’ she said. ‘I want you to see if you can find out what kind of trouble my husband might be in, whether it’s personal or professional, before he loses his fucking mind.’

Her language was like a glass shattering.

She paused then.

‘And maybe loses his company.’

4

Susan and I were having dinner at Bistro du Midi on Boylston Street, at an upstairs table with a panoramic view of the Public Garden, a view of which I never grew tired, from any possible angle. Boston’s version of Central Park, just in miniature.

‘I take it you’re taking the case,’ she said.

‘Not until I can figure out a way in.’

She reaches under the table and gives my thigh a squeeze. ‘And here I thought you’d finally gotten the hang of that.’

‘Do they teach you to talk like that at Harvard?’

‘No, big boy. That’s all you.’

She’d let me choose the restaurant tonight, as she and Pearl were having a sleepover. Susan had patiently explained to Pearl before we left the apartment that we would walk her in the park when we returned.

‘What if all that walking after dinner tires me out to the extent that it dims my ardor for you when we’re finally in bed?’ I’d asked her.

‘It is my belief that not even a missile attack while the two of us are looking at the swan boats could do that.’

‘Want to know why I picked this place?’

‘Because we could walk to it?’ She gave my thigh another squeeze. ‘I sleep with a detective, remember?’

‘You lucky duck.’

Susan smiled, this one full of mischief and promise. ‘You did say duck, right?’

I liked to dress up when we went out to dinner, though not as much as she did. Tonight I was wearing my new Brooks Brothers blazer, purchased about fifty yards from my office at the mother ship. Gray slacks, tattersall shirt open at the collar, perfect maroon pocket square, tasseled Ralph Lauren loafers, no socks. It was as much sartorial game as I could muster short of a tuxedo, or my one good suit.

I still looked like a bouncer sitting across from Susan Silverman.

She had taken even longer than usual getting herself ready tonight, to the point where we were nearly late for our reservation, which wouldn’t have been the first time. It was all because of what she called ‘The Process’: Lengthy shower after a day of seeing patients, then blowing out the hair just right, something that could occasionally take longer than the opera. At that point she was really just warming up. Then came makeup, and reviewing the jewelry options she’d given herself in her overnight bag. Eventually the only jewelry tonight turned out to be a necklace of cultured pearls I’d purchased for her at Tiffany, spending some of Kevin Boles’s money. She was wearing the necklace with a simple and elegant navy blue dress, just short enough to show off her sensational legs as we made our way across the park to the restaurant. There was just the faintest scent of what I was pretty sure was a new perfume.

The other Spenser, Edmund the poet, had once written of sovereign beauty.

That was Susan Silverman, in total.

Once our drinks had been delivered, a Kir Royale of just the perfect shade for her and a Tito’s martini with a twist for me, she raised her glass and I raised mine, as we toasted each other.

She saw me staring at her, and smiling to myself, before I reached for my glass.

‘Something you’d like to share?’

‘Nothing you haven’t heard before.’

‘Love talk, I hope.’

‘Yup,’ I said.

‘Give it to me,’ she said. ‘I can handle it.’

‘Not only can’t I believe you love me,’ I said. ‘I still can’t believe you talked to me.’

‘Back at you.’

Now we both drank, in no rush to even look at the menu.

‘I know you’ve been waiting to talk about Laura Crain,’ she said.

‘You probably know most of it.’

‘First I want to hear what she told you, and what you think,’ Susan said.

She took a sip of Kir. Though ‘sip’ might have been a rather generous assessment. Generally when Susan was working on an adult beverage she reminded me of a hummingbird pecking at sugar water.

I, however, took a much healthier swallow of my martini. It was icy cold and merely wonderful. But then it had always been my experience that even a bad martini was better than none.

‘I’ll take all the help I can get with this,’ I said.

She sighed.

‘I’m sure she’s already conveyed to you what she thinks about her husband’s recent behavior, and how alarmed she is by it, Suze.’

‘That he’s acting like a total wingnut? She has.’

‘Ah, yes, Dr Silverman,’ I said, stroking an imaginary beard and affecting a bad German accent. ‘Would wingnut be from the structionalist school, or functionalist?’

‘Swampscott High School.’

She took another small sip. I sometimes wondered what the point of ordering the drink even was. It was like watching her attack a salad, half a lettuce leaf at a time.

‘She told me he’s starting to act even more secretive and paranoid lately,’ I said.

‘On a good day, from what I gather.’

‘But she says when he’s out in public, or making an appearance somewhere, he still comes across like a lovable sitcom dad. It’s one of the reasons he’s as popular around the world as his friend Bill Gates. You know he’s just as generous. If a good cause anywhere needs money, he’s the first to raise a hand. The past decade or so, he’s focused most of his money and energy on supporting women’s rights, especially in countries known for oppressing women. Iran. The United Arab Emirates. Mostly Saudi Arabia, my God, the most gender-segregated country on the planet. He hates them.’

‘He sure doesn’t need oil from the bastards,’ I said.

‘No,’ Susan said. ‘He does not.’

‘Now his wife really is convinced the guy’s on the verge of some kind of breakdown, at what would be a very bad time.’

‘Is there ever really a good time for a nervous breakdown?’ Susan asked.

I’d finished my martini. I caught our waiter’s eye and discreetly pointed at my glass.

‘I’m talking about a bad time professionally, at least according to Laura,’ Susan said. ‘Because of the merger. Even you’ve heard about the merger, right, even though it hasn’t been covered in the Sports section of The Globe?’

Crain’s company was on the verge of merging with an electric-car company from Canada called Prise, a French word that basically meant plug-in. Prise had quickly and quietly moved up into second in the market behind Tesla and ahead of the Germans, and was looking to expand in both the US and Europe.

‘Hawk told me,’ I told Susan. ‘He gives me information like that on a need-to-know basis.’

Susan smiled. ‘I think that’s wise.’

‘But in the grand scheme of things, what does it matter if that merger doesn’t happen somehow?’ I said. ‘They’re already rich as shit.’

‘But just remember,’ Susan said. ‘If money could buy happiness, I’d be out of business.’

‘I’ve heard that it can’t,’ I said, ‘but consider it to be irresponsible gossip.’

‘On top of everything else,’ Susan said, ‘as I’m sure Laura told you, Andrew is giving even more money away than usual, in an almost manic way.’

‘Even in his world, I don’t see how that could be considered a bad thing.’

‘In mine,’ she said, ‘we contextualise things whenever possible. And in this context, his wife does think it’s a bad thing, no matter who it benefits. He’s acting out and she doesn’t know why.’

‘Is she worried that he’s going to give it all away before he’s through?’ I asked. ‘Didn’t the guy who owned The North Face give it all away to fight climate change?’

‘Patagonia,’ Susan said.

I grinned. ‘He wanted to fight Patagonia?’

She took a real sip now.

‘You’re an idiot sometimes.’

‘But I’m your idiot.’

I ordered the sweet corn soup and then duck breast with baby kale and figs as my main course. Susan ordered the arugula and endive salad and king salmon. Salmon was often her go-to entrée, no matter where we were dining. Tonight she had studied the menu the way she would have studied for a final in Counseling Psychology once, finally putting it down and saying, ‘I’ve made my decision.’

‘Salmon?’ I’d said.

‘Aren’t you funny.’

‘Kind of,’ I said.

I politely asked then if she thought we should order pommes frites on the side, this being a French restaurant and all.

‘Rhetorical question?’ she said.

‘Oui.’

We passed on dessert and then walked back home to walk Pearl. When she had finished her nighty ablutions and we were all on our way back to Marlborough Street, Susan and I had returned to talking about Andrew Crain, whom his wife wanted me to investigate without him knowing he was being investigated.

‘I have a bad feeling about this, Suze,’ I said. ‘It’s why I haven’t officially said yes to her yet.’

‘Which parts? Or all of it?’

‘All of it,’ I said. ‘She wants me to find out what’s tormenting the sixth-richest man in America without him knowing that she’s hired me to do just that.’

‘When you put it that way,’ she said, ‘it does sound like a hairball. But aren’t those your specialty?’

‘Only one of them,’ I said, and when we were back upstairs I showed her a few more. With undimmed ardor.

When she had shown me a few specialties of her own, she fell back on her pillow, flushed and sated and out of breath and somehow glowing at the same time while I tried to get my own breathing under control.

‘Ooh la la,’ Susan said.

5

Because of my move, Hawk and I had taken to running along the Charles again, usually at least three times a week, alternating with track work at Harvard.

My knees felt better than they had in years, even though I had relented to getting an occasional cortisone shot. I knew I was keeping up with Hawk only because he was letting me – something which he took endless pleasure in reminding me – but I felt that I was more than holding my own lately, even when we dialed it up to five miles the way we had today.

We had crossed over the Fiedler Footbridge, run down to the Mass Ave Bridge and then over to the Cambridge side, heading along Memorial Drive before finally turning back, the view even better from the Cambridge side, taking in all of Back Bay.

Hawk wore a black mamba T-shirt, black Lululemon running tights that looked as if they had been applied to his legs with a lacquer brush, and Adidas running shoes that I was certain had cost him more than my first car. I had dressed down because I didn’t know any other way when working out, decked out in a Harvard sweatshirt with the sleeves cut to my shoulders and baggy gray sweatpants and old New Balance gray shoes that I was sure were going to once again catch the fashion curve any day.

When we were finished we sat on a bench before heading back over the footbridge, drinking from the water bottles we’d both Velcroed to our upper arms. My breath had slowly returned to normal. It was different with Hawk. It always was. He was neither sweating nor breathing hard, giving no sign that we’d just run as far and as hard as we had, especially at the finish, when he’d delighted in running away from me the way Michael Johnson had famously run away from everybody in the 200 in the Olympics once.

Hawk, in fact, did not look as if he’d just done anything more strenuous than retie his laces.

We had not yet decided whether we wanted to have breakfast at Mike’s on Washington Street or Victoria’s on Mass Ave after showering at the apartment. While we waited to make the call, Hawk was explaining to me exactly how Andrew Crain and Ethan Lowe had won the lottery with their invention after they’d left Harvard.

‘Think of it this way,’ Hawk said. ‘Crain be Gates. Lowe be Paul Allen, he should rest in peace.’

He proceeded to give me a brief but detailed tutorial on lithium and its uses and most of all its value, especially in the age of the electric car, all of it delivered as only Hawk could, in his spectacular street patois, as if he were the second lead in The Wire telling you how to split the atom.

‘So am I your Gates?’ I said.

‘First among equals? Fuck no. I got no equals.’

He leaned back and let the sun hit his face, smiling as he did, looking neither young nor old, looking serene and completely comfortable in his own skin and his own impressive self, looking the same as he always had to me, which meant looking like Hawk.

‘Okay, you can be Gates and I’ll be Allen.’

‘You gonna keep interrupting, or you want me to explain this shit to you in a way even you can understand?’

‘I promise to shut up now.’

He snorted. ‘When pigs fly.’

He turned and leaned an arm over the back of the bench. ‘You understand why the world needs lithium, right?’

‘Batteries?’

He nodded. ‘Lithium-ion currently be going at a compound rate ’bout thirty per cent. And that don’t even figure in what the number might go to over the next ten years on account of all the cheap Teslas gonna be on the road ’fore long. I was reading something the other day, The Times, all about how lithium is gonna make electric cars more affordable, and how this one lithium mine, up to Quebec, basically feels like it walked into a way to just start printing money.’

I watched and listened, fascinated, not surprised by the intelligence and curiosity, they’d always been there, even in his leg-breaking days. I was just knocked back all over again at how well versed he was about so many different things.

‘Them lithium-ion batteries, just them, they charge faster, last longer, and have a higher power density for a longer life.’

‘I could use something like that,’ I said.

Hawk grinned. ‘Be called Viagra, leastways for old white men like you.’

I grinned. ‘But you digress.’

‘Yowza,’ Hawk said. ‘So all of a sudden these two nerds come up with a way to make they own. Nobody knows how they do it, but they do it. And now this country don’t have to go beggin’ to Chile or Argentina or Australia or Quee-bec for lithium. Or fucking Bolivia.’

‘And Crain and Lowe are the ones printing money and saying they’re going to use a boatload of it to save the planet.’

‘Or at least give the planet one of them extreme makeovers.’

‘And while all that is going on they’re supposed to live happily ever after, Crain especially,’ I said, ‘because he out-kicked his coverage with his significant other.’

‘Look who’s talkin’.’

‘Only now his wife is worried that he’s having a nervous breakdown, even if only she knows it yet.’

‘And she don’t know why.’

‘And wants us to find out why, lippity lop, if I decide to take the case.’

‘If you decide?’ Hawk said. ‘You know you gonna take it.’

He theatrically raised his eyebrows then. ‘And did I hear you say us?’ he said, now sounding as if he belonged in The Crown, making the transition as effortlessly as he always did.

‘Indeed you did, old boy.’

‘Yo, Jeeves?’ Hawk said. ‘Who you callin’ “boy”?’

6

Ihad called Laura Crain first thing the next morning and told her I was taking her case. I asked if her husband’s business partner shared her concerns. She said that he did. I asked if he would be willing to meet with me. She said she could check, and called back later and said that Ethan Lowe would be more than willing to meet with me, as early as today.

The old John Hancock Tower was now officially 200 Clarendon Street. So it had been rebranded, too. But if you lived in Boston you still thought of it as the Hancock. It was still the tallest building in the city, and in New England, whatever people wanted to call it.

Lith, Inc. was located on the forty-ninth and fiftieth floors. These were where their business offices were headquartered. The factories where their product was produced were scattered around the country. The site closest to Boston was right off 495 in Lowell. I had seen photographs of it. The buildings looked quite modern, and not at all as if they were helping to change the world, with lith in huge block letters on the side of the largest one.

Ethan Lowe didn’t want to meet at the office. When I called he asked if I knew where the Friendly Toast breakfast place was on Stanhope, saying it was just a short walk from the Hancock. I told him I knew exactly where it was.

‘I can walk there from my office, too,’ I said, making no attempt to hide the pride in my voice.

I was waiting for him when he walked in. I had gone to the Internet to remind myself what he looked like. He turned out to be taller than I expected him to be, even realising that guessing someone’s height by merely looking at a head shot was like trying to guess their weight at the same time.

He wore a black crewneck sweater and khaki pants and white Federer sneakers I recognised because Susan had a pair just like them. He was mostly bald in that way that had become fashionable, just a fringe of blonde-gray hair. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, was quite tan and whippet-thin, yet somehow his sweater looked one size too small.

I got up when he got to the table I had managed to score for us. He grinned as we shook hands. ‘Laura told me to just find someone who looked like he could lick any sonofabitch in the house.’

‘John L. Sullivan said that,’ I said.

‘I happen to know he was born in the same section of Roxbury I was,’ Lowe said.

‘Ward Bond played him in Gentleman Jim,’ I said. ‘In glorious black-and-white.’

‘I’ve always thought the world looked better in black-and-white,’ Lowe said.

‘You seem to have done just fine in this one.’

‘I have these bursts of nostalgia,’ he said. ‘But I’m not crazy.’

He ordered a cold brew.

‘Thank you for meeting with me,’ I said. ‘I’m sure this must be awkward for you.’

‘It is,’ he said. ‘But since we’re both here, you already know how difficult it is to say no to Laura Crain.’

‘I held out a whole day.’

‘Wow,’ Lowe said. ‘Now I’m sure you can lick any sonofabitch in the house.’

His cold brew was delivered. The waiter topped off my hot coffee. I didn’t like iced coffee. Susan said it was a generational thing and I just told her to go ahead and add it to the list. She said the list would eventually be longer than the phone book used to be.

When the waiter was gone Lowe said, ‘It goes without saying that this meeting never took place.’

‘What meeting?’ I said.

‘But as I’m sure Laura told you, I’m as concerned about Andrew as she is. As is Claire.’

‘Claire?’

‘Laura didn’t mention her? She’s the woman we call the other Mrs Andrew Crain. Claire Megill. His executive assistant. He met her in California when he hired her to work for us, and she eventually fast-tracked her way here, and to the office outside his. Andrew and I joke all the time that if the company plane ever went down with us on it, Claire could take over without missing a beat. She’s truly like Andrew’s other brain.’

‘Maybe I should talk to her, too.’

‘She may share our concerns, but I’m not sure how forthcoming she’d be with a stranger,’ Lowe said. ‘I myself don’t see meeting with you as a breach of loyalty, but rather an act of loyalty toward my partner. She would. She just wants to write this all off to stress.’

‘Involving the sale?’

‘Just the accumulated stress of having been Andrew Crain, all the way back to when we hit it as big as we did. She thinks it’s just finally caught up with him. That he’s going through a phase.’ He put air quotes around the last word. ‘Claire sees what she wants to see. And what she’s always seen with Andrew is an honest-to-Christ American hero.’

‘See no evil, even now?’

‘And hear no evil, even when he’s acting out the way he has been lately.’

‘Is she married?’

You poke at things when the opportunity presents itself, nibbling at the edges. We seemed to have gotten off-point with Claire Megill, but perhaps not.

‘Claire was married briefly, a long time ago. She never talks about it, other than to say that the only good that came out of it was her son. Cameron. He’s a junior at Cal Poly. Andrew is quite fond of him. I have no doubt that Andrew will find a place for him at Lith when he graduates. He’s already worked summers for us as an intern.’

‘I need to ask this,’ I said. ‘But is there a chance that his relationship with Ms Megill might be more than professional. It wouldn’t be the first time something like that has happened in an executive suite.’

‘I’d be shocked,’ Lowe said. ‘As loyal as he is to Claire and she to him, Andrew is even more connected, more reliant, on his wife. I tell him all the time that he’s the most married man in America.’

I saw the waiter go by with a blueberry muffin the size of a football, and wanted to tackle him from behind, if I thought I could catch the muffin before it hit the floor.

‘I’ve done some reading on both you and Andrew,’ I said. ‘It appears that he’s the first among equals.’

‘Sixty-forty,’ he said. ‘It was that way from the start, because he did most of the science. My role was more entrepreneurial.’

He took off his glasses, pulled a small cloth out of his pocket, cleaned them carefully, put them back on. Everything about him was meticulous, with even the smallest movements.

‘What if he woke up one day and decided he didn’t just want to spin off the software company, but cash out of Lith, too?’

‘At that point,’ Lowe said, ‘there wouldn’t be a goddamn thing I could do to stop him. Somebody else would own his share, and I’d probably be thinking about selling mine, maybe to the same person, though the list of people who would have the kind of money it would take would be a short one.’ He shrugged. ‘Ownership of our company would make the fucking earth move, I know that.’

‘What would you do if that happened?’

He took his phone out of his pocket, looked at it, frowned, put it away. I liked him better for not keeping it on the table in front of him while we’d been talking.

‘Him selling, or both of us selling?’

‘Either way.’

He looked at me and grinned. ‘How did we get here from talking about Andrew’s behavior?’

I shrugged then. ‘I have a short attention span.’

‘Somehow, Mr Spenser, I doubt that. We’ve only known each other a few minutes, but I have a good sense of people. You need one from what I guess you could call my perch. And my sense already is that people who underestimate you probably end up getting carried off the field on a stretcher.’

I drank more coffee. It was very good coffee.

‘So what do you really think is going on with your partner? You’re the one who’s known him even longer than his wife has, from what I’ve read.’

‘I guess that’s true,’ Lowe said. ‘He spent his first couple years at Harvard just worshipping Laura from afar. So technically I have known him longer.’

‘So the two of you have been in each other’s lives, passionately joined, for more than two decades.’

‘Just not continuously,’ he said.

‘I’m not sure what that means.’

‘It means,’ Lowe said, ‘that I lost track of him for a couple years after college. But then pretty much everybody did.’

7

I knew how much easier research was now because of technology, and had been since the first www.com. But there was a part of me that still missed going to the Boston Public Library when I needed to look things up regarding a case or a client.

Additionally I missed calling a friend like Wayne Cosgrove, the columnist who had become editor of The Globe, and asking him to go into the magical place I thought of as ‘the clips’ when I needed information.

I’d mentioned this to Susan on the phone this morning.

‘Please tell me this isn’t going to be another occasion when you wax poetic about microfilm,’ she said.

‘Those were the days.’

‘If you miss them that much, you can always Google them,’ she said.

Instead I spent the morning and then into the afternoon intensely Googling Andrew Crain, even though when I thought of it that way I always imagined inappropriate touching.

A lot of it I already knew, not just about his invention and the formation of his company, but about his passion for saving the oceans and supporting the right political candidates and nearly buying one of the big pharmaceutical companies during COVID, because he believed he and Ethan Lowe could somehow speed up the vaccine process.

He and Lowe had started charter schools from Africa to Serbia. There was no telling how much of his own personal wealth Crain had directed to Ukraine by now, in support of its president and its army.

All in all it was a modern American success story, another one out of the tech world, this one originating in Boston the way Mark Zuckerberg’s had with Facebook.

Just like that, another nerd ruled.

When it happened, I always pictured another angel getting its wings.

Two nerds in this instance, Crain and his partner.

Looks-wise, Andrew Crain reminded me of a grown-up version of Harry Potter, just with red hair and not black. Tall, skinny, round and oversized Harry glasses. Even now, more than twenty years after Harvard, he still looked as if he were late for class.

There was just one gap in his history, the one Ethan Lowe had mentioned over coffee, the two years after graduation and before Crain and Lowe went into business together, when Andrew was completely off the grid.

His story, one that had never changed, a story he repeated almost word for word every time he told it, was that he had strapped on a backpack and gone off to find himself. His parents, both dead by then, had left him enough money, or so he said, to finance a search for meaning in his life from Boston to the Himalayas and back.

He sounded like Larry Darrell in The Razor’s Edge. Maugham’s character had been traumatised by World War I. I wondered what might possibly have traumatised Andrew Crain, who’d found not only meaning in his life when he had come back to civilization, but the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow along with it.

‘I got my head out of books,’ he told Diane Sawyer in an old interview I’d watched, ‘and tried to understand the world as a way of trying to understand myself.’

Laura Crain had sat with him for that interview. She’d smiled and said to Sawyer, ‘He didn’t call, he didn’t write.’

‘All part of my master plan to win your heart,’ he said, ‘just praying that my absence would make it grow fonder.’

‘Well,’ his wife said, ‘mission accomplished.’

‘She was out of my league then,’ Crain said, ‘and still is now.’

Somehow the two of them were genuine enough and clearly loved each other enough that watching a sit-down like this didn’t cause a sugar high, even seeing it all this time later.

At breakfast I’d asked Lowe if he’d ever pressed Crain on at least some of the places he’d gone and things he’d done.

‘He has always been light on specifics,’ Lowe said. ‘In the end he just makes the whole thing actually sound like a religious experience. When it was over he said he knew the person he wanted to be. And, better yet, knew the one he didn’t want to be.’